2025 Predictions

Posted on January 1, 2025 by thezman

One of the challenges with making predictions the last few years was that every year seemed to be wilder than the last. It was tempting to hope that crazy things you want to see happen would happen. This year, it feels like we are headed to a more normal time, but that probably means we see some important things begin to happen, now that the crazies are going into hibernation. This could turn out to be a less dramatic year than 2024, but a much more substantial one.

Every year there is an important topic that is bubbling under the surface, either in the ruling class or amongst the rabble, that suddenly breaks through. In 2024, we moved from “securing the border” to “mass deportation now” as the growing sentiment against immigration of all types finally broke through. The 2025 issue will be the collapsing birth rates around the world. It is a thing that gets discussed in certain circles, but 2025 will be the year it goes mainstream.

We will have to suffer from the usual slop from the commentariat, who will try to make money applying the old slogans to this issue. The public nuisances we call influencers will pollute the waters too. But by the end of the year, the educated debate will settle on the four D’s of human destiny. Diet, Development, Divinity and Deracination will be the focus for what is causing the fertility collapse. The most important issue in the world will suddenly become import…

A long ignored issue related to the immigration debate and related to the birth rate debate, is the collapse of middle-class wages relative to the labor productivity gains of the last thirty years. A thing everyone has sensed for a long time is finally getting hard numbers attached to it. The truth is the fruit of the microprocessor revolution went primarily to the economic elites. Meanwhile, the middle-class has seen themselves turned into wage slaves…

One immediate upshot in the changing nature of the online right will be the long overdue marginalization of the influencer. These pests who jump into every issue hoping to score attention, while pretending to lead the debate will finally run out of road with the audience. They will not go away completely as there is always a supply of suckers for them to grift, but in 2025 the label “influencer” will become synonymous with the word “grifter” for the online right…

Once Trump ascends the throne, he will pardon all but a handful of the January 6 victims, leaving the edge cases for review. The overwhelming majority of the victims should have been handed a fine, but some did engage in criminal acts that are serious enough to warrant a review before pardoning. These victims may get commutations as a compromise solution. There will be no retribution from Team Trump. He will avoid going down this road for political reasons…

In February, the Republican Party will try to focus Trump on passing another tax scheme like they did in his first term. This will be part of a scheme to run the clock until the midterms, which they plan to throw to the Democrats. Having learned his lesson, Trump will squash this idea before it gets going. Look for Trump to be much tougher with his own party this time around. The fact is the biggest obstacle to reform is the GOP and the conservative industrial complex…

In the run up to the German elections, the government will begin arresting AfD members on the grounds they are coordinating with Russia. The Musk endorsement will prove to be the thing that breaks the glass for many Germans, and we will see polling that suggests the AfD could be following the path of Le Pen as a populist alternative to the corrupt ruling coalition. In defense of democracy, the German ruling coalition will seek to take the public out of the process…

The unrest in Syria will begin to spill over into other countries. Jordan will be the first crisis as the government has been unpopular for a long time but has also been weakening for a long time. They have the same problem as the Assad government, just without American sanctions. Similarly, the Egyptian government will begin to crack in the face of new activity by the Muslim Brotherhood and the spill over from the Israeli war on the people of Gaza.

This will not be the only problem in the Muslim world. The Israelis will shift from Iran as the great enemy to Turkey, as the Turks seek to establish themselves as the new Ottoman empire and regional hegemon. The Turks are using the Syrian crisis to address their Kurdish problem and build a new Arab coalition that is aligned with them over the Iranians. The Israelis will seek to use rising tensions between the Turks and Washington to warrant a militaristic line against Ankara…

Despite his promise to end the war in Ukraine within 24-hours, Trump will find that there is no deal to be made in Ukraine. Zelensky and his European backers will never agree to a deal and the Russians are in no mood to help Trump, so the result will be a slow burn of Ukraine until it collapses this summer. Trump will conclude that it is a loser and simply stop supporting Zelensky. Often, the best solution to a problem is to accept that there is no solution to the problem…

Trump will begin talks with China that will evolve into a grand bargain to not just include Taiwan, but the long-term economic relationship between the Western hemisphere and the Chinese. Trump’s bluster about the Panama Canal is aimed at expanding the discussion beyond Taiwan. Adding China’s growing influence in South America gives Trump options, but also gives the Chinese a shot at a long-term solution to their problems as well…

