Monthly Archives: May 2016

Time to Forget

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Certain events have a warping effect on the culture long after they have any practical impact. The sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols permanently altered the trajectory of Islam. The English Civil War is another great example of a single event casting a shadow over many subsequent generations. Regular readers will know I reference it often, because it plays such a big part in American history. America would be a much different place if the Mayflower had sunk in the North Atlantic or the Wampanoag had done the right thing and slaughtered the Pilgrims.

The reason we have the word “penumbra” is that every shadow has a limit, beyond which it has no influence. In the history of man, those seminal events that cast the shadows, shrink with the passage of time and their shadow correspondingly shrinks. In time, they cease to exist. We can joke about Genghis Khan because he no longer casts a shadow any of us can feel. One day, people will joke about Hitler in the same way because his deeds will have no impact on the minds of the living.

We are living in an age of receding shadows as the big events that have shaped our present fade from our collective memory along with the people who lived through them. Hitler is an obvious example. Let us assume the youngest one can remember back is to when they were around five years old. That means the youngest person to remember Hitler is seventy-six right now. It means the youngest person who could have fought Hitler is pushing ninety right now.

In my lifetime, the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement are the two issues that loomed largest in politics. I do not remember an election that did not have some racial component to it. The Democrats try to use the race card to turnout the black vote. At the same time, support for Israel has been a defining issue of foreign policy debates. Republicans are so hawkish on defending Israel; they often sound like they are running for Prime Minister of Israel.

For generations, the worst thing you could ever be called was an anti-Semite. A close second was racist. One of the things that we see in what we are now calling the Alt-Right is an indifference to the charge of racism. In fact, many make sport of being called a racist and spend hours on Twitter trolling Lefty in order to elicit the racist charge. The reason is the charge has been so overused that it is laughable. When you get called a racist for quoting FBI crime statistics, the charge has no meaning. It is simply another way for the mob to scream “witch!”

Vox Day has a recap of a twitter exchange between himself, Jonah Goldberg and Milo Yiannopoulos the other day. A point Milo and others are now making is that the charge of anti-Semitism has gone the way of racist. No one takes it seriously because it has been so overused. There is also the fact that no one alive has any clear recollections of the Holocaust so it has no emotional impact. That is why telling jokes about Jews is no more meaningful to young alt-right types than telling Irish jokes.

There is certainly some truth to their claims. When not spending the $400k salary he pays himself from the magazine his father created, John Podhoretz spends his days calling people anti-Semitic on Twitter. When he gets bored with that, he runs around demanding to see the bar mitzvah pictures of Jews he does not like, so he can accuse them of not being authentically Jewish. There’s only so long that festering carbuncles like John Podhoretz can do this before people no longer take any of it seriously.

The Holocaust has cast an exceedingly long shadow over American public life and it may be starting to recede. Like the tide going out, we are now seeing a lot of surprising things that had been covered by the water. One of those is that there is not as much conformity and unanimity within the Jewish community as has been assumed. The blood libel against all gentiles has forced a degree of solidarity on Jews in America, but as that loses its power to scare the goy, it also loses its power to unite the Tribe.

I think that’s what we are seeing with the feud between Bill Kristol and David Horowitz. Solidarity is losing its value so it is beginning to crack and a guy like Horowitz is fine with having a nasty public spat with a fellow Jew. Yes, what is good for Israel is a part of it, but that is not the defining issue for Jews in America. Evangelicals care more about Israel than most Jews. The core issue in this dispute is patriotism.

The yesterday men on the Right like Podhoretz and Goldberg will cling to the old slurs until the last man, but this is probably a positive development in America. You can meet Italians who are liberal and you can meet Italians who are libertarians. In other words, blood does not dictate politics for 85% of Americans. The exceptions are blacks and Jews and we may be seeing that fall away for the Jews.

That is probably a positive development as it means Jews can fully and publicly integrate into American life in the same way the Irish or the Italians have blended into the fabric of American culture. No one ever talks about Irish solidarity in the way we talk about Jewish solidarity or black solidarity. No one worries about offending Italians or Poles. There is no stigma attached to it. Just as important, the rest of us can stop tip-toeing around the obvious.

By obvious, I mean the fact that Jews have been the most successful ethnic group in America. In fact, no country has been better for Jews than America. Here, the Jewish people have been free to reach their maximum potential. That is something all Americans should take some pride in, but Jews should be extremely proud. Instead of viewing themselves as oppressed losers, American Jews should be confident winners, celebrating and enforcing that which allows them and everyone else to be a winner, compared to the rest of the world.

David Goldman comes down on the side of Horowitz and I sense he is viewing this as a positive as well. He does not address it head on in his column, but the fact that he chooses sides based on patriotism is a bit of tell, I think. What is good for America trumps ethnic solidarity. As a Jew you can be pro-Israel, but you have to be pro-American more than anything. That is the way every other ethnic group is expected to view things. You can cheer for Ireland over England in soccer, if you are Irish, but you do not root for Ireland over America.

