Monthly Archives: April 2017

Zed2K

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Kevin Michael Grace contacted me a while back about doing a segment for his podcast, Grace & Steel. He and his partner, Kevin Steel, do a weekly podcast where they will often interview someone for an hour or two. I’m a listener to their program, so I was flattered and agree to do it. I’m also a believer in the adage, “support the media that supports you.” One way to help to turn the tide in this fight, is for our team to universally no-platform the media of the bad guys. I may be a bit player, but I can do my part.

Anyway, another reason for agreeing to do this was that I have been thinking about doing a podcast, but I was unclear about what was involved. Frankly, I was not sure I could talk coherently for 30 minutes or more. Listen to a podcast and they cruise along effortlessly for a full show and it always feels like they could do so much more. On the other hand, you can stand in front of a crowd, giving a speech and five minutes feels like five hours. I was not sure if I could actually talk about enough things to fill a podcast.

What I learned is a good interviewer can keep you talking for as long as he likes and Kevin is a good interviewer. The real challenge, besides the content, is the technical aspects. In order to not sound like you are in a well or a steamer trunk, you need some equipment and software. Cheap equipment and cheap software means the audio sounds weird. It’s also why many video podcasts look like hostage videos. The sound is bad and the people are looking at their screen instead of the camera.

In my case, I relied on the microphone in the laptop, which probably costs fifty cents for the Chinese manufacturer. The result was a I sounded a little muffled and nasally. I think if I was going to try my hand at this, I’d want to invest in the proper equipment. I don’t know this for certain, but my guess is there is a lot more to it than just the microphone. I just got a taste of what is involved to do it properly. The big shot podcasters who actually make a living at it probably have studio quality gear and know how to use it.

In order to do a first rate podcast, you need to invest in a high quality microphone and you need to learn how to use software to mix, edit and touch up the final product. Grace & Steel uses a method where I recorded my end of the conversation and Kevin recorded his end. After it was over, the other Kevin mixed the two, filtering out the bad parts and strange noises. That’s the other thing I learned. There is a lot of work involved in producing these things, if you want to do it right.

As far as the interview, it was more of a conversation and we could have gone on for hours. Kevin is an interesting guy with a lot of time in the ideological trenches. He has read and interviewed the big shots in conservative media so he knows the terrain. One of the many knowledge gaps between those inside conventional politics and those outside, is that the people outside know there is a rich and dynamic world outside conventional politics. The people in the bubble don’t know what they don’t know.

Anyway, here is the final product. Enjoy.

https://soundcloud.com/user-762000146/grace-steel-ep-78

Alt-LARP

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For weeks, maybe months, the site WeSearchr was raising money to finance another street fight with the black clad Antifa guys. It was pretty obvious that the point of the “rally” was not free speech or to support Trump. It was an effort to have a rematch with Antifa, which kicked the crap out of the normies at the Berkeley Milo event back in February. The WeSearchr guys did everything but offer to drive the Antifa people to the event. It was such an obvious setup, it is surprising that someone did not shut it down in advance.

The social media reports from the event strongly suggest the cops were told to stand aside and let things take their course. That appears to be the style in Berkeley, where they just assume the numbers are always on their side. On the other hand, there’s a protest every day at Berkeley. It’s just part of the culture. It’s entirely possible that the level of cynicism has reached the point where the cops simply don’t care. There’s no way to know, but the Alt-Lite people see to think the cops were told to stand down.

From his secret lair in suburban Washington DC, Richard Spencer declared the resulting melee a win for his team, even though the people who organized it seem to hate Richard Spencer. The various schisms and feuds in the “alt” community have reached the point where it is hard to keep track of the sides. Regardless, the vanguard of the proletariat smashed the other vanguard of the proletariat, resulting in some hilarious video on social media. Judging by the coverage, it looks like Antifa was on the losing end of it this time.

Spencer is completely wrong in his assessment. He really, really wants to jam current events into his narrative of Weimar Germany and the rise of Hitler, but history never repeats itself so neatly. As the old saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” The rhythms of this age have some things in common with the rhythms of past ages, but that’s as far as it goes. Spencer is not Martin Heidegger and there is no young Adolph Hitler lurking in the local art school, contemplating a political future.

More important, the street theater we see going on between Antifa and the Alt-Lite, and it is the McInness wing doing the fighting, is nothing like the street battles that went on in the Weimar days. The Freikorps battling communists were not bored college boys killing a weekend with some live action role playing and a few brews with the bros. The Freikorps were an important German cultural institution that dated to the Seven Years War. These were former soldiers, organized into a civil political force.

