Monthly Archives: July 2016

Intellectuals Versus Ideologues

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I think if I were to produce a defining characteristic of a true intellectual, I would say it is someone willing to consider possibilities that are not already on the table. When I say “true intellectual” I mean to distinguish the real thinkers from the pseudo-intellectual posers. The truly smart and curious are not constrained by or extremely interested in the current fads. When presented with a puzzle, they first try to imagine all of the possible solutions and then begin eliminating the impossible.

One of the useful lessons of mathematics is that there are some problems for which there are many answers. If you are presented with x – 3 = 0   or   x – 4 = 0 then you know x = 3, 4. In other words, X has more than one possible solution. A surprisingly high number of allegedly smart people struggle with that basic concept. When you get into more complex areas like human sciences, the range of solutions to a problem may include a combination of factors interacting to cause the observed phenomenon.

Therefore, the intellectual is someone that starts with the set of all solutions and narrows the list to those that are possible. The religiously minded, on the other hand, reverse the order of things. They first eliminate all the possibilities that fall outside the limits of their faith. A Christian, for example, will never consider the possibility that his faith is nonsense and Jesus was a fictional character. The Muslim will never consider that Mohamed was simply a medieval L. Ron Hubbard.

Throughout history, we have examples of the priestly class convincing the people that the calamity that has befallen them is due to their deviation from the faith. When the plague ravaged Europe, the religious were convinced it was due to God’s wrath. What else could it be? The English blamed the Viking invasions on the faithful falling out of favor with God. Revolutionaries blame the inevitable bad results of their revolution on enemies of the revolution.

Just to be clear, religion is vital to every society. Most people should not be thinking about all the possible causes of what is around them. Islam may be useless to Western civilization, but it serves a needed purpose in the East. Christianity was vital to the development of Western Civilization. In fact, it was what preserved the stock of human knowledge that was the foundation of the modern West. Today, the West would be better off if our leaders were Christians, instead of insane.

Even so, the difference between the intellectual and the ideological enforcer is all about the possibilities. A good example of that is in this post on NRO the other day from someone calling himself Mario Loyola. He is one of the thousands of public intellectuals living off the taxpayer at foundations around the Imperial Capital. His CV is here and you see the word “fellow” turn up a lot in his work history. Most of our “conservative” intellectuals have credentials from the liberal of institutions.

Anyway, his post is about black crime rates and the causes of those crime rates. This bit got my attention. “When America is ready for a real conversation about race, it will start here. It will ask honestly what the causes are. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that race has absolutely nothing to do with crime rates, and that government policies such as welfare are the real culprit, creating the urban blight and broken families that lead directly to crime.”

Let us first start with the phrase, “have a conversation.” When you want to kill time, you have a conversation about the weather. When you want to let someone else know things about yourself, you have a conversation. When you want to find answers to problems, you do not have a conversation. That is how you get fired. You are fooling around having conversations instead of doing work. In modern America, when a Progressive says she wants a conversation, you better run.

Putting that aside, the first thing Mario does in his “exploration of causes” is eliminate those that fall outside the permitted. In fact, he makes clear that he is not interested in that conversation at all. If you already have the answer, there is no need for further discovery. Once you find the answer, the next job is to tell the world about your wonderful insight. That is why scientists post the results of their experiments. It is how the stock of human knowledge increases.

Of course, Mario is not offering any evidence of his assertion. For this type of Progressive, race falls outside the set of acceptable causes so it is eliminated without further discussion. Because he is from the shadow end of the faith, he also feels the need to eliminate racism so he can focus on the welfare state. His post is not intended to start a conversation or begin the search for the causes of black crime. It is testimony in support of his particular brand of Progressivism.

It is not a great surprise that our public debates are echo chambers. Biology has become forbidden knowledge. So much so that few know anything about it. That is because biology is at odds with egalitarianism, the foundation stone of the Progressive faith. Once you accept that nature does not distribute her gifts equally among all men, Progressivism is untenable. It is akin to saying Christ was fictional or Mohamed was a con-man. That can never be allowed, no matter how many people die.

Mobile Phones

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I have had a mobile phone since the early 1990’s. I was provided the Motorola bag phone when it came out and I think that was ’90 or ’91, but I may be off a year or two there. Before that I was provided with a model that was the size of a cinder block, when you added in the case, battery and antennae. The funny thing was that the early phones were so unreliable we had a pool of the things. That way when one was broken you could use one of the spares. Before long no one had the number they were assigned.

That was forever ago, of course. By the end of the ninety’s everyone had something small they could put in their pocket. Over the last 25 years I have been through all sorts of phones. I have always been an early adopter so I had the first flip phones and then the first pocket sized models. When Palm released the Treo, I had to have one. According to the stories, Steve Jobs invented the smartphone, but that’s nonsense. Palm created the smartphone. Somewhere in a drawer I probably still have the old Treo to prove it.

Since the Droid hit the streets, I have been an Android user and I stopped being an early adopter. I think by the second iteration of the Droid I decided I had gone as far as I needed to go with the smartphone. Having e-mail and text was great. I will use the GPS when I get lost and I do listen to podcast when traveling. The millions of apps are lost on me. Since something like 90% are never downloaded, I am clearly not alone in that. As a practical matter, the mobile phone topped out for me about six or seven years ago.

