A Price For Everything

Posted on February 19, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about being a jerk, old people sniffing deli meat at the grocery story and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

A tenet of the old right was that some things are too important to a society to be subjected to the crucible of reason. Traditions, for example, not only bind people to their ancestors, but to one another in the shared understanding of the past. Treating traditions as mere superstition inevitably leads to their abandonment and the loss of their associated social capital. A society without tradition and history is a temporary, ad hoc collection of deracinated individuals.

Reason is not just questioning and demanding proof. The marketplace is a manifestation of reason in the exchange of goods and services. Sellers compete with one another to attract buyers. Buyers compete with one another through the mechanism of price in order to determine the best good or service. Reason states that if you have a competitive and open market, you end up with the best products and services winning over those of lesser quality or higher price.

The old right would agree to the theory behind open market economies but point out that some things are too important to subject to the market. The moral claims of a society, for example, should not be up for bid. The marketplace would no doubt decide that slavery in certain areas is the superior option, as it has for all of human history, but we have decided that owning other humans is immoral. Therefore, we do not make this moral claim subject to the crucible of the marketplace.

We are getting a real-world glimpse of this with regards to the war in Ukraine which the Western managerial elite insist is a moral crusade. Helping Ukraine, they say, is proof that we worship the god called democracy. The Munich Security Conference just ended and speaker after speaker insisted that the god of democracy demands we empty our wallets to help Ukraine. The Danish prime minister went so far as to say that the West must give all of its weapons to Ukraine.

No one really knows, because the cause is too important to waste time on accounting, but the West has supplied Ukraine with weapons and money in amounts many times more than Russia is committing to the war. Hundreds of billions have been given to Ukraine with hundreds more lent though various contrivances. The sorts of people who perform at events like the Munich Security Conference are fond of talking about how the arsenal of democracy is going to save Ukraine.

The trouble is the weapons supplied to Ukraine have not made much of a difference and in many cases have been worthless. French supplied armored vehicles are nothing more than expensive death traps. British Challenger tanks are great on the parade route but unsuitable for actual combat. The German Leopard tanks were sitting ducks against Russian artillery in the summer offensive. Despite the economic advantages, Western weapons have not made much of a difference.

The reason gets back to the tenet of the old right. There is a story in the German tabloid Bild that takes a look at how Germany is supplying armored vehicles. Instead of producing or selecting vehicles best suited for the war, it is an elaborate financial scam that profits the arms dealers and their foreign suppliers but results in expensive and poorly suited vehicles to Ukraine. The German taxpayer is paying three- and four-times retail for equipment that is useless in the war.

To give some perspective, the Russians probably spend the equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars for an armored vehicle. The Germans are paying six hundred thousand dollars, but for the wrong sort of vehicle. This is a pattern that repeats across the Western supply chain to Ukraine. Either suppliers see a chance to unload useless junk at inflated prices or their top-line equipment, in the case of Western tanks, is proving to be ill-suited for the actual fighting.

The Russians, meanwhile, work from that old right tenet. Some things, like fighting land wars on their border, are too important to be subjected to the marketplace. There is competition within the Russian military industrial base, but the winners are not picked by the invisible hand of the marketplace. They are picked by the demands of the military for the situations they are facing. One reason Russian arms tend to be simple compared to American arms, is the military doctrine of the Russians.

It is tempting to think this old right idea applies only to something narrow like war fighting, but war fighting is a consequence of other factors. After the Cold War, the Russians did not embark on a process to ship their manufacturing base to low-cost countries as happened in the West. One reason for that is the Russians do not make profit the singular goal of their society. They set about modernizing their manufacturing base and now they are reaping the rewards.

This is a pattern we see all over the West. Open borders, like slavery in the ancient world, are profitable for society, but it erodes the social capital. It attacks the customs and habits of the people, the things that bind them together as a people. Once you have monetized the social capital of the people and carried it off to vaults in New York, it is no longer available when the crisis comes. It turns out that national borders should not be subject to the crucible of reason.

The crisis surrounding Ukraine, and make no mistake that crisis is spilling over into the West now, is a microcosm for what awaits the West. The reason for that is Western managerial elites turned their societies into for-profit enterprises. The decision point in every matter is whether it profits the managerial elite. Even the abrogation of ancient rights is merely a defense of the bottom line. It turns out that when everything has a price, nothing has value, not even your society.

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The Old Fear

Posted on February 15, 2024 by thezman

One of the many oddities of this age is the way in which the political class talks about itself, something they do incessantly. For example, the Senate just passed a giant foreign aid bill to give your money to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the military industrial complex. This is a more bloated version of the “bipartisan” deal that included a few pennies for the border patrol and enshrined open borders. This time they stripped out the border money and expanded the foreign aid.

Now, normal people could be forgiven for wondering if the senators have had some sort of collective mental breakdown. The reason the “bipartisan” deal on immigration failed was not that it was too tough on immigration, but that it did nothing to address the issues causing the flood of migrants. In fact, it promised to make the situation worse by limiting what could be done by future presidents. In other words, the answer was to fix the border provision by making it much tougher.

Again, this is the way a normal person thinks. The Senate drew an entirely different conclusion from the storm of protest. They concluded that what the people really wanted was more of the same on the border and even more of their money going to foreign actors and the war machine. Imagine someone makes you an offer on your car and you say the offer is too low. They come back with an even lower offer. That is what we are getting with the Senate at the moment.

Putting that aside for second, look at how the senators supporting this ridiculous bill are talking about it. They are not talking about the bill at all. Instead, they are talking about their heroism in passing the bill. Mitch McConnell went to the floor to say that history would remember his historic vote in favor of the bill. Chuck Schumer talked about himself as if he was Leonidas. By getting this massive giveaway passed in the Senate he was saving the free world from disaster.