I will have three surprises for 2025…

In sports, the world will suddenly realize that soccer is boring and stop watching these interminable events. The New York Mets will win the World Series, and the Detroit Lions will win the Super Bowl. This will lead many to dub 2025 the year of the loser in honor of the fanbases of these two teams. In 2025 it will finally be acknowledged that we have moved past peak sports. Interest has been declining, but new ways to monetize every nook and cranny has masked it, but the mask drops in 2025…

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2024: The Year In Review

Posted on December 31, 2024 by thezman

As is tradition, the last post of the year is a review of and comment upon the predictions made in the first post of this year. Normally, the results are mixed, as even the most cautious prognosticator gets some things wrong. Caution is the key to being good at making predictions. Assume that nothing will happen, your dreams will be dashed, and everything will continue as before. You will be right ninety percent of the time, and you can pretend to be smart.

My biggest miss this year was the election. I did not think Trump could make it through the defensive lines of the system, but the guy not only beat the regime, he literally dodged bullets. This is an example of something no one could see coming, but a few people took a flyer on it and now walk around with their chest puffed out thinking they can see the future. The 2024 election is a good argument in favor of the idea we live in a simulation tinkered with by the people running it.

I also got the Democrat side wrong. Years of predicting Biden’s death by God or by the regime came up dry, so I finally capitulated and predicted Biden would continue but then he gets shoved aside. This gets overshadowed by the Trump drama but having a sitting president forced out of the race in the middle of the night is another one of those things that suggests we live in a simulation. Instead of just killing him off or having him retire gracefully, they staged a crazy weekend drama.

Another loser was my prediction on Argentina. I said the revolt would begin in the summer, but so far, no revolt. There were huge protests in the spring and summer, but no revolution. There are weird things turning up in the countryside, like a military base being sacked by an unknown guerilla group, but despite a lot of bad things happening in the economy, no revolt yet. This is one that you can keep betting, because history says it eventually ends in chaos.

I also got the whole Ozark Mountain Shark thing wrong. Paul did not have to start a cooking channel either, mostly due to the failure of Ozark Mountain Shark to make its appearance, but that was a risky call. Similarly, the Lagos sportsball squad did not win the Super Cup, The Dodgers won the Global Series, and the English Premier League escaped bankruptcy. There is money to be made betting the other way on my sports bets, as they are never right.

On the winning side of the ledger, I got the inflation story about as right as possible without being a genuine seer. The Fed has missed the mark, but they seem to have decided that it is easier to lie about the economic figures than to solve the problem of too much credit money in the system. The real inflation rate is probably double their target, but until the politicians start making noises, the Fed can live with it. Whether the rest of us can live with it is to be determined.

My Middle East predictions were spot on, even my call about the change in Saudi – American relations. The Saudis let the petrodollar agreement expire, which will be the thing to watch in 2025. In fact, the biggest mess Trump inherits in his second term is a Middle East that is bleeped up even by the standards of the Middle East. It is all bad options that are made worse by terrible relations with Russia and China. It could easily gobble up his term if he is not careful.

Another winner was the snapback on the antiwhite stuff. This was on display in the debate over Christmas regarding infinity Indians. The antiwhite pogroms have had one unintended effect and that is with regards to immigration, people are asking who is coming in, not just how many and how. People are now perfectly comfortable saying they do not want to live around Indians. This is a massive change that seems to have stunned the great and the good last week.

I was also right about the entertainment rackets. This is one where you bet the trend continuing as the safe play. The people who supposedly make a living on their ability to read the room seem to be the last to notice the change in white attitudes. This year was a string of stunning failures and laughable efforts. Hollywood is mostly about a few flashy films arbitraging the Asian market, so they are not going bankrupt, but that scam will not last for much longer.

The final prediction was on the Ukraine war. I got it about half right, but I underestimated the stupidity of Zelensky. They should have capitulated this year, but greed and madness can overcome anything for a while. The Russians have continued to grind up the Ukraine army as I predicted. What you hear from the Russians is they are looking to wrap up the war in the summer of 2025. Maybe they think Trump will do a deal or maybe they think they just win.

Overall, it was probably the worst year for picks since I have been doing this, primarily because I broke the golden rule of predictions. That and I bet against Trump, who has proven to be a world historical figure. People should probably keep that in mind when predicting what Trump will do in 2025. He is not only a once in a lifetime figure, but a guy who seems to have a destiny that defies explanation. Dismissing his claims about his next term is probably not wise.

