Monthly Archives: March 2017

Essential Knowledge: Part VIII

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The great inflection point in Western history is probably the Renaissance, which was the start of the great flowering of European culture and intellectual life. There are endless arguments to be had on this topic, but there is no denying that in the 16th century, the West began to rocket past the world, moving from the “dark ages” into the modern intellectual era. When people talk about the Western canon this is the starting point.

It is impossible to be an educated man without having a familiarity with the important figures and events from the Renaissance through the 19th century. I say familiarity, because you can, and people do, make a career out of studying just one man or one period. The Scottish Enlightenment, for example, produced a library full of important texts that still resonate today. The Scots, arguably, gave the world empiricism, which is no small contribution.

Unless you intend to be an academic, a familiarity with the important people and texts is enough. One way to dive into these very deep waters is to examine the intellectual traditions in which our modern intellectual movements are rooted. A good place to start is with old Karl Marx. He was not some evil weed that sprang from the void. He was, in many respects, a result of the intellectual revolution that begin with the Reformation.

The first proto-Marxist book on the list is Utopia by Thomas More. In addition to getting himself executed by Henry VIII, Moore wrote one of the great works of political philosophy. It casts a very long shadow, having influenced works like New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, Erewhon by Samuel Butler, and Candide by Voltaire.  It’s also why we have the word “utopia” in our vocabulary and why we have science fiction today. That’s right. Modern science fiction has its roots in the works of a 16th century priest Lawyer.

Another work that influenced Marx and many other communists and socialists is an almost forgotten work written during the age of Cromwell. The Commonwealth of Oceana is not an easy book to read, even in its day. Harrington was, but all accounts, a terribly undisciplined writer. But, like a lot of the great books in the canon, the struggle pays off, even if you just sample it. It offers insights into the fevered mind of the radical egalitarian, that continues to wreak havoc on civilization to this day.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu has one of the greatest names in the Western intellectual tradition. He also wrote one of the great works of the Western canon. The Spirit of the Laws has been relied upon by radical republicans and radical Marxists. Montesquieu introduced two key concepts. The separation of the powers and despotism. He also introduced a different reading of history, one that explains great events in terms of mass movements, rather than just the deeds of men.

Despite what you may think, Marx studied the same political economist that allegedly influenced the free market economists of today. The first name on the list is, of course, Adam Smith. His massive, two volume The Wealth of Nations is actually not bad reading, even for the the short attention spans of today. For those libertarians obsessed with legalizing drugs, Smith’s discussion of the English corn laws is priceless. You can literally do word substitution with “corn” and “drugs” and get a great legalization argument.

Anyone who knows anything about Marx has heard the phrase “labor theory of value” even though Marx never used the term. That’s because the guy who did coin the phrase is David Ricardo. He not only gave us the labor theory of value, he gave us theories of rent, wages, and profits. He’s also responsible for the phrase “comparative advantage.” Ricardo is a giant in political economy, along with Smith, Mill and Malthus. The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation is the book to read.

Marx was not just focused on economics. Read the Communist Manifesto, and no, you will not burst into flames by holding it, and you see it is more than just an economic manifesto. Marxism, like communism and socialism, uses the vehicle of economics as a way to reach the just society. Of course, Marx was heavily influenced by Rousseau so reading The Social Contract is required. You can also read his Discourse on Inequality as it is short and popular with the modern Left.

Rousseau was building on the work of two of the most important philosophers in the Western canon. Thomas Hobbes gave us the term “leviathan” in the book conveniently title Leviathan, which established social contract theory, that has served as the foundation for most later Western political philosophy. To a modern reader, it is a tough slog, but worth it in the end. It’s also important to note that Marx largely rejected social contract theory in favor of utilitarianism.

Similarly, John Locke is a major influence, even to this day. Locke gave us republicanism, the theory of the mind, the concept of the individual, self-derived identity and the big one, the blank slate. Locke maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience. This is now known as empiricism, but it should be easy to see where this eventually led. That’s right, John Locke is responsible for trannies in the bathroom and female Marines.

Locke is a big deal so you have to read a few of his works to appreciate his contributions. Fortunately, Locke was also brief, so his works tended to be more like pamphlets. A Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding are required reading. Luckily, you can get these free on Kindle or for a few bucks as paperbacks. It’s ironic that the most important works in Western history are usually available for less than the price of a trip to Starbucks.

There were have an introduction to political philosophy via proto-Marxism.

The Null Culture

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Tyler Cowen is one of those guys worth reading in the same way Thomas Friedman used to be worth reading. There’s nothing about his arguments or analysis that is new or interesting. In fact, when he ventures into these areas he reveals a mediocre mind. The value is that he provides an insight into the thinking of the Cloud People with regards to the issues of the day. He’s a weathercock for the Cloud People.

Maybe this is intentional or maybe it is accidental. That can be debated and many of his most loyal fans start from the assumption that it is intentional. They believe his cryptic writing style is to encourage a hermeneutic reading of his posts and columns. Cowen indirectly encourages this by constantly referring to Strauss as if he is a deity. Many of his posts have a “read between the lines young grasshopper? vibe to them.