The same sort of thing happened in the first round. What little they said about the immigration portion of the bill was easily disputed by looking at the text of the bill they foolishly released to the public. Most of time was spent talking about their personal heroism in crafting the bill. Schumer did the media rounds tell the various stooges about how he labored like Hercules to overcome one obstacle after another in order to get this bill to the Senate for a vote.

There is nothing normal about how these people talk. Politicians in all times exaggerate their roles in things when times are good. They also exaggerate the role of opponents when times are bad. We expect politicians to do this. What is novel today is how they celebrate themselves like heroes for failing to do basic things. Every Washington pol is now his own hagiographer. At this rate, Schumer will be crafting a bill to have his face added to Mount Rushmore.

One possible reason for doing this is the same reason a failing company ramps up its marketing with promises of the product being new and improved. The theory is if you say it enough times people will believe it. The Senate is a clown show so they are heaping praise on themselves thinking that maybe people will not notice that these guys arrive at work in a Volkswagen Beatle done up as a giant mouse. The consultants are telling the senators they need to build their brand.

On the other hand, it is possible they believe it. These are the same people who thought people yelling at them about the terrible immigration bill were angry that it could possibly slow the flood of migrants. They were the same guys who thought using Senator Howdy Doody as the point man in immigration was brilliant. When you are making these errors, anything is possible, so it is quite probable that these senators view themselves as world historical figures.

Another possibility is that these senators are so insulated from our reality that they are now operating in the realm of fantasy. When was the last time Chuck Schumer talked to anyone who lived among the Dirt People? All of his social interactions are with the Israel lobby and Wall Street. The overlap here is immense. They certainly do think Schumer is a hero to his people, just not our people. You can go through the roster of long-serving politicians and see a similar degree of insularity.

Listening to these feeble old men sing their own praises, one cannot help but think of the Politburo in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Like Washington, Soviet politics had come to be controlled by a class of geezers. Their primary concern for a long time had been keeping their spot. The result was they surrounded themselves with sycophants good only for praising their bosses. The result was the political system was incapable of responding to the brewing crisis.

This is what we see with immigration. The solution is not complicated and most of the tools are available to bring the crisis under control. The old bulls in Washington, however, are primarily concerned with Speaker Johnson, who has come to represent a generational threat to them. The media stooges have acknowledged as much, saying that the Senate is hoping to box Johnson in with this bill. In other words, it is geezers thinking they need to fend off the youngster.

This would explain the self-praise. The geriatric ruling class fears the next generation more than they fear death. They have plenty of younger flunkies around to help guard their position and tell them they are the best. The old party hands have now reached that point many old men in the business world reach and that is to claim their experience trumps the talent and vigor of their young challenger. The result is Mitch McConnel now thinks he is Cicero.

The comparison to the Soviet Union brings with it a warning. Decades of insularity did not just result in an ossified ruling class. It also retarded the development of a succeeding generation of party men. When the icy hand of death started to thin the leadership ranks, what replaced them were men good at currying favor but not good at anything else, so the result was disaster. If Speaker Johnson is our Gorbachev, the next decade promises to be quite grim.

The Madame’s Shadow

Posted on February 8, 2024 by thezman

Note: For those looking for a good book to read, check out this new novel Faction: With the Crusaders, which is the follow on of the writer’s first novel called Faction.

One of the underappreciated aspects of the French Revolution is how the ruling class system became detached from the overall social system. The people in the ruling class were ignorant of what was happening in the country and not just the social unrest, but the economic changes that were coming. The people were just as ignorant about why their rulers were doing the things they were doing. Pre-revolutionary France was two black boxes left to guess about the contents of the other.

The United States is entering a similar period. Much of what makes up internet political content is either a reaction to some new emission from the managerial elite or an effort to contextualize those emissions. No one can be sure why the ruling class is doing the things they are doing, as it is not tied to anything normal people experience, so the Dirt People are left to produce their own explanations. Dirt People political culture is a debate about what in the hell is going on in the clouds.

The people in charge could very well be holographic projections from an alien world as far as anyone knows. Their actions and statements rarely correspond to their stated interests or the social interests. You see it in this big drama they are staging for themselves over the failed Senate bill on immigration. Somehow, official Washington convinced themselves that bundling Israel money, Ukraine money and open borders money was a winning formular with the Dirt People.

The reason they bundle these things together is one faction decides to make a trade with another faction in what is called log rolling. Congressman X wants money for a project and Congressman Y wants money for a different project, so they agree to support each other’s projects, even if they should be opposed to them. In this case, neocons go along with some sort of border reform, so they get more money for their efforts to start a nuclear war with Russia.

That is the theory, but in reality, the bill both parties in the senate thought was a winning compromise was something entirely different. It was the open borders crazies getting support from the blow up the world crazies so they could both get billions to fling open the borders and blow up the world. There was nothing in the bill that the voting factions of either party would want or even care about. No one wants open borders, and no one cares about Ukraine or Israel for that matter.

As soon as the senate bill failed, the demon known as Chuck Schumer told the world that he will be working with Mitch McConnell to come up with a way to give money to the blow up the world faction. This gives us a clue about what was really going on with that senate bill. We already have open borders, so that faction was not getting much from any deal, so the real issue was smuggling in the Ukraine money. Israel has check writing privileges at the Fed, so they get their money automatically.

That explains what was really going on here, but it raises a question. Why are these people so obsessed with Ukraine? We know the Kagan cult has enormous sway in Washington, probably due to their work with Epstein. We know that Ukraine is a money laundering operation and much of the money ends up in the pockets of connected people in Washington. That all makes sense, but we also know that this project is doomed, so why are they still obsessed with it?

The writing has been on the wall with regards to the Ukraine war for a long time, especially after the NATO planned offensive failed last summer. The reason General Miley is fishing now is he promised a smashing success. Instead, he delivered scenes of NATO armor on fire in the fields outside the Russian lines. Self-interest should have told Washington that it was time to find a way out of this mess. Instead, they remain singularly obsessed with this project.