Predictions aside, 2024 will go down as one of the most consequential years in history, simply for the elections. What comes as a result will be gravy. Add in the events around the world and holodeck developers in the next century will be offering a trip through 2024 in their premium package. It explains why it suddenly feels like the morning after a great storm. The calmness of nature is more intense, because the violence of the previous night is still fresh in our minds.

The coming year will initially feel like a year of nothing happening. It could also be the start of a great interregnum when the loonies go back into hibernation and normal people are once again able to speak freely. Either way, it will be tempting to think that the war is over, but we must resist this. The kooks are out there. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They feel no pity, or remorse, or fear and they absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!

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Energy Wars

Posted on December 30, 2024 by thezman

Note: I was on Coffee and a Mike yesterday. The Rumble version is here. There was no Sunday show this week. Taking a break for the holidays, but behind the green door I have a post about a cheap fitness watch I bought as part of my latest health kick, a post about milling about. Subscribe here or here.

For most of human history the store of value, what we call money, was shiny rocks melted into more useful disks. Occasionally money was colorful bits of paper that represented the shiny rocks or the raw power of the issuer. If someone wanted the produce of your labor, they needed shiny rocks. Then in the 20th century this began to change, and the shiny rocks gave way to drab looking bits of green paper that represented something new, the energy unit.

In the future, historians will put this great shift in how the world does business up there with the semiconductor, the printing press, and the steam engine. The petrodollar that was formalized fifty years ago was the result of a long realization that what every nation needed was access to energy. It was not just to fuel engines, heat homes and light the streets, but to grow the food and make stuff. Oil, coal and natural gas were the most important things in the world, so they became our money.

The importance of energy is obvious. If the price of gold goes up, barely anyone notices, but if the price of oil goes up, everyone notices. Much of Joe Biden’s scheme to run for reelection was based on keeping gas prices low. He drained the strategic petroleum reserve to keep crude prices from rising. His people worked tirelessly to keep a lid on the Middle East because a regional war would send crude price through the roof, which would mean rising gas prices.

There is another piece to it. The deal with the Saudis to price energy in dollars and reinvest oil profits in U.S. Treasuries made the United State the global bank and the global mint. On the one hand, the American banking system could produce as many dollars as it likes, because the demand for energy never slackens. This let the American government run massive deficits. It also provided a form of seigniorage, which profited the American economy.

It is this piece that lies at the heart of global trouble. For example, energy is one reason why Syria collapsed. The United States took control of the Syrian oil fields and starved the Assad government of those revenues. American involvement in Syria was not just about those oil fields, but also about making sure there was never going to be gas lines running from the Persian Gulf to through Syria if Syria was not within the American sphere of influence.

The rebels were not done looting official buildings when there was talk about reviving the Qatar – Turkey gas pipeline. Europe needs natural gas, and the choices now are Russia and much more expensive American LNG, so a new source would be welcome in Europe and be a boon to Qatar and Turkey. The odds of the United States going along with this are low, unless they can control this new pipeline, either directly or through proxies loyal to the dollar.

Of course, the war with Russia is as much about energy as it is about the neocon obsession with Russia. The Ukraine war was an excuse to cut off Russia from the global oil trade and a reason to cut Europe off from Russian gas. This has largely failed, but the United States is now selling Europe more LNG than ever, thus making them more dependent on the dollar. There was also the dream of gaining access to Ukrainian coal and gas reserves after the war.

The Ukraine war offers another example of the centrality of energy. Ukraine makes money transporting Russian gas to Hungary and Slovakia. Zelensky wants to end the deal unless these two countries support NATO membership for Ukraine. These two countries sell electricity to Ukraine, especially when the Russians turn off the Ukraine power plants. The Russians have hinted that they will destroy the Ukraine natural gas system if Zelensky does not continue the gas deal.

If not for those gas lines running through Ukraine, no one would care much about this corrupt backwater on the edge of Europe. The homicidal maniacs we call neocons would still care, but the rest of the world would not care, but since Ukraine is at the heart of the Eurasian energy system, everyone cares about Ukraine. The corrupt midget in the green jumpsuit gets to make demands of the world, because the world’s bank relies on controlling global energy.

America’s greatest ally understands the importance of energy to America, which is why they are talking about war with Turkey. They will claim the Turks are the new Iraq and demand America let them raid their Akkuyu nuclear plant, which is scheduled to begin operation in 2025. The Israelis are worried that the Turks could gain control of Syrian oil fields and make a deal with the Gulf states on pipelines. Soon, we will hear Lindsay Graham talking bad about Erdogan.

