The Body Of Lies

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The confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services were yesterday and they offered some interesting insights into how the world has changed over the last few years. In many respects, it was a blast from the past, with the more ridiculous performers dusting off their old routines. Elizabeth Warren, for example, did her angry chicken dance in the hallway after she did her raging old crone routine in the committee room.

Warren and the other senators who took the opportunity to make fools of themselves for the cameras during the hearing were a reminder not only that things have changed, but why they have changed. Warren’s act was just an act. It was clear at certain points that she did not understand the words she was reading from her script, but it was clear she practiced delivering them with the correct angry face. If her handlers had required it, she would have accused Kennedy of colluding with Bigfoot.

That is one reason why we are here. The public, at some point over the last few years, began to turn on this sort of performative politics. According to recent polling, the Democratic Party has its lowest approval rating ever. Meanwhile Trump is enjoying his highest approval ratings. The reason for that is Trump, whatever you may think of him, is a candid and sincere form of politics. People like Elizabeth Warren are just paid performers who will say anything for a buck.

Of course, the fact that Kennedy was there at all is remarkable. Not long ago, Kennedy was a fringe character trafficking in “conspiracy theories.” At least that was the accepted narrative around him. Most people no longer accept that narrative. For many, if not most people, he is now part of this general questioning of those narratives. No one benefitted more from Covid than RFK Jr., because all the trusted sources for public health abrogated that trust, thus validating Kennedy’s critique.

Once you start questioning the official narratives, you inevitably start questioning the people responsible for those narratives. In the case of Kennedy, that means the public health establishment, which plays an enormous role in life. In fact, it is one of the key pillars of the managerial system, right there with “first responders.” There have been libraries full of televisions shows and movies about the glories of the public health experts saving the day. People are now questioning those claims.

If you looked closely, you could see it in the hearing. One of the Senate performers mentioned the “conspiracy theory of Lyme disease.” Kennedy has been open to the possibility that it turned up fifty years ago as the result of a lab leak. Not far from where it first made its presence was a military laboratory that specialized in using insects to carry infectious diseases. That is the connection at the heart of the “conspiracy theory of Lyme disease”, which should sound familiar.

Up until a month ago, the “lab leak theory” regarding the Covid panic was a conspiracy theory, one that can still get you banned from YouTube. Now it is the official position of the United States government. Just a few years ago, being open minded about the causes of Lyme disease would have been disqualifying, but it was overlooked entirely in this hearing and Kennedy was even allowed to point out several so-called conspiracy theories that have turned out to be true.

This hearing was possible because the world has changed. Suddenly, as if someone flipped a switch, it is cool to question the narratives. A big reason for that is Donald Trump, who survived one conspiracy after another, including one involving a would-be assassin who just happened to be in a Blackrock commercial. One thing Trump proved is that there is a limit to how many coincidences people can tolerate before they start thinking about alternative theories.

That aside, what the Kennedy hearing reveals is that the moral authority of the people behind the official narratives is crumbling. Elizabeth Warren can carry on like a crazy old church lady all she likes, but no one believes her. In fact, no one believes any of these people because they have lied too much. It turns out Lincoln was right. You cannot fool all the people all the time and once you set off down that road, it leads to a place where you cannot fool anyone at all.

Perhaps one day when the AI historians are writing us stories about the American empire, one narrative will be about how the body of lies necessary to maintain the managerial system simply became unsustainable. It moved from condemning those questioning the more outlandish claims from the authorities to condemning anyone who questioned anything, even when their doubts were confirmed. In such a world, no one can trust anyone and the system collapses.

What probably comes next is asking what else about the past is a lie? Did the CIA sell drugs in the United States to fund covert operations? People like Maxine Waters were condemned for making the claim. It is most certainly true, by the way. They worked with the Mexican drug cartel in the 1980’s to fund the Contras. Here is an interview with a former high ranking DEA agent on that subject. Amazon also did a much longer treatment of this topic last year.

What all this points to is that we are heading into one of those clearings of history in which we exit one forest of lies and must evaluate that time, before we can enter a new forest of lies. The Russians went through this after the Cold War. There was a great reexamining of what had happened under communism. The United States did not have this period after the Cold War but is about to have it now. To close the door on the past, you must revisit the body of lies that is the past.