Comparing the ProudBoys to the Freikorps is laughable on its face and reveals a fundamental lack of seriousness on the part of Spencer. Comparing these Antifa idiots to the Spartacus League is even more absurd. German citizens after the abdication of the Kaiser thought the two paths forward were socialism or communism. Exactly no one supports Antifa’s political agenda, if they even have one. Similarly, Spencer has a following in the hundreds and no one thinks his ethno-state idea has a future.

To be fair to the Alt-Lite people, and again, it is the Alt-Lite out there doing the fighting, they just want to have their events without being harassed by lunatics. If the adults running the campuses and policing these political events did their jobs, none of this would be necessary. You really cannot blame them for taking matters into their own hands and laying into these Antifa nutters. If the people in charge refuse to do their duty and maintain civil order, then people will do it on their own. That’s an immutable fact of life.

Even so, America is not Weimar Germany. It is not even 1960’s America. The days of hard men enforcing ideological discipline on the streets are long over. The days of disaffected youth upsetting the social order are also past. Ricky Vaughn did more for the disaffected with his twitter account than any of these guys playing make believe on the streets of Berkeley. The bros had a good time beating up on the punks from Antifa and that’s not a terrible result in itself, but it is not the Spartacist uprising.

If there’s any lesson here at all it is that in the current crisis, the old tactics are more for theater and entertainment than advancing a political agenda. Going on campus to harass Charles Murray is not changing minds and it is not intended to change minds. It’s just something to do in order to show off to friends. Its bored children coloring on the walls, even though they know mom will be pissed. Since mom is not going to give them up for adoption over it, the act is just pointless, risk-free theater.

The Right Side of the Left

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This post from NRO’s Mona Charen is a good example of how the distance between the Buckley Conservatives and the Progressives has narrowed to the point where it is hard to see any light between them.

The headline was numbingly familiar: “For Blacks, College is Not An Equalizer.” The op-ed in the Washington Post by Ray Boshara explored what he called a “troubling paradox,” namely that so many well-educated black Americans “feel so economically insecure.” It’s a startling fact, Boshara continued, “that blacks with college degrees have lost wealth over the past generation.” White college graduates “saw their wealth soar by 86 percent” between 1992 and 2013, while black college graduates experienced a loss of 55 percent over the same period. I made a little bet with myself as I read the piece: “Two-to-one he doesn’t talk about family structure.”

It’s funny, but the little bet I made with myself while reading it was “A bazillion to one says she dares not mention IQ.” I won that bet, of course, because the subject of intelligence is now a forbidden topic with the so-called conservatives. The subject of group intelligence, or even group differences, causes these people to faint. They have fully internalized the magic of the blank slate so therefore biology is ruled out of any discussion of human behavior or quantifiable group differences. Magic is always the go to move.

The fact is, the efforts to get more blacks into college, and out of college with a diploma, has not changed the fundamentals of group IQ difference. All the affirmative action in the world is not going to change this fundamental reality.IQ is the single best predictor of life outcomes. The lowering of standards at colleges, in order to increase diversity on campus, just means more people with an IQ of 85 carrying around a college diploma. It has no bearing on the earnings gap between those with a 100 IQ and those with an 85 IQ. As everyone in the dreaded private sector knows, the diploma counts for nothing when the employee is being evaluated on their work product. Poor work produced by a college graduate is still a poor work product.

IQ is not the only taboo avoided in this piece. Immigration is also one of the banned topics with the so-called conservatives.

As I feared though, he avoided what I consider to be a key factor in the black/white difference. The great divide in wealth accumulation in America is founded on marriage. Married couples accumulate much more wealth than divorced or never married people do. A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the median married couple in their sixties had ten times more wealth than a typical single person. An Ohio State study found that divorce decreases wealth by an average of 77 percent. Jay Zagorsky, the study’s author, counseled: “If you really want to increase your wealth, get married and stay married. On the other hand, divorce can devastate your wealth.” Now consider the demographics of black college graduates. The overwhelming majority are women. Females now account for 66 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned by blacks, 70 percent of master’s degrees, and 60 percent of doctorates. Women tend to desire husbands who are as educated or more educated than they are, which makes marriage more difficult for black women with higher education degrees. According to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, the percentage of black women college graduates aged 25 to 35 who have never married is 60 percent, compared to 38 percent for white college-educated women.

