Artificial Eternity

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One of the clarifying things about Trump’s second term is that we are seeing the reality of politics on display. He made deals for support and right away he is making good on those deals. One of those deals was with Silicon Valley with regards to Artificial Intelligence, which they think is the next revolution. Trump is pledging billions for something like a Manhattan Project to make AI real. Here is Sam Altman explaining why this is the greatest thing ever.

Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever, but it is not the first time this has come up with the tech bros. Once Silicon Valley was awash in billions, they started investing some of it in life extension technology with the hope of conquering death. Ray Kurzweil has made a nice living selling life-extension ideas to the tech bros.

It is fair to say that conquering death has been an obsession with Silicon Valley since the great boom of the 1990’s started. Perhaps there is some natural link between extending human ability through technology and extending life with it. On the one hand, solving the complex mathematical puzzles that put the stock of human knowledge at your fingertips leads to hubris. On the other hand, that same hubris can easily lead to a view of life as nothing more than complex math puzzles.

Much of what lies behind the synopticon that Silicon Valley has rolled out over the last decades is the assumption that life is not terribly complicated because humans are relatively simple in their actions. Facebook and Google easily roll up our lives into easy-to-use data sets, so marketers can nudge us into buying their products. The fact that this strategy does not work is ignored. They have come to believe that the vast network of machines is controlling human behavior.

That aside, conquering death is not new to this age. Christianity is all about conquering death and living forever in bliss. That is the main point of Christianity, at least from the marketing point of view. If you live an ethical life, when you die and your life is put in the scales, you will gain access to heaven, which is everlasting life. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”

The Christians were not the first to think this way. In fact, it was most likely borrowed from Zoroastrianism, which held that heaven was one option for your soul once it left your body and crossed Bridge of Judgment. Of course, the concept of reincarnation has been with us since forever probably. The soul reentering the material world in the body of another human or as another species is a form of conquering death. The soul is eternal, so you never truly die.

In folk religions without a complex system of ethics tied to their deity, conquering death was still an important topic. The ancient heroes fought to be remembered after they had fallen in battle. Valhalla, which was reworked by early Christians into a warrior heaven, was originally just a resting place for warriors, until they poured out to fight alongside Odin against the jötnar during Ragnarök. Conquering death was to live so you could take part in the final scene of existence.

Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. Greek mythology is a great example of this. To be remembered was the point of life. The great heroes of the long-forgotten past are proof that a man can outlive his people. Troy, for example, was long gone by the time of Homer, but the men of Troy and those who defeated them, lived on long after Troy was forgotten. Our modern cemeteries still reflect this ancient urge to be remembered and thus conquer death.

in the modern age, men who aspire to greatness are not satisfied with having their memory carved on a rock. They will not blink their last blink with the knowledge that they will live forever at the foot of God. Both require a connection to a people who will maintain the rock or pray for your soul. Instead, they hope the machines with which they spend so much of their lives will save them from rotting away in a field or being incinerated in a crematorium.

Despite their brilliance, they not only think little about their obsession with immortality, but they never wonder if it is what they want. To this point, people have understood that living even a very long time comes with punishments. Our fiction is full of examples of men who lived too long. Even in good health, their psyche suffers from having lived beyond the natural limit. We have always had a sense that who we are is tied to the brevity of our time on this world.

Artificial Intelligence may help mitigate diseases like cancer, but at this stage it is mostly used for creating clever memes. The walls that contain AI right now, the limits of human knowledge, will probably prove impenetrable. It will never be able to go beyond what we know but merely be faster at accessing and applying it. That will have its uses but will fall far short of the robot future. Until we unriddle what makes human consciousness possible, AI will remain a fantasy.

Nature, of nature’s God, has a sense of humor, so the most likely result of AI is better ways to kill one another. We already see that with the war in Ukraine where AI powered drones hunt for men and equipment. This is another thing the present quest for eternal life shares with the past quests. The end result will inevitably require death, as without death, life is not possible. Living is not merely the absence of death but the struggle against death. Artificial Intelligence cannot do that for us.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Racism: The Death Of A Concept

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The concept of racism is a novelty of the twentieth century that in recent times has been treated as a timeless truth. In the last century, the best people decided that their fellow white people had been living in sin because they had not welcomed the descendants of former slaves into their lives, so they set about correcting it. What started as a project to better the material condition of black people and include them into general society, slowly transformed into a cult of leukophobia.

It is a good example of how a negative identity can both spread and slowly destroy the people who embrace it. The first “antiracists” were sober minded compared to the modern version, in that they simply wanted to address the practical problem of incorporating the black population into the American legal system. As a practical matter, the United States had two legal frameworks into the twentieth century, one for the white population and one for the black population.

