Monthly Archives: October 2013

Madonna Inc.

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Pop culture is not for old people. The reason is, pop culture is not terribly sophisticated, so it is highly repetitive. When you are 15, it all seems new, because it is new to you. By the time you hit your 30’s, you have seen a few cycles of pop culture, so it is not new to you and it feels a little trite. It’s why old people listen to the music of their youth rather than the new stuff. It’s not that they are out of touch, but it all sounds the same. The difference is, those old songs remind them of their salad days.

In this age, many supposedly mature adults self-infantilize by obsessing over the latest shows, fads and causes. It’s a sad attempt to sound young and hip. Hearing a middle-aged man using ghetto slang on ESPN is creepy and weird. Seeing Jonah Goldberg write columns about TV shows is another example. Someone his age writing, at a supposedly serious publication, for an adult audience, should not be obsessing over TV shows like he is a lonely teenager. It’s just not normal, but here we are anyway.

That’s why most normal adults make jokes about Madonna’s pathetic attempts to remain current. It is sad and cringe inducing to see a 50 year old women spread her legs on TV for money. Madonna was never a very attractive women, even in her prime. She has an average body, a plain face and a ghostly complexion that borders on the creepy. As you see with Sarah Silverman, you can be too white. In her twenties, her act was vulgar, but in her 50’s her act is gross and bizarre.

The thing about Madonna is she was never really a risk taker. Instead, she aimed for the safe spot near the edge of respectable. She also ripped off her stage act from Wendy Williams. The scanty outfits, bullet bras and sexual antics were done first and better by the Plasmatics. Madonna took the act, stripped out the stuff that scared middle America and made a PG-13 act out of it. Throw in conventional pop ditties with a few allusions to acceptably breakable taboos and you have 1980’s Madonna.

Give her credit for figuring it out and selling it, but it was just conventional pop stuff with better marketing. In many respects, she did what Steve Speilberg figured out with action movies. In his case, the movie was just a long commercial for all the branded merchandise. It’s what Disney did with theme parks and cartoons. the real money was in the merchandise and branding. The other stuff was marketing expense.

As far as Madonna, she managed to hang around longer than most pop stars, primarily because she is a dedicated performer and sound business woman. The mid-90’s through the mid-00’s were not a good time, based on her chart hits, but she had a few songs in that decade. For the last decade she has been trying to find another way to claw back into relevance, but has mostly been the butt of jokes.

Even in these tame, sedate times, the kids are not interested in hearing a granny talk about her vagina. If she was really anything but a corporate product, she would be entering that stage where she could reminisce about her wild days, entertain her generation with stories of the good old days and maybe do a tour singing her old hits. That’s what real rebels do if they make it this far. Corporate shills have to dust off the old marketing plans and hope no one remembers them.

 

The American Progressive

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The great Eric Hoffer wrote The True Believer, a classic meditation on the fanatic. Hoffer is a bit of a mystery as there seems to be some dispute about his early life. What we know is the fascist and communist movements were in full bloom during the first half of his life. He would have been 15 when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar. He was in his twenties when Fascism got going in Italy and Germany. He was in his 30’s when Hitler reigned over Europe.

In 1952, when he wrote the book, that was the frame of reference from which he worked. He was a longshoreman, so he would have been very familiar with the union movement in America and the men who were attracted to it. Some would argue that Jacobinism was the first secular religion, but it is fair to say that communism and fascism were the first to sink roots outside their native lands. They are certainly the only ones to have real staying power.

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Marxism and communism have lost all credibility because of mathematics. The claims to science by the early promoters of those religions seem laughable today. That’s true even if you are skeptical of global capitalism. The piles of corpses make it impossible to accept the premises of these great secular religions from the last century.

Fascism suffered a similar fate for obvious reasons. Like a virus, however, it had mutated several times prior to the denouement of German fascism. In Spain and Portugal, it took on a distinctly Catholic nature. In America, it attached itself to Progressivism, like an ideological parasite, influencing the Left in minor ways. Despite what Jonah Goldberg claims in his book, Liberal Fascism, the American Left is not fascist.

Fascism had another problem for Americans. In Europe, you have relatively small states with people conditioned to living under the rule of an elite. They are fairly homogenous and all white. America through the 19th century was a hodgepodge of voluntary associations. The national government was limited to managing trade and foreign affairs. State government was limited to public works. Everything else was hashed out by individuals and their neighbors as they saw fit.

