Category Archives: Politics

The Great Fear

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Imagine if tomorrow, a space ship descends to earth, hovering over some part of the United States. At some point, when the eyes of the world are fixed on the event, the ship lands and out pops a bunch of aliens. These aliens are able to speak to the people of earth in a way that everyone can understand them. They explain where they are from and that earth is just one of many planets with sentient life. Further, most of the people in charge of earth are aliens sent to run things while the talking monkeys get up to speed.

For a fuller presentation of this concept, you can watch the John Carpenter movie, They Live. One thing I liked about that movie, is that when people realized the truth, they were stunned and confused. Paranoia immediately set in as they tried to reorient themselves to the new reality. That’s what would happen in the above scenario. Suddenly confronted by the truth, everyone would know most of what they have been told was a lie. That would lead to questioning of everything else, then mass paranoia and fear.

Something like this happened in revolutionary France. Instead of space aliens, they got a collapse of the old order. Feudalism had been under great strain due to the new economics of the age. Trade and the beginning of the industrial age challenged the old economic system. There was also the rampant corruption in the French economic system that was slowing bankrupting the government. The King was not just broke. Massive borrowing to keep the system running had made the system insolvent.

The French Revolution was not just a money issue. Within one year, the King went from being god-like to merely a citizen. That was not a small thing. Symbolism is an important part of the normal rhythms of human society. The social order of France was built upon the King having a divine right to rule. Once the king became just another guy, the whole system stopped making sense. It was a short trip from there to conspiracies about the aristocrats plotting against the people. The result was the Great Fear.

That has been coming to mind often of late. My twitter feed is full of posts that can be charitably described as batshit crazy. Scan through the news and you see “reports” that range from the ridiculous to the deranged. I don’t have a Faceberg account, but I’m told that all sorts of crackpot stories are popping up there too. I’ve had to reconfigure my news reading in order to filter out the crazy rumors and made up nonsense. It feels like the wheels have come off the cart and we live in a world of nonsense.

The reason, I suspect, is the growing awareness that much of what we have taken for granted is, at the minimum, not what it appears to be. The open hostility of so-called conservatives toward the people they claim to represent, for example, has been quite an eye-opener for a lot of people. You don’t have to be a red-pilled conspiracy monger to think the whole conservative movement was just a money scam all along.

That also means the Republican Party was something other than a good faith attempt to counter the other party. When prominent leaders in the party appear to be backing the other party’s candidate, the system does look rigged. It’s not hard to imagine what these people are saying when the cameras and microphones are off. Throw in some leaked e-mails that seem to conform people’s worst fears and it is not surprising that the peasants are getting a bit paranoid about the ruling class.

The shenanigans in the news media has breached that wall in our minds that separates bias from conspiracy. When allegedly solid opinion polls swing by a dozen points in a few days, it is not unreasonable to wonder if they were fraudulent all along. The revelations in WikiLeaks has made clear that it is not just bias. It is an organized effort by our “news media” to fool people on behalf of the government party. Rigging the debates by feeding Clinton the questions is a pretty big deal.

Just this week we have learned that the FBI and the DOJ may very well be colluding in order to conceal very serious crimes by the Clinton Family from the public. Seeing that the current FBI director let the Clintons off the hook 15 years ago, when he was tasked with investigating them, naturally makes people think the whole system is rotten and corrupt. When people see e-mails from the Clinton campaign chair revealing that he is best buddies with the Feds, it tends to confirm and amplify their suspicions.

Probably the biggest blow to public trust has been the revelation regarding the Clinton Foundation and the shenanigans involved in covering up what looks like very serious crimes. Everyday we get new stories that make a Hollywood thriller sound pedestrian. All of a sudden, the conspiracy guys don’t sound so nutty as their theories are playing out in the news. If the Feds can accidentally find a laptop that brings down the Clinton Crime Family, name a cloak and dagger scenario that is still implausible?

We are in a period where no one takes anything in the news at face value, but lots of people are willing to accept all sorts of outlandish rumors. After all, the crackpots and conspiracy nuts have been right a lot lately. When every scandal starts with WikiLeaks or some anonymous tweet, it is not unreasonable to pay more attention to that stuff than the main stream media, which is often working to conceal these stories. You cannot blame people for being a bit paranoid, given what we see happening.

Too Stupid To Rule

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Talk to anyone in law enforcement and they will tell you that the stupidity of criminals is a key part of solving crimes. The crooks leave clues and make huge blunders that allow the cops to catch them. Ray-Ray decides he has had enough of Peanut disrespecting him so he walks up to him at a party and starts shooting. Not only are there a million witnesses, Ray-Ray leaves the gun with his fingerprints and brags to his buddies latter that he just dusted Peanut at a party. It’s not a hard case to solve because Ray-Ray is a moron.

That comes to mind when reading the stories about the Clinton secret e-mail caper. We have enough of the details at this stage to have a rough idea how we got to this point. They wanted to have a secret communication method that would be not be subject to government security and Freedom of Information Act requests. They also figured that this secret system would be free from Congressional oversight. After all, if no one knew it existed, then no one could ask any questions about what was on it.

