The BRIC Bat

Posted on August 29, 2023 by thezman

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Imagine one morning you wake up to the news that the dollar has lost twenty percent of its value against the other major currencies. Throughout the day, the dollar continues to fall as governments and banks dump dollars and treasuries. By midafternoon, the news is all about emergency meetings in Washington between the White House, Congressional leaders, and the Federal Reserve. The dollar has lost half its value and treasuries are now flooding the secondary market.

By that evening the public is starting to understand what the collapse of the dollar will mean for them, so they have shut down the internet in an effort to buy gold and silver from online dealers. The next day, retail gold and silver dealers, pawn shops and coin brokers are all closed. There are rumors of jewelry shops being looted as people look for anything of intrinsic value. By the second day of the crisis, all businesses have closed as state and local government declares martial law.

This is the dream scenario of the goldbugs and doomsday types that you find lurking around websites sponsored by precious metal dealers. Since Nixon closed the gold window, these people have been predicting the demise of the dollar. Peter Schiff has made himself rich telling people the dollar is about to collapse. The reason these predictions have not happened is this will never happen. This sort of collapse is simply not possible in the modern age.

The main reason this cannot happen is the rest of the world holds trillions in treasuries and dollars in their reserves. About seventy percent of what the world has on its balance sheets is denominated in dollars. Of course, the world’s most important and most traded commodity is energy and it is traded in dollars. There can be no collapse in the dollar like this because there is a buyer for every dollar. As soon as anyone starts to dump dollars, someone is right there to buy them.

That does not mean the dollar is a permanent feature of global commerce or that it can never lose value. The dollar rises and falls like other currencies because currencies are valued relative to one another. It just means that the dollar will disappear only after a long process by which it is replaced by something else. That process will take a long time and it will happen in fits and starts. In fact, the process has already begun and yet there is no panic in the currency markets.

One part of the process is the BRICS summit last week, where Argentina, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates were added to Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. What started out as a handy way for traders to identify emerging economies is now a loose confederation of countries promising to cooperate with one another on global matters. Most importantly, they are working to trade with one another in their home currencies, not dollars.

This is not a small thing. These countries are some of the biggest economies in the world and they have a lot of people. About 40% of the world’s population are in this group of eleven countries. Most importantly, they control about eighty percent of the world’s energy supply. If they decide to trade energy products in something other than dollars, a slow-motion version of the scenario at the start of this post will begin to take shape as the dollar loses its primary benefit.

The way things have worked for the last fifty years is you needed dollars and dollar equivalents to trade energy on global markets. The reason for that is the big oil producers only accepted dollars for payments. The Saudis led the way on this back in the 1970’s when they agreed to use only dollars in exchange for security guarantees from Washington, as well as technology assistance. If you want to buy oil it means first getting the dollars you need to buy it.

This has had an interesting effect on the dollar. Because there has always been excess demand for dollars somewhere in the world, Washington has been able to create as many dollars as it needs to maintain the domestic economy and operate a global military empire, without inflation. Since the U.S. treasury is the best collateral on earth, it has meant unlimited low interest borrowing for American governments and for global corporations doing business in dollars.

Ultra-low borrowing rates are the result of a complex form of seigniorage. This is the difference between the cost of creating money and the value of the money, Put another way, it is the profit from having the monopoly on the currency. In the old days, the king took a profit from minting coins. Since everyone in his realm had to transact using coins with his face on them, everyone had to buy his coins in order to do business with him or anyone in his realm.

In this age, the profit Washington gets from having the world’s reserve currency comes in the form of low borrowing rates and low inflation. This in turn has allowed the domestic economy to grow, despite massive borrowing. In fact, it is borrowing that has inflated the economy over the last decades. In a weird way, borrowing has become the business of America because those treasury bills are used throughout the global economy to facilitate commerce.

That is about to change, and it is already changing. When the Russians decided to accept only rubles for payment, they did so to defend their economy against the sanctions imposed by the West. When it worked and the ruble stabilized, it showed the world that there can be life after the dollar. The world needs Russia oil, gas, agricultural products and increasingly its manufactured goods. If they demand rubles as payment, then it means the world needs rubles too.

This is why BRICS is moving from a label to an organization. If the Russians can do this, then the other countries can do this as well. The West is even more dependent on China and India than they are on Russia. Brazil is a massive exporter of energy products and agricultural products. The plan by Western environmentalist to shut down all domestic farming cannot happen unless the West can make itself dependent on food imports from countries like Brazil.

By adding these six new countries, BRICS is laying the groundwork for an alternative currency to be used for international settlement. Given the makeup of the group, this will most likely start with energy. The Saudis will be the first to accept Chinese and Indian currency for payment. The Russians are already doing this with regards to oil exports to these two countries. Once the Saudis take this step, the dollar will be joined by the yuan and rupee as petro-currencies.

What this means for King Dollar is not much right now. Demand for dollars has already been declining, which is why inflation has been high the last two years. According to the Fed, inflation remains a problem and they will continue to hike interest rates in order to achieve their target goal of two percent. In other words, as the demand for dollars declines globally, the Federal Reserve will have to reduce the supply of dollars, which means borrowing rates will keep rising.

It is important to keep in mind that the countries involved in BRICS do not want the dollar to collapse or even sharply decline. The entire world economy depends on the dollar, including their own economies. What they are aiming for is a slow transition away from dollars that lets them lead the way in de-dollarization. The dollar and its goofy little brother the euro will remain major currencies in the end, just working next to other major currencies in international trade.

The big question is whether Western leaders understand what is happening and what is about to happen to their economies. In a multipolar world with multiple currencies, each currency is judged by the underlying economy, not through the clever legerdemain of Wall Street bankers. An economy that does not make things or possess natural resources is not going to have a strong currency. This does not bode well for Western economies based on services.

