Monthly Archives: July 2015

Obama’s To Do List

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Watching the hooting and hollering about Obama’s Iran deal, I’m reminded of something I thought I noticed about this administration from the start. It is two things actually, but both related. The first thing is Obama seems to work from a checklist of action items. An item on the list is lined out after a law is passed, an executive order is issued or, in some cases, he gives a speech about. Once it is marked as completed, he is done with it. It becomes old news.

That does not sound odd until you think about how the world works. A problem is identified then a solution is proposed. The solution is applied and it is a process to make sure the solution is working and the problem has been addressed. In a business, management does not write a memo and consider the matter closed. They follow up to make sure their policies are being implemented successfully.

In politics, an administration will judge itself and be judged by the success of its policies. If they make a deal with another country, they don’t throw it down the memory hole once the deal is signed. They keep talking about it and bringing it up if it is successful. If it is a failure then they spend time claiming to have fixed it. With Obama, once the law is passed or the order given, they have a press conference and forget about it. If someone brings it up later, we hear that the administration is not willing to “re-litigate” the matter.

That’s a strange tick, but what’s even odder is what’s on the list. I’ve written before about the Progressive timeline. Instead of viewing time as a linear thing, they see events on an emotional timeline. Events with great significance are close while those with lower emotional pull are further away. The Civil Rights Movement was yesterday, while their total control of American cities may as well have never happened it was so long ago.

With that in mind, Obama’s to-do list reads like a laundry list of slights and wounds to the liberal narrative. The deal with Iran and the deal with Cuba came out of nowhere. No American cared about either issue. The political class had no interest in Cuba and only cared about Iran in so far as whether Israel was going to nuke them. Out of the blue Obama does a deal with Cuba and then makes a comically bad deal with Iran, just to get a deal.

To Progressives, both Cuba and Iran have emotional resonance, because they are black marks on the narrative. Kennedy lost Cuba to the Soviets and was embarrassed by the Bay of Pigs. Therefore, finishing the job and bringing Cuba back into the fold was on Obama’s list. Similarly, Iran was Carter’s great failure. Progressives have always believed it is why the evil Ron Reagan became president. Proving once and for all that making a deal with Iran was the right policy, therefore, became an agenda item for Obama.

Early in the Obama administration, the big thing was resetting relations with Russia. It was always a strange thing as no one could quite explain what it meant. They had a big ceremony with the Russian ambassador and gave him a red button for some reason. In the minds of the Obama people it was “fixing” the Reagan legacy. To Progressives, the “belligerence” of the Reagan years was a big black mark on the narrative. Obama fixed it by giving Putin big red reset button.

That circles back to the first point. Fixing relations between two counties is a process. You have the breakthrough and then build on it over time to find common interests on which both sides can benefit by cooperating. For Team Obama, they ticked it off the list after the presser and then forgot all about it. The fact that relations with Russia are worse now than in the Cold War is irrelevant. All that matters is they ticked “reset relations with Russia” off their list and they forget about it.

The big one, of course, is health care. Obama spent all his good will with the public pushing through a bill that was nothing like he ran on as a candidate. In fact, it was pretty much what he said would never work when Hillary Clinton proposed it as a candidate. That’s not what mattered. What mattered was fixing the mistake of 1993 when Clinton failed to get health care done. Team Obama ticked it off the list and popped the champagne. All of the complaints and challenges ever since have been met with “we’re not re-litigating the issue.”

I suspect much of this is due to the fact that this is one of the least talented administrations in a long time. There’s not a lot of talent. Their best people are technocrats from the academy who see the world as a series of exams. Take the test, get a good score and move onto the next semester. That’s a strange aspect of the new meritocracy. They tend to think like college kids filling up their transcripts with grades, rather than as adults solving problems.

I also wonder if there’s not something else at work. Progressives have won all the big battles and most of the small ones. They have run out of bogeyman to rally the faithful. Forty years ago they could get the blacks so angry they burned down major cities. Today they can only rip up a few blocks in nowhere-ville and burn a few Confederate flags. There’s simply no one else left to fight that’s worth fighting so they going back and tidying up the past to fix the narrative.