For as long as I have been alive, the key phrase with regards to the Holocaust has always been “never forget.” That is a wonderful rallying cry for an abused people who feel they have to fight their way inside. It is self-defeating for a successful people who are already inside and often in positions of authority. Whether guys like John Podhoretz like it or not, people do forget and that is often a good thing.

A Totally Different Head

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One of the ironies of the information age is we are probably dumber as a result of the sea of information in which all of us now swim. Some of it is due to the volume of information coming at us. It’s just too hard to sort the nonsense from the truth. At the same time, publications are so desperate to get our attention, they are willing to post the most outlandish click bait. People naturally assume there is some effort by publishers to vet their stories.

Mass media seems to have encouraged the production of bullshit too. Social science stories are a pretty good example. The researchers slap on a press release that wildly overstates their results, because they know the stupid people in the media will run with it. The result is we get, often on the same day, a report saying coffee causes cancer and coffee prevents cancer. In reality, the studies are crap and don’t pass the laugh test, but that no longer matters.

Anyway, that’s always important to keep in mind when reading any medical story these days. This one about head transplants is a good example.

After more than a year of deliberation, the controversial Italian has set a date of “around Christmas 2017” in China to perform the first ever human head transplant.

He said that his team of Chinese scientists and the technology are now ready to perform the operation, and that the only obstacles needed to be overcame now are funding and, perhaps the most problematic of all, ethical approval.

Dr Canavero said: “We’re looking at a date around Christmas 2017 to perform the transplant in China.

“The Chinese team has already experimented on human cadavers to hone the technology.”

He added that the patient, who will be Chinese, could make a full recovery within a year of the procedure.

The Italian had said that he would perform the controversial operation on Russian patient Valery Spiridonov – a sufferer of a rare muscle-wasting disorder, but he said that he could not find a donor in China due to biological reasons.

Despite the obvious high-risks associated with the surgery, which will see Canavero remove a person’s head and put it onto another body, he says that he has established a way to perform it successfully.

He will cool both the donor and recipient to 12C so that cells don’t die due to a lack of oxygen.

He explained: “This’ll give enough time to cut the tissue around each neck and link the majorblood vessels through tiny tubes.”

The recipient will then be kept in a medically induced coma for several weeks “to limit movement of the newly fused neck, while electrodes stimulate the spinal cord to strengthen its new connections.”

That last bit is where I get off the bus. Medicine has been stymied by this for a generation which is why they have had no success treating spinal cord injuries. As of now, there is no way to reattach a severed spinal cord. It’s why we have protocols for handling suspected spinal injuries. It is to prevent further damage that could come from a broken vertebra. If these head transplant guys have figured out how to reattach a spinal cord, that would be a huge breakthrough for medicine.

The technical aspects are just one part of it. The human brain grows and develops with the body. This proposed procedure is not a head transplant; it is a body transplant. The brain would have to instantly figure out how every cell in the new body works without making a mistake. We know from stroke victims that “re-learning” basic functions can take years. Your brain would take a lifetime to figure out how to use a whole new body.

That said, it does bring up an interesting subject. Our sense of self lives in our consciousness, but is intimately tied to our physical self. The new body would most likely trigger a degree of madness that is unimaginable to us. Even schizophrenics can rely on their fingers moving as expected and their eyes blinking without any surprises. Imagine ever conceivable sense being foreign and relentlessly assaulting the patient’s mind.

That would be the great challenge for the singularity guys. Uploading yourself to the grid assumes you can digitally recreate all of the sensory inputs that make up your sense of self. You may be able to upload your mind to the internet, but the result is you go insane and are erased by an anti-virus program. Since you can’t know these things in advance, the singularity could very well be nothing more than a brief period of madness before death.

The Stupid Party Way

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Whatever the merits of Buckley Conservatism, it is utterly worthless as a political one. Since the whole point of ideology is to shape politics, an ideology that utterly fails in politics is worthless. Pretty much the only thing they can do well is explain why they lost and even there they manage to screw up. Somehow, the great conservative minds managed to convince themselves that the reason Romney lost was that he was not mushy enough. People can be forgiven for thinking it is deliberate.

News brings word that the House Republicans were stymied by the tiny minority of Democrats over the Zika response. The bill is to fund a response to the Zika virus that is spreading north from South America via mosquitoes and immigrants. The liberals demanded abortion provisions in the bill, which has nothing to do with abortion, but the Left never takes its eye off the ball. They attach abortion provisions to everything knowing the Right is too stupid to stop them.

The Left knows how to play the game. They know that the Right will want to look like good citizens and eventually cave on the abortion provisions just to get the Zika bill passed. Even if they don’t, there are a thousand other bills they will do the same thing with so eventually they will get what they want. The Left never takes a break, They are always pressing forward. There’s no deal you can strike with them that will end their attacks. They are like Muslims in this regard.