That paragraph is hilarious for a number of reason. Mona Charen presuming to speak for the tastes of black women in the mating markets is laugh out loud funny. There’s also the fact that she confuses income and wealth. The bigger issue here is the fact that she cannot bring herself to mention the real reason black males have rocket high unemployment levels. That’s immigration. Cheap foreign labor and a willingness to tolerate idle black men, has resulted in lots of idle black men. This is really not difficult material.

The main reason Buckley Conservatism no longer has a constituency outside the ruling class is they have accepted all the premises of the Progressives. They are convinced that all humans are just amorphous blobs that can be shaped at will. Differences in outcome, therefore, must be due to society. That rules out the right answer and leaves them in the same carnival of magical thinking as the Progressives. The only difference is one side has slightly different incantations and abracadabra words than the other.

The Surplus Value of Superman

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One of the fascinating things about the ideological struggles of the last century is that no one has ever bothered to refute the claim that capitalism is inherently self-destructive. The destruction of exchange value combined, with the preservation of use value, presents opportunities for new capital investment. The successful business attracts competitors by the nature of its success. Eventually, the market is saturated and profits reach the absolute minimum. The value of the original business is destroyed by its own success.

Marx was, of course, was observing the boom and bust cycles of the English industrial revolution. Much later, Joseph Schumpeter, drawing on Marx, wrote “the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. ” It is a famous line known as Schumpeter’s gale, which is just a clever way of saying that the destructive forces unleashed by capitalism are the cost of progress.

That came to mind reading this post on the comic book industry. According to people who read comics and follow the business, it has been overrun by howling at the moon social justice warriors. Comics are no longer about Superman vanquishing the bad guys for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Today it is a “half-black, half-Hispanic Spider-Man” lecturing the honkies about their backpack of invisible privilege. Maybe it is more subtle that that, but that seems to be the general direction of the business.

The article he links to assumes the nose dive in sales is due to the lurch into progressive lunacy by the comic book business. There’s no question that there is little to no market for the social justice warrior stuff. It’s why it always has to be imposed. Still, comic books have been in decline for decades. It is not a dying business, but a dead one. In fact, this SJW phase is what happens to the carcass of an industry or business that has already been pillaged by the money men and grifters of the credit age.

In the industrial age, the cycle Marx first observed was tied to the currency arrangements of the age. Societies still dealt in hard money so capital only seemed to appear and disappear like a magic trick. When a company folded, it felt like the money was gone, but in reality, it had just moved somewhere else. The cyclical nature of hard money, it rushes into a market or industry in good times, then rushes out at the peak, is the underlying cause of the booms and busts common in the industrial era.

We live in a a credit money era, where capital can be conjured out of thin air and just as quickly be made to vanish. Money is not the store of labor value. It is the store of intellectual and social capital. The banker is not worth a billion dollars because his labor sold for a billion dollars. He is worth a billion because his social connections and knowledge of the financial system places him at a highly valuable node in the system, allowing him to skim from the traffic on the network, like a highwayman.

What’s happening in the comic book business is emblematic of the credit money age. Into the 1970’s a comic book was cheap entertainment for boys. It encouraged reading and imagination. At the peak, there was something like 15 million comics printed a month. That meant it was an industry of maybe $10 million in annual sales, including revenues related to publishing. By the 70’s they probably made more from licensing than the comics. More kids experienced Superman on TV than through comic books.

By the 70’s it was a mature business with little in the way of growth. Then, clever money men of the credit era decided it was time to bust out the industry and strip away the remaining value. That’s how we got the great comic book bubble. The guy who chronicled this period, the source for the The Weekly Standard article, still has his blog up here. Even if you have no interest in comics, it is an interesting read because it helps explain the phenomenon of social justice warriors in the credit age.

What’s happening in the comic book business is a systematic strip mining of the value created in the golden age of comics. The first stage was to use credit money to blow a massive bubble, drawing in stupid money that the smart money players then ran off with before the bubble burst. That’s the essence of a credit bubble. Credit fuels artificial growth, which attracts real money looking for a quick return. Instead, the sharps take out the real money leaving the credit money behind, which is back by the worthless assets.

There’s another stage though. After the crash, another class of parasites comes in to feed off the carcass. In the case of comic books, there was the old characters developed in the zenith of American culture. In this case, it is the propaganda value of the comic book heroes. Instead of selling cheap fantasy entertainment to boys, they use the super heroes to promote the New Religion. Those social justice warriors now writing for Marvel did not infiltrate the industry. They were recruited.

This seems to be a feature of the credit money era. The ability to conjure money from thin air not only allows for the unnatural growth of industries, it allows dead ones to stagger on like zombies, re-purposed as propaganda. The reason Twitter is worth $10 billion, and Gab is worth $10, is credit money and the utility of the former to be one of the megaphones of the managerial class. At the same time though, the arrival of the SJW’s means the business or industry is dead, just shuffling along on fumes.

