Monthly Archives: August 2015

L’affaire Cankles

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Americans are conditioned to think that what is reported in the news is a fair representation of reality. Everyone understands there is considerable bias in the news, but everyone assumes it is deliberate. The news people know, for example, that Obama is lying about his Iran deal. They just like him and therefore cover for him on it. In other words, there’s no secret conspiracy or deep state maneuverings going on, just good old fashioned partisanship in the reporting. If you look close enough, you can figure out what’s going on in the world.

Palace intrigue, cloak and dagger capers and Byzantine conspiracies are for movies and history books. In the old days, conspirators worked behind the scenes to undo the king or subvert his enemies in court, but that’s long over. Most people today subscribe to Franklin’s maxim that the only way three can keep a secret is if two are dead. Only tin foil hate loons talk about conspiracies, the “deep state” and clandestine plots.

I’ve never been a conspiracy guy and I tend to think a conspiracy of more than a handful of dedicated fanatics is not going to go too far. Even something like the 9/11 attacks worked mostly because of sloth. There were plenty of people who knew something was not right, but they were too lazy or too stupid to do anything about it. Good old fashioned dumb luck had more to do with 9/11 than conspiracy.

That does not mean things are done in the open. Politics is thick with plotting and scheming. It’s all they do, even when it works against their interests. That’s what makes the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal interesting to watch. There’s a lot not in the public domain, but we keep getting these drips suggesting someone is doing the dripping. That someone has reasons and they have a boss, possibly in the White House.

The thing that the press never bothers to consider is what must have been known for a long time. Hillary Clinton was at State in 2009 and supposedly had the private e-mail system on day one. That means everyone at State knew about it. It means the White House knew about it. Further, all of these people knew it was unusual and maybe even illegal. The first question that comes to my mind is why did the White House let this go on? Why would State not blow the whistle on this?

My hunch is the White House looked at this as mana from heaven. They had fall in their lap the best piece of leverage possible. Their political enemy was caught red handed mishandling classified information. Maybe it was not that way at first, but it was at least a very embarrassing thing that they now had on Clinton. It’s the sort of thing J. Edgar Hoover used to collect on people in case he needed leverage on them.

The most obvious explanation for why the White House kept this under their hat, so to speak, is it was great leverage for later. If they ever needed a favor from the Clintons or they needed to take down Hillary, they had the perfect weapon. Presumably they had the NSA or CIA monitoring the server, maybe even copying the traffic to and from it. Reports indicate the Clinton people did not encrypt the traffic, which is amazing. That means they may have other stuff.

Something people don’t know about how the government polices classified data is they have multiple counter espionage shops looking at everyone, using all the tools you read about. In the course of their normal work this off-the-books server would have been in briefings that make it to the President. At the minimum, they would have been in the briefing books.

That leads to why this is getting into the public now. In politics, a standard way to handle dirty laundry is to reveal it yourself to friendly media who will spin it for you. That way you get it out in the public on your terms, deal with the initial excitement and then declare it old news if anyone brings it up again. That does not appear to be the case here as Team Clinton has been absurdly ham-fisted in their handling of this thing. They are acting as if they don’t know who knows what about this thing.

That means the White House or State as the top targets behind the leaks. People forget that it was State that leaked the information on Valerie Plame to the press. Scooter Libby took the fall, but it was State that was playing politics. In the Plame case it was just good old fashioned blabbing that was the cause. In Watergate, Mark Felt allegedly conspired with the Washington Post against Nixon entirely out of spite. That could be the case here as the Clintons have a lot of enemies.

The other possibility that comes to mind is the White House is behind it. I tend to think this is the case as the leaks to the media have a DOJ vibe to them. The FBI is involved and what’s coming out is the sort of stuff that comes from an FBI investigation into the mishandling of classified material. That cannot happen without approval of the White House. This DOJ is so politicized they don’t take a crap without calling the White House.

That would raise the obvious question of why now? Maybe it is just serendipity. Things get out of hand in politics too. My hunch is they want to get Warren to reconsider and clearing the field of the 500 pound gorilla would change Warren’s math. Six months ago she was looking at running as the liberal insurgent. That’s not easy when the “centrist” is a vicious street fighter who had access to your raw FBI files. If the gorilla is suddenly out of the picture, Warren could run as the sensible liberal alternative to Bernie Sanders.

Plan B could be to back O’Malley, but he has a penis and is white. Joe Biden is too old and too crazy to be a serious alternative. It seems to me that unless they know Warren is ready to ride in as the white knight, it makes little sense for Team Obama to be leaking this stuff. Spite is always a possibility, but these guys are cold blooded when it comes to politics so I’m not inclined to think that’s the case.

There’s one other reason Team Obama could be behind this and that’s ego. A Republican in the White House would let Obama be the wise man of his party and function as a shadow president, questioning anything he does not like about the new guy. Clinton in the White House takes that away and it gives Team Clinton a chance to settle any old scores with Team Obama. With a Republican in the White House, Obama can walk around as the greatest living Democrat. That was worth $150 million to Bill Clinton. I’ll also note that Clinton did not help Gore and was not a great friend to Kerry or Obama.