Another example is this stupid flag bill the House just passed. What on God’s green earth are this idiots thinking? This bill does nothing for Republicans and helps Democrats. On pure politics alone, the bill should have died in some no name committee. If the Democrats really wanted this bill, then the smart play is to attach a dozen poison pill amendments that lets the GOP vote for it, but makes Democrats vote against it. That’s how a majority handles the minority in a parliament.

But that’s not how the Wuss Right thinks. They are always seeking to curry favor with the Left. Paul Ryan would drop to his knees and beg Obama for forgiveness if he thought there was some chance he would give it. He spends more time plotting to derail those to his Right than he does trying to stop the Left. These are small issues that garner no attention in the media yet Ryan and his fellow “principled” conservatives can’t summon the courage to tell the Left to pound sand.

What’s maddening about this and why voters have thrown in the towel on these guys, is that they don’t seem to know the basics of politics. These men and women somehow managed to get elected without understanding how parliaments work. It’s tempting to think, as many in the Dissident Right claim, that it is deliberate. That’s the Moldbugian thesis. Republicans are the outer party and Democrats are the inner party. The conservative commentariat are just the fluffers for the stars of the political theater.

The argument against that is if they were truly so clever as to perpetuate this elaborate ruse on the public, they would do it so no one noticed. In reality, the Republican Party is just the land of misfit toys. The “conservatives” are just guys who tick the boxes they are told to tick, but don’t think much about it. There are exceptions, but most could just as easily be Anarcho-Syndicalists or Whigs. They just like the lifestyle and they are not very good at anything other than toadyism.

Paul Ryan has been in politics his whole life, He has done nothing else. We live in the age of mass media where everyone knows about everything instantly. He has to know he is about as popular with Republican voters as testicular cancer. He has to know his party is under the microscope. Yet, he can’t figure out how to score some small victories to maybe claw a little credibility back in time for the elections. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s stupidity. That’s the Stupid Party way.

Send in the Clowns

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One of the many reasons so many have abandoned the Buckley Right in the last two decades can be seen at the nation’s airports. Immediately after 9/11, Progressives were out screaming for a new Federal bureaucracy to run airport security. The bodies were not even cold and the Democrats were proposing bills for a new Federal security force. You got the sense they had these bills ready to go, just waiting for the right moment.

Of course, that new agency would hire tens of thousands of dues paying union employees, who could be counted on to vote Left. Millions in union dues would flow into Democrat coffers and Democrats would work hard to expand the agency in the future, thus guaranteeing themselves another revenue stream. Like with the schools, any useful activity coming from this new agency would be coincidental.

A sign of just how awful the Bush years were going to be was in the response to this craven attempt by the Left to exploit the death of Americans. Instead of fighting they proposed an even bigger government agency. We not only got the Transportation Safety Administration, we got the staggering monstrosity called the Department of Homeland Security. Fifteen years later, our airports are grinding to a halt because TSA can’t perform its one job, which is to molest people before they enter the terminal.

With mounting delays around the country being blamed on Transportation Security Administration cutbacks and increased passenger traffic, airports are turning to musical performers and free sweets to keep travelers’ tempers in check.

And some airports are getting a little more creative.

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport is now inviting miniature therapy horses and their handlers from the non-profit Seven Oaks Farms Miniature Therapy Horses program in Hamilton, Ohio to visit the terminals several times a month.

“Animals help reduce stress and anxiety levels and put smiles on people’s faces,” said Mindy Kershner, a spokeswoman for the airport.

“Unlike service animals, who are working and should not be touched, therapy animals can be patted and hugged.”

And while many other airports have therapy dog programs in the terminals, “We figured this is Kentucky, after all, so we need horses,” Kershner said.

This is how third world bureaucracy works. Instead of fixing the problem, they use the problem as an excuse to expand the department. It will not be long before we learn that some Senator slipped in funding for a new division of miniature horses and clowns at the TSA, along with its own director and staff. That also means expanding maintenance budgets to pick up after the horses crapping all over the terminal.

It’s not just miniature horse keepers who will benefit. Senator Chuck Schumer, a well regarded airport engineer and security expert, is demanding dogs be unleashed on the people standing in line. You’re standing in-line and a miniature horse just took a dump on your sneakers and then a pack of hounds trailed by fat guys in blue shirts starts chasing the horses through the terminal. Maybe that’s where the clowns come in. Like at the rodeo, their job will be to distract the animals.

In all seriousness, Chuck Schumer is a genius, but he does not know the first thing about running an airport or running airport security. In fact, no one in the TSA has the slightest idea how to do any of this stuff. The proof of that is this bit from a CNN story on the subject. The TSA has 45,525 employees and they claim an additional 768 people will alleviate the problem. That’s roughly adding half a person to every airport the TSA covers. There’s simply no way that a 2% increase in staffing can have the claimed benefit.