Obviously, energy is a major factor in China relations. The Chinese buy a lot of energy, mostly from Russia. The unwillingness of the Chinese to join the war on Russia is due, in part, to dependence on Russian oil and gas. The Chinese also have zero trust in Washington but take away the energy issue and China is behaving different than what we have seen over the course of the Ukraine war. For the Chinese, energy is money and money always talks.

The global energy war that has broken out over the last decade is due to a fundamental reality of the American financial system. The thing that backs the dollar in energy and the control of the energy markets. Just as bits of colorful paper used to be backed by shiny rocks, the American dollar is backed by the BTU. If the United States loses control of that asset, the dollar becomes just another representation of that asset and Washington ceases to be the global bank.

That is the process we see unfolding in these regional crises. It is about control of global energy markets, as much as the ideological fever dreams from certain subcultures in Washington. In fact, the neocon crusade on Russia has harmed the economic interest of America. By shaking the trust in the system, the rest of the world is now looking for a way around the dollar denominated markets. The global bank forgot why it existed and now we have multiple crises.

Most likely, this will shape foreign policy under Trump. Re-normalizing relations with Russia to get them back onto the global banking system will be a priority, even if it is never mentioned. Settling the Syria mess in such a way that the United States, through regional proxies, continues to control the flow of energy will be the focus of Trump policy. Note that everyone has stopped talking about Iran. The project there and everywhere is not war, but the business of America, energy.

Radio Derb December 27 2024

Posted on December 27, 2024 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

01m28s America First, Americans First
06m50s End guest-worker visas
13m48s Does Trump remember his first term?
21m27s Importing an overclass (cont.)
29m18s Mass deportations are under way!
31m48s California makes theft a crime
33m13s Britain’s Blairite ambassador
36m22s Trump and Cleveland in sync on death penalty
38m30s Mangione hybristophilia
40m27s The Gaetz Report
42m02s goes AWOL, how could they tell?
43m04s The quick key to Congressional spending
45m54s Signoff with Peter Dawson

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. I hope you have all recovered from your Christmas hangovers and surfeits of fruitcake, turkey, and plum pudding. This is of course your abstemiously genial host John Derbyshire with my last podcast of 2024.

That puts me under the usual temptation to make the show a back-glancing survey of the year. This year, though, I shall resist that temptation. The topic of legal immigration has been all over social media — at any rate, all over X, the only social medium I actually sign on to.

That topic is close to my heart. I’ve been commenting on in the past two weeks. I shall therefore continue my commentary here, leaving unrelated topics to later in the podcast.

Here we go. Continue reading →

The Indian Question

Posted on December 27, 2024 by thezman

Fifty years ago, the late political humorist P.J. O’Rourke did a piece for National Lampoon called Foreigners Around the World. It featured exaggerated stereotypes of various races and ethnic groups, along with over-the-top descriptions meant to satirize what was called racism at the time. The piece is preserved online, even though the magazine is long gone. The humor does not hold up, if it was ever humorous, but it is a good starting place for thinking about the immigration debate.

Even when satirizing the idea of racial and ethnic descriptions, the piece cannot help but reflect the hierarchy with regards to how Americans view the world. Fifty years ago, people could be honest about such things, but if you could do a poll today where the respondents are given truth serum, they would most likely rank foreigners similar to how O’Rourke inadvertently ranked them. Of course, the race and ethnicity of the American would play a big role in the ranking.

Black people, for example, would rank Africans at the top and East Asians at the bottom of their list. East Asians would rank Africans at the bottom. White people would rank East Asians at the top, because they see them as the model minority. The tiger mom business a decade ago was driven by upper-middle-class white women who thought the tiger mom explained why the math club was dominated by Chinese kids. Every race and ethnicity have their own ranking.

The one group everyone would put at the bottom, without needing truth serum is South Asians, specifically Indians. Over the last thirty years America has been flooded with migrants from almost every nook and cranny of the globe. Most noticeable are those from South America because of their numbers. In the summer, every business park and suburban neighborhood is littered with Hispanics cutting the grass. The next most noticed group is the South Asians.

Despite their small numbers, relative to Hispanics, South Asians stand out because of their jarring alienness and their reason for being here. Employers import Indians to depress middle class wages and displace American tech workers. As a result, middle-class white people notice them and unlike Hispanics, who white people tend to admire for their work ethic, the Indians have a very negative reputation. Not even the most deluded immigration romantic likes South Asians.

