Monthly Archives: October 2016

The Big Rake

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One of the things normal people don’t get about Hillary Clinton is how seamlessly she fits into the moral universe of the ruling class. For instance, to normal people, lying is a bad thing. It lowers your status among the other Dirt People. In the Cloud, lying is a conditional concept. Lying to the Dirt People is fine. It’s what Cloud People must do to maintain order and assert their superiority. Lying to rivals while wrangling for power can be acceptable, as long as it does not reflect too poorly on the managerial class.

Another way to see how Hillary Clinton is emblematic of the managerial class is to examine her motivations. Normal people assume she is running for the White House as a power grab. It is assumed that politicians have big egos and winning office is driven by those big egos. That used to be true, but not in the modern managerial state. The real motivation is money. Most of the people in the managerial class are always aware of the fact they are not rich, at least not as rich as they deserve, and they hate it.

Hillary Clinton has always been obsessed with money. In Arkansas, she would complain constantly about not having enough money. Some will recall how she used to moan about how they were not rich enough when they left the White House. Presumably, that’s why they stole the furniture. All of her capers have been about turning her position or her husband’s position into cash for the family business. In the managerial class, credentials and connections are to be monetized. That’s their purpose.

Hillary Clinton did not weasel her way into the State Department gig because she wanted to burnish her foreign policy credentials. It was not about staying in the game. There was always a money angle. At State, she could travel the world, shaking down the rich and powerful for cash to her money laundering operation. Her husband could charge outlandish fees to give speeches on behalf of the foundation and maybe put in a good word, for the foreign potentate, with his old lady at the State Department.

Clinton’s run for the White House has a similar angle. This story about Clinton’s scheme for American retirement plans is a classic managerial class rake. Getting picked as one of the firms with a license to “manage’ these new accounts is a license to print money. The government will have to “supervise” this process, which means the bankers will now have a billion reasons to be on good terms with the government. Put another way, Team Clinton is planning to build a giant graft machine .

Now, Team Clinton will not benefit in the long run, but they are getting tens of millions in contributions now, because they are promising to push through this new plan. If Wall Street wanted to bring back slavery, Hillary would be talking like Colonel Sanders and singing Dixie during her speeches. Her political motivations are a manifestation of her financial ambitions. All over the managerial class, the game is to monetize access, power and prestige. It’s why Hillary fits in so well with these people.

For about twenty years, the managerial class has been trying to figure out how to get their mitts on American retirement funds stashed away in 401K’s. Talk to any Progressive and they will tell you how terrible these plans are, while they drone on about the terribleness of Wall Street. They floated a scheme in the 90’s called the Guaranteed Retirement Account that was like a 401K, except all funds were invested in US treasuries. This never got far as it was just a complicated tax and the math could never work.

This new scheme is simpler, but potentially much more lucrative to the managerial elite. If every American is required to have a retirement account, administered by a fund manager, that’s billions of new money siphoned off the real economy into the pockets of the financial sector. Better still, those funds will be controlled by Wall Street. They will put those funds into investments good for Wall Street. What’s good for the bankers is to be on good terms with the government. You see where this leads.

This is the way the managerial class works the rake. In less sophisticated countries, like say France, the politicians just raid the pension funds. It’s legal plunder. In the managerial state, the plunder is more nuanced, tarted up with soft feminine language like “inclusion” and “coming together for a common cause.” You can be sure that this plan will be sold as a way to bring the country together to solve our retirement problems for those who “play by the rules and just want a fair deal.”

What will happen, of course, is the same thing we saw with health care and pretty much every other part of the economy these days. It will be a bust out. The billions that pour into these new funds will be “invested” in things that benefit the rulers. Politicians will get advance notice on some new move so they can cash in their privileged status. The fund managers will kick back a piece of their rake to the politicians for the right to manage these funds. It will be systematic robbery of the middle class.

You would be forgiven for thinking that this sounds a lot like organized crime. That’s because it is organized crime, except the criminals write the laws, thus legalizing their plunder. This is a feature of the managerial state. It is the big rake. Instead of the criminals eluding the state in order to plunder the people, the criminals acquire credentials, which are a license to skim off a portion of middle class wealth. The whole point of winning office or gaining access is so you can get a taste of the skim.

I Bring Bad Tidings

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Recently, I was involved, in a limited basis, with a bankruptcy. The company that went belly up had over a million dollars in debts and no assets. Most of their debt was in the form of accounts receivable, but they had some loans and leases as well. Up until the point they filed for bankruptcy protection, they had paid all of their bills on time. In fact, they paid most vendors in ten days, something that is just about unheard of these days. This prompt payment is what led their vendors to be so generous with them.

This story reminded me of something that happened years ago. There was a house party at a mansion (are there mansion parties?) and many party goers were out on a balcony of some sort that extended over the pool area. The balcony was large enough to hold dozens of people, but it started to give way due to the mass of people. Panic set in and that made things worse as the frightened party goers scrambled to get off the balcony. The whole thing collapsed and took a bunch of people down in the process.

The connection here is that it is human nature to observe the actions of others, trust those actions and to infer things from them. The vendors extended terms to that business saw that they paid in ten days and that others were more than happy to extend credit, so they did the same. The party goers saw everyone else out on the balcony and just assumed it must be safe. They never stopped to think that maybe it was not built to hold a hundred people. In both cases, when reality came rushing in, there was a rush to the exit.