It’s not hard to imagine the conversations leading up to the decision to go with this plan versus using Google or Yahoo accounts. They figured that the reason guys like General Patraeus got caught using Gmail was that the government IT people were able to tell when people were accessing these systems via their work computers. Alternatively, they just assumed the government had access to these system like they do in the movies. Either way, they determined that using these options for personal stuff was a bad idea.

Hilariously, it appears they came to the conclusion that having their own e-mail server meant that all the e-mail was magically hidden in the box in Hillary’s bathroom. Their subsequent attempts to erase the hard drives suggests they did not know that e-mail travels across networks and is also stored on the receiver’s servers. Those servers are usually on a network not controlled by the recipient. They started to realize this at some point, which is why they smashed their phones and laptops.

The most amusing part of this caper is they started sending e-mails from this domain to people outside the domain. If they had kept this as a tight internal communication system, they could have got away with it. Highly secure e-mail systems actually work this way. You cannot send or receive mail from outside the domain. That way people cannot forward mail off the system and the system is not exposed to outsiders looking for an open window. In some government facilities, access is only through terminals in the facility.

Once e-mail was sent from the domain to outsiders, it was only a matter of time before the secret was out. They were lucky that most media people are remarkably stupid so they lack the wherewithal to wonder why Hillary Clinton did not have a State Department e-mail account. Watch the cable channels and you come away thinking that the people on TV just learned about e-mail last week. Eventually the Romanian cab driver unearthed the whole thing and the enterprise came crashing down.

The other bit of interest in the area of technical competence is how they responded to FBI requests for their e-mail. They printed them off and turned them over as paper documents. These are lawyers and they just assumed they could bury the government with paper. After all, how can they possibly organize 50,000 pages of e-mail? This is an old trick. In discovery one side asks for everything so you give them everything plus a mountain of junk they have to sort through to find what they want.

What they failed to understand is that the FBI digitized this stuff in a day or two. Modern high speed scanners can process 50 pages a minute. OCR technology can turn the paper into a machine readable document. Content management systems let you store millions of documents so they can be searched and sorted based on content. I have this on my laptop so I can stash all of my documents in a database, rather than file folders. The Clinton people were as ignorant of this as they were of how e-mail worked.

There are a lot of angles to these Clinton scandals, but the thing that transcends all of it is the rank stupidity of the people involved. There were safer and more secure ways to establish clandestine communications. Even with their setup, a modest amount of discipline would have prevented most of this from happening. All they had to do was limit mail going out of the system. When the time came to burn it down, they only had to destroy the server entirely and no one would be able to prove anything.

The argument from Team Trump in the closing days of the election is that Hillary Clinton is too corrupt to rule. He’s painting her as the face of the larger problem, which is the metastasizing corruption of the ruling class. It’s a good closing argument and it resonates, but the reason Hillary should not rule is she is dangerously incompetent and she surrounds herself with outlandishly stupid people. A society can survive crooked rulers, but it cannot survive stupid ones. Hillary Clinton is too stupid to rule.

Hamlet at the Bureau

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Thinking about what comes next in this most bizarre of campaign seasons, it occurs to me that this is a good lesson in how nothing exists in isolation. Every decision has consequences. Those consequences may not be obvious and they may not show up until much later, but no action exists without a reaction. It’s the old gag about the time traveler going into the past, stepping on a spider, only to return to a world ruled by super intelligent insects. It is formally known as the Butterfly Effect.

In the early days of the Clinton administration, Team Clinton hoped to put a fellow crook in the job of attorney general. That way, they could make sure they had a member of the family blocking the inevitable criminal probes that follow the Clintons around like an odor.They tried Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, but both failed to get confirmed. They settled on Janet Reno, a dull-witted bureaucrat just happy to have the work. They put her in the job for the same reason crooked southern politicians install their retarded brother in-law as sheriff. She was too dumb to get curious.

It mostly worked, but her stupidity also kept her from blocking cases that would prove to be embarrassing to the family. A real pro in the job would have headed off the intern problem, for example, before that got to Ken Starr. In fact, Kimba Wood is clever enough to have quashed the whole special prosecutor thing entirely. In other words, putting a stupid person in the job worked up until they needed a clever person in the job. You can be sure that Janet Reno does not get Solstice cards from the Clinton family.

Team Obama tabbed James Comey to the job of Director of the FBI primarily because he was harmless. Republicans had no problems with him and Democrats were not afraid of him. That’s not to say he is a crook. He’s just one of those careerists, who make a point of doing no more than the job requires. You run into thee guys all over government because they never get curious and ask too many questions. Politicians love these guys because they look like Boy Scouts, but they never cause any trouble.