Another way to look at this style is that it is intended to mask the fact that he has no new insights or ideas to offer, so he puts the focus on the alleged game of expository cat and mouse. In the same way female pop stars dress like whores to hide their lack of talent, writers like Kevin Williamson, for example, rely on bloated prose to mask their lack of talent. Maybe that’s Cowen’s game.

Regardless, his latest column on Bloomberg is an example of his usefulness as a window into the hive mind of the Cloud People.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, food has replaced music’s centrality to American culture. These are invariably somewhat subjective impressions, but I’d like to lay out my sense of how the social impact of music has fallen and the social role of food has risen.

In the earlier era, new albums were eagerly awaited and bought in the hundreds of thousands immediately upon their release. Diversity in the musical world was relatively low, as genres such as rap, heavy metal, techno and ambient either didn’t exist or weren’t well developed. It was also harder to access the music of the more distant past — no Spotify or YouTube — and thus people listened to the same common music more frequently.

One of the remarkable things about the Cloud People is they have a non-linear timeline that has more holes than the fossil record. For most of them. the world started in the 1960’s. That’s because the Cloud is dominated by Boomers, but it is also when the Cloud started to form up as a social force. The result is they have two versions of the past. Their past, the 60’s and 70’s, and the long ago past, when Lincoln defeated Hitler.

This ahistorical world view is why they reflexively compare every foreign leader to Hitler and every problem in world affairs to Munich. It’s even more present tense for domestic matters. They have never stopped fighting the Civil Rights Movement. T.N. Coates makes $50K a speech because his kid brushed up against an old white women on an escalator once and that was just like the cops attacking the blacks at Selma.

Anyway, Cowen is obsessed with food and the so-called foodie culture. He correctly points out that this is a common obsession in the Cloud. He does not phrase it that way as that would require a degree of self-awareness he does not posses. Many of his posts and columns are about his trips to find something new to eat. Whenever he is preparing for a tax-payer funded junket overseas, he posts a bleg for restaurant tips.

So-called foodie culture is interesting in that it is not really a culture. It is the result of lack of culture. The people endlessly searching for a new dish or new cuisine do so because they have nothing of their own or at least nothing they wish to hold up as their own. The endless search for some new exotic cuisine is a distraction from facing the fact that their own culture is dead and its artifacts are now just museum pieces.

Culture is the spirit of the people. Their customs, foods and social structures are the result. The moveable feast that is foodie culture is not a celebration of something holy or sacred. It is shiva for people who no longer have any attachment to the rest of us or our share past. They see themselves as rootless visitors, sampling life in the hope that it will provide their lives with meaning, or at least make them mildly interesting to others.

Foodie culture is a null culture, the abnegation of culture. The Cloud Person going on about the food stalls they visited in Thailand is someone trying hard to not be from here, to not be of here, to not be a part of you. It’s why fusionism is so popular in the foodie world. It lets every person have their own thing, so they can avoid sharing their thing with others and therefore avoid the burdens and responsibilities of shared culture.

It also is why the managerial state and the Cloud People society dependent on it is brittle and fracturing. It has nothing to offer. If culture is old men planting trees in whose shade they will never sit, the managerial state is the burning of those trees in an outdoor fire pit so the imported cook from Thailand can prepare traditional dishes from his homeland. The former outlives the man, while the later cannot outlive the fire.

The Skins Game

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There’s a popular quote from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, where one character asks another character how he went bankrupt. The response is “Gradually and then suddenly.” It’s funny because it is true. The great upheavals in human affairs seldom happen without warning. They are always part of a long process that was plain to see, but people preferred not to notice it so it rolled along until a crash or revolution.

A generation or two from now, people will look back at America and wonder how racial conflict broke out after what many thought were years of social progress. After all, the good whites had atoned for all the bad things done by bad whites. In reality, those years of “progress” were just accumulating bad habits and bad decisions, disguising an underlying rot. American society is headed for a bad place and you can see it here in this story.

Outrage has grown at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, as the school faces layoffs and increased class sizes due to a law limiting funds for schools with a higher white student body.

The Los Angeles Unified School District provides more funding for schools where the white population is below 30 percent.

In a letter to parents, the district noted the highly regarded middle school had been above the percentage for the past couple years.

The racial formula was a condition imposed by court decisions dealing with desegregation in the 1970s.

Los Angeles has a form of misery sharing in their school system. Since people vote with their feet, they naturally tend toward self-segregation. This means the schools tend to reflect this as kids go to the schools closest to where they live. To remedy this, the good schools are punished as a way to “even the playing field.” It’s an insane effort to implement the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron.

A look at the makeup of this particular school offers a glimpse of the future. The first thing you see is the school is 47% Hispanic, which in Los Angeles is going to mean Mexican, with a sizable chunk of Central Americans. It is roughly 30% white, 11% Asian and 7% black. The test scores, across all races, are above average for the city. This means the school can have a decent basketball team, but still do well in the math bowl.

The North Hollywood area is not a slum, but it is slightly downscale. The demographics, as of 2000, were Hispanics 57.7%, whites 27%, Asians 5.7%, blacks 5.6%, and others at 4%. Gentrification is underway so those numbers will begin to change as the renters are priced out of the market. In other words, the local schools will either have to import diversity or build private schools. Otherwise, they will be de-funded by the city.

