Hard Times

Posted on September 14, 2022 by thezman

Note: The comments have been getting bombed by Ukrainian bots, which is why moderation has been so immoderate. This was part of the public relations campaign around the recent offensive. It is slowly abating, but for now moderation will remain tight to prevent a flood of nutty comments.

The American stock exchanges dropped sharply yesterday when it was announced that the inflation reduction act had not reduced inflation. The consumer price index came in higher than expected. This triggered the robots to sell on the expectation that the Federal Reserve will keep tightening the money supply. The DOW dropped 3.94% bringing the decline for the year to 14.4%. Luckily, they have changed the definition of a bear market so this is still a bull market.

The inflation report was all bad news. Gasoline prices declined ten percent, but all other energy increased for the period. That probably means two things. One is the gas price decline is due to less driving. In other words, people are adjusting their spending because inflation is not starting to take a bite out of their budgets. Instead of a weekend car trip, people are staying home. According to AAA, over all sales of gasoline declined in August to levels last seen during the lockdowns.

Another piece of the gasoline puzzle is the dumping of cheap crude on the domestic refineries by the Biden administration. They panicked when gasoline hit five bucks a gallon nationally so they started releasing crude from the SPR. This drives down the price of gasoline a little. The taps run dry at the end of next month, just before the election, so prices will tick back up. In other words, some of the bad news has been pushed out to after the November elections.

The reaction to the inflation report is a good example of how the people in charge believe their own narratives. The never ending debate on this side of the great divide is whether they believe their nonsense. When it comes to the economy, they can talk themselves into anything. They had Biden out bragging about the good economy just when the report was released, on their assumption that it would be the proof they needed to go along with his speech. Whoops.

This also ties in nicely with the orchestrated media campaign in August claiming that Joe Biden was leading his party to victory in November. They rolled out a bunch of polls along with pleasing narratives about specific races. Of course, they claimed that abortion was killing the Republicans with voters. The narrative said the economy was catching fire, inflation was falling and this would result in the most popular man in history leading his party to a smashing success.

Putting that aside, inflation is the second worst thing that can happen in an economy, the worst being deflation. There is a debate about where the sweet spot is with prices, but everyone agrees that anything outside the two percent range is bad. The Fed targets two percent inflation. The sound money guys think a two percent decline in prices is the right target. Right now inflation is at eight percent using the current model and double that using the old model.

That last bit is key. We have been lying to ourselves about inflation since the 1990’s and it is obvious when you look at old bills. Pull out a cable bill from ten years ago and you see the difference. Food is probably twice what it was ten years ago. Ten years ago, people were complaining about two dollar home heating oil. In places with real winter, oil contracts are around five bucks a gallon now. This has been over a period when they say inflation was around two percent.

The subtext to this is the politics. The reckless behavior of the ruling class made people angry enough to vote for Trump when times were good. When people are worried about buying food, they tend to get a bit cranky. This hits the middle-class even more as they are riddled with angst. Poor people accept that they may have to stand in line for food, but middle-class people loath the idea of it. It is why we hide food banks from the middle-class, so they are not freaked out about it.

A suddenly panicked middle-class, still not happy about the 2020 election or the behavior of the elites, might start looking around for something a bit stronger than Trump and his one-liners. Whether that is happening or not does not matter, as the regime will assume it is happening. That is why the administration is sending goons out to rough up political opponents. Just as they were sure inflation was a social construct, they are sure the invisible Hitler army is angry over inflation.

This is probably why Russia and China are so confident about their prospects in this global economic war. They look at Europe and see an economic and political circus that is about to get very bad. In the United States, all the signs point to the last days of an empire in decline. Realistically, they are not wrong. America has been broken for a long time and now it is going broke. That is why countries like India and Saudi Arabia are not siding with the empire in the war against Russia.

Putting that aside, the news is all bad right now as far as the economy. The Federal Reserve has no choice but to keep raising rates. They should have moved faster and earlier, but Powell is doing his Arthur Burns impression. He was the Fed chief in the 1970’s who dithered while inflation raged. Powell seems to be finding his inner Volcker so that means tight money and that means recession. Just how deep is the only question that matters at this point.

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The Corpse Of Democracy

Posted on September 8, 2022 by thezman

The results are in and despite what you have observed in your own life and on-line, Biden’s Gates of Hell speech was a huge success. According to a new poll close to 60% of Americans now think Donald Trump and his nefarious “MAGA movement” are a threat to our democracy. Not only that, 60% of Republicans do not think the MAGA movement represents the majority of the party. It looks like it is all over for Trump and the tens of millions who support him.

Now, most MAGA people will dismiss the poll as just another example of the craven efforts by the regime to prop up their chief stooge. This is, of course, the result of Putin’s propaganda and disinformation campaign. These conspiracy theorists questioning the veracity of polling, especially this poll, are just doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin and are probably semi-fascists. They are semi-fascists because they do not know they are being turned into fascists by the Trump movement.

Granted, the details of the poll are not available so there is no way to examine the crosstabs to see if it supports the press release. The only clue in the press releases is that the poll was weighted toward self-identified Democrats. It also subtly suggests that only 25% of the self-identified Republicans in the poll agree with the claim that Trump is a danger to the planet. There is growing evidence that the dispossessed are no longer identifying as Republican, so there is that.

In all seriousness, this is the sort of story that underscores the problem with mass democracy in the mass communication age. This poll could be a complete fraud, but there is no way to know. More important, your favorite news site is never going to check or question it. They just pick it up as a part of the automated service they use to plug into news feeds like Reuters. The left-wing news highlighter Matt Drudge is running this poll in red at the top of his site.

As de Maistre said, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” Drudge is a left-wing partisan, but his site is like most news sites these days in that it relies on feeds to populate itself. Even with site-created content, there is little editorial control. It is easy to inject a false opinion into the system and see it get repeated a million times in minutes.