For most of what the FBI does, having a straitlaced guy like Comey at the top works just fine. He’s an able administrator, who will be respected by his staff for being fair and sticking to the rules. His lack of political ambition means he can get along with the rank and file. So much of what the FBI does is just process, they need process guys to make sure the processes are followed. The Bureau has not been the swashbuckling crime fighters we see in TV for generations. It’s mostly bureaucrats processing paper.

The decision to put him in the top job looked like a genius move until last week. Having a go-along-to-get-a-long guy handling the Clinton problem made it easy to push him into a favorable decision. The trouble is, he is an honest guy with a conscience and apparently his conscience finally got the better of him. The same qualities that made it easy for the politicians to push him around, made it easy for his subordinates to push him to take on the Clinton Crime Family in the most spectacular way imaginable.

My bet is more than a few people in the Obama White House are thinking they should have found a crook to put into that job. If not a crook, at least someone with ambition for a life in DC after his term at the Bureau was up. That’s the kind of guy who would look for a way to make everyone happy, because he wants friends in town, not enemies. Comey is looking a lot like a guy who will be happy to retire to some small college job teaching law, after he finishes up his public service at the Bureau.

Now the Democrats have the worst possible problem. When they want to train all of their weapons on Trump and his defects, they now have to peel off a few divisions to attack Comey and the FBI. The trouble with that is it means this story stays on the front page. The Clinton campaign is about focusing everyone’s attention on Trump’s flaws so people don’t notice her corruption and unpleasantness. Now they have to choice but to talk about her corruption and everyone gets reminded of her unpleasantness.

What makes this even worse for Clinton is the subtext of this election is the systemic rot in the form of lying and rule breaking. The reason Trump’s line about the system being rigged resonates is most people think the pols are lying and the media is covering for them. This is the sort of story that presses on that wound. In the fullness of time, the face of this era of corruption will be Hillary Clinton. She is everything that is wrong with politics. This e-mail caper and the current drama over it just reminds everyone of why they’re pissed off.

My Heart is an Alligator

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The meteor that just slammed into the Clinton campaign thanks to the FBI is one of those events that is both wildly entertaining, but also a bit baffling. The FBI director is not a moron so he had to know that this was an unprecedented act. He’s not just putting a new story into the political bloodstream, but he is putting himself and the FBI into the presidential election in an unprecedented way. In other words, he knew before he sent the letter that he was setting off the mother of all shit storms.

The question then is why has the FBI Director taken this step?

Assuming he knew the consequences, the only logical answer here is that the alternatives were all deemed to be far worse than setting off this scandal. This assumes he is not some sort of sadist that enjoys being in the middle of political pissing matches with skunks like the Clintons. It also means that waiting was not an acceptable choice. Waiting two weeks to send this letter would have avoided this and perhaps buried the news in the post election celebrating. For some reason, he decided this was not a viable option.

If we start from there, the question then becomes what could be so bad that the Director believed he had no choice. The first thing that comes to mind is that we have the story that money moved from Team Clinton to the number two man in the FBI, through his wife. Clinton helped raise money for a PAC that Terry McAuliffe controlled, which then handed half a million to the campaign of Jill McCabe, who is the wife of the number two man at the FBI. He was also working the e-mail case.

This is the sort of the thing that results in expensive lawyers getting phone calls from DC’s power players. It is possible that the game is to throw the Republicans some red meat by getting butch with Clinton over her e-mail. The problem here is Comey says they have new information and that will have to be disclosed. It also means tangling with Team Clinton, who could be in the White House in a few months. If you are going to strike the queen, you better kill the queen or have plans to leave the country.

Another possibility that comes to mind is something that was revealed in the daily WikiLeaks e-mails being dumps. We now have proof that the White House knew about the secret server and Obama was getting e-mails from Clinton’s private account. They had successfully played dumb on this but this steady release of e-mails has to be making people nervous. John Podesta is not some clerk. He is one of the biggest power brokers in Washington. He knows things that are not supposed to be known.

The other angle here is that the Obama people have always hated the Clintons and a lot of people on the Left of the party still hold a grudge against Hillary. This could simply be a case where the Obama people are using this as an excuse to execute the kill shot on someone they truly loath. Politics is a blood-sport and Obama’s people play rough. They cracked open sealed divorce documents twice to help Obama win local campaigns in Illinois. They would not flinch at doing the old bag like this.

That’s the other piece of the puzzle. It’s very clear that Team Clinton had no idea this was coming. Clinton looked poleaxed giving her statement to reporters and what she said bordered on nonsense. This was a well orchestrated hit job. In a town where keeping a secret is nearly impossible, the FBI managed to spring a total surprise. That was not an accident either. This was done for maximum effect. It either means the White House was in the dark up until Friday or the White House was orchestrating it.

There is also the lesson of Watergate. The caper was done for the most mundane reasons. John Dean acted as he did out of purely personal motives. Mark Felt talked because he had his feelings hurt. Alexander Butterfield was just an honest guy asked the right question at the right time. The point being, serendipity and personal grudges often count for more than Machiavellian scheming. Some last straw may have finally caused Comey to go rogue and take out Clinton at her most vulnerable moment.