The fact that this dual legal system existed in America is a great example of how practical necessity must always come before the ideal. America was born, in part, in the notion of equality before the law. It nearly tore itself apart in a civil war over this very same issue, but into the twentieth century the majority of Americans, of both races, were comfortable with a two-tier legal system. It was this gap between the ideal and reality through which antiracism entered.

Those first “antiracists” were opposed to this dual legal system. Soon they were opposed to the people who defended it and then opposed to the human reality that perpetuated it despite reforms in the law. The civil rights revolution in the middle of the last century went beyond eliminating the dual legal system. It was aimed at eradicating the conditions that made it possible. Those conditions, it was assumed, were in the hearts and minds of the white population.

This version of the Great Awakening was motivated by a desire to once and for all eliminate that which makes racial inequality possible. Instead of pulling up at the water’s edge of biological reality, the reformers imagined that they were smashing into the final defenses of racism and the racists who made it possible. That sin of racism discovered in the last century was anthropomorphized into an army of imaginary devils, against which the great and the good could rally.

The last generation of madness has been in pursuit of what Chief Justice John Roberts called the folly of trying to create equality from inequality. Not only are differences in individual people immutable, differences on groups of people are immutable, but that itself became one of the deadly sins of antiracism. The stubbornness of this reality just made the antiracist more determined until they embraced state sponsored violence against this imaginary evil.

Whether they understood what they were doing is unclear, but what antiracism became was a mirror of what they claimed was white racism. This started with shifting the definition of racism from “prejudice based on race” to “prejudice plus power”, which meant only whites could be racist. Since hating white people was not new, they shifted to hating whiteness, the condition that produce white people. The result was a moral code built on the hatred of white people, leukophobia.

In the final decades of the last century, American children were taught about the cultural lunacy in communist countries like Russia and China. They would struggle to accept that people could submit to reeducation camps and struggle sessions run by crazy people at war with reality. In the fullness of time, children will look at the diversity pogroms of this age the same way. Future children will struggle to believe that psychopathic con artist like Robin DiAngelo were real.

Like the madness of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the bloody madness of Stalin’s purges, the madness of antiracism has run its course. Yesterday, Trump signed another executive order, this one rescinding Lyndon Johnson’s EO 11246, which established affirmative action in government contracting. Ten years ago, anyone suggesting this was called a white nationalist and purged from polite company. Suddenly it is in the trophy case of the most banal political activists.

What we are experiencing right now is a preference cascade. Long ago, a wiseman said that antiracism would collapse on the day a so-called conservative professed his antiracism in front of a gathering and that gathering started to chuckle and then burst into uproarious laughter as they all realized the same thing. That thing was that everyone else was sick of this nuttiness too. All sudden, it was okay to laugh at it and so everyone indulged in hysterical laughter.

This is not to suggest that we will be restoring segregation or that television actors will start casually dropping racial epithets. It simply means that the social movement built around antiracism has reached the end of the line. The quest to eliminate race as a defining feature of public discourse ended with race as the defining feature of public discourse, leaving it with nowhere to go but away. The solution to a racialized public square is a de-racialized public square.

Another way of looking at this is the old expression, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. This refers to the idea that wealth gained in one generation will be lost by the third. The founder starts the business, turning it over to his son who competently manages it. His son then runs it into the ground. There are a lot of variations on this same theme, but all point to the same idea. Regression to the mean is undefeated over a long enough time span.

The concepts of racism and antiracism were created by clever people seeking to capitalize on that gap between the American ideal and reality. They got the social movement going and the next generation established it as a fixture of American political discourse. For a couple of decades, antiracism provided good jobs at good wages to college educated people with no real skills. They just had to show up and play their role, but instead they brought the movement to ruin.

One could also look at the death of racism, the political cause, and its moral claims, as part of the overall decline of the American empire. Racism and antiracism were made possible by the emergence of the American superpower after the two great industrial wars of the twentieth century. This last spasm of racism was made possible by the final victory over the other great ideology to emerge from those wars. Now that the empire is on the wane, its social movements are dying with it.

Regardless of your preferred narrative, there is no escaping the fact that the world has suddenly shifted on the issue of race. The moral center is coming to rest where it belonged all along with regards to race and that it is a private matter. One chooses to live with who they like, for any reason they like. It is not a collective matter. We are seeing the line between the private and public reappear. The first casualty is the concept of racism and its traveling partner antiracism.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Data Dump

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Lost in all the excitement of inauguration day, and there was much to find exciting, was something Trump said in response to a question. He said he plans to release everything about JFK, RFK and MLK that is currently classified. He tried to release the JFK material in his first term, but was talked out of it for some reason, but now he seems committed to it and has now added the others.  His attorney general nominee pledged to release all the Epstein material.