I’ve written a lot about the comparisons between Hillary and Nixon. Their lives would make a great dual biography so the reader could compare the two in real time. Nixon was ultimately undone by enemies he knew, who were exploiting enemies he never imagined. Mark Felt was a nobody and no one had a reason to care about him. Alexander Butterfield was just a guy on Haldeman’s staff. More than a few great men have been brought low by minor figures just doing their jobs. Maybe that’s what we have here.

It would be great theater if in the end, Hillary goes to jail and Bill walks free.

Currency Wars

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I have a pet theory that a good way to understand history is to examine the currency arrangements. Historians will address the rampant debasement of the currency by the Romans in the third century, for example, but they never try to explain events through the lens of currency. I think you can argue that the history of money is the history of man in the sense that the arc of civilization is the mastery of money by the people in charge.

Two good examples are Charlemagne and Offa of Mercia. They were contemporaries and both reformed the coinage and mastered seigniorage. Forever after them, a key goal of the ambitious ruler was to control the coinage and use it as part of his arsenal against his adversaries. Closer to home, the history of the world post World War II is all about the dollar and its role as the reserve currency of the world.

Anyway, it looks like James Rickards was right a few years ago when he said the world is descending into a another currency war. That’s a great book, by the way. The Wall Street Journal reports that China is debasing its currency and sending shock waves through the emerging markets.

China’s devaluation of its currency jolted global markets Tuesday, hitting stocks and commodities and boosting government bonds.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.2% to 17402.84, erasing most of the previous session’s gains. The S&P 500 fell 1% to 2084.07. The pan-European Stoxx Europe 600 index closed 1.6% lower.

Oil and metals prices also fell sharply, while demand for haven assets pushed down bond yields in the U.S. and Europe, as investors worried that Beijing’s move signaled concerns over growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

The moves came after the People’s Bank of China on Tuesday pushed down the yuan’s trading range against the dollar, setting its daily fixing rate 1.9% lower. Investors reacted to the move by pushing the yuan down almost 2% from that level.

Financial markets saw it as a sign that Chinese authorities believe it is necessary to act to boost flagging growth, said Ewen Cameron Watt, chief investment strategist at BlackRock’s Inc.’s Investment Institute.

They call currency devaluation “beggar thy neighbor” for a reason. China, in an effort to boost exports, will start printing money, thus lowering its value against the dollar and other currencies. That will make Chinese products more competitive in US and European markets. This may be fine for the US and Europe as it means cheap goods and people like cheap goods for a while.

The trouble is everyone else will have no choice but to follow suit and debase their currency. It can easily become a race to the bottom. International management through central banks is probably enough to keep things from getting out of hand, but there are unknown unknowns. The biggest is the off the books carry trade market that is possibly over $9 Trillion USD now.

The entirety of this market is leverage. You borrow money to invest it in another currency. Presumably, settlement of both ends of the transaction leaves a profit, but big moves in the currency rates means huge losses. Those losses are covered by liquidating other assets to cover the loss. This can set off a cascading effect blowing up whole markets in days, even with the loss prevention systems governments have in place. The most obvious example is The Asian Financial Crisis of ’97.

Life is not a math problem and so economic problems become political problems. Brazil, which is already struggling, cannot withstand a currency war. This is not a country with a stable political and cultural foundation. The current president is already under fire so a deepening economic crisis will probably lead to political turmoil or worse. Military coup is the traditional way of doing things in Brazil so you never can rule that out as a possibility.

Currency wars never end well. The currency war that started in the 1920’s ended with depression and world war. The disorganized flight from the Bretton Woods system eventually led to the current system of towering world debt that may be about to tip over. The only way for the West to maintain their massive custodial states is through unlimited credit emissions. A full on currency war probably brings that to an end.

 

The Cost Shifting Economy

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Car dealers train their salesmen to focus the customer on the car payment and not the sticker price. There’s a number of reasons for it. One is that people will take a larger car payment that they want if they like the car. The difference between a $500 payment and a $550 payment is easy to justify when you’re in love. That’s a few thousand dollars more in car, but it only feels like fifty bucks.

The other reason is the dealer can bundle everything up so that the customer cannot negotiate each item one at a time. The last thing a dealer wants is to debate the trade-in, the interest rate, the dealer options and so on. A good salesman can sneak in some high profit items to the dealer, while hitting the customers peak tolerance for a car payment.

The mobile phone market has always worked on this principle. My first mobile phone was from a place in Boston that basically leased you a phone and charged you each month for minutes. They quickly figured out that was a loser and just included the minutes. That was late 80’s and it has been that way ever since. You “buy” the phone, but you’re really just making a down payment. The rest is financed through your monthly bill.

That’s about to change and it is another example of the cracks showing up in the cost-shifting economy.

Verizon Wireless today announced a new set of wireless data plans, and none of them are available with contracts or phone subsidies.