Then you have the elephant in the room. The global American Empire is facing a choice over the next decades. Do we fund the old age of the swelling retired class or do we spend money on the war machine. In the Republican debate, all but one was in favor of slashing Social Security to fund Ukraine. Given the racial makeup of the retired class, you can be sure the Democrats are onboard with that as well. It is not hard to see where this is heading over the next decade.

On the other end, rising interest rates mean the young will be shut out of the housing market in most of the country. New car prices have gone up 30% over the last three years and that is before the higher cost of borrowing. In other words, it will not just be old people made poorer by this process. The young, diverse, and technically deficient will also be made poorer. The cost of politicians celebrating their generosity to foreigners is about to rise as the dollar falls.

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Phase Change

Posted on August 28, 2023 by thezman

Note #1: I was invited on to chat with Peter Quinones about the Republican debate, the courage of Trump, the Tucker interview and many other things. For those missing the sound of me droning on each Friday, you can get your fix here.

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The war in the Ukraine is about to go through a phase change as the Ukrainian initiative comes to an end this autumn. For most of the year, the war has been characterized by Western initiates, along with Ukrainian military action. Planning and publicizing the Ukrainian spring offensive dominated the first half of the year, while the last three months have been dominated by the offensive itself. By all accounts this will run out of steam in the next few weeks.

According to Western media, the point of the counter-offensive was to use NATO trained brigades using Western equipment and tactics to break through Russian defenses in the south and create a corridor to the Sea of Azov. This would split Russian forces and isolate the Crimea. The assumption was that the Russian army would abandon their positions rather than fight. This in turn would create a political crisis in Russia, perhaps forcing a withdraw from Ukraine.

What happened instead was the newly trained Ukrainian units charged headlong into massive minefields while being slammed with Russian artillery. The internet was full of videos showing burning NATO equipment and desperate Ukrainian soldiers trying to escape the minefields. Western sources indicate Ukraine lost a third of this force in the first weeks of the offensive. This map of the southern defensive lines shows how little progress the Ukrainians have made in three months.

In addition to the big push in the south, the Ukrainians tried to retake Bakhmut, which they had lost in the spring. By all accounts this was a total failure and they ceased trying to retake the city. Those forces have been diverted to the south for one last shot at making some progress. Right now, the Ukrainians are putting their last Western units into a final push to capture a tiny village called Robotino. This appears to be the final battle of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.

On the public relations front, Ukraine has been launching small drone attacks against buildings in the Moscow suburbs. They have also launched attacks against Crimea using their remaining Storm Shadow missiles they got from Britain, as well as the small, improvised drones they have been using on civilian targets. These efforts have no military value, but they are seen as moral boosters. The images are quickly spread around by Western media.

The long and short of this is the West appears to be in a panic over the results, especially in the south. The narrative said that Russia is a paper tiger, and the army would break at the first sign of Western equipment. At this point, the Ukrainians were supposed to be bathing in the Sea of Azov. Instead, billions in NATO gear lies in ruins in a place now called Bradley Park. It is called that by the Ukrainians because it contains so many bombed out Bradley fighting vehicles.

There is now a growing concern that the Ukrainian army is running out of men and material to continue fighting. That speaks to the horrific losses they have taken in this ill-fated counter-offensive, but also the long toll of the war. As a result, Ukraine is stepping up mobilization efforts. There are rumors that that Zelensky will call for a full mobilization of Ukraine, which means that every available male will be called to service and maybe even the females of military age.

The one area where Ukraine has had some success is in the Black Sea, where they have been using sea drones to harass Russian shipping. There is speculation that they are using Romania to launch and control these British made drones and maybe there are British contractors helping them. American Reaper drones are also active in the Black Sea, suggesting they help locate targets. Regardless, the Black Sea has become a problem for the Russian navy and Russian shipping.

The question is what comes next. There are rumors that the Russians have been plotting an offensive of their own. This may simply be echoes from the Battle of Kursk, which took place eighty years ago in the same location. In that battle, the Soviet army stood their ground against a massive German offensive, then counter attacked, leading to one of the biggest tank battles in history. The Russians are obsessed with their history, so this may be the source of those rumors.

On the other hand, the Russians have been advancing along the northern part of the line of contact, to the point where Ukraine has evacuated the strategic city of Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region. This has led to speculation that Russia may be planning to capture Kharkiv city, which is the second largest city in Ukraine. They could also swing south and cut off supply lines to the Ukrainian army in the Donbas. The Russians supposedly have over 100,000 men in this area.

The other possibility is that the Ukrainians had to strip this area of men and equipment in order to supply their offensive in the south. As a result, the Russians are taking advantage of the situation to capture these important transport hubs. In other words, they are simply filling a void left by the Ukrainians, and it has nothing to do with their plans for the fall and winter. Either way, the collapse of this part of the Ukrainian lines supports the lack of manpower claims.

This leads to the topic of what comes next. As this phase of the war reaches its end over the next few weeks, the ball will now be in the court of the Russians, who have spent a year building up forces in Ukraine. They could go on the offensive or simply continue to grind away at the Ukrainian army. They could also begin to work on the Ukrainian infrastructure as a way to weaken their resolve. Of course, a major winter offensive is also a possibility.

There is also the question as to what the West does now that their great Ukrainian counter-offensive narrative is in tatters. For now, they seem to be contenting themselves with a blame game focused on the Ukrainians. The neocons are blaming the Ukrainian general for not following their orders, while the Pentagon is pointing the finger at Zelensky for meddling in the military planning. Out of this will come a new narrative, but its details remain a mystery at this point.