People will be tempted to say it is money and power, as those are simple answers that let you stop thinking, but these people have the money and power. If Mitch McConnell wanted more power, he would never have gone along with this ridiculous bill and instead railed against the Ukraine project. That is good politics, especially in an election year when he could see his party return to the majority. Money and power say the republicans should be doing the opposite of what they do.

That brings us back to those black boxes of the French Revolution. A healthy society has a feedback loop between the people and their rulers. The practical interests of the people feed the rulers through various mechanisms like the media, voting, public protests, and economic behavior. The moral claims of the rulers, the things you ought and ought not do, flow down those same channels to the people so that the behavior beneficial to the elite becomes a habit of mind.

In pre-revolutionary France, this loop was broken. The economic interests of the elite were still based on a feudal understanding of the world, so they could not read the economic activity of the masses, which were shifting from that model. Similarly, elites were blind to what was happening in the newly emerging bourgeois class that was arguing about liberal ideas in salons and public houses. The feedback loop had broken and that left those two black boxes.

We have a similar problem in modern America. The media used to provide signals to the Cloud People about what was happening with the Dirt People. Now the media is poorly tuned repeaters of things said by the Cloud People. For example, they are all chanting the word “chaos” now, as if they received a memo instructing them to weave the word into their public performances. This makes the Cloud People feel good, but it also blinds them to what is happening with the Dirt People.

Similarly, Dirt People continue to get bizarre instructions through the economic and media channels about the constantly changing moral code. For no reason at all the Clouds begin to rumble and some weird new idea rains down on people. One day it is men in dresses falling from the sky. The next day it is Jewish dwarf in a green jump suit demanding money to fight the Russians. When the Dirt People look into the clouds, they now see a funhouse mirror.

There are two ways this can end. One is some people in the Clouds realize what is happening and organize a revolt against the other side. This is mostly what happened in the late-1960’s and 1970’s. One group of Cloud People revolted and ushered in a period of reform. The other way it ends is the Cloud People rally in defense of their position against what they perceive to be a peasant revolt. This inevitably leads to a peasant revolt and the collapse of the system.

What that senate bill suggests is that there is no one in the managerial class aware of the problem, much less interested in solving it. James Lankford, the Oklahoma senator who negotiated the deal with Schumer, should not even be in the senate much less brokering such a deal with an arch demon like Schumer. Lankford should be back organizing swim lessons at Bible camp. If there were any reformers in the system, they would have stopped this before this point.

The question that remains is whether or not the American system is past the point where reform is possible. There are libraries of books describing such inflection points in the French Revolution. The past is always uncertain, so there are lots of debates about when things became inevitable in revolutionary France. In the moment, however, no one seemed to know because no one could know. In other words, we will know it is too late when Madame Guillotine is set up across from the Capitol.

Plotting The Collapse

Posted on February 7, 2024 by thezman

On 24 February 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin went on television to announce the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Russia is a legalistic society, so Putin did not declare war or even say it was an invasion, as those terms carry meaning within Russian law that would trigger other parts of the law. We are now fast approaching the two-year anniversary of what everyone involved thought was going to be a quick and largely bloodless path to a negotiated settlement.

For the last eighteen months Russian leaders have talked about the conflict lasting years, as it is now a proxy war between Russia and its partners and the United States and the vassal states of the West. Some have suggested this war is like the Thirty Years War in that it will radically change the moral and political order in Europe, eventually seeing the United States exit Europe entirely. Others see this as another sign that the West is in crisis and headed for dark times.

Putting aside the big picture aspects of the war, things may be running ahead of schedule, at least from the Russian perspective. The first big item to start the year is the stalemate in Washington over Ukraine funding. To the shock and horror of the neocons and their fellow travelers, the public is not interested in the issue, which means there is no risk to opposing more money for Ukraine. The result is money for Ukraine is probably a dead issue for 2024.

That will have enormous implications for Ukraine. The billions flowing from Washington to Kiev do three important things. First, Zelensky uses the money to buy loyalty, as he is Washington’s bagman. This allows him to buy off the various factions in Ukraine and make sure pro-Washington people are in the government. It is why he has faced little opposition to cancelling the elections. Those inclined to speak out against this have either been bribed or jailed by those being bribed.

That brings up the second thing the money does for Ukraine. Those dollars are not just dumped on Ukraine. Instead, the dollars are converted into Ukrainian hryvnia, which are then deposited into the Ukraine banking system. Of course, Ukraine also gets euros from selling energy products and agricultural products to the EU on special deals and those are converted to hryvnia. This is what allows Kiev to pay government employees and mask the money printing to pay the soldiers.

The final piece of the puzzle is the corruption around converting dollars and euros into weapons that can be used in the war. Even regime media has been forced to admit that a lot of the weapons have ended up on the black market. No one knows how much has been stolen or who is doing the stealing, but Ukraine is a pirate’s cove now, with privateers, official and unofficial, stealing everything they can. Even Kiev is getting worried about the degree of theft.

If the flow of dollars stops or even significantly declines, all three legs of the Ukrainian side of the racket will snap. We may be seeing the first signs of this in the drama between President Zelensky and General Zaluzhny. It has been known for months that Zelensky wants to fire Zaluzhny, but so far, he has not been able to do it. Zaluzhny simply refuses to cooperate by resigning or taking another position. Instead he posts pics of himself with the leader of the ultra-nationalist faction.

When the president of a country wants to fire his top military officer, the officer usually resigns in order to save some face. In some cases, the civilian leader will fire the man in order to make a point. Truman fired MacArthur in order to send a message and underscore the subordination of the military to the civilian government. When the civilian leader cannot fire the top military commander and that commander is openly challenging the civilian leadership, there is a crisis.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the head of the Wagner organization repeatedly challenged the authority of the Russian government. He even went so far as to stage a ceremonial march on Moscow. The Russians foolishly thought they could tolerate the behavior of Prigozhin until that point. They realized their error and it was not long before Prigozhin’s plane was falling out of the air in pieces.