It’s not clear from Verizon’s announcement whether it’s going to completely stop offering contracts and device subsidies to new customers after these plans become available on August 13. Since the announcement doesn’t say anything about killing existing plans, it’s possible that the company could still offer traditional two-year contracts, but without promoting them. We’ve asked Verizon about this and will provide an update if we get one.Going forward, Verizon will encourage customers to either buy phones outright or pay for the entire device in installments. This differs from the model in which you get a discount of several hundred dollars off the price of a new phone but have to sign a two-year contract that can’t be broken without paying early termination fees. When customers own their phones outright, it’s a lot easier to switch carriers to get a better deal.

The mobile carriers have been subsidizing the phone purchase by financing it through the bill. That’s how the broke waitress can afford a $650 iPhone. Apple was shifting the cost of their phone to the carrier. The carrier, in turn, found a way to game the customer by tucking the costs in the monthly bill. They also put some interest in there too.

That worked fine in a growing market, but the market is saturated. They’ve run out of greater fools. Now the carriers are chasing price and that means the subsidies go away. The number of people will be willing to pony up $650 for an iPhone is probably much less than the number willing to pay $200. This will have the inevitable result of collapsing the margins of the phone makers as they have to chase price.

For a long time now the US economy has been based on the belief that growth is forever. When every business in a market is based on forever growth, when the market stops growing, it collapses and takes everyone with it. The housing bubble is a classic example, but large swaths of the tech economy have worked the same way. We’re running out of new people to pay for the old people now. The results are inevitable.

We have Always Been At War With The South

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The descendents of Puritan Yankees are bound together over one thing and that’s a deep hatred of the South. They used to hate the South because it represented the Royalist side of English life. Once the North was able to destroy the South and Royalist culture, things calmed down for a while. But, the fevered lunacy of the North was revived with the importation of new crackpot ideas from the Continent and the Cult of Modern Liberalism was born. Soon thereafter they went to war with the South again.

This just in from old friend Lois Lerner:

Lois Lerner, the central figure in the IRS targeting controversy, called Abraham Lincoln the country’s worst president in an email disclosed in a bipartisan Senate report, according to USA Today.

“Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best,” Lerner wrote in an email dated March 6, 2014.Lerner, the former IRS director of Exempted Organizations, joked in one email that the 16th president should have just let the South secede, rather than fighting the Civil War.

“He should [have] let the south go,” Lerner wrote in response to a friend who disparaged Texas as a “pathetic” state. “We really do seem to have [two] different mind sets.”

The report also highlighted emails written by Lerner calling conservatives “crazies” and “a–holes.”

As I keep saying, the cultural heirs of those Yankee Puritans are not acting from facts and reason. They look at the rest of the country, particularly the South, as sub-human. In the 18th century they saw the South as an affront to God. In the 19th century they saw the South as a threat to God’s creation. They’ve dropped the references to God in the 20th, so the South became an obstacle to the Progressive paradise.

It should come as no surprise that Lerner is from Massachusetts, the epicenter of liberal lunacy. Her husband appears to be from Eastern Ohio, which was settled by Puritan lunatics after the Revolution. Another one of my themes is that belief is heritable and therefore fanaticism is as well. A whole lot of commies were the children of religious Jews for a reason. The believing gene is strong in the Tribe.

ISIS and the West

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The rise of fundamentalist Islam has perplexed and outraged the West for a few decades now. The prophesies all said the brown people would rejoice when the good thinkers welcomed Islam into the West. Instead, the muzzies have gone bonkers, rejecting the West and retreating into a medieval philosophy that rejects everything the West believes about the world.

I thought about that while reading this book review in the New York Review of Books. Why it is written by “anonymous” is a mystery to me. Maybe the Economist style is coming to America. It always seem to me that the propaganda arm of the custodial state should use that style. That way it is hard for the masses to dismiss the lectures. Anyway, the article is worth reading, but this bit is what got my attention:

The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast.

I’m highlighting that bit as there was a time when using the phrase “social justice” would get you laughed out of most rooms. Even lefty outposts like the New York Review of Books would flinch at that phrase. That’s because everyone knew it was a ridiculous idea, held only by the naive and stupid. Today, “everyone knows” the point of government is social justice. Go figure.

Interestingly, the “genuine economic growth” line has crossed the street in my life as well. There was a time when only black-hearted right wingers talked about economic growth. Decent people understood that there was much more to life than money. Now, even the most fanatical Progressives thinks that every tree must grow to the sky, no matter what.

I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise.

I’ve argued often that American Progressive faith has a lot in common with Islam. Some of my comparisons are meant to be snarky, but there’s a lot of points of comparison. One area is the inward looking nature of the two faiths. Progressives fixate on communal salvation in the same way Muslims do, the two just have different ends.

The main difference is that Islam knows a lot about the West. Most people don’t know that Islam was the the center of intellectual life before the Mongols came calling. The Sack of Baghdad in 1258 is viewed as the point at which Islam fell behind the West and the East culturally. Muslim Arabs are well aware of this, having grown up in the shadow of the West, often living in the West.

We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.

I’ve come to think of Progressives as the decedents¹ of the Puritans for a number of reasons. The one reason important here is the inward looking nature of both Puritan and Progressive culture. The Puritans saw salvation as a community activity. Internal discipline and cohesion were paramount so they focused on it exclusively. A certain studied ignorance of the outside world was critical to maintain discipline. That’s a Progressive quality as well.

