Monthly Archives: October 2016

Broken Women

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I’m fond of the Hoffer quote regarding how mass movements degenerate into rackets. The exact quote is, “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” Drunk driving is the greatest example of this. We have done all that can or should be done to address drunk driving, but MADD remains a multi-million dollar jobs racket for its members. What little good it does is undone by the fact it now advocates for the violation of basic civil liberties.

In his day, this probably encapsulated the possible outcomes of a mass movement living beyond its purpose. Today, there is another possible option in addition to business, racket and cult and that is mental illness. All over we are seeing causes turn into collection points for the mentally ill to advocate for issues that are best described as insane. The whole trannies in the bathroom stuff is the most obvious example. This is lunacy advocated for the sole reason of causing mayhem.

Feminism is a another good example of a cause becoming a lunatic cult. First Wave Feminism was fairly small bore in its goals and tactics. The gals wanted to vote and have the same legal rights as men. Judging from the photos in history books, the tactics back then were for the feminists protesters to make themselves as sexually unappealing as possible in order to force the guys to concede. It was a mistake to give into these demands, but it probably seemed rational at the time.

Second Wave Feminism was proof that women, lacking a man around to say no, will begin to commit suicide by destroying the culture that allows them to prosper. That it quickly degenerated into Third Wave Feminism is all the proof you need. The Wikipedia entry for Third Wave Feminism is mostly just word salad because there’s no way to provide a concise description of what amounts to a grab bag of outburst by mentally ill women. That can be taken literally.

The first time I formally learned about mental illnesses and disabilities was in my high school health class.

Along with topics like pregnancy and a healthy diet, we also touched on eating disorders, schizophrenia,addiction, and physical disabilities.

I use the phrase “touched on” deliberately – because while these topics were mentioned, we never reallytalked about them.

We watched outdated videos with singular, stereotypical (mainly white, cis, middle-class) examples of individuals living with or affected by mental illnesses and various physical disabilities. We read definitions and biomedical criteria of diagnoses in textbooks filled with glossy photographs of the same stereotypical depictions as the videos.

It took me years to merge these classroom images with the lived experiences of people I knew.

As more and more schools recognize the importance of incorporating social justice topics and consent into the classroom, it’s important to recognize how the US education system has so far not only failed to contest ableism and mental health stigma, but also fails to challenge schools’reinforcing these forms of oppression.

One thing that the New Religion inherited from the Marxists is the concept of the struggle. It is integral to their identity to believe they are in a life or death struggle with dark, mysterious forces. This is what allows the blue-haired cat ladies of modern feminism to claim they are being oppressed, because the rest of us don’t care about their eating disorder. At the individual level, it is just another log on the fire of the raging bonfire of lunacy between the ears of the typical young woman.

The trouble is, these unhinged gals are rampaging through the culture and coming to dominate the managerial class, which means their mental illness is turned into official policy. Scroll down through the list of recommendations in the linked piece and you will see this gem:

For example, classrooms can integrate books written by, about, and depicting disabled folks. Political science and history classes can and should discuss the historical and contemporary reality of violence against disabled people and individuals with mental illnesses, such as police violence against mentally ill individuals. Relatedly, classes could discuss various social justice activist movements like the Section 504 Sit-In of the 1970s.

What this is, of course, is a Factitious Disorder, which means a self-imposed condition or illness. Third Wave Feminism is about searching for pitiable people for whom the feminist can feel suffering by proxy. It’s a way for unattached, childless women to gain attention. The normal biological urges no longer have the constructive cultural channels through which to flow to their natural destination, motherhood and marriage. Instead, like a blocked river, these urges flow into unwanted areas and put society at risk.

I’m fond of pointing out that the Muslims are not wrong about everything. The sterile materialism of the West is antithetical to normal human organization, theirs and ours. They are also right about the role of women in society. I’m not talking about the over-the-top Islamic views on women we see on TV. I mean the more sober Islam where women have a defined role that is different from that of men. “Equality” does not mean “identical” and women can have an equal place in society, without having an identical role.