That changed with the waves of immigration, but that old ethos was still strong among the ruling elite into the 20th century. It was very strong in the heartland among normal Americans. Throw in the ethnic, racial and cultural divisions and a unifying religion like fascism could never work the same wit worked in Europe. Then you have to throw in the fact that America was always a very Christian nation. Secular religions cannot coexist with Christianity.

The virus mutated, however, from what we think of as fascism, and attached itself to the ruling ideology of the American empire. There was a subset of fascism that preached an internationalism, which was more like a federation of fascist nations, bound together by a common interest among the fascist elites. That seems to be what survived and is now flourishing in American and Europe.

Today’s American Progressive is as much a true believer as the Nazis though. They sign onto the cause out of a desire to belong to something they see as superior to themselves. Joining a movement is an act of self-abnegation. The adherent swaps their identity for that of the group. In the case of the modern Progressive, they seek salvation. Taking on the identity of the group allows the adherent to be saved from his sinful self. Rigorously enforcing the internal codes of conduct is the proof. The Calvinist element of Progressivism remains.

Over the last half century scholars have described the Nazi, the Bolshevik and the fascist fairly well. We really don’t have a similar taxonomy for the modern Progressives. Like pornography, you immediately know one when you mean them, but they are hard to describe. Everyone knows that person who was a little flaky and little lefty, but then they went full-on crazy with some form of radical politics. It’s like a form of mental illness than gets progressively worse.

Mental illness is not a bad metaphor. When you run across posts in mainstream publications titled “Taking Carbon Personally” you have to assume the author and audience are struggling to keep it together. These bare the people with “COEXIST” stickers on their car, but they live in the whitest neighborhoods on earth. That worry about racism, but would not be caught dead on a street named after Malcom X. It’s as if they can’t see themselves or hear what they are saying.

The Trouble With Conservatives

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John Fund is like one of those guys in a large organization that people know, but they don;’t know what he does. He’s in the halls, in the lunchroom, he turns up at meetings, but he never says or does anything anyone notices. Most can’t remember his last name. He’s just “John” or that guy with the short tie. Fund writes fro the Wall Street Journal and National Review. These are the two big platforms of Conservative Inc. Yet, you never hear anyone mention him or pass along a link to one of his posts.

Anyway, he has this post up at NRO. It is emblematic of what is defective with the conservative mind. They confuse policy, principles and politics. The current fight in Washington has very little to do with policy and nothing to do with principle. It is a partisan fight. Both parties fear they are losing their base. The best way to win over doubters is to pick a fight with the enemy. Rulers have been doing this since the dawn of time. Nothing brings the people together like a good short war with a hated enemy.

John Boehner is not a genius, but he figured out that he had to go along with the conservative members on this and take a stand. Otherwise they risked losing big in next year’s election. In the end, they may have to accept some minor cuts here or there, which will amount to nothing, but they will have rallied the base for the next fights. It’s nothing but theater to invigorate the base. The Democrats are doing the same thing. That’s the nature of tribal politics, so this will be the norm as we move to majority-minority status.

Maybe professional conservatives get this, but they are paid to sell what their donors want, so they prattle on about principles and political theory. Maybe that’s part of the whipping campaign to get the conservative base re-engaged. Maybe they are really as dumb as they seem. They seem to have developed an identity that depend on them appear to be above politics, which is a sure way to lose any political fight. The Left never makes this mistake. They are proud political warriors.

Anyway, the goal in political fight is to make the other guy look awful or silly so he will give you better terms. Forcing that Harry Reed to go on TV and defend this mess is good politics. Any time you can get Pelosi or Wassermann-Schultz on TV is a good day for Republicans. They will inevitably say something so nutty the public. Conservative Inc never seems to get this and instead demands immediate surrender so they can regroup for another day, when they have the policy just right.

The trouble is, the Republicans think these National Review types are the authentic voice of the base, so they are bullied into surrender, even when they have the politics right. It’s why the new politics, whatever comes next in the age of white identity, will first need to dispense with conservatives. They have been the handmaiden of the Left, helping them lead a war on the bourgeois white core of America. despite what they claim, they can never been an ally, as they have always been the enemy.