The result is the people in charge not only misunderstand the world beyond their understanding, they have no way of understanding it. To understand the draw of Islam to young Arabs, you need to consider the possibility that life in the West is not on the road to paradise. You also have to contemplate the possibility that there are many ways to be happy as a people.

The innate intolerance of Progressives prohibits this sort of speculation. There’s also the deep rooted belief that bad things happen to God’s people when those people fail in their duty as God’s servants. That means 9/11 was America’s fault for not abiding by the Progressive virtues. The rise of ISIS was due to bad US policy in the region (Bush). The muzzies lack agency of their own so they are not blamed.

That’s why Progressives are so vexed with ISIS. President Obama, peace be upon him, has been running policy in the region for a long time. Everything has been done properly and yet these people hate us as much, if not more, than they did in the Bush years. Their “analytical spade” hits bedrock very fast because it does not exist. They have not thought for a second that the Muslims could have a point of two to make.
¹Yes, that is on purpose.

The Die is Cast

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Watching the GOP “debate” the other night, I started thinking about how my bias will effect my judgement of the results. That’s what you always see with these things. Everyone wears their bias on their sleeve. I know Kasich fans who swear he carried the night. Trump fans are on twitter claiming Trump had a good night. Kevin Williamson needed his meds doubled in order to avoid being committed.

That last bit is a good example. Williamson hates Trump. It is an irrational, unhinged hatred, which would be fine except that Trump is doing well. Worse for Kevin is that his readers are mostly enjoying the show and see Trump as a protest vote. The result is Kevin sounds like a low-IQ lunatic. Bias can be very powerful stuff.

Anyway, I was watching and wondering how my bias is shaping my opinions. I want to like Perry, but he’s just not very good so I’m probably doing OK on that score. I want to like Walker and I’m probably willing to overlook his wobbly responses to the important questions. I want to hate Santorum, but I have to admit he says sensible things. I can at least see why people like him.

The truth is I don’t have a big investment in the Republicans. Thinking about my biases, that’s the conclusion I hit on. I’m probably more invested in Kevin Williamson’s nervous breakdown over Trump, as I used to enjoy reading Kevin’s columns. Who the GOP nominates for their guy is simply not all that important to me. I’m just not that into them anymore and they are not into guys like me either.

The last few elections, I went to vote out of habit and loyalty to the old ways. I was born into a country where people, who were like me, tried hard to win my vote. I now live in a country where people who hate me and are nothing like me chase the votes of people who hate me. Voting, for me, is mostly about remembering the way things used to be. Occasionally there’s something on the under-card worth considering.

The other night, thinking about this stuff, I was reminded of this Sean Trende piece from the last election. This table explains Trump and it predicts who the GOP must pick for their candidates in order to win:

Whites are starting to walk away from the process. Not all classes of whites. The Trende piece shows that it is the rural and working class whites, that is staying home. He characterizes them as the Perot vote, which would now be called the Trump vote. The folks on the Dissident Right, who would not be considered downscale in any other context, are certainly a part of this dynamic.

My guess is the GOP’s biggest problem is with white men. I know a lot of white guys who are generally disgusted with the Republicans. I was at lunch the other day with men who are typical middle-class suburbanites. The sort you think of as Chamber of Commerce types. All of them were fed up with the GOP and they were talking about Trump. They know he is a clown, but they’re just tired of the bullshit from the party.

Now, Trump will never be the nominee. That circus on Thursday night was just the appetizer. While Trump helps Bush and the surrender wing of the GOP right now, he is seen as an embarrassment so he has to go. Ideally, from their perspective, the air goes out of his balloon in the fall and he drops out over the holidays. That way he is a non-story for the primaries.

Can they win without these voters?

Here are some math to consider. These are states along with their electoral votes that are Democrat locks: WA(12), OR(7), CA(55), NM(5), ME(4), NH(4), VT(3), MA(11), RI(4), CT(7), NY(29) NJ(14), MD(10), DE(3), DC(3), HI(4). That’s 175 votes and they need 270 to win.That’s just the states that are a mortal lock. The GOP will not even campaign for president in these states.

Here are the “swing states” that the media locks in on every year. CO(9), MN(10), WI(10), MI(16), IA(6), MO(10), OH(18), PA(20), VA(13), NC(15), FL(15). That looks like a lot, but states like MN have not gone GOP since the 70’s. Demographics say this can change, but until it does there’s no reason to think it is going to in 2016. Adding back the heavy leaners to the Democrat total you get 240 electoral votes.

The GOP has to sweep Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida and make sure none of their more reliable states like Missouri swing the other way. Virginia has been invaded by Hispanics and Yankees, who vote Democrat exclusively. It went for Obama the last two times for that reason. Similarly, Florida went Obama the last two times.

Can the GOP win these states if they don’t drive up that white guy vote? Maybe, but the odds are against them. Can they win with a guy like Bush at the top of the ticket? There’s where things get interesting. A Bush – Kasich ticket will give the GOP the White House as they are sure to carry Ohio and Florida. Similarly, a Kasich – Rubio ticket will get them the White House. Any other combination is probably a loser.