The Government Screw-Up Fraction

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Most people out on the fringe, which is getting rather crowded of late, are more than a bit angry and bitter. It’s hard to be a sunny optimist when you sense that the world is going to shit and there’s nothing that can stop it. Turn on the TV looking for sports, only to see them parading around a mentally disturbed man in drag and you have to wonder if blowing it all up is not what’s best.

The truth is mass media makes the weird seem common, but it is no more common than in previous eras. When I was a teenager back in the last Maunder minimum, a friend dated a girl who lived with her father as her mother had died when she was a child. Dad had no woman in his life, but he had a closet full of women’s clothes. As long as he kept it out of the streets, people politely ignored it. Today he would be on display by the mass media.

Similarly, the corruption we see with monied interests and the governing elites is nothing new. Kings granted lands and titles to their favorites who just happened to fill their coffers with gold.  A century ago bankers and monopolists controlled western governments, buying politicians at every level. Government has always been for sale and it always will be for sale as long as humans are in charge. No man is so virtuous that he will refuse the highest bidder.

The real trouble we face, the true crisis of the age, is the mounting incompetence at all levels of government. We can joke around about failing up, but it is a real problem when it involves necessary work not getting done. In a prior age, there was a limit to the corruption because things had to get done. In the “post-scarcity” world, the people in charge operate as if there’s never any cost to their failures.

And they can for forgiven for thinking this. Take a look at the career of Marilyn Tavenner. She has been in government and quasi-government her whole life. No, public hospitals in America are not private enterprise. Her career before getting to DC is impossible to judge from where I sit, but her Washington career has been nothing but a string of disasters. Now, she is cashing in to be lobbyist.

Former Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner has been hired as the new CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, representing an industry that she helped regulate during the turbulent launch of Obamacare.

The powerful K Street lobbying group’s announcement Wednesday comes months after Tavenner, a nurse and former hospital CEO, stepped down as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. At the agency, she was responsible for writing many of Obamacare’s rules and oversaw the troubled rollout — and repair — of the HealthCare.gov enrollment website.

If you are an aspiring screw-up, you have to look at this as a great inspiration. If you are good at polishing the right apples and know how to toady to the right people, you too can get fabulously rich off the taxpayers, even you are a colossal screw-up. In this case, Mx. Tavenner is hired because she is on good terms with all the other screw-ups in the bureaucracy.

Smart fraction theory asserts that a nation’s per capita GDP is determined by the population fraction with IQ greater than or equal to some threshold IQ. Consistent with the data of Lynn and Vanhanen, that threshold IQ is 108. The more people you have in that fraction, the more stupid people they can carry up the economic ladder. Detroit has few people with an IQ over 108, while San Francisco has many.

You have to wonder if something similar is going on with government.The Iron Triangle of government consists of interest groups, members of congressional subcommittees, and agency bureaucrats. Interest groups lobby politicians through their staffers (bribes) who pass laws for agency bureaucrats to implement. Since agency bureaucrats are not very bright, they rely on interest groups to write the implementing regulations.

That is not as bad as it sounds as industry works as a brake on the incompetence of the bureaucrats and the lunacy of the political leg. The trouble is the government has grown so large and complex, industry needs insiders to work the system on their behalf.  This is where screw-ups from the agency bureaucrat pool get into the blood stream of government.

The inept bureaucrat gets a job in the industry they regulate, but they are a screw-up so the industry finds a home for them back in the bureaucracy or on the staff of a politician, usually at a higher level than they started. In time, these staffers cycle back into the bureaucracy, replaced by some other screw-up that was plucked from the bureaucracy by the special interests.

In this process, the number of competent people remains fixed while the number of screw-ups multiply. There’s a point where agencies are so loaded down with stupid people and screw-ups they no longer function in a predictable manner. Most of what gets done is pointless, the rest is mischief.

The Cloud People

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I’m fond of calling the emerging global elite the “cloud people” because they are untethered from the places the rest of us call home. Way back when Obama was running the first time someone asked him about American exceptionalism. He responded with something along the lines of “everyone thinks their country is exceptional.” He not only did not understand the question, he went out of his way to say citizenship is for chumps.

Obama is typical of the new global elite. He does not know a whole lot about his host country and its people. He has weird ideas about people worshiping fire gods and carrying boom-sticks, but he’s really not all that interested. When he leaves office, expect him to live mostly abroad in global capitals, rubbing elbows with the rest of the global class.

That’s why governments are synchronizing their tax and residency policies for the rich.

