Category Archives: Politics

Brexit

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On Thursday, which I think the EU requires the Brits to call quartidi, the subjects of England vote on whether or not to remain in Europe. The vote to leave, in theory, will compel the British government to negotiate an exit from the EU and paddle the island further into the Atlantic. The timing of the exit and the terms of the deal are not contemplated in the text of the referendum. There may be something in British law that determines these things, but I can find nothing to support that claim.

That is not an unimportant bit in this discussion. It is no secret that the ruling class of England not only wants to remain in the EU, but they dream of a day when Britain is just another administrative zone of Europe, sort of like how the Romans treated Britannia. It is not just that the idea of separate countries has become a heresy. The ruling elite seems to think the time has come to exterminate the British people entirely, at least as an identifiable tribe. As former Lord Chancellor Jack Straw put it, “the English as a race is not worth saving.”

Looking at the polling, the way to bet is that Brexit falls short. There has been a surge in support for leaving and English nationalism bubbling under the surface often goes unnoticed in polls. On the other hand, vote fixing and browbeating do not always show up in the polls either. There is also the fact that people perceive the status quo as the safe choice. Humans are funny that way. Any change meets some natural resistance, even when there is no logic to resistance. Roll it all up and Remain most likely carries the day.

Let us assume, by some miracle, that Brexit wins, what then?

In theory, the British government will begin negotiations with the EU on the formal withdraw of Britain from the EU. In reality, there has to be some political theater first. David Cameron will come under pressure to resign by members of his own party. He staked his reputation on this referendum so a failure to deliver would damage his standing. Plus, the people that really run things may want a scalp to send a message. As the saying goes, kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.

Of course, ousting a Prime Minister is no small thing and it could lead to all sorts of turmoil in the ruling party. Usually when this happens there is a group within the party that has coalesced around a new leader, they are ready to install, once they have  deposed the old leader. But that is not always the case and all hell could break loose once the Cameron is gone. Britain could end up having early elections, which would put things on hold until after the election. In effect, Britain would have a do-over referendum on Brexit.

If we assume that the political fallout is limited to the theatrical, the next step is the process of implementing the intent of the referendum. That will most likely take years as neither side will be in much of a hurry to get on with it. Parliament will surely pass some legislation as a stop gap to keep the current arrangements in place until a deal is done. The EU will set off on a long drawn out process of forming a committee to study the process of forming a committee to appoint a board to review Britain’s exit request.

The hope for all concerned is that the English people, having blown off some steam in the referendum, will go back to their affairs and forget all about it. From time to time the public will be notified that negotiations have taken place in the south of France during the winter or in the Alps during August, but otherwise nothing much will happen. There will no doubt be tales told to the British press about the long hours required to address the millions of details involved in actually leaving the EU.

Polling outfits will be surreptitiously dispatched to keep measuring public sentiment regarding the EU and the referendum. The hope being that opinion will swing the other way and Parliament can then pass an act overturning the referendum. The pressure to reverse the results of the referendum will slowly build over time until either the opposition is worn down or some crisis allows the rulers to act. A recession will be blamed on Brexit and it will be quickly “fixed” by overriding the referendum.

This probably seems like cynicism. After all, Britain is a liberal democracy where the will of the people, as expressed at the ballot box, is respected by the politicians. Our rulers invest a lot of time telling us this and then spend even more time getting us to come out and vote. Then there is the bizarre obsession with getting foreigners to vote in their own lands and come to our lands so they can vote in our elections. You can be forgiven for thinking that voting is important and respected by our rulers.

That has not been the pattern in Europe, or anywhere else in the West, over the last few decades. The voters vote and the political class does whatever it likes, coincidentally in line with the will of their donors and sponsors. The French people voted against the EU Constitution and the rulers promptly ignored them. Other EU countries then cancelled their referenda. The Greeks kept voting for change, only to get more of the same after each election. Despite the rhetoric, voting counts for little.

The reason for this is that what we keep calling liberal democracy is actually corporate democracy. The political class serves the function of the management group in a corporation. The buccaneering billionaires of the global elite are the board of directors, who hire and fire the politicians, based on their performance. The voters are just the minor shareholders who are mustered every once in a while, to endorse the actions of the board as represented by management. The vote is never binding.

Whenever there is shareholder revolt, the board takes it out on management. In theory, the shareholders could overthrow the board as well as management, but this always requires leadership from a large shareholder who is, in most cases, on the board. It may feel like the shareholders are taking control, but in reality, the board is always in control. It is just that the individuals members of the board may make war on one another.

In the case of Britain remaining a sovereign state, the board is of one mind, regardless of what the minor shareholders do tomorrow.

The Court Loon

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History is full of men who somehow managed to be wildly successful, only to be revealed as lunatics, madmen or incompetent. It is an incredible thing to read about Caligula or Nero and think about what it must have been like to serve in the Imperial government during their reigns. According to Seneca, Caligula was presiding over games and ordered his guards to throw an entire section of the crowd into the arena during intermission to be eaten by animals because there were no criminals to be prosecuted and he was bored.

Imagine being in the next section over.

The thought that always comes to my mind is how it was possible for such lunatics to get into power. In most cases, it was simply the result of a faulty system of succession. A favorite example of this is Christian VII of Denmark. He became the king of Denmark because he was the next in line, despite his mental illness. Christian was a chronic masturbator who made visiting dignitaries play leapfrog with one another. He also would slap people in the face for no reason.

In the case of legendary madmen like Caligula and Nero, their madness came on after they assumed power so maybe it was just bad luck. Tiberius, Caligula’s predecessor started out as a perfectly sane and normal ruler, but slowly became a paranoid tyrant. Of course, there are example of men who rise to power simply because they are devious schemers. They finally get to the top and find they have no skill for the job.