This has come as a great shock to Elon Musk and his tech bros. For some reason he decided to use Christmas Day to announce that he wants Trump to fill your neighborhood with Indians so he can win something. This set off a multi-day firestorm over the topic of Indian immigration. The tech bros were poleaxed by the reaction, as they had no idea how much the average American dislikes Indians. So much so that even yelling “racism” has no impact.

There are a lot of reason for this. Every American has called their bank or the help line for some bit of electronics, only to get someone who is obviously an Indian, despite using an American name. What follows is endless frustration. Of course, we have the stories of Americans being fired and then replaced by Indian guest workers. Now we have the Indian phone scammers targeting old people. During Covid, Indian scammers were on the cutting edge of Covid scams.

Daily, the average American, regardless of his race or ethnicity, is reminded of these alien weirdos who make his life difficult. Much like how gypsies are the one group Europeans are allowed to hate, without being called racist, Indians are becoming that group for Americans. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the origin of the people called gypsies is most likely the Indian subcontinent. Regardless, when it comes to South Asians, Americans of all types have a negative opinion.

There are justifiable reasons for this growing anti-Indian sentiment. The main reason is we do not need Indians. No one has ever said, “This place would be perfect if we fill it up with Indians.” All the arguments in favor of importing Indians do not hold up to scrutiny, so people assume those are deliberate lies. When the official explanation is not trusted, then people are free to conjure their one explanation. Vivek Ramaswamy discovered that when he came out in favor of infinite Indians.

The immediate assumption was that he was in favor of importing his countryman to take your job and take over your neighborhood because they are his countryman. That puts a massive hole in his image as the example of the “New American.” In fact, in one tweet he may have created a majority in favor of not just ending immigration from India, but starting the remigration process. Of course, it also makes it impossible for him to cry racism when he is clearly motivated by race.

Given that Musk and his tech bros were deluged with negative comments, we may have just witnessed a preference cascade with regards to Indians, but perhaps also with immigration in general. Five years ago, Musk would have been able to get away with this, because people would have assumed it was immoral to oppose immigration, much less Indian immigration. Now they are seeing that most everyone around them holds the same negative view of immigration, especially from India.

Immigration patriots are also helped by the fact that the so called tech bros are mostly flim-flam men. Silicon Valley stopped innovating long ago and now relies of financial legerdemain for skim billions for the economy. Vivek Ramaswamy is a pretty good example of this reality. Look at how he got rich and you wonder how he is not sitting in a federal prison, which is itself a reminder that the people promoting Indian immigration are not the most honest people in America.

It is not all good news. In response to getting blasted on his own platform, Musk has rolled out a new censorship scheme so he and his tech bros will not get the sads reading their feed. Regardless of what the people think, the oligarchs are going to plow ahead with their nation wrecking schemes. Even so, as Asad just learned, you cannot rule over a hostile public forever. This Twitter event was not Ceausescu’s famous last speech, but perhaps a foreshadowing of what is to come.

Corporate America

Posted on December 26, 2024 by thezman

Just in time for Christmas, the “tech bros”, who jumped on the Trump bandwagon last summer, launched a campaign on Twitter in favor of infinite Indian migration, for all the long ago debunked economic reasons. The trigger for this was Trump naming someone calling himself Sriram Krishnan to an advisory board. This person was a Kamala supporter, in addition to being a strong advocate for bringing all his countryman to live in your neighborhood.

It is unlikely that Trump thought much about Sriram Krishnan before naming him to this advisory board, as it is not an important post. It looks like he took the recommendation of David Sacks, who is running a technology advisory board for Trump. David Sack is an open borders fanatic for all the expected reasons. He spent Christmas day trying to justify Sriram Krishnan’s appointment as “America First”, while also defending unlimited immigration from India.

It was not just David Sacks trying to subvert the meaning of American First. Elon Musk took time away from not celebrating Christmas to push the idea of unlimited immigration from India as well. Like all the tech bros, nation wreckers and open society types, his claim rests on the obvious lie that India is full of future Einsteins that America must recruit in order to win. What we win by turning your neighborhood into a New Delhi slum is never explained, because it is a lie.