The sound you hear is the ratchet clicking. As these sorts of incidents happen, everyone begins to think in terms of race. The honkies can accept writing checks to the blacks, maybe, but the Hispanics? The Asians, of course, see no reason for cutting checks to anyone. The Hispanics are in a bind as they try to work out whether it is better to be on Team Honky or Team Black, but they are not going to cut checks to the blacks.

The Cloud People imagine a world built like a sports league. The rich successful teams write checks to the poor, unsuccessful teams. That works in baseball as the Yankees and Red Sox need opponents for their games, so they agree to pay Tampa to field a team. In real life, people don’t think that way. The Asians are never going to think they need a really good hoops team, so they will hate writing checks to Team Black.

As the racial spoils system settles into society, new types of response develop for each group to maximize their slice of the pie. One example is gentrification. This is where rich white liberals buy up parts of the ghetto and then drive the hues away with high rents and heavy policing. This way they can have nice urban playgrounds for their kids to enjoy the cosmopolitan lifestyle, without being stabbed by a junkie.

What we have going on is a racial undertow, where the current at the top appears to be flowing in, but underneath, a stronger current is flowing out. In a society with one defined minority group, the majority will go along with helping the minority. When you have nothing but minority groups, which is where America is headed and where LA is now, you end up with the skins game and that is always a zero sum game with winners and losers.

A popular quote in the hate-think community is from this interview with the Lee Kuan Yew. “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” That is the example of history and it is why Singapore has always been an authoritarian society. It is the only way to keep peace. Men with guns have to supervise the skins game.

It is why humans across the globe instinctively reject multiculturalism and diversity. Even the lunatics preaching this nonsense avoid diversity and multiculturalism. They always live in rich white neighborhoods and send their kids to private schools. They like diversity and multiculturalism from a safe distance. Humans know another thing that is popular in the hate-think community. That is, Diversity + Proximity = Violence.

 

Stranger Danger

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I don’t have a television subscription anymore. I use the Amazon Fire for my video entertainments. It’s a useful device for those who have cut the cord. One of the apps on the thing is for SkyNews, the Murdoch propaganda platform that is the retarded little brother of the BBC. It’s pitched as the “conservative” alternative to the government run BBC, which means it is pretty much just a ruling class echo.

I was working on a small project in the living room so I put on the television to see if there was something worth watching. SkyNews had a program on about the latest Muslim mayhem in London, so I thought I’d give that a go. It was some sort of panel show, hosted by a guy who looked like a homeless man. He was an old guy kitted out to look like a college professor, but he was so shabby, he looked more like a bum than a professor.

The Mr. Chips routine remains popular on television news. They take a stupid person, dress him up to look like a college professor and then have him say his lines with an avuncular voice. Hilariously, the actors they have playing these roles on the news are almost always as dumb as hamsters. I guess a degree of dullness allows the actor to play the part without any self-regard. Maybe it is just one of life’s little ironies.

Anyway, the old gasbag droned on for a few minutes at the start, reminding us of the proper way to virtue signal about these Muslim attacks. He was also careful to make clear that no one, under any circumstances, is to speculate about why Muslims keep going bonkers and attacking people in Western cities. In fact, he was careful to not use the word “Muslim” and even suggested that the man’s identity remained a mystery.

Then, it got ridiculous. It was a panel show so the hobo went around and introduced his panelists. It was four women, all in their prime powerskirt years. These are the years when a powerskirt is still feeling the biological clock so she is not entirely without hope of being a women, but she is at her maximum anger at reality for not yielding to the latest feminist pieties. Of course, one was black and another South Asian, because that’s who we are!

The first powerskirt to speak sounded like a JohnRivers parody on Gab. She opened with how much she cares about the victims and how passionate she is for victim’s rights. Powerskirts are always passionate about stuff, just like Hitler. She then lurched into a tangle of sentences about how this incident opens the doors for hate and how any assault on London’s multiculturalism is far worse than a few white people being murdered.

What’s striking about watching these modern lunacies acted out with British accents is it makes the lunacy so much more obvious. What the hell does “open the door for hate” even mean? I bet the stupid twat who said it has no idea either. It just appeals to the fevered female mind. Similarly, they have deified the word “multiculturalism” as if it is a real thing, when in fact, it is just a word for the nullification of culture.

The funny thing about her little performance was that you could see her nostrils flaring and her cheeks getting a bit flushed. Maybe she is well-trained, but my take was she really meant every word of the nonsense she was saying. That or she was sexually aroused by it. Who knows, maybe the thought of being slaughtered by Muslim savages is arousing to these people. It’s not entirely out of the question, given the state of men these days.

That really is the issue. The men of our ruling class have no pride or self-respect. They got to where they are, largely untested as men, so they have no sense of achievement. As a result, the women have no respect for them or the culture they are supposed to symbolize. Consequently, we have a ruling class populated by hand-wringing pussies and terminally pissed off women, looking with envy at those swarthy guys on the border.

