Monthly Archives: June 2016

Globalized Intelligence

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The news brings word that the British public is now telling pollsters they are tilting heavily toward voting to leave the European Union. If the Brexit referendum passes, the British government will be required to paddle the island further into the North Sea in order to get beyond the reach of Brussels. Just how far they will have to go will be left to the government if and when it is necessary.

This is setting off panic on the Continent. The Brits pay roughly €13 billion per year into the Europe Union. They get out about €6 billion, give or take. This sounds terrible, but this does not account for the intangible benefits, assuming they exist, of having a say in the management of the European Union. That’s been the argument against Brexit. The indirect benefits of Remain dwarf the costs.

Like all economic arguments, the Remain argument is built on a foundation of statistical falsehoods and manipulation. They assume the worst case scenario of Brexit and the best case of Remain. In reality, most of the trade in place now will remain in place. The Germans need open access to British markets and they don’t have any desire to start a financial war with the English speaking world. They are in no position to pick that fight.

For all the talk of hidden benefits, there’s little talk of the hidden costs. Globalism is built on the concept of privatizing profits and socializing costs. Importing migrant labor, for example, allows the employer to spread the real cost of labor laws, insurance and competitive wages. At the same time, he can shovel those costs onto the public via welfare programs, crime, charity, etc. There’s nothing more expense than cheap goods made with illegal labor.

In the case of Brexit, there’s an enormous hidden security cost to the British that comes with European membership. This story about a Russian mole in NATO is a good example. During the Cold War, intelligence gathering and handling was managed by the Brits and Americans. The so-called Five Eyes did all of the electronic snooping and managed that information. The Brits have always been one of the best at spy craft and the Americans have always been great at signal intelligence.

Since the Cold War, NATO intelligence has become European intelligence. That means the active participation of all EU members. Countries like Portugal, with their poor record of keeping secrets, gets the same intel as Germany, with their excellent record of keeping secrets. The golden rule of all security systems is that they are as strong as their weakest link. In the case of Europe, their intelligence services will always be as reliable as Athens and Lisbon.

When you have separate countries, this problem is easily addressed. First, no country passes on intel to a third country without first getting permission from the source country. Countries that violate that rule are cut out of the loop. You can’t enforce that rule in a world without countries. The Portuguese and Turks get the same information as the Brits and Germans. Since that can’t possibly work, the result is going to be endless scheming, hidden agendas and deception.

The other “hidden” benefit of separate countries is the British intel services know perfectly well whose interests they are serving. The goal of their efforts is manifest to everyone in MI6. All of these motivations are transparent. Policing these relationships becomes much easier. If James Bond is living beyond his means and cavorting with a Russian mistress, you know something is amiss.

That, of course, leads to another problem. The British not only understand their interests, they can act on them unilaterally, if they think it necessary. If the US passes on intel that a mosque in London is housing mischief of Exploding Mohameds plotting to blow up a school, the Brits can act on that as they see fit. The people in charge of Britain know that their first duty is to protect their people.

All of this leads to the fundamental problem of the borderless world. It makes for a dangerous world. Government is not a precision instrument. It is a hammer. The bigger the government, the bigger and less precise the hammer. Public safety and national security are precision games. National government does them poorly which is why so much is delegated to local government. That’s not possible in a global world.

Better Living Through Chemistry

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I am a bit skeptical about claims regarding the glorious future. One reason for the skepticism is the fact that the West seems to be careening toward a bad period, similar to what happened at the end of the industrial revolution. Super intelligent robots, the singularity, forever life and so on assume a quickening pace of technological discovery. A crisis period like the end of the 19th through the middle 20th century would put a halt to that sort of progress, by redirecting resources to the crisis.

Then there is the fact that predictions about the future are always hilariously wrong. We should probably be thankful that these predictions prove to be wrong. Imagine dressing like this. The mistake futurists always make is in assuming current trends will continue unabated into the future. They also always assume things will unfold within their lifetime or close enough to it so they can get their hopes up for actually seeing it. If you spend your days dreaming of the glorious future, you hope to see it.

All that said, I enjoy reading the predictions. Stories like this are catnip for me because they seem plausible. Quality of life improvements always attract investment. Produce a practical way to transport humans from Sydney to London in two hours and you are a going to make billions. Even a six hour flight would be awesome. Making air transport faster and more pleasant is the sort of opportunity that is possible and potentially wildly profitable so I can see it taking a big leap forward in the near term.

That got me thinking about what else smart people, with an eye on profit, will be looking to improve in the near future. The most obvious place to look is health. I do not mean living forever stuff. I am thinking Viagra level improvement. The penis pills made their inventor billions because it addressed a basic human desire. There is not a great demand to live forever, but there is a great demand for a long life. The longer the better. Make the daily existence of people better and you will become richer than Midas.

My guess is the next Viagra will be a pill or treatment that solves gray hair. I do not have much in the way of gray hair, but most people my age are “dealing” with it. Woman start dying their hair as soon as they see gray. Men often go the same route, opting for ridiculous looking home treatments. Then there is the beard dying business which always looks bad. Science has a rather good understanding of the process, so solving it is plausible. Produce a cure and the geezers will beat a path to your door.