This episode is a good reminder that modern America is cursed with one of the worst economic elites in human history. Most of what they do adds nothing to the country or the stock of human capital. Silicon Valley is now just financial flim-flams and financial legerdemain masquerading as a tech sector. Like the Wall Street economy, the Silicon Valley economy is just a skim, not a lot different than how the mafia operated Las Vegas or the Teamsters Union back in the 1970’s.

The main difference between the mafia and the current oligarchs is the mafia knew it was the mafia, while the current oligarchs think they are some weird combination of religious leader and entrepreneurial genius. Elon Musk is Valentine Michael Smith from the Heinlein novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Instead of promising sexual liberation, he is selling motorized doorstops and trips to Mars. The original Valentine Smith came from Mars and this one wants to return.

It is easy to hate the oligarchs as sociopathic greed heads, but they are a symptom of a deeper problem with post-Cold War America. The reason these guys exist is that after the Cold War, America fell into an old bad habit of seeing itself as nothing more than an economic zone to be exploited. This is a current in American history that goes back to the colonies, when the New World was nothing more than an untapped economic zone to be exploited by who got to it first.

This is something Tocqueville observed in his travels around America. There has never been an enduring sense of American identity, other than the idea that making money is the heart of American liberty. The way to avoid the exploitative relationships common in the old world is to maintain a free economy so that anyone can get rich. The concept of “Fuck You Money” is based in this belief. You can get rich enough to not fear coercion from the government or the other rich people.

One main reason people admire Musk is he is the ultimate example of the guy who has achieved “Fuck You Money” status. He is the world’s richest man and the world’s biggest shit poster online. Instead of bending the knee to the Indians running Twitter, he bought the platform for probably two or three times its value. In reality, Musk paid $44 billion for what amounts to a poorly coded message board. He overpaid for it because he has “Fuck You Money”.

Many in the MAGA movement slobber over Musk because of this, but there is an evil that lies behind all of it. Oligarchs like Musk do not see America as their home, but as a company they just acquired. The triumphalism of the tech bros is that they now think with Trump in the White House, they can do what Musk did with Twitter, to the whole country and reorganize it for their purposes. They are the board that took the company called America private and now plan to reorganize it.

This is the next turn of the wheel in the managerial revolution that kicked off a century ago with the rise of the American empire. The large shareholders have become disenchanted with management, so they are shaking things up. The trouble is the shareholders are not American in any meaningful sense. If they think this guy is as American as those with just one passport, then their definition of citizen is no different from their definition of employee.

It is tempting to call this feudalism, mostly because feudalism has an odor about it, but the feudal elite actually had a bond with the peasants. The feudal order started with the reciprocal relationships between the elites, but it also included vertical relations that bound the top to the bottom. The king had a duty to his people. In this age, the oligarch has no duty to his employees. They are mere economic units to be exploited in order to fulfil his obligations to his fellow shareholders.

What we are seeing is an effort to transform the fundamental relations between the citizens and the state, but also among the citizens themselves. Your duty to your neighbor is now the same as your duty to Apu in IT, who was just flown in from Bangalore to replace your neighbor. Everyone is now supposed to see themselves as employees of America Inc., which is now run by people who view you as an expense to be reduced and a liability to be eliminated.

It is not a big leap from using the income statement to justify unlimited Indian immigration to using it to justify involuntary suicide or the deportation of citizens who are no longer working out for American Inc. If economics trump the moral arguments against immigration, then there are no moral arguments that can trump economics when it comes to anything else. Once citizenship is defined as employment, everything and everyone is a slave to the bottom line.

The flaw in this is no rational man will sacrifice for his CEO. The transactional relationship between employer and employee cannot work for a society, because of the fundamental compact at the heart of every human society. The people tolerate and even sacrifice for the elites in a human society, because those elites provide protection through the mechanism of government. If those elites are no longer willing to provide protection, then the reason to tolerate them evaporates.

Perhaps this is the sign that we are fully in late-stage managerialism. The economic elites sense America Inc. is faltering, so they step in to force a change in management, without understanding the root cause of the problem. They view Trump as a turnaround specialist who can reverse the fortunes of the enterprise, while maintaining the transactional relationship between themselves and the people. In the end it must fail because American is not a corporation. It is a people.

Merry Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2024 by thezman

The Third Testament

Posted on December 24, 2024 by thezman

Yesterday’s post regarding the future of Christianity inadvertently set off a debate about whether the Bible is fake. Is the collection of books we call the Bible, anything like the texts the original Christians used either in written form or as part of the oral tradition while they were forming up in the first century? Most Christians accept the argument that the Bible is the product of a long process that started after the life of Christ and his disciples, while others insist the Gospels are firsthand accounts.