Anyway, I had to buy a new phone as the old one was starting to become unreliable. I started with the assumption that I would buy another Android model or maybe try an iPhone. The cost of the things got me thinking that maybe it is time to downsize and go back to a basic phone. Spending $700 for a smart phone that mostly sits idle on my desk strikes me as a waste of money so I went looking at other options. Even with the zero interest financing from the carrier, it seemed like a waste.

I decided to break form entirely and buy a Windows phone. I know one person with one and they love it. I was skeptical, but I saw one on-line for $200 at the Microsoft store so I got less skeptical. You have to try new things and new things that can save you $500 are worth trying. If it were a crappy phone, I figured, it would be a $200 lesson. I have learned much more expensive lessons so the risk seemed small. Plus, the phone was unlocked so I could shop plans.

The hardware is actually a Lumia 650, but it is branded Microsoft and loaded with the Windows 10 OS. It turns out to be a great phone and the OS is vastly better than I expected. The interface is better than Apple and Google. I never would have guess that in a million years, but that tile interface is a great idea. It is stupid on a desktop, but it works really well for a phone. I use mine one handed so using larger tiles for the upper left and small ones at the bottom right means I can reach everything with my thumb.

Since I was going rogue, I figured it was time to walk away from Verizon and try the low cost guys that the local drug dealers use. Mobile phones are a vital part of ghetto life so there are all sorts of low cost carriers catering to the poor. The average hopper is not leaving the five block area of his gang’s turf, so quality of service is not an issue. What is important is that you can get a good deal on a burner and the retailer does not ask too many questions.

So, I went with T-Mobile. I do not know if they serve the black community or it was just the miracle of local demographics, but I was the only honky in the phone store. I suspect I was the only person with a job, other than the clerks. But the lack of an income is no longer a hindrance to participating on the modern consumer economy. I saw two gals who I know have not worked a day in their lives buying new phones on whatever payment plan they offer. Maybe they were signing up for Obama phones before he leaves office.

I have a theory that most of the airtime on wireless networks is used by stupid people talking to other stupid people. Watching the sad sacks at the T-Mobile store I could not help but wonder what they talk about to the people on the other end. If their conversations in the store were representative, millions of minutes are consumed with people saying “yeah” and “you feel me” to one another. It is not like they are coordinating meetings between business trips.

Of course, keeping the people down at the bottom busy is an increasingly important issue in a modern society. The bottom is creeping up as the demand for low-skill labor and low-IQ laborers declines. This is a problem that will only get worse over the next decades. Giving them enough money to buy game consoles and mobile phones means they have plenty of toys to fill their day. Consumer electronics are the Soma of the technological age. The iPhone and Xbox are what gives meaning to their lives.

Thoughts On Turkey

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In my youth, military coups and revolutions were not common, but they were not unheard of either. Real countries like France or Canada did not have coups, but banana republics in South America had them with some frequency. Then you had the intrigues in the Soviet Bloc. A leader would suddenly stop showing up at public events and that meant he was sick or he had fallen out of favor. Africa would have revolutions with some frequency. We called them revolutions, even though nothing ever changed, but that’s Africa.

The general assumption was that a real country did not have military coups or revolutions because they had democracy of some sort. If the people were unhappy, they could vote in people they liked. If elements of the ruling elite were unhappy, they could appeal to the public for change. The military, instead of being an instrument of the ruling class, was subordinate to the civilian government and excluded from politics. That is not a bad place to start when defining a modern country. Real countries have elections, not revolts.

I think this is why the western news services were having so much trouble fitting the attempted coup in Turkey into their standard narrative. Turkey is supposed to be different from the rest of the Muslim world. Turkey is a real country with elections and globalism. Sure, the political leadership sounds a lot like the lunatics from the Arab world, but that is just an act. It is their version of boob bait for the bubbas. Instead of guns and abortion, their rednecks want to hear about Allah and the Jews. Turkey is a real country, not a banana republic.

Following along via Sky News, the BBC and CNN, I had to laugh at the confusion of the news people covering this thing. They did not know which side they were supposed to support. Initially, they were just baffled, as they do not know anything about the world that is not fed to them through their earpieces. They were reduced to stuttering through live images of people walking around the streets waving flags. Then Obama came out in defense of the Islamists and the rest of NATO followed suit. Instantly, the new media was anti-coup.

Another thing I thought was humorous about the news coverage was the repetition of the claim this coup was not a “21st century coup.” I first heard this said on Sky News and then all of the news services were saying it. Whether this was “monkey see-monkey do” or the official word from the party is hard to know. What I found amusing about it is Turkey is not a 21st century country, but it is in the middle of a 21st century civil war, of which this was a part. The fact that this is not obvious to the alleged experts, who rule over us, does not bode well for our future.

In this civil war, Erdogan is the Oliver Cromwell of Turkey and this attempted coup was something analogous to Penruddock’s Uprising. It is not a perfect analogy, but it helps explain what is happening in Turkey. The army is the defender of the secular legacy of Ataturk and the defender of the old order. Erdogan is the leader of the new order, the Islamists that believe they can have a modern technological society, under medieval Islamic moral codes.