That’s something I think about when I read stories like this regarding the global economy. The entirety of the world economy is built on one thing. That is the rock solid belief that the US government will never miss a debt payment and never devalue the dollar to arrest its debt. The entire global economy is built on the asset value of US Treasuries. If there ever comes a time when people begin to doubt the security of that debt, the panic will plunge the world into a new dark age or possible something worse.

The people in charge of the Federal Reserve understand this. The people running the ECB know this. The PBOC knows this. The masters of the universe all agree on one thing and that is they have to protect the foundation stone of the world economy. Guarding the underlying stability of the financial system is their overriding concern. That means they are willing to risk recession and maybe worse in order to protect the asset system. It’s not unreasonable from their perspective, but it does reveal the bigger problem.

That bigger problem is we have reached the logical end point of the credit economy. If the US economy does lurch into recession, the world economy will follow. The central banks will not have many options as they have used all of their big tools to prop up the asset base over the last decade. The Fed can lower rates a bit and maybe restart their Quantitative Easing program, but they will have little or no success in blunting a recession. The world will just have to wait it out and hope for the best.

That is not how the world ever works. A 2017 recession will cause the new US president to propose “solutions” and new governments in Europe will demand relief from Brussels. Bad economics always leads to worse politics and the politics of the West are already fairly rotten. The rise of nationalist and populist parties in Europe will only complicate an already fragile set of arrangements. Imagine if something like a Syriza were to take over the Italian government just as the world is headed to recession. Fun times.

The fact is, there’s a limit to how much the world can borrow from the future. We are probably near that limit. With recession looming, the ability of central bankers to blunt it with credit issuance is limited. That means it becomes a political problem. The record of politicians coming up with useful reforms in times of crisis is not good. What’s needed is a sustained and organized retreat from a money system that has outlived its usefulness, but that is probably impossible. Instead it means a disorganized and haphazard retreat.

As Evans-Pritchard concludes in his story, the possible outcomes are mostly grim with some of them very grim. If the central bankers get it wrong and plunge the economy into a deep recession, the politicians will most likely respond with massive spending of money that does not exist. That could unleash price inflation and a collapse of asset values. It’s not guaranteed, but the fact that it is one possible outcome is grim news in itself. The future is grim and things will mostly likely be worse than we expect.

Unsocial Media

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The coining of the term “social media” was not the observation of a new phenomenon or some new way for people to interact. Bulletin board systems had been around since the early days of the internet. By the early 1990’s, there were millions of people posting on these systems. Newgroups and e-mail lists were also around in the early 1990’s, as cheap modems rolled out to the public. Message boards came along in the mid-90’s and soon took over as the dominant community platform on websites.

The new term to describe what was happening was the signal that new controls were coming to discourse on the internet. Something that is social, community owned, must have community standards. Those standards must be enforced and that means people must be given the authority to enforce those standards. In other words, it was the starter’s gun unleashing the totalitarians and pink skits to goose step in and start pushing people around on-line. Now, everywhere you go, there are posting rules and moderation.

What was fun about the internet in the olden thymes was the lack of rules, at least in terms of what you could say and how you could say it. Debates on bulletin boards or news groups were viscous vicious (It was late and one “slipped” through editing) and no holds barred. The term “troll” used to mean a poster who trolled for attention by posting provocative things. That’s what made these things fun. The early on-line communities were experiments in social dynamics, without the usual social limitations. This old list of Usenet types gives you a flavor of it.

Un-monitored and unregulated arenas for people to speak freely are a danger to the established order, so it did not take long for the usual suspects to start looking for ways to put an end to it. There was also the fact that millions of people were getting on-line, without knowing that internet culture was a bit rough. Polite always triumphs over right and before long all but the underground sites were heavily regulated. Sites like Faceberg and Twitter were built on the idea of pleasing the easily offended.

The trouble with policed communities, is the old saw about who will police the police. The sort of people that go in for being site moderators, are exactly the sort of people you never want in those positions. It’s not long before they start abusing their power and people start getting banned. It’s why Faceberg is mostly for old people to view pics of their grandchildren. It’s also why Twitter is imploding. When milquetoast users like Instapundit are deemed out of bounds, it’s a matter of time before all the interesting people are gone.

It’s also why alternatives to the mainstream options are growing up all of a sudden. Gab is the first alternative to Twitter with any chance of succeeding. Quitter is actually a better platform, but it has not caught on with English speakers. Gab is targeting the alt-right and troublemakers like me, promising an anything goes environment. They are also improving on the concept, rather than trying to please the managerial class. Longer message lengths and a better interface are the two obvious improvements over Twitter.

Vox Day is behind the alternative to Wikipedia. It’s called Infogalactic and it is intended to be the non-PC version of an on-line encyclopedia. Like Gab, they are using better technology to improve the user experience, but the real point of the effort is to be an alt-right alternative to Wikipedia. To quote the associated blog, “The single biggest problem with Wikipedia isn’t Jimmy Wales or its outmoded 1995 technology, but the fact that it is patrolled by 532 left-wing thought police who aggressively force their biased perspective on the rest of the world.”