Along the same lines, skin tone is one of those quality of life issues that many people would pay to address. Women get treatments for their hands, to address the effects of aging. The “Madonna Mitts” problem is important to women. Of course, both men and women get their faces stretched and use Botox to get the wrinkles off the mug. John Forbes Kerry looks like Frankenstein because he has had so much work done to his face. Modern people want to look young and skin tone is a big part of it.

Like gray hair, this is an area that science understands enough about to think a solution is plausible. It is really not a solution that is needed, as much as it needs mitigation. The age at which humans start fretting over skin tone is the middle years. By the time you reach your late fifties you have come to terms with your mortality and get on with enjoying your time. A pill or treatment that helps the 30-year old women look twenty-five for a few more years would make the inventor a billionaire.

Finally, I was at the diner the other day and the place was full of geezers. It was also full of walkers and air tanks. The complaint most people have when they age is the lack of energy. This is mostly due to reduced cardiovascular capacity. By the time you get in your 60’s, walking up hills and taking the stairs is taxing. That is why people in their 80’s have to use walkers (often) and carry air tanks. But this is also a complaint for people in their middle years. Being tired is probably a top-10 complaint about aging.

Again, this is something we know a bit about so addressing it is plausible. Athletes have been using drugs to goose their cardio for years. Sharapova was just banned from tennis for using the drug meldonium, which is prescribed in Eastern Europe for people suffering from congestive heart failure. In the West, we have all sorts of drugs for people suffering from lung and heart disease that preserve their cardiovascular capacity or at least extend it for a while.

If someone were able to produce a supplement for people to take, like a daily vitamin, that would offer just a subtle boost to their cardio capacity, thus giving them more energy, without the long term side effects of current drugs, the market would be huge. Look at how many famous people in entertainment and sports abuse Adderall so they can be more alert. Maybe the answer is simply a pill for better, deeper sleep, but boosting cardio capacity could be part of it. Imagine how much money you would make if your little pill offers increased vigor throughout the day.

There you go, my glimpse into the glorious future.

The Middle East Will Get Much Worse

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Smart policy types like to use the acronym MENA to describe what we in the West generally think of as the Arab world. North African populations in Libya and Algeria would reject the idea that they are in the same bucket as Arabs. Persians in Iran would have a similar complaint, even though they really do not have a basis for it. That is all true to one degree or another, but it is a useful bit of shorthand for discussing the collection of “countries” that are Muslim and mostly Arab.

If you look at the list of countries in the group, nine of the nineteen have been something close to stable over the last twenty years. Five of those are Gulf countries. Countries like Kuwait and Qatar are basically company towns run by a sheikh selling one product – oil. Then there is Israel, which is an exception. Oman and Jordan are also special cases, protected on the sly by Israel and operating as buffer states. Morocco is a special case, since it is mostly just a tourist trap for Europeans.

The stability that does exist in this region is based in Saudi Arabia. At least it has been. The Kingdom has avoided the revolts that were laughably called the Arab Spring by stupid Americans. They keep the GCC out of trouble and limit the mischief Iran is able to spread around the region. They also quietly work with Israel to limit the violence from the Palestinians.

Of course, they work with the US to maintain a strong military presence. There are a lot of US “advisers” in the Kingdom. Companies like Raytheon have been building and maintaining projects for the Saudis for decades. A lot of this booked as civilian use, but it is all military and all about controlling the region. Those listen posts the US runs in the Kingdom serve more than one purpose. That information is shared with Saudi intelligence. That is what has helped the Saudis control the explosion of chaotic violence coming from Yemen.

That last part, however, is where the worry starts. Yemen is a country full of inbred hyper-violent morons, who can barely organize a war-band. Yet, they have fought the Saudi military to a draw. This is a Saudi military equipped and trained by the US. They have the best equipment and the best training available, in addition to logistical and tactical support from the Americans. US military contractors have been with the Saudi military for decades, so there is not a problem with coordination. Yet, the Saudis cannot beat groups of retarded guys armed with old AK’s.

This war in Yemen has been an enormous drain on Saudi finances at a time when oil prices are depressed. The great leaps forward in drilling technology have most likely put a hard cap on oil prices, because wells can be brought back on-line quickly. Even if the Saudis can organize OPEC to hike prices again, they may not be able to enforce it. There is also the fact that the Saudis managed to alienate everyone with their policy of dumping oil to attack the US oil sector. The result is the Kingdom is hemorrhaging cash and will be forced to make deep structural changes.

That brings up another problem. The Saudi domestic setup is unsustainable. There are about thirty million people in the Kingdom, but ten million are foreign workers and many of those are basically slaves. The mean IQ of Saudi Arabia is tough to nail down, but the consensus puts it in the high 80’s at the optimistic end. Some old data suggest the mean is somewhere just north of 80, which is what you see in sub-Saharan Africa and American prisons. Add in the fact that most young Saudis do not work and you have a dearth of human capital. The general rule is you need a mean IQ of 95 to have a modern economy.