When George Osborne last Wednesday announced a shake-up of tax rules for foreigners living in Britain, the chancellor was careful not to damage his country’s underlying appeal.

The “non-dom” tax status “plays an important role in allowing those from abroad to contribute to our economy”, he said.

The UK is not alone in rolling out the red carpet for wealthy foreigners. As Mr Osborne noted, many countries have some sort of special tax status to attract the global rich. Cyprus last week announced plans to introduce the concept of “domicile” into its tax regime. Portugal, Israel and even France have all introduced tax concessions for foreign incomers.

In Switzerland, as in Britain, there has been pressure to increase the fairness of special tax rules for foreign residents but it has stopped short of their abolition. Switzerland is set to increase the bills for rich outsiders using its lump sum tax system but in a recent referendum it rejected proposals to axe them.

When countries try to draw in rich foreigners, it is not just tax privileges that are on offer. A growing number of countries — including about half of the EU — are selling residency rights. A smaller but fast-growing group are selling passports. The number of cash-for-passport schemes have increased since the financial crisis. In the case of Cyprus, there was a direct link: affluent foreign investors were offered citizenship as compensation for their bank deposit losses.

Antigua, a tiny nation in the eastern Caribbean, offers one of the most popular “citizenship by investment” programmes. It sells itself as a tropical paradise “with some 365 beaches of clean turquoise waters” and the prospect of visa-free travel to 130 countries to prospective citizens. Antigua only requires its new citizens to visit for five days every five years.

In 2014 George Georges, a Syrian businessman, became the first of Antigua’s new citizens under the investment scheme. Since then more than 500 other passports have been sold to Chinese and other nationals. The scheme has brought in $65.9m for the cash-strapped island, which is still scarred by the massive fraud carried out by Allen Stanford, who until 2009 was the island’s largest employer.

Christian Kalin of Henley Partners, a specialist in immigration and citizenship, said that several thousand people a year were opting to acquire additional passports. His clients were driven by a desire for long-term security, easier, visa-free travel and, in some cases, fears of being targeted by terrorists.

He said: “Since 9/11 it has accelerated. A lot more people are seeing the value of an alternative citizenship.”

In a recent working paper the International Monetary Fund said that citizenship by investment programmes were reporting “a surge in clients from China, followed by Russia, and a steady rise in clients from the Middle East, although to a much lesser degree”. Citizens from “advanced countries” were also well represented and generally motivated by tax savings.

Some countries offering citizenship investment programmes cite “their favourable tax treatment in an attempt to attract high net-worth clients seeking global tax planning”.

The IMF cited preferential tax treatments available with economic citizenship programmes in Cyprus and Malta as well as investor residency programmes in Bulgaria, Hungary, Ireland and Portugal.

There is no shortage of controversy surrounding the sale of residency or citizenship rights. In Portugal, there were arrests in connection with its “golden visa” programme last November. Also last year the US Treasury warned that Iranian businessmen were seeking to exploit citizenship for investment in St Kitts in order to skirt international sanctions. In 2014, the European Parliament passed a resolution criticising Malta for offering EU passports for sale.

Tax is another potential source of controversy, although the IMF said the global crackdown on avoidance and evasion was reducing the scope to misuse citizenship or residency investment schemes. It said their use “may become increasingly difficult as more advanced countries adopt anti-avoidance provisions in their tax legislation and enact financial transparency laws”.

The Tax Justice Network, a campaign group, is not so sure. It fears that residency rights are being sold to people who want to circumvent new transparency rules. Banks are starting to report tax information to their clients’ country of residence which — if it is a tax haven — will ignore it. John Christensen, a director, said tax evaders had a big incentive to adopt a tax haven as their country of residence.

“Selling residency and special tax treatment is contagious. It is creating a new tax loophole that will spread geographically,” he said.

No Country For Greek Men

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The idea of a nation or country as an organizing unit of human society is a new thing in human existence. In the Bronze Age there were city-states organized around the palace economy system. A ruling clan could control multiple cities, but each city-state operated as independent entities. Each one had a palace through which the economy flowed. More important, the people in those polities identified with their respective city-state.

The last time I bothered to read up on the history of the nation-state, it was pretty clear that historians did not agree on much of anything anymore with regards to the birth of the nation-state. The way I was taught in school was that the nation-state was born with the Peace of Westphalia. The Westphalian System was the first time Europeans had what we would consider to be nation-states.