It’s why the way to bet is for the Muslim invasion of  the West to result in the Islamification of the West or at least the rise of a mutated form of Islam in the West. Given the choice between the yapping of fruitless young woman and men with beards throwing infidels off of roofs, the latter will be much more appealing to the men of the West. Maybe it will not come to that, but a society run by broken women cannot last. Either the women get fixed or someone throws a bag over their head and a net over the rest of us for allowing it.

The Return of The Mule

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If you go back and watch videos of Reagan in the 70’s and 80’s, one of the things that jumps out is how aggressively he attacked the Left. In his first inaugural address, he attacked the very essence of what Jimmy Carter stood for as a politician. The man was sitting just behind Reagan as the Gipper explained that everything Carter believed was dangerous nonsense. The other thing that jumps out, when watching old Reagan speeches, is that no Republican talks like that anymore.

Instead, every Republican that has aggressively pressed the attack against the Left over the last quarter century, has been attacked by the media and so-called conservatives as unacceptably “polarizing” as if that is a thing. Official Conservatism has instead insisted that they abide by a set of gentile rules designed by the ruling majority, intended to perpetuate their hegemony. You could be forgiven for thinking that maybe the whole thing was a setup, a game of bad cop – worse cop, in order to rig the results.

Whenever the futility of this arrangement has been pointed out to Official Conservatism, they sigh and concede that it is unfair, but principle demands “we abide by the rules because that’s who we are.” If you pointed out that “who they were” was a bunch of losers, they would put on their lemon face and suggest that perhaps you were disloyal or some sort of hate thinker. Conservatism in America became the candy coating to the liberal nut inside the system.

I was thinking about that over the weekend as first we get the leaked tape of Donald Trump talking like a normal man, who believed he was in a private conversation with another man. The beta male pansies in the managerial class don’t know anything about this, but normal men in private like to tell dick jokes, boast about women and reminiscence about their exploits. The faggots that take up space in Official Conservatism don’t know about these things.

Watching one traitorous fink after another decry Trump’s locker room talk from a decade ago, I was reminded once again that these people were never on my side. It was always a con, a grift, to fool otherwise decent people into putting down their weapons and surrendering to the Left. Buckley-style conservatism, whatever it was, is now just a tool of the managerial class to clear the field for nation-wrecking policies to benefit the ruling elite at the expense of the middle class.

Last night, I was reminded of why Trump was able to obliterate the GOP field despite being out spent a million-to-one. He is not a pussy. Any other Republican faced with the dirty trick pulled on Friday would have gone into the debate prepared to grovel and plead, begging for a second chance. It is not all all inconceivable that he would have offered to step aside. Trump went into the debate prepared to deliver a counter bunch designed to knock the old fat cow on her ass.

It was a sterling performance that turned the tactics and strategy of the government party back onto them. If the contest is going to be a referendum on Trump’s character, then Trump is going to make a big show of exploring the character of the Clinton Gang. Having Bubba’s many sexual assault victims at the event was a missile landing directly into the weapons cache of the Clinton campaign. His demand for a special prosecutor reminded everyone of the elephant in the room.

When even the most disloyal of craven rumpswabs concedes Trump won the debate, you know it was a great night for The Donald.

Guys like Jonah Goldberg  would sooner take a job in the dreaded private sector than say anything nice about Trump or the people prepared to vote for him. As I’ve pointed out in the past, Goldberg is Exhibit A for the case against Official Conservatism and the party it has infested. Trump stands as the rebuke of the surrender caucus, that has profited guys like Goldberg so handsomely over the last two decades. If he has to concede to Trump, you know it was a great win.

Trump probably will not win and even if he does, it’s probably too late to avoid disaster anyway. Democracies always murder themselves. That is the lesson of history and ours will do the same, sooner rather than later. If the worst is to be avoided, then the present arrangements must be de-legitimized in order for a reform effort to have room to grow. That’s the role of Trump in the election. He the destroyer of worlds that need destroying.