I snapped it off, thinking that it would probably be a good thing if an Exploding Mohamed walked into the station and ended things for all of them. Frankly, if I was walking outside the studio and Mohamed came running toward the entrance, I’d offer to hold the door for him. The people inside are hostile strangers to me. The only thing I know about them is they hate me for reasons I cannot address. Otherwise, I don’t know them.

That is the the final resting place of multiculturalism. A people without a shared past cannot have a shared future. The Muslim invader cannot look around the landmarks of London and feel pride. His people did not build these things. His ancestors were on the wrong end of a bayonet charge by the people who built Big Ben and London Bridge. The people who made these things are strangers. Their descendants are strangers to him.

Men cannot live as isolated, transactional economic units. Nature abhors it. It’s why the gray featureless world our rulers imagine is so horrifying to the Mohammedan. It’s why populist movements are sprouting up all over the West. Man is a social creature. In order to have strong bonds with each other, we must share strong bonds with our past. The people who rule over us must share those bonds too. They cannot be strangers.

It’s why, after every one of these attacks, the powerskirts and hand-wringing pussies rush out to fret about The Backlash™. At some level, they know that the real threat to their position is not the random muzzie, strapped with explosives screaming “Allahu Akbar!”, rushing into the offices of SkyNews or into Parliament. The real danger, what they truly fear, is that guy deciding to hold the door for Akmed. Then it’s all over for them.

The Truth About Health Care

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Humans live in a finite world. The universe may be infinite, but the world of man is finite. There’s only so much stuff. Because there is only so much stuff, there’s always going to be a shortage of the stuff that people tend to like or need. It’s not always a desperate shortage, but there’s never enough so that everyone can take what they want. There’s always going to be one more hand reaching for the last item just after it is gone.

This is a basic axiom of life and one of the foundation truths of economics. It’s even a foundation truth of communism, which assumes scarcity can only be mitigated, but never fully eliminated, by the elimination of profit. Economists of all stripes work from the assumption that scarcity is an immutable fact of the human condition. The question they wrestle with is how to increase supply and distribute the results.

What this means is that all goods and services must be rationed. Since there’s never enough to meet the maximum demand, there has to be some way to say “no” to people demanding the goods or services. The most common way to do this is price. The poor guy who wants a Mercedes is told he cannot have a Mercedes by the big numbers on the price tag. This is how the supply of luxury cars is rationed.

The other way to ration goods and services is for men with guns to take control of the supply and create rules for who can and who cannot have access to the stuff.  Rocket propelled grenades are not very expensive. An RPG can be had for around $500 and the rounds are about $100. The government, at least in America, controls the supply of RPG’s and determines who can have them. In other words, the government rations the supply of RPG’s in America.

This is an iron law of economics. All goods and services are rationed. This is true for health care too. There are no exceptions to this law. Thus, the First Truth of Health Care: No health care plan or system can ever be taken seriously unless it addresses, up front, how it will say “No, you cannot have it” to people who want it. At some point, someone has to tell the patient they cannot have whatever it is they want or need.

In America, rationing is mostly done by price, but increasingly the state is taking over this role. In Britain, most people are denied services by the long lines for those services. The long wait times for basic services is a form of rationing. If you can deliver X per day and the demand is for 2X, you solve this by giving people numbers and having them wait a long time until their number is called. This is socialized medicine in nutshell.

The fact is, most people could pay out of pocket, for their health services. It is only when poor people get old or have accidents when they need someone to pay for their medical care. Most middle-class people should be able to put away a little every payday to reserve for their later years. That is, if they were not being taxed into poverty by the current system in America that has seen prices rise five times the inflation rate.

Thus, the Second Truth of Health Care: The current insurance model is just a wealth transfer from the middle-class to the health care industry, in order to cover the cost of poor people and the metastasizing layer of people who live off the system. Those is really just a tax. Most people use about 5% of their plan for themselves, the rest is used to pay for poor people and the army of people who work in the system.

That’s the thing politicians never want to discuss, which is the whole reason they are talking about health care in the first place. How does a modern society pay for the poor, who cannot afford needed medical services? How to we address the free riders on the system? More important, how much are we willing to pay for the health services to the poor? There’s a limit to all of this and that’s the question that always has to be answered.

Of course, one of the paradoxes of modern life is that you can get very rich off the poor, which is why liquor stores and furniture rental shops dot the ghetto. In the social welfare game, the point is to lay a massive guilt trip on the public, and grease the right political palms, in order to get the middle class to look the other way as their money is siphoned off for one program or another for the poor, always administered by a rich guy coincidentally.

Thus, the Third Truth of Health Care: Health services are a massive skimming operation. Today, the one area of the economy that “grows” is the health care industry. Every year, more and more people pile into that wagon, mostly in administrative roles. The number of nurses and doctors does not grow very much, but the number of bureaucrats grows like a weed.

Then you have the pill makers, machine makers, research people and lawyers. There are always lots and lots of lawyers. The health care industry is massive and government dependent. It’s why rub rooms are now called message therapy centers. They are angling to get it on the racket, by having their service declared an essential health care service. That way, you will be paying for some guy to get a happy ending.

That’s why reforming health care has become an impossibility. As soon as anyone makes any noises about fixing the system, the army of lobbyists, hired by every vested interest, shows up to bury the reformers. If they are not able to kill the idea of reform entirely, they set about corrupting it into another grift that their clients can use to get a free shot at your wallet. The only people not represented in these efforts are the voters. They get no say.