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 War On The Shadows

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One of the early features of Trump 2.0 is that it is nothing like the first version of Trump and nothing like what his adversaries imagined. Despite the evidence that this version of Trump would be different, his antagonists inside and outside the regime were certain he was the guy they imagined. Therefore, his victory was a shock, but they were sure what worked the first time around would work again. The weird silence from regime outposts is due to having been wrong yet again.

This version of Trump is a very different thing from the original version. We are seeing this in the realm of foreign policy where Trump 2.0 has been executing a plan rather than doing battle with the hydra that is the foreign policy community. It turns out that his refusal to have any dealings with the foreign policy community as a candidate, and his decision not to use government resources for the transition, has provided him with the element of surprise upon taking office.

You see that with his initial appointments. Marco Rubio was an out of the blue pick for the State Department. It seems to have been a shock to Rubio as well. Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon is another bolt from the blue. In the case of Rubio, he is an easily controlled lieutenant running an agency in need of radical reform. Hegseth comes to the job with his own radical ideas about reforming the Pentagon. The semi-permanent staff at the top of both agencies are now in a crisis.

Then you have Trump’s peculiar moves regarding the Ukraine war. He appoints Keith Kellogg as his personal envoy on the issue, but Kellogg is in no big hurry to get the ball rolling on Project Ukraine. He initially set up a tour of Europe and meetings with Kiev but then cancelled all of it. Trump has answered some questions about the Ukraine war but has not had any discussions with Europe about it. In fact, no one in the Trump administration has talked to the Europeans about the war.

At the same time, there is a purge underway of certain parts of the foreign policy establishment with some novel tools. For starters, Trump is cleaning house of neocons by assigning them to new positions intended to encourage their departure. This is an old corporate trick. He has frozen spending on just about everything, pending a review of how the money is being spent. Since all of government exists to spend money, it has thrown the usual suspects into a panic.

What this move is aimed at is the shadow foreign policy community that exists outside of government but is funded by government. These are the think tanks and research shops that live off government grants. They are full of former government officials and future government officials. Their job is to prevent whoever is in the White House from changing the direction of foreign policy. It is in the offices of these places that his first impeachment was organized.

These covens of mischief that were prepared to do their old tricks now find themselves in a crisis as their income is frozen and under scrutiny, while at the same time their friends and collaborators are being forced out of government. It is hard to plot the next regime change operation against Trump when you are struggling to make payroll, which is the point of this funding freeze. It is also a clear signal that Trump 2.0 is prepared to deal with these people.

This extends to the thicket of NGO’s, charities and think tanks that operate internationally, in coordination with the shadow government. Trump had Rubio freeze all work at these operations by freezing their money. The people who make regime change possible through their color revolution schemes are now starved of cash. If they cannot pay “independent media” and “opposition leaders” then those entities cannot organize “spontaneous” rallies against the government.

What Trump 2.0 is doing is attacking the vast shadow government that has evolved to be resistant to electoral politics. The Kagan family, for example, have plied their trade regardless of who is in the White House. They were able to do this because so much of what ends up as a foreign policy item on the president’s agenda is created by entities operating outside of government. Victoria did not retire when she quit the State Department. She continues her work in the shadow government.

Foreign policy is just one example. The chaos of immigration is due in large part to the vast network of not-for-profit entities that make millions facilitating the wholesale abrogation of immigration laws. These entities survive on grants from the government, much in the same way we see with foreign policy. The freeze and review of these programs is part of bringing them to heel. When J.D. Vance mentioned Catholic Charities role in immigration, it was a deliberate warning.

This is why the media response to Trump 2.0 has been so weird. Much of what they produce is handed to them by this thicket of extra-government entities who shape the media narratives around public policy. That extra government ecosystem now finds itself under direct assault by a new administration that did its homework and is now executing a plan of attack on that ecosystem. Compounding it is the fact that the donor class seems to be backing the Trump plan.

What has happened over the last several decades is that the official government of the United States was enveloped by this vast collection of extra-government entities that produce good jobs at good wages for the managerial elite. Since the number of government posts is small, relative to the number of credentialed people who think they deserve them, this network of entities has grown to serve an ever-growing collection of people who cycle in and out of government.

Since these people not only think they deserve the plumb assignments, but they think they know better than the voters and their politicians, the result has been a slow shifting of policy outside of official government into this shadow government. Foreign policy is most obvious, but this process has happened everywhere. No one can say who banned normal light bulbs, for example, because the policy bubbled up from the network of extra-government entities of environmentalism.