Everyone seems to agree that this event makes Erdogan stronger, but Turkish politics are so opaque that outsiders can never really know what is going on in the country. This could have been an operation run by the secular military to get the Gülen cult removed from their own ranks. The Gülen Cult is thought to have a stronger presence in the police than the military so this could be something more complex. In other words, this may not have been a revolt against the AKP but a revolt within the AKP.

There is also the fact that ethnic Turks are a majority in Turkey for now. Kurds are the future, demographically. That is a big part of what has put the AKP in power. The Turks view secularism as the cause of the demographic decline. The organization of the Kurds into a single political party, denying AKP a majority in the last election is a glimpse of the future and the Turks know it. That is why the AKP sent in the army after the election to persecute the Kurds. It is a part of what is driving the Turkish involvement in Syria.

The civil war among the Turks is about what to do about the future, a future that will have more Kurds than Turks if something is not done to arrest the low TFR of young Turks. Turkey has the Western disease, but it is still an Eastern culture. In the West, civilizational death is celebrated in the form of open borders and multiculturalism. In the East, it is met with religious revivals and bloodbaths. David Goldman makes the argument that the Iranian revolution was driven by similar forces.

The Turks are faced with a choice. They can be fully Western and go quietly into that good night. Alternatively, they can be Eastern and fight against the dying of the light. The former means modern technology and prosperity, for a little while at least. The latter means men in robes ordering homosexuals thrown off buildings. That is what is happening inside Turkey today. It is a version of what is happening in the West, but only in a country that culturally is closer to Byzantium than Brussels.

Low Energy

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The glorious future is always just over the next mountain. The older you get, the taller that next mountain becomes and the further away it seems. It is this realization, this understanding, that young people often mistake for cynicism. They think their elders, poo-pooing their excitement for some new innovation, are just cranky old people unable to appreciate the dawning of the new age and unwilling to adapt to it. In reality those grumpy geezers are tired of sitting through the same film, never getting to the end.

I often feel that way about energy policy. Every decade we have a re-run of the same film, but never get to the end. Instead, everyone gets bored and walks out before the final scene where the utopian dreamer is fed into the woodchipper by a couple snaggletooth rednecks from coal country. Instead, the movie is cut short so it can be retooled for a new audience a decade later with the promise that this time, there is a new and improved ending. That is the catchphrase of every new plan to replace fossil fuels. “This time, things will be different.”

Here is a quote from Jerry Ford’s 1975 State of the Union speech, in which he laid out his energy plan: “I have a very deep belief in America’s capabilities. Within the next 10 years, my program envisions: 200 major nuclear power plants; 250 major new coal mines; 150 major coal-fired power plants; thirty major new [oil] refineries; twenty major new synthetic fuel plants; the drilling of many thousands of new oil wells; the insulation of eighteen million homes; and the manufacturing and the sale of millions of new automobiles, trucks and buses that use much less fuel…”

The only thing he got right was that cars use less fuel per mile, but that had nothing to do with the big dreams of the energy futurists. Fuel economy has steadily improved since the mass marketing of cars back in the stone age. That is due to better engineering. The cars not only get better fuel economy today, but they also ride better, they are of better quality, they use better components. A new car off the lot in the 1950’s suffered from rattles, wind noise, poor fitting components and it needed constant maintenance. In other words, fuel efficiency is mostly just a byproduct of better engineering of cars in general.

The rest of Ford’s agenda never happened. Later, Carter got on the solar bandwagon. In the late 70’s, everyone new that in the future, cars would be electric and be charged by solar panels. Every house would have a rooftop solar generator. Fossil fuels would go away entirely. The fact that none of this happened did not stop the dreamers from dusting off the solar fantasy again in the 2000’s. I am not sure, but I think the last big solar panel plant in the US shut down last year. If I eat right and exercise, I will live to see it re-opened again under another government free energy scheme.

What brought this on is this story in Scientific American last month. You would think that a publication with “science” in its name would be less inclined to fights of fancy, but that’s not how it works. It’s not how anything works these days.

The United States, Mexico and Canada will make a joint pledge tomorrow to draw half the continent’s power from non-emitting sources by 2025.

President Obama, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada will announce the ambitious target at the North American Leaders’ Summit in Ottawa, Ontario, which will also address security issues and other concerns to the continent’s three governments.

White House climate adviser Brian Deese described the pact as a sign of the growing bonds between the nations on climate and energy policies. He told reporters yesterday that the trio are cooperating more on those issues now than at any time in recent history.

“We find ourselves now at a moment where the alignment in terms of policy goals and focus on clean energy between our three countries is stronger than it has been in decades,” he said.

None of this will happen. The big non-carbon power generation facilities are nuclear and hydro. We are not building those anymore. The people who swear Gaia is vexed with us because of our cars are the people that killed off nuclear and hydro decades ago. Then as now, the problem is Gaia. She did not like nuclear energy and she did not like us blocking fish from swimming downstream. According to the Gaia worshipers, she is not happy with solar or wind either so the odds of those technologies getting anywhere are close to zero, even before you get to the science problems of both.

That is the irony of the green energy movement. Even if the significant scientific hurdles can be overcome for things like solar and wind, the greens will scuttle the projects anyway. The same people banging their tom-toms over coal and oil are out blocking the so-called green alternatives. Nuclear, which has the most promise in terms of “clean” energy, has been stalled for generations now. Gen-IV reactors are extremely safe and productive. If not for the greens, we could have all our electric from nuclear, but that will never happen.