When this all started, I compared Trump to the character in the Asimov Foundation series called The Mule. One way of interpreting this character is as a destroyer that sweeps away that which must be swept away in order for something better to rise in its place. That’s the Trump campaign. By cracking the Conservative Industrial Complex and challenging the legitimacy of the managerial class, he is exposing the whole thing as a racket, one which the people can no longer trust.

Last night The Mule Returned.

The Corporate State

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The other day, someone was telling me about their troubles getting fraudulent charges removed from their credit card. It started with a $499 charge for some sort of AT&T service. He called his bank and was told he needed to call the merchant that put through the charge. After a number of phone calls, he was put in touch with someone that tried to talk him out of a refund. After some angry words, he got the the charges reversed and a credit to his account.

Somewhere in the process, he spotted some more fraud charges, so he was back hassling with the bank and vendors getting those off his card. Those charges were for shoes and clothes he did not buy. Talking to the merchants, he discovered that the items were being shipped to an address in another state so he asked if he should notify the police. The merchant laughed and said they don’t do that. They just try to notify the shipper to have the items returned. Otherwise, it is just a loss.

I would imagine everyone reading this has had a similar hassle with this type of theft. I once had a bunch of weird charges show up on my Verizon bill. It was a cramming deal and it took weeks to get the things off my bill. Verizon was in on it somehow and they eventually got hit with a civil suit. I called the attorney general, but I quickly learned they had no interest. They only take on small fries they can push a around. A big company like Verizon operates outside the law.

Now, I did get my money back from Verizon and my acquaintance got his money back on his credit card. I’m guessing he had half a day of time in hassling with the bank. I had a few hours yelling at the dirt bags in Verizon customer service. In my case, I had gone to a paperless bill. I had to jump through hoops to get an actual paper bill sent to me again so I could begin watching the bills for this sort of scam. Verizon works very hard to conceal the details from their customers and this is why.

This sort of theft is just a fact of life everyone accepts. The police no longer investigate most property crimes and they rarely go after the organized scammers, like the crammers working the telephone bills. The on-line merchants that get hit by credit card scammers just accept a certain amount of loss and bake it into the cost of doing business. Even the banks assume losses due to electronic theft. All of these losses are socialized, spread around to all of us in the form of interest and fees.

It’s not just that they are socialized. Increasingly, government is handing the responsibility of policing society over to corporations. That’s what happened when the government had Yahoo monitor their e-mail system without a warrant. They basically deputized the corporation so they could do the policing. Cities and counties all over America have outsourced traffic enforcement to private enterprise. These companies get the right to tax speeders and red light runners by using cameras to catch them.

This happens with other types of crime too. If my vehicle is stolen, the cops do not look for it. Instead, the insurance companies now organize the hunt for car theft rings. In many parts of the country, the cops no longer investigate home robberies until the insurance companies step in with evidence of a pattern. Since filing a claim with your insurer is mostly likely going to result in a rate hike, many people don’t bother calling the cops at all. There’s little benefit and lots of hassle.

This is another facet of anarcho-tyranny. It’s not just that the state has stopped doing the basic duties of government. They have subtly outsourced them to cartels with the power to tax all of us in order to socialize the cost of crime. As we saw with the Yahoo case, the logical next step is to give corporations the power to police. You may never be arrested by Google or Apple, but they will be the ones that report you to those with the power to arrest you, most likely a contractor, too.

Sam Francis imagined a more Orwellian end result than we are seeing. The end game appears to be a corporate state that is legitimized by the law, but fully de-legitimized in practice. On the one hand you have management that wears the synthetic mask of enthusiasm, as they go from meeting to meeting, figuring out how to obliquely enforce policy. On the other hand you have the lower ranks, grimly going through the motions in order to avoid interaction with management.

The Last Cards

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In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched Operation Michael, a well designed offensive against the Allies, specifically designed to knockout the British Expeditionary Force in France. It was assumed, correctly, that the British were exhausted from the previous year’s battles. The Germans had close to a million fresh troops from the Eastern Front to throw at the British. The plan was to punch a hole in the lines and then surround the BEF in Flanders.

