Monthly Archives: August 2013

Our Broken System

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Here is an interesting article on the tax reform debate that is part of a larger push to pass a big tax reform bill after the next election. Congress is trying to be serious about fixing the tax system, rather than just grandstand on it. They may even be willing to tackle such touchy things as the mortgage interest deduction, corporate welfare and so forth. The hint that they are serious is that the Democrats are playing nice on the issue. The truth of American politics is that nothing gets passed without the blessing of the Democrats.

Old bulls like Max Baucus on the Democrat side are actively looking for big ideas to fix the tax system. House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp is having his staff draft bills for consideration this fall. When you have big shots in both parties in both houses working on something, it usually means there’s been some deal making done to get past the regular nonsense. When the old bulls are waging their fingers or carping at one another across party lines, you know it is all theater, not a serious effort.

It sounds promising until I get to this:

On the Senate side, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) asked colleagues in both parties to submit recommendations on which tax preferences should be preserved, starting from a “blank slate” where all current benefits are eliminated. To provide senators political cover and deniability, the committee put all recommendations under a 50-year top-secret classification, and restricted access to them to just 10 staff members.

Dullards like Kevin Williamson picked up on this claiming this is why the public seems to be siding with Edward Snowden over the rulers. It is a variation of the Old Testament warning from a prophet about how death is coming because the people have turned away from God. The conservative version of this is that the gods are angry because we have turned away from our constitutional principles. It’s circular reasoning. We are losing our republic because we have abandoned the basics of republic government. No kidding.

It misses an important point. The people in charge resort to these sorts of remedies not because they don’t rust the system They do this because they no longer trust themselves as a ruling class. That’s why they are employing the Cone of Silence. They know if this stuff gets out, members will use it against one another. Put another way, they are afraid to be candid with one another, because they fear their candor will be turned into a weapon against them in the future. Everyone assumes everyone else is a liar and a knave.

They also know the army of lobbyists will start pounding the war drums in order to get their special deal in the final bill. With a man in the White House willing to sell his daughters into slavery to score ideological points, no one can trust that there will be an honest debate or even a discussion if it is held in public. The result is that the elected representatives of the people have to abandon the fundamentals of self-government in order to get anything done in Washington. Is there any wonder they have so little respect for the Constitution?

An essential point that people on our side have to understand is that constitutions and political ideology are the result, not the cause. Principles are the rules the winning side imposes after they win. The constitution was written by the victors of the Revolutionary War and the post-war squabbling among the elites in the former colonies. The mercantile class of the North allied with the planter class in the South, came together to impose a political system on the new country that worked for them as a ruling elite.

The War on Science

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I’ve been reading this article by Steve Pinker in The New Republic. It has been ages since I have had a reason to pick up a copy of TNR. Maybe that says more about me than it does about them, but I actually check into Mother Jones and The Nation once a week, so maybe TNR just got dull. There was a time, probably in the late 1980’s, that The New Republic was a must read journal, if you wanted to know what the ruling class was thinking about policy. Anyway, the Pinker piece is interesting to me for two reasons.

The first is that he starts with the claim the great thinkers of the Enlightenment were all scientists.That’s more than inaccurate. He gives the impression that they were pure empiricists and not influenced by philosophy or religion. Blaise Pascal was a Christian fanatic in addition to being a great scientist. Locke and Hobbes were certainly men concerned with philosophy, economics and politics. I suspect the great men he lists in his opening would have viewed their science as a hobby, a sideline to their real work.

It is one of the things I find irritating about materialism. Pinker carries on at great length about the war on science, but it reads like a jeremiad against the humanities. I think what he sees as a rejection of science is really just a rejection of the absolutism we get from guys like Pinker. It’s similar to how atheists turn the religious into straw men. The critique is not about explaining the object of the critique, as it is celebrating the critic. Maybe the humanities are nothing but magical thinking, but there’s a reason for that too.

Anyway, that’s not why I started this post. Pinker brings to mind the real trouble for science and that is the corruption of science. Putting economics, for example, in the same bucket as chemistry is the sort of corruption I have in mind. Economics is not astrology, but it is probably closer to wine tasting than it is to physics. A lot of economics is wishful thinking dressed up with mathematics. It gets even worse when it comes to other so-called soft sciences like psychology or sociology.