No one reading this will live to see the day when America is getting the bulk of its electric from nuclear. Your children and grandchildren will not live to see it. The most optimistic estimate puts the window for the change to nuclear well past mid-century. The most optimistic window for wind and solar is somewhere around the time we discover the warp drive. Instead, every decade or so we will have another round of nonsense about how some new green energy will finally ween us off of oil and coal. Billions will be squandered on it; the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.

Dismal Quackery

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The other day, I made a crack about the soft sciences, psychology, sociology and so forth, comparing them to astrology and economics. It was in the context of the replication crisis that is roiling fields like psychology. The soft sciences are trying hard to pretend it is problem in all science, but that is not true. Anyway, someone gave me grief for slandering astrology, because the early strides in astronomy and even astrophysics were due to people trying to improve astrology. If you believe in that stuff, precise measuring of the movement of stars and planets is important.

I think most empirically minded people have long ago concluded that psychology is quackery. When I was a kid, talk therapy was the rage. The schools were hiring “counselors” and having kids sit down and talk about their problems. Even as a kid I knew it was nonsense. Talking someone out of being insane or depressed is slightly less nutty than slaughtering a goat and reading the entrails. Imagine if someone claimed they could talk you out of a broken leg or cancer. Quackery seems to stick around much longer than logic says it should.

That is the pattern we are seeing with economics. The colossal errors in the field should have discredited it a long time ago, but economist are still the court magicians of the modern state. This post by Tyler Cowen is a good example of dressing up uninformed opinion with the jargon of economics to make it sound like science. As Steve Sailer pointed out in the comments, economists have yet to offer a plausible explanation for how the post-nationalist world could operate. The only possible answer is that it would be based on force.

Europe is a great example of just how wrong modern economics has been about pretty much everything. The totality of mainstream economics has been cheering the Euro project for decades, even when it was pretty clear that the single currency was a disaster for many of the members. It has all the cyclical defects of hard money and none of the benefits. The open borders part of the project has resulted in a flood of non-Europeans, who have upset the social order, threatening the stability of the Continent.

This is not the first time modern economics has been outlandishly wrong about Europe. This post by Greg Cochran is a great reminder of just how absurdly wrong the field was about the realities of communism. The best estimates by the court magicians overstated communist economic output by two or three times reality. This despite the fact they had firsthand observations of the state of these communist countries. Westerners, including western academics, traveled throughout these countries and could observe the squalor firsthand.

In the 80’s, an acquaintance was getting sent to Moscow on government assignment. His family held a going away party as he was expected to be there for two years. Everyone was asked to bring something he could use in Russia. He got things like cartons of cigarettes, blue jeans and small bottles of liquor. The Russians turned a blind eye to this type of smuggling because they wanted the stuff too. The customs agent would take something for himself and maybe set you up with his cousin Yuri to sell the rest. Everyone, except economists, knew the score.

Of course, the birth of economics as a distinct field from political-economy was roughly one hundred years ago, with the publication of an economic textbook by Alfred Marshall. Economist were just as wrong about reality then as they are today. Prior to the Great War, globalism was all the rage, just as it is today. A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that territorial conquest had become unprofitable, and therefore global capitalism had removed the risk of major wars. A few years later Europe was murdering itself in the worst war in human history.

Science gets lots of things wrong. The scientific method assumes this, which is why test results are published, along with the methods, so others can challenge the results. Negative results are still results and add to the stock of human knowledge. In economics, they get fundamental elements of their field wrong and manage to subtract from the stock of human knowledge in the process. The problems facing Europe today are problems people understood well 50 years ago. Thanks to economics, policy makers are now forced to relearn what their grandparents took for granted.

The root of the problem is that statistics are not science and economics is pretty much just statistics applied to commerce. It is not worthless, but it is limited. Probability and correlation can point real scientist in the right direction, but they do not explain the mechanics of cause and effect. We know that smoking correlates with emphysema, but biologists figured out why one causes the other. Per capita chicken consumption correlates with US oil imports and only an economist would suggest one causes the other. Know what is happening is different from knowing why.

Calling back to where we started, most quackery manages to have some benefit, even if it is to just some make people feel happy. Astrology is right about the movement of the stars, at least as far as charting them. Horoscopes are stupid, but a harmless way for people to feel good about the uncertainty of life. Alchemy was a confidence racket, for the most part, but it eventually gave us chemistry. Even climate science has some utility, despite the massive fraud. Economists are fond of calling their racket the dismal science, but that is not fair or accurate. It is really just dismal quackery.

The Wuss Right

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In the chattering classes, the line dividing the Left from the Right is over means, not ends. Watch cable news for a while and inevitably they will have one of those mini-debates they like staging to illustrate the two extremes of what is acceptable opinion on some issue. After the Dallas shooting, for example, a liberal and conservative would offer their take on the incident. What we are supposed to take away from these exchanges is that your opinion better fall somewhere between the two offered on TV. Otherwise you’re some sort of fringe weirdo or worse.

The acceptable window varies from station to station, but there’s not a lot of diversity within the dominant political culture. The liberal channels set the window closer to their preferred opinion while Fox is slightly to the right of them. The thing is, everyone agrees on the ends. You never see two people debating an issue where one has an entirely different goal in mind. Both sides always start from the same premise and have the same ends in mind. By “ends” I mean esoteric concepts like world peace, racial harmony or economic equality. They both talk about “solutions.”