You also have to add in the fact that Ukraine is a lawless, corrupt kleptocracy now flooded with weapons and soldiers. Last year, one of Zaluzhny’s lieutenants was blown up by a grenade hidden in a gift intended for Zaluzhny. Someone tried to poison the head of the secret police, Kyrylo Budanov, but missed and poisoned his wife and some of his staff instead. Of course, the Russians mysteriously got the coordinates of Budanov’s location and tried to take him out with a missile.

In such conditions, it is not hard to see how the end of dollars from Washington could set off a political crisis. If that is not enough, the war is going poorly for Ukraine as the Russians slowly ramp up the pressure on all fronts. According to Ukraine, they need thirty thousand new recruits a month to keep up their numbers, which means they are losing a thousand men a day in this war. Many of those men are trained, experienced soldiers who cannot be replaced with raw recruits.

As of this writing, the Russians have broken through one of the biggest strongholds in Ukraine, a place called Avdiivka, or often spelled Avdeevka. Since 2014 the Ukrainians have been building this place up with tunnels, bunkers, mine fields and heavy weapons, to be an anchor point of the front line. Reports from Ukraine say the Russians have entered the city and have trapped Ukrainian forces. That would mean a starving out operation will be followed by a surrender.

There are similar stories around smaller fortifications along the front and all of it is due to the shortage of men and material. According to Ukraine, they have mobilized close to a million men so far and they have plans to mobilize half a million more. Those kinds of losses are added pressure on a political system that has major cracks. If the money runs out, it is not long before some factorions think about what sort of deal they can cut with the Russians to end the war.

Collapse is like the famous Hemingway line about bankruptcy. It happens a little at a time and then all of a sudden. Armies collapse slowly over time then they begin to surrender in great waves. Governments collapse over a period of time, punctuated by crises until the principles either flee or end up dead in a final crisis. The current crisis in Ukraine could be just one chapter, but not the final chapter. Maybe the Republicans will produce the money and save the day.

Regardless, all of this points to a catastrophe down the road and probably right around the November presidential elections, which will make for great drama. Eventually the reality of Ukraine will come home to Washington, no matter how hard they try to pretend it does not exist. Like all bankruptcies, the failure of imperial foreign policy proceeds a little here and a little there, all leading to a point when the whole project collapses, maybe taking the empire with it.

Political Onanism

Posted on February 5, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a film I did not like, a post about code-switching and the Sunday podcast which remains a morning edition for now. Subscribe here or here.

Carl Schmitt famously said that “the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.” The shorthand you hear in dissident circles is that politics is about friends and enemies. You can see this in your own life when it comes to some issue with which you have been on the opposite side of a friend. That person may now be a former friend if the issue was important at the time. It is why families often avoid talking about politics during the holidays.

A practical aspect of this reality is that political activism should always seek to harm the opponent and boost your side. An action that makes the other side look bad is good activism and it is even better activism if it also makes you look good. Of course, bad activism is that which boosts the enemy and harms you. The Charlottesville rally in 2018 turned out to be disastrous activism for the alt-right. It rallied their enemies and gutted their support in the broader community.

Life is not always so cut and dried. Generational politics, for example, often feels like good politics to the people doing it. Whether it is young people moaning about old people having had it easy or old people moaning about young people having it easy, the people doing it always feel good about it. A Nick Fuentes feels like a hero when he makes fun of adults for being adults. He thinks it is good politics because it brings in money and gets his young fans excited.

Of course, this goes both ways. Matt Walsh from the Daily Wire often makes fun of Zoomers for being whiny and soft. Recently, a young girl posted a video of herself crying about having to work forty hours a week and still not having money to live like she did in college so Matt Walsh made sport of her. The young people who always complain about the boomers then piled in to tell him he was a horrible person for not empathizing with the young girls in the video.

At a personal level, generational politics is good as it makes money for the people doing it, but at another level it is bad for their overall political mission. The only people engaged in generational politics are white people who are either in white identity politics or aligned with it. Nick Fuentes casts himself as a white identitarian, but he spends a lot of time mocking white people. Matt Walsh opposes antiwhite politics, but like Nick Fuentes, he spends most of his time attacking white people.

You will note that the people who control the culture are fine with this sort of politics, despite it coming from people they hate. In popular culture you will never see a young black guy calling his grandfather a boomer. You will not see an old Jewish guy laughing at his grandson’s student loan debt. For the people who control the centers of cultural production, generational politics is only for white people. It is one part of their antiwhite pogroms that have come to define popular culture.

Generational politics is not politics at all but a form of political onanism. It is not only a fruitless activity, but it also discourages the sort of politics that could bear fruit. It is no different from the war of the sexes business, where feminists and anti-feminists seek to pit white males against white females. Whatever the truth of the mutual critiques, it is not an activity that can lead to anything other than temporary ecstasy. It is a form of politics that can never lead to good activism or any activism.

For example, look at the recent trend of attacking Reagan. Critics correctly note that he signed off on immigration reform. He also ushered in economic reforms that now feel like bad ideas, especially for young people. This critique of Regan usually ends with angry shouting at boomers for having enjoyed the good times that followed the reforms of that period. The boomers are bad people for having enjoyed a good stock market and low interest rates over the last forty years.

Let us assume that Reagan and his supporters were evil people who knew what they were doing would harm their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Let us also pretend that the boomers all agreed it would wreck the country for their children and grandchildren who they would live to see. Even if you could prove this, what would be the point of doing it? The most you get from it is the momentary satisfaction of shaking your first at an imaginary version of the past.

The reason to care about the past is to understand how you reached the present and to have some sense of what comes next. Understanding the politics around the Reagan era immigration policies is about understanding the nature of the people behind the just proposed immigration reform bill in the senate. Chuck Schumer put that together because he hates you and he has always hated you. There is no talking him and his allies out of hating you. He is the forever enemy.