The madmen and lunatics get all the attention, but history is littered with examples of mediocrities managing to thread the needle somehow, ending up on top, only to be undone by their own stupidity. In my lifetime, Jimmy Carter is the most obvious example. Carter was a smart man in an extremely narrow sense, but he was a terrible politician and he suffered from delusions of grandeur. His four years as president featured a series of unforced errors that still boggle the mind.

The point is life is big and complicated with lots of variables. Under the right conditions, the dice can land the wrong way and we end up with a lunatic on the Supreme Court, which is why we have an impeachment system. if a nut winds up in the White House or on the bench, they can be removed. It does not happen often, but it’s a remedy, just in case we end up with someone like, say, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor submitted a racially-charged dissent in a Fourth Amendment case on Monday, which commentators hailed as a “Brown/Black Lives Matter manifesto.”

The case, Utah v. Strieff, was occasioned when police stopped Salt Lake City man Edward Strieff on leaving a house suspected to quarter drug activity. The state of Utah concedes the initial stop was illegal, as the officers in question had no probable cause to seize and search Strieff.

During the course of the stop, officers discovered Strieff had an outstanding warrant for a small traffic violation, and methamphetamine in his pocket. The Court was asked to decide whether the exclusionary rule — which prohibits police and prosecutors from using evidence obtained illegally — applies when an officer learns during an illegal stop that there is a warrant for an individual’s arrest, and finds additional contraband while executing the arrest on said warrant.

The High Court ruled 5-3 that the arrest, and the evidence obtained during the arrest, were legitimate, even if the initial stop was not. Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion, joined by the Chief Justice, and Justices Kennedy, Breyer, and Alito.

Sotomayor filed a peppery dissent, joined in part by Justice Ginsburg.

“The white defendant in this case shows that anyone’s dignity can be violated in this manner,” she wrote. “But it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. For generations, black and brown parents have given their children ‘the talk’— instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them.”

“We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are ‘isolated,’” she continued. “They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere.”

Elsewhere in the dissent, she characterizes the United States as a “carceral state,” and pillories the “civil death” endured by those subject to arrest, a process she describes in vivid terms. She also accused the Court of treating minority communities as “second class citizens.”

The dissent’s citations are as interesting as the text itself, which read like a survey of the American black literary tradition. At various points, she cites “The Souls of Black Folk,” by W. E. B. Du Bois, Michelle Alexander, a law professor who has written extensively on over incarceration, and the more radical works of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Where does one start with this? This is a Supreme Court Justice, not a college freshman writing her first college paper. The nonsense about blacks being the victims of police harassment has been debunked so many times, even race hustlers have dropped it. The facts on black crime are simply too easy to lookup. Here’s a study from the Obama administration that tells us that young black males are 3% of the population but commit 27% of homicides. You would think a judge would know about this.

Of course, that misses the elephant in the room. Sotomayor is launching off on a Black Lives Matter rant over a white guy, who was the alleged victim. A fanatic is someone who cannot change their mind and will not change the subject. When you layer in the references to guys like Genius T. Coates, it is not unreasonable to wonder if this woman has not lost her marbles. She may not be randomly slapping people or demanding members of the gallery be fed to the lions, but she is acting just as nutty as those legends I mentioned at the start.

How did we end up with a mentally disturbed dwarf on the high court? The same way Christian VII landed on the throne of Denmark or Caligula donned the purple. The process for selecting judges means ticking the racial boxes and a willingness to catch spears for the One True Faith. Obama nominated this woman because she was a Latin lesbian. Finding someone who checks those boxes and is competent in the law is impossible so he just took a loyal fanatic. The result is we have a mentally disturbed woman on the high court – for life.

The Reactionary Left

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The word “reactionary” has become synonymous with the Right entirely due to the Left applying it to anyone they hate. The Left does not use it much anymore, as new abracadabra phrases have taken its place. Read radical writings of the 60’s and the word turns up all over the place. The claim is that the opponents of the Left are not working from a basis of facts and reason. Instead, they are merely reacting from emotion and therefore they can be dismissed.

It is why I tend to think the people embracing the label, calling themselves neo-reactionaries, are making a critical mistake. They are dismissing their own thoughts as nothing more than a hysterical reaction to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy. That is not their intention. They are reaching back to an older definition, but that is not how anyone outside their movement is going to take it. Like it or not, the Left controls the language, or at least they have for a long time, so they get to define the terms.

It is just another example of the dominance of the Cult of Modern Liberalism in American life. Everything, even the thoughts of its adversaries, has been warped by it. Vast bits of history have either been lost or retconned to the point where they tell a story in direct contradiction to the facts. The reactionaries used to be the people in charge, facing down the rebels of the radical Left. Today, reactionary conjures an image of a thoughtless old man unwilling to change with the times.

Thinking of the Left as the establishment is hard because the narrative of the Left always features them as the plucky underdog, facing off against the reactionary philistine. The concept of the struggle is integral to the creation myths of liberalism, as well as to the ongoing narrative of the faith. Like all cults, Liberalism can function without a leader, but it must always have a devil. As a result, even the harshest of critics can be forgiven for failing to appreciate the Left’s hold on society.

This altered reality obscures the fact that as an intellectual construct, the Progressive project in America has collapsed. That is evident in the Democratic primary for President. Bernie Sanders ran on the old time theme of economic equality and sounded like a stock character from the 1950’s filmstrip on the Red Menace. It was not what he said, but how ridiculously out of place it sounded compared to modern Progressive rhetoric.