Then there is the election calendar. The Poles have elections is October, which will be an interesting look at European public opinion. There is no anti-war party in Poland to speak of, so it is going to be a more subtle read on how the ruling party has managed the war to this point. In June, the Germans have an election. The AfD is an anti-war party and they have jumped in the polls. So much so that the German government is threatening to ban the party entirely.

Of course, the American presidential election cycle has started. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the anti-war option on the Democrat side. The regime has banned any serious polling on him, but they must be worried as they have pulled Bernie Sanders out of mothballs to campaign in New Hampshire. Then you have Trump who is the enemy of the neocons and the military industrial complex. His swarthy mini-me, Vivek Ramaswamy, has also taken a strong anti-war position.

The bottom line is there is no path to victory for Ukraine. This phase of the war which has gone on for close to a year makes that abundantly clear. While the Ukraine army has fought heroically, they are outmanned and outgunned. Now that the West is out of weapons to send to them and Western domestic politics is about to take center stage, Ukraine will be faced with some grim choices. The big question is how a Western defeat plays out over the next year.

The Singularity Of War

Posted on August 25, 2023 by thezman

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One of the fascinating parts of the Great War is how the sides adjusted to the changes in military technology. At first, they did not adjust at all. They continued to use tactics that they used before the invention of machine guns and high explosives. This was despite seeing the power of these new weapons in the various Balkan wars in the years preceding the Great War and the Italo-Turkish War in 1912.

That changed quickly once both sides figured out that the new weapons had made the old tactics suicidal, but they did not have a good answer. After the German advance stopped, both sides had the same idea, which was to outflank the other side to the north, which became the famous race to the sea. Once both sides reached the sea, what came next was years of trench and attritional warfare.

The curious thing about the stalemate is that it took both sides so long to figure out how to solve the trench problem. The first use of tanks was two years into the war, and they were a long way from being determinative. It took another year for the Allies to figure out how to use them properly. Neither side ever developed tactics for breaching entrenched positions without suffering heavy casualties.

The armored vehicle and the airplane solved the trench problem. Airpower could suppress opposing artillery, allowing armored vehicles to enter the defensive zone, which allowed infantry to follow behind the armor. Mobility suddenly made fixed defenses a liability. The German sweep into France in the Second World War was proof that mobility trumps even the best fixed defenses.

The war in the Ukraine has now brought us full circle. The Russians crossed into the Ukraine and ran into a series of heavily fortified defensive lines. Those lines included artillery and surface-to-air missiles. In front of those defensive lines, they found obstacles and mine fields organized like a maze. The Ukrainians also had a fairly good air force, including a good supply of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 attack drones.

There was no way for the Russians to use their superior tanks and armored vehicles to break through the Ukrainian lines. By the time they got to the minefields the Ukrainians were attacking them with artillery. The minefields and obstacles slowed the assault, giving the Ukrainians time to bring up reinforcements to meet the attack. The choice was heavy losses or retreat, and the Russians chose retreat.

The Russians made an assault against a town in the south called Vuhledar, also known as Ugledar. They thought they could roll up on the Ukrainian positions by first taking the surrounding dachas and turning them into a staging area to assault the town. Instead, they found themselves in a maze of minefields. Then the Ukrainians unleashed their artillery on those stranded units.

Of course, this works both ways. After the Russians settled into the war, they started building their defenses. They brought in their artillery and surface-to-air missiles to solve the problem of the Ukrainian air force. They quickly figured out how to knock out the Bayraktar drones using electronic warfare. Their one innovation was the use of modern mines to create vast and complex minefields.

This is why the NATO-planned offensive has been a disaster. They still think mobile warfare beats even the best defenses. They sent armored columns at the Russian lines, only to be attacked with drones that destroyed the mine clearing tanks and forced the rest of the armor into the minefields. These highly mobile units were quickly made into immobile targets the Russians could easily destroy.

It is clear that the West has no answer for this problem. They could give Ukraine F-16’s with contract pilots, but they are not much use against Russian air defenses. The West could bring in their own air defenses to neutralize the Russian air advantage, but that still leaves the trench problem. There is no answer to crossing minefields and attacking fortified defenses without air superiority.

The Russians have the same problem. Once this Ukrainian offensive burns itself out, they will have to figure out how to break the Ukrainian defenses. They will have air superiority and a huge edge in artillery. They also have a growing selection of drones they can use to knock out Ukrainian artillery, but they still have to cross those minefields while Ukrainian defenses fire on them.

It is not an unsolvable problem. Like the Great War, the winning side will be the one able to maintain the fight. Biden said the quiet part aloud the other day when he said NATO is running out of weapons. The Russians figured this out last year which is why they have been waging a war of attrition. They know if they wait long enough, the other side will collapse just like the Germans did in the Great War.

That still leaves us with the same problem. Assuming the West could ramp up its industrial production and match the Russians, it simply means that we are back to the old trench warfare problem. As drones get better and militaries get better at using them, this problem will only get worse. The Russians are now experimenting with drone technology in old tanks to use them as decoys.

This problem could also apply to naval warfare. The Russians were able to use a hypersonic air-launched ballistic missile to take out a Patriot battery. That same weapon can be used to take out a ship. Those cheap drones that take off from Russia and hit targets all over Ukraine can do the same thing to surface ships. It is not hard to see how new technology could turn the ocean into a version of the trench.

War has always been about innovation. A new weapon or tactic results in a new counter measure, which forces the development of new weapons and tactics. You have to wonder if there is a limit and maybe we have reached it. Short of nuclear weapons, the West cannot hope to beat the Russians on the battlefield and the Russians cannot hope to beat the West. We may have reached the singularity of war.