This is important because the Saudis recognize that they are running out of cheap oil to sell at huge profits. They are not going to run out of oil in our lifetime, but the cost of getting their crude out of the ground is going up and technology is allowing producers in the US to compete further up the price curve. That’s why they have this ambitious plan to restructure their economy to move away from simply being a giant oil company. They plan to open up the economy, diversify the tax base and shift work from foreign workers to Saudi workers.

Plans are great, but they rarely survive contact with reality. A country full of low-IQ nitwits, as the result of a culture of cousin marriage, is not going to turn into Silicon Valley overnight. Throw in the repressive Saudi religious culture and any attempt to open up the economy is going to run into trouble. Westerners working in the Kingdom live in compounds because the Wahhabi religious authorities demand it. Osama bin Laden was set off on his war with the West because Americans were stationed in the Kingdom during the Gulf War. Imagine what happens when Westerners are given easy access to the country.

That returns us to the central problem and why things will get much worse in the Middle East over the next decade. About 70% of the native Saudi population is under thirty. They do not work and they grew up in Wahhabi schools. The Saudis tended to export the fanatics to places like Afghanistan so they could go on jihad and never return. The more useful ones get pulled into the Saudi security services.

Imagine this process reversing and outside groups like ISIS recruiting these fanatics to make jihad on the House of Saud. Suddenly, ISIS or something similar is operating in Riyadh. There are plenty of signs this is happening now, but information is suppressed by the Kingdom for good reason. Still, smart people think this is a more of a now problem than a future problem.

Current estimates put the point at which the Saudis run low on cash between five and ten years from now. These are all guesses, of course. The only people, who intimately understand Saudi finances, work in the US Federal Reserve. The Saudis have already started a process of belt tightening in order to arrest the cash bleed, but these sorts of structural problems have to be addressed slowly, even in an autocracy.

Maybe the new King can get the country part way to its goal of diversification and that will be enough to stave off collapse. Nothing is ever certain in the Middle East except that there will always be turmoil. All the signs, however, are pointing in the wrong direction at the moment. That means the way to bet right now is on collapse of Saudi Arabia within the next decade. That, of course, will plunge the whole region into chaos.

The other reason to bet this scenario is the West is now led by people with a childlike understanding of the world. The European leadership class, growing up in the hothouse of US protection, resemble infants. There is no Bismarck or Metternich coming out of Germany in our lifetime. In the US, the political class has always been all thumbs in foreign affairs, but now they have succumbed to the madness of multiculturalism, rendering them dangerously incompetent.

This will not end well.

TV and Movies

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I have mentioned before that I am not a big consumer of television. I own a TV just so I can watch sports. This time of year, I am pretty much just watching baseball. I have the MLB subscription so I can watch the Red Sox. I do not have anything against TV, but I never developed the love for it as a kid like most people. I might watch a show in syndication if it was popular and I will download movies, but these days it is done in batches. Binge watching is pretty much the only way I can watch a series from start to finish.

Anyway, someone recommended a program to me called Justified. I had never heard of it, but the internet tells me it was extremely popular. That is the thing about the modern mass media culture. You can be a huge star, even though most people have never heard of you. A TV show can be a hit, by attracting 2% of the audience. The culture is so balkanized, we are all just ships passing in the night and TV reflects that reality. My guess is Justified was popular with normals, but unwatched by the folks in Yankeedom.

Anyway, the show itself is fine. It sort of reminds me of the fad in the 70’s of the cowboy detective. I forget the names of the shows, but the twist on the traditional police show was to have the hero as a sort of an updated western sheriff with the hat, boots and pithy country expressions. The show is based on an Elmore Leonard novel so it has lots of catchy dialogue. That was a Leonard trademark, the banter between characters that was simple, but packed with meaning. I suspect that is the attraction of the show for fans. There is a lyrical quality to the writing.

I have only watched the one season, but what strikes me is that the male lead is pretty much a normal male lead. In fact, all the men are the sort of men you see on earth or at least you used to see on earth. The beta male hipster thing is a sad reality of our age. The women are also normal women. We hear lots of complaints about the feminization of men, but the presentation of women in pop culture is equally bizarre. I can see why this show would be popular with the gals, as it has lots of relatable female characters in it.

I have often wondered just how popular the modern female heroine is with real women. There’s endless hype for Hunger Games types of gals, but I never hear real women talk up these types of films. I suspect it is a lot like the homo movies. We are buried in hype about them, but there is little to no demand for gay cowboys or the life story of Liberace. Then again, I am just a broken down old hate thinker so I could be all wrong. Maybe the young gals of today all dream of wearing Lycra jumpsuits and beating up men.

The other thing that struck me is the fair treatment of downscale whites. It still has lots of stereotypes about toothless hillbillies banging their sisters, but it is much more nuanced than you typically see. The war on bad whites has been raging for so long now it is easy to forget that bad whites are people too. They are just presented as people. It is a sad statement on our age when it is unusual for our betters to present normal people as genuine people, rather than as bad guys and monsters in their morality plays.