Clinton, in contrast, chants the slogans of identity politics, which are all just in-group signaling. Her campaign to run as a slightly-out-of-the-closet lesbian is what liberalism is today. Talk to a modern liberal and ask them why they are supporting Clinton. Most likely they will change the subject, saying something about Trump. Otherwise, you get a shrug because they do not know. It is just what they do. It is what they are supposed to do.

Something else that has been obscured by the howling from the Left is that it is an entirely reactionary movement now. With nothing to offer a modern technocratic society, other than a post-modern form of nostalgia for the glory days of the Cult, the Left is mostly focused on stamping out bogeymen, real and imaginary, past and present. Listen to a liberal today and what you hear is a litany of things they oppose and those things are more often than not fictional.

It is why the college campus is so weird now. They are dominated by liberal women and minorities, yet they are engaged in endless witch hunts for dangerous white males. The Rolling Stone rape hoax featured a guy named Haven Monahan, a name intended to conjure an image of a toothy, horse faced WASP brimming with entitlement. College has become live action role playing for paranoid Progressives, with the quests set as morality tales based on Progressive piety.

It is what critics of Obama miss when railing about his refusal to say, “radical Islam.” They assume it belies a hidden agenda or a naive ignorance. It is neither. Obama is a reactionary. Whatever his adversaries are for, he is against. His reactionary instincts are mostly just a moldy form of anti-colonialism that was popular with his parent’s generation, but still exists in Afrocentric circles. Obama is defined by what he hates, not what he loves.

It is why his first act as President was to have the bust of Churchill removed. African anti-colonials hated Churchill, seeing him as the symbol of British imperialism. Right out of the gate, Obama was showing us he was a man defined by his hatreds. He was for nothing and against just about everything. In this regard, he is the quintessential reactionary. His only interest is in maintaining the Progressive order. Whether or not it is good for the country is irrelevant.

The entirely of Obama’s presidency can be explained in the reactionary framework. Like most successful blacks in America, he is consumed with a hatred for whites so a lot of what he does is just spite against the honkies. The more substantive acts read like a laundry list of Progressive revenge fantasies. His rapprochement with Russia was styled to be a rebuke of Reaganism, not a diplomatic strategy. It is why it failed. After the point was made, he and his flunkies laughed and move onto other topics.

The big health care push was never about health care. Instead, it was about revisiting the liberal defeat in the early 90’s. That is why it quickly devolved into score settling over issues like abortion and religious liberty. The Left has not the foggiest idea how to reform health care and they are not interested in it. They just wanted to exact some revenge against Christians and the middle-class. The point of that is to remind everyone they are in charge and it is the natural order.

Obama’s refusal to take obvious steps to address the Muslim problem is just a form of trolling. He knows it pisses off the squares and that is why he does it. It is not that he is a secret Muslim or that he has a secret agenda of some sort. The truth is the opposite. He as no plans and not interest in forming a plan. What consumes him is poking a stick in the eye of the people he detests, which so happens to be normal Americans. In this regard, he is our first foreign President, but he mostly just a reactionary President.

Ultimately, reaction cannot exist as an intellectual force on its own, as a simple matter of logic. Just as Buckley Conservatism curdled into a weird Corporate Libertarianism without the menace of Soviet communism, the Left has evolved in reaction to the void where it is old enemy once existed. The radical project was always based on the assumption of scarcity, a zero sum game where some had extra and some went without. It is why communist states never try to arrest scarcity. They need to survive.

Today, no one goes without, as a practical matter. It may be an illusion build on credit money, but a whole generation has grown up with too much of everything. When the poor are suffering from obesity, scarcity is no longer a problem. Instead of promising a future where poverty and inequality are banished, the Left is now a paranoid power cult lashing out indiscriminately in a vain quest to hold power. They are like meth addicts fighting the imaginary spiders, except they wield real power and do real damage.

America, like the rest of the West is entering a crisis of legitimacy due largely to the fact the Left decimated the intellectual battlefield. In the zeal to pull down all competing social constructs, they forgot to build one of their own that can hold up in a modern technological society. What passes for mainstream moral philosophy today is a vast moonscape littered with the remnants of old ideas. The Left is reduced to settling old scores and lashing out at imaginary bogeymen. This is the age of Liberal Reaction.

A Culture of Lies

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“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple

I’ve often wondered if it were possible to devise a metric for the measure of madness in a society’s ruling class. We know that the people ruling Canada, for example, are much further from reality than the people running Poland right now. You can tell that by the things they say. Justin Trudeau says things that suggest he is a schizophrenic, while the ruler of Poland says sensible things about the troubles facing Europe. The former ruler of North Korea often made announcements so outlandishly crazy, it’s hard to believe they were intentional.

If you could create a scale measuring the distance between the things the rulers say in public and reality, you could then compare one regime to another on the crazy scale. North Korea would probably be the gold standard of crazy so the “nork” could be the measure of ruling class lunacy. Turkmenistan would be seven “norks”, while France would be three “norks.” It’s an impossible thing and maybe a bit batty, but if I ever have the time, maybe I’ll try to work it out just for fun.

There’s little doubt, however, that the Dalrymple quote relies on the observation that authoritarian regimes rely heavily on spouting nonsense at their citizens and having the citizenry repeat it. Every society has “pretty lies” that help grease the wheels, but authoritarian societies almost always jump into that other category, where clearly false things are declared official truths. It’s not a matter of degree. It is a category difference.