After the war, historians would call the German offensive the “final card” in the story of the Great War. The Germans had run out of options for winning the war. This was their last card they could play in order to go to the peace table as an equal. This spring offensive was going to be the great last gamble to force the Allies to the peace table and get a good deal from the process. If it failed, then all would be lost as the German people, as well as the German army, were close to collapse.

The funny thing about this phase of the war is that in retrospect, there was no way this could work as the Germans imagined. They had developed new tactics for punching through the lines and avoiding the meat grinder offensives of the past, but they lacked the mobility to exploit it. The role of cavalry had yet to be replaced by tanks and and armored personnel carriers. A retreating Allied army would have to be chased on foot and the German Army was starving.

One of the great things about the First World War is it has something for everyone. The Marxists had their take. The fascists, of course, had their interpretation. Americans have largely forgotten about it because we have been taught that history started in 1938. The lesson I have always thought most important is that old ideas, old ways of doing things and old systems for organizing people do not go away quietly. They have to be broken on the wheel of reality, before they are consigned to the past.

By the Battle of the Frontiers, the military planners on both sides should have known there would be no quick end to the war as the technology had outstripped their military strategies. Machine guns made cavalry useless. Barbed wire and trenches made infantry useless. The only result from an attack would be thousands instantly killed or wounded, with maybe a small advance into enemy territory. Yet, they continued doing what they were doing, battle after battle for four years.

Another lesson of the Great War is that as the old system or organizing Europe murdered itself, it often looked strong, when it was crumbling. The Russian Czar appeared to be fully in control of his country, at least to outsiders, until the moment his train to Petrograd was stopped by a group of disloyal troops. The German offensive in 1918 had General Haig, the commander of the BEF, convinced they should sue for peace as the Germans were too strong to resist. Six months later, the German Army was broken at the Second Battle of the Marne in August 1918.

All of this came to mind reading this story about how Brussels is ordering the British press to stop reporting Muslim terrorism. They issued a report basically ordering the British government to pass new laws to control the press. They make “23 recommendations for changes to criminal law, the freedom of the press, crime reporting and equality law.”  It’s as if they are unaware that Brexit happened. Instead, they are just going about their business as if the events happening outside their windows are not happening at all.

The EU, of course, is a solution to the past. More precisely, it is what the Europeans wish they had done before the Great War, believing it would have prevented all of it. Like all solutions to past mistakes, it is wildly miscast for the present. That does not bother the Eurocrats. They are convinced their way is correct and they run forward, head down, into the block wall of reality. It is precisely this sort of stuff that led a majority of Brits to vote their nation out of the project, but facts and events play no role in EU thinking.

Like the military planners during the Great War, the modern Eurocrats have no compassion for their people. They are just resources to be used for the project. The reason the press reports on Muslim terrorism, is because Europe now has a serious exploding Mohamed problem. That problem was created by the EU and its member governments, specifically the Germans. That’s of no concern to the EU. The project must continue, regardless of the body count.

I like comparing the present to the period before the Great War because the points of comparison are many, even if we live in a technological age that feels like a world away. The people in charge of the world a century ago were just as certain as today’s rulers. They clung just as hard to their modes of thought, their plans for the future and their organizational methods. They were wrong about most everything and they murdered 17 million people learning this lesson, not including what came next as a result of their errors.

That of course is why stories like that one out of Brussels gets my attention. The utter lack of regard for the people, the blind fidelity to a way of viewing the world, is always at the core of large scale human suffering. Whether it is the French Revolution or the Great War, the story is always the same. The people in charge were wildly mistaken and it is their people who paid the price. Looking around at our callous and detached rulers, one can’t help but feel a sense of foreboding.

It will not end well.

 

Weather Alert

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I am enjoying the mass panic and evacuation of South Florida at the moment, but I expect to be out of here by the time Godzilla strikes. The hosting service where this site resides, however, is located in path of the monster. These companies are pretty tough these days, with power generators and redundancy, but there is always a chance things go very bad. If this site is dark for some reason, the most likely reason is the hurricane. Or, they finally came for me, but the most likely reason is weather.