Right now, my heart is an alligator.

The End of Radicalism

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In the middle of the 19th century, European politics was about the role of the monarchy, nationalism, democracy, capitalism and the emerging political consciousness of urban working classes. The latter is where communism found its opening. In America, politics was about slavery, sectionalism, the territories and protectionism. Monarchism was obviously not of any interest to Americans, but neither was communism. It is a good reminder that politics is always local to both time and place.

It does not always feel that way though. If you were a Frenchman in 1970, the big debates were about the same stuff as they were in the 1940’s. Sure, the Algerian question was a hot topic in the Fourth Republic and not so much in the Fifth Republic, but the ideological landscape was the same. Similarly, US politics settled into a center-left consensus after World War II and remained so throughout the Cold War. The topics changed from decade to decade, but the ideological landscape did not change very much.

I picked these two periods for a reason. The Revolutions of 1848, or the Springtime of Nations, was a time when old ideological frameworks were collapsing and new ones were emerging. The remaining feudal arrangements were being toppled in favor of nationalist arrangements.The post-war period a century later was a time when the new arrangements, the Pax Americana, were settling in across the West. The point being is that all epics have a start and a finish, with the former beginning in the latter.

It is generally assumed that we are living in an age where the old order is under pressure and new challengers are rising up to offer an alternative to the status quo. Is this just the the Pax Americana unraveling as the United States staggers along into decline as the world’s remaining super power? Are we seeing the emergence of a post-liberal consensus built around supra-national organizations controlled by global elites? If so, is the nationalist reaction just a rearguard action? Or is this the end of the liberal era entirely?

One thing seems clear and that is American Progressivism is dead as an ongoing ideological movement. The managerial class still uses the language and tactics of the Left, but they are fully committed to global capitalism. Hillary Clinton is the face of the Left and she is wholly owned by Wall Street. Her embrace of open borders cuts what is left of the cord linking Progressives with the labor movements out of which they grew in the prior century. A liberal from the 60’s, looking at the current Left, would be horrified.

The remaining radicals on the Left are just posers. These are the people who embrace things like structural racism, gender identity, sexism, climate change, and economic inequality. Guys like Ta-Nehisi Coates are just ornaments for managerial class types to decorate their cultural institutions. Since most of what these people say and write is nonsense, they can be indulged. Again, a Hillary Clinton can be seen with a copy of a Piketty book, on her way to give a speech at Goldman Sachs.

Similarly, the European Left is a dead man walking. The British Labour Party now looks like a comedy skit from Monty Python. The Lib-Dems have collapsed entirely. The two main British parties are the SNP and the Tories, both embrace technocracy. It is a similar story on the Continent as the the main stream parties, both Left and Right slowly fuse together in defense of Europe against the rise of nationalist parties. As in America, the European Left is married to global finance and managerial authoritarianism.

What the 19th century made clear is that constitutional monarchy was just a transition phase, from aristocratic rule to liberal rule. Something similar may be true about social democracy. The Left has always dreamed of one-world global socialism. Communism was always intended to obliterate national borders. Socialism, in its various national manifestations, may simply have been a transitional phase. Once the nations of the West are ruled by like minded technocrats, the next logical step is merger.

Alternatively, this could be the end phase of the radicalism born in the French Revolution. The rise of traditionalist, reactionaries and nationalists all over the West could be a classical liberal reaction to the restoration of a new aristocratic system of rule. Instead of a ruling elite selected by magic blood, the restored aristocracy will be a mandarin system based on the acquisition of credentials, only attainable by the sons and daughters of the managerial elite. Instead of inherited titles, they have legacy admissions to elite colleges.

This is all idle speculation, of course, but like the people of the mid-19th century, in the midst of the revolts, we are witnessing a great transition away from the old system to something new. The Left that has been a feature of the West, the cornerstone of the ruling consensus, is going away. Socialist economics are dead. Communism is a museum piece. National liberation, a staple of post-colonial radical politics in the last century, has been thrown down the memory hole. All that’s left of radicalism is nostalgia.

A Meandering Post About Nothing

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Imagine you are in a room with six sides and each wall has a door. If you leave the room through one of the doors, you end up in another six-sided room with doors. Assuming no obstacle, you can move in a straight line in any of six directions. If there obstacles, then things gets more complex. Anyone old enough to remember the Avalon Hill war games from the 70’s will be familiar with this concept.  The idea was to simulate the 360-degree movement of the real world, but with segmented game space.

Now, imagine yourself in that first room and let’s assume it is filled with sights, sounds, smells and all sorts of other things that you can experience with your senses. So much so, in fact that you can’t quite experience and remember all of them. You spend as much time as you want, studying as much of the room as possible, before moving to the next room. Let’s say you master 80% of what there is to master. Then you move onto the next room to experience whatever lies within.