For the same reason counterfeiting used to be a hanging offense, fake science should be given rough treatment from the empiricists. The only way the folks over in the philosophy department are going to respect the folks in the chemistry department are when both sides know the boundary. That’s where Pinker goes wrong. He thinks there is some great fusion to be had between the two. There’s not. Science is an explanation of the knowable. The scope of what is knowable expands as science expands.

The point being is that the defenders of science never stop to think that maybe they have some hand in the reaction against their work. They seem to lack any respect for the common man and his skepticism of science. The public used to hold science in the highest regard, but decades of corruption and unaddressed hucksterism has made the average guy into a skeptic. The old gag is, “where is my flying car.” The first place to start in the defense of science is to clean out the corruption in the sciences.

That said, Pinker is right to attack the ridiculous straw man of “scientism.” This just made up nonsense from neo-Christians. They also rail against “Darwinism” which they conveniently define as a religion. The people pitching this stuff almost always call themselves Bible-believing Christians, which means they practice a bespoke religion based on whatever they like form the New Testament. There is a good argument to be made that they are not Christian, but actually post-Christian pagans.

Regardless, they are noisy, not serious. The defenders of science would be wise to ignore them in the same way evolutionary biology ignores intelligent design. They are not making arguments that can be refuted. They are simply hooting like primitives about things that confuse and frighten them. Let them hoot. It’s harmless. The world is no more going to spin off its axis if some small minority believes in voodoo than if some small minority are young earth creationists. Pinker is thinking like a totalitarian here.

 

The R Word

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The evidence that Progressivism is a cult is all around us. The main bit of evidence is how they engage in the most blatant of group think. In the clip below the nation’s second most famous lesbian thinks she is being clever by refusing to say the name of the football team at the heart of this terrible scandal. Of course, She has no idea why her cult is angry at the sports team. My bet is she has never seen a football game. She just hears the other loons howling about the team, so she starts howling so she can be part of the group.

Maddow, of course, is obviously struggling with mental illness. The disjointed mannerism, the inappropriate facial expressions and odd smirking are familiar to anyone who has been around people using heavy duty psychiatric drugs. Medication can make them functional, but they are never normal. She has discussed this in interviews, but I suspect she struggles to keep it together every day. Watch the clip and then imagine such a person working in your office. You would assume she is seeing a shrink every week.

http://youtu.be/DAs1-NAfDJI

Of course, this is an example of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is a mental disorder where a person pretend another is ill, so they can care for them. The other version is where the caregiver is actually making the person sick, so they can then care for them. A fireman who starts fires so he can be the heroic guy putting out the fires is another variation of this. In the case of childless lesbians like Rachel Maddow, they find victim groups to champion, so they can feel needed. Same idea, different victims.

That is the thing you see with Progressives now. They no longer deal in the practical, like economics, or even the temporal, like real people. Instead, they invent victims and then conjure ghostly causes like racism and privilege. The goblin that haunts the minds of Progressive women is always the heterosexual white man, so they imagine what evil white man must hate and then invent a victim group. From there it is search for proof, like the hunt for ancient aliens or Sasquatch. Here we have imaginary bigots and fake Indians.

Banishment

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This story is a cornucopia of crazy. For starters, the guy who was arrested is obviously a complete loon. It is one thing to wave around a rebel flag. It is another to do so in the middle of a Camden street, yelling at black people. The Confederate flag stuff is just anti-white agit-prop. That said, the South did lose the war. Why would anyone adopt the symbols the losing side?  In all other times and places, people hold up their losers as objects of derision or simply ignore them. People celebrate winners, not losers.

For some reason racist rednecks went the other way. In fairness, lots of Southerners simply see the Rebel flag as part of their heritage and culture. The racist goofballs simply hijacked the symbol. Putting that aside, the fact that this racist redneck is from Pennsylvania, a northern state, makes it even funnier to me. Maybe he is from Alabama originally, but I doubt it. The story strongly suggests that this guy is just an idiot.