Best of luck to all of those in the path of the storm.

Trouble Brewing

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One of things you cannot help but notice is that pretty much everything in America is some sort of scam run by the managerial class to extract money from the rest of us. The most common way to do this is via cost shifting and you see it in the so-called non-profit rackets. Everywhere you look, non-profits are working the tax code so that Cloud People can live self-actualizing lives, while we get to pay for it. It looks like that scam may be reaching its end.

When New Haven Mayor Toni Harp gazes out her office windows, she can see across the street to Yale University’s idyllic buildings and grounds — none of which are on her city’s property tax rolls.

Yale, a nonprofit despite its $25 billion endowment and sprawling property (it owns about half the land in the city, Harp says), doesn’t pay property taxes. And some officials in Connecticut, including Harp, would like to see that change.

They aren’t alone. City and state officials in other parts of the country, including Maine, Massachusetts and New Jersey, also are questioning whether they can continue to allow wealthy schools like Yale, or big nonprofit hospitals, to remain off tax rolls while they scramble for money to pay for police, fire, streets and other infrastructure and services.

In some cases, they are looking for ways of taxing what until now have been tax-exempt sacred cows.

For a long time now, the Federal government has strong armed states into going along with policies they would never implement on their own. They do this by threatening to withhold Federal funds for thing like roads and education. The result is state budgets have swelled as they take on the burden of the the Progressive fantasies, while the Washington politicians strut around like heroes for having cooked up these programs. The states are now running out of money to pay for this crap, so they are look for new taxes.

Of course, these colleges are working the same rackets. Yale could offer free tuition to its undergrads. They could expand their undergrad population and thus reduce tuition costs. Schools like Yale have the same sized student body they had after WWII, when the country was a third of its current population. Instead of doing those things, they have turned Yale into a five star resort whose primary purpose is to be a money laundering operation for the super-rich, looking to avoid taxes.

All of these cost shifting schemes have something in common and that’s leverage. State governments have been able to hide the cost of social programs through debt issuance. Colleges have become luxury resorts by passing those costs onto graduates in the form of student debt. Young people are holding north of $1 Trillion in debt at the moment, with close to 20% of it technically in default. What that is telling us is that this form of cost shifting is reaching its end as well.

There’s a Assembly of Notables vibe to stories like this because what we are seeing is the beneficiaries of the system desperately trying to keep the plates spinning. The people in power, the members of both parties, all know that either government spending at all levels is sharply reduced or that taxes are sharply increased. In all probability, both will be necessary. The trouble is the people with the money to be taxed are rich and powerful. Yale does not want to pay taxes and it does not want its patrons to pay them either.

As was the case in the French Revolution, what we are seeing in America is the use of debt to perpetuate a system that was evolved for a bygone era. Social democracy, which is what we have in America, is a 19th century concept implemented in the 20th century. Big parts of it are no longer useful, but no one knows how to reform it. There are millions still making a nice living doing busy work in the system and they will fight anything that resembles reform. The result is endless haggling over how to make 2 + 2 = 5.

The most likely outcome of this is we first see state governments begin to buckle. California is, for all practical purposes, insolvent. Illinois is probably going to be the first state to face defaulting on its pension obligations. All but a handful of states are facing very serious debt problems that will require doing what they previous assumed was unthinkable, like taxing hospitals and colleges.colleges. Next up will be a push to get rid of the tax breaks for charitable deductions. That’s when the whole non-profit racket collapses.

What will be interesting to watch is what happened when the people on the fringe of the managerial class start to be cut loose to save money. When hospitals need to cut costs, they will not be laying off nurses and doctors. They will go for the diversity coordinator and the patient liaison officer. Colleges are not going to drop the football team, but they will get rid of the Transgendered Studies people. A whole lot of people in self-actualizing careers will find out they are luxury items, not necessities. That’s when things could get fun.