This applies to China as well. There is no doubt that Russia is helping China build out its missile and drone technology to defend against the American navy. If the US navy cannot get carriers within striking distance of the mainland without suffering catastrophic losses and the Chinese cannot blockade Taiwan for the same reason, then the long planned war with China over Taiwan become mutual suicide.

What is the answer to a hypersonic missile striking a carrier? They can put air defenses on the carrier, but they are not able to defend against these missiles at this time and the missiles will keep getting better. Like the tank, the aircraft carrier is losing its value due to changes in technology. If opposing navies are afraid to get in range of one another, then we have a standoff on the seas.

Of course, we always have nukes. Maybe the answer that the empire lands on is the use of nuclear weapons to solve the problem. The regime talks about them incessantly with regards to Ukraine. Maybe the plan for China will be sub-launched nukes to disable her coastal defenses. That is the history of war. Every new defense is met with a new offense crafted by a bloodthirsty lunatic.

Covid II: Revenge Of The Experts

Posted on August 24, 2023 by thezman

In the fullness of time the ape historians may refer to this time as the age of reboots because everything seems to be a remake of the past. It is not just movies and television shows that are constantly rebooted. Must of our politics is a replay of the 1930’s, the 1960’s or the 1980’s. Every villain is Hitler or Bull Connor, and every victim is Ann Frank or Emmet Till. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to hear that the people in charge are planning to reboot the Covid franchise.

Despite a mountain of evidence showing that none of the Covid mandates made a lick of difference when Covid was a real thing, we are seeing them comeback as we get a glimpse of what we used to call flu season. A few cases of the sniffles have school systems cancelling classes and installing plastic bubbles again. A college in Georgia has brought back all of their Covid restrictions. Fake TV doctors are out pitching the latest Pfizer products, just in time for the holidays!

The “experts” who told you to tie your underwear around your head and stand in little circles painted on the floor at the grocery store are now saying there is a new variant with a really cool name. The Eris variant, perhaps the result of the Evropa Project, is spreading like an untended Hawaii wildfire. The “experts” say it spreads much faster than the prior variants, which must be bad. That is why we must act now as we only have a few weeks to flatten the curve.

Thankfully, the drug dealers have a cure for what ails you. Just in time for cold and flu season, they have a new batch of vaccines. What makes a reboot so attractive is they already have the IP established. They do not have to invest in making the public aware of the new thing, so those savings drop to the bottom line. In the case of the vaccines, they still have millions of doses of the last batch, so it is just a matter of slapping on some new labels and handing out some new bribes.

You are probably thinking that there is no way that they can reboot the Covid franchise so soon after the original finally ended. After all, public opinion has moved hard against the nanny state nonsense that defined the original Covid run. Companies are still struggling to get their people back into offices. Most of the hard thumping Covidians now pretend they never fell for it. Despite is all, it looks like the Biden administration is moving ahead with plans to reboot the franchise.

The conspiratorial minded suspect that the regime is plotting some new shenanigans and forcing people off the streets with Covid mandates is part of the plan. If you are going to put one of the presidential candidates in jail, for example, having a ban in place against forming up crowds would be useful. That way the regime would not have to worry about another January 6. If protests broke out, they could unleash the dogs and firehoses in the name of public health.

The more likely answer is that Covid was just one giant leap in the direction of security tyranny that is all around us now. The health care system is now full of people who think it is their duty to push you around for your own good. Every business now has a safety manager who thinks like a paranoid helicopter mom. Public health officials have the same attitude as the staff of a prison. They see themselves as your perpetual guardian and you as a problem they must solve.

That last bit is the vital part. The more people pointed out the idiocy of the Covid polices the more determined the Covidians were to hold the line. Just as the managerial elite have come to define themselves in opposition to the masses, our army of experts define themselves in opposition to the people pointing out their mistakes. The more the evidence stacked up that the Covid regime was a sham, the more determined the Covid experts were to hold the line on the mandates.

Since so much of what animates our ruling class is a redress of past grievances, this reboot of Covid could be an effort to do it right this time. The experts will proclaim a public health emergency over Covid. The public health managers will claim they are better prepared this time and launch into rounds of public health theater that prove they are on top of things, while countering the “disinformation” about Covid. It sounds crazy, but we live in a ridiculous age.

There is also a weird psychology involved in the reboot lifestyle. We see this with the repeated reboots in Hollywood. Even when it is obvious that the planned remake of a classic is going to fail, they forge ahead anyway. Hollywood released a Terminator remake with a decrepit Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a geriatric robot interior decorator named Karl. Clearly there is some form of psychosis at the heart of this berserk desire to reimagine the past.

The big question is whether the public will fall in line again. There are reasons to think they will not go along with it. The novelty of working at home has passed, so that carrot is no longer available. The public is far more cynical about this stuff now, given the endless stream of official shenanigans. Only the dullest of zombies believe anything coming from official sources now. This reboot would look like a farce, even to people who enjoyed the original Covid theater.

On the other hand, cavalier disregard for public opinion is becoming a charm on the purity bracelets of the political class. If you are willing to offer Biden’s crackhead son a sweetheart deal with blanket immunity then appoint a family friend to be the special investigator after the deal blows up, you might look at a Covid reboot as a way to show your friends you really do not care what anyone thinks. Spiting the ungrateful masses with a Covid scare is just the ticket.

TV Time In Tiny Town

Posted on August 23, 2023 by thezman

Whether anyone likes it or not, the 2024 election kicks off officially tonight with a debate in Tiny Town between eight midgets vying for the Republican nomination. According to the strict standards for selecting the performers for this show, the cast will be Doug Burgum, Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott. These eight campaigns claim to have met the requirements set forth by the producers of the show.