Inevitably, we will learn that this is a carefully choreographed slowdown by the TSA so they can get more money. The media will play up the lines and people will write their congressmen. This being an election year, everyone will want to be the solution so that means a boost in funding for more hack jobs and more miniature pony rides at the airport, while you stand in line hoping the pervy looking TSA guy does not put his hand in your daughter’s pants.

This is, of course, anarcho-tyranny. The self-serving security bureaucracy is only good at harassing honest citizens. A trip to the airport involves at least three glaring apparatchiks giving you the business. That’s the tyranny. Standing in line for half a day to take a one hour flight to Philly is the anarchy. In the managerial state, the basic functions of government grind to a halt or are simply abandoned.

The obvious solution is to let the airports run their own security like they used to do before we lost out minds. TSA never would have stopped the 9/11 hijackers. Private security firms have much better training and methods. Augmenting this should be restrictions on travel to and from Muslim countries. Sensible limits on letting Muslims travel to America would cut threats by 99.9999999%. No system is perfect, but I’m willing to take that chance for the ability to walk unmolested in an airport.

The Faceberg Six

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One of the stranger aspects of the current ructions is the willingness of members of the professional Right to gleefully and publicly stab their colleagues in the back. Politics is an ugly business, where men squabble over trivial slights, but the custom is to avoid making it nakedly personal and to avoid being overtly craven. This last bit is especially true with the Buckleyites, as they love carrying on like Victorians. For as long as I’ve been alive, conservatives have railed against putting “politics above principle.”

Like most of what the Buckleyites preached, that was all bullshit, but they did try hard to keep up appearances. That’s not been the case during the Trumpening. National Review turned itself into MoveOn.org last fall, posting daily rants about how anyone supporting Trump is Hitler. Then we got the #nevertrump stuff, which was pretty much just people taking cash from donors to pretend to be a grassroots resistance to Trump.

A couple of weeks ago it was revealed that the lone Trumpette on Fox News, Andrea Tantaros, was dropped from the network. The official reason was a contract dispute, but the grapevine says the midget tag-team act of Greg Gutfeld and Dana Perino got her fired over Trump. The internet says both are unpleasant people in private, despite their TV act, but I have no way of knowing if that is true. I do know it looks terrible to dump the only conservative on the network.

Today brings word that the traitorous Mark Zuckerberg is recruiting some of the more deranged Trump haters to help him do a better job suppressing dissent on Faceberg.

On Wednesday, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg will hold a meeting with “leading conservatives,” embattled The Blaze head Glenn Beck, and former George W. Bush Administration official and co-host of Fox News Channel’s The Five Dana Perino, at the website’s Menlo Park headquarters to discuss Facebook’s conservative media suppression and censorship scandal.
Last week it was reported that “anonymous sources at Facebook’s news team have confirmed to Gizmodo that, in addition to suppressing conservative news sources, the company suppresses stories about itself while artificially promoting stories about the Black Lives Matter movement.”

In spite of this, Zuckerberg denies any wrongdoing, stating “we have found no evidence that this report is true.” He is instead planning to hold a session Wednesday where he will essentially “pat conservatives on the head” with a photo-op that is a direct testament to the fact that nothing has changed. It is also quite telling that he has reached out to Beck, who is struggling to remain relevant in the conservative media sphere.

Beck announced the meeting in a Facebook post on his page early Sunday morning. Beck and Perino will be joined by Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, CNN’s S.E. Cupp, and Mitt Romney’s former digital director, Zac Moffatt.

Glenn Beck is a nut and desperate for cash now so it is no shock that he would come running when Zuckerberg calls. One of the true benefits of the Trumpening has been the near destruction of Beck and his lunatic cult. The others have always struck me as being sensible enough to avoid stunts like this. S.E. Cupp is a C-list talking head, who should avoiding making enemies. Her drunken bar slut routine would make her a favorite of red pill types if she went that way.

The weird thing about this is the public nastiness of it all. Trump is not a Buckleyite, but they could easily do business with him if they were willing to play ball. There are worse things than having Trump selling your pet project. Unlike most Republicans, he could possible get some things done in Washington. Even if you hate the guy, smile and pretend and make the best of it. Smart politics says it is better to have a guy like Trump inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in.

It’s not just about Trump with these people. There’s a sneering contempt for the public in their Trump hatred. The Trumpening has been revelatory in that regard. Most of these people in the Conservative Industrial Complex are just in it for the cash. They could just as easily be peddling Marxism if it paid better. They don’t like you or your country and they don’t believe in anything but making a buck. Zuck is passing around cash so they will sell his brand of nation wrecking lunacy and say bad things about Trump.