A nation was defined as a sovereign state with defined, internationally recognized borders populated with people sharing a language and culture. More important, the ruling authorities had exclusive dominion over domestic affairs. The rulers of France would coin their own money, manage their taxes and laws, arbitrate disputes between its citizens and maintain whatever political institutions it found appropriate.

For the West, this has been the definition of a country for 367 years.That’s a long time but it is still an exception in human history. The Roman Republic lasted 482 years. The Roman empire lasted 400+ years. Put another way, the nation-state system has been in place for about 5% of human civilization. City-states and empires have been the norm, along with ad hoc temporary groupings along geographic and tribal lines.

This summer, the Westphalian System, as a practical matter, has been ended.  Greece no longer possesses the things one uses to define a country. The “Europeans” now control the financial system and the currency. They will manage the national budget, setting spending limits and priorities. They will dictate the laws and regulations. More important, the national parliament no longer has any say over these things.

Greece is not a ward of the state. Greece is a ward of the new global technocracy. The alphabet soup of international organization were just ad hoc councils until now, as they had no real power, other than what the participants agreed to do with one another. In July 2015, for the first time, a supra-national organization has taken over a country. Greece is now a territory, a possession of the EU.

That’s the only way to read what has gone down over the last week. The deal Greece “negotiated” with Europe is a full and total renunciation of its status as a free and independent country. Tsipras admitted as much right after the deal was agreed to on Monday. “We managed to avoid the most extreme measures,” Tsipras said. “Greece will fight to return to growth and to reclaim its lost sovereignty.”

In another age, a trouble maker country like Greece would face invasion by other countries. If the Germans wanted the gold they lent the Greek king, they would have to take it by force. Today, they invade their financial systems and take the money that way. Of course, they are not really taking the money. They are simply transferring what’s left in the banks to the bankers in Europe. They will keep doing that to make sure future interest payments are met.

It’s a fascinating thing in that most people, including me, thought the Greek crisis was a threat to the EU model. It is turning out to be a confirmation of the model. Maybe the Greek people will revolt. Maybe there’s a Greek Gavrilo Princip waiting for Merkel somewhere. I don’t see any indications of that, but who knows what the future brings. For now it looks like a stunning coup for the Germans and their vision of Europe.

It is also a glimpse of what our rulers have in mind for the rest of us. Participatory government is not very useful in the global age. The Dutch East India Company had good reason to not go around the world spreading Dutch republicanism. It is a hindrance to doing deals. The modern global economy is for cloud people, through supranational organizations, to make deals. Voters just get in the way.

The next thing to watch is how Greek politicians and the Greek voters respond in future elections. If you’re a Greek voter, you have to know voting in local elections is pointless. Years of that exercise have only made your situation worse. Similarly, the young ambitious pols have to see that courting voters is a waste of time. Snuggling up to the technocrats in Brussels is the key to success.

Something no one in the major media bothers to discuss, because it is hard, is how the loyalty chain is supposed to work in this new global world. Kinship is the most basic form of loyalty. It is based in biology. You increase the odds of your genes carrying on by working with the people in your kin group. It is a basic evolutionary strategy. Similarly, the tribe is just an extension of this as is the clan. National identity is just the same concept scaled to its maximum.

The thing is, loyalty is both vertical and horizontal. The head of a family has duties to his family and his family has duties to him. These duties and loyalties are also between members of the family. In larger groups, these become more formalized in customs, rules and, when you get big enough, laws and religions. Still, even at the nation level, the call of blood is still there. Francois Hollande is loyal to France as a Frenchman. Merkel is loyal to Germany as a German.

How this is supposed to work in a global technocracy where the rulers are floating around in cloud cities, disconnected from the people they rule, is a mystery. How can Greeks have loyalty to Brussels? How can a Dutch technocrat working in a cubicle somewhere in Europe feel any loyalty to a grape farmer in Tuscany? To one another, they are not people, just numbers on a page.

What is imagined for us is a no-trust, transactional society where everyone is an economic man, whether he likes it or not. There will be no countries and therefore no citizens. Everyone will be a rootless, atomized cosmopolitan. The Greeks get to try it out first, but the rest of the world will soon follow.