My bet is someone is plotting an alternative to Facebook or simply something better, that serves a similar purpose, but without the social justice warriors. The fact is, Facebook is not doing anything all that clever from a technological point of view. There’s also the alternative media sites with open comments, that are the intellectual engine of the rebellion. This story in the neocon magazine American Interest about the boom in high brow sites catering to heterodox opinion is worth a read.

I think what we are seeing is two things. One is the Progressive enforcers have squandered their legitimacy enforcing rules that are unenforceable. People get tired of being treated like children by depressed women taking revenge on the world as forum moderators. So, there is demand. There’s also the fact that people trafficking in the ideas popular on the fringe want to debate with others into the same things. There’s nothing more dull than reading a comment section filled with mainstream drivel.

The downside of this, and the inevitable consequence to the current social unrest, is a balkanizing of social media. Gab will be Twitter for hate thinkers, while Twitter will be the home of the establishment, assuming Twitter remains in business. There will be those who get their news and analysis from hate thinkers like Sailer and those who read establishment sites. The internet will be a world of fractured reality and that will inevitably show up in society as a whole. To some degree, that already exist in terms of who watches which cable news channel.

The downside of this process is it means the alt-right, Dissident Right and whatever else this thing we’re doing is called, is going to self-ghettoize. The people who still read National Review, for example, will not see comments from hate thinkers like me. At the same time, hate thinkers will stop reading the mainstream press and lose perspective about the greater world around them. Instead of “bringing people together” social media will end up amplifying the balkanization of American society.

Pink State

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Imagine the space-time continuum gets scrambled and you find yourself in a world where the coming election is between a crazy old cat lady, an old hippie, Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler is leading one major party and Mussolini is leading another major party. The hippie and the cat lady have no party and very little support. As a practical matter, your choice is between Hitler and Mussolini. More important, you know the ramifications of both choices. The former is murder and mayhem and the latter is authoritarianism and long speeches.

To anyone with a soul, the choice is clear. You vote for Mussolini. It’s a terrible option, but so is chemotherapy. No one enthusiastically opts for chemotherapy, but it beats dying from cancer. If you told your doctor that your morals prevented you from choosing chemo, so you were going to visit some guy with magic crystals, your doctor would try to have you committed. Similarly, no one would wants Mussolini as the ruler, but he is a vastly better option than Hitler. You do what you must, even when it is unpleasant, to stop Hitler.

To continue this a bit further, imagine if someone came up to you are said “I’m Susan Wright and my principles prevent me from voting Mussolini, even though I know Hitler will murder millions, so I’m voting for the goofy hippie guy.” You would have dark thoughts about that person. They are willing to stand aside and allow something truly horrible just so they can avoid doing something unpleasant. To make it worse, they demand that you pretend that their cowardice and treachery is high minded.

Further, you would look at those people investing all of their energy ridiculing Mussolini as pro-Hitler partisans. After all, the successful end of the efforts can only mean one thing –  Hitler wins. They could protest all they like that they hate both Hitler and Mussolini, but you would know them by their deeds. They are working to pave the way for Hitler, regardless of their reasoning. If successful, they would be, in part, responsible for what comes next. Blood would be on their hands and you would feel justified in holding them responsible.

Alternatively, if someone came up to you and made the case for Hitler, along with pointing out the faults of Mussolini, you would not feel the urge to punch them in the face. They may be horribly mistaken, but at least they are being honest. They are pro-Hitler and they take responsibility for it. They own it. Who knows, they could be right and Mussolini is worse in the long run. In theory, at least, you can debate this with the Hitler fans and maybe in the process sway some undecided voters to your side.

Obviously, you see what I’m doing here. Replace Hitler with Clinton and Mussolini with Trump and we have the debate between the Cult of Never Trump and the rest of us. No one thinks Trump is the ideal candidate. Many of us think he is a awful candidate, but he is orders of magnitude better than Clinton. Her election means the nation lurches into authoritarianism. What comes next will be unfathomably horrible. If you have a soul, you do what you must to prevent evil from triumphing. Susan Wright has no soul.

This twitter exchange I had with her is the genesis of this post:

Red State, of course, has gone full-on moonbat. Their only reason to exist these days is to bash Trump and Trump voters. A moral nullity like Susan Wright also takes time out to bash other Dirt People like Sarah Palin. Even loopy liberals have moved on from Palin-bashing, but as a dog returns to its vomit, the degenerate social justice warriors of the Never Trump Cult go back to Palin-bashing when they need material. Reading her posts, you could be forgiven for thinking she was a writer for Salon.

To return to my analogy, Susan Wright is the sort that would spend all her time harping about the defects of Mussolini, then claim she is standing on principle, as Hitler rounds up the Jews and packs them off to the gas chambers. She would rather something horrible happen, than get her hands dirty doing the hard work of opposing evil. Of course, that assumes she thinks Clinton is a bad choice. Again, reading her posts, it’s hard not to think she is related to the old bag, not just a supporter.

After the war, many Germans tried to say they did not know what was happening so they should not be held accountable for supporting the Nazis. The question in those cases was whether or not the person should have known or could have known. The Clinton Crime Family has been a known quantity for 25 years. Susan Wright and her ilk know exactly what comes from a Clinton victory. Blood will be on their hands. “I did not know” is not going to be an acceptable excuse when the time comes.