Time will tell if this is part of some larger strategy that has yet to reveal itself. Six months from now, being #nevertrump is going to be the mark of Cain, regardless of the election outcome. If Trump loses conservatives will blame these traitors for the defeat. If Trump wins, the #nevertrump loons will be packed off to the labor camps. Well, we can dream. Still, life is not going to be fun for these people if Trump is in the White House. There’s just no obvious upside to this #nevertrump nuttiness, other than the craven cash grab.

Hillary’s Dilemma

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In the run-up to the 1968 presidential election, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that the country was tipping into the abyss. Liberals had waged war on the normal people for most of the decade. A vast expansion of the federal government, race riots, nation building in Asia and the cultural revolution left normal people wondering if America was going to survive. In less than a decade the country had gone from the middle-class prosperity of Eisenhower to the madness of LBJ.

Americans have a habit of using elections to address previous electoral mistakes. In 1960, a peaceful and prosperous country decided it was time to pass the torch to a new generation and passed on Dick Nixon, the sitting Vice President. Three years later Kennedy got two in the hat from a communist, putting LBJ in the White House. Mostly out of grief for the death of Kennedy, the public elected Johnson in a landslide the following year.

Whether it was suicidal guilt or a desire to gain respect from the Yankee elite, Johnson set off on a five year rampage through the American culture. The massive expansion of the welfare state, the unleashing of black violence, degenerate youth culture and nation building in Southeast Asia had many people thinking it was a colossal mistake voting for Kennedy over Nixon. Who knows how things would have unfolded if the Chicago mob had not fixed the 1960 election, but it could not have been worse.

Nixon was no one’s idea of a popular figure. Buckley conservatives hated his social liberalism and liberals hated his red baiting. Yankees hated his decidedly downscale tactics and aesthetic. Even so, Nixon was willing to punch the hippies and he represented a line in the sand middle Americans could respect. He was also a staunch anti-communist, but willing to put an end to the pointless Vietnam War. Tricky Dick was a low-risk chance to stop the bleeding so he won in a landslide.

I’ve often compared Hillary Clinton to Dick Nixon. In 1968, Nixon had been a public figure for over three decades. Here in 2016, Hillary Clinton is now halfway through her third decade in public life. Of course, the ethical comparisons are obvious, even though Nixon was a boy scout compared to the Clintons. Tricky Dick played rough when it came to politics, but he was never a crook. Still, like Nixon, the Clintons play rough in politics and are willing to cut deals with anyone.

If you look at the broad outlines of the Clinton campaign in 2016, you see some hints of the Nixon campaign of 1968. She wanted to run as the solid, stable choice that would curb the excesses of the Obama years. Hillary may be a crook, but she was going to get the race mongers and foreign weirdos out of government. Whatever her ethical and moral defects, Clinton would have been the better choice in 2008 when the country, high on the narcotic of racial justice, elected Obama

The problem is that Hillary is attached to the weirdos and lunatics that have been running wild the last eight years. Her cynical attempts to position herself as a restoration of sober governance is ridiculous, given that she worked in the Obama administration for six years. There’s also the fact that Obama’s Attorney General is the only thing standing between Hillary and an orange jumpsuit. It’s simply laughable to think of Hillary as anything but a fun house mirror version of Obama.

It’s why they have shifted gears and decided to run Hillary as the defender of female virtue against the boorish womanizer, Donald Trump. The campaign is now selling vagina cards and the liberal media is running stories about Trump’s wildly successful sex life. The hope is they can pivot off Trump’s alleged hostility toward woman and make the election a referendum on the awfulness of white men. Instead of a charming black guy promising vengeance, it will be an old lesbian.

That’s the irony of this election. Hillary started her life in politics as a minor staffer on a Congressional committee hounding Nixon. Like all liberals of her generation, she defined herself in opposition to Nixon. Now she finds herself as a post-modern caricature of Nixon, but at odds with those same forces. She’s both the square representing the status quo and the radical weirdo that freaks out the squares. She is the worst of both sides of late 1960’s politics.

Compounding her dilemma is the fact that Trump is a master at deflection. In the primary, he made the campaign about one candidate after another, rather than a referendum on Trump. It was Bush, then Fiorina, then Rubio and finally Cruz. Worse yet, Trump’s critiques reinforce his general theme of being a restoration of commonsense over the deranged fads of an out of touch ruling class. This makes him the worst possible candidate for Clinton.

As the saying goes, a week is a lifetime in politics and we are five and a half months from the election. The Trotsky wing of the GOP is still plotting a third party candidate to try and derail Trump. The Progressive media will coordinate with the Clinton campaign on the war on women nonsense. Trump has made blunders so he is capable of saying or doing something stupid this summer. Still, all of the trends are working against Clinton and she has proven to be a fantastically bad candidate.

She’s going to need a miracle to win.

Blog Update

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This blog crossed a traffic threshold in the last month. In fact, every month since I started this has seen an uptick in traffic, but somewhere in the last month the average traffic crossed the 35,000 mark. That means the readership is now averaging just a tick over 35K. I have no idea how that stacks up to other blogs, but it seems like a lot given that I am not famous and I have done nothing to promote myself. You’re here by word of mouth and I am thankful for the interest.