Judge Richard M. Berman

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One of the looming problems facing the country is the number of psychotic loons on the bench. These are fanatics who spent their lives trying to get on the bench so they could spend the remainder of their lives inflicting damage on the culture.

John Sununu talks about this in his recent book with regards to Judge Souter, who became a raging nutter once he got on the Supreme Court. We’re seeing it with John Roberts who should probably be removed for psychological reasons. His increasingly deranged opinions strongly suggest he is suffering from mental illness.

An example down stream is Richard Berman who is tormenting Dinesh D’Souza right now.

At a hearing Monday in Manhattan in which he ruled filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza must continue community service for four more years, U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman said he considers D’Souza’s violation of federal campaign-finance laws to be evidence of a psychological problem and ordered further counseling.

D’Souza’s defense counsel Benjamin Brafman provided evidence to the court that the psychiatrist D’Souza was ordered to see found no indication of depression or reason for medication. In addition, the psychologist D’Souza subsequently consulted provided a written statement concluding there was no need to continue the consultation, because D’Souza was psychologically normal and well adjusted.

But Judge Berman, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, disagreed, effectively overruling the judgment of the two licensed psychological counselors the U.S. probation department had approved as part of D’Souza’s criminal sentence.

“I only insisted on psychological counseling as part of Mr. D’Souza’s sentence because I wanted to be helpful,” the judge explained. “I am requiring Mr. D’Souza to see a new psychological counselor and to continue the weekly psychological consultation not as part of his punishment or to be retributive.

It’s tempting to recall that the Soviets liked sending dissenters off to an asylum so that way they could not only claim the person was nuts, but that saying what he said was nuts. Maybe that’s all there is here and Judge Berman is just an fascist hot head. It’s also possible that he has slipped a gear and this erratic behavior is a sign of a mental health problem.

His words about trying to help someone who clearly is in no need of help are just plain weird. Normal, well balanced people don’t talk like that in a professional setting. It’s possible he is trying to couch is malign intent to make a political enemy suffer in therapeutic terms, but that’s  worse. Having sadists on the court is not something a free people can tolerate either.

 

Electric Cars

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There’s a fine line between enthusiasm and lunacy. There’s a reason someone coined the term “fan” to describe over the top supporters of sports teams. Some percentage of people become untethered from reality over interest in a subject, like a sports team or even a whole sport. I’ve met college football fans in the South who will talk of nothing but college football.

I’ve always suspected that the same trait responsible for intense religiosity is responsible for intense enthusiasm or devotion to a narrow topic. I have no way of proving it, but that is my hunch. A lot of die hard Communists 100 years ago came from deeply religious families. It’s why Jews were over represented in Leftist causes. People immersed in hobbies often come from parents who were deeply committed to some cause or religion.

Those thoughts always come to mind when I run into electric car enthusiasts. They have the passion of a zealot for something that most people find uninteresting. 90% of people would be fine if a team of midgets were in the engine bay of their car, providing the propulsion. They just want to drive it where they need to go.

The electric car freaks and to a lesser extent the magic energy crowd, obsess over electric motors in the same way crazy old men in another era obsessed over steam engines. They lose themselves in minutiae and spend their free time re-reading details of the future electric car. They also write blog posts so other electric car fans can read and comment about their thoughts on electric cars.

One of the hallmarks of a cult is the adherents are convinced that the promised land is just over the next hill or around the next bend. The prophesies are inevitable and there’s nothing that will alter the future so they spend their time documenting the events leading to the ultimate event. Zero Hedge is a pretty good example. Greece did not blow up the world so they onto other “three key charts before the crash!!” postings.

From that post about electric cars:

Elon Musk has ushered in the age of the electric car, and whether or not it, too, was inevitable, it has certainly begun. The Tesla Model S has sold so well because, compared to old-fashioned gasoline cars:

I’ve omitted the list and want to focus on the highlighted words. I looked up the sales figured for the Tesla S. In 2015 they have sold 11,600, which sounds pretty good, until you look at the market sales data. So far in the US 5.3 million cars have been sold this year. Tesla has sold well, compared to previous attempts to market electric cars, but that’s hardly an accomplishment.