The Traveler

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Sometimes the world does change. For some reason the habits of the people shift from one mode to another. The American attitude toward divorce is the most obvious example for someone my age. I can recall my parents saying, “There’s no way he can run. He’s been divorced!” By the 80’s, I don’t think anyone cared much at all about the marital history of public figures. In one generation, divorce went from being a deal breaker to a non-issue for public figures. That’s a big change that people could watch happen in their lifetime.

Then other times you just start noticing something that has always been true, but for some reason you did not know it. All of us are prone to thinking that something new to us is actually new to the world. Millennials are especially prone to this. They carry on about the mundane as if they just discovered fire. But, it is not always easy to know if what you are seeing is a change in custom or just the accumulation of experience leading to a better understanding of something, that has been there all along.

Traveling, I cannot help but notice that I now have to navigate a thicket of thieves, hustlers and bandits, most of whom fly the colors of authority. For example, I check in at the airport and I’m told I will be charged $20 to check my bag. The airlines used to include this in the fee, but now they lie about it so they can pretend they are giving you a deal when you book the flight. Somewhere on the on-line booking site, I’m sure, there is language indicating that someone at the airport will rob you, but no one ever reads it.

When I was in the land of elves, I was charged $47 to check my bag. I fly often and on almost every flight, they beg people to check their items because they lack space in the overhead bins. Inevitably, there are people trying to rob the airline out of free stuff in exchange for them checking the carry on item. This feels new to me. I don’t recall having to go though this sort of stuff with the airlines. You paid a fee, they encouraged you to check your bags at no extra charge, and that was that.

It’s not just bag fees. Airlines have a million ways to rob the unsuspecting passenger. They charge for food, of course, but they also charge for things like a desired seat. I just flew on American and the man at the counter tried to “upgrade” me to an aisle or window seat. I reminded him that I was already booked in first class, where there is no middle seat. He tapped away at the keyboard for a minute, pretending to examine my claim against his company’s information, and then finally handed me a boarding pass. He had no shame.

This is not unique to airlines. Travelers are now familiar with the many people, who have their hands out, expecting something from the traveler. My swank hotel normally charges for water. Not bathing water, but the bottled water they leave in the rooms. The absurdity of this is never noticed, even when you point it out. I was once presented with a bill at check-out for a newspaper, as part of “guest services.” If they had not listed it on the bill, I would never have noticed, but it was like they wanted to rub your nose in it.

Highway robbery is not new, which is why we have the term. It just seems to me that the airlines, hotels and even restaurants used to go out of their way to let the traveler know they were not bandits. It used to be an axiom. for example, that you should eat where travelers eat, because you know the food is good and the  proprietor is honest. Today, it seems like the opposite is true. Places that cater to travelers are crooks, working every angle to separate the traveler from his money.

Last night I was out to dinner at one of the many places in Miami that cater to tourists. In the fine print of the menu, our menus are now legal documents, is a notice that they apply a 12.5% gratuity to the bill. Most people, as was the case with my host, just assume they decide the tip, based on the service. They conduct themselves accordingly and often fail to notice the included gratuity. By definition, a gratuity is voluntary, but this is no longer the case at many places catering to travelers. It’s just another hand reaching into your wallet.

I’ve traveled a lot in my life, going back to the days before metal detectors and weirdos fondling your business at check-in. Air travel was always a hassle, but it now feels worse. It feels like people that talk like me and look like me are part of an organized plot to rob people like me. Everyone now has a grift, an angle they are playing to “increase their per client yield” as the business dorks say. That’s just it, behind these schemes are business majors with econ degrees looking at the customers the same way a serial killed looks at prostitutes. It is a transactional experience.

When I travel these days I’m prone to dark thoughts about the future because all along the way, I’m navigating around one hustler after another. They are kitted out in costumes and language intended to fool me into handing over my credit card, which they will pillage like Vikings on holiday. This is the very definition of a low trust society. It did not always feel like this. Maybe it was and I never noticed, but I am noticing now. My default assumption when dealing with anyone while traveling is to assume they are a bandit.