Anyway, the other indulgence on the TV front was the movie Martian. Once I could download it free (I am ridiculously cheap) I watched it as I heard it was a really good sci-fi movie. Maybe my standards are out of whack or I lack the proper frame of reference, but it seems rather mediocre to me. Matt Damon was good being Matt Damon on Mars. The other actors are unknown to me but they seemed like they were doing a good job. The visuals were great, but it just seemed sort of blah.

The thing is, I expect the visuals in modern movies to be great. We are long past the point where CGI is new and cutting edge. Every movie now has outlandish special effects. The days of model spaceships hanging from fishing line against black paper are long gone. I had the same reaction to the movie Gravity. Yes, it is neat how they make it look real, but they are supposed to make it look real. That is the point. Not making it look real would be unusual. I cannot remember the last time I saw a movie where the effects were not realistic.

I have this debate with friends. Modern sci-fil is lacking because they invest everything in the visuals and scrimp on the writing and character development. They care more about getting tight shots of the actresses ass in the Lycra jumpsuit than telling the story. The Martian turned out to be Castaway on Mars, except Matt Damon was vastly less introspective and interesting than Tom Hanks. Hanks came back a better man. Damon comes back and we are led to believe he was turned into a self-absorbed douche by his experience, which was what he was before his adventure.

At the risk of sounding like an old coot, the stories were better when they had none of the modern visual aids. A show like Star Trek had to be carried by the story and characters. Watch an old Western and they are basically stage plays put on film. They were more respectful of the audience, because the audience had to fill in the blanks with their imagination. The writers and actors had no choice but to invest in the writing and character development. That is all there was, for the most part.

Of course, that sort of brings me back to the beginning. These long form serial dramas we see on cable like Justified, work because they do invest in the writing. These shows have plenty of costume and setting work. Game of Thrones is set in adventure land with magical midgets and dragons. But that is not what these shows are about or why people watch them. They are well designed and executed dramas with good writing and acting. They are traditional western entertainment, which is people entertaining other people by telling their tale.

Kristol Nicht

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In a hilariously absurd post, the #nevertrump fanatic David French declined to be the nominee of Bill Kristol’s new political party. French is prone to drama so this is pretty standard stuff from him. I take some pride in having spotted him as a loony-tune a long time ago. I could just tell he was, in the mold of Glenn Beck, one of those guys who careens from one cause to the next, always overdoing it in a quest for grace. In a better age, these sorts were turned into missionaries and shipped off to Africa.

That said, I am a little surprised that Kristol’s scheme has been such a disaster. He is a smart guy and a very connected guy in the GOP. He has been a made-member of the Bush crime family for decades. His ideological inclinations may not be my cup of tea, but I respect his IQ. He had to know that going third party was suicide. He may be willing to commit suicide for his cause, but unless your name is Mohamed, it is not easy to get volunteers for your suicide mission. As a result, I assumed he was up to something else, like leveraging access to Team Trump.

Even smart guys screw up and smart guys who think they are smarter than everyone tend to make big mistakes. There is also the fact that Kristol is no spring chicken. He is sixty-three, which is not ancient, but that is when some men start to slip. I am not saying he is ready for the home; it is just that he is not going to be as politically nimble as he was twenty years ago. There is also the fact that he has been in the bubble for a long time and his connections to the currents of American life are now entirely indirect.

He and many other neo-cons seem to be trapped in 1995, unable to appreciate that the world has changed, the culture has changed and, most important, neo-conservatism is not so “neo” anymore. Their ideas all seem dated and out of sync with 2016 America. Listen to Kristol or his half-orc sidekick John Podhoretz talk about America and it is as if they just awoke from a twenty year nap. They keep repeating the same slogans from two decades ago as if the last two decades never happened. It is cringe inducing.

That is probably the biggest error Kristol made in his attempt to unhorse Trump. The Bill Kristol brand of conservatism was a horrible flop that nearly killed the Republicans Party and turned the word “conservative” into an epithet. In 2000, conservatives had full control of government for the first time in a century. Instead of rolling back the welfare state, they expanded it and launched into a massive war with Islam that we still cannot figure out how to end. We have been dropping bombs on Muslims for a quarter century now and things are worse.

People can be forgiven for thinking that maybe these neo-cons were never all that conservative. You can only scold people for so long about your principles before they expect to see you act on those principles. It seems like the only principles the neo-cons hold dear are the ones that allow them to take a powder when it is time to take on the Left. The last time conservative won back any ground against the Left was in the mid-90’s. Since then, it has been a long bloody retreat.

There is also the issue of tactics. Kristol’s claim to fame was the purging of Pat Buchanan and the remaining paleo-cons from the party. His trick in the 90’s was to bait them into saying bad things about Israel or the Israel lobby in Washington. Many fell for it and were tarred as anti-Semites. That made throwing them out of the party an easy task. There is nothing that strikes fear in the heart of the Republican like being called an anti-Semite. They would rather be associated with pedophiles like Denny Hastert than tied to someone who is an anti-Semite.

Trump is too smart for that and he is very pro-Israel in the typical American spirit. Most Americans support Israel because they are Christian and they see the Israelis as the underdog, facing a billion lunatics who want to murder them. That is Trump. He does not have deep thoughts on the subject, but he instinctively backs Israel. Having spent his whole life working with Jews in New York real estate, he is extremely comfortable around Jews.