The Tesla Model S is a toy for a rich guy. It’s a $75,000 car that costs a lot to own, due to the infrastructure needed to charge it. If you live in Marin or Greenwich, it’s a cool status symbol and a fun toy for the weekend. When you blow $20K on a ski weekend, $75K for an electric car is just more grace on the cheap.

The rest of the post has that unhinged vibe that makes you wonder if it is not a put on. This item from his list of great benefits is hilarious to me: “It comes with an app that allows you to manage the car from your phone.” I’m pretty sure I’ve poked fun at people a few times using a line similar to that. “You can control your ice maker from your iPhone!”

The great hurdle for the electric car has been the same for 100 years. That is, how to quickly  and safely store chemical energy in a small container that can be quickly converted to kinetic energy. Gasoline and Diesel are really good for this. Batteries are not very good for this. Right now, the Tesla figures say it takes about ten hours to fully charge their car if it has the twin charger option.

That’s not useful for most people. Driving to work and back is fine, but if you have to go more than 100 miles from home, you’re out of luck. Given that material science has hit a wall in terms of battery design for these things, you can’t assume those charge times will drop quickly. Massive investment has yielded little progress. So much so, Elon Musk has dropped the search for a breakthrough and has invested big in conventional battery production. He’s betting against the breakthrough.

But, there may be a future for electric bikes and scooters. There are firms offering scooters that are fine for tooling around a city or campus and they can be charged quickly. The battery is removable so you can plug it in at school or work. A motorcycle with a 500 mile range and a few hours of charge time is another option that is within the possible.

All of those limits to electric cars have been known for years. The same is true with solar power, by the way. The science moves forward at a snails pace, pushing the day we are free from hydrocarbons further into the future. But, that never stops the fanatics. They are sure that electric cars powered by sunshine are just around the corner. All they need is a few trillion more dollars from the taxpayers…

Failing Up

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I’ve taken my turn mocking Ellen Pao, but her story is hardly original. Failing up is so common today it feels like it is new, but it has been a feature of the human condition for a long time. Alcibiades is a guy who would be comfortable in today’s culture of failing up. Instead of screwing up the invasion of Syracuse, he would have run a bank into the ground and then run for the Senate.

In prior ages, society could afford precious few of these sorts of people. Mistakes were simply too costly to tolerate having too many idiots in powerful positions. In the post scarcity world of today, it feels like we can tolerate an unlimited supply of losers, grifters and charlatans. Hillary Clinton is 50/50 to be president, despite being a colossal screw-up for the last forty years.

Ellen Pao would have been a non-story, but the Cult thought they could turn her into a Rosa Parks. She was an Asian female with a gay black husband suing a gaggle of Pale Penis People, who make it their life work to oppress women. That’s what makes her interesting to the Cult. Her scam is not in trying the shake down the PPP. Her scam was to con the Cult into making her a heroin. Edit:That’s right. Inject her right into the veins of the culture!

I was thinking about Pao when reading this on NRO. A fair number of people who think of themselves as diehard conservatives are fans of Fiorina. She is polling in the single digits, but the GOP will find some reason to get her on the debate stage. The reason, of course, is she is a woman. To her credit she says the sorts of things you expect a Republican to say, which says a lot of about the state of the party, but the only thing that matters is she lacks a penis.

That’s part of the con, of course. Fiorina was playing the vagina card when Ellen Pao was figuring out what to wear to her high school prom. Twenty years ago Fiorina was doing the vagina hustle to work her way up the ladder in Silicon Valley. Like Pao, she interviewed great, put on great presentations and was outlandishly incompetent in one job after another.

In 1995 she was put in charge of Lucent Technologies, a spin-off AT&T. I knew people who worked at Lucent in those days and they still tell stories about the madhouse management culture ushered in by Fiorina. Bell Labs was part of Lucent at the time and was one the great research facilities on earth. By the time Fiorina was done with it, it had been reduced to an R&D lab for a half-assed phone company.

Then she moved onto HP. Her tenure there is talked about to this day as a cautionary tale about hiring the wrong CEO. It is easy to forget that HP was one of the great Silicon Valley companies. In the 90’s, they were the model for tech companies all over the world. After six years of Fiorina, they were a smoking ruin that has never recovered. Share holders had parties upon hearing of her firing. The stock jumped 10% the next day.