Of course, there is the other problem. Who cares if a majority of people are falling for the latest conspiracy theory? That is, after all, what all this hysteria about Trump and the MAGA movement is, when you examine it. It relies on the assumption that there are sinister, unseen forces at work behind the scenes. The old people wearing red Trump caps at the diner are not just people who hold contrary opinions. They are part of an invisible army of fascists and evil doers.

Imagine a poll that reported a majority of people thought there are little green men visiting earth on a regular basis. You do not have to imagine it. There was a big global survey half a dozen years ago that claimed a majority of people on earth think there are little green men out there. A majority of Americans believe in ghosts. More people think psychics are real than think Ron Paul is real. Big Foot is ten times more popular than the vice president of the United States.

The point is, most people are stupid, at least when it comes to understanding things that have no direct impact on their lives. They may know accounting or chemistry, but they can also think disagreeing with the government is bad for democracy. This has always been the argument against democracy. Most people lack the desire or capacity to master the material necessary to make good political choices. Giving them a ballot is like giving a toddler a hand grenade.

Of course, opinions change. Fifty years ago, when Joe Biden entered politics, few people thought he should be elected to anything. When he ran for president in 1988, he was laughed off the stage. In 2008, he was seen as a joke candidate to give the media some entertainment. In 2020, his own party preferred an item from the museum of communism, but then everyone changed their mind all of a sudden. The same change of heart happened on election night. Opinions change.

Clearly, a polling outfit would know that their polling is a snapshot in time and may not mean anything in a week. That Reuters poll also reports that close to 60% of the respondents think the speech will make things worse. Half never bothered to watch it and two thirds think Biden is a bum. In other words, the poll is invalid on its face, but it makes for a handy false opinion, so it gets minted and passed onto gullible dupes like the rent boys running the Drudge Report.

This is the problem with mass democracy in a mass media age. Our culture, including the political process, is a giant lie machine. Imagine if people went about their day with people from the state following them around with a bullhorn, constantly shouting random slogans at them. This is what we have today. We are awash in nonsense from the mass media but are expected to have sensible opinions. It is no wonder that the political system is unresponsive to the public will.

It is the irony of mass democracy. The stated point of democracy is to make government more responsive to the public will. Instead, it reveals that the people who are in charge have no interest in the public will. They serve other interests. That means those who oppose the prevailing order should ignore the public will as well. Instead, the focus must always be on who decides. The solution to the ills of democracy is to let democracy murder itself and be ready to bury the corpse.

The End Of Grifts

Posted on September 6, 2022 by thezman

Eric Hoffer famously said that what starts out in America as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation. As we saw with Covid, it can often be all of these things at the same time. When Hoffer made this observation, mass media was still in the analog age, so things moved slower. A movement would linger for while in the corporate stage before devolving into a racket. In the digital age, these things can happen simultaneously and instantaneously.

The reason for this is America is not an actual country, like France or Sweden, but an open outdoor bazaar held together by a merchant class. As Coolidge supposedly said, the business of America is business. That means everything is treated as a business, even things that should never be a business. It is the worship of the marketplace where everyone assumes the right answer will magically arise from the transactions that occur in the marketplace. The invisible hand is our god.

The trouble is, there are things that are true that people would like to think are not true, so those market results will be at odds with reality. There are things in every society that should never be exposed to market forces. They are too important to let the fickle mobs in the marketplace decide. In theory, this is supposed to be a bedrock assumption of the American form of government. There are things like natural rights that are beyond the reach of the political process.

The corrosive effect of marketism on the political process is clear in the political industrial complex that has consumed the political system. Billions are made every election cycle in politics. What should be a straightforward process whereby the parties and candidates make their case to the voters, is instead run by a massive political industry of consultants, advisers, technicians and the media. All of these people are in the process to make money from politics.

Here is a useful example in a legacy site called the American Spectator. The post is an argument in favor of something called rank choice voting. This a system that requires voters to list their preferred candidates in order of preference. The first choices are then counted up and you get the normal total. In some systems, if no candidate gets fifty percent of the vote, then the second choices are tallied up and added to the candidates total. In other systems, this is automatic.

There are two rather obvious problems with this system. One is it adds a layer of complexity to the voting system. A central tenet of all democratic systems, even those that limit the role of voting, is that voting is clear and open. In the rank choice voting systems, you can get a minority candidate winning the election, despite most people voting for some other option. Put another way, it is not clear to the users of the system how their inputs will affect the outputs of the system.

Therein lies the other problem. This added complexity becomes a bonanza for the army of grifters in the political system. Now that the social media consultant racket has run its course, they get to jump on the ranked choice voting scam. You can be sure that all of the pinheads with “social media influencer’ in their bio are now thinking about removing the Ukraine flag so they can make room for the letters RCV. This “innovation” is quickly becoming both a racket and a business.

The proof of this assertion is the man behind that post. According to his bio, Eric Wilson is a digital-first political strategist based in Washington, DC. He was a Technology and Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, located at the Harvard Kennedy School. In other words, his post at The American Spectator is simply advertising for his services. Ranked choice voting, according to Eric Wilson, is good for the people, because it is profitable for him.

It cannot be emphasized enough just how terrible ranked choice voting is for a country that is quickly losing trust in its systems. With normal voting it takes some jurisdictions weeks to count the vote. The Alaska election he holds up as a great example took weeks to sort out after the election. Imagine that in a big corrupt state like California or New York. It will take years to resolve an election. There are still court cases going on over the 2020 presidential election.

Of course, this can only add to the sense that voting is rigged. Every innovation, like mail in voting, early voting, ballot harvesting and drop box voting has come with an observable increase in shenanigans. The states at the center of the 2020 election scandal were states that suddenly embraced innovated voting methods. Imagine a state like Pennsylvania suddenly switching to ranked choice voting a week before the election and you have the beginnings of armed revolt.