If I were to describe what it is that drives those on the dissident right away from conventional politics, into the arms of various alt-right groups, I think I’d start with the ends in mind. People in the various refusenik camps, on the fringes of society, simply reject the ends that the conventional Left and Right accept as their starting point. It’s not that the trouble makers want the opposite of those Utopian goals. It’s that they reject the assertion that those goals are possible. Humans are imperfect and there is no solution to that bit of reality.

An example of how this works is in this piece from The American Conservative on the problems of Baltimore City.

From near and far, too many people who felt qualified to offer an opinion or exercise power to help didn’t take the time to appreciate the history that has shaped West Baltimore or the variety of people who have been working for decades to improve this place. Accounts of a place like Sandtown have to start with policies forged decades ago regarding redlining and lead paint—policies that handicapped the value of many residents’ homes or did likewise to their children’s brains. The harm is ongoing: conservatives can easily recognize how the welfare state disinclines people to work, but it is hard to blame recipients when most of the wealth transferred through government goes straight to property managers and hospitals, not to the people themselves, who have little opportunity to accumulate wealth. The institutions that are accessible to people in West Baltimore—primarily churches and gangs—are trusted because other institutions don’t maintain any reliable order or support.

Ask any liberal why Baltimore is a dumpster fire and they will make the exact same claims. They blame it on magic. Redlining, as a real practice, never really existed. In fact, banks have been under pressure for generations now to lend to unqualified minorities. Even if we pretend it was a real thing, it ended two generations ago. Blaming long dead bankers for the problems of today is the same as blaming ghosts. No one ever tries to explain how not getting a mortgage causes T’Quan to murder Terrelle for his sneakers. Blaming redlining is no different than saying Allah wills it.

There’s a similar problem with lead paint. It was banned in 1971 and government has been removing it from housing for two generations. There’s also the fact that there are no studies showing increased levels of lead in the residents of Baltimore, compared to the surrounding areas. It’s an interesting theory, but that makes it a good example of how statistical correlations can lead you down a blind alley. But, blaming magic means not facing reality so the Left and Right embrace crackpot theories like lead paint as the cause of black crime.

Rebuilding institutions requires local leadership as well as outside aid. Great hay was made of some $130 million spent on a public-private partnership in the late 1990s and early 2000s to revitalize the neighborhood. Much of this money can still be seen in the homes that were rebuilt. You can walk around whole blocks that were vacant 30 years ago and that now have clean sidewalks, no drug traffic, and the sort of neighborliness that New Urbanism celebrates. As deep as the problems of Sandtown are, much good has been achieved using outside investment directed by people from within the community.

This is the sort of stuff black radicals like the Black Panthers used to demand back in the 60’s. They wanted no-strings attached money from white people so they could build their Afro-paradise. When they got it, they stole most of it and used the rest to build out their criminal enterprise. Well intentioned white people supported these groups because they assumed the fairy tales were true. If you just gave black people money, they would create a black version of Mayberry USA. It was just assumed that all human capital was the same, because after all, all humans are the same and only racists would say otherwise.

West Baltimore is what it is because it is full of West Baltimoreans. The people who built and maintained the city’s institutions left a long time ago for suburbs. The current residents moved in, like animals taking up spots in abandoned buildings. They did not build it. They could not maintain it. The result was that nature took its course. The institutions decayed and collapsed. The habits and ways of the new inhabitants took over. There’s no solution to this reality. You don’t fix human biology with a government program or pseudo-prayers to the gods of diversity.

The line dividing the New Right and the Buckley Conservative is between those who accept the reality of the human condition and those who don’t. The writer of that piece thinks all people are the same and that the observable differences are due to various forms of magic like racism and lead paint. It’s why they are called the Wuss Right. They inevitably give into the Left because they share all the same assumptions about humanity as the Left. They share the same goals. Convergence in the form of orchestrated surrender is the inevitable result.

In The Cloud, You Never Have To Say You’re Sorry

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After the Brexit vote, Prime Minister David Cameron announced he was stepping down from his position and leaving Parliament. He was on the losing end of the vote so he took the traditional approach and stepped aside. He did not have to do it as it was a referendum, not a parliamentary election. He also had plenty of support in his party for sticking around after the election. Instead, he chose to follow protocol and retire from politics. It is an acknowledgement that no man is indispensable and that there must be consequences to losing.

America used to have a similar tradition. When one party lost an election, they changed their leadership and maybe put new people in charge of the party. That is not the case anymore. Nancy Pelosi presided over a historic defeat for her party, but she refused to resign and remains as leader of her party in the House. Similarly, Harry Reid remains the leader of his party in the Senate despite leading them to disaster. Of course, losing an election is no longer a reason to retire from politics. Instead, it is a reason to make millions on Wall Street preparing for another run.

A big part of what ails America is the near total lack of accountability in the managerial elite. President Obama made a long list of claims about his health care bill, all of which proved to be false. There’s strong evidence that he lied about much of it. Yet, nothing happened. No one resigned from his team. They just laughed, shrugged and went onto other things. Jonathan Gruber, the man credited with designing the thing, laughs about lying to the public about how the program would work and what was expected. He got to keep his perch at MIT.