The truly scary part of the story the crime. Camden apparently has a law against thinking bad things about black people. Or, maybe it is a law against saying bad things about black people. Interestingly, Camden is 17.59% (13,602) white, 48.07% (37,180) black and 47.04% (36,379) Hispanic, according to the Wiki. That’s mathematically impossible so I’m going to assume a lot of “white Hispanics” in those numbers. Either way, it is more Latin than I would have expected. I wonder if the Latins know about this magic black guy law

Of course, the Hispanic presence may be the root of the law. Blacks hate whites, but they fear Hispanics. Once the brown guys start moving ion, the black guys start moving out and not always by choice. The crime rate is sky high and Camden is considered one of the ten most dangerous places in America.  I’m thinking these hate crime laws are a tribal thing. The in group makes laws to protect them from the new arrivals.

The best bit is what the city is planning for this knucklehead. They intend to banish him from the city. That’s a pretty good punishment. I wish we did more of this. It is not easy in a nation of 300 million to house all of our criminals. Banishment would solve the problem of prison over-crowding. Instead of just barring this dope from Camden, how about shipping him off to a penal colony? It would be cheaper and pretty good deterrent.

Sometimes a Banana is Just a Banana

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The race hoax is becoming something of a trope these days. Usually it is the alleged victim who is behind the hoax. Sometimes it is the alleged victim simply interpreting a normal event as a racial assault, just to get attention. This looks like an example of the latter. In fairness, he could really believe he was the victim of a racist taunt, but most likely he is just doing what all blacks are trained to do these days and that is cry racism. it is not a matter of conditioning, as much as a part of their identity as former slaves.

Cameras cover every inch of a modern ballpark including the stands, concessions, gangways and bathrooms. If it did happen, they will quickly find video of it and locate the monster who did it. I watch a lot of baseball and the announcers always mention when something is thrown on the field. The fact that this player is currently the only witness makes me suspicious. The desire for victim point is so overpowering now, even black millionaires cook up scenarios where they are victims of down scale whites.

At some point, ESPN will hold a town hall meeting on this so we can get lectured by them on banana etiquette. That’s one reason for the escalation in hate hoaxes. The Progressive media is so thirsty for these tales, they never stop to ask any questions. Of course, the demographics of the media make them especially receptive to anything that casts whites as immoral. The resulting pattern is a claim is made, it accepted on face value, then a long lecture from our betters and finally the truth is revealed and the whole thing is forgotten.

Putting my skepticism aside, there is something else going on here. The player is on social media looking for people to agree with him and tell him he is a good guy. It would appear some have decided he is a pansy who has over reacted. Others think he is mistaken. Some just think he needs to toughen up. His reaction to that is to threaten to leave social media. We now have black snowflakes, who fall to pieces whenever anyone tries to hold them to civilized standards of behavior. That seems to be an issue here.

The thing is, if it did happen the person who did it probably just happened to have a banana and chucked it on the field. This is San Francisco for goodness sakes. Anyone who has been to that park knows the stands are full of hipsters eating healthy. To an east coast guy used to grimy ballparks like Fenway, the first trip to San Fran was weird and unsettling. People bring their damned dogs to the park. The fan threw the banana because he was not done with his soy latte or his arugula salad.

Update:  Looks like I was mostly right. It had nothing to do with race. Jones is free to place that chip back on his shoulder and continue his hunt for the great white devil.

Liberal Fundamentalists

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Listening to sports radio this morning, I heard two knuckleheads on a Boston channel blabber on about about Tim Tebow. They want Tebow cut from their favorite team and they cannot sleep knowing he may make the roster. They did not put it that way, but it was obvious. Both jock sniffers were standard issue lefties that you see throughout the mass media. These are the type of folks who walk around convinced they are middle of the road moderates or maybe libertarians, when in reality they are solidly on the Left.

Anyway, listening to the two idiots rant and rave about Tebow, I was reminded of something about Liberals I have always found irritating. That is, they never want to be around contrary opinion. They don’t want to see it anywhere in their lives. If they are in a group of people that includes a non-liberal and the conversation turns to politics or current events, they will walk out of the room. Often they put their hand up in that  way women do to indicate they don’t want to hear anymore. It’s like they will melt by hearing bad-think.