There you see the problem with generational politics. The young people trembling with anger over the thought of Ronald Reagan are focusing on their grandparents rather than the people who finked on their grandparents, the same people who are now trying to close the door on America, by opening up the borders. It is a politics that turns old friends into imaginary enemies and enemies into fans cheering the people attacking one another in the arena of generational politics.

The Arc Of Managerialism

Posted on February 1, 2024 by thezman

In March of 2021, the FBI conducted a raid of a company called U.S. Private Vaults located in Beverly Hills, California. The company offered safe deposit boxes to clients seeking privacy and security. Banks have rules about what can be kept in their safe deposit boxes and often require disclosure of the contents. This company did not place such restrictions on their clients. As a result, it was assumed its clients were criminals or people who would like to circumvent government surveillance.

For this reason and no other reason, the FBI got a warrant to inspect the company’s records, presumably to confirm that criminals were using the service. The legality of this was not questioned by the judge who signed off on the warrant because judges no longer question warrant requests from agents of the state. The FBI could hand a judge a drawing of stick figures in fingerpaint, claiming it is surveillance video of criminal activity and the judge would accept it.

Putting that aside, the warrant made no mention of opening the safe deposit boxes or inspecting the contents for criminal activity. On the day of the raid, the special agent in charge of the raid ordered his agents to pry open the boxes, inventory the contents, bring in drug sniffing dogs to sniff the contents and collect fingerprints from the boxes and the inside of the facility. Then the FBI decided to seize tens of millions in property on the grounds that they could do it.

At this point, the FBI had produced no evidence of a crime. They were probably right that criminals would like to use such a service to hide cash, valuables they bought for money laundering purposes and other things. It would also be attractive to foreign nationals working on behalf of a foreign government. Mossad, for example, could use a company like this as a dead drop. Space aliens could also use it to hide their ray guns and the keys to their flying saucer.

Again, there was never any evidence of wrongdoing. The FBI lied to the court about their intensions, and they willingly violated the law when they decided to not only pry open the boxes, but also steal the goods inside them. The owners of the stolen property sued the FBI to get back their property. The court initially ruled in favor of the FBI because the courts are almost as corrupt as the FBI. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the lower court’s decision.

In its ruling, the court called the raid an egregious violation of the owners fourth amendment rights. They also noted that the FBI clearly intended to steal the contents so they could use what they found in order to go after other people, perhaps raid other private security services in a similar fashion. The government tried to settle the case before it reached this point, suggesting they knew they had willingly violated the law, but they hoped to avoid the court making it official.

Presumably, the FBI will return the property to the owners, but the owners will have to sue the government in order to get back the cost of having to litigate this in federal court for the last three years. The government will probably settle so as to avoid another potential court loss, but the harm can never be fully cured. The company went out of business and who would trust a similar company in the future? If the secret police can willy-nilly raid a private business, what is the point of the service?

More importantly, none of the people involved in this raid from the government side has faced any punishment. The agent who ordered the raid was not fired. The agents and lawyers who lied to the court to get the warrant were not fired. There will be no criminal charges brought against any of these people, despite the fact they committed some of the worst abuses of power in our system. The Ruby Ridge and Waco cases tell us that the agents involved here will get promoted.

In the managerial state, no one is ever held accountable because accountability requires two elements missing in managerialism. One is a moral duty to the stated goal of the institution. If the people inside the FBI were motivated by an aristocratic spirit, the agents involved would all resign for having shamed their leaders. If they had a republican spirit, they would resign for having shamed the institution. Instead, they have a managerial spirit, which means no shame is possible.

The other element for accountability is clear responsibility. Managerialism is primarily about shifting responsibility from individuals onto collections of managers with a shared interest in controlling the organization. It is the magic trick of managerialism that collective error is never the fault of anyone in the collective. Managers socialize failure onto the abstraction that is the system, while privatizing the benefits onto the individuals within the managerial system.

This is why reform of managerialism is impossible. Reform starts by holding people responsible for the results. Managerialism evolved to prevent this so the reformer is either repelled by the system or consumed by it. This is why public companies that fail must be taken private. Elon Musk bought Twitter, took it private and became the man responsible for the company. He then fired half the staff and started holding the rest accountable for their work. He overthrew the managerial system.

Of course, this means the large social systems that control American society will never be reformed either. Everyone in Washington knows the FBI is a disaster, but no one can be held accountable, so not one tries to hold anyone accountable. This means the managerial state will follow the arc of all public companies in that it will reach its end phase and either collapse entirely or be taken private, as in private rule, so the system can be scrapped along with the managers.

The Year Of The Fink

Posted on January 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: The Sunday podcast is back as a morning performance this week, but could shift back to evenings as needed until I get settled in the new place. There is a post about firing old white guys and post about rug merchants. Subscribe here or here.

If you are one of the many schemers in Washington, or you dream of becoming a schemer in Washington, this is a troubling time. By now Trump should be in exile, having had to quit the presidential race due to his many legal troubles and the collapse in his support due to those legal troubles. A more acceptable candidate was supposed to have emerged and pushed Trump out of the race. This was the narrative the schemers in Washington have lived by for over a year.

In what is becoming a regular feature of our politics, the narrative did not turn out as written and the scramble is on for a narrative update. There are still the court cases in Georgia, New York, Florida and Washington. The last two are in Federal court, but the Mark Steyn case tells us that we may all be dead before they get going. The Georgia case may fall apart due to racism. Apparently, racism made the DA turn the case into a chance to give her lover public money.

Of course, the big hole plowed through the narrative was the first two contests of the primary season, where Trump won easily. By the time Iowa came around all but three non-Trump candidates had quit the race. After Iowa it was the neocon offering, but she was trounced in New Hampshire, thus leaving Trump as the presumptive nominee, assuming nothing untoward happens this spring or summer. Few in Washington expected this to be the state of affairs at this point.