Here’s the thing though. You can only remember so much before the memory begins to fade and you forget some things. When you get into the new space, you have new stuff to process and organize in your head. Making room for the new stuff means forgetting some of the old stuff. Let’s say you forget a third of what you tried to remember of the first room by the time you get to the 80% point in the new room. Your head now contains 66% of 80% of the first room and 80% of the second room.  You can do the math. I’ll wait.

If you move into the third room, you forget even more of the first room. You can see where this is headed. Keep moving from room to room and before long you only have vague recollections of what happened in the first rooms where you started. Even if you write stuff down you’re recollections are bound to get out of whack. When it comes to why you picked one door over another or what you were thinking at the time, well, your memory will be clouded by the present. It’s called recency bias.

Now, instead of you moving from room to room, imagine it is generations of men. The first generation operates in the first room. The next generation moves onto the second room, taking with them as much as they can recall being taught to them by the first generation. Then the third generation moves onto its phase of existence, having only second hand memories of their grandparent’s age. It does not take but a few generations before the people in the present are thoroughly detached from their ancestors. All they have are recollections of recollections.

That’s where the modern conservative finds himself in this age of turmoil. I was listening to someone on the radio the other day, lamenting the fact that no matter what happens in the election, the “conservative movement” is mortally wounded. The Trump insurgency has forever marginalized those rock-ribbed conservatives and their dreams of managerial technocracy. They did not put it that way, but that was the flavor of it. The person saying this clearly had no recollection of where the Right started or the road it had taken to end up at what some think is its terminus.

The fact is, Official Conservatism is so far from where it started, it is a crime against the language to call it “conservative.” The traditional American Right was always an individual liberty cause, which starts and ends with freedom of association. Everything that can be “conservative” rests on the basic idea that you have a basic right to associate with whom you like, when you like, on the terms you like. No one on the modern Right has talked about that in so long it is now forbidden knowledge.

The people writing at the big foot conservative publications never think about such things. Most of them came into the world of political ideology thinking that conservatism was about cutting taxes and losing wars of choice. The geezers came along when conservatism was focused on fighting the Russians and trying to figure out how to get around Roe in order to curtail abortion. The neocons are pretty much just hyper-violent globalists with a bizarre grudge against the Russians.

It’s why Trump’s talk about law and order, for example, sounds so alien and weird to the modern right-winger. To their ears, it almost sounds like Trump is hostile to government, which is crazy talk on the Right these days. That’s because the modern conservative is so far removed from the time when conservatism stood for ordered liberty that it is no longer even a recollection of a recollection. It is no longer part of their mental landscape so it falls outside their definition of conservative.

One can go on forever about the wrong turns the Right has made over the decades. Lord knows I’ve written enough on the topic. None of which really matters all that much, as the modern Right is where it is, in this time, a time when it no longer has anything to offer those outside the statist ideology of modern globalism. The alternative to post-national managerialism cannot be a different version of post-national managerialism. That’s why people, particularly young people, are turning their back on it, heading off to other rooms.

The Big Rake

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One of the things normal people don’t get about Hillary Clinton is how seamlessly she fits into the moral universe of the ruling class. For instance, to normal people, lying is a bad thing. It lowers your status among the other Dirt People. In the Cloud, lying is a conditional concept. Lying to the Dirt People is fine. It’s what Cloud People must do to maintain order and assert their superiority. Lying to rivals while wrangling for power can be acceptable, as long as it does not reflect too poorly on the managerial class.

Another way to see how Hillary Clinton is emblematic of the managerial class is to examine her motivations. Normal people assume she is running for the White House as a power grab. It is assumed that politicians have big egos and winning office is driven by those big egos. That used to be true, but not in the modern managerial state. The real motivation is money. Most of the people in the managerial class are always aware of the fact they are not rich, at least not as rich as they deserve, and they hate it.

Hillary Clinton has always been obsessed with money. In Arkansas, she would complain constantly about not having enough money. Some will recall how she used to moan about how they were not rich enough when they left the White House. Presumably, that’s why they stole the furniture. All of her capers have been about turning her position or her husband’s position into cash for the family business. In the managerial class, credentials and connections are to be monetized. That’s their purpose.

Hillary Clinton did not weasel her way into the State Department gig because she wanted to burnish her foreign policy credentials. It was not about staying in the game. There was always a money angle. At State, she could travel the world, shaking down the rich and powerful for cash to her money laundering operation. Her husband could charge outlandish fees to give speeches on behalf of the foundation and maybe put in a good word, for the foreign potentate, with his old lady at the State Department.

Clinton’s run for the White House has a similar angle. This story about Clinton’s scheme for American retirement plans is a classic managerial class rake. Getting picked as one of the firms with a license to “manage’ these new accounts is a license to print money. The government will have to “supervise” this process, which means the bankers will now have a billion reasons to be on good terms with the government. Put another way, Team Clinton is planning to build a giant graft machine .