Finally, I think Kristol, like many neo-cons, has forgotten the whole point of their movement. It was always intended to be a sales pitch. It was an effort to stitch together the various strains of American conservatism into a political force that could win elections. To their credit, it worked quite well, but it failed to deliver anything more than hollow election victories. In the end, a viable political movement has to deliver and 85% of GOP voters tell pollsters that their party has not delivered.

It is the old saying from the drug game. Do not get high from your own supply. That is what happened with the neo-cons. They started believing their own sales pitch and soon forgot that it was just a sales pitch. They stopped thinking about the practical reality of politics which is that the coalition that wins expects to get something for it. The neo-cons got swank offices and additional quarters added to their public pension, but the spear catchers and water carriers of the party got nothing. Pleas to ideological purity are not going to work on people who feel burned.

The Umman Manda

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Thirty years ago, most Americans felt they could, to some degree, relate to the people who ruled over them. The politicians did not tool around in armored vehicles or have armed men in mirrored sunglasses guarding them. The so-called “public servants” were not highly compensated, even if they did not work hard. The members of the commentariat were few in number and they worked hard to present themselves as normal people. There was a gap, for sure, but it did not feel like a huge gap.

A lot has changed and today it feels to most people like we have been colonized by pod people from another planet. They sort of look like us and make familiar noises, but they are not us. They are alien. Every day they say things that suggest they are just visiting our planet. President Obama makes the sort of “gaffes” a person makes when they have been trained to sound like a person, but maybe did not pay strict attention in human class. Hillary Clinton often sounds like a stroke victim learning to talk again.

Today, of course, there is an army of chattering skulls, experts and commenters we see on TV and on-line. Unless you live in one of the guarded combines around Washington or in a swank building in Manhattan, you will never run into these people on the street. They live apart from the rest of us. That is why they sound like graduate students on an anthropology study. They peer out at us and then describe to each other what they think is happening. To them, we are just talking monkeys in a game park.

The foreignness Americans now feel toward their rulers is rather weak compared to the alienation the rulers feel toward the people. Decades of telling each other scary stories about racist, misogynistic and bigoted Americans has left most of them fearful of normal Americans. The universal response from both the Left and the so-called Right, to the rise of Trump, has been to compete with one another for who can produce the vilest epithet they can fling at the Trump voter.

Some elements of the ruling class still think they just need to adjust some settings in the enclosures and things will calm down. They write long letters to one another about “connectedness” and how Trump is really just leading a rear guard action of losers and misfits. When that gets boring, it’s back to telling campfire stories about how Hitler has come back from the dead and is organizing the Final Final Solution on twitter. Listen to the mainstream press and you would think the streets are teaming with skinheads, brown shirts and Klansman.

If you are a normal person, you can’t help but feel like an alien in your own country when you see stuff like this on twitter. A normal person at a Trump rally is set upon by a mob and our so-called betters howl with approval. All those lectures we used to hear from the ruling class about free speech and protest being the highest form of patriotism suddenly ring a little hollow. So-called conservatives care more about democracy in Iraq than in America. The liberals care more about the foreign invaders than the safety of Americans.

This great divide that has opened up between the ruling classes and the people is largely the result of globalism. The source of the great fortunes is no longer tied to countries or cultures. Global money bankrolls government and the petty royalty that lives off government. The result is the people in charge have divorced themselves from the people over whom they rule. The Cloud People define themselves by their opposition to and essential difference from the Dirt People.

Over the last few decades as this has evolved, it was one big party for the government class. No matter which party won the election, the money still poured into the Imperial Capital to finance the petty royalty that lives in the suburbs around the city. Six of the ten richest counties in America are connected to DC. Two are outside the financial capital of the world, New York City. Good times or bad, the last three decades has seen their wealth and prosperity grow.

For the people in charge, particularly the commentariat, the American people have become the Umman Manda. These were people who poured south into Mesopotamia in the second century BC. The name, depending upon the source, means “the horde from who knows where” or, and my favorite, “the scourge of the gods.” To the people peeking at us through the windows of their car services and telescopes, the public is just a formless mass of savages that threaten the established order. It is why they hate what is happening. It is why they will stop at nothing to end it.

Guaranteed Basic Income

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“‘It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure— had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!”

–Time Machine

The Swiss are voting on a referendum that if passed, would require the state to supply every Swiss citizen a basic income of 2,500 Swiss francs per month. That is roughly $2500 or £1,755. This story in the BBC does a respectable job of covering the topic. The news suggests the referendum has little chance of passing. The Swiss are a practical people and this proposal has too many unanswered questions. That and the proponents are something less than assuring.

These proposals are following the typical course of reform efforts. They bounce around the academy for a while as intellectuals work over the concepts. Then they are sold to the political class in fits and starts. If the political class is resistant, then maybe an activist group or industry group is enlisted to move the effort. Over time, what was once a radical idea is being discussed by respectable people. Before long, the debate is over who can best implement the new idea.