Collective Amnesia

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As the roll out of ObamaCare looks more and more like a roll over a cliff, keep in mind that this is probably the best of times for the program. In time, the reality of the program will be impossible to deny. Quietly, so as not to offend the racial sensitivities of blacks, the program will be gutted and rolled back. It can’t work and it can’t last, because it will be an albatross on the political class. It’s like creating a food shortage and thinking it will be good politics to run on building better bread lines.

How is it possible that anyone is surprised that this is a gigantic flop?

No one alive today can recall a government project that came in on time, under budget or worked anything like it was promised. For as long as anyone has been a live, there have been jokes about $500 hammers and $1000 toilet seats. The image of the government worker asleep on the job has been a stock character for a century. Yet serious adults have been walking about for three years believing the government could pull off a monumentally complex IT project without a glitch.

It really is amazing.

Steve Sailer likes to bring up the fact that we seem to forget a lot of important things as a society. It is clear we are getting collectively dumber. People in Boston today lived through the Big Dig. As public works projects go, it was one of the greatest boondoggles in the nation’s history. For close to two decades, every local yokel with a shovel found someway to get his beak wet on the thing while slowing down completion. This old blog post does a nice job covering the finer points.

Yet, those very same people who saw that nonsense for close to two decades have total faith in government to handle health care. It is as if they have brain damage. Not only that, the same people,e preaching for government run health care will fly into a purple faced rage over the evil of corporation health care. They will often do it from the pages of corporate media platforms. It’s as if they are incapable of remember what they said five minutes ago or recognizing their own staggering hypocrisy.

It is not just government projects. People rhapsodizing about how well Tip O’Neil and Reagan got along and made government work. They say, “Tip and Reagan would not let the government shut down.” Anyone alive then should know that the two men went at one another hammer and tong for eight years. It was often vicious. They had quite a few government shutdowns in the process.Politics were probably worse then than now as Democrats regularly claimed Reagan was a nut hell bent on blowing up the world.

Of course, collective amnesia is a feature of politics. You see that with the treatment of Ted Cruz by the media. Not long ago, the moderate Democrat was wither a social conservative, but fiscal liberal, or a social liberal but pro-business. That was considered the moderate wing of the party and there were a lot of them. That’s Ted Cruz. Thirty years ago he would have been a moderate. Today he is a far right Republican.

Of course, that points to just how far Left the political class has moved over the last several decades. That march Left relies on a collective amnesia, so it is probably just a natural part of the Progressive ruling coalition. They control the media, so they get to decide what is forgotten, which is everything inconvenient to current efforts. Forgetting the past, however, just means repeating past mistakes over and over until something really bad happens, like a revolution or wide scale social unrest.

But history is not for the amnesiac.

In China Everything Is Fake

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One of the weird things you see in illicit drug markets,  is the intolerance for a specific form of fraud. Just about anything goes in the drug game, except for fake drugs. If a dealer gets caught passing off baby laxative as cocaine, he is going to be dead. It is not just that he ripped off his customers. It’s that he cheats his fellow drug dealers. The guy selling fake stuff raises everyone’s costs and risks. The faker gives everyone a bad name.

It is one of those truth about the marketplace that everyone just accepts. No matter how rough the trade, every deal is based on trust. It’s why pawn shops willingly cooperate with the police to counter theft for similar reasons. Their customers are not going to solicit a business that supports burglary. Antique dealers try to uncover fakes as it undercuts their business. Why spend big money on an original when you can get a fake?

None of these measures stop the fakers, of course, but part of every organic market is an organic mechanism to police the market. Counter-intuitively, highly distributed markets can do this better than centralized markets. It’s why industries like music and movies lobby the state to crack down on forgers. Unlike the drug dealer, the record company cannot kill a downloader. Hollywood cannot go around breaking skull in movie theaters when they catch a guy pirating a film. They turn to government for that.

There is a vast middle ground where most of us live and that’s where fakers can cause the most trouble. For example, a site like National Review will post something like this in their article queue. It is not an article, but an advertisement dressed up to look like an article. National Review agrees to place ads like this in their article queue in order to trick people into clicking on the link, thinking it is legitimate content.

Magazines now have multi-page advertisements made up to look just like one of their normal stories. Even more strange is the ad in question here is itself full of fake stuff. The whole xenoestrogen stuff is largely nonsense, at least as it relates to organic food. Plants have all sorts of tricks to ward off pests. That’s just one of the many ways life has evolved over millions of years. Calling something organic has come to mean “good” and in morally good, but it is important to remember that cobras are organic too.