So, there’s no reason to pay any attention to the GOP primary. The die is cast.

The Tourney O’Champions

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I’m not sure if there is a good way to handle a field of 17 candidates, as far as holding debates and candidate forums. It’s not like most of these candidates are fringe candidates with no shot to win. All of them have at least a puncher’s chance to win a primary or two. There’s just no way to have a debate with 17 people. Once you get past five or six it get too busy.

The bigger problem is having media people run these things. They want good TV and that means a bad forum for transmitting information.It also means using the “talent” used for the news programs and many of those people are as dumb as a plank. Stupid people asking liars their views on public policy is not a recipe for success, but it is how we do things in the Banana Republic.

The Kiddie Table

I felt sorry for this bunch. For some reason they held their debate in an empty auditorium so it underscored the fact that no one likes these candidates. It had a Model United Nations vibe to it, like they were high school kids learning about elections through a mock debate.The two airheads asking questions were what you would expect from announcers at the New Year’s Day parades.

Rick Perry: They asked Perry about Trump right away and he got angry and stayed angry the rest of the show. There was one point where I was sure he was going to fly into a rage. It was not until his closing remarks that he cracked a smile. Perry’s problem has always been that he cannot explain how anything he did as governor had anything to do with the Texas economy. He also has a little of the Bush mush-mouth to him and that brings up bad memories.

Rick Santorum: I don’t want to like this guy, but he is the best informed on the topics and he holds sensible opinions on most of them. He’s the one guy who truly understands that ours is a culture fight, not a math problem. On the immigration question you could tell he has thought about it. It was a good answer too. The trouble is he is detested by the press and the Republican establishment so he has no chance the get any traction.

Bobby Jindal: I got the sense that he was looking at Pataki and Gilmore and wondering if that’s not his future. Jindal has been a competent governor by the standards of Louisiana, but you have to have more than that to run for president. He’s a guy who would look great with a PowerPoint presentation explaining how accounting saved money on envelopes last quarter. His basic argument is he will run the Leviathan better than anyone else. He’s the Nehru version of Mitt Romney.

Carly Fiorina: I get why media think she is good. She’s what Washington thinks normal people sound like. Normal people think she sounds like the woman from HR. Her argument is that she will run the custodial state better than the others thus making Americans trust the rulers again. Like any technocrat, she thinks making the columns lineup on her spreadsheet is the solution to everything. She’s Mitt Romney in drag, but the media plans to drag her into the top tier because that’s the narrative.

Lindsey Graham: I take a back seat to no man in my loathing of Caitlin Graham, or the “Bro with no ho” as they say in the hood. But, I felt bad for him. He was nervous and his voice was cracking like a teenager. His answers bordered on the bizarre they were so rambling. The look on his face is what you expect from someone reading a note on a hostage tape. You have to wonder why he is doing this. He has no reason to run, nothing to say and he sucks at it.

George Pataki: Men who have spent their lives in politics, particularly in east coast states, get very good at these things. They have stood in front of empty rooms and packed houses. They have stood in front of old folks and high school kids, giving the banal speeches local pols give every day. Pataki is a very good speaker, but he would be better off in the Democrat party. His answer on abortion was what moderate Democrats used to say in the 80’s.

Jim Gilmore: People forget that Gilmore was a solid governor. It was a different time and a long time ago, but there’s something to say for being a good governor. That’s the trouble. It was a long time ago. He’s another guy who is a good candidate, doing all the little things you want from a politician, except he has no reason to be running. Come to think of it, he had no reason to run for governor.

Kiddie Table Post Game

The show after the show had the usual collection of chattering skulls from Fox. George Will made me laugh because he has been in the bubble for so long he’s not even sure what time it is. There was a time when Will was a big deal because he was the only non-liberal on TV chat shows. Today he looks like a guy who went to sleep in 1977 and just came out of the coma. It’s kind of tough to watch.

I predicted that they would all try to pump air in Fiorina’s tires and I was right. All of the skulls took turns slurping on Carly, insisting she stole the show. One of them was puzzled as to why voters have no idea why Fiorina is running. It’s one of those times where the media reveals something about themselves they try hard to conceal. In this case, they live in the media hive and see the rest of the country as an alien land. We’re talking monkeys to them.

The Adult Table

The pregame had A-list Fox stars and a packed house, which gave it the feel of a beauty pageant. I think if I were an atheist, I’d point to this as proof there is no God. If there was a God, he would rain down fire and brimstone on any country that picks its leaders this way. I have low standards for this stuff and I was embarrassed to be watching it. Maybe having a hereditary monarch is not such a bad idea after all.

Donald Trump: The problem business people have when running for office is they are not very good at being polite to losers. Trump is not used to humoring losers and so he gets ticked off dealing with the press. That’s fine on the stump, but in a debate he just ends up looking surly and unpleasant. Chris Wallace was there to submarine Trump and he did a good job at it. Trump did not help himself very much either. He did not kill his chances, but he is going to have be better at these things if he wants to be a serious candidate.