It is not just Democrats who never have to say they are sorry. Paul Ryan was the most embarrassingly incompetent running mate since Admiral Stockdale. Yet, he was rewarded for this by rising all the way to be Speaker of the House. Reince Priebus took the reigns of the GOP after the 2010 election and presided over the stunning defeat in 2012, only to stick around as head of the party. He is responsible for this battle plan crafted after the 2012 election. Everything in that document has proven to be wrong. Trump is the nominee because he did the opposite of that plan.

It is not just the politicians and party officials escaping responsibility. David Frum was humping this story on Twitter the other day. The story is nonsense, but what got my attention was the author. Franklin Foer used to be the editor of the New Republic back in the Bush years. He was the guy signing off on fabricated stories by a guy using the pen name “Scott Thomas”, claiming to be deployed in Iraq. It turns out that the writer was not in Iraq at all. It was also revealed that he was married to one of the fact checkers. The whole story is here if you have an interest in it.

Now, editors can get fooled by writers or by fake sources. Most anonymous sources in modern journalism are made up anyway. These fabricated stories were so outlandish, only a complete boob or a lunatic could fall for them. Regardless of the reason, he embarrassed his profession and his employers. In most lines of work, this means finding a new line of work, but that’s not how things work in The Cloud. Foer gets to write for big-foot publications and work at a think tank. Short of getting caught on video beating a Girl Scout with a puppy, there is no way to get fired in journalism.

Conservative Inc has a similar policy of shielding their worst elements from responsibility. The publisher of The Federalist is a guy named Ben Domenech. He also co-founded the RedState group blog. He also worked for the Washington Post until it was revealed he was a serial plagiarist. When caught he lied repeatedly until it was impossible to maintain the lies. He was also caught in a payola scam where he secretly accepted payments from agents of the Malaysian government to write editorials promoting Malaysian interests. Like Foer, Domenech could murder a nun on national TV and face no consequences.

The rest of The Cloud enjoys the same risk free existence. Look at all the people who pushed the Iraq War. They remain in their positions as experts at think tanks and government agencies. Karl Rove has grown rich on Fox News being wrong about everything. Bill Kristol is a millionaire based on being wrong for the last three decades. The Bush administration nearly destroyed the Republican Party and yet all of the principles escaped any consequence. Many have been recycled into new government positions with others waiting to join the next administration.

One of my favorite idiots is Jamie Gorelick, who has been a colossal screw-up at everything she has touched. In every position she has held, she managed to screw up in ways no one imagined. She was instrumental in the mortgage meltdown and collapse of Fannie Mae but walked away with close to $30 million. People thought it was impossible to break Fannie Mae, but she managed to do it. She even managed to screw up Duke’s handling of the phony rape scandal. It’s fair to say the woman is as dumb as a post, yet she was close to being named FBI Director by President Obama in 2011.

We could spend days listing the people in economics and banking who were disastrously wrong yet suffered no consequences. Being a Cloud Person means never having to say you are sorry. It means never paying a price for failure. That is the job of the Dirt People. They pay the price. The result is our ruling class is packed to the brim with credentialed fuckups who flit from one disaster to the next, usually because they created them. It is why Obama was able to rise through the ranks so quickly. Merit no longer has any meaning in The Cloud.

The fact is we are ruled over by irresponsibly reckless idiots paid for by a global elite that has no concern for the governance of our countries. They are global pirates riding a sea of credit money, as they sack the Western middle class. They have no interest in good governance because competent people in government may do something about the financial pirates like George Soros. Rule by hired moron means rich guys can crater the mortgage markets and escape with billions. It means you can lose two wars of choice and keep your sinecure.

That brings us back to where we started. David Cameron was on the wrong side of the Brexit vote and resigned. That is what an honorable man is supposed to do. Theresa May was on the Brexit vote and not only stayed on, but she also fought to get the top job and will be the next Prime Minister. The guy who was probably most critical to mustering support for the Leave campaign, Boris Johnson, was not only passed over for the job, but he was also shived in the yard by his fellow inmates in the party. He is out of politics while the losers get to be in charge of the country.

The common theme here is sex. In the wild, males fight males for females. It is winner take all. the loser either dies or flees. Females compete with one another for the attention of males, but it is not winner take all. The loser simply hangs around hopping to lure the male away at some later date. The Cloud is feminine, dominated by women and the habits of women. The pirate class out there on the sea of credit money is exclusively male. In effect, our national governments are literally the kept women and common night walkers, for the global billionaires.

Aristophanes was right. This will not end well.

Barak X

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Way back in the olden thymes, there was a guy named Kurt Schmoke, who was the hottest thing in black politics since Martin Luther King. This was the late-70’s and early-80’s so most black politicians were like Jesse Jackson. Schmoke was different. He was charming and smart with credentials from the Ivy League. Most important, he was not standing on ghetto corners yelling about the honkies. Instead, he had moderate political views, worked in the legitimate economy as an attorney and he participated in mainstream politics. He was the sort of well-behaved black guy white liberals love.