I was thinking about this yesterday listening to the coverage of the Orlando shooting. The facts are familiar at this point. A second generation Muslim goes bonkers and kills people in the name of Jihad. In this case, the killer had a deep hatred of homosexuals and blacks so he shot up what is usually a gay club, but on this night it was Latin night so it just looked like a gay club. This is now becoming a familiar pattern and we all know the general reason for it. The contours of Islam are now familiar to everyone.

That’s the reality of this event. Barak Obama, on the other hand, blames it on Magic Shape Theory™. He claim this man was exposed to metal and plastic formed into mystical shapes that imbued them with the power to take over the mind of this one guy, turning him into a murderer. Therefore he is calling on his chief sorcerer to cast a level three wishing spell to prevent this particular shape from forming again. That way, no one will ever be possessed by this shape and turned into a killer.

OK, he did not mention a sorcerer, but calls for gun control are about as honest and fact based as calling for the Court Wizard of the kingdom to cast a healing spell. It’s utter nonsense. Obama knows it is nonsense and everyone in the media repeating it knows it is nonsense. The proof of that is they refuse to even talk about the obvious issue in this case. When that’s mentioned, Obama declares it immoral to even discuss it and the press is directed to spend their time talking about how Trump is firing up Christian bigots.

Lying used to be something that damaged reputations, even with politicians, but we have reached a point where lying in public is so common, it is considered part of the normal. Everyone knows Hillary Clinton is lying about the pay-for-play scam she was running from the State Department. We have video proof of her lying repeatedly, but no one in the press bothers to press her on it. After all, lying is just the new normal and only weirdos care about the truth when it comes to politics or anything else for that matter.

That’s part of what the ruling class finds so horrifying about Trump. He exaggerates for effect, but he does not say things that anyone can see as outright lies. You may disagree with his opinion on the Orlando shooter, but he’s not out there blaming it on Christian bakers or Magic Shape Theory™. It’s why they call him a bully. He’s not playing by the rules. We have reached the point that Orwell called the time of universal deceit. Trump is a radical merely for stating the obvious in public.

As a geezer, I’m old enough to remember a time when things were different. In my youth, homosexuals were still kept on lavender farms in the South and Muslims were kept over in their territories, so things like Orlando were impossible. I also remember when Trump’s plain speaking was not uncommon. Politicians exaggerated, for sure, but they were not competing with one another for who could tell the most outlandish whoppers in public. A folksy candor was a popular way for politicians to distinguish themselves from the crowd.

I’m going long here, but maybe this is a byproduct of mass media. The only way to break through the noise is to be outrageous and what is more outrageous than telling outlandish lies that everyone knows are lies? The foundation of Western civilization is social trust. The ultimate affront, the ultimate outrage is to be thoroughly and complete untrustworthy. To point out the obvious, to acknowledge the real means getting lost in the noise. Instead, the only way our rulers can get our attention is by embracing a culture lies.

Who Killed Conservatism?

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Many normal people would flinch at the assertion that conservatism and the conservative movement is dead or even dying. Instead, the normal person would prefer to say it has been betrayed by politicians, as well as their flacks in the so-called conservative media. Of course, all of this assumes one can get three people to agree on what it means to be a conservative.

There’s also an age issue. Someone in their 70’s will have a different sense of how to define conservative from someone in their 30’s. The 70-year old will have come of age when Eisenhower was the definition of conservative or maybe Goldwater. The 30-year old is walking around thinking Newt Gingrich is the archetypal right-winger. All of us are trapped in our piece of the timeline.

If we narrow the scope a bit and just look at professional conservatism in America, the type we associate with the modern Republican Party, then it is fair to say it is seriously wounded, if not dying. The action these days is out on the fringe. The term “Alt-Right” seems to have taken over as the popular label, but it is pretty the same people who have been purged from conservatism.

Before you can finger the people responsible for killing conservatism you have to figure out what went wrong. Buckley Conservatism ran out of reasons to exist. It was first and foremost a defense against communism, specifically Soviet aggression abroad and communist infiltration at home. Once the Cold War ended, communism collapsed and Buckley Conservatism was left without a reason to exist. The dragon was slain and there was no need for a champion.

Buckley Conservatism was supposed to be a fusion of libertarian economics and politics with traditionalism and social conservatism. The Right would be for free markets, but also defend traditional institutions and the social consensus that promotes stability. Ronald Reagan ran on this platform in 1980 and National Review, the flagship publication of the Right, was the intellectual home of fusionism.

That combination of traditionalism and capitalism should have been a solid foundation for a post-Cold War conservatism, but that’s not what happened. Instead, official conservatism quickly became something closer to Corporate Libertarianism. The guy to blame for that is probably Newt Gingrich. He emerged as the leader of the baby boomer conservatives in the early 90’s and made it into technocratic managerialism.

Newt redefined the Official Right in the 90’s, steering it toward Jack Kemp’s managerial conservatism, with its emphasis on making government better. Instead of rolling back the welfare state, the goal was to direct the power of the Federal government toward “conservative” ends. If you look at the Contract with America, the thing reeks of managerialism. It’s the sort of technocratic agenda guys like Ramesh Ponnuru are still trying to sell, mostly because it means jobs for their friends and family.

Eventually, the Gingrich Revolution gave us Big Government Conservatism and Compassionate Conservatism, both just marketing programs for embracing statist solutions in place of traditional conservative solutions. Instead of leaving families and communities to manage their affairs, government would nudge them along with an array of tax schemes and regulatory gimmicks. Need more kids? Turn the knob for child tax credits to get the old baby makers heated up out their in flyover country!