This is the main reason Trump’s efforts to address the problems of ObamaCare failed last week. What Ryan and the other crooks in the GOP were hoping to do is pass a bill that made it easier for their paymasters to skim money from the rate payers, while providing fewer services. Ryan’s bill was just an attempt to help the people feeding at the trough get a little fatter off the middle-class. Its failure suggests we have reached the end phase.

Talk to anyone responsible for paying health insurance premiums and they will tell you that the rates are reaching the point where they cannot be paid. When premiums are going up by multiples of inflation, there can be only one result. Once rates pass a certain level, people stop paying those premiums. You get black markets, non-compliance and a system that can only persist through brute coercion. Soon after you get collapse.

South Africa

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Back in the 1980’s, “ending Apartheid” was the celebrity cause of the Left. Every Hollywood nitwit was slobbering over the ANC and babbling about how the internal affairs of a country, on the other side of the globe, were the most important thing in America. In many movies, the villain was made to be an Afrikaner, giving work to all the actors, who used play Nazis in the previous era. Eventually South Africa buckled under the pressure and Apartheid was ended in 1991.

Sober minded people made the point that eventually, the blacks would do what they have always done and murder all the whites. It was a process that was well underway in the former Rhodesia. The white farmers were being harassed, having their lands seized and in some cases getting killed for being white. But, the good thinkers in the West claimed it was exaggerated and anyway, Nelson Mandela was black Jesus so nothing but good would come from the end of Apartheid.

Of course, Zimbabwe is a complete disaster under black rule as the white farmers were chased off and the economy then collapsed. Now, South African appears to be headed for a similar fate, maybe worse, as the lunatic running the place declares war on the white population. Jacob Zuma is all but authorizing genocide against the white population and other prominent black leaders are running around, openly advocating war against the whites. The result of this is inevitable. It will be a race war.

Today, whites are about 9% of the South African population. Fifty years ago they were just over 20% of the population. Those are important numbers. A well organized minority that is 20% of the population can defend itself pretty well, as long as they have the intellectual firepower to maintain discipline and a willingness to fight. Once a population falls below 10%, they can only survive by appealing to some faction of the majority for protection or by moving out to the fringe.

Jews in Europe are the most obvious example. They carved out a space on the fringe where they could survive as a tiny minority. They also had the cognitive skills in demand by the ruling elite, so a semi-peaceful existence was possible, despite their numbers and outlier status. Gypsies are a variation on this, except they have to exist even further out on the fringe, as they have nothing to offer the ruling classes. They exist as a semi-tolerated parasite population that is always on the move.

That’s not realistic in Africa, where the moderate black leaders are just a bit less homicidal than Pol Pot. Anyone familiar with sub-Saharan Africa knows that tribal politics still dominate the culture.That precludes peaceful alliance between out-groups. The best you get is a hostile stand-off. The questions for South Africa are a) How long before the blacks decide it is time to kill all the whites, b) How many blacks will the whites be willing to kill in order to survive? and c) How will the West respond?

The most likely answer to the first question is soon. Zuma will follow the Mugabe formula and keep ratcheting up the violence incrementally. Given that he is the moderate at the moment, he will play the triangulation game where he will promise to hold off the more insane elements of the black leadership, in order to get concessions from the white population. This will roll along until Zuma is killed, or decides he has to go for it in order to maintain his position.

Talk to a typical South African and they have a bizarrely optimistic view. Many just assume they will find refuge in English speaking countries if things get bad. That means there will be a large cohort of Afrikaners who will prefer working with Zuma. This is just paying the crocodile to eat you last. The answer to that second question is “no where near enough nor soon enough.” By the time it dawns on the Afrikaners that it’s fight or die, it will be too late to fight. Math and modern morality have sealed their fate.

That’s where the third question gets interesting. Barak Obama, of course, would never have allowed mass migration of whites from South Africa. If anything, he would have shipped arms to the black government along with a wishlist of whites he wanted killed. That list would have had one item, “all of them.” Similarly, a squirrel like Trudeau in Canada would block any escape for all but the trans-gendered Afrikaners. Australia would take them and Trump would probably accept them, but Europe? It’s no guarantee.

There’s a lesson here for the people currently in charge of the West. There are no right answers when it comes to biology and culture. The blacks in South Africa are not going to be talked out of genocide. There is no reasoning with them. They want what they want and it is not about wrong and right. it is about their will to do and their ability to do it. Similarly, the Muslims dynamiting Europe are not motivated by facts and reason. They are doing it because they want to do it and they can do it.

Humans have always been hierarchical, tribal and territorial. That means there is competition within the group for status and competition between tribes for territory. Your tribe does not hold what it has because of some piece of paper or the airy notions of dead ancestors. You hold what you have because you hold it against all challenges. That’s the iron law of life on this planet and we will get to see it play out over the next decades in South Africa. The winner will be the side willing to kill as many of the other tribe as it takes to win.