¡Yeb! Bush: I tend to think ¡Yeb! will be the nominee simply because he has the money, connections and the support of Conservative Inc. National Review has all their folks going off to ¡Yeb! camp through the summer so they can properly pimp him next year. The trouble is he is a dull as dirt. I can’t believe anyone walked away from this thinking he was their guy. I suspect his backers are getting very nervous right now.

Scott Walker: On paper, he should be the front runner. He’s a solid conservative. He’s getting better on immigration. he took the full blast of the Cult of Modern Liberalism and stood his ground. I doubt anyone remembers a thing he said in this debate. My sense watching him is he is playing for when Trump goes away so he can take down Bush one on one. He’s going to be the reasonable guy to the right of Bush.

Mike Huckabee: There’s a sizable Evangelical vote in the primary and Huckabee knows how to reach that vote. Like Rand Paul, he is a boutique candidate who can live off the land, hoping for something miraculous to happen. Nothing like that happened in this debate, but he did not say anything weird.

Ben Carson: I kept thinking Carson was invited because he promised to bring weed. I’m sure he is a nice man, but his answers were incoherent and he stumbled through his answers like a beauty pageant contestant. I’ve heard him a few times and he always sounds confused when answering off-the-cuff. I suspect he vaporized himself tonight as there are other options for people looking for a values candidate.

Ted Cruz: He’s the one guy who says exactly what he wants to say on every subject. He’s a trained lawyer and he is the smartest guy in the race. That shines through clearly when he is given time to speak. He comes off a bit too hot for these things and probably for most voters. he’s not a man blessed with charisma. I think he did enough to stick around for a while, but he really needs Trump to go so he can be the man of the right.

Marco Rubio: He pretty much disappeared. I never got the point of his candidacy. The reason the party is pushing him as Bush-lite is he is Hispanic, which they think is magical. The rest of us just think he is too young, too dumb and too inexperienced to be taken seriously. Like Carson, I think he goes flat quickly now that his voters have other choices that say the same things.

Rand Paul: Rand Paul is right about a lot of things. His highlight was when he disemboweled Tubby over the Fourth Amendment. There’s really nothing better than seeing someone knock a bully on his ass. After that he disappeared. I don’t know if it matters as he is a boutique candidate anyway. But, he probably did enough to stick around and that’s all that matters for him.

Chris Christie: The highlight of the night was Rand Paul slapping fatty around over search warrants. I can’t figure out why Christie is running. he should be going for the good government pitch, a prol version of ¡Yeb! Instead he is bellowing like a lunatic about things no normal person would get exorcised over. It’s like he thinks screaming is his thing and he has to do in order to be authentic.

John Kasich: What a jerk. That’s what I think every time I hear him speak. He could be a saint, but his TV vibe is fingernails on a chalkboard. He’s another guy who plays too hot for TV. He’s always shouting and pointing. No one wants someone in their living room who is shouting and pointing. I always wonder why no one asks him about being a big shot at Lehman right up until they collapsed.

Post Game

The media will declare Fiorina the big winner from the junior circuit. That was obvious before this started. They like the idea of the long-shot female candidate trying to break up the pale penis people club. It’s a great example of the hive mentality of the press corp.

The big loser is Trump. He looked like a jerk and he did not seem to know much about the issues. Immigration patriots will be disappointed, but they were fools if they thought he was going to win this thing. Trump is a vehicle to shaking up the race and in that regard he was the big winner. My guess is he starts to fade, unless he gets better quickly.

The other big loser was Bush. He was just another dull white guy on stage. If you were a Bush man going into this, you saw several options that were better and similar to Bush on policy. Even Fox, which is Bush country, had nothing to say about Bush after the show. I may be biased, but Bush was a big nothing.

Watching the Debate

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I’m not sure if I will watch the debates tonight. I have been meaning to clean the dryer vent for a while and maybe learn how to do a prostate self-exam. In all seriousness, I have a tough time watching these things as they have been turned into talent shows, without the talent. The preening clowns from the media, grinning like chimps for the cameras, asking a bunch of moist robots pointless questions is no way to run a country.

I’m not alone. Last cycle, the best numbers for a debate were early on when Gingrich was bashing the press. The debate in August of 2011 got seven million viewers. The rest struggled to break three million, which is 1 out of every 50 households. I doubt the debates have any impact on voter behavior. Romney waxed the floor with Obama in the debates and still lost handily.

I think one of the things to watch for tonight is how much of an ass Chris “Thanks Dad” Wallace makes of himself trying to be clever. He’s there to mug for the camera and that means trying to trip up the candidates with silly questions he thinks are clever. Trump’s presence will be too much for him to resist so I expect Wallace to show up wearing big floppy red shoes and a red rubber ball nose.

The night is, of course, all about Trump. He’ll get the business from Wallace and how he handles it will be the story. Having Wallace asks the questions probably works for Trump, but you never know. Trump’s act works when he fills the room. Being one guy on a stage of ten may make him look small. That’s what happened to Fred Thompson. Everyone expected the bigger than life TV guy and they got just another guy.