Trade and Trade-Offs

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The Eden Treaty, named after the British negotiator William Eden, was signed in 1786 between France and England. It is notable for a few reasons. One is it reflected the new ideas from the Physiocrats, who promoted a more liberal trade policy between countries. Adam Smith was not technically a Physiocrat, but he aggressively argued against Mercantilism. In fact, he coined the term “Mercantilism” in the 18th century, to describe the prevailing polices of the time.

That’s the other notable thing about this deal. France and Britain were longtime rivals and both countries were committed to Mercantilism, yet they struck one of the first “free trade “deals or at least the first deal premised on philosophy of free trade. Even today, many free market types will argue that trade can overcome even the bitterest of rivalries. People like making money more than they like making trouble, so the theory goes. This trade deal is proof of that.

The most notable part of the deal is that it was a disaster for France. Soon after the deal was signed, there was a flood of British manufactured goods into France. Importation of British goods doubled. This put enormous pressure on the already distressed French industries, setting off riots and revolts. Naturally, this put pressure on the already strained relations between the provinces and the crown. Most historians count the Eden Treaty as one of the contributing factors leading up to the French Revolution.

What the French government did not understand when negotiating the treaty is that trade is not a static thing. Even if the French could vastly increase their sale of wine and linens to Britain, in order to offset the import of British manufactured goods, there would still be significant economic dislocation in the French economy. The wine merchants would be happy, but the French cotton mills in Normandy would be devastated, which is why riots broke out there soon after the deal was implemented.

Trade between nations can be a very good thing for both nations. It can be a terrible thing too. It’s not always easy to know in advance. World trade rapidly expanded in the 19th century as shipping costs plummeted and trade barriers fell. Not only did European economies boom, the quality of life for their citizens rapidly increased. In 1870, British life expectancy was 41. In 1913 it was 53. Food prices plummeted by 80%, thus eliminating malnutrition for most of Europe.

It was not just economics that changed with the global trade boom in the 18th century. Cultures changed too. Close to half a million foreign-born laborers worked in the heavy industries of French Lorraine and Germany’s Ruhr. It’s impossible to overstate the radical nature of this. For most of human history, the mass movement of people meant war. Suddenly, it was encouraged. Trade was so good that smart people were convinced it had made war impossible.

Of course, not long after publication of The Great Illusion, war broke out in Europe. Over the next five years the industrial powers of the world tried very hard to exterminate one another. Was trade the cause of war? Not exactly, but trade was not a magical solution to the age old problems of the competition between peoples. No matter how much commerce there was between the Germans and the French, the Germans, as sensible people, would still hate the French.

The topic of trade is a good place to start when wondering about what went wrong with American conservatism. One of the foundation stones of Anglo-Saxon conservatism is the understanding that there must be a balance between tradition and progress. Another is the understanding that 2+2 always equals four, for all values of two. Trade that benefits one part of the nation’s economy, will be balanced out by some detriment to another part of the economy, or even the culture, which always has to be put into the balance.

It is not zero sum game, but close enough to assume so. Therefore, trade policy is about picking winners and losers.This is where libertarians lurch into fantasy. They argue that “free trade” gets the state out of the business of picking winners and losers. In reality, it amplifies the state’s role in that process. The reason is, all trade deals are negotiated by men with agendas, friends, and selfish reasons to want some things and reject others. Men are not angels and neither are their governments, so neither are their trade deals.

Modern American conservatives took a long drag from the libertarian bong, with regards to trade, and came away believing all the fantasies about free trade. Worse yet, they have made global trade a totem. Anyone that questions the wisdom of anything related to global trade is labeled a heretic. The result is we have chubby nihilists at the flagship publication of American conservatism, cheering the destruction of large swaths of American society, all in the name of free trade and other economic fantasies.

Trade, like every other public policy, is about trade-offs. The point of popular government, however structured, is to debate these polices in public. While never perfect, it reduces the chances of trade-offs that benefit the few at the expense of the many. Trading citrus products to Canada for hockey pucks and beaver hats is good for both sides. Giving Ford a free pass to avoid US labor, tax and environmental laws by moving their plants to Mexico is an entirely different discussion.

It is what makes popular government fundamentally conservative. Pubic debate over public policy is not about protecting the poor from the predation of the rich. It is about protecting the powerful from one another and limiting their natural inclination to consume that which supports their position in society. The managerial authoritarianism of modern conservatism insulates the powerful the consequences of their behavior. The lesson of history, the lesson of Burke, is that this always ends in blood.

The Virtual Candidate

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In the 1992 election, the one thing that jumped out to me was the enthusiasm for Clinton at public events. He had big raucous crowds, while Bush had smaller, older crowds. The press had all the same horse race stories we see today, but it felt like Clinton had all the enthusiasm on his side, despite the tight polls. One of the things I recall is not seeing any Bush bumper stickers, but lots of Clinton stickers. That always stuck in my head as a useful metric when trying to gauge the intentions of the voters.

This ad hoc measure held up in the following election, as Dole was just a sacrificial candidate the GOP put up just so they could have someone on the ticket. In 2000, this metric really did not hold up as I saw many more Bush signs and his crowds were much bigger than Gore’s crowd, but it was a razor thin result. That said, it held up very well in 2004 as Bush clearly had the more enthusiastic voters. I recall seeing a clip of him at an event that looked like a rock concert. I knew he was going to win handily.