Given how day one unfolded, it is safe to take Trump at his word. He seems to be sensitive this time to the fact that he got a reputation in his first term for big talk but little action, so on day one he delivered some controversial items. The pardoning of the J6 people without a lengthy review was a welcome surprise. The executive order on birthright citizenship was a stunner. If he is following through on these items, it seems reasonable to think he will follow through on the other items.

The question at the heart of all of these long-held secrets is why this information has been hidden from the public. The easiest one to answer is the Epstein material, which is going to include the names of his friends. Given the activity on that island, powerful people do not want their name attached to Epstein. It is possible that the FBI has been using this knowledge to blackmail people. The corruption in the FBI is so deep, you cannot rule it out.

Given Trump’s new friends in the economic elite, he probably feels safe to dump this out into the public domain. By now, whatever evidence held by the government regarding Epstein’s untimely death or his connections to Israeli intelligence has been destroyed, so there is not much harm in putting it out to the public. At this point, even if they admit that Epstein was controlled by Mossad, the only people who would be surprised by this revelation would be those who live in Washington.

The other stuff is a bit more interesting. What information is the government hiding about Martin Luther King or his killing? About twenty years ago, a bill was proposed to require all remaining MLK documents to be released by 2027. The MLK Records Act has never passed, but Trump could just order it. Supposedly, the government has documents about the assassination. No one questions who did it, but maybe James Earl Ray had friends in the FBI at the time.

The most likely reason for keeping MLK documents hidden away for over half a century is that they are embarrassing to the government. One of the interesting bits of cognitive disconnect is that on the one hand the intelligence services think they are the great manipulators, controlling things from the shadows. On the other hand, they are sure that the public has total trust in them, so they do not want this material released as it would destroy public trust in the agencies.

In the case of MLK, everyone knows that the FBI was bugging his phones and rooms, spying on him and his associates, and trying to create trouble in his organization, as they did and continue to do to any organized opposition. There is a good chance that there is a lot of information that is not flattering to MLK that has been hidden away for political reasons. Again, none of this would shock the public, but the people in Washington think King is a national hero.

Now, the Kennedy stuff is another matter. At this point, the only good reason to block the release of the remaining Kennedy material is that it implicates the CIA or the Mossad in the assassinations. Many of the conspiracy theories revolve around the fact that the intelligence community did not trust the Kennedys. Both Kennedy brothers were Israel skeptics who were at odds with the nascent Israel lobby. Give the direction of Israel policy after JFK left office, this is plausible.

Lyndon Johnson was a super-Zionist. His closest advisers on Israel and the Middle East were Mathilde Krim and her husband Arthur Krim. The two of them lived with the Johnsons off and on throughout his presidency. Mathilde was a convert who in her youth joined Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization fighting the British. Swapping out John Kennedy for the compliant Lyndon Johnson would have made a lot of sense to the Israelis at the time, so it is plausible.

The argument again this is that Trump makes all the noises of being as rabid a Zionist as Lyndon Johnson, so if that is the nature of this long-hidden material, it seems unlikely that he would release it. That would not make his Zionist supporters happy. This is what suggests the information is damning to the CIA or the FBI. Given how the CIA and FBI treated Trump during his first term, getting some payback this time around fits in with the theme of this term.

There is also the fact that Trump’s new best friend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is sure the CIA was involved in these killings. Ted Kennedy was a powerful senator for a long time and despite his problems, he no doubt had access to people who had access to the information hidden away by the government. The CIA angle has been the default assumption in Washington, as well. This is the best argument for why this information has been hidden away for so long.

In the end, assuming this data is finally released, it will all point to something that we have known for a long time. That is the managerial state that first took root in the post-war intelligence agencies, has been the real power in Washington. Most of what is presented to the American people has been a lie to one degree or another, because the people in charge think they know best. “Our democracy” has meant “their democracy” for much longer than the expression has existed.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Instauration

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about robot doctors, a post the coming interregnum, a video from the bed of my truck and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Today is the big day when Donald Trump completes the greatest comeback in American political history. After his ouster in 2020, few thought he would be allowed to run, much less win the presidency. Every part of the managerial regime was focused on stopping him by any means necessary, but he found a path through it. In that regard, his restoration today is the greatest political victory in American history. No candidate has overcome bigger odds than Donald Trump.

That may be why the crazies are so quiet this time. Every narrative since 2016 has ended with the end of Donald Trump. They simply ruled out any possibility of Trump winning this election, so now that it has happened, they have no mechanism for dealing with the disconfirmation. No one has conjured a new narrative that includes their victory over the orange man as he enters the White House. There is no Russian collusion hoax to explain this victory.