Schmoke was supposed to be the example of how Progressive race polices would succeed. He went to public school, but got into Yale, went onto a Rhodes Scholarship and then Harvard Law School. This was how race policy was supposed to work. Given the opportunity to be free of white racism, blacks could rise to the very top of society and compete with whites. No one talked about affirmative action and it probably never played much of a role. Schmoke was a genuinely smart guy, but that did not stop white liberals from taking credit.

Schmoke eventually won office in ’82 and then became mayor of Baltimore in ’87. Everyone assumed he would be governor one day and then who knows. Instead, the politics of Baltimore devoured him. He went into office as a cerebral, race neutral technocrat. He was going to fix the city and avoid the racial politics. By the time he left office, he was wearing a dashiki and waving the flag of the African National Congress. Instead of being the sort of black politician that made white liberals proud, he ended up the sort that made them ashamed.

Twenty years after Schmoke was written off by white liberals, they had found a new great black hope. Barak Obama was a “new breed” of black politician. He was the product of the best schools and, according to Joe Biden, “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Even better, he had an exotic back story with a white mother, a Kenyan father and a youth spent in Indonesian madrassahs. Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic convention made him a star in the party and punched his ticket as the next big thing.

The 2008 presidential was one long sales pitch about how Barak Obama was the salve to what ailed America. Obama was the quintessential example of what post-racial America was going to be. He was a post-racial healer, who would close the books on America’s racist past. The way the Obamasoxers carried on in 2008, you could be forgiven if you thought Obama was the leader of a new cult. They honestly believed he was the fulfillment of prophecy. He was the one to bring about the end to the long civil war in favor of those on the winning side of history.

The Magic Negro stuff was never going to last. It is not how the world works and it is certainly not how things work with the American Left. Obama was always a prop, a pitchman, an actor hired to play a role written for him by old white lefties from the 1960’s. His job was to freak out the squares. People forget that in 2008, the chatter from the Left was that whites feared nothing more than an intelligent, articulate black man. They believed it which is why they hired Obama in the first place. That was the point. They did not care a whit about Obama’s ideas. His job was to read from the teleprompter.

Things did not go as planned. The debacle of health care led to the midterm disaster and the Left decided Obama had to be scarier. The Henry Louis Gates flap was where the shift began. Obama the racial healer could have turned that into a chance to close the books on the bitter racism of Gates, but that would not have freaked out the squares in the suburbs. Instead, Obama made it clear that when the choice was between a black and a white, particularly a white authority figure, the weight of his government would back the black guy.

Here we are at the end of his time in office and America is looking worse on the race front that it has since the late 60’s. Instead of the post-racial leader of a unified America, we have a bitter black guy shaking his fist at the honkies, while homicidal blacks run wild in American streets. All the talk of the new black political leader seems like a long time ago. It is also reminiscent of the end for Kurt Schmoke. The reason Schmoke rose to be a star was that he was black. In order to remain a star, or at least remain in office, he had to keep getting blacker.

That has been the story with Obama. He has gone from the Magic Negro to Barak X.

It’s The Bogeymen’s Fault

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When the Vikings sacked the monastery at Lindisfarne, the Anglo-Saxons, trying to figure out what happened, came to the only logical conclusion. God was angry with them over something did or did not do.

“In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen people destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.”

–The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

What followed in Britain as well as the rest of Christendom was more than just a military response to the Vikings. There was a spiritual revival. The secular authorities contributed to the Church and invited the bishops and priests into the granular management of society. The Church reformed religious orders and cleaned up the monasteries and nunneries. The role of women in religious orders was also diminished at this time. In other words, Europeans responded to a pagan assault by getting right with the Almighty.

Oliver Cromwell was pretty sure he was in God’s good graces. After all, he went from minor political figure to the head of the parliamentary army to the Lord Protector of God’s people, the English. After the disastrous military expedition into the Caribbean and a Royalist revolt, Cromwell came to the obvious conclusion. God was not happy with him and the English people. He set off on a campaign to restore liberty of conscience and promote both outward and inward godliness throughout England.

In the early 19th century, Abolitionists were sure that slavery was an offense to God and its presence in the new world would bring an end to the America Experiment. The people of Yankee New England were convinced that America was the city on the hill, the savior of mankind. They still believe this. The lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic make this quite clear.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on.

The winning side of the Civil War blames the war on the siege of Fort Sumter by the evil white men of the evil South. The truth is the Abolitionist fanatics were spoiling for a fight. They truly believed that slavery was an offense to God and the only way to get back in the good graces of the Almighty was to end it by any means necessary. American Abolitionists grew out of the Clapham Sect, a group of evangelical Anglican lunatics.

We are now fully in the post-Christian era so the schools no longer teach kids the religious origins of the present lunacies. Instead, an array of bogeymen and evil spirits are conjured as replacements. Blacks are where they are, despite three generations of Progressive programs to help them, because of the mysterious demon called “white privilege.” No one can describe how this works, but our betters are sure this demon travels in the book bags of college students.

Sometimes bad juju is the cause of trouble as we see in this article about the George Soros funded attack on Dallas cops.

When the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza in 1963, their reports ricocheted off the tall buildings surrounding the green park. One bullet caught an innocent bystander. One found the governor of Texas. Two more, of course, struck and killed President John F. Kennedy, and in those few seconds frozen in time, the city of Dallas was instantly branded: the City of Hate.