The Political Class Murders Itself

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The point at which the Roman Republic moved from republic to empire is generally placed at the point when the Senate granted Octavian almost unlimited power and he adopted the title Augustus. Some historians argue it was when Caesar crossed the Rubicon or when Octavian defeated Antony at Actium. The implication is that once the transition was started, there was no turning back. The more useful analysis is to think of it as a process, with roots in the Republic, that evolved to the point where dictatorship was inevitable.

The die was most likely cast when the Republic began to compromise its own rules for limiting and distributing power. The system they had created was a reflection of the tribal realities of the early republic. In order to keep any one family from gaining too much power, they systematically limited the time anyone served in office. The system also forced an apprenticeship on those who went into public life. This had the benefit of making public men buy into the system. Therefore they were willing to defend it.

That meant the system had a policing mechanism to sort out enemies before they could cause trouble. An ambitious young man could not skip any steps on his way up the ladder, so once he got up the ladder, he was not agreeing to any changes in the process. Defending the system was a way to defend one’s prerogatives, but also a way to defend the system from lunatics. Verpus Maximus may be smart and talented, but he was not only going to wait his turn, he was going to do all the jobs necessary to prove his worth.

This system started to break down with the rivalry of Sulla and Marius. Sulla was the first man to hold the office of consul twice. He also got away with marching an army on Rome itself, in order to defeat his rival, Marius. Both of these acts were supposed to be disqualifying, but exceptions were made for expediency. Sulla sided with the Senate so the Senate bent the rules to serve themselves. A good case can be made that this is the point when it was all over for the Republic.

It was just a matter of time before someone used Sulla as a precedent.

It is a good lesson to keep in mind as the politicians in the Imperial Capital wrangle over what could be a very dangerous scandal for them.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes declared Wednesday that members of Donald Trump’s transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under inadvertent surveillance following November’s presidential election.

The White House and Trump’s allies immediately seized on the statement as vindication of the president’s much-maligned claim that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phones — even though Nunes himself said that’s not what his new information shows.

Democrats, meanwhile, cried foul.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, cast doubt on Nunes’ claims in a fiery statement and blasted the chairman for not first sharing the information with him or other committee members.

Schiff also slammed Nunes for briefing the White House on Wednesday afternoon given that the Intelligence Committee is in the middle of an investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, including possible collusion with the Trump team.

The political class chased Nixon out of town for talking about the use of the FBI and CIA as weapons against political opponents. The rule in politics has been that the use of the IRS or the intelligence agencies was expressly prohibited. There could be no exceptions for obvious reasons, as it would give these bureaucracies dangerous power. That was the lesson of Hoover. If the CIA or IRS are allowed to use their powers to gather dirt on elected officials, then they can control elected officials. That’s the end of democracy.

Of course, there’s another reason to take certain weapons off the table in politics. That’s self preservation. In prior ages, where the winners had the losers killed, the challengers would always have as their goal, the death of the current ruler. That prompted the ruler to get ahead of the curve and have any potential challengers killed, before they could be any trouble. This was Stalin’s game and he just about gutted the the intellectual and political elite of Russia in the process. They still have not recovered from it.

That’s what makes this so dangerous. It’s now clear what happened. The Obama people started spying on Trump once he had the nomination or perhaps even earlier. They may have started earlier with an eye on helping the Republicans knock him off in the primary, but that’s not clear. They figured that Clinton was a lock so they were not careful about covering their tracks. The Clinton people are as dirty as it gets so they were not going to be ratting on anyone over it. If anything, they would expand on it.

This is where the Russian hacking story comes into the picture. Once disaster struck and Team Obama realized they had a problem, they needed cover, so they started with the Russian hacking nonsense. They would then claim that it was all an accident and they were just trying to prevent Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale from attacking our democracy! It’s also why Obama signed a retroactive Executive Order giving cover to the intel agencies for their domestic spying activities. They were creating a cover story.

The complication is that it appears that at least one person has perjured himself over this and that one person is FBI Director Comey. There’s no way to square his testimony with these new revelations. The best he can do is split hairs and claim he was not part of the spying effort. Of course, there’s no way to touch him as he runs the FBI. In fact, there’s no way to investigate any of the intelligence organizations. This is the point where many of the robot historians of the future will say the American political class murdered itself.

Unless there is some will to address it, and that’s highly unlikely, we now have a new normal where highly politicized intelligence agencies are used by both sides to discredit one another and discredit any attempts to reform the system. It’s no longer a game of rules. It is a zero sum  game of power and that cycle only ends one way, with someone marching their army on the capital and taking control. As with Rome, whoever emerges as the dictator will not have murdered the system. The system will have murdered itself.

Space Aliens & Talking Monkeys

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On the Twitter machine, I saw this posted by Chris Hayes, a liberal airhead, who makes noise on cable television. Given that the BBC is advocating the return of blasphemy laws, I naturally assumed American liberals were now agitating for a police state. But, that was not the point of the tweet. It was a link to his article on something called The Hive. The irony was completely lost on him. Almost two decades ago Joe Sobran and Tom Bethell coined the term to describe the Left-Intellectual orthodoxy that rules us.