In the case of Tim Tebow, his mere presence as an adherent of another religion so upsets them they demand he be cut from the team. That’s really what it is with him. He’s a vocal and unabashed Christian. He’s also very southern, which is a second strike against him in the case of Boston liberals. For liberals, his very existence is an abomination that has to be removed from their site. Heck, they would probably be OK with having him removed from earth. They see him as a mockery of what they believe to be holy and true.

This is why liberalism needs to be viewed as a religion. It’s got a lot of similarities to Islam, which is mostly defined by what it opposes. Muslims are nuts about eradicating non-Muslims from their ranks. It’s not enough to simply know they are right. They don’t want infidels anywhere around them. Of course, the Bolsheviks maintained a rigorous internal exile system to accomplish the same thing. The totalitarian mind is defined by those borders, as well as their purity. That means the heretics are either expelled or killed.

That’s the liberal mind and why they hate guys like Tim Tebow.

The GOP’s So-Con Problem

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This post by Steve Sailer is good reminder that social conservatives are not small government people. In fact, they are not even conservative in the modern sense of the word. To be a conservative today means being in favor of small government, low taxes and free markets. You can throw in a bias toward global corporation over national small business. Social conservatives are none of those things. Some social conservatives are in favor of those things, but most are not all that interested in these issues.

I’ve always suspected that a major defect of the Republican coalition is that the social conservatives are in favor of big government, when it comes to their issues. They want the state to ban abortion and put prayer back into schools. That’s why they are engaged in politics in the first place. In the 1980’s when Farewell and Robertson were going strong, the argument they made was that good people will lead to good government. If they could get their guys in office, government would enact their agenda.

The trouble is the social conservatives are largely ambivalent about the small government, pro-business stuff, so they are not engaged in those issues. This allows the GOP to play a double-game on a major segment of the base. They promise to address the social issues and fight the culture war, but only after they take care of the tax cuts, sweetheart deals for business and so forth. Throw in the warmongering agenda from the neocons and the GOP is basically a long con by neocons and the chamber of commerce.

The Bush years proved that this formulation can’t work forever. Even social conservatives eventually figure out they are being conned. They got one of their own, George Bush, into the White House. He was the first Evangelical since Jimmy Carter and unlike Carter, he made his politics conform to his religion. He was supposed to be the final piece of the puzzle. Instead, the Bush years were nothing but giveaways to big business and trillions spent attacking half the world. The social conservatives got nothing for their support.

We are seeing it again with immigration. Evangelicals, Mormons and Catholics think the ticket to filling the pews is to bring in 30 million Mexican peasants. I see vans all over my part of the world for Baptist churches painted with Spanish and English writing. The local Catholic church does a service in Spanish now. Immigration is good for business if you’re in the church business.  At least they hope it is, just like they hoped Bush would fill the bench with pro-life judges. The Evangelicals are now for open borders.

The trouble is, open borders are suicide for the party and probably suicide for the religious establishment. When the church members are seeing their towns ruined by immigration, they will have little patience for sermons in favor of open borders. The result will be what happened to main line Protestant churches once they sold out to the Democrats. Their pews are full of degenerates and the clergy is gays and lesbians. The Evangelicals are headed for a world where the pews are full of peasants looking for free stuff.

Egypt’s Conflicts

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Here is a well done and very interesting piece on Egypt from the Weekly Standard. It is one of the few articles I’ve seen on the recent happenings that is based somewhat in reality. That’s a bit surprising, given the publication. Bill Kristol is a forever war guy and his stable of writers fit comfortably into the neocon warmonger bucket. Kristol still argues for the Freedom Agenda, despite 12 years of miserable failure. I guess part of the appeal of the article is that it is from an otherwise delusional publication.

The interesting bit is the observation that liberalism is exclusively an Occidental import to the countries of the Maghreb. That’s true throughout the Arab world. There are no native liberal traditions. More important and something the author skips is that the essence of Arab culture is antithetical to liberalism. Islam rejects the foundation stone of Western thought and that is the contract. Everything springs from the concept of people freely entering into an agreement with one another and being held to it by society.