If you are a fan of comic books, this is not much solace, but it does suggest that the appearance of SJW’s is a late-phase phenomenon. It only happens when the end is near for the business, industry or movement. In J. B. S. Haldane’s The Inequality of Man, fanaticism is listed as one of the four great inventions of early civilization. It is what allows a society to grow and break out of its natural bindings. When a society is dead, it is the one thing that remains. It is the last to go.

 

 

Trump Fu

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In the last couple of weeks, it seems that everyone has celebrated and castigated Trump, sometimes on the same day. Examining the range of opinions on Trump’s presidency so far is like looking through a kaleidoscope. No matter how gently you hold it up to your eye, you see something different than last time you looked through it. In normal times, it is easy to know where everyone stands. The Liberals think the Republican president is Hitler and they think the Democrat is Jesus. The Right adjust accordingly.

With Trump, all of the pundits are standing in the darkness, silhouetted by a wall of light and sound. We can sort of see them moving and we hear noises, but it is hard to know who is saying what about whom. Every once in a while a face from the crowd pops into view and says something good or ill about Trump. One minute Bill Kristol is sneering about Trump and then all of sudden Lindsey Graham is praising Trump. The Alt-Right is one minute hooting about Syria and then praising the new border push.

It really is exhausting, but it is part of how Trump plays the game. It is a good reminder that traditional metrics are not much use when judging Trump the politician. It’s also why he mowed down the GOP field with a cell phone and a twitter account. It was not that he broke their rules. It was that they wasted a lot of time complaining about Trump breaking their rules. Meanwhile, Trump was out giving voters a reason to support him. It is a classic form of political distraction that Trump has adopted to the modern communication age.

Similarly, Trump is wildly unpredictable, at least he seems unpredictable. That’s a big part of how he plays the game. He wants everyone to think the range of choices for him include some collection of unknown options that no one has yet to consider. That keeps foes on the defensive, making them tentative, even when they have the advantage. By appearing to have no clear strategy and routinely breaking old habits, Trump appears to be a wild man, who is capable of anything. Therefore, there’s no way to plan for him.

The big weapon Trump has in this regard is his willingness to attack unexpectedly. He always looks to attack when everyone is sure it is foolish to do so. He went to the very pro-military state of South Carolina and called John McCain a loser for getting shot down and captured by the Vietnamese. He questioned McCain’s conduct as a prisoner. The media howled about how he went too far, but his opponents suddenly got very nervous as they realized they could never relax around Trump. He could attack at any moment.

Another thing about Trump  that makes him an extreme outlier in national politics is that he is not an ideologue. Most of our politicians are quite stupid. All of their intellectual energy is focused on the endless scheming and game playing that is politics. What passes for ideology in American politics is really just a laundry list of policies aimed at buying votes from interest groups. That’s why they sound like robots. They stick to the script, even in the face of a public revolt, because that’s the safe and easy way to do it.

That’s not Trump. He is not married to any policy. In the campaign, he would regularly say something one day and then take it back two days later when it proved to be unpopular. It is safe to assume, for example, that Trump has zero interest in health care. He’ll sign off on anything that is popular with the voters. He’s also willing to dump a bad policy without worrying a bit about being called a hypocrite or inconsistent. Trump is practical about these things. If it does not work, he tosses it aside and moves onto to the next thing.

This will be terribly frustrating for partisans, but Trump is a goal oriented guy. The never ending circus has a point. In the case of the Syrian attack and the blow up with the Russians, it is looking like the point of it all was to play a little domestic politics, but a whole lot of international politics. The way he handled the Chinese leader last week is looking like a game to get the Chinese to do something about North Korea, in order to save face. The “Crazy Trump” act hurling missiles at Syria is excellent cover.

It’s easy to read way too much into these accounts, but the Chinese are now saying extremely bellicose things to the North Koreans. Bush and Obama used every trick they knew to get the Chinese to address the North Koreans and failed. Suddenly, the Chinese are issuing ultimatums. It could simply a be a coincidence and China has been planning to rid themselves of the Kim family for a while, but it is hard to imagine anything like this happening under the last four presidents. They lacked the boldness to try it.

None of this is to suggest that Trump is going to be good for our team, however you interpret that. It’s just that using the old metrics to assess Trump is a category error. He’s not a regular politician and these are not regular times. No one should have imagined Trump as their white knight. At best, Trump flips over the tables and creates enough chaos to give those outside official Washington a chance to join the fight. Trump the Destroyer of Worlds is going to be exhausting for everyone. That’s just part of the deal.