Like any seat of the pants observation, it is prone to your own bias. I think in 2000 I was probably fooled a little by where I lived at the time. I was in Virginia, which was strong Bush country. Even so, we all have our biases and that means we tend to see that which confirms our magical thinking. I think about that when I see the video from Trump events. The guy is playing to massive crowds that we last saw when Obama ran in 2008. Even the reporters covering these things admit they are yuge.

On the other hand, Clinton is playing high school gymnasiums where a few hundred people, at most, are herded into to hear her cackle at them. These are rare, as she spends most of her time at private fundraisers or sleeping. That’s the other thing that is so odd about this election. She takes weeks off, not having any public events. Right now, she has been under wraps for five days. Criminal Genius David Axelrod is now suggesting she skip the next debate entirely. Frankly, would that be shocking if she did skip it?

The disconnect in this election between what we are being told and what we are seeing is dizzying. The polls all show a tie or a slight Clinton lead. If that is true, it means Trump voters are willing to drop what they are doing, stand in line for hours, just to see their guy give a speech. Clinton voters are not all the interested in seeing her or even hearing her take questions. This is entirely possible. Unhappy people are more likely to go out and protest, while those satisfied with the status quo stay home. But, in an election?

The trouble is I can think of no example where this has been the case. Even poor old Bob Dole was out giving speeches in front of decent sized crowds. If I recall, he did a barnstorming thing at one point where he would show up at a few places every day and give a speech. People showed up and cheered. Clinton has become invisible to her own voters. I see her commercials, but she has not held a single public even within a three hour drive of me. Trump has done a few events and my state is a long shot for him.

To make this election even more bizarre is the way the press has ignored the biggest story in political history since Watergate. The Wikileaks stuff is explosive. It is what political reporters used to pray for, back when we had political reporters. The stuff in those e-mails is the sort of stuff that used to end careers and bring down governments. Despite the caterwauling from  the stray moonbat, the media has ignored the story, preferring to spend all their time talking about the Trump bimbo hoax.

One of the things that was clear about the ’92 campaign is the Left studied Reagan. They were convinced Reagan won because of his ability to use modern media to reach voters. As a result, they had ready for 1992, Hollywood film makers to assist the Democratic nominee. The Clinton campaign was the first to use Hollywood to stage their events and produce their campaign videos. They even brought in costume people to help them select clothes for their events. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud.

The result has been increasingly synthetic candidates on the Democratic side. Al Gore was so scripted people wondered if he was a robot. He was not allowed to pick out his own ties, he was so tightly controlled. Kerry’s campaign was actually packaged for him by the same people that created the Mark Warner campaign in Virginia. For instance, they recycled the hunting skits that Warner used to appease gun owners. Kerry’s job was to learn his lines and convincingly wear the costumes.

By the time Obama came along, the Democrats were fully prepared to run an actor hired to play the role designed by the party. Obama may as well be an actor, for as much as anyone knows about the guy. Even after all these years, his back story remains a mystery to most Americans. He’s simply the young version of  Morgan Freeman playing President in Deep Impact. Staff write his speeches, prepare him for the fake interviews they stage for the public and otherwise direct every aspect of his public performance.

Now here we are with Hillary Clinton running as the virtual candidate. For all anyone knows, she could be a head in a jar and those old fat women we see waddling around from time to time are just body doubles. While Trump is running a real campaign in front of actual humans, Hillary is hidden away somewhere, a virtual presence on campaign videos, but otherwise detached from the physical world. The media plays along, focusing all of its attention on the weird flesh and blood guy talking to humans. This ad from 2008 is turning out to be disturbingly prescient.

 

Hillary Clinton and the Cinderella Syndrome

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if you examine the record of Hillary Clinton in any detail, what jumps out is the staggering incompetence of this woman. There’s nothing on her resume that stands out as a success, other than her ability to stay married to that skeevy pervert of a husband, despite the serial humiliations resulting from his infidelities. In every other endeavor, small or large, she has been an astonishingly failure. Even in simple capers, she has found a way to bungle things that should have been easy.

The one that always stands out in my mind is her ham-handed influence peddling caper in Arkansas with James Blair, the Tyson Food guy. Even small town mayors understand that you have to have a cutout in these things. Otherwise, it looks too obvious. You find “an investment guy” to act as a firewall, so he gets to pretend to be a shrewd investor and you get to pretend to not know what he was up to all along if things go bad. Hillary could not be bothered with that.

This is Public Corruption 101. They teach this at orientation for your town council seat. The FBI never bags people for this sort of stuff anymore because even the dumbest politician knows how to run this scam. These days, the Feds have to dig harder to unearth this kind of self-dealing because of the common use of cutouts and bag-men to insulate the players from the game. How is it possible that Clinton did not understand or was not told how this works?

Back when this was coming to light, there were several theories offered to explain Hillary Clinton’s serial brushes with the law. Her defenders, of course, claimed she was a Job and suffering for her righteousness. Honest people pointed to her arrogance and sense of entitlement, while others argued that she simply likes crime so much, the law of averages says she will bungle some of it and get caught. The last option is probably the most likely of the three, but not persuasive.