Hayes, of course, is an incurious dullard so it is hardly a surprise that he was unaware of the irony. MSNBC could have people dressed up in bumblebee costumes, dancing around the set of his show, and he would still not get it. Still, most people under the age 50 would not be aware of Joe Sobran and his writings about Progressive fanatics. The great convergence of the so-called Left and the so-called Right has sent all the old paleocons down the memory hole. Vast swaths of conservative thought has been largely forgotten.

The point here is that it is easy for information to get lost between generations. Most of the people, who were around when guys like Sobran were active, are either old men now or they were too young to appreciate what was being said. That and the long neocon war against Anglo-Saxon conservatism has gone on for so long that multiple generations of people have grown up believing these ideas were outside the realm of respectable thought. This has happened to libertarians, as well. How many Reason Magazine types are aware of Lew Rockwell?

The modern assumption is that human knowledge is accretive, which means it builds up over time. Each generation adds another layer of knowledge upon which subsequent generations puts down their layer of knowledge. After all, the technology of this age is more advanced than the technology of a century ago. The people in the age of the Great War were far more advanced than the people of the Napoleonic era. It certainly feels like technological progress is a steady accumulation from one generation to the next.

While it is true that we are technologically advanced compared to people in ancient Greece, the progress has been in fits and starts. Further, the progress has not been universal. The Greeks knew more about human nature and culture, for example, than modern people. Our intellectuals are advocates of the blank slate, which is a few clicks more ridiculous than the flat earth argument. Further still, some knowledge possessed by the ancients has been lost to us. Damascus steel and Greek fire are two examples.

There’s also something called The Sapien Paradox, which means, why did humans become smart so late? We know that the human brain evolved to its current state about 60,000 years ago. It took 50,000 years for humans to figure out agriculture. Over the last 10,000 years, humans developed symbolic concepts like notions of value, number and measure. Abstract social concepts like status and power, along with the symbols associated with them are, relatively speaking, very recent developments

Even in this recent run of progress, there were long periods where humans not only stagnated, but regressed. Life in Rome at the time of Julius Caesar was vastly better than life in Rome during the fifth century or even the tenth century. Agricultural technology regressed for much of the medieval period after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. If you departed earth from Europe in 1900 and returned to Europe in 1950, you would have assumed society collapsed and fallen back into barbarism.

The fact is, the store of human knowledge has leaks and is susceptible to spoilage over successive generations. This is obvious in the current state of space exploration. Two generations of men went from zero to landing on the moon. Now we struggle to get payloads into space. Right now we can’t return to the moon. It will take a generation to accomplish what happened two generations ago. Imagine what would happen if some great calamity strikes the world like an epidemic or nuclear war.

What does this have to do with space aliens?

Given that humans needed 10,000 years to go from domesticating animals for the first time to making it to the moon, we have some idea of where visiting space aliens would be on the evolutionary timeline. They would be at least 10,000 years ahead of us, maybe more. The reason for that is the technological jump, from where we are now to effectively transporting anything to another solar system, is about the same as the jump from riding a horse for the first time to riding a rocket to the moon at back.

There’s also the fact that this alien race would have figured out the problem of knowledge boiling off between generations and especially between cataclysms. The most likely solution for former would be much longer lives. If humans lived for 200 active, vibrant years, a reasonably smart person could learn everything to be known in his field and have time to add to it. The latter problem would require accumulating enough knowledge to avoid the society destroying cataclysms that have been a feature of human history.

Of course, being a very long lived species would have an added benefit when it comes to space travel. Launching a human to Mars and back is a one year mission. Landing on the planet probably makes it a two year trip. That’s about ten percent of a man’s prime space travel years. If we assume space aliens can reach something close to light speed, they would still need 40 years to get anywhere interesting. If they had lives roughly equivalent to a thousand earth years, then a trip to visit us would be like us going to the moon.

There you have it. If space aliens are out there and able to reach earth, they will most certainly be a very long lived species. This is not just for the travel issue, but for the store of knowledge problem. They will also have to be a several orders of magnitude smarter than modern humans. To them, we will be a dumb version of our ancestors, who first left Africa. It’s entirely possible the space aliens will find the insects and fauna of our planet more interesting than the talking monkeys.

Female Trouble

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The one thing that Europe has in common with America is the thorny issue of immigration, especially the problem of Muslim immigration. Europeans are also facing the problem of sub-Saharan African immigration, which is a different problem. Black Africans are not yet forming up terrorist rings and threatening to destroy Western civilization, at least not on purpose. The daily drumbeat of terrorism stories we see in the news are all tied to Islam and its hostility to Western civilization. The fact is, Islam is incompatible with the West.

The question that never gets asked is why are European politicians so wedded to the idea of open borders, when it means Muslim immigration? Letting Poles move from their homelands to London, as tradesman, is one thing. There’s an economic argument there, not a good one, but at least there’s an argument. Making it easy for Mercedes to build car parts in Slovakia has an economic argument to it. Again, it is a fallacious argument, but you can see how some people, especially politicians, could be dull enough to fall for it.

There’s no economic argument for importing Syrians or Turks. Muslims are overwhelmingly represented on the welfare roles. In Denmark, people from MENA countries make up 5% of the population, but consume 40% of welfare benefits. This is a story across Europe. It is not just the new arrivals. Turks in Germany have been there for a couple of generations and have been the worst performing economic group in the country. Estimates put the total working population at 20%, while the rest live off welfare benefits. Then there is the issue of sky high Muslim crime rates.