Fundamentally, conservatism is a cultural perspective. It’s a philosophical outlook rooted in ones traditions and heritage. Managerialism is the obliteration of culture and tradition, in favor of sterile technocratic governance. Once the Official Right surrendered to this it ceased to be conservative. No conservative ends can ever be achieved at gun point. Political liberty, after all, is the minimization of the use of coercion by the state in its essential role of preventing one person’s freedom from intruding upon another’s.

That’s why Buckley Conservatism is dying. The challenges of this age are all cultural. Globalism marshals the monopoly of force of each state against the local communities trying to hold onto their traditional way of life. Mass migration disrupts the demographic balance that makes for social stability. You can’t address these forces, much less oppose them, with programs that promise to expand the role of the state in the affairs of the citizens.

The Contract with America promised to eliminate 95 specific government programs. None of those programs were eliminated. Welfare reform was passed and offered the first substantive alterations of these programs in a generation. Even so, the budget for these 95 programs during Gingrich’s time as Speaker grew by 13%. That’s the story of post-Cold War conservatism. Lots of Five Year Plans and artfully labeled agendas, but the result has been a 25 year run of expanding government and retreating liberty.

Newt’s brand of conservatism was all about avoiding the schoolyard bullies by either currying favor with them as a flunky or quietly submitting to them, pretending to maintain his dignity. It’s why the modern conservative endlessly prattles on about his principles. For them, dignified submission is a principle. The result has been a generation of failure. The Left has gone from one triumph to the next in the culture war, beating the country so out of shape a man of 1990 would hardly recognize it.

Newt is not history’s greatest monster and he may very well have been sincere in his efforts. Regardless, the embrace of credentialism, the creeping mandarinism that comes with the managerial state and the preference for technocratic solutions over traditional responses is what killed Official Conservatism. The flowering of all that was in the early 90’s when Newt and the other “Class of ’94” types seized the party and redefined conservatism. Two decades on and it is now headed for the ash heap of history.

Globalized Intelligence

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The news brings word that the British public is now telling pollsters they are tilting heavily toward voting to leave the European Union. If the Brexit referendum passes, the British government will be required to paddle the island further into the North Sea in order to get beyond the reach of Brussels. Just how far they will have to go will be left to the government if and when it is necessary.

This is setting off panic on the Continent. The Brits pay roughly €13 billion per year into the Europe Union. They get out about €6 billion, give or take. This sounds terrible, but this does not account for the intangible benefits, assuming they exist, of having a say in the management of the European Union. That’s been the argument against Brexit. The indirect benefits of Remain dwarf the costs.

Like all economic arguments, the Remain argument is built on a foundation of statistical falsehoods and manipulation. They assume the worst case scenario of Brexit and the best case of Remain. In reality, most of the trade in place now will remain in place. The Germans need open access to British markets and they don’t have any desire to start a financial war with the English speaking world. They are in no position to pick that fight.

For all the talk of hidden benefits, there’s little talk of the hidden costs. Globalism is built on the concept of privatizing profits and socializing costs. Importing migrant labor, for example, allows the employer to spread the real cost of labor laws, insurance and competitive wages. At the same time, he can shovel those costs onto the public via welfare programs, crime, charity, etc. There’s nothing more expense than cheap goods made with illegal labor.

In the case of Brexit, there’s an enormous hidden security cost to the British that comes with European membership. This story about a Russian mole in NATO is a good example. During the Cold War, intelligence gathering and handling was managed by the Brits and Americans. The so-called Five Eyes did all of the electronic snooping and managed that information. The Brits have always been one of the best at spy craft and the Americans have always been great at signal intelligence.

Since the Cold War, NATO intelligence has become European intelligence. That means the active participation of all EU members. Countries like Portugal, with their poor record of keeping secrets, gets the same intel as Germany, with their excellent record of keeping secrets. The golden rule of all security systems is that they are as strong as their weakest link. In the case of Europe, their intelligence services will always be as reliable as Athens and Lisbon.

When you have separate countries, this problem is easily addressed. First, no country passes on intel to a third country without first getting permission from the source country. Countries that violate that rule are cut out of the loop. You can’t enforce that rule in a world without countries. The Portuguese and Turks get the same information as the Brits and Germans. Since that can’t possibly work, the result is going to be endless scheming, hidden agendas and deception.

The other “hidden” benefit of separate countries is the British intel services know perfectly well whose interests they are serving. The goal of their efforts is manifest to everyone in MI6. All of these motivations are transparent. Policing these relationships becomes much easier. If James Bond is living beyond his means and cavorting with a Russian mistress, you know something is amiss.

That, of course, leads to another problem. The British not only understand their interests, they can act on them unilaterally, if they think it necessary. If the US passes on intel that a mosque in London is housing mischief of Exploding Mohameds plotting to blow up a school, the Brits can act on that as they see fit. The people in charge of Britain know that their first duty is to protect their people.

All of this leads to the fundamental problem of the borderless world. It makes for a dangerous world. Government is not a precision instrument. It is a hammer. The bigger the government, the bigger and less precise the hammer. Public safety and national security are precision games. National government does them poorly which is why so much is delegated to local government. That’s not possible in a global world.

The Middle East Will Get Much Worse

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Smart policy types like to use the acronym MENA to describe what we in the West generally think of as the Arab world. North African populations in Libya and Algeria would reject the idea that they are in the same bucket as Arabs. Persians in Iran would have a similar complaint, even though they really do not have a basis for it. That is all true to one degree or another, but it is a useful bit of shorthand for discussing the collection of “countries” that are Muslim and mostly Arab.