Of course, the promise of chaos is exactly why the consultant class want yet another way to muddy the waters on election day. Chaos is good for business. The fact that it is bad for the health of society is besides the point. Those racks of donuts are not going to buy themselves, so that means Eric Wilson needs steady work. If that work is bad for the people, well, too bad for them. They should have figured out a way to grift on the collapse of their country like Eric Wilson.

This is the problem with marketism. When everything must be exposed to the marketplace, everything quickly becomes a racket. When the governance of your country becomes a racket, you no longer have a country. That is why the people at the top of the racket so fiercely oppose anything that looks like community. It offers an alternative morality to that of marketism. If people begin to put something ahead of making a quick buck, the market could collapse.

That is where things are headed. Politics is a massive racket run by conmen, grifters and sociopaths who care only about a quick buck. The system staggers on because of the cultural inertia behind it, but eventually, it must succumb. There are also ideologues that take advantage of this to push their agenda. We see that with the neocons and their efforts to blow up the world. With no one in power interested in the wellbeing of the system, the system will eventually collapse.

The Reality Jubilee

Posted on August 24, 2022 by thezman

The Biden administration is gearing up to offer some sort of college debt jubilee as their answer to the student debt crisis. The details of the scheme are being leaked to generate interest in the forthcoming announcement. The idea is to use printed money to buy votes from the millions holding student debt. Coincidentally, this comes just as the regime begins the fall campaign. Currently there is $1.6 trillion in outstanding college debt, most held by the Federal government.

There is no economic sense behind the idea. A debt jubilee is just another way of dropping cash onto the economy. With roaring inflation and supply chain problems, this is pretty much the opposite of good policy. The net effect of the program is to put more money in the pockets of the debtors. They will spend the money, just as they did the stimulus checks, which puts upward pressure on prices. Of course, this will come after the midterms so it makes sense to the politicians.

The reason there is $1.6 trillion in college debt is that the government has been mucking around in the education markets for several generations. Financial aid, like public pensions, quickly became a good way to buy votes. Opposing it on economic grounds, while factually correct, looked like you were opposing it on moral grounds, which makes you a monster. It quickly became a political racket that grew out of control and now we have a multi-trillion dollar monster.

The madness of college financial aid is obvious when you look at the rise in tuition costs over the last thirty years. They have grown at multiples of the official inflation rate and that is excluding hidden fees. There was a time when a student could work his way through college. It was a struggle, but it was possible. Today, the cost of tuition alone dwarfs what a student can make working fulltime. In other words, in the effort to make college affordable, it was made increasingly unaffordable.

This is a well understood phenomenon. If the government starts issuing subsidies for the purchase of new BMW’s, the price of the cars will increase. The increase will track with the subsidy. The people running BMW are not stupid. Once they know the buyers can afford the premium, they will raise prices. This very same thing just happened with the subsidy for electric cars. The electric car makers raised prices to match the new subsidy from Washington.

The remarkable thing about this is everyone knows it is true. The reason the people animating Biden’s corpse have been slow to pull the trigger on this scheme is they know it will be bad for the economy. The timing is to get the applause before the election, then have the public pay the price after the election. They figure that in two years people will forget all about it. Come the 2024 election, the corpse animators will have some new scheme to sell the public.

Even more remarkable is the fact that some people in the media know it is true, but most are innumerate so they do not understand the material. Some of the former group will ask the Biden people about the math and the Biden people will make up a whopper about how the definitions of commonly used economic terms have changed so shut up bigot and clap louder. There will be no serious discussion of this scheme and the economic condition of the country will decline a bit further.

Critics will settle for blaming the voters, especially those rotten kids down at the coffee shop with their nose rings, philosophy degrees and college debt. “The people are voting themselves a raise from the public fisc!” It is a good example of the perverse effect of democracy on the public mind. The people responsible for the terrible governance get a pass, while their victims get the blame. When the people work through bad policy, the “leaders” take credit for the result.

If Joe Biden were the dictator, installed by the ruling class after the old dictator was deposed, there would be no question about who to blame. This is why they remain berserk over the 2020 election controversy. If the people think the game was rigged, then there is no way to shift the blame for the results onto the voters. It turns out that the best way to avoid the wrath of the people over the manifest corruption of their leaders is to give them a ballot and tell them they are in charge.

Putting all of this aside, the college debt crisis hides a much bigger problem going on that you can see in the college numbers. As the cost of a credential has gone up, its value has declined. One reason for that is the dilution of it by handing them out to anyone who qualifies for debt. The other reason is the changing complexion of the student body. The diversity push has changed what the credential means, which has diluted its value to the core market.

The people not going to college are the people who should be getting the additional training from the education system. That is the cohort that is dropping out of the system because the cost-benefit relationship has turned negative. The result is a swelling number of credentialed idiots carrying debt they can never pay. They are also more likely to stop paying, knowing you will not dare go after them. The moral inversion of the education system is creating new downstream problems.

Of course, all of this means the system can never be reformed. What needs to happen is a debt jubilee along with the abolition of all subsidies. Most colleges would close and half of the current students would drop out of school. The system would shrink down to its core of training bright young people and doing useful research. That can never be allowed to happen, so the system will stagger on like this until the printing presses can no longer keep pace and we reach collapse.

Our Weird New Reality

Posted on August 16, 2022 by thezman

One of the great unnoticed things about the current crisis is that the rules that everyone said were inviolable no longer seem to apply. This is most obvious in the economic realm where nothing makes any sense. Things that were said to be impossible a generation ago are now the default. Similarly, politics is now operating by a set of rules that no one can explain. Things that were considered outside of the realm of the possible are the new normal.

Way back in the before times, when Covid got going, the world literally shut itself down in response to the virus. In America, over twenty-five million people were laid off and tens of millions more were sent home to work. The official unemployment rate peaked at thirteen percent and was then restated to be just under seven percent. What the actual unemployment rate was at the peak is unknown. Regardless, it was an unprecedented attack on the economy that should have been devastating.