It is a good reminder that the crazies are not self-directed. They need to be fed stories from the system around which they can rally. Remove the Russian collusion hoax and much of what happened in Trump’s term is not possible. The “resistance” rested on the belief that his victory in 2016 was illegitimate due to the modern version of Old Scratch tricking people into supporting his agent, Donald Trump. They were not just mad about an election result. They were resisting evil itself.

This does not mean the Russian collusion hoax was 4-D chess. It was just another lie from the Clinton machine, but the stars aligned for it to become the great rallying point for the mentally ill. It was also a useful excuse for permanent Washington, as they scrambled to contain the damage of 2016. It is why to this day no one who bought into the Russian collusion hoax has explained how Trump’s alleged deal with the Putin resulted in his winning Pennsylvania.

It is a good example of how events take on a life of their own. While there are schemers plotting behind the scenes, their schemes often turn into something far different from what they initially imagined. The Russian collusion stuff was originally a way to distract from those embarrassing emails being released online. It then became the magical reason to explain the failure of the Clinton campaign and then it became the excuse for official Washington to declare war on the president.

The great gaslighting campaign on behalf of Harris did not include such a provision, probably because the people behind it did not think it would work. They knew all along that her odds were not good. Unlike in 2016 when everyone was sure Clinton would win easily, no one thought Harris was a favorite. The efforts to conjure a new conspiracy to explain Trump’s victory went nowhere primarily because powerful people were unwilling to invest in a new Old Scratch story.

There is another bit of evidence to suggest that the reason Trump is in Washington right now is the economic elites shifted in his favor. In 2016 they were all invested in Clinton as she was the machine candidate and the machine ran Washington. Rich people took the safe course and invested in the “resistance.” The great drama the machine put on for the country was as much about gaslighting the economic elites as it was about undermining the Trump presidency.

Four years of mismanagement under Biden caused enough concern among the economic elites that they were not willing to hand Washington a blank check, especially after the events of the summer. Biden’s incoherence, Trump getting shot and then the selection of Harris deeply concerned the economic elites. Like the ownership of a company realizing that their managers are stealing from them, the economic elites decided it was time for a change.

One result is no money to underwrite a new resistance. The crazies have been sent off to the internet version of an internment camp. Facebook and Twitter are now back to normal, for the most part. Regime media is under pressure to behave this time, which has led to a purge of some of their hard thumping crazies. The Washington Post and New York Times will not be leading the resistance to Trump this time. Their owners will not tolerate it, so the coverage has been quite tame.

This is another clue that the people in charge are back in charge. The Trump agenda is far more aggressive this time around, but we are not hearing much from the regime lackeys about it. Trump is expected to sign one hundred executive orders today and regime media has barely noticed. The prevailing mood in Washington now is like what happens when a new management team is installed. Those who buy in really buy in and those who do not buy in head for the exit.

None of this suggests it will be all puppies and rainbows, but the signs all point to a restoration of normalcy as the default. The freakshow that has been the norm for the last decade is being replaced with a sober minded standard. You see this in the nomination hearings where the hysterics have been kept to a minimum. In Trump’s first term, for example, the crazies shut down Washington over Kavanaugh, but this time they were quite muted over Hegseth.

One should not forget the lesson of the Russian collusion hoax. This effort to wrench normalcy from the jaws of lunacy will itself set off a chain of events that will lead to things no one can anticipate. Careers have been built on the lunacy, so the decline of Lunacy Inc. will have fallout. Some of it will be good for those on the dark side of the great divide but might not be viewed as such by the economic elites. The rich guys can easily go from heroes to zeroes.

There is also the fact that the rich guys will want what they want from Trump and that may not be good for the country. We saw this with the recent H1B flap. The good guys won the rhetorical fight, but it is a good reminder that rich people are like any other tool in radical politics. They are useful when they are useful and that is determined by those who are using them. The price of victory in this system is relentless pressure on the economic elites, not hero worship.

In the end, today signals quiet waters for the first time in a long time. The instauration will be followed by another interregnum. The Great Awakening that kicked off with the 2000 election has finally burned itself out and we will get a period where the mess gets cleaned up and normal people can speak freely about it. In the previous interregnum, after the cultural revolution of the 1960’s, everyone assumed it was forever and failed to claw back what had been lost.