If you look at the list of countries in the group, nine of the nineteen have been something close to stable over the last twenty years. Five of those are Gulf countries. Countries like Kuwait and Qatar are basically company towns run by a sheikh selling one product – oil. Then there is Israel, which is an exception. Oman and Jordan are also special cases, protected on the sly by Israel and operating as buffer states. Morocco is a special case, since it is mostly just a tourist trap for Europeans.

The stability that does exist in this region is based in Saudi Arabia. At least it has been. The Kingdom has avoided the revolts that were laughably called the Arab Spring by stupid Americans. They keep the GCC out of trouble and limit the mischief Iran is able to spread around the region. They also quietly work with Israel to limit the violence from the Palestinians.

Of course, they work with the US to maintain a strong military presence. There are a lot of US “advisers” in the Kingdom. Companies like Raytheon have been building and maintaining projects for the Saudis for decades. A lot of this booked as civilian use, but it is all military and all about controlling the region. Those listen posts the US runs in the Kingdom serve more than one purpose. That information is shared with Saudi intelligence. That is what has helped the Saudis control the explosion of chaotic violence coming from Yemen.

That last part, however, is where the worry starts. Yemen is a country full of inbred hyper-violent morons, who can barely organize a war-band. Yet, they have fought the Saudi military to a draw. This is a Saudi military equipped and trained by the US. They have the best equipment and the best training available, in addition to logistical and tactical support from the Americans. US military contractors have been with the Saudi military for decades, so there is not a problem with coordination. Yet, the Saudis cannot beat groups of retarded guys armed with old AK’s.

This war in Yemen has been an enormous drain on Saudi finances at a time when oil prices are depressed. The great leaps forward in drilling technology have most likely put a hard cap on oil prices, because wells can be brought back on-line quickly. Even if the Saudis can organize OPEC to hike prices again, they may not be able to enforce it. There is also the fact that the Saudis managed to alienate everyone with their policy of dumping oil to attack the US oil sector. The result is the Kingdom is hemorrhaging cash and will be forced to make deep structural changes.

That brings up another problem. The Saudi domestic setup is unsustainable. There are about thirty million people in the Kingdom, but ten million are foreign workers and many of those are basically slaves. The mean IQ of Saudi Arabia is tough to nail down, but the consensus puts it in the high 80’s at the optimistic end. Some old data suggest the mean is somewhere just north of 80, which is what you see in sub-Saharan Africa and American prisons. Add in the fact that most young Saudis do not work and you have a dearth of human capital. The general rule is you need a mean IQ of 95 to have a modern economy.

This is important because the Saudis recognize that they are running out of cheap oil to sell at huge profits. They are not going to run out of oil in our lifetime, but the cost of getting their crude out of the ground is going up and technology is allowing producers in the US to compete further up the price curve. That’s why they have this ambitious plan to restructure their economy to move away from simply being a giant oil company. They plan to open up the economy, diversify the tax base and shift work from foreign workers to Saudi workers.

Plans are great, but they rarely survive contact with reality. A country full of low-IQ nitwits, as the result of a culture of cousin marriage, is not going to turn into Silicon Valley overnight. Throw in the repressive Saudi religious culture and any attempt to open up the economy is going to run into trouble. Westerners working in the Kingdom live in compounds because the Wahhabi religious authorities demand it. Osama bin Laden was set off on his war with the West because Americans were stationed in the Kingdom during the Gulf War. Imagine what happens when Westerners are given easy access to the country.

That returns us to the central problem and why things will get much worse in the Middle East over the next decade. About 70% of the native Saudi population is under thirty. They do not work and they grew up in Wahhabi schools. The Saudis tended to export the fanatics to places like Afghanistan so they could go on jihad and never return. The more useful ones get pulled into the Saudi security services.

Imagine this process reversing and outside groups like ISIS recruiting these fanatics to make jihad on the House of Saud. Suddenly, ISIS or something similar is operating in Riyadh. There are plenty of signs this is happening now, but information is suppressed by the Kingdom for good reason. Still, smart people think this is a more of a now problem than a future problem.

Current estimates put the point at which the Saudis run low on cash between five and ten years from now. These are all guesses, of course. The only people, who intimately understand Saudi finances, work in the US Federal Reserve. The Saudis have already started a process of belt tightening in order to arrest the cash bleed, but these sorts of structural problems have to be addressed slowly, even in an autocracy.

Maybe the new King can get the country part way to its goal of diversification and that will be enough to stave off collapse. Nothing is ever certain in the Middle East except that there will always be turmoil. All the signs, however, are pointing in the wrong direction at the moment. That means the way to bet right now is on collapse of Saudi Arabia within the next decade. That, of course, will plunge the whole region into chaos.

The other reason to bet this scenario is the West is now led by people with a childlike understanding of the world. The European leadership class, growing up in the hothouse of US protection, resemble infants. There is no Bismarck or Metternich coming out of Germany in our lifetime. In the US, the political class has always been all thumbs in foreign affairs, but now they have succumbed to the madness of multiculturalism, rendering them dangerously incompetent.

This will not end well.

Kristol Nicht

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In a hilariously absurd post, the #nevertrump fanatic David French declined to be the nominee of Bill Kristol’s new political party. French is prone to drama so this is pretty standard stuff from him. I take some pride in having spotted him as a loony-tune a long time ago. I could just tell he was, in the mold of Glenn Beck, one of those guys who careens from one cause to the next, always overdoing it in a quest for grace. In a better age, these sorts were turned into missionaries and shipped off to Africa.