The other thing I’ll be watching is how Christie is treated and how he does with his one shot to get attention. I’ve always suspected the media liked him as “good TV, but totally safe on policy.” Take away the bombast and you have Rudy Giuliani in a fat suit. If ¡Yeb! can’t get his act together, the fat man is a good alternative for the party and their media sponsors. I don’t think primary voters feel the same way, but Republicans tend to fall in line, rather than fall in love.

That’s the other big story. Can ¡Yeb! arrest his decline. In the candidate forum the other day he was awful. I forgot just how bad the Bush Klan is at speaking in public. They have a way of making good news sound like a cancer diagnosis. Bush needs to give people a reason to like him. Right now he is trading on his name recognition and starting now the other names will become recognized. Personally, I hope he strips naked and runs screaming into the street.

The warm-up acts are another area of interest. The kiddie table Fox has set up for the candidates not polling well enough to get a seat at the adult table could be a story of their own. My hunch is the media will be looking for one they can start to champion just to have a story to tell. Narrative journalism requires at least one long shot and plucking a Carly Fiorina from the pack and promoting her fits the narrative. Plus, the press could use her to prove Republicans hate women.

I’m going to watch Walker and Cruz. I can’t say I’m a big fan of either guy, but they have a tale to tell. Cruz is the populist firebrand, at least by today’s soft feminine standards. TV is a cool medium that tends not to work well for firebrands. Walker is a boring dork who sounds like a robot, but he has the best resume of the bunch. I’m curious as to how they try to make this thing work for them.

Otherwise, this is the first weekend of the NCAA tournament for politics. It’s fun to sort through the candidates and think about how they could win, but we all know the game is rigged. Still, it is fun to see the underdogs score some points and give the big dogs a fight. Football season starts in a month so it fills the time between now and then.

Post-Christian West

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On this day 1374 years ago, give or take, A Northumbrian army assembled on a field in the West Midlands, which is on the west (left) side of England. North Umbria was in the northern most territory of England, bordering Scotland. Their leader was a man named Oswald and he was the king of Bernicia. He was the most powerful king on the island, the Bretwalda, and the man often credited with the Christianizing the north of England.

On the other side was King Penda of Mercia, one of the other kings of the heptarchy. Mercia covered the area that is now called the Midlands, which is conveniently located in the middle of England. Penda was a pagan, the last pagan king of England. Mercia was not very powerful, but they stood in the way of Oswald dominating the south, so they were a natural target for the Northumbrians.

On the day of the battle, Oswald, no doubt, stood before his men and prayed to the new God for victory over their pagan enemies. The custom of the age was to promise gifts to the Church and maybe a daughter or son to the Church in exchange for victory. This was one of the many pagan habits the Church tolerated in order to bring the people slowly into the Church.

On the other side, Penda most certainly made offerings to the old gods, along with promises of additional sacrifices if they were victorious. The origins of King Penda are a bit murky, but we do know he was a pagan, and the pagan faith of Britain was Wodenism. It most likely came over with the Saxons and there’s some evidence that Penda was a Saxon.

The Battle of Maserfield probably lasted just a short while. The “armies” of the day were warbands under the command of an Althing or head chief. No one really knows, but the consensus is that armies were at most a few thousand men and probably numbered in the hundreds. In the end, Penda was victorious. Bede describes the outcome as a field made white with the bones of the saints. Oswald, when the battle was lost, is claimed to have knelt and prayed for the souls of his soldiers. Penda had him chopped into pieces and displayed on stakes.

If you were alive at the time, particularly if you were a Mercian, you probably thought Christianity was on the run and the old gods were reasserting their dominion. Certainly, Christians had their doubts. But, a dozen years later Oswald’s brother killed Penda at the Battle of Winwaed and a dozen years after that Oswiu presided over the Synod of Whitby where the secular and Christian authorities codified Christianity for the whole of England, including Mercia.

The point of this blast from the past is to illustrate how the culture can seem to shift very quickly. Even in the slow moving medieval period, a nation could switch religions within a generation. One day you’re helping your father burn the Christian missionary, the next day your son is packing wood under your pagan feet at the behest of the local priest. In a world where the religion of the king is the religion of the people, things can change quickly.

A little closer to our time is the matter of homosexual marriage. In the US, as is usually the case, the rulers impose their fads on the people through the mockery of the court system. That makes it easier for the people to pretend they are a conservative people with a liberal government. The reality is Christianity is dead in America so the people in charge know they will face no resistance.

In Ireland, a place to played up by Hollywood as an austere Catholic country, the people rushed to the polls to vote for homosexual marriage. It’s not that they really cared about the gays or that they were smiting the Church. They simply stopped being Catholic. In 1990, 80% of the people went to church each week. Today it is half that number so voting for homosexual marriage was just what the cool kids were doing.

The point here is that what you see happening today is a lot like what happened with the spread of Christianity through Europe. It was slow and proceeded in fits and starts. Early Christianity in Britain, for example, was hilarious due to the heavy drinking and fornicating of the priests. The commoners could hardly be held to account by such men, at least on moral issues. Over time, a critical mass of true believers gained the upper hand and Christianity became a defining force in English life.