Now, Team Clinton will not benefit in the long run, but they are getting tens of millions in contributions now, because they are promising to push through this new plan. If Wall Street wanted to bring back slavery, Hillary would be talking like Colonel Sanders and singing Dixie during her speeches. Her political motivations are a manifestation of her financial ambitions. All over the managerial class, the game is to monetize access, power and prestige. It’s why Hillary fits in so well with these people.

For about twenty years, the managerial class has been trying to figure out how to get their mitts on American retirement funds stashed away in 401K’s. Talk to any Progressive and they will tell you how terrible these plans are, while they drone on about the terribleness of Wall Street. They floated a scheme in the 90’s called the Guaranteed Retirement Account that was like a 401K, except all funds were invested in US treasuries. This never got far as it was just a complicated tax and the math could never work.

This new scheme is simpler, but potentially much more lucrative to the managerial elite. If every American is required to have a retirement account, administered by a fund manager, that’s billions of new money siphoned off the real economy into the pockets of the financial sector. Better still, those funds will be controlled by Wall Street. They will put those funds into investments good for Wall Street. What’s good for the bankers is to be on good terms with the government. You see where this leads.

This is the way the managerial class works the rake. In less sophisticated countries, like say France, the politicians just raid the pension funds. It’s legal plunder. In the managerial state, the plunder is more nuanced, tarted up with soft feminine language like “inclusion” and “coming together for a common cause.” You can be sure that this plan will be sold as a way to bring the country together to solve our retirement problems for those who “play by the rules and just want a fair deal.”

What will happen, of course, is the same thing we saw with health care and pretty much every other part of the economy these days. It will be a bust out. The billions that pour into these new funds will be “invested” in things that benefit the rulers. Politicians will get advance notice on some new move so they can cash in their privileged status. The fund managers will kick back a piece of their rake to the politicians for the right to manage these funds. It will be systematic robbery of the middle class.

You would be forgiven for thinking that this sounds a lot like organized crime. That’s because it is organized crime, except the criminals write the laws, thus legalizing their plunder. This is a feature of the managerial state. It is the big rake. Instead of the criminals eluding the state in order to plunder the people, the criminals acquire credentials, which are a license to skim off a portion of middle class wealth. The whole point of winning office or gaining access is so you can get a taste of the skim.

Pink State

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Imagine the space-time continuum gets scrambled and you find yourself in a world where the coming election is between a crazy old cat lady, an old hippie, Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler is leading one major party and Mussolini is leading another major party. The hippie and the cat lady have no party and very little support. As a practical matter, your choice is between Hitler and Mussolini. More important, you know the ramifications of both choices. The former is murder and mayhem and the latter is authoritarianism and long speeches.

To anyone with a soul, the choice is clear. You vote for Mussolini. It’s a terrible option, but so is chemotherapy. No one enthusiastically opts for chemotherapy, but it beats dying from cancer. If you told your doctor that your morals prevented you from choosing chemo, so you were going to visit some guy with magic crystals, your doctor would try to have you committed. Similarly, no one would wants Mussolini as the ruler, but he is a vastly better option than Hitler. You do what you must, even when it is unpleasant, to stop Hitler.

To continue this a bit further, imagine if someone came up to you are said “I’m Susan Wright and my principles prevent me from voting Mussolini, even though I know Hitler will murder millions, so I’m voting for the goofy hippie guy.” You would have dark thoughts about that person. They are willing to stand aside and allow something truly horrible just so they can avoid doing something unpleasant. To make it worse, they demand that you pretend that their cowardice and treachery is high minded.

Further, you would look at those people investing all of their energy ridiculing Mussolini as pro-Hitler partisans. After all, the successful end of the efforts can only mean one thing –  Hitler wins. They could protest all they like that they hate both Hitler and Mussolini, but you would know them by their deeds. They are working to pave the way for Hitler, regardless of their reasoning. If successful, they would be, in part, responsible for what comes next. Blood would be on their hands and you would feel justified in holding them responsible.

Alternatively, if someone came up to you and made the case for Hitler, along with pointing out the faults of Mussolini, you would not feel the urge to punch them in the face. They may be horribly mistaken, but at least they are being honest. They are pro-Hitler and they take responsibility for it. They own it. Who knows, they could be right and Mussolini is worse in the long run. In theory, at least, you can debate this with the Hitler fans and maybe in the process sway some undecided voters to your side.

Obviously, you see what I’m doing here. Replace Hitler with Clinton and Mussolini with Trump and we have the debate between the Cult of Never Trump and the rest of us. No one thinks Trump is the ideal candidate. Many of us think he is a awful candidate, but he is orders of magnitude better than Clinton. Her election means the nation lurches into authoritarianism. What comes next will be unfathomably horrible. If you have a soul, you do what you must to prevent evil from triumphing. Susan Wright has no soul.

This twitter exchange I had with her is the genesis of this post:

Red State, of course, has gone full-on moonbat. Their only reason to exist these days is to bash Trump and Trump voters. A moral nullity like Susan Wright also takes time out to bash other Dirt People like Sarah Palin. Even loopy liberals have moved on from Palin-bashing, but as a dog returns to its vomit, the degenerate social justice warriors of the Never Trump Cult go back to Palin-bashing when they need material. Reading her posts, you could be forgiven for thinking she was a writer for Salon.