A little more than 50 years later, the shots have rung out in downtown Dallas again, just a short stroll from infamous Dealey Plaza. There are some eerie circumstantial similarities, to be sure. But this time the target was not a president—it was police officers. And the political obsession of the moment was no longer the Cold War but racial division, the remaining scar of America’s greatest sin: slavery.

Notice the residual language. Sin is a Christian concept so if there is no Christian God, there can be no sin. That’s too complicated for the modern lunatic so they appropriate the language of their spiritual forebears, without thinking much about the implications. In this case, the modern lunatic thinks we have not fully atoned to the invisible forces of nature, for the sin of slavery, so we are having another spasm of black rage. How one can get right with the Great Spirit is never explained, but it means punishing the bad whites for some reason.

The modern era is riddled with these sorts of bogeymen and evil spirits. The Southern Poverty Law Center exists for the sole purpose of scaring old Jewish widows with stories about Hitler. Adolph is no longer a flesh and blood historical figure. He is a permanent spirit-force that takes the form of man, usually a Republican politician. Similarly, the KKK has become the Eye of Sauron, watching every dusky fellow in the country. If a brotha is not on his toes, a cop will pop out of thin air and shoot him for no reason.

Our current ructions are over who is to blame for angering the Bogeyman.

Cloud People Blues

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Steve Sailer has a post up on this story. Steve does his thing highlighting certain passages and commenting upon them. The point of the NYTimes article is an attempt to explain why the Dirt People are so angry over things, particularly immigration. Michael Ignatieff is a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party. It is entirely from the perspective of the Cloud People, which should surprise no one.

That’s the thing you see from all of these “think pieces” in the media and commentariat. They are written by strangers, foreigners who are observing us through a telescope, trying to make sense of what we are doing. They are not interested in our opinions any more than a myrmecologists would want to know the opinions of his ants. Reading these articles, I always come away with the sense that the Cloud People spend so much time studying the Dirt People that they have not bothered to notice much about themselves.

Here is a representative example:

According to his argument, what we’re seeing is, in part, an ideological split between cosmopolitan elites who see immigration as a common good based in universal rights, and voters who see it as a gift conferred on certain outsiders deemed worthy of joining the community.

Cosmopolitan elites like to kid themselves about their love of universal rights and the common good, but it is total nonsense. Just take a look at their strongholds. These people talk like MLK, but they live like the KKK or like a KKK fantasy world. Our elites live in hyper-white exclusive communities. Many are gated and walled. Often, they have their own private security forces. A modern college community, for example, operates almost like an autonomous zone with their own government and police.

On the college campus, just like in the elite neighborhoods, minorities are decorations, not parts of the community. Professor Boobingu from Ghana is not there for his intellectual contributions. He is there as a decoration so the white people can feel good about diversity. On the home front, guys like Tyler Cowen get to visit the ethnic restaurants in your neighborhood or maybe in the Potemkin “arts section” near the campus, but he is not living anywhere near the people who work in that ethnic restaurant.

The swank urban hipster areas are examples of how modern ethnic cleansing is done. Harlem, which had been close to 100% black for a century is now mighty whitey-ville. San Francisco is no longer the land of Dirty Harry chasing black gangsters. Instead, its Ice People as far as the eye can see. As Steve Sailer put it, they have their housing costs discriminate so they do not have to. Everywhere you see gentrification, you see whites moving in and nonwhites moving out.

This near total lack of self-awareness by the Cloud People even effects their ability to observe the Dirt People. I am sure Michael Ignatieff is a peach of a guy, but what in the hell can he possibly know about what is going on outside the walls of his mansion? Sure, he has his telescope and peppers the domestic staff with questions. Perhaps he even has his butler read to him from the Internet. Even so, he is an unlikely person to have any insight into the Dirt People.

Reading that NYTimes article, it is not hard to imagine what it must have been like inside the aristocratic houses during the French Revolution. The people inside were not just baffled by the people outside. They were baffled about themselves. They had invested generations of intellectual resources into a mythology about themselves and their position, to the point where they were invisible to themselves. They could not rationally evaluate their own culture. They were not just strangers to the people; they were strangers to themselves.

The authoress of that NYTimes piece is a person calling herself Amanda Taub. She is the authoress of this piece in Vox. The point of the article is to scare the readers, not inform them. If Mx. Taub had any interest in understanding the Dirt People, she would talk to one of them. There are thousands of writers and bloggers that would be happy to answer her questions. Instead, she finds Cloud People to add authority to her theories about how the Cloud People are on the side of angels and the Dirt People are evil.

One of the things about the French Revolution that is most intriguing is that the people in charge never gave much thought to how it would end. They were always focused on maintaining the status quo and beating back the revolt. Similarly, the Cloud People do not seem to think much about how their multicultural wonderland is going to work. How do they expect to remain on top as a ruling minority with no means to defend themselves from the dusky hordes outside the walls of their communities?

Instead, they seem to be obsessed with punishing the Dirt People for making a racket. How else does one explain the plan to revive the Gang of 8 scheme? How else can you explain the Cloud People siding with the cop killers in Dallas? The Cloud People think they have done a masterful job of running the world and they see the Dirt People as ungrateful rubes, who must be punished. If Michael Ignatieff and Amanda Taub want to know why the Dirt People are revolting, they should stop thinking the Dirt People are revolting. Maybe even talk to some of them and ask their opinions.