This will be the first time anyone has seen Doug Burgum, whose name is often pronounced “bugman” by less scrupulous commentators. He is the current governor of North Dakota, a place few Americans can find on a map. Similarly, Asa Hutchinson will be introducing himself to the world, despite having spent the last half century in politics, mostly in Washington. He is the former governor of Arkansas and the man who championed the mutilation of children.

There used to be a time when the pundits would handicap these things in terms of what each candidate must do to help themselves in the debate. The game was to pretend all of them had an equal chance, so if they took the advice of the pundits, then they could become more equal than the others. For political people, this used to be a fun part of the process, but now that we know our elections are like professional wrestling, normal people have no interest in pretending otherwise.

Then there is the orange elephant in the room. There should be a fifteen-foot orange elephant on the stage with Donald Trump’s face on it, so the performers keep looking over at it as they read their lines. That would be both wildly entertaining and an honest presentation of what is really happening. The eight dwarfs are auditioning for the role of not-Trump, because they have been told that the real Trump will soon be behind bars or disqualified from the party’s nomination.

Given that all of the performers know this, the first reason to watch is for any clues as to the timing and circumstances of Trump’s removal. With the exception of Ramaswamy, none of these guys are working math puzzles in their free time. One of them is bound to say the quiet part aloud in the heat of the moment. The betting favorite in this regard is Chris Christie, who is playing the jilted lover role. He is there to trash Trump and eat donuts and they will not be serving donuts onstage.

That brings up another good reason to watch. Team DeSantis let slip that their guy was going to attack Ramaswamy in the debate. DeSantis is a career politician and he has proven himself adept at handling hostile media. He no doubt thinks he can take this young whipper snapper down a few pegs. Ramaswamy is an unusually smooth operator on his feet. Maybe this is where DeSantis shows himself to be a skilled debater or maybe this is where his campaign ends.

Of course, none of this is ever on the level. Fox News is hosting this show and they were just busted stacking the audience. There is little chance that the general audience is a true sampling of the public. We will get of the post-debate narrative by the reaction of the actors placed in the audience. Their job will be to cheer the planned winner and jeer the planned loser. The betting window remains open for your bets on who will be declared the winner, regardless of the results.

Right now, the oddsmakers have Ramaswamy as the betting favorite to win the crowd, but the smart money is on Tim Scott, followed by Mike Pence. The reason is the narrative will be about gravitas, the abracadabra word the media uses to anoint someone without having to explain it. The narrative will be about how normal the debate was without Trump and how we got to see the gravitas of the guy they are trying to sell as the winner of the evening’s performance.

This brings up the side bets, which are always fun. Which of these idiots will be the most cringe tonight? Which one will get caught in a loop and repeat his/her catch phrase over and over to no effect? Which one will be programmed so poorly that you expect to see a question mark appear over his head? Amusingly, the betting favorites here are also Tim Scott and Mike Pence. These two would make for a fun episode of robot wars, so they are good bets.

Then we have the wildcard action. In a sign that maybe the narrative writers are struggling to pick a winner from the cast of Tiny Town, the story of tonight could be that none of them are fit for the role. Instead, the story will be a totally authentic call for a savior, someone like Glenn Youngkin, who is the governor of Virginia and pals with all the right people in Washington. You would have to be a very cynical person to think that the usual suspects are plotting such a thing.

In the end, the main reason to care about this ridiculous farce is that Tucker will be interviewing Trump at the same time this show is happening. Clearly, Tucker and Trump are doing this to spite Fox News. It will be interesting to see the numbers for the Tucker show on Twitter. Fox will lie about their rating because that is what they do, but we will get a sense of it from the Twitter numbers. If Twitter shows more than five million views, then it was a very bad night in Tiny Town.

Film As Art

Posted on August 22, 2023 by thezman

Can a movie be art? It probably depends upon your definition of art. The general definition is “something created with imagination and skill that is beautiful or expresses important ideas.” There are a lot of subjective words there. What is beautiful to one person can be silly looking to another person. Important ideas are not always easy to define and often take a long time before they are seen as important.

Using this general definition, even allowing for variations of taste and perspective, movies can be art in the same way a pop song can be art. It is unlikely that anyone will be performing Madonna songs a century from now but lots of people thought the songs were beautiful at the time. Some people even say that she was a culturally important figure at her peak. But is Madonna in the same club as Beethoven?

Another way of looking at art is that it is something that holds a mirror up to the society that created it. Greek statues speak to the nature of the people who created them in ways that their graffiti and pornography does not. The Greeks had graffiti and crude art produced for the masses, just like this age. They had pornography too, but what stood the test of time was their sculpture, literature, and architecture.

When you look at it this way, pop songs are not art because they do not speak to the nature of the society that produces them. The reason no one thinks about the pop songs of the 19th century, and they did have pop music, is the same reason no one will talk about Madonna songs in the 22nd century. This sort of crude entertainment has nothing important to say about the people who produced and consumed it.

That brings us back to movies. Most films are made for the same purpose most popular music is made, which is profit. You get a decent script and some famous actors, have it made by a competent director and profit! The only films made for reasons other than profit are the small projects by famous stars and directors. The studios let these guys do pet projects as a way to keep them happy.

This is probably why studios are fine with ruining their franchises by making unnecessary sequels and reboots. Star Wars is a punchline now, but it made billions for the studios, so it is all good. The Indians Jones franchise has ended with the thud, because the studio views it as a profit vehicle, not a work of art. You do not reboot Mozart or remake a Da Vinci painting. You can reboot a movie franchise.

This brings us to the classic Disney film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is number fifty on the AFI top-100. There is no need to summarize it or even offer a critique, as everything that can be said about this has been said. Not only is it the greatest animated film of all time, but it is also based on a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, thus tying it to the soul of Western man.