Putting that aside, this is deception. it is just as much a forgery as the guy printing fame art or selling fake drugs. The market place for ideas is a marketplace like the drug trade or the art trade. It relied on the participants acting in good faith and maintaining a high level of intolerance for fraud. When the creators of the market for conservative ideas are embracing wholesale fakery, it calls their integrity into question.  In the case of conservatives, it simply confirms what everyone has suspected for a long time.

It does not stop there. According to this story in the Economist, academic papers are also being forged. The market for fake term papers is well developed. Even before the internet, there was a market for term papers, and essays among undergraduates. Today, the internet makes it a thriving market, so colleges now employ software to combat it. You can probably outsource your thesis if you are so inclined. Since few of them are every read, who’s going to notice if your thesis is mostly recycled from prior work?

To no one’s surprise, the epicenter of this new fraud is China. There’s always been an embrace of banditry among the Chinese.  We get the term “sand bag” from China. In the colonial days, Chinese tea merchants would put sandbags at the bottom of casks to defraud the British. It is a bandit culture with no history of integrity. There are companies that have to use special coding on their boxes to distinguish their product from the fakes, as the Chinese will fake even the most mundane things.

Like the fake news story, fake research has a terrible trade off. If no one can tell the real stories in a magazine from the ads, people stop buying the magazine. If we can no longer distinguish real research from fake stuff from China, we no longer do research because no one can trust it. This is the great challenge to the West posed by China. If they are to remain a part of the developed world, they have to play by Western rules regarding fraud and theft. If they can’t do that, then they have to be isolated and excluded.

That’s not so easy when China can offer Western counties access to a billion cheap workers and unlimited ecological degradation. Making batteries in China is cheaper than making them in California, because the Chinese government does not care if the workers die and the land is poisoned. The battery maker is willing to tolerate some theft, but can the rest of us tolerate it?  Is that a good trade? What’s good for business is not always what’s good for society. Otherwise, we would still have slavery.

Immigration Fanatics

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I fully admit to being torn on immigration. The arguments against allowing high numbers of foreigners to settle here are indisputable. We have too many workers right now. It is not just low skilled or laborers. It is all types. Depressing wages by flooding the economy with foreigners is not what a responsible government does to its people. Then there’s the issue with assimilation. The Hispanics are simply not assimilating like the myth claims they will.

The statistics are grim when you look at crime, addiction and social pathologies like illegitimacy rates. Our cultural elites celebrate ghetto life (from a distance) so it should come as no surprise that the imported peasant classes embrace the black ghetto culture as soon as they arrive here. In the prior century when the elites strongly embraced White values and demanded rapid assimilation, you got a different result. That and the immigrants, except for the Jews, were from white countries.

On the other hand, low levels of  immigration has worked in the past. America is better off having allowed certain types of people to settle here. The sort of person who packs up his bags and sets off for a new land is usually from hardy stock. It takes balls to do it, even with all the welfare help in place. Most people are afraid to move across town. That sort of risk taking is what keeps a culture vibrant and self-renewing. It’s a fresh injection of the pioneering spirit to keep the old stock population fresh and bold.

There are trade offs and maybe that’s not discussed enough, but the emotional side never gets discussed either. We sort of know we are getting things right when the world wants to come here and join the deal. That has value too. On the other hand, the focus on the romantic side of immigration could also be a sign that American culture is entering an the death phase. A people romanticize their past when they can no longer bear thinking about their future. That could be why we are so open to endless immigration.

The deciding factor for me is amnesty. There is no rational argument in favor of granting amnesty to illegals. None. It is simply a way to get grace on the cheap for people who fundamentally hate themselves, hate their fellow citizens and hate their country. In some cases, it is merely a way to rip off the public with some cheap labor. Put another way, the people in favor of high levels of immigration are either lying on looking to stick the rest of us with the cost of their quest for grace. If they’re for i, I’m against it.

Poor Little Indians

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The people who came to settle in the Americas, after migrating from Asia over the Beringia land bridge during Late Pleistocene era, make for a great case study with regarding human evolution. For example, science can now use DNA to tell the difference between those who settled ion South America from those in North America. The initial population split and became isolated enough from one another to develop different genetic mutations from one another. That buttresses has been observed elsewhere in the world.