There are some good arguments in favor of the guaranteed basic income. One is it is simple. Like the flat tax, the GBI replaces the myriad of welfare programs and the government vipers that come with them. The other point in its favor is it addresses the growing problem of mass unemployment. In the robot future, most people do not work so this solves the problem of people not having a way to earn money. There is also the fact that it is value neutral. People get the money to spend on whatever they wish, without the nanny state harassing them.

There are many arguments against it, with the most obvious being that welfare programs never go away. In America, the US Congress has repealed exactly one welfare program in the last century. The WPA was passed in the 1930’s and later replaced by Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, which was such a hilarious disaster, it was replaced by a program called the Jobs Training Partnership Act. That was eventually repealed in the 90’s. That is a long time to kill one horrible welfare program.

The most likely result, at least in America, is a basic income on top of existing welfare programs. There are seventy-nine means tested welfare programs in America. Everyone of those programs has a federal agency employing thousands of people who do nothing but administer welfare programs. Congress will get rid of those right after they do something about the unicorn infestation. Until the inevitable fiscal crisis forces a mass retrenchment of industrial era government programs, there will be no reform of welfare in America.

Putting that aside, there are other problems. Spend time in the ghetto and you see the effects of the dole on the human spirit. A man not working quickly falls into bad habits. Families dependent on public money soon start to act like zoo animals, because they are essentially zoo animals. The state gives them an allowance, tells them how to spend it and supervises their living conditions. Granted, most got into that state because they lack the ability to manage their own affairs, but the corrosive effects of dependency are well known.

Even so, for all of human history, nature solved the problem of too many people by killing off the excess people either through famine, warfare or migration. In other words, supplying enough food, shelter, water and security for the population required all hands on deck. If a society out bred its resource supply, then that meant starvation or expanding territory through conquest in order to get more resources. Often, it just meant killing off a lot of people in wars over resources, thus solving the problem.

We are now able to produce all the food we need long into the future. More important, automated food production is well on the path to producing all the food we could ever need with very little human labor. The robot future has been discussed to death at this point, but even allowing for a fair bit of hyperbole in the predictions, we are facing a future where human labor is decreasingly necessary. That means the value of human capital will plummet, assuming the current economic models.

In a world of scarcity, society can carry the old and very young, along with a ruling elite. The modern industrial society could carry many more people who produced nothing because technology made those who did produce vastly more productive. Welfare programs knocked the edges off the inequality by transferring wealth from the rich to the poor. In the mature technological society, vast numbers will be idle, but provided for as there will be more than enough resources.

How that is resolved will be the greatest intellectual challenge in human history.

Religion Of Hate

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Imagine that you can go back in time and have a conversation with your younger self, maybe explaining events of today. Since my audience is getting younger all of a sudden, I will keep this bit of make believe relatable for all ages. Imagine you go back to 2005 and meet your 2005 self with all the knowledge and experience of your 2016 self. I am picking 2005 because that precedes the collapse of the Bush presidency and the beginning of the manic phase of the Great Progressive Awakening that started in the 90’s.

Now, 2016 you sits down with the 2005 you and says, “In a decade, our black Muslim president, who may be bisexual (Google Reggie Love), will issue an edict forcing schools to let mentally ill men in dresses into restrooms, so they can watch your daughter pee. The Republican Party will sneak a provision into a mammoth budget bill legalizing this edict. When challenged, the President will claim the Christian Bible requires it.”

It is reasonable to assume that your 2005 self would think your 2016 self had gone insane or was pulling some absurd joke. A normal person in 2005 could not imagine that serious people would be talking about trannies at all, much less allowing them a free shot at children in restrooms. Think about it, in 2005, Obama and Hillary Clinton were against homosexual marriage. Now, Clinton is a click away from coming out as a lesbian.

How in the hell does this happen?

One way to understand the threat to civilization from the neo-puritan cult we call liberalism is to look at the language. Somewhere in the mists of time, the cult started insisting we say “gender” instead of “sex.” No one thought much of it. It just felt like one of their silly ticks so they can feel special. Normal people are not obsessed with waging war against society so they tend not to assume these ticks are part of a larger plan.

Biology tells us there are two sexes so claiming there are three or four is never going to fly. Humans do not have genders so once you get outside the world of the real, you are free to make up whatever you like. That is how we ended up with 85 “genders.” Once you expand the definition of something, you can start to include other stuff that was never part of the original definition. That subtle shift from “sex” to “gender” opened the gates of Hell.

Similarly, it was not so long ago when men had wives and women had husbands. Now, we have “intimate partners” which means nothing, so it can mean anything. This sounds like a harmless neologism to dodge the whole queer couple issue, but that is not where it ends. It is never the end. By conflating all sexual relations into this formless term, there is no distinction between marriage and an orgy or porn shoot. All of a sudden, your marriage is no different from a random hookup.

I was reading about the Baylor “sexual assault” scandal the other day and it became clear that sexual assault is a term that means nothing and everything, depending upon the social justice warrior’s inclination. Rape is a real word with real meaning. When a woman is raped, we know it means non-consensual sexual intercourse. There are degrees of rape, but they are based on the degree of violence involved. The sex is still sex and non-consensual.