The thing with the Clinton Crime Family is there has always been two sides to it. The Bill side is all about sex. The guy has a serious problem. His dozens of trips to the Dominican with Jeffrey Epstein for the purpose of gaining access to underage females is about as reckless as one can get. That’s the one thing about Bubba that we can probably say with certainty. He is living the Tony Montana lifestyle to the fullest. His entire life has been organized around getting laid.

Hillary is different. All of her capers somehow involve her putting cash in her purse. Back in Arkansas, she was the one involved in the phony land deals, bank jobs and influence peddling. Today, she is the one running the money laundering operations, that necessitated the secret e-mail system and all of the shady characters like Syd Blumenthal. It’s always a money scandal with her. Even her big health care initiative back in the 90’s was designed so she could shake down interested parties.

There’s another aspect to Hillary’s capers though. Her weird relationship with Bill has always been assumed to be loveless and transactional. They are imagined as two sociopaths with converging interests. That’s plausible to a point, but she would be vastly better off without him now and he would have always been better off without her. If this were merely a business relationship, their partnership would have foundered a long time ago.

What normies don’t get about the ruling class is they are often bloodless in their dealings with other humans, but they are not entirely bloodless. Bill and Hill have a political marriage for the purpose of advancing their common and individual interests. Even so, there is some emotional bond between them. Otherwise, they would have traded up a long time ago. These two are most likely sociopaths so calling their thing love is a category error, but it is emotional.

That’s what I suspect is behind Hillary’s criminal career. She is the business manager of the partnership, but she wants to please Bill. The result is she is always reaching beyond what is reasonable for the next payday. Watch that video detailing her capers over the years and the thing that ties them all together is the lack of restraint. All she had to do was be a little less greedy and she would have walked away unscathed by these things.

The other aspect is when she gets jammed up in one of the scams, it is always Bill who has to come to her rescue. What Hillary lacks in charm and guile, Bill makes up for in spades. He’s not terribly smart, but he is extremely clever. He can wiggle out of anything and make his pursuers look bad for trying to do their jobs. The one sure way Hillary has to gain Bill’s attention is to have the law chasing after her over some shady deal she has pulled on behalf of the crime family.

It’s the Cinderella Syndrome modified for a criminal enterprise. Hillary Clinton is not helpless and dependent in the way in which bitter feminists imagine. She simply has some of that normal female quality of wanting the attention of her mate. Since her mate is her business partner, as well as a serial sexual predator, disinterested in her physically, screwing up is how she gets his attention.Look back at all of her scandals and what ties them together is they tie her and Bill together on defense.

You can be sure that more than a few times he was in the middle of assaulting a woman and the phone rang or an aid knocked on the door, telling him that he had to attend to Hillary over some scandal or some deal gone sour. If the hundreds of secret service agents and state troopers are to be believed, their fights are always over business that has interrupted his stalking of women. This is all amateur psychiatry, but it does tie up all the facts better than the other options.

The 1.3 Party System

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One of the many things that has been exposed by the Trump campaign is that America does not have a two-party political system. It has a 1.3 party system. A good example of this is how Paul Ryan probably had one of his cronies leak that lewd tape to embarrass the party nominee. Whether or not he orchestrated it is immaterial, as he clearly had foreknowledge and was prepared to pile on as soon as it was released. In fact, it looked like he was coordinating a revolt against the nominee until it became clear it was going to backfire.

This is not the normal functioning of a political party. Hillary Clinton could be caught on video, strangling a baby, and the party would rally to her side. The media would celebrate baby strangling for a week. Just look at how hard they tried to hide her severe health problems from the public. That’s how political parties are supposed to work. The role of the party is to advance all of its candidates, even the ones they don’t like all that much. John McCain is an obnoxious nutjob, but the party fully supported his candidacy.

The truth is that about a third of elected Republicans would prefer to be Democrats. Within living memory, guys like Paul Ryan would have been moderate Democrats or possibly liberal Republicans. The distance between Clinton and Ryan on the main issues of the day is tiny. Ryan and most of the party leadership are post-national globalists, just like the Democrats. Ryan would prefer to be a bit more tightfisted on some spending items than Clinton, but he has made it known, time and again, that he will not fight over these things

There is another third or more of the party that is not interested in rocking the boat. They just like the good life and generally think the status quo is pretty good, at least for them. In another age, many would have been seat warmers in the Democrat Party, but time and circumstance put them in the GOP. A guy like John Boehner, for example, would have been in the Democrat party in the 1970’s. He’s the sort of guy union boys would like as he is unpretentious and likes talking about bread and butter issues more than philosophy.

That leaves a small fraction of the party’s elected officials in Washington that are dedicated to opposing the dominant orthodoxy and its political party. The result is a guy like Jeff Sessions getting grief from his own party, because he is standing by the party’s nominee. The weirdness of this goes unnoticed in official Washington as the majority of the Imperial Capital thinks guys like Sessions are a nuisance. There are just 40 members of the House that can be described as traditional American conservatives. That’s 16% of the caucus.

Now, Gallup has been polling on ideological self-identification for a long time. The portion of the country that self-identifies as liberal is around 20% and the portion that identifies as conservative sticks around 40%. The rest are low-tax liberals and conservatives that live in liberal states. In all probability, this group of “moderates” breaks 2-to-1 to traditional American conservatism. At least, if they are given the choice between a Reagan and an Obama, for example, they would break toward Reagan.