It remains to be seen if the Trump effort to defang this shadow government will succeed, but it helps that he has support from economic elites. The shadow government does not live only on government handouts. It also thrives by selling indulgences to powerful people and business sectors. Having friends in the shadow government is better than having friends in politics, because politicians come and go, but the shadow government is permanent.

One reason for the swing to the side of Trump by the economic elites could be that they have grown frustrated with this arrangement. People who think they are smarter than the voters are going to think they are smarter than the donors. Like a business run into the ground by management, the large shareholders are now stepping in with the support of the small shareholders, to clear out old management. Trump is like the old greenmailers; except this time the target is Washington.

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 Great Economic Shakeup

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Imagine a society made up of farmers who produce what they need to live but also trade extra to one another for things they do not produce. This is not the most efficient society, but as long as everyone is self-sufficient, it works. At the minimum, each farm produces enough food for the family, even in lean years. Perhaps like the Amish, they voluntarily come together on larger projects that are shared by everyone and individual projects that require a lot of hands.

One day, someone comes along with an offer to one of the farmers. Instead of that farmer trading with the other farmers, this stranger will buy the excess for what the farmer wants in trade. He makes this deal with other farmers and before long he makes his living as the middleman. He does the trades between the farmers, keeping a little extra for himself in the process. Before long there are others doing similar and they all live in what they call town.

Now, imagine all the farmers decide to quit farming altogether and move to town to be traders and merchants. Obviously, that cannot work as now there are no farmers to produce the things the traders are trading, and the merchants are selling. Some of the farmers can quit, but not all. Additionally, some can begin to specialize to the point where they are no longer self-sufficient. They now rely on the traders and merchants in town to get the things they need to live.

In other words, the original model works just fine, but it is not efficient. The farmers are all just above the sustenance line. The introduction of middlemen makes for more efficient use of farm labor, so everyone can do a little better. Specialization in farming and in trading increases productivity. Somewhere in this model there is a mix of farmers, traders, merchants, and specialization that attains the maximum amount of productivity for this society.

That productivity, however, must benefit everyone. Otherwise, we get the problem of the farmers looking at the townspeople and deciding they would prefer to be a trader, rather than a farmer. There also must be a balance with regards to specialization, as this could make the productive class overly dependent upon the middlemen, who can then maximize their profits from the productive class. A society with a small number of people controlling all the profit is inherently unstable.

Therein lies the problem Trump inherits in terms of the economy. Starting in the 1970’s with the microprocessor revolution, the American economy has been hellbent on maximizing efficiency. Wherever technology can increase the output from labor, it has been done, often overdone. In fact, the data shows that efficiency has gone up far faster than wages, so we tipped past the happy balance long ago. While the overall economy continues to grow, it grows only for a minority of citizens.

On top of that, we long ago blew past the balance between producers and middlemen described in that prior scenario. A couple of generations of Americans have been trained to work in the middleman economy, often doing busy work related to boutique beliefs like diversity of climate change. Meanwhile, the productive sector atrophied or was shipped off to other parts of the world. The American economy is more like a global counting house now, rather than a self-sufficient economy.

The global bank model has run its course. The rest of the world, for various reasons, is disconnecting from the American model. The rest of the world is unwilling to do like the farmers in that model and turn everything over to the middlemen. That town full of merchants and middlemen is noticing that the farmers are not coming to town to trade their goods as much they did in the past. Suddenly, the skim from the work of the farmers is getting too small to sustain the townsfolk.

It is not a perfect way to think about it, but it helps understand the economic problems Trump inherits as president. It is why he is convinced that shifting from a tax system focused on labor to one focused on trade is a winner. It will help shift labor from busy work in cubicles back to doing productive things because the cost of imports will rise relative to locally produced items. Foreign producers will adjust by investing in production inside America.

The practical problem Trump inherits is the American economic model evolved to favor the middleman over the producer. Over time it led to the imbalance we see between producers and facilitators. It also led to a narrowing of profit to a shrinking number of players in the economy. In some ways, the American economy has become a digital version of the Bronze Age palace economies in that everything flows through financial and information centers that operate as skimming houses.