That said, I am a little surprised that Kristol’s scheme has been such a disaster. He is a smart guy and a very connected guy in the GOP. He has been a made-member of the Bush crime family for decades. His ideological inclinations may not be my cup of tea, but I respect his IQ. He had to know that going third party was suicide. He may be willing to commit suicide for his cause, but unless your name is Mohamed, it is not easy to get volunteers for your suicide mission. As a result, I assumed he was up to something else, like leveraging access to Team Trump.

Even smart guys screw up and smart guys who think they are smarter than everyone tend to make big mistakes. There is also the fact that Kristol is no spring chicken. He is sixty-three, which is not ancient, but that is when some men start to slip. I am not saying he is ready for the home; it is just that he is not going to be as politically nimble as he was twenty years ago. There is also the fact that he has been in the bubble for a long time and his connections to the currents of American life are now entirely indirect.

He and many other neo-cons seem to be trapped in 1995, unable to appreciate that the world has changed, the culture has changed and, most important, neo-conservatism is not so “neo” anymore. Their ideas all seem dated and out of sync with 2016 America. Listen to Kristol or his half-orc sidekick John Podhoretz talk about America and it is as if they just awoke from a twenty year nap. They keep repeating the same slogans from two decades ago as if the last two decades never happened. It is cringe inducing.

That is probably the biggest error Kristol made in his attempt to unhorse Trump. The Bill Kristol brand of conservatism was a horrible flop that nearly killed the Republicans Party and turned the word “conservative” into an epithet. In 2000, conservatives had full control of government for the first time in a century. Instead of rolling back the welfare state, they expanded it and launched into a massive war with Islam that we still cannot figure out how to end. We have been dropping bombs on Muslims for a quarter century now and things are worse.

People can be forgiven for thinking that maybe these neo-cons were never all that conservative. You can only scold people for so long about your principles before they expect to see you act on those principles. It seems like the only principles the neo-cons hold dear are the ones that allow them to take a powder when it is time to take on the Left. The last time conservative won back any ground against the Left was in the mid-90’s. Since then, it has been a long bloody retreat.

There is also the issue of tactics. Kristol’s claim to fame was the purging of Pat Buchanan and the remaining paleo-cons from the party. His trick in the 90’s was to bait them into saying bad things about Israel or the Israel lobby in Washington. Many fell for it and were tarred as anti-Semites. That made throwing them out of the party an easy task. There is nothing that strikes fear in the heart of the Republican like being called an anti-Semite. They would rather be associated with pedophiles like Denny Hastert than tied to someone who is an anti-Semite.

Trump is too smart for that and he is very pro-Israel in the typical American spirit. Most Americans support Israel because they are Christian and they see the Israelis as the underdog, facing a billion lunatics who want to murder them. That is Trump. He does not have deep thoughts on the subject, but he instinctively backs Israel. Having spent his whole life working with Jews in New York real estate, he is extremely comfortable around Jews.

Finally, I think Kristol, like many neo-cons, has forgotten the whole point of their movement. It was always intended to be a sales pitch. It was an effort to stitch together the various strains of American conservatism into a political force that could win elections. To their credit, it worked quite well, but it failed to deliver anything more than hollow election victories. In the end, a viable political movement has to deliver and 85% of GOP voters tell pollsters that their party has not delivered.

It is the old saying from the drug game. Do not get high from your own supply. That is what happened with the neo-cons. They started believing their own sales pitch and soon forgot that it was just a sales pitch. They stopped thinking about the practical reality of politics which is that the coalition that wins expects to get something for it. The neo-cons got swank offices and additional quarters added to their public pension, but the spear catchers and water carriers of the party got nothing. Pleas to ideological purity are not going to work on people who feel burned.

The Umman Manda

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Thirty years ago, most Americans felt they could, to some degree, relate to the people who ruled over them. The politicians did not tool around in armored vehicles or have armed men in mirrored sunglasses guarding them. The so-called “public servants” were not highly compensated, even if they did not work hard. The members of the commentariat were few in number and they worked hard to present themselves as normal people. There was a gap, for sure, but it did not feel like a huge gap.

A lot has changed and today it feels to most people like we have been colonized by pod people from another planet. They sort of look like us and make familiar noises, but they are not us. They are alien. Every day they say things that suggest they are just visiting our planet. President Obama makes the sort of “gaffes” a person makes when they have been trained to sound like a person, but maybe did not pay strict attention in human class. Hillary Clinton often sounds like a stroke victim learning to talk again.

Today, of course, there is an army of chattering skulls, experts and commenters we see on TV and on-line. Unless you live in one of the guarded combines around Washington or in a swank building in Manhattan, you will never run into these people on the street. They live apart from the rest of us. That is why they sound like graduate students on an anthropology study. They peer out at us and then describe to each other what they think is happening. To them, we are just talking monkeys in a game park.

The foreignness Americans now feel toward their rulers is rather weak compared to the alienation the rulers feel toward the people. Decades of telling each other scary stories about racist, misogynistic and bigoted Americans has left most of them fearful of normal Americans. The universal response from both the Left and the so-called Right, to the rise of Trump, has been to compete with one another for who can produce the vilest epithet they can fling at the Trump voter.

Some elements of the ruling class still think they just need to adjust some settings in the enclosures and things will calm down. They write long letters to one another about “connectedness” and how Trump is really just leading a rear guard action of losers and misfits. When that gets boring, it’s back to telling campfire stories about how Hitler has come back from the dead and is organizing the Final Final Solution on twitter. Listen to the mainstream press and you would think the streets are teaming with skinheads, brown shirts and Klansman.

If you are a normal person, you can’t help but feel like an alien in your own country when you see stuff like this on twitter. A normal person at a Trump rally is set upon by a mob and our so-called betters howl with approval. All those lectures we used to hear from the ruling class about free speech and protest being the highest form of patriotism suddenly ring a little hollow. So-called conservatives care more about democracy in Iraq than in America. The liberals care more about the foreign invaders than the safety of Americans.