The math suggests that about half the country has no party representing their interests. At best they have a third of one party, which happens to be controlled by the other party. The other 5/6ths of the political class speaks loudly and aggressively for the 20% of the public that identifies as liberal. As guys like Paul Ryan have made clear, they have zero interest in listening to the pleas of their conservative members. The House leadership has made it clear that the troublesome right wingers are to remain quiet and out of the way or else.

It’s why a rather poor politician like Trump has rocketed to the brink of winning the presidency. For the first time in decades, one party has put up someone that talks about issues important to the bulk of the the country in a way that is familiar to close to half, maybe more than half, of the voters. It’s also why Trump finds himself running against the leadership of his own party, the so-called conservative media and the full army of the Progressive establishment. Trump is essentially running as an independent.

Popular government cannot work when it is not popular. By that I mean the public must think their interests are being represented in the halls of power. Otherwise, it is just another form of despotism in the eyes of that portion of the public that feels excluded. What’s happening now may be a modern American version of the Conflict of the Orders. An unrepresented portion of the public is demanding to be represented and using the tools at its disposal to force reform on the established order.

Perhaps this election is a modern American version of the Day of the Tiles. Instead of throwing roof tiles at the agents of the state, the people are using the blunt weapon that is Donald Trump. In isolation it will just feel like a wacky event that means nothing, but in the fullness of time it will be viewed as a pivotal event. It’s hard to know, but what is known is that this system has lost its legitimacy because a swelling portion of the public is no longer represented by either party. That cannot last and it will not last.

Nothing Is On The Level

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Reading this long column by James Pinkerton the other day got me thinking about how strange things seem today, compared to not so long ago. Pinkerton used to be on TV a lot when I bothered watching cable news. He would be the libertarian, as well as contrarian, guy on the panel of a current affairs show. That was the standard model for current events programming. They would rustle up some columnists and have them talk about issues presented by a moderator. Maybe they would add some shouting to punch it up a bit.

That seems like a long time ago for the simple reason it seems so quaint and innocent. When a guy like Cal Thomas or Bob Novak moved to TV, they brought with them a long history of opinion writing. You knew where they were coming from most of the time. They still wrote columns for newspapers and they had seen a lot of politicians come and go, thus giving their opinions a salty flavor. Even the lefty chat show guys were old newspaper men, who had seen and heard it all.

The point being is that even though the news was biased and the balance on the chat shows tilted to the Left, you knew where everyone stood. Bill Press, for example, was crazy as an outhouse rat, but his opinions were his own. When he got into a heated argument with his conservative co-host, you knew it was a bit of an act, but it was also a fight they had had a thousand times over beers at their favorite DC watering hole. The point here is the news has always been biased, but it was on the level, for the most part.

This election has made clear that the mass media is anything but on the level. It’s not just biased, it is manufactured bullshit cooked up by schemers in league with members of the ruling class. The Michelle Fields hoax is a great example. Fields, according to her bio, has never actually worked as a reporter. She popped out of college a few years ago, wiggled her ass at the right guy and got cast as a “journalist” on-line and on TV. She’s too young to have opinions worth having so she may as well be an actress, hired to play a role.

That’s pretty much what she is, as she is willing to have whatever opinion you will pay her to have, even if it is the opposite of what she said yesterday. Fields is by no means an oddity. The Wikieaks dump revealed that Louise Mensche has been secretly working for Hillary Clinton. Mensch has been passing herself off as a conservative and crusader against political correctness. It turns out that it was all an act. As the linked new piece notes, immediately after the truth was made public, she was on Twitter playing a new role.

It’s not just the TV tarts pulling this stuff. CNBC has a guy they kit out as the avuncular professor names John Harwood. It turns out he was in cahoots with the Clinton camp to rig the news in their favor. Hilariously, CNN was giving Clinton the debate questions in advance so she could not just prepare for them, but prepare how to act surprised by the question. That’s so typical of how the Clintons operate. Somewhere, in Hillary’s things, is the fourth nail intended for the Crucifixion.

Of course, none of this is being covered by the main news outlets. As I write this, the New York Times has a couple of stories about a rumor about the rumors of rumors of Trump being rude to a woman on their front page. Nothing about the Wikileaks stuff. The Post has the same made up story about Trump and a story about how vexed the Clinton camp is over their e-mails being released.The official newspaper of the Imperial Capital cannot be bothered to cover the biggest scandal since Watergate. It’s as if it never happened.

This is just another aspect of the tsunami of bullshit that is the major media today. It’s not that they color the news or that they make up stories. The actors posing as a journalists on TV can be written off as grifters working the system so they can land lucrative TV gigs. There’s no excusing what appears to be an organized and coordinated attempt by major media to suppress the news. If you want to know about Wikileaks, you have to go to the alternative media or read through the database of released documents on your own.

It is one thing when the news is slanted. People adjust to the bias. We are in a strange age in that the mass media is entirely made up. None of of it is on the level. It’s layers and layers of manufactured stories, crowding out real news, to the point where it is impossible to take any of it at face value. You can’t even be sure the people in the stories are real. The Clinton campaign is planting child actors in crowds, posing as adorable local kids, to ask questions. Our public life is now less authentic than professional wrestling.