Sexual assault, on the other hand, means anything from an unkind word on-line to violent rape. In the Baylor case, one of the two players involved was accused of sexual assault. He spent the night drinking with a girl, who invited him into her apartment in the late hours. He says sex was consensual and she says she did not want sex. There is nothing more to it beyond that, but it is in the same bucket as violent rape, because of the language.

Again, normal people think sexual assault is just a polite way of saying rape, but normal people are not nursing elaborate revenge fantasies against all men. The whole point of creating this new expansive term was to accuse otherwise innocent men of horrible crimes. It lets unhinged coeds turn a college campus upside down by making reckless accusations of sexual assault. It makes it easy for the demented harpies of the Cult of Modern Liberalism to wage war on normalcy.

Think about the kind of people who cook up the phrase “undocumented worker.” These are not just dishonest people. These are crazy people. They are so committed to their cause, which always involves immiserating normal people and pulling down civil society, they will endlessly plot to pervert the language as a part of the longer term goals. Everything about their lives is directed at destroying what you consider to be normal, including you.

It is an important part of our reality. The people on the other side, call them liberals, globalists, moonbats, commies, whatever, they are fully committed to the end of you and everything that defines you. It is a religion for them, a religion based on hatred of you. Whatever it was or whatever it may claim today, it is just a religion of hatred, mostly a hatred of white people and specifically a hatred of white men.

There is no reasoning with fanatics. There are no bargains that can be struck. The lesson your 2005 should learn from your 2016 self is that every deal struck with these people was broken. They never stopped demanding more and more, because they will never stop until they pull the roof down on all of us. The folks cheering on the Mexican mobs attacking people in San Jose are never going to consider you a friend. They hate you, so you better be prepared to hate them back just as hard.

Clinton Math

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The radio guy John Batchelor followed me on twitter so I followed him back and tuned into his program a few times. I do not listen to a lot of talk radio and I have only listed to this program a handful of times. My sense is that he, like most pundits, is bearish on Donald Trump. I could be wrong here, but my sense is he is in tune with the conventional wisdom which says Trump has no chance to beat Clinton. Even though polls look good for Trump, the feeling is the deck is stacked against him.

One reason I think the conventional wisdom is wrong is they keep referring to the Red State/Blue State model as if it were written in stone and handed down by the gods. Batchelor keeps mentioning it in his analysis. It is a very weird thing about the modern age, but people struggle to remember anything past a decade or so. It is as if the present were permanent, never having changed and never changing. I am not that old and I remember when elections were nothing like the Red State/Blue State model.

The other odd thing, something that you see on the Left all the time, is the absolute belief that the future is now. Progressives have been dreaming of the demographic paradise when America is majority-minority for so long, they seem to think it has happened. Maybe it is just honkyphobia, but they carry on like blacks and Hispanics have a veto over our elections. America is still roughly 70% white and many Hispanics prefer to ID as white, when given the choice.

Of course, there’s the elephant in the room. Hillary Clinton is the most unappealing candidate to lead a party since Mike Dukakis. Frankly, I am probably being unfair to Dukakis, who was honest, but cursed with a dull personality. Hillary is a shrieking harpy, who makes your skin crawl. If you had her pop out of a closet in a haunted house, the authorities would shut it down for public safety reasons. To normal men, testicular cancer is more appealing than Clinton.

The bigger issue is the math problem. Here’s the back of the envelope demographic breakdown of the 2012 vote:

Demographic Group % of Vote Obama Share Vote Share
The Blue-Eyed Devil 73.7% 39.0% 28.7%
The Sacred People 13.4% 99.0% 13.3%
The New Sacred People 8.4% 75.0% 6.3%
Minorities That Get Into Stanford 3.8% 71.0% 2.7%
Totals 99.3% 51.0%

I’m pulling this from census data and there are some rounding issues, but it is a good starting point when looking at this coming election. For starters, blacks came out in historic numbers, for obvious reasons. That’s not happening in 2016. Second, whites never warmed to Mittens. The white vote was down 2% from 2008 and that was down significantly from 2004. While Obama struggled with honkies, enough stayed home to allow the elevated black vote to carry him to victory.

Using current polling, we have a Clinton model like this:

Demographic Group % of Vote Clinton Share Vote Share
The Blue-Eyed Devil 74.70% 32.00% 23.90%
The Sacred People 12.00% 99.00% 11.88%
The New Sacred People 9.40% 75.00% 7.05%
Minorities That Get Into Stanford 3.00% 100.00% 3.00%
Totals 99.10% 45.83%

What I have done here is assume a slight uptick in the white vote, based on history and what we are seeing in the primaries. I am assuming the black vote returns to normal and I am giving the Hispanics a bit of boost, even though the data does not suggest it. Keep in mind that the white vote was 77% in 2004. I could be understating it here, but I am trying to be conservative and not sound like a Trump cheerleader. Even so, Hillary Clinton is looking at a ceiling of 46%, which matches up pretty well with the polling so far.

To make matters worse, recent polling has shown Trump doing much better with blacks than the typical Republican. He is in the 10% range which is unheard of and suggests the black vote will be very depressed. Similarly, Trump is polling better than Romney with Hispanics. Put another way, the model in that graphic is the rosy scenario for Clinton at the moment. Unless things change, she could be facing a Hubert Humphey sized defeat.