On the way back from dinner, we passed a man waving his arms next to what one would assumes was his vehicle. My host wanted to stop and help. The man waving his arms looked Middle Eastern. I told my host to not stop as this has become a way to rob people. They pretend to be a traveler in distress, you stop to help and then they rob you. She gave me that look that women give to men when they are disappointed in them, but then she realized I was probably right and we moved on.

This is the dream world of economists and libertarians. They fantacize about the day when no one has any loyalty to anyone and everyone is a moist robot, calculating their advantage in every transaction. It is a world dominated by rootless men of commerce, who go from one deal to the next, without any thoughts of the future or the past. They invest in nothing because they have loyalty to no one but themselves in the moment. If you want to see the future, go to the airport. That’s what they are preparing for us.

The Others

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The phrase “third world” is one of those terms that will probably fall out of usage over the next decade. The Cloud People never use it these days as it is dangerously problematic for them. It is one of those terms that is now freighted with a lot of bad thoughts and bad memories. That and the term made the most sense in the Cold War days when the civilized world and the fringes were divided between the Americans and the Soviets. Most people under 40 have no idea what the “second world” even was so having a third world today probably seems like nonsense to them.

The term was coined by a guy named Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer. He wrote an article comparing the countries no one cared much about, with the Third Estate. It was an idiotic and ridiculous comparison, but it stuck and was eventually embraced by banana republics and African potentates. It got picked up by American radicals as a cause and the term became associated with the ass-backward crap-holes almost always south of the equator. That bit of noticing is what’s now very dangerous.

The term still means something to geezers like myself and whenever I have a reason to experience the third world, I call it the third world. The thing that distinguished these societies from the advanced societies is the disorganization. Pretty much everything is a disorganized mess, especially the traffic. P.J. O’Rourke once observed that the degree of chaos in a country’s traffic correlates to the general chaos and lawlessness of its society. I no longer recall why he said it, but it has always stuck with me.

The reason, of course, is trust. Large scale social organization requires a relatively high degree of social trust. If you want to build a building, for example, you have to trust that the people in charge are not going to change the laws halfway through your project so that you capital has been wasted. You have to trust that the laws will remain pretty much the same, with regards to property and contracts. Otherwise, you are leaving your investment to chance. Contract law and private property are rooted in social trust.

Driving is one of those large scale things Westerners take for granted, but the whole enterprise relies on social trust. As a driver, you rely on the other drivers to operate their vehicle by the conventions of your culture. You assume the other drivers are going to act in a predictable manner. In low-trust societies, it is every man for himself on the roads, because no one assumes anything about anyone, other than they are out for themselves. The result is YouTube videos dedicated to insane drivers.

Anyway, I get through the airport and make it out to where I can catch a cab. The driver has one of those great Caribbean names, Vladimir Sanchez. For some crazy reason, a lot of Caribbean mothers named their kids after Tolstoy characters. There are a lot of Puerto Rican girls with German first names like “Heidi” for some reason. I once knew a Puerto Rican girl named Olga. Vlad was chatty, but I barely understood him as Caribbean Spanish is loaded with slang. But, he was cheery and helpful.

He also drove like a maniac and came close to slamming into a few cars on my short trip from the airport to the swank Miami hotel. That’s when it occurred to me, as my life flashed before me, that we will need a new term for the world that is about to be forced upon us. Calling some country south of the equator “third world” is not going to make much sense when most of American is operating much the same way. Instead, we will have terms for the “other place” and the “other people.” We’ll need a name for those not like us, but allegedly still “us” according to our masters.

For example. A Cloud Person heading to Miami for a meeting with other Cloud People will talk about being amongst the other people. Maybe Miami will just be one of the many “other places” that exist outside the fortified Cloud cities of Washington and Manhattan. Similarly, the Dirt People will talk about those almost ethereal people, who are mostly seen on their TV’s, but once in while are seen touring the favelas of America. Persians have a word, “biganeh” that literally means an unknown person or person of alien origins. We will all be biganeh to one another.