There is no economic argument in favor of importing these people. Businesses that want cheap labor have options within Europe. Like US companies, global European firms have used Asia for slave labor in the old dirty industries. Just like Silicon Valley, European tech firms have used indentured servants from India and China to undercut domestic wages and dodge local labor laws. The fact is, human capital from MENA countries has little value in modern, Western countries. The only people benefiting from the importation of them are security firms and prison builders.

That leads to the other possible reason the political class is in love with mass immigration from Muslim countries. Is there popular support for importing these people, despite their uselessness as citizens? Again, there’s no data to suggest this is the case. European leaders could have put the issue to the voters, but they fanatically avoid it. In fact, anyone who dares run on the issue is branded a Nazi. Politicians love democracy when they are assured of winning. They avoid it when they are assured of losing. Therefore, it is safe to assume they don’t think this is a winner for them.

What makes the political math crazy is the polling shows quite clearly that the majority of the public would support a ban on further Muslim immigration. Clever politicians could easily dress such a thing up in flowery language and have a winning issue. Even not-so-clever politicians could simply call for a halt to further immigration, without naming Muslims directly. One of the French candidates could cut Le Pen off at the knees by simply adopting a restriction position on immigration. Yet, all of them go the other way.

If it is not good economics or good politics, why is the European ruling class hell bent on replacing their native population with openly hostile foreigners? Mass insanity is the tempting response, but that’s just another way of blaming magic. If it were mass insanity, it would have some sort of external cause, like a virus that strikes middle-aged white politicians. How come it only seems to cause hyper-altruism among people in political power? It’s a fun thing to say, but it is not fruitful speculation.

A better answer may be that this is the inevitable result of the feminization of Western civilization. The most important country in Europe is ruled by a barren old women, who started out in life as a communist. The most masculine politician in France is Marie Le Pen. Germany’s opposition party is led by a mousy little wood nymph named Frauke Petry. Even the Brits turned to a woman to lead them out of Europe after the Bexit vote and the collapse of Cameron’s government. The West is now a matriarchy.

Look at the reaction to Donald Trump among the ruling class of the United States. He is detested, mostly by upper class women. Their reason is he has a penis and enjoys using it. As a comparison, Le Pen’s support is lowest among upper middle-class women in France. Sweden, which now runs on the principles of the womyn’s studies department at your local university, is also  the poster child fro immigration restriction. The broads in charge of that country have destroyed at least two of their cities with Muslim migrants.

The fact, men and women are different cognitively and well as physiologically. This is not just old school male chauvinism. It is solid science. Women like drama and emotional theater. They also like the idea of the alpha male coming to their rescue. Put women in charge of a country and they will set about creating danger and chaos so that the males will come rescue them. That’s where the swarthy rapists from the south come in. Europe and America settled their differences and ran out of dragons to slay, so the gals created new one in the form of Muslim lunatics imported into the West.

The trouble is the men of the political class are mostly pussies. Look at the men in positions of authority in the West. Barak Obama was a wigger dork. Paul Ryan is a ridiculous pussy, afraid of his own shadow. The males in Western politics are effeminate, fragile peopel, who spent their youth in the library. There are no tough guys, former soldiers or adventurers in Western politics. It’s all power-skirts and the men who secretly wish to dress like them. The result is the female side is creating drama and the male side is sobbing in the corner, promising to hold the camera steady.

Welcome To The Custodial State

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It’s easy to dismiss the warnings about what’s coming, lots of people do, arguing that only the wildly pessimistic think we’re headed for serious trouble. Stories like this suggest you can’t be too pessimistic about what’s coming.

John Rivello, the Twitter user who allegedly sent a tweet that caused a journalist to have a seizure, was charged by the Dallas District Attorney Monday with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The felony assault charge comes with a hate crime enhancement.

The Maryland man was arrested by the FBI Friday for allegedly sending an animated image, also known as a GIF, to Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald in December which said, “you deserve a seizure.”

Eichenwald’s wife subsequently tweeted that the GIF had indeed caused Eichenwald to have a seizure. The federal criminal complaint says that a direct message from Rivello’s alleged account, “Ari Goldstein” or “@jew_goldstein,” to another account said he hopes that the GIF “sends” Eichenwald “into a seizure.”

The FBI located Rivello through an Apple iCloud account associated with a phone number he used to sign up for Twitter. The iCloud account included a photo of Rivello posing with his driver’s license, the complaint says.

This appears to be first situation where someone has been arrested due to an internet posting causing the direct bodily harm of another user. Rivello is being being charged federally under a law which prohibits using an electronic communication with the intent of hurting or killing another individual.

The assertion that an image caused this lunatic to have a seizure is so ridiculous, that it is impossible to assume the authorities believe it. Even if such a thing were remotely possible, it means we will need to build a lot of new prisons. If posting certain images is not a criminal act solely because someone claims harm, this ends with everyone accusing everyone of a criminal act. The fact is, the FBI is just harassing this guy because they want to send a message. That message is you better get permission before you speak.