Does this film have something important to say? Does it hold a mirror up to the society that produced it? Is it beautiful? The answer to the first question is no, but the second and third questions are not obvious. It does feel like a statement of some sort, but that is mostly because we view it from the perspective of this age. It reflects what we have come to view as a better, more decent age than our own. But is it art?

Probably the best argument for it being a work of art is the response to the news that Disney plans to vandalize this film. They wanted to reimagine it by making it diverse and vulgar, like everything else. Instead of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs it is going to be Nonwhite and the Seven Diverse Weirdos. People were not outraged or offended as it is too late for that now. Instead, everyone laughed.

Vandalizing Star Wars makes people angry because you are destroying a part of their childhood, but once those people are gone, the film, the remakes and the outrage around those remakes are forgotten. When someone says they want to improve on Beethoven or paint a better version of the Mona Lisa, you laugh because you know the person doing it is an idiot and he and his work will soon be forgotten.

In other words, a work of art cannot be remade, rebooted, or even vandalized, as it has deep roots in our cultural consciousness. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are still with us, even though they are long gone, because they made such a deep impression on the people of that time that the memory of them has been preserved. Art not only stands the test of time, but it also transcends time and place.

The one issue with this line of reasoning is that unlike any other form of art, film has to be seen to be appreciated. We can appreciate the Colossus of Rhodes from descriptions and drawings. We know it existed and we can imagine what it was like seeing it at the time. You cannot do that with a film. Once Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is gone, all we have left is the fairytale on which it is based.

That is the reason to watch this film. Given the age in which we live, it could soon be condemned for heresy. They removed Song of the South and now hardly anyone remembers it existed. If you want to see it, you have to watch it on a weird website or download it from the Chinese. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a great film, but it is also a reminder that we have to fight to keep our art.

The Liberal Post Liberals

Posted on August 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the 70’s classic Taxi Driver, a post about the legendary film and book, A Clockwork Orange and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Over the last several years, a group of academics and intellectuals have formed what is now called post-liberalism. The members of this group do not agree on many things, but they agree on one important thing and that is what they call liberalism has run its course and it is time for something new. Patrick Deneen, one of the key members of the post-liberals, has a new book out called Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future, in which he sets out to describe what should replace liberalism.

This is the third book from Deneen on the subject. In 2016, Deneen published Conserving America?, which was a collection of essays on the current social and moral troubles of this age. After that he published Why Liberalism Failed, which was a book length analysis of what he calls liberalism. This latest book is supposed to build on that second book and lay out a vision for how to put an end to the liberal order and provide a sketch for what should replace it.

Regime Change has been met with mostly negative reviews. A good example is from Charles Haywood at Worthy House, who was enthusiastically positive about Deneen’s prior book on the subject. It is also fair to say that Haywood is positively disposed to the broad concept of post-liberalism. He makes the point that despite the title, Deneen is not actually suggesting we change the regime. Instead, he offers up the usual list of reforms that have no chance of being considered.

The main problem with the book, as Haywood notes, is that it is organized in such a way as to avoid the main topic of the book. The first three quarters are a summary of the arguments Deneen made in his liberalism book. Instead of leading to a demand for a bloody revolution to overthrow the regime, replacing it with a dictatorship of recent Catholic converts, Deneen delivers a poorly conceived list of reforms and some bromides about racism and colonialism.

This gets to one of the main problems with the post-liberal project. It is not really post-liberal and the members are not opposed to liberalism. Instead, they oppose some of the consequences of the current ruling order. They appropriate words and concepts from dissidents, without fully understanding the meaning of them. The phrase “regime change” is a good example. One gets the sense that Deneen liked the sound of it and wrote a book so he could use it for a title.

More troubling, the post-liberals have not thought about why the arc of the liberal project has led to the present. If they wished to limit the scope, they could start with the American constitution and examine what happened along the way. It should be quite clear that the current ruling order is nothing like what the Framers created and nothing they imagined was possible. Chronicling how we got to this point, skipping past the speculation as to why it happened, would be a good start.

There is none of that in this book or in Deneen’s prior work. In fact, it is not particularly clear that he understands where to place the starting point of liberalism. He gives us far too many references to Aristotle, which is always a sign that the author is struggling with his choice of topics. He also likes to quote Aquinas. That is getting warmer, but when he talks about Locke, you wonder if he is talking about the same John Locke that the rest of us had to read in college.

Probably the most puzzling thing about the Deneen project is that he never mentions Alasdair MacIntyre, who was a long serving scholar at Notre Dame. He wrote the book, After Virtue, which was a highly successful critique of liberalism. If you search the name in Deneen’s last two books you get zero mentions. This is strange, since MacIntyre tackles the causes of liberalism’s failure and also takes on John Rawls, the most important liberal political thinker of the last century.

This gets to the main problem of the post-liberal project. They do a respectable job describing the present and the dangers it presents. Where they struggle is in understanding that maybe the current order is not actually a liberal order, but a post-liberal order. Further, they do not understand that the American project evolved outside of European liberalism. The Enlightenment is a good starting point, but the Reformation is a much better place to start.

All that said, none of this should be taken as a dismissal of the post-liberal project or the academics and intellectuals attracted to it. What Deneen and others are doing is drawing attention to the inherent flaws of the current order and in the process legitimizing the questioning of it. Slowly, questioning the assumptions of liberalism is becoming acceptable. When a bigfoot college academic calls for regime change, it is now acceptable to discuss the topic in polite company.

As far as the Deneen book, while it fails to deliver on the promise of the title, it is a useful look inside the mind of the post-liberal. The dissident will see the same struggle they experienced as they crossed the great divide. What comes through in this book is a man struggling to wake up from the myth of the 20th century. If members of the modern monastery are experiencing this, then it suggests the regime is far closer to a moral crisis than many would like to admit.