Islam rejects the idea of a covenant between God and man. Muslims believe that God is unknowable and unpredictable. It is called occasionalism. This permanent uncertainty is thoroughly baked into the character of the Arab people. If you have ever done business with Muslims, you know how crazy it is to nail them down to a contract. In Islam, the contract only exists in the moment, the time in which to deal is made and all parties are present. When circumstance change the contract is no longer valid.

Sharia contract law is pretty much whatever the local Imam thinks is best at the moment, which usually means that which either keeps the peace or satisfies the powerful. You cannot have liberalism if you don’t have contracts. There’s also the concept of private property, which is mostly alien to the rest oft he world. In a place like Egypt, property rights largely only exist with regards to personal property. What you can carry is yours, but real property is not protected. Intellectual property, of course, does not exist.

Of course, the idea of a social contract is completely alien to the Arab. They view government the same way people viewed the Mafia. It is merely the way the rich and powerful enforce their prerogatives on the rest of the population. Every Arab country operates along feudal lines. In Egypt, the military has the monopoly of force. Business has the capital. Together they have ruled Egypt since King Farouk. In Iran, the clerics have taken the country back to feudalism completely by declaring their rule the will of God.

That brings me back to the central problem with The Weekly Standard column. There is nothing we can do to change the Arab culture. Most of our troubles stem from their hostility to our trying to change their culture. Arab terrorists are not springing from nothing. They have reasons for doing what they do. The fact that every election in Muslim world has been won by Islamic parties is what we call a clue. The garden variety Muslim is not interested in liberal democracy and western culture. In fact, they are hostile to it.

Just because they like some of the technology that comes from the West, does not mean they want western liberalism. The truth is, they despise most of what defines western social democracy, including the democracy. Mohamed does not want to see a transgendered fruitcake writing for their major newspaper. If the way to prevent that from happening to his society is to stick with the old ways, they are willing to make that trade. Therefore, the answer to our terrorism problem is to leave the Mohammedan alone.

A Looming Revolt?

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A good thing to ponder is how America has gone this long without falling into an autocracy of some sort. That is the natural end of democracy and it is something the Founders understood. They were educated men and that meant knowing their Greek and Roman history. The Greeks would regularly appoint a dictator to deal with emergencies like war or social unrest. The Romans eventually succumbed to autocracy. The French Revolution eventually gave us Napoleon. The Germans gladly accepted Hitler as the Fuehrer.

The natural course of popular government is to give way to some form of authoritarianism, either supported by the masses or imposed by the elite. Even today, we see European countries slowly turning over their national sovereignty to an un-elected bureaucracy. The strange truth of democracy is it eventually votes itself out of existence. The people, it would seem, simply tire of the responsibility. Perhaps it is just a phase societies go though as they swing from disorder to order. Maybe people are just incapable of keeping it.

In a June 21, 1788 speech urging ratification of the Constitution in New York, Alexander Hamilton said, “It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” This attitude was representative of the Founders as a whole.

The puzzle is how has America slowed this process and still maintained some sense of self-governance. One reason is the constraints of the original Constitution. Today, it is the Bible of conservatives or maybe the Ten Commandments. It is a “who we are document” for the civic nationalists. In reality, it was a strongly anti-democratic documents that sharply limited popular participation in the federal government. The early American republic was much closer to Sparta than it was to Athens and that was deliberate.

The Spartan nature of the document a natural hostility to power within the ruling elite of America into the 20th century. In other times and places, the strong man arguing against democracy, promising to cut through the clutter and solve the problems, had no emotional barrier like that to overcome. American rulers have to swear to live within the Constitution to get a purchase with the public. Opponents of the “man of action” promising fix things in a hurry, therefore had a ready weapon to check their path to despotism.

Another reason, at least in America, is that the Progressives always gets ahead of themselves and anger the public. The Right never wins by their own accord, but the Left does lose from time to time. The first example of secular madness in America was the abolitionist movement. The fanatics of the North agitated for the end of slavery ending in the slaughter of 600,000 white people in order to free 3 million pieces of farm equipment. Reconstruction foundered because the public grew weary of the fanatics.