This is what makes the Texas border showdown an interesting thing. All of a sudden, we get word that Mitch McConnell is telling his party that the politics of immigration have flipped and they need to rally to Trump on the issue. Then Greg Abbott finds his inner confederate and defies the Feds with regards to the razor wire he had installed in a public park that sits along the border. Finally, we have every Republican governor rallying to his side in this fight with the Feds.

The first thing to consider here is that the Republican Party is the party of scheming perfidious finks, so whatever they are doing is not on the level. This is a party that selects for people who live to fink. They should just rename the party to “The Fink Party” but that would be a degree of candor no fink could muster. That also means that their sudden embrace of immigration and Trump’s position on it is not on the level. They are up to shenanigans because it is their nature.

One angle is that they suddenly realize that immigration is important to the voters despite the best effort of regime media to anathematize the issue. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire listed immigration as a top concern. This never happens. Voters always put economic concerns at the top, because people are practical. This means immigration has leaked into the domain of the practical. All of a sudden, the Republicans have to pretend to care about immigration.

There may be something more perfidious afoot. Those court cases are still ongoing and one of them is scheduled to start in March. That means Trump is still in legal jeopardy and could be removed from the ticket. The issue is timing. They could not conjure an alternative in the primaries, so maybe they are looking to get a replacement ready, perhaps as his running mate. In other words, maybe word went out that there is a casting call for who will be Trump’s future replacement.

From the scheming weasel point of view, this is a good save to the official narrative that had Trump dropping out by the end of 2023. He cruises along winning delegates, picks a regime approved running mate and then is convicted in the summer. The party then does some hand ringing and decides to expel him from the party and tab his running mate as the party nominee. “We really hate to do this but with Trump facing jail time, we have to go with his top choice to replace him.”

It sounds like 4-D chess, but these are people who traffic in finkery. Shenanigans are like water to a fish or oxygen to a human. We know the collection of flunkies who ran in the primary did so becasue they were told Trump would be removed. They admitted as much during the debates. It is not unreasonable to think word has gone out to the governors that there will be a new casting call for players in the updated version of the Never Trump narrative that remains a hit in Washington.

Then you have the fact that what Texas is doing is mostly a show. This area they are walling off from the Feds is a tiny portion of the border. The park itself remains wide open to the Feds. If they wanted to do it, they could take down the razor wire, but thus far they have not done it. As for the states voicing support and sending national guard units, this is a cost-free gesture. They risk nothing in doing it, as even the national party thinks it is okay to sound butch on immigration.

One other factor suggests there are shenanigans afoot. There was the rumor that Trump might consider Haley as a running mate. This seems to have come from Washington and probably has a kernel of truth to it. The party may be offering to support Trump in his legal and political fights, if he agrees to a running mate that is on good terms with the regime. There has no doubt been discussions about this between the party and the Trump campaign.

All that said, Trump has proven to be one of the most resilient and lucky political figures to come around in generations. He is probably shrewd enough to avoid picking a running mate that could be his replacement. That just means the shenanigans will take another turn this spring. The regime hates Trump with the intensity of a thousand suns so they will never relent. What the first month of the political year tells us is that 2024 will be the year of the fink.

The Clash Of Visions

Posted on January 24, 2024 by thezman

The New Hampshire primary turned out about how most sober minded people expected, with Trump cruising to victory. As expected, regime media and those in the anti-Trump cult have quickly moved onto other things. Even though the narrative on this election has been wrong so far, these people were sure the gods would deliver them from the terrible Orange Man in New Hampshire. Now they will update the script for the South Carolina primary in a few weeks.

Even though the New Hampshire primary was not a surprise to normal people, it does have a few things worth noting. One is the turnout. In 2016 when all of this was new and exciting, about two hundred and sixty thousand people voted on the Republican side, with Trump getting one hundred thousand votes. This time, with the results known in advance, three hundred thousand voted on the Republican side and Trump got one hundred and sixty thousand votes or fifty-four percent.

Further, exit polling says that only about a third of the people voting would call themselves “MAGA”, by which they mean part of the Trump movement. We do not have similar polling from 2016, but it is reasonable to say that most of Trump’s vote during those crazy days would declare themselves part of the movement. You also have to consider the fact that even Trump’s most loyal fans would find it weird to ask them if they were part of the MAGA movement, as if it is a club.

Even so, it says that people were voting for different reasons this time. Various anti-Trump groups poured money into the state to boost other candidates. Mikki Haley spent over twenty million on ads. The DNC spent millions last year getting their voters to switch to undeclared so they could vote in the GOP primary. About half of the Republican primary voters were undeclared, so it is reasonable to assume many will vote Democrat in the general.

What the regime tried to do with a fair bit of success is turn the Republican primary into a general election by flooding the voting booth with Democrats. It explains why Haley dropped her “tough conservative gal from the South” routine and morphed into “I want to speak to the manager” feminist hero. Her people had her go out and praise Hillary Clinton because they knew that half the voters probably voted for Hillary over Trump and would like to do it again.

It also tells us something about the dynamics of this election. This is not the 2016 election where people voted for Trump for the same reason the drunk guy in the crowd mooned the king or shouted derogatory things at him. In 2016, Trump was for many voters a harmless protest vote. In 2024 it means something different because things have gotten much worse since then. Note that for the first time primary voters put immigration at the top of their concerns.

There is something else here that may be driving a new dynamic in this election and that is the open shenanigans in this process. Think about the sort of person who schemes up a plan to get Democrats to vote in the other party’s primary a year in advance in order to subvert the will of the voters. This is a level of sociopathy that few people think is possible. Serial killers are not this devious. The people claiming to defend democracy are now out front with these schemes.

Of course, such a scheme only works if there are people willing to do it. Years of interacting with people who put up signs on their lawn promoting the latest thing is slowly changing how normal people see things. Thirty years ago, the typical suburban peasant thought they just needed find the right person to say the truth the right way and these people would see the light. Today, the typical suburban peasant thinks the woman with the BLM sign might be better off in another country.