Now here she is playing the vagina card in the GOP primary. The climb up the corporate ladder, by an otherwise talentless hack, is accomplished by showing great loyalty to key superiors. The hack also is good at displaying loyalty to the firm in front of the right people. That was her game in business and she is doing the same in politics. She’s making nice to the leaders and defending the party like a lioness defending her cubs. She’s also going after Hillary tooth and claw.

Fiorina is smart enough to know she is not winning the nomination. This is the long con and that means angling for the VP spot or maybe a cabinet position. She will get on the stage and look good in the debates. By spring of next year she will be out of the race and have a good idea as to who will win the nomination. She will make a big show of endorsing that person and campaigning on their behalf.

In 2017 she will be nominated as Secretary of HHS and she will do to health care what she did to Bell Labs.

The Islamic States of America

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I’m fond of pointing out that America has a lot in common with Iran these days. The fetishes and fascinations of our ruling lunatics are different from those of the Iranian lunatics, but the underlying motivations are the same. A group of fanatics is trying to force the rest of us into their fanaticism. Here’s a good example.

Local police received a complaint when a shopper discovered Nazi and Confederate merchandise at a popular flea market last weekend, according to Chief William Wright.

An officer responded to the Redwood Flea Market on South Turnpike Road Sunday to investigate the report and found Nazi and Confederate memorabilia for sale. He told the complainant, who is Jewish, there was nothing police could do because the merchandise was on private property.

“There was a table set up with this material,” Wright said, unsure of the exact amount, but speculating several showcases. “It’s not criminally illegal, but obviously it offended this person. It causes some people a sense of being uncomfortable. Certainly the owner could preclude this merchandise.”

The complainant, a town resident, feared possible backlash and asked to remain anonymous. He told the Record-Journal that in addition to several showcases there was Nazi merchandise, including German helmets with swastikas, images of Hitler, and Jewish stars of David, in a truck.

“I was shaking and almost vomiting,” he said. “I had to run. My grandmother had numbers,” he said, referring to the Nazi system of tattooing numbers on prisoners.

I doubt that this man’s grandmother had such a tattoo. The tattoo that looms so large in modern lore was not common. It was just not terribly practical. But, inter-generational transitive post-traumatic stress is still a big deal for many Jews. It’s an excuse to make a scene in public trying to get some grace on the cheap.

Ken Dubar, who owns and manages the flea market, disputed the man’s account of how much anti-semitic and Confederate merchandise is at the weekend venue.

“There may be some of those items, some collectibles and some might be counterfeit,” he said.

Dubar also emphasized police found no evidence of any crime.

Jason Teal, president of the Meriden-Wallingford NAACP, said he was not familiar with the flea market and had not heard any complaints about the merchandise being sold there.

“It’s difficult because it’s on private property and it’s considered free speech,” Teal said.

The man also contacted Mayor William W. Dickinson Jr., who immediately asked Wright to determine if any laws were broken.

“I had to check with the chief over what is actionable and what isn’t,” Dickinson said. “Unless something violates state or federal law, there’s no jurisdiction for government to do anything. We had to ask, is it something controlled by law?”

Unremarked here is the fact the local cop was not sure if there was a crime. That’s how far down the fascist hell hole we have fallen as a society. I’m old enough to remember when “this is a free country” was the default response to this stuff. Even lunatics like the guy making the complaint would have been tempered by it.

Today, it is just assumed that the lunatics have the whip hand. Everyone, including the cops, figured it is best to ask permission than to run afoul of the religious authorities. This is no different than what you would see in Iran or Saudi Arabia. People are more worried about the fanatics than the cops.

The irony here is the lunatic who made the scene not only will not be charged, but he is now pretending to be the victim. The newspaper is hiding his identity as if he has something to fear, when he’s the one making a nuisance of himself. That  is the real danger we face. These nuts are convinced they are defending themselves as they try to pull the roof down on all of us.

The Greek Struggle Session

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I have found the Greek financial crisis endlessly fascinating over the last five years. The main reason I can’t get enough of it is that unlike American political scandals, all of the important parts of the Greek drama are hidden. What we see from the performers is their reaction to those important actions and we are left to guess what is going on behind the screen.

After all, the Greeks have no money and they owe a massive amount of money relative to what they can possibly raise over the next ten years. Even if they stated auctioning off islands and national treasures, they are never paying off their debts. We finally learned that they will never be able to pay the interest on those debts. There’s some other reason Europe is spending countless hours pretending to disentangle an “impossible” knot.