According to official statistics, the economy shrugged it off. The official figures say the economy contracted by 3.4% in 2020 but all of the decline was contained in the third quarter of the year. The fourth quarter began a massive rebound. The official numbers say the economy grew by 5.7% in 2021. That more than made up for the decline in the prior year due to Covid. It turns out you can literally shut down an economy and nothing serious will happen. No wonder people want to stay home.

It is not just in America where the laws of economics have been suspended. In Europe they are allegedly facing an energy shortage. Since forever we have been told that steep increases in energy prices trigger recession. Germany is literally facing the prospect of having no gas and no one seems to notice. The massive disruptions to the flow of energy into the EU has thus done little to upset the economy. According to the old rules, this should not be possible.

It is possible that the media is simply lying to us. Maybe people are seething at the suffering that has been inflicted upon them. The official media, controlled as it is by state actors, is ignoring this in favor of happy talk. It could also mean that all of those economic rules were just made up. No on really knows why the economy does what it does but like court magicians, economist pretend to know in order to provide authority to the ruling class. The whole thing is a put-on.

It is also possible that we live in a simulation. What we think of as reality is just a bit of software that the creators can tweak as they please. Those old rules had to be abandoned because the system got a computer virus. In order to keep the simulation from crashing entirely they changed the code. It is a temporary patch to the system until the next upgrade. Maybe that is why big events from the past, like the lockdowns, suddenly feel like distant memories. We rebooted.

Politics has the same weirdness. Everyone reading this is absolutely certain that we did not arrest people for speech. That was written down somewhere and everyone agreed that you could say what you like with some very narrow limits. Yet Douglas Mackey faces a decade in jail for making fun of Hillary Clinton on Twitter. Maybe like the economic rules, there was a patch done to the software, a hard reboot and we are suddenly operating under a totally new set of rules.

This confusion is obvious with the political actors. Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage in New Jersey. All of a sudden, the people dedicating their lives to suppressing speech were bemoaning this attack on free speech. In Britain, Boris Johnson has people thrown in dungeons for using the wrong pronouns, but he was out there decrying this attack on our sacred liberty. Maybe the software engineers forgot the update these guy’s code during the last service pack.

Even taking a step back and looking at things in the most general sense, the rules no longer seem to apply. Politics used to be defined by the three big human motivations, money, power and sex. How does drag queen story hour fit in here? Who is benefitting from this lunacy? The point of this assault on the children seems to be the promotion of general mayhem, which used to be the opposite of what rulers sought. The old rules said order was the goal of the people in charge.

Of course, we know that a tenet of the new religion states that only through mass confusion can we transcend this world. They believe if they get everyone into a state of agitation that we somehow break free from our old thinking. This lets us adopt a new model of thinking which is the passage to the glorious future. The endless “subverting expectations” is a deliberate effort to make everyone crazy. It is hard to accept, but this does explain why the rulers now prefer chaos.

That does not explain why the system trundles on, despite violating all of the rules we have been told are inviolable. We have double-digit inflation, periodic food shortages and record high gas prices. The whiplash effect is now emerging, where price hikes are followed by demand destruction, which collapses prices, only to see demand return and drive prices back up again. In other words, we are seeing stagflation in the economy but no one seems to notice or care all that much.

Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing it. Maybe it takes us a while to recognize reality after a long absence. Perhaps what lies ahead is a mass recognition of reality and a sudden return of the old rules. Maybe the people running the simulation get bored and shut us down. At this point, given the general weirdness we are seeing, we cannot safely assume anything. For now, at least, we are in a new world with new rules and a new sense of reality.

The Lying Game

Posted on July 27, 2022 by thezman

Note: If you are familiar with Moldbug, who now calls himself Curtis Yarvin, I did a review of and comment upon his work behind the green door. Here is the SubscribeStar link and here is the Substack link.

At first blush, logic says that deception should have been bred out of humans long before humans settled down. Deceiving the tribe would be bad for the deceiver, resulting in exile or even death. That would significantly lower the reproductive success of the deceiver. On the other hand, tribes with deceivers would be less cooperative which would lower their overall success. Given enough time, it seems like deception should have disappeared from humanity.

Clearly that is not the case. We have lots of liars. That means deception has some useful role in human society. At the minimum, deception is not so negative that it would significantly lower the reproductive success of the deceiver. In fact, deception has probably always been an asset on the mating market. Even in the narrow world of the tribe, sweettalking Pebbles into a roll in the cave has obvious benefits. Perhaps lying for sex is enough to make deception a feature of man.

On the other hand, every society has prohibitions against deception. In European cultures, reputation is tied to honesty and trustworthiness. Someone who gains a reputation for deception loses status. In more clannish societies, deceiving outsiders is not so bad, especially if it helps the in-group, but lying to people in the clan can have severe consequences. Someone who deceives his own people can be exiled from the group or possibly worse.

This apparent contradiction has been known for a long time. It is not just humans who display the willingness to deceive others in the group. In many animal societies, like bees and ants, cooperation is rewarded and deception is punished. As with humans, deception should have been selected out a long time ago, but that is clearly not the case which suggest deception has some value. The deceiver gets enough benefit over time to make deception useful in some way.

A new study suggests that cooperation is what makes deception possible, as cooperation involved complex rules. An individual can exploit those rules to gain benefit without having to contribute. The more cooperative a society, the more opportunities there are for free riders to game those rules through deception in order to prosper from the cooperation of others in the group. The less cooperative a society, the fewer opportunities to exploit the rules through deception.

Given that we live in an age of universal deceit, at least by those in positions of authority, the evolution of lying suddenly matters a great deal. Part of it is that we are better able to see the lying of the people in charge. Before the mass media age, it was hard for people to get information on official lies. Of course, it was also much harder to promote official lies. Mass media results in a sense of mass cooperation, which means the communications revolution has revolutionized mass lying.