What the typical suburban peasant is waking up to, even though he cannot articulate it, is that we are living in a clash of visions. The people on the other side of that sign explaining all the things that go on in that house have a view of the world that is completely different from most people. That vision often assumes that the people without such signs are what stands between them and the future. The vision of the self-anointed says the benighted are the problem.

This is because when they talk about “democracy” they are not talking about the mechanics of picking office holders. They imagine a society in which all of the moral questions have been solved. The only thing left is figuring out how to quickly attain diversity, inclusion and equality. Further, they assume that everyone must want this, unless they are evil, so the only reason we have not “made progress” is that these evil people are using shenanigans to confuse the masses.

In contrast, the typical suburban peasant imagines a world where he has a job he enjoys, friends to grill with and watch ball games and a chance give his kids a better life than he got from his parents. For him, democracy is about picking the best office holders who will take turns buggering through the problems. In most cases, the typical suburban peasant prefers the guy who will do very little, as things could always get worse so best not to rock the boat too hard.

It is not just that one vision is radical and utopian and the other conservative and pragmatic, but that the former sees the destruction of the latter as a proper and necessary part of their program. What we are seeing in this election could be a sign that the typical suburban peasant is waking up to this reality. It is not just that the middle-aged white woman with the BLM sign is wrong, but that she represents a danger to the life and welfare of the typical suburban peasant.

Whether or not this awakening among the typical suburban peasant is happening can be debated, but we can be sure he has yet to arrive at the solution. There can be no compromise in this clash of visions. When the ends of one side are the destruction of the other, the only plausible response for the other side is to seek the same. As more suburban peasants wake up to the reality of sign lady, more will inevitably arrive at the only solution that guarantees their survival.

About Last Night

Posted on January 16, 2024 by thezman

In the old days, people used to preserve food by “putting it up” in various ways, which meant storing it in a way that prevented spoiling. It also meant storing it in such a way that rats and mice could not get to it. In modern times homeowners make sure their house is safe from mice and squirrels. In both cases, there is a lot of time to think about the strategy of rodents. This is the same sort of thinking we must use when looking at the results of the Iowa caucuses last night.

None of the players in the drama were operating entirely on the level. Trump was the big winner; however, his game is not about the conventional winning of delegates, but of outflanking the lawfare system. The bigger the wins, the more difficult it will be for the system to remove him. At least that is the thinking. He assumes, perhaps foolishly, that a runaway win in the primaries will force the party to abandon its scheme to remove him from the ballot and appoint someone as the nominee.

Similarly, the minor candidates were using the six-month run up to this event for reasons that had nothing to do with winning. Christie ran to earn some good will from the party by saying mean things about Trump in the debates. Hutchinson ran so they will mention it in his obituary. Ramaswamy is playing the long game, hoping to become the heir to Trump. He is hoping to be the burnt orange version of Charlie Kirk so he can run in the future or have a media career.

These sorts of rodents scurry around every presidential primary, but we have some unusual vermin this time. Nikki Haley is running as a standard issue regime Democrat in the Republican primary. The base assumptions of her campaign are that Trump will be removed from the ticket and the party is ready to throw in the towel and merge with the Democrats like you see in most Democrat states. In those states, the Republicans run lighter versions of the Democrats in statewide elections.

What she hoped for in Iowa was a clear second place finish. This would have knocked DeSantis out of the race. She would then be the sole anti-Trump option for the next few months, establishing herself as the logical alternative for when the party removes Trump from the ballot. Instead, she came in third place, with her support coming mostly from Democrats crossing over to vote for the most virulent anti-Trump option. She was close enough to DeSantis, however, to stay in the race.

Her strategy is to look for a big night in New Hampshire next week. The way to look at this New Hampshire primary is as a general election. It is an open primary so anyone can vote on the Republican side. The Democrats and Republicans have been running massive get out the vote drives in order to have as many far left crackpots from Massachusetts take a GOP ballot. That is another thing about the state. People from Massachusetts regularly drive over and vote in the primary.

DeSantis has all but abandoned New Hampshire, as in a general election style format there is no room for a candidate trying to stake out the middle ground. Instead, he is now focused on South Carolina and Nevada. He has no chance to win either contest, but his people think he can beat Haley in both. If he bests her in her own state, then he can argue that he is the better choice for when Trump is removed. Currently he is behind Haley by a factor of four in South Carolina.

The more likely path for DeSantis is to do well enough in South Carolina to argue that Haley is unelectable and then conserve money to run a minimum campaign into Super Tuesday when things get interesting on the lawfare side. It is the longest of longshots, but it is what he has at the moment. The party and its financiers prefer Haley as their Trump alternative and Trump voters have come to despise DeSantis. That leaves him with few voters to collect in these primaries.

Of course, one of the biggest rats gnawing away at things is the media. Clearly, the word has gone forth that they are to invest in Nikki Haley. The reason they called the race so soon was so the campaigns could have a coping strategy and therefore a narrative to use in the media. This will help Haley as she can plausibly claim that she barely lost to DeSantis due to the early call. She did win one county, which is something DeSantis did not accomplish.

Through the media, we can see that the regime has determined that Haley is a good replacement for Biden, even if she is in the wrong party. In a way, they are trying to engineer the primary into a version of Hillary versus Trump in 2016. This may be why Haley is running around praising Hillary Clinton. This is the narrative framing that the regime is conjuring, so Haley is leaning into it. After all, from her perspective, the real nominating process is in Washington.

The biggest rat in the room is the regime. It is an open secret that they want Trump removed from the ballot, but even a regime as evil and sterile as this one has some fear of the peasant revolt. If Trump is plowing through these primaries and people are wise to Haley being a Democrat catspaw, executing their scheme could turn out to be their Samson option, so there may be some hesitance in some circles. Last night’s result was another setback in their scheme.