This great divide that has opened up between the ruling classes and the people is largely the result of globalism. The source of the great fortunes is no longer tied to countries or cultures. Global money bankrolls government and the petty royalty that lives off government. The result is the people in charge have divorced themselves from the people over whom they rule. The Cloud People define themselves by their opposition to and essential difference from the Dirt People.

Over the last few decades as this has evolved, it was one big party for the government class. No matter which party won the election, the money still poured into the Imperial Capital to finance the petty royalty that lives in the suburbs around the city. Six of the ten richest counties in America are connected to DC. Two are outside the financial capital of the world, New York City. Good times or bad, the last three decades has seen their wealth and prosperity grow.

For the people in charge, particularly the commentariat, the American people have become the Umman Manda. These were people who poured south into Mesopotamia in the second century BC. The name, depending upon the source, means “the horde from who knows where” or, and my favorite, “the scourge of the gods.” To the people peeking at us through the windows of their car services and telescopes, the public is just a formless mass of savages that threaten the established order. It is why they hate what is happening. It is why they will stop at nothing to end it.

Clinton Math

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The radio guy John Batchelor followed me on twitter so I followed him back and tuned into his program a few times. I do not listen to a lot of talk radio and I have only listed to this program a handful of times. My sense is that he, like most pundits, is bearish on Donald Trump. I could be wrong here, but my sense is he is in tune with the conventional wisdom which says Trump has no chance to beat Clinton. Even though polls look good for Trump, the feeling is the deck is stacked against him.

One reason I think the conventional wisdom is wrong is they keep referring to the Red State/Blue State model as if it were written in stone and handed down by the gods. Batchelor keeps mentioning it in his analysis. It is a very weird thing about the modern age, but people struggle to remember anything past a decade or so. It is as if the present were permanent, never having changed and never changing. I am not that old and I remember when elections were nothing like the Red State/Blue State model.

The other odd thing, something that you see on the Left all the time, is the absolute belief that the future is now. Progressives have been dreaming of the demographic paradise when America is majority-minority for so long, they seem to think it has happened. Maybe it is just honkyphobia, but they carry on like blacks and Hispanics have a veto over our elections. America is still roughly 70% white and many Hispanics prefer to ID as white, when given the choice.

Of course, there’s the elephant in the room. Hillary Clinton is the most unappealing candidate to lead a party since Mike Dukakis. Frankly, I am probably being unfair to Dukakis, who was honest, but cursed with a dull personality. Hillary is a shrieking harpy, who makes your skin crawl. If you had her pop out of a closet in a haunted house, the authorities would shut it down for public safety reasons. To normal men, testicular cancer is more appealing than Clinton.

The bigger issue is the math problem. Here’s the back of the envelope demographic breakdown of the 2012 vote:

Demographic Group % of Vote Obama Share Vote Share
The Blue-Eyed Devil 73.7% 39.0% 28.7%
The Sacred People 13.4% 99.0% 13.3%
The New Sacred People 8.4% 75.0% 6.3%
Minorities That Get Into Stanford 3.8% 71.0% 2.7%
Totals 99.3% 51.0%

I’m pulling this from census data and there are some rounding issues, but it is a good starting point when looking at this coming election. For starters, blacks came out in historic numbers, for obvious reasons. That’s not happening in 2016. Second, whites never warmed to Mittens. The white vote was down 2% from 2008 and that was down significantly from 2004. While Obama struggled with honkies, enough stayed home to allow the elevated black vote to carry him to victory.

Using current polling, we have a Clinton model like this:

Demographic Group % of Vote Clinton Share Vote Share
The Blue-Eyed Devil 74.70% 32.00% 23.90%
The Sacred People 12.00% 99.00% 11.88%
The New Sacred People 9.40% 75.00% 7.05%
Minorities That Get Into Stanford 3.00% 100.00% 3.00%
Totals 99.10% 45.83%

What I have done here is assume a slight uptick in the white vote, based on history and what we are seeing in the primaries. I am assuming the black vote returns to normal and I am giving the Hispanics a bit of boost, even though the data does not suggest it. Keep in mind that the white vote was 77% in 2004. I could be understating it here, but I am trying to be conservative and not sound like a Trump cheerleader. Even so, Hillary Clinton is looking at a ceiling of 46%, which matches up pretty well with the polling so far.

To make matters worse, recent polling has shown Trump doing much better with blacks than the typical Republican. He is in the 10% range which is unheard of and suggests the black vote will be very depressed. Similarly, Trump is polling better than Romney with Hispanics. Put another way, the model in that graphic is the rosy scenario for Clinton at the moment. Unless things change, she could be facing a Hubert Humphey sized defeat.

That does not mean Trump is a lock. He has a number of hurdles to overcome before people see him as a safe and plausible choice for President. There is also the Traitor Party Bill Kristol is trying to run as a straw to siphon votes from Trump. Even that nitwit Gary Johnson could become a home for the #nevertrump loons. These people are lackeys of the Custodial State and will do everything to help Clinton, someone they see as one of their own.

Even with all that, the math is terrible for Clinton. Counting on a straw in a presidential race is the very definition of desperation. John Anderson was not able to stop Reagan and Wallace could not stop Nixon. A candidate has to offer something more than disdain and a lecture. The Democrats are now the anti-white party and the anti-male party. In a country that is 70% white and 50% male, which is going to be a losing hand in the long run. Having a shriveled hag as your candidate makes the task impossible.