The flash point in yesterday’s post was the line about the Gospels being written roughly a century after the events they describe. This should not be a controversial assertion as the majority of biblical scholars think the Gospels were likely written between AD 66 and 110 with the usual uncertainty. That is not a century after the life of Christ, so that is a bit of an exaggeration, but that has no impact on the general point. Early Christians were not waving around Bibles, because the Bible did not exist.

That does not mean the Bible is fake, but it does mean the Bible as we know it would be a strange thing to early Christians. They would recognize the stories, as the written texts were no doubt relying on oral sources. Most scholars think the stories about Christ and his disciples were part of the proselytizing of early Christians, used to convince their audience that Jesus was a miraculous figure. The stories also served as examples for early Christians facing their own persecution.

The way to view the Gospels is as part of a marketing campaign for the new religion that also formed the basis of the new religion. After all, Christianity, like any human organization, had to answer the question, “Who are we?” and what followed is what must always follow and that is a collection of rules that define who is inside the group and who is excluded. Fundamental to being a Christian is accepting that Christ is the son of God and the symbol of God’s covenant with mankind.

The Gospels as a sales pitch offend some people, but it should not, as close to half the New Testament is exactly that and no one complains. The Letters of Paul are clearly intended to support and grow the Christian audience. While much of the content was written to address specific theological issues in the early Christian communities, all of them contain encouragement to believers in the face of persecution, urging them to live in a godly manner and to spread the faith.

The point being is that much of what we think of as the Bible was written by men to address the issues faced by early Christians. Like Christianity itself, those early stories evolved in their telling and then further evolved as they were written and rewritten as circumstances warranted. Even the first effort at formalizing these written texts did not stop this process. The mere act of writing them in Latin meant the first Bible was different from the first written Gospels.

Of course, the Bible was written by men and then rewritten and edited by men, which means errors and omissions. Figuring this out is impossible. Why was the Gospel of Saint Thomas left out of the Bible? Probably because it was not anywhere near as popular as the Synoptic Gospels. Maybe early Christian scholars thought there was a whiff of gnostic heresy in those alleged sayings of Jesus. Whatever the reason, it was most likely not a question of authenticity.

Not only were whole texts excluded, but parts of the included texts have been excluded and rewritten since the first efforts to write them down. This story about a hidden chapter of the Bible was floating around recently. The media claims are overdone, but it does reveal that the editing process started soon after the writing process began and went on for centuries. Much of what we think of as the Bible is the result of practical decisions within the limits of the age.

This is the primary argument against literalism and sola scriptura. You cannot accept the Bible as the literal word of God when it was clearly written and heavily edited by men, with all the errors that come with man’s actions. Similarly, it cannot be the sole infallible source of authority for Christian faith and practice when it was compiled by men who were not infallible. Instead, the Bible is to be viewed as a living thing within a living Church that adapts to present reality.

The counter to this argument is that as soon as people start talking about a document as a living thing, they will soon be trying to kill it. This has been the history of the American republic and the Constitution. Everyone who speaks about the “living constitution” is plotting to stab a knife through some part of it. Once people start talking about the Bible as mere inspiration, it is not long before the leaders are embracing sodomy while the congregation is talking about converting to Islam.

Putting aside that debate, the history of the Bible tells us that like the Church itself, the Bible is part of an evolutionary process. Christianity did not spread around the globe and survive to this day, because it was unable to adapt. The Bible itself, with its errors and omissions, survives because of those errors and omissions. The reason people can debate this is because of those imperfections. After all, evolution is driven by defect which turns out to be superior to the standard.

Perhaps that is what lies ahead for the Church. Maybe a third testament, perhaps a collection of yet unwritten texts, adapting the core message of Christ to the modern problems of a technological society, is in the future. No doubt, there will be people who hate it and long debates about what should be in included and excluded, but in the end a timeless message must adapt to the times. It is how we got Mormons. Perhaps for Christians, there is a Joseph Smith waiting to be born.

Evolutionary Christianity

Posted on December 23, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about how the best path to a healthy life is to ignore your health, a post about the bastardization of the college football postseason, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the most important dates on the Christian calendar is Christmas, the day set aside to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. There is a 1-in-365 chance that Jesus was born on December 25, but no one knows when Jesus was born. The date is of no great significance to the life of Christ. What matters is he was lived and died, and his life and death are the root of the world’s most important religion. To Christians, the life of Jesus is the most important event in human history.