The volume of comments has ticked up as well and I’m seeing more long debates than in the past. That’s to be expected. I ended moderation so that allows for more back and forth, good and bad. In that regard, I’ve thought about adding a discussion forum to the site. It’s a simple thing and it allows for readers to get long winded, if they choose, in response to a topic. There are many free message board systems so I may add one to the site when I have some free time. We can form a Witenaġemot!

On a related note, I’m working on adding a subscription feature. The normal WordPress feature is terrible and gets filled with spammers. I have ten thousand subscribers but my bet is nine thousand are Ukrainian robots. I’ve noticed that when I subscribe to other WordPress blogs, nothing seem to happen so something is broken with the subscription module that comes with the blog software.

As far as who reads this blog, it is mostly Americans according to the stats tracker. The UK and Canada are the next most popular countries. Interestingly, I have a lot of readers in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. I have no readers from Mexico. Similarly, the people who link back to me are mostly American sites, with a sprinkling of Canadians and Europeans. I get a lot of links back from car and firearm sites for some reason.

I’m also getting media requests. I started this blog as a hobby and I never thought much about it being more than a hobby. I’ve had some podcasters and radio people contact me about being on their shows. The trouble is I don’t check the e-mail account here that often so I was unable to respond in a timely fashion. I may add something here for media requests, just to see if it is worth my time.

Finally, I’ve been asked about donations and I have no plans at the moment to setup the stuff you need to take donations. Maybe when the readership reaches 50K I’ll do it as it may makes sense at that point. I don’t know enough about how it works to know if it is worth the effort. Steve Sailer and Kathy Shaidle seem to make a living from their blogs this way, but I have no way of knowing this. They could be living on dog food for all I know. But, I’ll jump off that bridge when the readership gets bigger.

Thanks for reading, commenting and tweeting me!

Diversity Sucks

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Years ago I knew a devout Catholic woman that was very active in her church. It was a decent sized and youngish congregation so they could maintain a grammar school and youth programs. The way it worked, if I recall, is the regular parishioners got a discount on tuition while everyone else paid full retail for their kids. Jews often send their kids to Christian schools, for example, even though they obviously do not participate in the life of the Church so they paid retail.

At some point, the neighborhood started to change. The local Jewish population began to leave and was replaced with blacks. In the Baltimore area this is a common phenomenon. Jews in America have always been the most generous to blacks, preferring to hire them over whites and now immigrants. This is a custom that dates to a century ago, which is why it is ironic that famous blacks like Barak Obama and Al Sharpton hate Jews so much.

As is often the case when neighborhoods change, people worried about home values so there was a cascading effect. In Baltimore they used to call it “block busting.” Realtors would get one family on the block to sell to a black family and immediately everyone else on the block was in a selling mood. It was a good way for realtors to churn a stable neighborhood.

Anyway, as the neighborhood turned, the church started to get blacker too. The new members who would show up once a month or less, demanded access to all of the parish resources for regular members. Because modern Americans would rather see their church collapse than be thought anything other than enthusiastic for the swirl, a classic cycle ensued where costs went up and contributions declined.

All of the new “members” wanted their kids in the parish school at a discount, but they were not kicking in time and money to help support the church. The old members grew resentful of what was happening and started to leave the church. Of course, many simply sold their home and moved away. The result was predictable. The finances of the parish declined and services had to be cut. That drove away more paying members and, if memory serves, the school eventually closed.

People living around large cities in America are familiar with this pattern. Europeans will soon become familiar with it as they are overrun by Muslims. Moving away is not a solution as the troublesome population soon follows. For the same reason bank robbers rob banks troublesome minority populations seek out stable majority neighborhoods. It’s why diversity is a toxic poison in the West. It generates social instability.

The more mixed the Sunday morning pews are, the fewer people are likely to be in them.

That’s the primary finding of a new study from Baylor University published in the current Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Researchers studied the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, where racial diversity doubled from 1993 to 2012, and found that, at the same time, churches with the greatest diversity growth also had the steepest declines in attendance.

Kevin Dougherty, an associate professor of sociology at Baylor and lead author on the study, said the findings should not be taken as a stab at racial diversity in churches.

Rather, he said, it shows congregations that are not originally started — “planted,” in church parlance — as diverse will have a tough time becoming so after their planting.

“That change in the fundamental character of a congregation is an extremely daunting task,” Dougherty said. “Congregations intentionally planted as diverse from the beginning have the greatest potential to sustain that change while those that are trying to change their diversity will have a bumpy road ahead.”

It’s the fundamental defect of all egalitarian ideologies. The diversity advocates assume that all people are the same, when they are clearly not the same. Thousands of generations of evolution have hard wired humans to seek out those who are most like them. Trust is highest with our kin. Social structure like churches, and civic communities are built on trust. Throw a bunch of strangers from different tribes together and they are not going to build a community.