Even adjusting for our natural recency bias, institutional lying has exploded over the last thirty years in America. Every day someone from the government stands in front of cameras and blatantly lies about things. They know they are lying. The people in the press room know they are lying. Everyone in the room knows that the people watching it know everyone involved is lying. There is the sense that the people in these positions look at lying as a game where the biggest liar wins the day.

This is not a new thing. For twenty years the drug companies have said that serotonin levels are responsible for depression. It turns out to be wrong and the studies they relied upon were obviously wrong. In other words, they should have known their claims were false, but they had a billion reasons to lie, so they lied. This sort of deception has become the norm. Here is a story about a prominent cancer research facility caught faking their research.

Of course, we are still living through one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on human society, which is the Covid pandemic. The virus is real, but the claims around it have been nonsense since the start. Mask wearing and social distancing never had any basis in science or reason. Important people not only insisted it was science but forced people to play along. Now we are learning that the vaccines are not what was claimed and may have made things worse.

Many people have noticed the scale and degree of lying from official quarters, but the assumption is always that the cause is degeneracy. That is the people slithering into positions of authority are responsible for the rise in deception. The solution is to round them up, put them on boats and send them out to sea. Put honest people back into positions of authority and we return to the normal levels of deception. That may be just as wrong as the things coming from our leaders.

It may be that we have reached a point where the people in the ruling class of society, this includes the managerial and administrative classes, no longer feel any connection to the rest of us. They lie and willingly repeat lies, because it causes no harm to them and solves immediate concerns. Like people in clannish societies, deceiving outsiders brings no penalty as outsiders simply do not count. The ruling class is now an alien clan that is indifferent to the rest of us.

Alternatively, this evolving class awareness may bring with it a sense that the people over whom they rule are a constant threat. Like the Alawites in Syria, the new class at the top of the social hierarchy now sees their position dependent on keeping the masses confused and disorganized. Israel has always done this with her Arab neighbors, preventing them from uniting against her. Perhaps the explosion of lying is due to fear and hostility by the ruling class.

Another possibility, suggested by that British study linked above, is that deception tracks with cooperation. The more cooperative a society, or at least the more it appears to cooperate, the more deception in the society. This seems counter intuitive as cooperation is about trust and deception undermines trust. On the other hand, the more people experience deception, the more they are willing to cooperate with those who display trustworthiness. Trust and deception rise and fall together.

An underappreciated aspect of the communications revolution is how unity has become the standard of politics. Fifty years ago, people understood that politics was the art of the possible, which meant compromise. You give a little to get a little, but often there was no deal to be had and you just accepted it. Today, politics is all about uniting everyone behind a narrow cause. Every day our rulers demand we put aside our interest for something. Mass cooperation is the norm.

These demands for mass cooperation track with the growth of mass media and they track with the rise in anathematizing of dissent. As communications have increased, the demand for cooperation have increased. As cooperation increases, the deception increases with it. Some of the lying is in an effort to trick people into putting their interest aside for the good of the cause. Much of the lying is just opportunism. The greater cooperation has led to an explosion in deception.

The prisoner’s dilemma game is a classic example of how even simple human interactions can become quite complex. Rational self-interest can lead someone into a trap depending upon the rules in which they are forced to operate. This may be what we are seeing with the explosion of lying. The communications revolution has altered the ancient rules of human cooperation within large scale society. The ability to enhance mass cooperation has resulted in mass deception.

Like that prisoner’s dilemma game, the people doing the lying think they are acting in their self-interest but they are actually undermining their collective interests. The more they lie in defense of “our democracy” the less valuable the system that makes it possible for them to be a ruling class. Their efforts to enhance the value of their position in society is undermining their position. Taken to its logical conclusion, the collapse in trust will bring about a collapse in the ruling class.

Shark Sightings

Posted on July 14, 2022 by thezman

The sharks are begging to accumulate off the coast of the Biden administration, as his popularity falls along with his cognitive functioning. The current polling has him at or near the lowest ever recorded for a sitting president. His party is in a panic over the upcoming midterm elections. There is an obvious shift going on in the media where they signal that it is time to think about what comes after Joe Biden. Now the first dorsal fins of potential replacements are showing up in the water.

The first fin to pop up was that of Gavin Newsom, the current governor of California and former mayor of San Francisco. He recently ran an ad in Florida telling the locals that their state is terrible, they smell like feet and the smart ones should leave the filthy place and come to California. Presumably, his team thinks this is a way to pick a fight with Ron DeSantis, who has become a bogeyman for his cult. They seem to have forgotten that Florida is a critical swing state in elections.

Newsom turning up at the White House while Biden is visiting Israel suggests that the people in charge wanted to send a message. A child of extreme privilege, Newsom got richer by partnering with the fourth so of oil tycoon John Paul Getty. They started a winery and then a private equity firm that targeted entertainment properties catering to the managerial elite. Newson got bored with that and bought himself a mayoral office and then the governorship of California.

To his credit, he is one of the few politicians alive today who has ever signed the front of a paycheck and done any sort of real work. Granted, these are silly businesses that look like they were underwritten to make his resume look good. Boutique wineries and hipster restaurants are different from making car parts or fixing refrigeration units, but it at least looks like real work. He will no doubt run as a self-made man who knows how businesspeople struggle in these difficult times.

Another fin in the water is Gretchen Whitmer. She is up for reelection and has been getting lots of favorable news coverage. She gets to speak to important Democratic party groups and was on Biden’s short list of VP choices. He passed on her as she is too ambitious. The people around Biden had him select Harris as a form of life insurance policy. Just as no one would take out Obama with Biden as VP, no one is going to take out Biden with Harris as VP.

Whitmer’s resume is the dreary stuff we have come to expect. She has been on the dole her whole life. Her biggest claim to fame is the kidnapping hoax, which may have started as a campaign trick. It is hard to know, but so far, we know it was orchestrated by the FBI and not the patsies they put on trial. Her former lawyer seems to be involved with the FBI handlers. The whole thing is a seedy example of FBI corruption but also how big a role they play in politics.