Reading this post on ZH this morning, I think I may now know the answer. The European Project is all about reducing cultural and national identity administrative distinctions. Being an Italian simply means living in a place that used to be a country called Italy. If you are a Bantu who floated over last week, granted EU citizenship and now reside in Milan, you are an Italian!

Here we have the Greek stubbornly acting like Greeks by voting out politicians who go along with the European program. They voted out one main party for another and when that failed they voted out the main parties altogether. Syriza, despite its Marxist trappings, won on an explicit appeal to Greek patriotism. The Greeks even went so far as to vote in huge numbers against the EU proposal in last week’s plebiscite.

The result, as that Zero Hedge piece points out, is the Greek parliament voting in favor of the same deal that was rejected last week by the people. Talk about the ultimate in humiliation. If you are a Greek who voted for Syriza and against this plan, you have to feel like a fool. The people in charge are laughing at you. All you did with your silly voting is waste the ruler’s time and for that you will suffer.

And that has been the point all along. It’s not the money. It’s the humiliation. The Greeks have been cast in a German snuff film for the titillation of German technocrats and as a warning to everyone now living under the German yoke. You either goose step to the tune being played in Brussels or end up like Greece.

In the last century, Marxism relied on personal humiliation to break the will of people. The rulers would require the people to say ridiculous things in public about the wonderfulness of the regime and it’s animating theodicies. Children would be made to sing party songs and officials would be required to participate in official charades. It was all intended to humiliate the people. It is hard to rise up in revolt after you have been made to toady to the state in front of your peers.

There was also the forced confession and the struggle sessions. Forced confessions were how individual heresies were made into collective ones. They turned a natural virtue – empathy – into a vice. How could one feel sorry for a suffering human who had gone against the revolution? It was intended to atomize the citizen, cutting off his loyalties to his fellows and replacing it with loyalty to the state.

The struggle session worked similarly. The heretic would be forced to confront their own apostasies in such a way that altered them emotionally. Everything about them, right down to their core, was challenged and questioned. Once they could no longer trust themselves, they could only trust their masters in the party.

Ultimately, that is what has happened in Greece. It is one long struggle session. Like the forced confessions and show trials the Soviets were so fond of, this was intended not just for the Greeks, but the rest of Europe. The Greek Finance Minister said it was to warn the French, about being French. It was certainly a warning to the Brits and others who have patriotic parties making noises about Europe.

If you are a Greek citizen, how can you have any faith in your Greek democracy? Why would you bother with it? You now see that voting is just a charade. The people making the decisions are in Berlin and Brussels and they speak German. Those are the people in charge, not those guys lobbying for your vote. Comrade, why are you struggling against the tide of history?

As an aside, if you ever thought about what Europe would have been like if the Nazis had won, take a look at today’s Europe. Eventually Hitler would have died, probably assassinated, and been replaced by technocrats like Albert Speer. The Germans love technocrats more than they love scat films. By now, rule by street thug would have given way to rule by lemon-pussed technocrats.

Better Bring a Jacket

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In my lifetime, material progress was the solution to human suffering, the cause of human suffering, the cause of the planet suffering and due to making Gaia angry, the cause of human suffering again. There’s a fair bit of masochism in Western society and its outlet is environmentalism. The Greens really hate people and now they may have some great news. An ice age is on the horizon.

The Earth could be headed for a ‘mini ice age’ researchers have warned.

A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles – and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out.

This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the ‘Maunder minimum’ – which has previously been known as a mini ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London’s River Thames to freeze over.

The new model of the Sun’s solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun’s 11-year heartbeat.

It draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone.

Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the ‘mini ice age’ that began in 1645, according to the results presented by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.

The model predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022.

During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.

‘In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun,’ said Zharkova.

‘Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other.

‘We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum”

The Maunder Minimum, as a sidebar explains, “is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.” That corresponds to a period know as the Little Ice Age. It is also the period global warmists exclude from their models since it screws up their predictions.

If you live in Florida, a mild cooling of the climate is great news as it will mean San Diego style weather 12 months a year. If you live in Boston it means you will be shoveling snow in June and learning how to live with 20 foot snow piles in your drive. The good news is you have fifteen years to stock up on ice melt and work on your shoveling technique.