That is the great question that looms over all of this. In the short term, will Trump follow through on his promises and address the crimes of the past? Will we see some corrective action taken against the system for the abuses? On the other hand, will the beneficiaries of his victory use their new platforms to continue the long-term fight against the forces of darkness or will they simply get rich off it? Today is the end of the beginning and the start of the long interregnum war.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Radio Derb January 17 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Radio Derb Podcast, 1/17/2025
  • Table of Contents
  • 01m53s World Logic Day
  • 09m09s The Competence Collapse
  • 16m00s Economist fixes Africa
  • 19m35s French theater fiasco
  • 22m28s A new Botany Bay?
  • 26m10s How is Tété-Michel Kpomassie doing?
  • 30m39s The immigration racket
  • 39m28s Where is Vivek?
  • 40m13s Usha, Tennyson, and me
  • 41m41s Can the universe think?
  • 43m04s Signoff for California

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your logically genial host John Derbyshire with news and commentary.

First, however, a little housekeeping. The website VDARE.com remains in suspense thanks to the evil machinations of New York State’s well-upholstered Attorney General. However, the parent VDARE Foundation is very much alive, and planning for the future.

The latest development there is that Peter Brimelow, who got the whole thing started 25 years ago, now has his own Substack account. You can subscribe, and I urge you to do so.

You can support the VDARE Foundation itself by mailing a check to us at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. You can support me personally by earmarking the check with my name, or by any of the alternative options spelled out on my personal website. Thank you!

End of housekeeping. Let’s see what’s in the news. Continue reading →

Civilizationalism

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Last year I did a show on the concept of civilizationalism, but I thought it was a good idea to revisit the topic now that Trump is back in town. Many of the things Trump has been saying since the election suggest he is headed in this direction, even if he does not think much about the concept. The tides of history are dragging him along toward this new organizational model.

The short definition of civilizationalism is that instead of humanity organized into countries or empires, it will be organized by civilization. Language, culture, history, tradition, and religion are not immutable, but they are not malleable. They evolve over long periods of time, so they feel permanent to us. These are things that resist the best efforts of the ideologues.

The last time I addressed this topic it was in the historical perspective. The show this time is about the nuts and bolts of it. We are seeing the rough contours in the world and even in the behavior of Trump. His desire to annex Greenland and Canada is not much different from Russia reabsorbing Ukraine into the Russian world. Canada and Greenland are part of the American civilization.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Intro
  • Trump’s Curveballs
  • Sphere of Influence
  • Clash of Civilizations
  • Multipolar World
  • America & The New World

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

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Troubled Youth

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Over the last week a dispute has erupted on Twitter about the relative difficulties faced by young people. One camp, current young people, claim they are entering a world that is much more difficult for them than youth of prior generations. They do not think they have the same opportunities as their parents and grandparents. Another camp thinks that young people are entering relatively good times economically but may have unrealistic expectations regarding adulthood.

To be accurate, there is at least one other camp in this debate. That camp thinks the youth face a demographic reality for which they have not been properly prepared and a prevailing culture that works to prevent that preparation. The relative state of the economy for young people does not matter if they are entering a society that is about to come apart along demographic lines. Young white people have been poorly trained up for a world that should not exist.

As is often the case, the two camps squaring off over economics are on the main stage while the camp looking at upstream issues is marginalized. While economics is downstream from demographics and culture, it still matters. We see this with the oldest demographic who remain stubbornly committed to the system. Baby boomers, overall, have it pretty good, so they still believe in the system, even it means they must endure an emergency room that looks like a Tijuana bus stop.

The economic question for young people is difficult, because it is more about expectations than objective measures. For example, about 16% of native-born teenagers have jobs today, compared to 32% in 1990. On the one hand, this is a bad thing because it means fewer young people getting necessary training to be an adult once they finish their education. On the other hand, it means they have an easier time of it than prior generations who had to work.

Those over the age of fifty love telling stories about the terrible jobs they had as young people, while no one under the age of thirty complains about not having had crappy jobs to make ends meet. In fact, the main complaint from college graduates in their twenties is that they have crappy jobs. This is where the great divide opens between those two main camps debating the issue. Old people roll their eyes, because having a crappy job is a rite of passage. Young people see it as a broken promise.

If you are in that third camp, you can see how both sides are right. On the one hand, young people should stop moaning about crappy jobs and being poor, because that is what every generation faced. In fact, prior generations had it far worse. On the other hand, this was not the deal promised to young people who went into debt to get a college diploma. They were told that this investment would let them bypass the struggle portion of their life and get right into the middle-class.

Here you see the root cause of the complaint from young people. The breakdown of order has eroded the social contract. In fact, the social contract is now a terms of service agreement. They were told to click “accept” in high school, but once they exited college, they were told the terms of service have changed. Just in case they objected, they were also told that the privacy policy had changed as well. “Please click accept” quickly became “accept or else.”