The final fin in the water of Kamala Harris. Up until a few weeks ago, she was programmed to chant about how she looked forward to running with Biden in 2024 whenever asked about it. Someone swapped out her response code with a new response designed to give the impression she hopes Biden dies soon. This is probably the only way she ever becomes president. Even with support from Biden she stands little chance of winning the nomination on her own in 2024.

The main reason for looking at this is to note the long term planning that goes on with presidential candidates. Rich people thought Newsom could be president twenty-five years ago so they have been grooming him for this moment. That is a long term commitment to a project. The same is true of Whitmer. The kidnapping hoax is the sort of thing you do when you think she can run ten years hence as a tough independent female who stood up to the patriarchy as a governor.

The other interesting thing about the fins sticking out of the water is the Democrats are going to look for a white person in 2024. Harris ticks the brown boxes, but the wrong brown boxes as far as Democratic voters are concerned. Look around at other potential fins in the water and they all look like great whites as well. The Left’s commitment to diversity is like Pelosi and Biden’s commitment to Catholicism. It is a ceremonial item that has no bearing on how they live or think.

This is something the dullards in conservatism, which is pretty much all of conservatism, never seem to grasp. The chanting about white supremacy, antiracism, diversity and so on is a uniform these people wear to signal their commitment to their class. Fifty years ago, they walked around in brand new work clothes to signal their solidarity with the working man. Today they wear the language of diversity, inclusion and equity to show their solidarity with the swarthy fellows tending their gardens.

Putting all of that aside, the next six months promise some good political entertainment as the number of fins in the water reaches critical mass. While there is no reason to vote for Republicans, there are enough people mad at the economy to switch both the House and the Senate this fall. That will lead to a public debate about what to do with the aging Joe Biden. Do they let him serve out his term or do they push him down a flight of stairs after the election?

A year ago, the way to bet was on the unexpected tumble, but Harris has been so bad that swapping Biden for her is probably a bad bet. The people running the White House need Biden in place as they secure new places in the next regime. That means they put out word that Biden is re-thinking his 2024 plans. Sometime in the winter he announces his retirement after his first term in office. That also shifts the focus from the failures of Biden to the future failures of the next regime.

On the other hand, the 2020 election says that anything is possible so Biden running and winning in 2024 is not unthinkable. The beautiful people love firsts so he can be the first man in a coma to win election. Maybe the first man with a single digit approval rating to win reelection. After all, he was the first man to lose the first four primaries and still win his party’s nomination. He also got eighty million votes in the general election, which says that in America anything is possible.

Bad Choices

Posted on July 7, 2022 by thezman

Note: I was once again interviewed by a recovering libertarian. This time it was Peter Quinones and you can find it here and here.

Word from Britain is that Boris Johnson has agreed to step down as Prime Minister as soon as his party finds a replacement. His party will have an election to pick his replacement in October. According to the news, the main reason he is resigning is that his party worries that his personal scandals will drag them down in the polls and risk their majority in Parliament. This is one of those stock answers that the news supplies when no one wants to use the right answer.

The right answer is that the plutocrats who control British politics never liked Johnson and they seized this chance to get rid of him. In many ways, Johnson is like Donald Trump in that he represented the unhappiness of the Tory voters, even though he never really sympathized with them. Trump rode popular discontent into the White House but was obsessed with gaining elite approval. Johnson rode a populist wave into power, but never seemed to understand any of it.

There are, of course, lots of different opinions on the two men, but the one thing everyone agrees upon is the best people hated them. The reason the best people hated them is they appeared to side with the rabble against their betters, which is the one unforgivable sin in this age. Just about any degenerate act can be forgiven, but if you go against the family, you will never be forgiven. Like Trump, Johnson never seemed to understand this for some reason.

Another parallel to Trump is that the British ruling elite now faces the same trouble as the American elite in that a replacement is not obvious. In 2020 the selectors in Washington settled on a bumbling old simpleton because the other options were terrifyingly incompetent. No matter how angry you may be at the orange dirt monster, the thought of Elizabeth Warren in charge is a bridge too far. Bernie Sanders was literally their next best option.

For the Brits, the options are only slightly less ridiculous and that is only because the Brits tend to like the ridiculous. According to the European press, the favorite to replace Johnson is a Hindu bugman named Rishi Sunak. His great accomplishment in life was marrying the daughter of a Hindu billionaire while at Stanford. His other big accomplishment was wrecking the British economy as Chancellor of the Excheque during the Covid panic. You cannot make this up.

The other option for the selectors is Jeremy Hunt, who is something like the British version of Mitt Romney. He is a blend of oleaginous mendacity and obsequious rumpswabbery that would make him an ideal Republican. He represents the fink-on-the-voters wing of the Tory Party. He also looks like a character from a Mr. Bean sketch that gives him something Rishi Sunak lacks, which is some connection to the country over which he wants to rule.

The third likely option is Liz Truss. She should be a favorite as she is in many ways the most representative of the modern political class. Truss is noisy, self-aggrandizing and as dumb as a goldfish. As Foreign Secretary she encouraged Brits to volunteer to be killed in the Ukraine. She confused the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea while making bizarre threats against the Russians, while in Moscow. The woman is the poster child for the modern professional woman in the managerial class.

Interestingly, two other options, both considered longshots at this point, are Sajid Javid, from Pakistan, and Nadhim Zahawi, from Iraq. That makes three of the top contenders who are clearly not British. Further, they represent the party that claims to represent the traditional British nation. One could argue that the traditional British nation is a polyglot mishmash of people from the empire, but it is unlikely that most Tory voters think of Mumbai or Lahore when they are feeling sentimental.