Talkin’ Bout My Generation

Posted on August 18, 2023 by thezman

After a week of stellar posting inspired by a trip to American Renaissance, I thought a show on generational stuff would be a good way to finish the week. It is also a good show to do before a summer vacation. With two weeks left of summer, I am going to take the next two weeks off from the show. I have some things that I want to get done before the fall, so it means making some time in the schedule.

The post earlier in the week about the Zoomers and specifically the Fuentes cult got me thinking about other issues related to generational topics. Something I did not mention in my show is the fact that the Zoomers are about to be elbowed off the stage in the next year or two by Generation Alpha. I am told this is the label for the kids who are currently in high school at the moment.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the thought of Fuentes and his crew suddenly finding themselves as geezers in pop culture terms. I look forward to the Alphas calling him a Zoomer-Boomer as a way to indicate he is an old man while they are the young happening future. Maybe we also get an Alpha version of the groypers turning up in comment sections to heckle the Zoomers.

Putting that aside, the Alphas will be the first diverse generation. They will be majority-minority, so the media will love them. The face of this generation will be a trans lesbian of color immigrant transvestite. Nothing screams the glorious future like a young mentally unstable genetic dead end. Maybe they should be called Omegas, as they may be the last generation for the circus known as America.

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Generational Madness
Generational Politics
Culture versus Calendar
My Generation
Sympathy For The Zoomers

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The Revolutionary Airport

Posted on August 17, 2023 by thezman

The way to think of revolutions is as national bankruptcies. Like bankruptcy, the debts are cleared so the enterprise can start fresh. In the case of a company, the debts are the manifestation of bad decisions by prior management. In the case of the country, the debts are the ruling class and the system that makes them possible. These are the results of decisions made by prior generations. Wiping those away allows the new generation to reinvent the enterprise of society.

People are much more practical about a big sprawling corporation that go through bankruptcy than they are a country going through revolution. In the former case, the focus is on the mundane. The company needs to shed product lines and business entities in order to focus on the profitable stuff. In the latter case, all of the talk is about grand plans for reorganizing the very nature of society. Revolutionaries want to reinvent the people that make up society.

The better way for revolutionaries to think, at least in the planning stage, is about the small things that make up daily life. Airports, for example, are a thing that most people now experience with some regularity. There is nothing more populist, democratic and elitist than a nation’s airports. When you travel to a foreign country, your first impression of the place is in the airport. You hear the strange new language and maybe see some strange new things for the first time.

An airport is a symbol of a country. As a public works project, it is one of the more complicated things a country does. It is a system that has to guide millions of people who are often out of their element, thus easily confused. Those people expect to be cared for as they leave for a journey or return from abroad. The airport is not just the welcome mat of a country, it is the welcome home sign. You can judge a nation by its airports because it reflects the nature of society.

For example, when you travel into an organized society like China or the United Arab Emirates, the first thing you notice is the orderliness of the airport. Everything is clean and works as expected. In a disorganized country like the United States, airports are often an incomprehensible mess. The best airports are worse than the worst airports in high functioning societies. The worst airports are what you expect in Africa. There is a genre of video for this experience.

Assuming things continue on the current path in the United States, what would the revolutionary committee do to change the airports? How would these vital ports of entry and transit hubs be changed to reflect the sensibilities of the revolution? The point of the revolution is to change the nature of society, so there is no better place to start than where tens of millions of citizens frequent. How would the revolutionary airport serve the goals of the revolution?

The first change would be how people dress in the airport. Shorts for men would be banned inside all revolutionary airports. Men and women would be required to dress as they would at a proper office. There is no reason for men to be in shorts at an airport other than slovenliness. Men arrive in an air-conditioned car and are quickly transported on an air-conditioned bus then to an air-conditioned terminal. You can hang meat in most airports, so there is no need for beach wear.

This is not about comfort or aesthetics, even though the latter is important. It is about instilling confidence and self-respect back into the people. The reason people dress up for special events like weddings is they want to feel their best. Erasmus famously wrote, “vestis virum facit”, which means clothes make a man. The reason this is true is how you dress reflects how you think of yourself. The same can be said for how we dress our people in our airports.

The next change is to ban roller bags on planes. A feature of the modern airport experience is people wheeling bags the size of steamer trunks around, calling them carryon luggage. Every plane is late because they run out of overhead space and the extra bags must be stowed in the belly of the plane. Of course, people also carry a huge second bag that needs space. None of these ever fit properly in the bins, so people waste time figuring out how to get them into the bin.

Watching this circus on every plane, you are reminded that the people, and the people in charge, are no longer able to operate an airport. The revolutionary airport will assign space to each passenger for their carry-on. Their bag will be measured in advance and if it is too big then they and their bag will be hurled into a crusher installed in every airport for this purpose. This solves the immediate problems, and it solves the problem of people who cannot or will not follow basic instructions.

This sounds harsh, but you know that the people who carry steamer trunks and giant backpacks are the sorts of people who cannot order off the menu. These are people who prove they are special by making sure they are a public nuisance in every aspect of life. Eliminating them from the airport system by eliminating them from the gene pool turns the airport into a selection mechanism for society. The revolution has no place for those who cannot follow simple instructions.

Fixing the passengers is one half of the problem. The other half is the people running the airport, especially security. In organized countries, security is not handled by blue shirt wearing simpletons. Security is not just a matter of forcing people into long lines, hoping that the bad guys have less patience than the good guys. In well run countries, airport security is close to invisible. It is there but it is woven into the system in such a way that you barely notice it.