Is this the result of the breakdown of pubic trust? Are we just seeing the logical result of a ruling class that no longer has any trust in the people whom it rules? Maybe this is just the natural end of a mass media age. No one knows, as this is the first time one has existed. Maybe in the fullness of time, we’ll know that mass media cultures always decay into a liar’s ball, where nothing is on the level, nothing is what appears to be and the only thing you can know is no one can be believed. Perhaps this is what Hell is like.

Two Worlds

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I had no intention of watching the debate as I’ve seen enough of them to know they will always be “two-on-one moonbat fun.” The moderator will gang up with the Democrat to attack the Republican. Even mild nothing-burgers like Mitt Romney got the business from that fat woman on CNN. But, friends told me Trump was beating the old bag up, so I tuned in just in time to see him put the saddle on the fat cow and ride her around the debate stage. I did not watch a lot of it, but it was fun seeing the good guys win.

The thing that crept into my mind was how weird it all felt. As a normie, I know that the two airheads installed as moderators are way out there where-the-buses-don’t-run. In all probability they have been working with the Clinton campaign to try and setup Trump. Similarly, the audience questions would be hand picked and designed to help Clinton. I knew all that and I’m sure everyone watching knew it too. Yet, I got the distinct impression that the two moonbats really thought they were fooling us.

The same was true in the after debate programs. I ran through the cable channels and I saw chattering skulls swearing that Clinton had a great night. I saw others grudgingly saying that Trump did some things well. What everyone in America saw was a complete and total beat down. Even the squirrely guy with the bad wig, Frank Luntz, could not get his phony-baloney focus group to pretend it was close. I was left wondering if these people are insane and really believe this stuff, or they are just paid to lie so they lie.

Having had my fill of that nonsense, I flipped over to the sportball games and I saw an ad from the fat cow featuring a person claiming to be a Republican voting for the fat cow. The claim in the ad is Trump has autism so she is not going to vote for him. Think about that for a second. The man has been in the public eye for over three decades. He has been doing business deals all over the world. By now someone would have noticed that he has autism. Yet, they run the ad hoping that someone will believe it.

Steve Sailer has a post up about how everything the media tells us with regards to Hispanics and their voting habits is largely nonsense. If you went solely by what is broadcast by the media, you would think America is about to tilt majority Hispanic and their vote is critical. In reality, Hispanics are about two-thirds the black population and their votes don’t matter very much because they tend not to vote. As Sailer says, the media does not seem to know much about Hispanics. Alternatively, they are lying.

I think there is a third option. The media reports on the America they imagine, not the actual country. They stuff the news events into their model of reality. It’s why the British press runs laps around the US media when reporting on America. The people immersed in the American media eventually come to believe the model of the world and can’t imagine any other. The result is the people screaming at us through the megaphones often sound like crazy people, ranting about imaginary things that either don’t exist or can’t exist.

It’s not just the media. That’s the window through which we glimpse the managerial class. I’ve recently had reason to spend time among the Cloud People and I had the same feeling I get when traveling abroad. I was in a strange land with strange people,so  I was much more restrained in my speech and movement. Even though I speak the language, I really can’t read what’s behind the eyes anymore. They look like me and they make the same sorts of noises, but there’s a barrier between myself and these people.

Within living memory, professionals regularly interacted with the working and lower classes. Poor people got to see how middle and upper middle people lived. I grew up poor and had many examples of middle class people I could emulate to get out of poverty. Today, the Cloud People are increasingly insulated from the Dirt People. To the typical managerial class type, the great bulk of America is outside their field of view. In the case of the media, it is to the extreme as they live and work in the media centers.

When the “experts” pondered the Brexit result, they sounded like primatologists puzzling over why the monkeys they were observing suddenly acted in a new way. In the current US election, I’m often struck by the feeling that the people in the media are puzzled as to why Clinton is not up by fifty points. Because the answer is outside the set of things that sit inside their model of the world, they are left to either pretend she is up by fifty points or assign dark motives to the deplorable Dirt People outside the perimeter.

We are a nation of two worlds now. The Cloud People are in their world, which is just about divorced from our world. Increasing they speak in their own argot that uses English words, but with alien meanings. They don’t live where we live or live as we live. We have been colonized by pod people, who are only vaguely aware of the rest of us. Unlike the British Colonial officers of old, our rulers don’t have much interest in us. We’re just a bad smell to them, something they tolerate while dreaming of the day when will be rid of us.

This is similar to the Brazilian model, except that in Brazil, the ruling elite is at least a full standard deviation more intelligent than the lower classes. In the American model, the world of the Cloud People is something similar to the Marching Morons, except that the extraction system on which it is based insulates them from the consequences of their own actions. Hillary Clinton is a dangerously incompetent boob, but she may be elevated to the top job simply because the system protects her and repels even well-heeled challengers.

One of the lessons of Africa in the mid-20th century is that people prefer to be ruled poorly by their own, rather than expertly by strangers. The Managerial class spends all of its time debating how to expertly manage the economy and how to replace the Dirt People they find inconvenient with imported Dirt People they believe are more compliant. Meanwhile, the Dirt People slowly begin to realize that they are ruled by strangers. When the Africans were barred from taking command of the machinery of rule, they smashed it. That’s another lesson to remember.