That’s what we’re seeing with the New Religion. It’s not ready to wipe Christianity out completely. It’s simply too ridiculous to be taken seriously by enough people. But it is making steady progress. If you look at this post from a blogger with a name that is too hard to spell, what you see is the steady erosion of Christianity in America. A third of people under 30 have “no religious affiliation” which means they are not Christian.

About half the country does not attend church at all. In New England, the home of liberal fanaticism, church attendance has collapsed, now resembling Europe. The number of church closings in America suggests that self-reporting of church attendance is wildly inflated. Even in the South, which has always been the most religious part of the country, there’s been a decline in church attendance.

The Battle of Maserfield seemed to stall or even possible signal a rollback of Christianity, but it was just a blip. Similarly, the eradication of Christianity by people of the New Religion has stalled from time to time, but it is winning and will win in time. Today Christians are stripped of their property for disobeying homosexuals. In a generation they will be banned from public. Like Wodenism, Christianity will be a weird part of the past for future generations.

Roundheads Versus the Cavaliers

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A central thesis of mine and a reason for this blog to exist is that most of America is entirely clueless as to why the 20% are making war on them. The daily assaults on the Four Olds by the Cult of Modern Liberalism is like a swarm of bees attacking from all directions. Logically, you know the numbers are small, but it feels like there are so many of them.

Jonah Goldberg wrote a book called Liberal Fascism a few years back. In it he documents how both American Liberalism and European Fascism share intellectual roots and how early Progressives borrowed from the Italian Fascists. There’s nothing new in the book, but it is a nice summary of the topic. Goldberg had to pull his punches, of course, given his career choice. Calling your employers fascists is never a good idea.

The trouble with so much of the analysis of the Left by the so-called Right is that it starts when their people arrived in America. It is a default assumption of “immigrant America” that the wave of Europeans that arrived at the end of the 19th and early 20 century forever reconfigured American culture. The story of America for them begins in the Jewish, Italian and Irish ghettos of New York, cutting off the 200-plus years of history that still defines the country.

If you read the Dissident Right, a common theme is the Cold Civil War between one group of whites (Progressives) and the other group of whites (Traditionalists). The assumption, and probably an accurate one, is that this term refers to the American Civil War. My guess is most people who think of the culture war this way are referring to the American Civil War. That event looms so large in the imaginations of the political elites, it is a reasonable way to start.

I would contend that the better place to start is the English Civil War, the fight between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, the Parliamentarians versus the Royalists. The people that settled New England were English, who were on the side of the Roundheads. Some actually fought in Cromwell’s army. They also came from specific areas of England, thus having customs particular to that area, which they brought with them to the New World.

The other big colony founded at the time was the Tidewater area around the Chesapeake. The men who founded and developed Virginia and North Carolina were men of high birth and they created the sort of society you would expect from such men. The colonies of the Deep South were founded by plantation owners from Barbados. They not only shared the same sensibilities as the Tidewater gentry, they were also Royalists.

Just as the two sides of the English Civil War had a different political and religious vision, they had a different social vision. This was true of the American colonies. The Yankee world was one that was highly egalitarian and defined political liberty in terms of community freedom. The South was hierarchical, defining liberty as that of the gentry and their freedom as a ruling class.

The bigger divide was in their social views. Males in a Cavalier society were going to be what you imagine. Status was conferred on those who showed courage, daring and risk taking. In a Puritan society, males attained status through the sorts of things a highly egalitarian and fanatically religious people value. Instead of flamboyance, it was competence and community spirit that were the key to status.

This standoff between the New Model Army and the high risk cavalry charge is with us today. The assault on white males is not about race as much as it is about the concept of masculinity. This insane article from Salon gets at what I mean.

Toxic white masculinity defaults to violence as a means of maintaining social and political control. It clings to guns as a symbol of “real” male identity. It fears women as equals; it lashes out at non-whites who are somehow “stealing” white men’s jobs and power. Toxic white masculinity sees “liberals,” “progressives,” “social justice,” and “feminism” as enemies — out of a fear that “white masculinity” will somehow be made obsolete or extinct. The dream worlds and paranoid fantasies of angry white men are distractions that look to some type of Other as the preeminent threat to America’s safety and security. The reality is of course, very different.

There’s the old Roundhead versus Cavalier fight. The Progressive crazies making war on white males today are the spiritual descendents of those Roundheads, who executed King Charles. It’s not a political or cultural issue as much as it is a spiritual issue. The modern Progressive sees the flamboyant brash male as a threat to the spiritual well being of the community. In the Puritan tradition, men are humble, competent and risk adverse, as God expects from the elect.

Another Puritan attribute comes into play here and that’s a fanatic’s sense of obligation to enforce their ways on everyone else. The Puritans believed they were chosen by God to protect the common good through maintaining internal conformity and unity. When John Adams won the Presidency after Washington retired, he immediately set about enforcing Puritan culture on the rest of the country.

The Alien and Sedition Acts are exactly the sorts of laws you expect from religious fanatics. Modern Iranians or Saudis would perfectly understand the point. On the one hand Puritans wanted to keep foreigners from bringing foreign ideas, by forcing them to assimilate – or else. On the other hand, they wanted to stamp out dissent, particularly from those Cavalier males to their south.