This is the problem of empire. For an empire to work, the people at the top must eventually reduce their own people to the same level as the conquered. Initially force and grandeur is enough to keep the subjects in line but over time that no longer works so the imperial leadership must incorporate the conquered. This means granting them the same status as their own people, which can only be done by reducing their own people in terms of their place in the empire.

This is why the Tories and the Republicans have come to be the great champions of diversity and multiculturalism. They are the conservatives, but in the imperial sense, not the national sense. They are defending the empire, which means they defend the system that raises up the various people absorbed into the empire at the expense of the core population of the empire. This is why Tories and Republicans are sure their opponents are the real racists.

The final parallel to the Trump phenomenon here is that Johnson will end up being an unheeded warning because the people who could hear it lack the ability to respond to it with anything but anger. Trump was a sign of disgust by the white population of the country toward the political class. Similarly, Brexit and the dynamics that it unleashed, leading to Johnson becoming PM, was a warning shot. The British people were unhappy with their political class.

The trouble is, there is no answer for this. Like America, the British political system is controlled by people who hold the core population in contempt. Even if they could get past that, their options within the political system are terrible. The system has become a weird carny act, selecting for increasingly ridiculous people. Replacing a gasbag like Trump with a dementia patient was not an upgrade. Replacing Johnson with a simpleton like Liz Truss will not make life better.

What Johnson and Trump will come to represent was the dead end for a political system that evolved to its logical conclusion. When politics became theater, the stage was soon filled with carny acts, rather than serious people. In easy times, picking between the bearded lady and the sword swallower was fine, but in difficult times, these are not acceptable choices. That is where the British elites find themselves now, left with nothing but bad choices among terrible actors.

The Road To Revolution

Posted on July 4, 2022 by thezman

Note: My Taki post is on the same topic as today’s post. Sunday Thoughts is on a short break for the holiday, but I did post this about our spoiled rulers.

For the longest time, Americans were told that class did not exist because in America anyone could grow up to be president. While theoretically true, everyone understood that this was never to be taken literally. It simply meant that if you worked hard and made the right choices, you could maximize your potential. A person born poor could become rich is they had the talent for it.

This has been true, at least as far as economics. Many of our rich people started out as modest men. Through good fortune and tenacity, they made billions. Even today you can go far if you know how to work the system. Ibram X. Kendi has made himself very rich working the race hustle. Robin DiAngelo got rich in the same hustle. Even these sorts of mediocrities found riches by working the right angles.

This economic egalitarianism has fooled people into thinking the same rules apply to the management of society. America is a democracy where the people pick their leaders and guide public policy. The fact this is not true and never had been true is something with which Americans have always struggled, but good times made it is easy to conceal, because the system seemed to be working.

Things have not been working for a couple of years now. In fact, the sense that things are going wrong has probably been with us since the Bush years. While the economic numbers given to us by the government painted a rosy picture, people were starting to question things when the Iraq War went bad. The sense that things were heading in the wrong direction grew during the Obama years.

The election of Donald Trump was confirmation that a significant share of the voting public was worried about the direction of things. He was a blow against the Deep State that was secretly rigging things in favor of certain elites. The response from Washington seemed to confirm that shadowy actors are putting their thumbs on the scale, eighty million of them perhaps, to alter outcomes in their favor.

The concept of the Deep State is another form of escapism. Instead of questioning the system itself, blame goes to invisible players who corrupt the system. Even the most unhappy people want to believe the system can work. Those shadowy players use this to pit one group of Americans against another. “It is the Left!” for some, “It is white supremacy” for others.

A recent poll claimed that most people think the government is completely corrupt and barely half trust election results. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of Americans say they are proud to be an American. In fact, well over half say they are very or extremely proud. The fact that the poll headline suggests the opposite of the results could explain the apparent conflict in these polls.

People are starting to figure out that they are ruled by aliens and they have no peaceful way to alter this reality. The two parties are just two sock puppets operated by the people who are in charge. In the fall, one sock puppet will “win” the election, but they will just do all the same things the other party was doing. It will be done in the name of bipartisanship, which is when you are supposed to clap.

This is where that gap between the two polls creates trouble. The various campaigns waged by the ruling class over the last few years were intended to destroy pride in being an American, especially among a certain group. Instead, it has evolved a sense that the people in charge are alien and hostile. They have corrupted the people’s system for their benefit at the expense of the people.

In other words, the managerial elite wanted people to become more docile and dependent on the people running things. In order for that to happen the people needed to lose trust in themselves as “Americans”, whatever that means, and increase their trust in the experts running the system. What those two polls suggest is the exact opposite of what the managerial elite needs to happen.

Things will get interesting in the coming months as inflation, recession and supply chain problems eat into the economic wellbeing of the public. Again, people can and will tolerate just about anything if they have a good economy. Juvenal mocked this about the Romans and many do the same about Americans, but this practicality is the thing that makes civilized life possible.

People get political when forced into it. Bad times force people to look around and update their judgement about society. Those drag queen story hours piss off politically inclined people in good times. In bad times, they infuriate everyone else. In good times, a president who struggles to remember his own name and soils himself in public makes for some good jokes. In bad times it stops being funny.

None of this is to suggest that there is a revolution brewing. Right now, inflation is tolerable and gas prices are worrisome for most people. Revolution is a process that starts with a tiny minority realizing that the system is beyond reform. If they are right, this awareness slowly grows among the politically inclined, changing their rhetoric and how they engage with the public at large.

This is what happened when the colonies revolted 250 years ago. A sense of separation between the rulers and the people crept in like the fog. Some people never lost their connection to the king. Others lost it at the first sign of trouble. Most were in the middle somewhere, eventually coming around to the fact that they no longer had a natural bond to the people who claimed to rule over them.

The first rebellion in the colonies was close to a century before the big rebellion that led to independence. In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led an army of 1,000 Virginia colonists against the governor William Berkeley. They suspected the governor was in league with the Indian tribes, which made him reluctant to go after the tribes that were massacring settlers on the frontier. That should sound familiar.