America is a heavily armed country. There is no reason we cannot rely on the tens of millions of gun owners to handle security. The revolutionary airport will license citizens to be air marshals. In exchange for their service on flights and in the terminal, they get to fly free domestically. This is a country where 65% of fires are put out by volunteer fire companies and 70% of EMS workers are volunteers. There is no reason the bulk of airport security cannot be handled by volunteers.

There also needs to be a tonnage tax at airports. Another horrible aspect of American airports, aesthetically and operationally, is the fat people. Frequent travelers know the joy of being wedged into a seat between two fat people. Pass through an American airport at holiday time and it is a circus of fat guys in shorts and fat women testing the physical limits of yoga pants. All tickets will be hit with a BMI tax to both limit fat people on planes and encourage a healthy weight in the population.

In fact, this is an idea that should be extended to all food sellers. Imagine the checkout at the grocery store having a scale. Before you pay for your food, you weigh in and calculate the tax. Even more fun, imagine Starbucks installing scales. Social pressure alone would lower the national BMI. The fat tax would also be a voluntary tax, which is the best kind of taxation. After the revolution, people will care about how they look, because they will have pride in themselves again.

A Surprise Ending

Posted on August 16, 2023 by thezman

The latest indictments of Donald Trump are a good example of how narrative is a controlling feature of the managerial state. This is the fourth batch of indictments and arguably the most ridiculous. The players on the side of the regime are like characters from a racial satire. The fact that they accidentally posted the results before the grand jury vote is what we have come to expect in the crisis of competency. It is as if the regime is trying to prove the critics are right.

Putting aside the idiocy of it all, the interesting bit is how narrative drives the actions of the elites even when the narrative is false. They come up with a scenario for how things will unfold in their favor over some period of time. This gains circulation among the elites and their key servants in the managerial class. Those key servants then announce the narrative to the media, who then scurry about repeating it in various ways until it becomes the consensus.

We see this with the Trump indictments. Before the first indictment, there were rumors about the Department of Justice looking into Trump. Then we had some stories about pressure on Merrick Garland to appoint a special investigator to look into Trump’s role in the January 6 stuff. It was at this point the key servants arrived to deliver the narrative on the Trump indictment. They wrote op-eds and appeared on cable chat shows to explain to the media what will happen.

What would happen is this. Trump would be indicted for mean words and one of three things would follow. He would be disqualified under the 14th amendment. He would drop out of the race. The Republican Party would disqualify him. All of this assumed that once he was indicted, his support would collapse. The only people supporting him would be QAnon weirdos and election deniers. This could then be used to pressure him if pressure were needed.

Once the official narrative was announced, the race was on to be the star of the show that got the ball rolling. The affirmative action guy in New York pulled the lucky ticket and indicted Trump for the crime of paying his bills on time. The excitement among the media was as if they were waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive. They were about to see the fulfillment of the narrative. Trump showed up, got charged and then continued campaigning as his popularity spiked up.

It took a little while for the media to figure out that the narrative was not playing out as they had been promised. CNN had a townhall hosted by their new you-go-girl that was supposed to be a roasting of Trump over his legal issues. To their horror, you-go-girl was not as good on stage as on the couch. Trump all but put her over his knee for a good spanking. Worse yet, the audience turned on the bimbo and laughed along with Trump at the idiocy of the whole thing.

Instead of backtracking on the narrative, we got two sets of Federal indictments of Trump, along with the same story lines from the prior indictment. The only thing missing was a Greek chorus chanting, “We got him this time. There is no way he escapes the narrative after this indictment.” Of course, in both cases Trump’s polling has gone up as people begin to see him as a victim of a malevolent system. At this point, the official Trump narrative should have collapsed.

Instead, we have a fresh batch of indictments. There is also word that other states with crackpot governors are looking to indict Trump. It is becoming something like the iPod craze back in the before times. All of the fashionable people in the provinces now want an indictment of Trump like the cool people have in the big cities. At this rate, the Europeans will be indicting Trump. Maybe they can drag him to the Hague for crimes against humanity for eating his steak well done.

Note that in each effort to push the narrative along the focus has been on humiliating Trump in the process. In this new show from Georgia, the first thing they did was announce that they will mugshot Trump and spread the pic online. The fact that they continue to think they can humiliate this man by making him more popular is a staggering indictment of these people. Trump will be selling shirts with his mugshot on them to raise millions for his campaign.

The Trump business is just a recent example. The war on Russia has been controlled by elite narrative framing. It is the same process. They created a narrative of Russian collapse and instead of updating the narrative in the face of disconfirmation, they reinvent the narrative with new features, like a counter-offensive or now the new spring of 2024 Ukrainian offensive. No matter what reality is doing, the narrative must be protected, even if it could bring disaster.

This is something to keep in mind as the economy falters this autumn. People in the dreaded private sector will tell you that things are not great in the economy, and it has all the signs of a recession. Inflation is not defeated, despite claims to the contrary, and oil prices are rising just in time for the heating season. The rise in the cost of money is starting to have its effect on the economy. Now China is admitting that it is headed to recession, due to slack demand from the West.

This is happening while the regime prepares to run the corpse of Joe Biden as the man who not only saved the world from Trump, but the man who singlehandedly saved the economy from disaster. The key servants have been out instructing the media on the new narrative about the economy. This means we will be flooded with stories about the economic miracle just as the economy is tipping into recession. Such a disconnect is the sort of thing that causes revolutions.

That is what may be the death of our regime. The people at the top of it live in a world of narratives that are independent of reality. They are so sure they can compel reality to fit their version of reality that they cannot imagine an alternative ending. The Tsar, no doubt, could not imagine an alternative ending to his narrative. The many people who met the national razor never were shocked by the end to their narrative. Our rulers may be in for a surprise ending too.

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