This may seem bleak, but the future always does. It is the way things are headed as the people in charge tear apart what took centuries and millions of dead to construct. When you come into a place like Miami, you see see why the Cloud People want this for everyone. They see the polyglot beef stew culture around their swank hotel and think that it is the glorious egalitarian future foretold in the prophesies. They never see Liberty City or Miami Gardens. They have no reason to care as that is an “other” problem to be managed by other people.

Friends and Enemies

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For well over a year now, I have been talking about the Trump Effect™ and how it may be the single most important part of this election. Don’t get me wrong, Clinton winning is most certainly the end of America as an on-going concern. She will invite in 50 million foreigners, confiscate guns, auction off everything that is not nailed down in exchange for cash to her slush fund. She will weaponize the court by packing it with coreligionists. America will have become a banana republic and there is no peaceful way of returning from it.

That may be the end result, even if Trump wins the election, but what comes next will include a whole lot of people who are now fully aware of the reality of the political class. There are exponentially more people “fully woke” now than a year ago. Official Conservatism™ is circling the bowl, largely because the grassroots have looked around and decided guys like Jonah Goldberg are just low-tax liberals who hold them in contempt.

For a long time, the Cloud People have told the Dirt People that the great divide in America is between Liberals, who want to expand government and create a socialist utopia, and Conservatives that wish to restore limited government and a constitutional republic. The Bush administration put the lie to the latter and the mobilization of Wall Street behind someone’s wife in order to block Trump puts the lie to the former. Old school Progressive like Bernie Sanders are now outsiders on the Left.

In fact, among the Cloud People there is no divide. They unanimously agree that class solidarity comes before everything else. That’s made clear in this editorial from the Arizona Republic endorsing someone’s wife.

The 2016 Republican candidate is not conservative and he is not qualified.

That’s why, for the first time in our history, The Arizona Republic will support a Democrat for president.

This is the new team chant of Official Conservatism™. The logic here is akin to saying “They don’t have my favorite ice cream so I’m going to have rat poison instead.”

Trump responds to criticism with the petulance of verbal spit wads.

That’s beneath our national dignity.

By “our dignity” they are not speaking for you. You are not “our” and you better get that through your thick head.

Trump’s long history of objectifying women and his demeaning comments about women during the campaign are not just good-old-boy gaffes.

They are evidence of deep character flaws. They are part of a pattern.

These are not the words of serious people thinking seriously about the country. These are the words of teenage girls gossiping about one another in the bathroom. That’s what is dawning on many Dirt People. These feckless airheads allegedly carrying the people’s banner in the media are more concerned with their status among the beautiful people than anything else. There is no divide among the Cloud People. They think the Dirt People are revolting.

And increasingly the Dirt People are revolting. Even people like Ace of Spades are moving toward a break with Official Conservatism™ and the GOP.

The party — not just the party;the writers who are supposed to have telling the truth as their first mission, but instead of become nonstop liars all the time decrying Trump as a liar himself — has declared war on all of the Lessers beneath their station, those not in The Media and who should, therefore, not have quite as much of a say in things as they themselves have.

They’ve made themselves into exactly what they pretend to oppose — and exactly what I do in fact oppose.

Guys like Jim Geraghty, and other NR-types, used to quote Ace all the time, but now they don’t know his name. The reason is class loyalty. Ace has his ideas and loyalty to the managerial class is simply not a concern. Given the choice between Trump and Clinton, he rationally picks Trump. For the National Review types, this is treason. Class loyalty trumps everything or else, so Ace is now dead to them.

The sadness and frustration you see in that Ace post turns up all over as people begin to see the reality of their condition. More than a few look back at their support for Bush, for example, and wonder how all those big shots in conservative media were so wrong. They wonder why they never talk about it, much less admit it. The conclusion many are making is that it was just a scam, a con, a way to turn the virtue of conservative voters into a vice in support of the Progressive project.

Eric Hoffer wrote “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” That’s what happened with the conservative movement. By the 1980’s they had their charismatics, Reagan and Buckley. Next came the money making opportunities in talk radio and book selling. By the time Bush came along it was a racket, a bust out, where the only real concern was how much money these people could stuff into their pockets before the game was up.

The game is up now and the Dirt People are waking up to it.