That does not mean people have live in isolation from one another. It’s just that stable, productive communities maintain their stability by working to limit diversity as much as possible. In the bad old days when covenants prevented home owners from selling to weirdos outside the group, the community remained stable. Those who moved away sought out places where their kind was welcome. Those who moved in did so knowing they would fit in with their neighbors.

One half of this still happens. The example I described at the start of this post is a good example. The people who fled the diversity moved to places that were pretty much like their old neighborhood. They were just far away from public transportation and had no apartments that could be conjured into ghettos by the miracle of Section 8 vouchers. The people moving into the old neighborhood did so because their tribe was moving there.

The fact is, for most people, diversity sucks.

Edit: The nice church lady I mentioned at the start eventually moved away. Her new church has many of the same people from her old church, who moved away for the same reasons. The new church is a growing concern while the old church has fallen into deep decline.

Reform Week Part V

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This being the final edition of this series of posts and it being Friday, I thought it would be a good time to think about some radical reforms the ruling class could implement to address present problems. It is hard to imagine the ruling class making radical reforms, given their inability to manage small reform to this point, but events often force the issue. A century ago, giving women the vote was a crazy idea in 1919. It is a crazy idea now.

Anyway, I mentioned previously that a big problem for the American political class is the influence of the mega-rich. At the end of the industrial revolution, the answer was to bust up the great fortunes. Maybe this time, the answer is to embrace the great fortunes. Instead of having billionaires buying politicians, perhaps the answer is to create a chamber for the mega-rich. A third chamber of Congress could be something like the House of Lords. It is open only to those with a net worth in the top-1%.

The idea here is to get the mega-rich out of the shadows, so to speak. Instead of pouring money into campaigns and political action committees, guys like Mark Zuckerberg could claim a seat in the Patrician Assembly. The trade-off would be no other participation in politics. The top-1% would be banned from politics other than running for office. Since the ultimate spot would be membership in the Patrician Assembly, the mega-rich would compete for one of the spots.

The thing that makes divided government work is each branch has a unique power. The House has the power of the purse. The Senate confirms judges and executive appointments. The Patrician Assembly would need a unique power in order to be worth the office. The most logical power to give the super-rich would be the power to borrow. This would, in effect, be a veto over deficit spending. Raising the debt limit and authorizing new debt would be the job of the Patrician Assembly.

Another nagging problem in modern America is mobility. Americans move around for all sorts of reasons, mostly for work, but also for family. Of course, foreigners move here for economic reason. This makes maintaining local communities difficult and is a growing source of instability. A big reason Donald Trump is having so much success is that millions of Americans feel like strangers in their own neighborhoods. The place where they grew up is now alien to them.

A solution to this is to change how people vote. The new rule would require you to vote where you were born, in addition to where you reside. That means those Yankee lunatics born in Massachusetts can still move to sensible places like Texas, but they will not be able to start voting for drunken Hibernian politicians. If Mass lets them vote absentee, then they could vote Kennedy that way. Otherwise, they give up voting in exchange for the good life in Texas.

This solves two problems. One is it solves the problem of lunatics moving to a new unspoiled place and then spoiling it by voting lunatic. The other important feature is it solves the immigration issues. This rule means those fifty million foreign born will never vote. Their kids can vote, assuming they are born here to citizens, but the foreign born will never gain the franchise. This removes the benefit of citizen replacement that is so popular with liberal lunatics.

Finally, we are on the cusp of the great automation. No one reading this will see the robot future. Your children and grand children will not see it either. We will, however, see more and more jobs replaced by robots. That means fewer and fewer people working and earning money. An obvious way to fix this is to get women out of the workplace, but that is only going to come when Islam is the official religion of the West. Look for London to pass such laws in the coming decade.

A more plausible solution will be a guaranteed income. Instead of a welfare state designed for the poor, a new system of a monthly salary for all citizens could be implemented. Alaska pays its citizens a royalty from oil sales each year based on the idea that the oil is a public good. Maybe the same approach must be taken with the robots. The robot future is a communal good so everyone gets a royalty from the robot economy.

The Swiss are about to experiment with this idea. One excellent benefit is it applies to citizens, thus depriving one incentive for migrants. The bigger issue is it junks all the social engineering ideas from a bygone era. Social welfare programs are a solution to poverty in the industrial age. In the technological age, poverty is not the issue so much as the lack of work.

Here is where it can become even more radical. The annual income could also be an incentive for marriage and stable family formation. Married couple would get a bonus for every year of marriage. That way, Yolanda here in the ghetto has no incentive to breed outside of marriage. Her stipend would not change with more kids. Her chance to boost her income would be to marry and stay married. For ghetto women, children stop being a symbol of success.