Much will depend on what happens in the courts. The first shoe to drop will be the 14th amendment case. The court has agreed to take this on an expedited basis, which means a decision may come in February. If the court comes down hard in favor of Trump, which is a possibility, then it could signal to the rest of the legal system that lawfare will face an uphill battle. If the court is open to the claim, then it will be read by the lower court judges that they can do their worst.

All of the study of rat behavior obscures the fact that the only reason any of this is happening is Trump dared to speak for normal white people in 2016. Whites are about seventy percent of the voters right now. Twenty percent of them are insane, leaving about half the voters with no representation in the system. The Democrats explicitly hate these voters, and the Republicans implicitly hate them. Elections are about who gets to spit in these people’s faces first.

That is the subtext of this election. The regime is debating with itself whether now is the time to close the door entirely on the white voter. They believe the time is near when national elections will be like we see in Democrat controlled states. There is a permanent majority called Democrats, a ceremonial opposition called Republican and the goal is to prevent the majority of citizens from getting any say. The results last night suggest they still have some work to do.

Managerial End

Posted on January 15, 2024 by thezman

Note: The Sunday podcast is back!. It will be an evening performance until I get settled in the new place. There is a post about the cost of groceries and a post about driving the Jeep Gladiator for a week. Subscribe here or here.

Last week someone posted a video of herself getting fired by Cloudflare via a zoom call and the video went viral. It has nine million views at this point. The reason the video caused such a stir is it touches on many of the things that people find unpleasant about the current age, but either lack the language to discuss or feel they should not be discussing out in the open. That last part turns up in the resulting thread as people naturally turn it into a black hat versus white hat issue.

That last part is the most obvious, but the least interesting. Whenever these sorts of topics arise on social media, conservatives begin rhythmically chanting phrases like “toughen up snowflake” or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” What they are instinctively doing is rallying to the defense of the giant corporation as they have been trained to do by conservatism. When challenged, the retort is some form of “The world does not owe you anything”, which is complete nonsense.

The basis of all human societies is reciprocal obligations. Social contract theory rests on this assumption. Monarchy rests on a collection of reciprocal vertical relationships that bind the king to the lowest peasant. The social club assumes the members will be loyal to the club and its members. In return, the members get benefits from the club and fellow members exclusive to them. A club that has no duties to the members is not a club, but a random collection of strangers.

This is the central defect of conservatism. When the people we call the left claim society has some new moral duty, conservatives never challenge the moral duty, but instead fall into a form of bourgeois anarchism. Terrified of challenging the left on moral grounds, they instead argue that society has no duties at all. In the case of the mega-corp screwing its employees, they say the company has no duties to them. Conservatism is always an answer to a question no one asked.

Putting that aside, you see the horrors of managerialism in that video. Clearly, senior management screwed up and hired too many new people. Instead of admitting this and reducing their staff, they send out flunkies from middle-management to chant nonsensical gibberish at people via Zoom call. Odds are neither of these two zombies could name a single metric they reference or what it means. For them these are abracadabra words that make the employee go away.

The woman getting let go has a reasonable expectation. She was hired under a set of conditions, and she met her end of the bargain. At one point she concedes that the company has a right to change the bargain. They over-hired and now need to trim the staff and her name was picked from the hat. If they were honest with her the video probably never gets posted. It is clear that the woman is not offended by the firing so much as by the lying about it.

This is one corrosive effect of managerialism. It turns everyone into a sociopath by forcing them to lie even when the truth makes more sense. The two zombies chanting corporate catchphrases are doing it so as to avoid being on the other end of one of these zoom calls. Like the Nazi camp guards given a choice of being a guard or being one of the guarded, millions of Americans are forced to be terrible people in middle-management positions, doing the bidding of management.

This is why we get the weird language. It is a way for the people at the top to manipulate their flunkies into doing this stuff. Instead of cutting jobs they are enthusiastically reducing newly discovered redundancies. They are not eliminating a department and the people in it, they are efficiently implementing a new compelling initiative in furtherance of corporate goals. No one can be upset at these words because they are stripped of anything meaningful to humans.

Managerialism, whether on the small scale like at a corporation, or at the large scale as in a society, is a system that seeks to socialize the cost of decision making while subtly privatizing the benefits. Senior managers enjoy the bulk of the benefits but spread the cost of failure across the organization. It does this by distributing the decision making across senior management. No one person at the top gets the blame when things fail, because it is always a group decision.

We see this in politics. The banks fail and the Fed has to print up trillions to bail them out and no one gets fired, much less jailed. Instead, all the top people agree that the system failed in some way. Top men are tasked with addressing this system failure, which of course pays them handsomely. After the banks get bailed out and things return to normal, the bankers congratulate themselves with bonuses. Managerialism is an aristocracy with none of the social benefits.

This is not without consequences, and we see it in politics. When no one in the managerial elite is ever held accountable, the selection pressure for membership in the elite shifts from aptitude to obsequiousness. You see this in every established corporation and in the government. The people at the top are increasingly incompetent while increasingly obsequious. Politics is packed to the gills with oleaginous grifters because the system selects for such people.

While it is true that the Pareto principle works in the elite as it does everywhere, eventually that smart fraction within the elite is overwhelmed by the growing number of sociopathic grifters slithering into the elite. Again, we see this writ large in politics where incompetence and failure seem to be the goal. The logical end of managerialism is a committee room stuffed with narcistic simpletons waving their credentials at one another as the riots rage outside the committee room.

This may be one bit of subtext to the statue toppling. “No one builds statues honoring committees” is an old truth that haunts managerialism. Statues to great men offend the managerial elite not just because those men were white. It offends because it is a reminder that it is great men that make the world, not the boring mediocrities who come to dominate managerialism. The latest thing is just a convenient excuse to remove the shadow of the great men that haunt the mind of the manager.

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