The fact is, there were many revolts, rebellions and insurrections prior to the war for independence, all of which stemmed from the same problem. The people in charge were not safeguarding the interests of the people. Often, they ignored their duty for personal gain. In time, the general population was in revolt spiritually, if not physically taking up arms. The result was inevitable.

This is where we are in America. Every day, more people have that revolution in the mind where they realize that it is the system that created these loathsome creatures who inhabit positions of authority. The system was not captured by them. The solution is to throw the whole thing into the ocean and start fresh. Perhaps in time January 6th will be Culpepper’s Rebellion or the War of the Regulation.

The American revolution was not a singular event. It was the culmination of a process that began generations earlier. The same is true of all revolutions. The events that made this day possible happened over a long period of time. Present day America is somewhere on the timeline, maybe closer to the end than most realize, but still not quite at the revolting stage. Time will tell.

The Story Tellers

Posted on June 30, 2022 by thezman

The war in Ukraine has brought into focus a strange belief among the ruling elites of the West that the world is controlled by narratives. If they can conjure a good story that seems to cover the facts in evidence, then the story is not only true, but it will control reality for the people in it. It is a form of abductive reasoning where they start with observations of varying degrees of plausibility, make sweeping conclusion and then declare war on anyone who raises doubts about them.

Formally, abduction is a form of logical inference. You begin with a set of observations and then look for the most likely conclusion from the observations. It is simply the best available explanation for what is observed. There is the possibility that some less likely or entirely unknown explanation is the correct one. This is where the ruling class logic departs from the formal definition. The explanation deemed most likely becomes an article of faith, often in support of some other belief.

Another difference from the formal definition is that the initial set of observations are never debated or reevaluated. The faith of the ruling class in their own ability to observe and define the world rules out uncertainty about their observations. Since many of the observations are part of this process, reconsidering these observations means questioning the reasoning behind them. More important, it means doubting the reasoner behind them and that is forbidden.

With regards to the war in Ukraine, Western leaders told the politicians that Russia was nothing but a big gas station with large land holdings. They could not sustain a large army in the field for very long. They lacked the capacity to make the ammunition and equipment needed for the war. Her economy was no better than Venezuela, so a boycott would bring it crashing down and before long it would lead to one of those mysterious color revolutions so popular these days.

This set of observations dates back to the post-Cold War days when the Russian economy was recovering from the collapse of communism. To whatever extent they were true at the time, no one has bothered to update them. They have become articles of faith, pillars upon which all relations with Russia are based. Over time, the new set of observations about Putin have been synthesized by the same crowd to fill in the gaps between the prior observations.

This mental framework with regards to Russia and the war in the Ukraine is so brittle and inflexible, it is forced to ignore facts on the ground. This story in a main Western media organ has become a standing head. In the old days of the newspaper business, a standing head was a headline used so often that it was made into a permanent block for the printer. For five months, Western media has been quoting regime experts claiming the Russians are about to run out of supplies.

The first quoted official is illustrative. “There will come a time when the tiny advances Russia is making become unsustainable in light of the costs and they will need a significant pause to regenerate capability.” This is true only within the logical framework of the belief set. The fact that Russia is obliterating the Ukrainian army and seizing large chunks of territory is ignored. The fact that the prior predictions have been false and the Russians show no signs of running out material is also ignored.

The undeniable truth of the war is that the Russians are using an expeditionary force of about 200,000 men from its professional army to systematically annihilate the Ukrainian army, which is larger and dug into fortified positions. This is possible because Russia is not a gas station with land holdings. In fact, it now has a military industrial capacity greater than the West. It can sustain its operations in Ukraine for as long as it takes to destroy the Ukraine and its ability to field an army.

None of this seems to register with the decision makers. This quote from retired Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. forces in Europe who is now with the Center for European Policy Analysis, is illustrative. “I remain very optimistic that Ukraine is going to win.” He then added, “Right now it sucks to be on the receiving end of all this Russian artillery. But my assessment is that things are going to be trending in favor of the Ukrainians in the next few weeks.”

The natural assumption by people in control of their faculties and aware of what is happening in the Ukraine is that these people are lying. Many of them, especially the ISW types, have a well known cultural affinity for lying. This general, and many like him in the decision tree, display no signs of sociopathy. They genuinely believe the narratives that they have played a role in creating. The fantasy world they have made for themselves is now more real than physical reality.

This disconnect between the world the elites imagine they control and the world that exists for everyone else is the crisis in the West. Four months ago, that general should have seen that their plan to bunkerize the Donbas and wait out the Russians was quickly becoming a suicide pact. The Russians are simply standing off and hammering these fortifications with artillery. This reduces their losses to the barest minimum, while it slowly and systematically destroys Ukraine.

That is reality, but for Western elites, this does not exist. Instead, they imagine a world where heroic fighters, who look a lot like them, are defending against an increasingly desperate horde of barbarians from over the horizon. It is the great battle for Middle Earth and the beautiful people are the elves and the Ukrainians are the humans, hobbits and other lower creatures of the world. Meanwhile, Putin is Sauron and his army are those vicious, bloodthirsty orcs.

The war in the Ukraine is but one glaring example. The gap between reality and the narratives created by the ruling class are everywhere. The energy crisis they created is not angry people paying five dollars a gallon for gas. It is the struggle to break free from hydrocarbons and transition to a world powered by fairy dust. Food shortages are just the price to be paid for transitioning to sustainable food created in labs using twigs and bugs so that the woodland creatures may be free.

No matter the problem, they have a story for it. They call these stories “messaging” but they are just stories to comport the bits of reality that interrupt the dream, with the larger narratives that define ruling class reality. This summer we will be awash in messaging in the run up to the election, which now works like an award show for the freaks that populate the political class. The best message wins. The winner then gets to spin some new narratives to please the Cloud People.

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