There is more to this broken social contract than economics. The conditioning of young people comes with the assumption that if they follow the rules and tick the correct boxes, they will find meaning and purpose in life. Instead, what they find is life in a cubicle, paying off school debts while living at home. Half of college graduates live at home, which is not as high as you might think, but they continue to live at home long after they have left college. That is a novelty.

In effect, young people were sold a program that said if they went to college, took on the debt and followed the rules, they would come out the other end with the sort of fulfilling life they saw in the media. Instead, they are faced with what feels like a pointless existence as an economic unit. That philosophy major at the coffee shop is not just a punch line. She is a bitter victim. Telling her that she now must find her own meaning in this struggle sounds like another lie to her.

That said, the youth of the past did not like working in high school and would have preferred to hang out with friends playing video games. College grads of the past would have preferred to get a job in their field at the same wage as an experienced man, rather than working retail until they could get their foot in the door. The struggle for today’s youth is relatively easy, even if it is the result of a broken promise. In fact, young people probably have it too easy in many respects.

This generational conflict is, in the end, a proxy for the larger conflict which revolves around the failure of the ruling class over the last thirty years. Instead of upholding the rules, especially the rules of the social contract, they turned the country into a smash and grab where everyone is on their own. As a result, the powerful, for example colleges, exploit the weak, their students. It should be no surprise that the victims of such a system are not its biggest fans.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Inequality Of Man

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In the fullness of time, whoever is writing the story of the American experiment will marvel over the fact that the United States never understood itself and as a result, was eventually destroyed in a struggle with itself. A land with vast resources and a capable people could never move past a central problem that stepped off the Mayflower to start the American story. That problem is how can you build a society that derives equality from inequality?

At every step in the American story, we see this conflict. One the one hand, what drives the efforts of the American people is the desire to equalize not only American society, but the society of man. On the other hand, there is the grudging acknowledgment that what lies between here and the egalitarian paradise if the impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. Despite the unconquerable truth of the human condition, what drives America is the desire to overcome it.

This conflict is right there in the founding myths. The colonists rebelled against the symbol of hierarchy and innate inequality, the King of England. They did so on the grounds that all men have the same rights. It is right there in the powerful opening of the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the greatest celebration of egalitarianism ever written, but written by a man who was the gold standard of both the natural inequality of man and the necessity of hierarchy.

This contradiction is right there in the life of Thomas Jefferson. He was a man of aristocratic stock, born into a wealthy family. He was living proof that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. He supported the redistribution of land to the poor, despite the fact he was a wealthy planter and slave owner. Despite the reality of his life, he was also capable of expressing the egalitarian spirit in such powerful and direct language that it continues to haunt the nation he helped create.

Modern America, the Global American Empire, is the product of the innate American egalitarianism, but also the willingness to use violence in the unequal relationship between America and the rest of the world. The regular speeches we hear from politicians about America’s role in the world would be familiar to Thucydides. On the one hand those speeches are a form of the funeral oration of Pericles and on the other hand the frank dialogue with the people of Melos.

The present crisis of America is the product of this great contradiction. In his majority opinion in Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, Chief Justice John Roberts struggles with this very question. Much of the opinion, in fact, is a recitation of how the country has struggled with this question. Often, Roberts laments that the court has failed to live up to those ideals of equality, but then he acknowledges that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

In his discussion of Plessy, the case that established the doctrine of separate but equal, Roberts argues that despite the intent and the remedies to address defects in the doctrine, the result was institutional inequality in education. Roberts writes, “the
inherent folly of that approach—of trying to derive equality from inequality—soon became apparent.” The remedy was to scrap it entirely in the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision.

Note that in a 237-page decision lamenting the history of discrimination and challenges in addressing it, the central problem lies in just one sentence. You cannot derive equality from inequality. If Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally, a truth not only visible to the casual eye, but supported by mountains of data, then the equality of man is impossible and any effort to achieve it is folly. Despite this immutable truth, the court continues its quest to reach the egalitarian paradise.

Right there is the beating heart of the current crisis. For going on three generations now, the moral arbiter of America society, the Supreme Court, has demanded that we press ahead with a project it knows is impossible. The moral regime that makes the open society as the highest good and discrimination as the worst evil, which grew from the Brown decision, is all about finding, at long last, some way over or around that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

The moralizing is clear in the text of the decision. Roberts often blurs the lines between legal discrimination and general discrimination, because to make such a distinction suggests the latter is acceptable under the right conditions. Instead, the starting place is the assertion that discrimination is always immoral, but for now certain exceptions must be made until we work out a few things. Affirmative action, for example, is a temporary fix until equality is achieved.