To return to my analogy, Susan Wright is the sort that would spend all her time harping about the defects of Mussolini, then claim she is standing on principle, as Hitler rounds up the Jews and packs them off to the gas chambers. She would rather something horrible happen, than get her hands dirty doing the hard work of opposing evil. Of course, that assumes she thinks Clinton is a bad choice. Again, reading her posts, it’s hard not to think she is related to the old bag, not just a supporter.

After the war, many Germans tried to say they did not know what was happening so they should not be held accountable for supporting the Nazis. The question in those cases was whether or not the person should have known or could have known. The Clinton Crime Family has been a known quantity for 25 years. Susan Wright and her ilk know exactly what comes from a Clinton victory. Blood will be on their hands. “I did not know” is not going to be an acceptable excuse when the time comes.

The Virtual Candidate

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In the 1992 election, the one thing that jumped out to me was the enthusiasm for Clinton at public events. He had big raucous crowds, while Bush had smaller, older crowds. The press had all the same horse race stories we see today, but it felt like Clinton had all the enthusiasm on his side, despite the tight polls. One of the things I recall is not seeing any Bush bumper stickers, but lots of Clinton stickers. That always stuck in my head as a useful metric when trying to gauge the intentions of the voters.

This ad hoc measure held up in the following election, as Dole was just a sacrificial candidate the GOP put up just so they could have someone on the ticket. In 2000, this metric really did not hold up as I saw many more Bush signs and his crowds were much bigger than Gore’s crowd, but it was a razor thin result. That said, it held up very well in 2004 as Bush clearly had the more enthusiastic voters. I recall seeing a clip of him at an event that looked like a rock concert. I knew he was going to win handily.

Like any seat of the pants observation, it is prone to your own bias. I think in 2000 I was probably fooled a little by where I lived at the time. I was in Virginia, which was strong Bush country. Even so, we all have our biases and that means we tend to see that which confirms our magical thinking. I think about that when I see the video from Trump events. The guy is playing to massive crowds that we last saw when Obama ran in 2008. Even the reporters covering these things admit they are yuge.

On the other hand, Clinton is playing high school gymnasiums where a few hundred people, at most, are herded into to hear her cackle at them. These are rare, as she spends most of her time at private fundraisers or sleeping. That’s the other thing that is so odd about this election. She takes weeks off, not having any public events. Right now, she has been under wraps for five days. Criminal Genius David Axelrod is now suggesting she skip the next debate entirely. Frankly, would that be shocking if she did skip it?

The disconnect in this election between what we are being told and what we are seeing is dizzying. The polls all show a tie or a slight Clinton lead. If that is true, it means Trump voters are willing to drop what they are doing, stand in line for hours, just to see their guy give a speech. Clinton voters are not all the interested in seeing her or even hearing her take questions. This is entirely possible. Unhappy people are more likely to go out and protest, while those satisfied with the status quo stay home. But, in an election?

The trouble is I can think of no example where this has been the case. Even poor old Bob Dole was out giving speeches in front of decent sized crowds. If I recall, he did a barnstorming thing at one point where he would show up at a few places every day and give a speech. People showed up and cheered. Clinton has become invisible to her own voters. I see her commercials, but she has not held a single public even within a three hour drive of me. Trump has done a few events and my state is a long shot for him.

To make this election even more bizarre is the way the press has ignored the biggest story in political history since Watergate. The Wikileaks stuff is explosive. It is what political reporters used to pray for, back when we had political reporters. The stuff in those e-mails is the sort of stuff that used to end careers and bring down governments. Despite the caterwauling from  the stray moonbat, the media has ignored the story, preferring to spend all their time talking about the Trump bimbo hoax.

One of the things that was clear about the ’92 campaign is the Left studied Reagan. They were convinced Reagan won because of his ability to use modern media to reach voters. As a result, they had ready for 1992, Hollywood film makers to assist the Democratic nominee. The Clinton campaign was the first to use Hollywood to stage their events and produce their campaign videos. They even brought in costume people to help them select clothes for their events. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud.

The result has been increasingly synthetic candidates on the Democratic side. Al Gore was so scripted people wondered if he was a robot. He was not allowed to pick out his own ties, he was so tightly controlled. Kerry’s campaign was actually packaged for him by the same people that created the Mark Warner campaign in Virginia. For instance, they recycled the hunting skits that Warner used to appease gun owners. Kerry’s job was to learn his lines and convincingly wear the costumes.

By the time Obama came along, the Democrats were fully prepared to run an actor hired to play the role designed by the party. Obama may as well be an actor, for as much as anyone knows about the guy. Even after all these years, his back story remains a mystery to most Americans. He’s simply the young version of  Morgan Freeman playing President in Deep Impact. Staff write his speeches, prepare him for the fake interviews they stage for the public and otherwise direct every aspect of his public performance.