In a matriarchy, this is a powerful incentive for the males to behave. All of sudden, Darius is not such a valuable mating option when he can’t stay out of prison, while the bookish Urkel comes with the bonus of extra cash in the monthly check. The welfare state broke this relationship and black crime went along with black illegitimacy rates. Restore those family incentives and let nature take its course.

 

Reform Week Part IV

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In the 1990’s the NBA started drafting high school kids and letting them play in the league. It was an idiotic decision that has haunted them to this day. High school boys are not ready to play at that level and they lack the maturity to develop as a bench warmer for a few years. It is fairly well established that the peak years for athletes of this type are from 25-to-32. Taking a player who is seven years from his peak is sure to retard his development and waste a lot of money. The result was a steady decline in the level of play in the league.

That is an important lesson. Even in sports like track that are based on pure physical gifts, you need more than natural talent. There is a set of skills and a degree of maturity that allows the athlete to fully exploit their natural talents. Development systems not only help nurture talent, but they also weed out the mercurial and erratic before they are put into a position where others are counting on them. More than a few great talents have washed out before they hit the professional ranks because they lack the character or maturity for the job.

For political athletes, a similar development system is necessary to police the ranks efficiently. One or two corrupt individuals slipping into the legislature is manageable. A whole parliament full of crooks is a recipe for disaster. Making the process of getting there arduous is a time tested way of filtering at the source. The Roman Empire became unstable right around the time they started taking shortcuts and cutting corners in their development of their political leaders. They started making exceptions and before long no one respected the rules and customs of the Republic.

American politics is suffering an NBA problem. The Senate and House are both stocked with far too many people who never served time in the minor leagues of politics. It is hard to find anyone who has a job, much less did the grunt work of being a town manager or city councilman. Instead of earning their bones in the minor leagues, they are jumping right to the big show.

For example, the great hope of the Trotsky wing of the GOP is Ben Sasse. He spent a year in the dreaded private sector after college and then got on the gravy train of government work. A dozen years on the dole and runs for Senate and is now the shiny new penny “representing” Nebraska, a place he rarely visited for twenty years prior to his election. Instead of working his way up from dog catcher or state rep, he just parachuted into the Senate without much vetting.

Marco Rubio is an example of trying to rush guys along before they are ready. Rubio had a successful career in the Florida legislature. Making the leap to the Senate was a big step, similar to going from AA to the majors. He had the skill to do it, as long as he was going to spend his first term learning the ropes and growing into the position. If he flourished, then maybe he could be offered a spot on the 2024 GOP ticket or perhaps run for governor of Florida. Instead, he is a has-been at 44.

One way to restore the development system is to return the Senate to the states. The original design was to have the Senate represents the interests of the states, while the House was the democratic voice of the people. The 17th Amendment, passed in 1913, changed that and threw the system out of balance, making it just as prone to democratic impulses as the House. More important, it has made the Senate more accessible to the overly ambitious. The result is a chamber increasing full of feckless climbers like Ben Sasse.

Repealing the 17th would not be an easy sell, but simply returning the selection of senators to the states is probably a workable compromise. Each state could then create a system for picking senators. Given this power, they will inevitably create a system controlled by local interests, even if it maintains the veneer of popular selection. Having the legislature nominate candidates for the public to vote on is an obvious solution.

Another reform that would help restore the development system is to expand the House of Representatives. The Apportionment Act of 1911 set the current size of the House in an age when the population of the country was a third of what it is today. Doubling the size of the house would get the apportionment closer to what it was a century ago. It would also make buying influence much more expensive. Buying off two hundred legislators is much easier than bribing five hundred of them.

Expanding the House would also make being a congressman less important. Lowering the prestige of the House, while increasing the prestige of state legislatures will help keep the kids on the farm until they are ready for the big show. That means state government gets better at protecting the interests of the state as a counter to federal power. The good people of Nebraska would washout a poser like Sasse long before he could be inflicted on the nation.

Finally, another angle of reform could be on the pay side. Paying Congressman and Senators $200K a year sounds like a lot, but Washington is not a cheap city. A pol has to maintain two homes and bear the cost of commuting, to some extent, from the district. It’s why guys like Paul Ryan take advantage of insider information to make money in the markets. It is perfectly legal and they all do it.

It is how a guy like John Kasich gets a net worth of $25 million, despite a lifetime in elected office. Harry Reid became a millionaire off shady land deals he was able to broker first at the state level and then in the Senate. One of the surest ways to become a millionaire is to get elected to Congress. On your first day there is a line of lobbyists ready to give you investment tips.

In order to strip away the self-dealing, the pay would have to go up considerably. Maybe giving Congressman and Senators an allowance for a house in Washington and a salary commensurate with the importance of the job would be enough to make a ban on self-dealing workable. There is some history here as Congress passed the gift ban twenty years ago. There will always be bribes and people willing to take them but removing some of the justifications makes it easier to police.