Think about how many social problems could easily be solved by simply acknowledging that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. If the court said that Harvard is a private college and so it can admit who it likes for any reason it likes, this case never sees a courtroom. Public universities, on the other hand, must admit everyone that meets the objective criteria for admissions. Debates over college admissions would vanish instantly.

Simply acknowledging objective reality about human beings would solve many of the problems in present day America, but it is impossible. The belief in the equality of man is too powerful with the managerial class. John Roberts and his staff wrote 237-pages of text to cover over “it is folly trying to derive equality from inequality.” Since the middle of the last century, all efforts have been mustered to defeat that simple truth, but it remains that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

A Do Nothing President

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Note: Over the weekend the SSL certificate for the site was supposed to renew, but something went wrong and it did not renew. This is why your browser got angry when you tried to access the site. H1B strikes again!

On Monday, Trump will be installed as president, so naturally everyone is speculating about what he will do once he gets the keys to the White House. Interestingly, much of the speculation is around the foreign policy issues he inherits. The neocons in the media are working hard to keep Ukraine in the news, so they are making claims about what Trump will and will not do with Putin. The Israel lobby wants Israel to be number one, so they are focusing on Iran.

What does not get noticed is Trump was elected on domestic issues. In the last election, Israel and Ukraine were far down the list for all voters. The number one issue was the economy. Immigration was the next big issue. The typical Trump voter looks at Ukraine as a boondoggle and Israel as an unsolvable problem. Logically, these two issues should be far down the list for Trump, but the media is focusing on them, which speaks to the power of their respective lobbies.

The first hint of what Trump has in mind for Ukraine came last month when Trump’s personal envoy to Ukraine and Russia said that it will take one hundred days to get a deal with Russia over Ukraine. This was a big shift from prior claims about Trump ending the war in a few days. Kellogg has also shifted with regards to what is happening in the war. The business about there being a stalemate has been dropped in favor of an acknowledgment that Ukraine is in trouble.

What the “one hundred days” tells us is Trump is not going to litter his first one hundred days with the Ukraine matter. It is a custom to assume that the first one hundred days of a new administration set the tone, so it is not an accident that Kellogg was suddenly using that phrasing. It is a signal that the Ukraine matter is not in the list of items that will take up the president’s time starting in January. To whom it was a signal is not all that clear and whether they understood it is unknown.

Time is the way to think about what Trump is planning for his second term. He has just one term and that means he has about eighteen months to get his domestic agenda pushed through Congress and the administrative state. Once we get to the summer of 2026 his party will be busy throwing the midterms. This means they will not pass anything the people want but instead focus on angering the base. After the election, Trump will get nothing from Congress.

This is a lesson Trump learned the hard way the first time. Once he won the election, he was swept up in a series of events that forced him to use his time in ways that had no benefit to him. He became the salesman wasting his days tending to customer service issues, rather than finding and closing new business. The number one skill for a salesman is time management. If you fail to manage your time, you fail. This is true for presidents, especially reformers like Trump.

It is why the signs point to Trump being something of a do-nothing president with regards to foreign policy issues. With Ukraine, he can do nothing, and it will resolve itself, as far as Trump is concerned. He inherited an unsalvageable mess from Biden, so no deal is better than any deal. Spending any time on it is a waste, so the one hundred days will probably turn into forever. The post-war deal with Russia will be left to the governments of Europe and the EU.

As for Israel, the signs are there for a delaying action. Kellogg was asked about it and reiterated the usual lines about pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear program, which they largely did long ago. Michael Waltz, the new national security adviser, seems to get his opinions on Iran from Fox News. One suspects that he was picked because he will do what the boss says. Despite talk of new sanctions, Trump remains opposed to a war with Iran, or an Israeli war with Iran.

Another signal that the Middle East may be down there with Ukraine on the priority list is the fact Trump has signaled his disdain for Netanyahu. He was not invited to the inaugural and Trump has tweeted some untoward things about him. He also posted a link to Jeffrey Sachs calling Netanyahu a “deep, dark son of a bitch”, which is not the sort of thing you say about your friends. Trump has also been clear about wanting out of Syria, especially now that it is in chaos.

What may be shaping up for the first half of the Trump term is a policy of doing nothing with regards to the foreign policy hotspots. Trump and his advisors can answer questions and make the usual noises, but when it comes to investing time, the scarcest commodity Trump possesses, the administration will be stingy. These issues will get the absolute minimum amount of time and only so that they do not become a time waster for the domestic agenda.