That does not mean Trump is a lock. He has a number of hurdles to overcome before people see him as a safe and plausible choice for President. There is also the Traitor Party Bill Kristol is trying to run as a straw to siphon votes from Trump. Even that nitwit Gary Johnson could become a home for the #nevertrump loons. These people are lackeys of the Custodial State and will do everything to help Clinton, someone they see as one of their own.

Even with all that, the math is terrible for Clinton. Counting on a straw in a presidential race is the very definition of desperation. John Anderson was not able to stop Reagan and Wallace could not stop Nixon. A candidate has to offer something more than disdain and a lecture. The Democrats are now the anti-white party and the anti-male party. In a country that is 70% white and 50% male, which is going to be a losing hand in the long run. Having a shriveled hag as your candidate makes the task impossible.

The Collapse Of The Old Order

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In modern America, the mass media is controlled by adherents of the technocratic, neo-puritan religion we call modern liberalism. The simplest way to think of modern liberalism is as an identity cult where a relatively small group of whites look out at the rest of the country with contempt. As a result, public debate and public opinion exist within the context of liberalism. The terms, assumption, premises and boundaries of public discussion are determined by liberals in the media.

The point of bringing this up is to underline how easy it is to come away with a very warped view of what is happening in the world. In the recent Austrian election, for example, the Freedom Party was described as crypto-Nazi, despite being the opposite of National Socialists. If you read their party platform, they are more like the guys at Reason Magazine than anyone from Der Stürmer. From the perspective of the people writing the news stories, however, these rather bland libertarians of the Freedom Party feel like extremists.

The result of ceding control of public discourse to the cult of modern liberalism is that there is not a lot of discussion about what is happening to the Left. The coverage of the Austrian election is a great example. The press carried on like civilization just escaped an attack from Godzilla but breezed past the fact that Alexander Van der Bellen is a complete loon. The Austrian Green Party is nuts even by the standards of Austrian politics, which is no small thing.

Granted, the election was symbolic in many ways and that tends to result in weirdos doing well. Small town mayors are often eccentric because they have so little power. Voters are free to indulge in the entertainment side of politics when there is little at risk. Still, a complete crackpot won a nationwide election in a modern Western country. The reason for it is the political Left in the West has snapped free of its connections to normal society and is now rocketing out to the fringe.

Another useful example of this is the British Labour Party. It was not so long ago that the party was led by dreary technocrats like Tony Blair. Despite all the rhetoric, Labour was not a bunch of communists. They were always a left of center party that was just as happy to curry favor with the rich and powerful as the Tories. Today they are led by a madman who thinks Stalin was a trimmer. Jeremy Corbyn is a lunatic who has spent his life in fringe politics. Today he is one election away from being Prime Minister.

In America, the Democrats have been drifting into lunacy for a while under Obama as they desperately try to hold their coalition of weirdos together. Bernie Sanders is an old communist in a competitive race with Hillary Clinton. Sanders is not just an academic commie. He deeply admired the Soviets and thought Albania was a good model for the world. Just a decade ago a guy like Sanders running as anything other than a no-hope third candidate was laughable.

The dynamic in America has always been that the Progressives yank the window toward some fringe issue. The normals would grudgingly go along, kicking and screaming, so that the Overton Window gradually shifted in the direction of the loonies. All of a sudden, the normals appear to have simply let go of it. Set loose of that tether, the American Left is rocketing off into madness. There’s really no other way to describe the trannies in the bathroom business. It is madness.

Comparing American politics to European politics is not always sound because Europe has lived in a consequence free bubble since World War II. The economic and territorial safety of Europe has been America’s problem for 70 years, leaving the Euros to indulge is a more provincial brand of politics. Still, the events in Greece last year and what we are starting to see in more stable countries like Austria, suggests a global trend. At least a trend in the Western world.

The old order is breaking down and our politics are pulling apart. The old Center-Left coalition that has dominated Western politics is collapsing. On one side we have crackpots and lunatics trying to fill the void. On the other side we have traditionalists and nationalists, long marginalized, trying to organize in order to get into the fight. The Austrian Freedom Party had that “happy to be invited” vibe to it because none of them expected to be competitive.

Austria is a good lesson. We live in uncertain times and it is not always clear to voters who is wearing the black hat and who is wearing the white hat. People tend to go for the safe choice, and the safe choice is more often than not the familiar choice. Hillary Clinton is the worst candidate since Mike Dukakis, but she is familiar, like that hairy wart on Aunt Zelda’s chin. It is gross and disgusting, but you are used to it. That is what keeps her in the race, despite her many defects.

In the larger context, citizens in the West have been familiarized with Lefty for generations. Even the crazy ones like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn are stock figures on the political stage. The traditionalists and nationalists still feel alien and weird to many people and therefore face a bigger challenge. The result will be a period of derangement in politics where the fate of countries is placed in the hands of feckless nitwits like Justin Trudeau.

In short, things are probably going to get much worse before they get better.