Another useful example of this phenomenon is the Wilsonian Era. Many on the Right have declared Wilson as history’s greatest monster, but that’s nonsense. His opponent was the blood thirsty Theodore Roosevelt, so Wilson was not all bad. Still, he was a true believer and convinced he could redesign American culture. He was probably our first technocratic ideologue. Maybe he is best described a proto-fascist totalitarian.  Of course, he went too far and the reaction to Wilsonian Democracy was the Return to Normalcy.

In fact, the pattern that started with the expansion of the franchise in the early 20th century has been periods of liberal fanaticism followed by periods of normalcy. The FDR/Truman years brought excesses and a snap back with Eisenhower. Then it was the Johnson years, that brought more excess and then a corresponding revolt by the “silent majority” in the election of Nixon. Democracy in America has been spasm of progressive excess followed by the long hangover, which is then followed by another binge of excess.

This phenomenon is well documents and called the ratchet effect. The nation moves toward despotism, then takes a small step back, followed by another great leap toward despotism and some small drawback. Maybe the reason America has not collapsed into despotism is that we’re only into a century of democracy. Maybe we’re just a few more turns of the wheel before the public demands a strong man to impose order. Perhaps the Progressive fanatics have just not gone far enough or crazy enough to break the system.

The other thing worth noting is the compression of the cycles. The pendulum is now swinging wildly between radical change and modest reform. When every political institution has an approval rate below 50% and the most democratic one, Congress, is down at 15%, the path is clear for a strong man to take over. When the lawlessness of the Obama administration is finally revealed, it is possible the public will simply throw in the towel on democracy. Black triumphalism could very well portend a looming snap back.

There Goes Another Amendment

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This story is getting plenty of run in the nerd and conspiracy communities. The short version is that a company running an encrypted e-mail service has shut down due to some involvement with the government. Edward Snowden reportedly used the service in his cloak and dagger work. The assumption is the Feds have forced the guy to reveal his encryption keys so they can rifle through the mail sent and received through his service.

Some people think the Feds may have tried to bully him into letting them read his traffic going forward. The owner chose to go out of business so we can assume the government made it so he had no choice or they were prepared to shut him down if he did not do something he is not free to discuss. It’s hard to know, but it is a good example of how the government is “partnering” with Silicon Valley to stifle alternatives to Big Tech.

This is not new. Way back in the olden times, there was an anonymous mail server in Finland. You did not need an account to use it and it had no logs. The way it worked is you sent the server an e-mail. The first line was the address you wanted to reach. The rest of the body was your e-mail text. The system would forward it to that e-mail and strip away all evidence of your identity.  Here’s the Wiki on it, which is mostly correct.

Even further back when encryption of internet traffic got going, the governments of the world began to freak out. The US government banned strong encryption or limited its use because they feared they could not spy on people otherwise. The United States classifies cryptographic products as munitions, believe it or not, and therefore bans the export of such technology beyond a certain strength. That’s how serious they take the subject.

Since the dawn of time, governments have wanted to prevent private conversations among the citizenry. There’s a reason why The Founders had a fetish for private association and freedom of assembly. When citizens can keep secrets from the state, they can be free. More important, when they can speak outside the ear of the ruling class, they can conspire to overthrow the ruling class. Privacy is the seed corn of revolution.

The fact is the real bad guys know how to avoid the Panopticon. They use strong encryption for electronic communications, but also deploy old fashioned techniques that are impossible to thwart. Government is always a blind giant swinging a mallet. The men and women at the NSA think they are the smartest kids on the playground, but that’s not the case. They simply have the force of the state to magnify their efforts.

That said, the giant swinging the mallet can cause a lot of damage. There’s a crazy Arab sitting in the Obama administration needed to conceal their shenanigans in Libya. On a fairly regular basis cops break into the homes of innocent people because they think they are dealing weed. Thousands of honest people are on terror lists, spending enormous sums to get their names cleared so they can get on a plane. The Giant wrecks a lot.

Now, the provider of an e-mail service is out of business because the Feds can’t force him to violate your Fourth Amendment rights. No one is going to shed a tear for this guy, because most people are either blindly patriotic or they don’t understand the issues involved in technology. There’s going to come a time though, when it becomes clear to most Americans that the partnership of Big Tech and the Deep State is very bad for us.