Now here we are with Hillary Clinton running as the virtual candidate. For all anyone knows, she could be a head in a jar and those old fat women we see waddling around from time to time are just body doubles. While Trump is running a real campaign in front of actual humans, Hillary is hidden away somewhere, a virtual presence on campaign videos, but otherwise detached from the physical world. The media plays along, focusing all of its attention on the weird flesh and blood guy talking to humans. This ad from 2008 is turning out to be disturbingly prescient.

 

Hillary Clinton and the Cinderella Syndrome

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if you examine the record of Hillary Clinton in any detail, what jumps out is the staggering incompetence of this woman. There’s nothing on her resume that stands out as a success, other than her ability to stay married to that skeevy pervert of a husband, despite the serial humiliations resulting from his infidelities. In every other endeavor, small or large, she has been an astonishingly failure. Even in simple capers, she has found a way to bungle things that should have been easy.

The one that always stands out in my mind is her ham-handed influence peddling caper in Arkansas with James Blair, the Tyson Food guy. Even small town mayors understand that you have to have a cutout in these things. Otherwise, it looks too obvious. You find “an investment guy” to act as a firewall, so he gets to pretend to be a shrewd investor and you get to pretend to not know what he was up to all along if things go bad. Hillary could not be bothered with that.

This is Public Corruption 101. They teach this at orientation for your town council seat. The FBI never bags people for this sort of stuff anymore because even the dumbest politician knows how to run this scam. These days, the Feds have to dig harder to unearth this kind of self-dealing because of the common use of cutouts and bag-men to insulate the players from the game. How is it possible that Clinton did not understand or was not told how this works?

Back when this was coming to light, there were several theories offered to explain Hillary Clinton’s serial brushes with the law. Her defenders, of course, claimed she was a Job and suffering for her righteousness. Honest people pointed to her arrogance and sense of entitlement, while others argued that she simply likes crime so much, the law of averages says she will bungle some of it and get caught. The last option is probably the most likely of the three, but not persuasive.

The thing with the Clinton Crime Family is there has always been two sides to it. The Bill side is all about sex. The guy has a serious problem. His dozens of trips to the Dominican with Jeffrey Epstein for the purpose of gaining access to underage females is about as reckless as one can get. That’s the one thing about Bubba that we can probably say with certainty. He is living the Tony Montana lifestyle to the fullest. His entire life has been organized around getting laid.

Hillary is different. All of her capers somehow involve her putting cash in her purse. Back in Arkansas, she was the one involved in the phony land deals, bank jobs and influence peddling. Today, she is the one running the money laundering operations, that necessitated the secret e-mail system and all of the shady characters like Syd Blumenthal. It’s always a money scandal with her. Even her big health care initiative back in the 90’s was designed so she could shake down interested parties.

There’s another aspect to Hillary’s capers though. Her weird relationship with Bill has always been assumed to be loveless and transactional. They are imagined as two sociopaths with converging interests. That’s plausible to a point, but she would be vastly better off without him now and he would have always been better off without her. If this were merely a business relationship, their partnership would have foundered a long time ago.

What normies don’t get about the ruling class is they are often bloodless in their dealings with other humans, but they are not entirely bloodless. Bill and Hill have a political marriage for the purpose of advancing their common and individual interests. Even so, there is some emotional bond between them. Otherwise, they would have traded up a long time ago. These two are most likely sociopaths so calling their thing love is a category error, but it is emotional.

That’s what I suspect is behind Hillary’s criminal career. She is the business manager of the partnership, but she wants to please Bill. The result is she is always reaching beyond what is reasonable for the next payday. Watch that video detailing her capers over the years and the thing that ties them all together is the lack of restraint. All she had to do was be a little less greedy and she would have walked away unscathed by these things.

The other aspect is when she gets jammed up in one of the scams, it is always Bill who has to come to her rescue. What Hillary lacks in charm and guile, Bill makes up for in spades. He’s not terribly smart, but he is extremely clever. He can wiggle out of anything and make his pursuers look bad for trying to do their jobs. The one sure way Hillary has to gain Bill’s attention is to have the law chasing after her over some shady deal she has pulled on behalf of the crime family.

It’s the Cinderella Syndrome modified for a criminal enterprise. Hillary Clinton is not helpless and dependent in the way in which bitter feminists imagine. She simply has some of that normal female quality of wanting the attention of her mate. Since her mate is her business partner, as well as a serial sexual predator, disinterested in her physically, screwing up is how she gets his attention.Look back at all of her scandals and what ties them together is they tie her and Bill together on defense.

You can be sure that more than a few times he was in the middle of assaulting a woman and the phone rang or an aid knocked on the door, telling him that he had to attend to Hillary over some scandal or some deal gone sour. If the hundreds of secret service agents and state troopers are to be believed, their fights are always over business that has interrupted his stalking of women. This is all amateur psychiatry, but it does tie up all the facts better than the other options.