Fixing the imbalances within the rules of the system is impossible. This post by an economist calling himself Jack Rasmus explains how the tools available to government no longer work to address the practical imbalances. The people controlling Joe Biden poured almost four trillion in extra money into the system, but it did nothing to mitigate the problem of shrinking middle-class budgets. Prices keep rising while wages remain static, which means most people are getting poorer.

The only way out of the current trap is through systemic changes. That is why Trump is fixated on tariffs as an economic and policy tool. On the one hand this brings costs back in line with prices, so the market regains some coherence. If the real cost of an item is in the price of the item, then people will reward the genuinely lower cost items. In the current model, the cost of cheap goods turns up in the loss of social capital, delayed family formation and, of course, high crime.

A simple example is prepared food. These are cheap for the consumer but are packed with hidden costs. The refrigeration units used to be made in America, but those plants were shipped abroad by the miracle or tariff free trades deals. Of course, the plants are often staffed with cheap foreign labor, the cost of which turns up in your property taxes, the crowded schools, and the healthcare system. That frozen pizza turns out to be vastly more expensive than the price on the box.

Multiply this out all over the economy and it is easy to see the problem. Fifty years ago, middle-class families could get by on one income. Today, it takes two-incomes which is why there are far fewer families. Ours is an economy that looks prosperous on the outside, but the internals are littered with hidden costs. The only way to remedy this is to bring the costs back to the front of that frozen pizza and that can only be done through systemic change.

There are three challenges. One is the small number of people profiting from the current model will fight reform. That is not insurmountable. Trump having some of the richest men on earth in his corner will help a great deal. The bigger problem is the transition cost, which will come in the form of recession. There is no escape from it. The early 1980’s were the cost of transitioning from the productive economy to the middleman economy, so expect similar as we transition back.

The biggest challenge in this project is a dysfunctional managerial class that sees any change as a challenge to their position. The middleman economy was very good for the sorts of people who have a long list of impressive sounding credentials but view tangible accomplishment as a disqualifier. The army of managers in the managerial state cannot survive a transition out of a middleman economy. Like the aristocracy in 18th century France, they will not go quietly.

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 Death Of Progressivism

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about how the presentness of this age results in collective amnesia, a post how AI will destroy us, a video from the bed of my truck and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

In certain circles the triumph of Donald Trump is being viewed as either a sign that liberalism is dying out or the sign that it is dying and the forces opposed to it are finally on the ascendant. Still others, stuck in the thinking of the last century, see the victory of Trump as a sign that the forces of darkness are ready to turn out the lights on the liberal order they are committed to defend. In both cases, there is that old problem of language in that no one seems to have the same definition of liberalism.

This confusion is not helped by the fact that for about a century the people at the retail end of politics have used the word “liberal” as a label. In the United States, people we call the left also use the term liberal. In fact, they often use the term left to mean super-liberal or radically liberal with liberal simply meaning pro-government. Liberals for example, want Medicare for all, while the left wants single payer. To confuse things even more, the right wants government regulated healthcare.

Putting aside the retail use of the word liberal, there is confusion as to what is meant by liberalism in modern discourse. The civic nationalists continue to insist it means the moral and political systems based on things like individual rights, equality before the law and the consent of the governed. Critics tend to view it as the collection of bourgeois cultural and social fads that have ripped through the West. One imagines liberalism as John Locke and the other as John Rawls.

The truth is the liberalism of the 18th century has been dead for a long time. In Europe, ideology replaced liberalism in the 19th century. The triumph of ideology resulted in two great industrial wars in the 20th century and then the rise of managerialism in response to the dominance of the American empire and the Cold War. In Europe, the dominant political order is managerialism. Rights, equality before the law and the consent of the governed exist only as rhetorical flourishes.

In the United States, the Lockean liberalism of the Framers quickly gave way first to a reformist Protestantism, culminating in the Civil War. This slowly gave way to what was called progressivism in the 20th century. progressivism is the reformist Protestantism of the past but stripped of its Christian overtones. The mental and moral structures remain but lacking the fixed points of Scripture and the Christian conception of God, the implementation has wandered all over the place.

Another way to think of it is that the European left travelled down a road that began with the decline in Christian faith. The first step was to use reason to arrive at the same ethical conclusions as Christianity, just without the Christianity. This then led to thinking about new ethical conclusions based on reason alone. Ideology is, after all, a set of moral claims backed by the authority of reason. The two great industrial wars in Europe were about how we ought to organize ourselves.