Of course, it is interesting to try and puzzle through what happened to ancient or forgotten civilizations. In some cases where they put together something that looked like an advanced civilization, then suddenly it collapsed. Figuring out why it disappeared in a few years is fun. It can also tell us something about human civilization in general. Although, knowing why the Greeks and Romans failed at the end has not changed a single mind among the modern ruling classes so it may not be a worthwhile endeavor.

The trouble, of course, when it comes to talking about the Amerindian societies is the modern primitives and their superstitions get in the way. We are no longer allowed to point out that sub-Saharan Africans never advanced far beyond the stone age until the white man arrived with the wheel, writing and so forth. Similarly, any discussion of American Indians must be is such reverent tones that it makes discussing the topic close to impossible, at least in an objective way. Here’s a good example.

In an otherwise straight forward story  you get something like this:

The first evidence of a settlement in the Cahokia area is from the year 600 CE, at a time when the Maya civilization would have been at its peak. But it wasn’t until after the largest cities of the Maya began to fall in the 1000s that Cahokia came into its own. It’s estimated that the city center held as many as 15,000 people (making it comparable in size to European cities of the same era), and reached the height of its productivity between roughly 1000-1300 CE.

The implication, something we routinely see in stories about the Mayan, Aztec and other Mesoamerican groups, is that these people had reached a comparable level of civilization to that of Europeans. Sometimes they are described as being more advanced, at the time, than Europeans. Always lurking somewhere in the discussion is the implication that everything was fine until the pale face came along and screwed everything up. It’s a version of the noble savage, with the white man as the villain ruining paradise.

The first step in human civilization was agriculture. This required something larger than kin-based organizational units. One guy planting a garden is not enough. Figuring out how to raise crops required large scale (relative to hunter gatherers) cooperation amongst people. The mesoamericans got this far. They also got to the point where they could have specialization. Instead of farming, some portion of society were craftsman, tradesmen and government functionaries/religious class.

That’s a big deal as it allows for a class of people who come up with new ideas and improve on old technology. Successful agriculture allows for an intellectual class. If Bill Gates had to till his fields every day, he was not going to have time to steal code from IBM. Having a class of people dedicated solely to metallurgy allows for constant improvement in that technology. The results help a society grow richer and add to its stock of people working on non-agricultural projects. There is a compounding effect.

That’s thing with these ancient people. They never made it that far. Europeans were smelting metal for 2,000 years before the Maya were stacking rocks on top of one another to make a simple wall. When they were at their richest, presumably allowing their best and brightest to try new things, they did some impressive stuff with stonework and architecture. More often than not, however, it was used for ceremonial, cultural and religious ends, rather than practical ends, like plumbing and sewage.

They did not invent any new technologies that would help them take control of their natural surroundings. While the Maya were perfecting stone age technology, Europeans had passed through the bronze age and were well into the iron age. Comparing the civilization achievements of these people with Europe is simply ridiculous for these reasons. Why one group went down a blind alley and one did not is interesting and useful to know, but it is not allowed to be discussed in the current climate of righteous hysteria.

Of course, we’re all supposed to feel bad for what happened to the Indians. To show that, we celebrate the achievements of the Maya, Aztecs and whoever else we can find that was kicking around the Americas before the white man. Throw in a healthy dollop of the noble savage myth and you have middle-aged white women claiming to have “Native American” ancestry. The American Indian has become a stock character in the never ending morality tale of white guilt and the quest for redemption.,

Reality is something different. The Indians were a dead end of sorts. At least when comes to technological achievement. The most advanced civilizations in the south never developed a large enough smart fraction to overcome their environment to a degree that allowed the shape their environment. They maxed out their ecosystem, but where never able to take control of it as happened in Europe and Asia.There were a few smart Indians around, but never enough to reach the necessary critical mass.

That last bit is the key. Europe in the 900’s was not a fun place. War, disease, famine and general mayhem made living beyond 30 a rarity. We called it the dark ages for good reason. Still, the ingredients were all there for a breakout. People had figured out the basics of agriculture to the point where they could produce more than they consumed and there fore have an inventive class, working on making better tools, better weapons and better ways to organize themselves in order to capitalize on their advances.

Understanding that process and why it happened is important. We know Amerindians have an average IQ a little higher than Africans. We know Europeans and Asians have significantly higher IQ’s than other human groups. That’s probably the place to start when trying to understand why the Aztec went down a dead end and were never able to get over the hump in terms of cultural development. This is all taboo, so instead we waste time worshiping people for having been mankind’s greatest losers.