It is looking like Trump learned that the most important card any president can play in politics is his attention. There is not much anyone can do if Trump simply de-prioritizes Ukraine, for example. “We are looking into it” works just as well against the schemers behind things like Ukraine as it does his own voters. Perhaps this time, instead of saying this regarding domestic issues, Trump will be saying it regarding foreign policy, to focus on the issues that matter to him.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Dogs And Bones

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the coming troubles for Europe with regards to Ukraine, a post the eternal war between mice and cats, a video from the bed of my truck and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

“A dog who will bring a bone will carry a bone” is an old-time expression that usually is meant to say that someone who will steal for you will steal from you. More generally it means that an immoral person on your side will eventually let you down or go over on the other side. The underlying assumption is that even in an adversarial environment, there are rules. The person who violates those rules can never be trusted, even when their rule breaking favors you.

This “lack of a code” lies at the heart of the traitor in wartime. The person who makes a deal with the enemy is harshly punished, usually executed, not because of the practical aspects of their crime. It is not that they gave the enemy an advantage or useful information. It is that they violated the code that holds everyone together in the fight. They have excluded themselves from the company of men who can be trusted to uphold the code when no one is looking.

Similarly, the traitor that comes over from the other side is usually treated with suspicion. In the Cold War, defectors were rarely treated well by either side. Russians who betrayed their countrymen just so they could get an American passport were treated well enough to encourage others, but they were assumed to be disreputable people. The Russians took the same view. Famous spies like Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union, were never welcomed by Russia.

Again, the underlying reason for the way traitors have been treated by their own people as well as the enemies of their people is that someone who breaks trust for any reason cannot be trusted. Someone who deliberately breaks a sacred trust is especially suspicious. It is why American corporations used to discriminate against divorced men. If your wife cannot trust, why should your boss? Adultery used to be a serious social crime when we were a proper society.

It is a good thing to keep in mind as we head into what is looking like another interregnum. Suddenly, the people who were sure Donald Trump was Hitler are now strangely quiet. Much of it is simply the fact that their emotional tank is drained. A decade of hysteria has run it course. At the same time, many have just decided to change tactics, seeing that their Hitler lies failed to stop Trump. They will come up with new lies because it is what liars do. They lie.

The same should apply to those who look like converts. Someone who was an implacable opponent of even the slightest pushback but is now “coming around” on things like immigration should be treated with a great deal of suspicion. They could simply be opportunists. That is, after all, the spring that motivates every traitor. They see an opportunity for themselves in violating the trust of others. Often, they lure their victims into trusting them so they can betray the trust.

A great example is Ben Shapiro. Everyone with two brain cells knows his deal. He is an ultra-Zionist whose only interest is his people. He is willing to lie promiscuously for that cause. It speaks to the nature of Zionism that its most fervent practitioners are the least endowed with European morality. Even the most fervent Nazi understood that there is such a thing as truth. It was the Nazis, after all, who gave us the expression “The Big Lie.”

That aside, even when a Ben Shapiro is doing damage to the enemy, it is important to always qualify the praise so no one forgets that a dog that will bring a bone will carry a bone. If an arsonist burns down the house of that guy selling drugs near the high school, it is normal and healthy to be happy for his suffering or death, but it should never be an endorsement of arson. If the arsonist, however, is one of your guys, then that is another matter. “Who” is what matters, not how.

Those are easy cases, but a more challenging example is someone like James Lindsay, who started out in life as an anti-Christian bigot. He then moved on from that hustle to tricking academic journals with fake grievance studies papers. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian made up fake studies using the bizarre jargon of the grievance studies rackets. These papers were made deliberately ridiculous to expose the vacuity of the so-called social sciences.

This was hilarious and it confirmed that the people involved in these fields are mostly hucksters making a living off lunatics. The trouble though is Lindsay and Boghossian were deceiving people not on behalf of their cause or for their people. They were betraying people for personal advantage. In other words, they were bringing a bone to one group but would eventually carry a bone from that group. This is what we now see with their attacks on populists and Christians.

Whatever benefit came from these two subverting the grievance studies people came at the cost of having them attack the people who cheered for them, but from a position of greater authority. When James Linday was just a chubby massage therapist hating on Christians, no one cared. Now that he is a famous internet influencer; he can do real damage. It is a good reminder that giving power to immoral people is never a good idea.

None of this means that political actors must be purer than Caeser’s wife. As Mr. Dooley said, “Sure, politics ain’t bean-bag. ‘Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples an’ prohybitionists’d do well to keep out iv it.” Or as Carl Schmitt would put it, politics is about friends and enemies. The thing to remember is that it is a commitment to the morality of the cause that distinguishes the friend from the enemy, so even though an enemy can be useful, they remain enemies.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!