Whether Christianity is still the most important world religion is the most important part of that first paragraph, given the state of Christianity in the world. In Europe, where Christianity evolved and flourished in the Roman empire, Christianity is no longer an important part of the culture. The trappings of Christmas remain, largely for commercial reasons, but otherwise Christianity is just about gone. Islam and managerial liberalism are the most important religions in Europe.

In the United States, Christianity remains under assault by the usual suspects but remains an important part of the culture. Even in the secular regions, the cultural framework of Christianity remains in place. God has been replaced by “the tides of history” and Scripture with the latest slop from progressivism, but these things are just filling the hole left in the Christian framework. In the more normal parts of the country, Christian churches still dot the countryside.

There is no question that Christianity is on the wane in the Western world and that spells trouble for the Church globally. It is tempting to wonder if Christianity has a future at all, but the better question is what will it become in the future? The story of Christianity is survival and evolution. What we think of as Christianity today is nothing like what the early Christians experienced. Even medieval Christians would find modern Christianity to be weird and heretical.

For example, early Christians would be puzzled by the reliance on Scripture by many modern Protestant sects. The Gospels were not written until roughly a century after the life of Christ and his disciples. The first “Bible” was assembled by St. Jerome around A.D. 400 and included 27 books of the New Testament. In 382 A.D., the Council of Rome finished the process of determining the 73 books of the Bible. There were probably millions of Christians before there was a single Bible.

Then you have the fact that the Christianity that emerged from the Levant and began to spread around the Roman Empire ran into both Roman paganisms, but also the much more potent paganism of the Germanic barbarians. Many of the things we associate with Christianity were borrowed from these pagans. James C. Russell argues in his book, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, that the culture and religion of Germanic pagans shaped Christianity.

Of course, there are “Bible believing Christians” who reject these claims, but these people are practicing a form of Christianity that could not exist if not for the evolution of the Church into the late Middle Ages. It was the revolution within Christianity that gave us Protestantism and to some degree its secular partner liberalism. The dynamic between the two is a hot topic today in dissident circles. There would be no “Bible believing Christians” without this evolutionary process.

This evolution of Christianity also helps explain why it survived at all. A handful of radical Jews changed the course of human history, by creating something that has motivated men to die for their belief in it. In 303, the Roman emperor Diocletian issued a series of edicts rescinding Christians’ legal rights, setting off a decade of persecutions, just as the early Christian were beginning to codify their faith. Despite this, the Church not only survived, but became much stronger.

There is a good argument to be made that the success of Christianity was due to its struggle in the face of persecution. Early Christians had to be smart, courageous, and resourceful to maintain their religion. This selected for the sorts of people who were willing to take on the enormous challenge of maintaining, spreading, and developing a fundamentally new moral and cosmological outlook. The early Christians had to be to the far right of the bell curve.

Another way to think of it is that Christianity was a new mind virus that quickly evolved to spread among its new host. It then had to evolve even faster once it broke out of its original population. When efforts to eradicate it came, it once again evolved rapidly to adapt to the changes in its host population. Like the common cold or the flu, there are lots of variant of the original Christian virus now. In the end, they all promise the same thing for those infected.

Still another evolutionary way of thinking about how Christianity survived and thrived is that it is a mutation in human thought. Until Christianity, monotheism was limited to Jews and Zoroastrians. Universalism did not exist. These two mutations combined in Christianity and spread through the life, struggle, and death of early Christians until it became a dominant trait. The irony here is that some Christians dispute evolution, but they would not be here if evolution were not real.

The point of all this is not to rustle the sensibilities of those Christians who think the reason for the Church is it is the will and word of God. The point is that Christianity exists at all because it has adapted and survived far worse that the commercialization of Christmas and the “happy holidays” nonsense. Christianity is facing a new challenge in the West, one to which it will have to adapt, while maintaining the thing that has allowed it to survive, which is the hope and courage it provides the believer.

The reason the West is in crisis is the new religion, that which the managerial class struggles to understand, even while they are preaching it, is not able to provide an answer to the questions Christianity has always been able to answer. Those questions are “Who says?” and “Why should I listen?” Men will live and die in defense of the answers to those questions. Whatever Christianity becomes on the surface, it will thrive because it answers the most important of man’s questions.

Radio Derb December 20 2024

Posted on December 20, 2024 by thezman