In the United States, reason has never played much of a role in what has often been called liberalism, because it never dropped the mental structures that it inherited from the Protestant reformers. The original progressives littered their language with references to Scripture. This stopped in the 20th century as Jews joined the elite and entered progressive politics. The moral structures stayed in place, but the authority for them simply disappeared, but has always been assumed.

It is why the people we currently call the left are so fond of claiming that they are on the right side of history. In part, this is a reference to the Hegelian historicism they experienced in college but is much closer to the Calvinist sense that the righteous act as they do because they are righteous. Instead of being on the right side of history, they could just as easily claim to be on the side of angels. They do what they do because they are trying to bring the rest of us along to the glorious future.

It is why modern progressivism is so thuggish. Without a Bible to hold up as his authority, the modern progressive has only her fist to shake at the crowd. Since she is on the right side of history, she is the white hat, so anyone in opposition must be the black hat and against the black hat, you must use any means necessary. What was called Woke was the fanaticism of the Puritan but untethered from Scripture and the reason to interpret and apply Scripture.

This explains the progressive takeover of Protestant churches. Instinctively, they seek moral authority for their claims, so they take over the old moral authority and decorate it with their symbols. Elite divinity schools are full of progressives who reject everything about Christianity, but they seek the framing of Christianity to animate their own progressive moral claims. Protestantism gave birth to progressivism and then was slowly devoured by it.

One of the oldest debates within Christianity is between faith and reason. This is the source of the phrase, Athens and Jerusalem. What we see with progressivism is the end result of that debate. The people called woke are briming with faith, but devoid of reason, so what they believe cannot be expressed in words. Woke was a visceral expression of progressive faith. The often-comical irrationality of it was the logical end of the abandonment of reason.

The growing sense that the fever has broken, which some see as a sign of the end of liberalism, is something much simpler. The fever has broken, and that fever was the secular religious fervor of late stage progressivism. It was the primal scream of faith without reason. What this signals is not the death of liberalism, which happened long ago, but the death of progressivism. Like a demon leaving the body of the possessed, the old Calvinist demon is leaving American politics.

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 24 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 01m25s Pre-Inaugural Adventure
  • 08m38s Energy in the Executive
  • 15m00s The Bishop of Woke
  • 21m08s Britain grovels
  • 25m15s War against the normal
  • 30m00s Indophobia
  • 34m20s A line from Kipling
  • 35m25s Suggestion for a pardon
  • 38m29s Year 50
  • 40m55s If VDARE.com, why not the SPLC?
  • 42m16s Signoff with Victoria de Los Angeles

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     That was indeed quite a week. And for all you fellow 1960s survivors: Yes, that was the great Millicent Martin. She is still with us, I think still active after a career spanning at least seven decades, and looking forward to her 91st birthday this year. Happy birthday in advance, Millie, and many more.

This is of course Radio Derb, being introduced here by your exultantly genial host John Derbyshire. As I said, it’s been quite a week.

It began for me on Sunday the 19th; and although there is nothing very consequential to report about that beginning, I’m going to give it a segment of its own anyway. The name of the segment is: Pre-Inaugural Adventure.

Here we go. Continue reading →

America Inc.

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The first week of the Trump restoration has recalled the times when a company has gone through a reorganization or had a management shakeup. Companies run on the decisions made by the people inside the company and those decisions are the result of the habits of mind, the company culture. Even the big decisions tend to follow a predicable course once you understand the culture.

When there is a reorganization or a new management team comes in, it feels like a shock to the system because it is a shock to the system. The new ways of doing things rattle the old culture because the new ways or the new people conflict with the old ways and those old ways must give way or those old ways must break the new people and the changes they are trying to implement.

Watching Trump act as the new CEO, sitting at the old CEO’s desk, cavalierly signing executive orders while stunned media asks questions, it recalled those experiences with corporate shakeups and takeovers. In 2016 he was the guy hired over the objections of the senior managers. In 2024 he is the new owner. It is an entirely different atmosphere now compared to then.

All of this has recalled an old idea of America as a corporation. The business of America is business, because America is a business. As such, a way to understand her is through the lens of business. That is the show this week. It is an alternative history of America as a business and a history of the managerial revolution through the lens of the old expression, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.

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
  • Alternative History
  • The Macro Business Cycle
  • The Managerial Cycle
  • Not All Businesses Fail

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

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 conditions 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.

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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!