A Post About Feudalism

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In the Middle Ages, feudalism was not thought of as a political system or even an economic system. The people using the term, and enforcing the rules, simply looked at it as a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the nobility. The lord or king, granted property, a fief, to a vassal, who then had military or economic obligations to the lord who granted it to him. The property could be land, titles or a right to collect taxes in a certain area of the realm. You’ll note that the peasants were not part of the discussion.

Just because the people ruling over the feudal system had no regard for the peasants, it did not mean the peasants were unimportant. The peasants worked the land, provided men for military service, operated the system of trade and food rents. Modern historians prefer to describe this period as manorialism. This a system that bound the peasants, the nobility and clergy together economically and politically through a hierarchy of economic obligations. Everyone kicked up to someone, in labor, kind or coin.

It’s easy to dismiss this organizational model, but it lasted for six centuries and provided the foundation for later developments like property rights and the rule of law. One big flaw in this system is it transfers the cost of society, and all the risks inherent in the human condition, to the lowest possible level of society. The peasants have to hand over food rents, even when there is a bad harvest or an invasion by barbarians. That’s because the lord of the manor owes his lord food rents or coin, regardless of the harvest.

Probably the biggest defect is it is a zero sum game at the top of society. The king can only have one heir. Similarly, his vassals can only have one heir. Usually, the goal was to have an heir and a spare. The spare served in the military just in case the first born son died or was an idiot. Extra kids and daughters would be sent off to the church. This is good for the church and military as they get high quality people, but the rest of society is locked into a swelling peasant population until nature culls the herd.

In his book A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark argues that Britain experienced an extended period where the peasants died off due to disease and violence. At the same time, members of the ruling class precipitated down to take up the positions in the lower classes. Downward mobility raised the mean IQ of British society until it reached an inflection point where it escaped feudalism and developed a market economy, and eventually the industrial revolution. Downward mobility birthed upward mobility.

Historians have argued that the black plague ended feudalism on the Continent because it knocked the foundation out from under the economic pyramid. When a third of the peasant population was killed by disease, the system ceased to be economically viable. Of course, the disease killed a lot of nobles too. Once the peasants were free to move about, they could go work for the highest bidder. The labor shortage caused by the plague gave the peasantry new economic power and that translated to political power.

The mobility of human capital, vertically as well as horizontally, coincides with the collapse of the feudal system. Whether it was the collapse of the system that unleashed this mobility or it was the mobility that undermined the system is debatable. Perhaps some combination of both. As the system became more fragile, mobility increased, which in turn made the system more fragile. The waves of plague that decimated the population finished off the process that started much earlier.

something similar happened in America in the 17th and 18th century. The second and third sons of land owners headed west looking for land. Of course, ambitious and talented men like Ben Franklin could literally go from rags to riches. Similarly, the post WW2 period was a time of high social mobility in America. Ambitious men could move up into the middle class or move west looking for a shot to make their fortune. It’s not an accident that the U-Haul Company started after the war. Americans are not moving much anymore.

Another interesting reality of the feudal system is that it was a rentier system. The people at the top did not make anything or improve anything. They were not particularly inventive or creative. The slow progress in agricultural technology is a good example of the technological stagnation. The nobles and the church lived off the rake. They skimmed from every layer of society. Feudalism was  a pyramid scheme, where each layer paid the layer above a portion of their take. It operated a lot like the modern financial system.

The real key to the system, the point of system, was the protection of asset values, which mostly meant land, but also mines, ports and fisheries. The chief concern of the nobles was the preservation of the asset base. Owning land meant owning rents, which meant a permanent place in the ruling class. Feudalism was, at its heart, a way to protect land from external threats, as well as internal ones. In the modern age, the monetary system works the same way. It’s primary purpose is to protect and promote asset values.

The challenge of the feudal system was not a lot different from the challenges of the current age, at least for those who sit atop the social system The key was maintaining the balance between the social layers of the pyramid. Too many people in the managerial class means too many idle hands doing the devil’s work. They could also start complaining about their economic status. Maybe they would try to rally the lower classes to support their demands for a bigger share of the skim.

The New Ways Of War

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Early warfare, as best we can tell, was more like gang fights in the modern ghetto than the sort of stuff we associate with war in Antiquity. One settlement would round up some men, who would take on the men of the neighboring settlement. They went at one another in a melee, using axes, clubs and short swords, maybe, with the leaders right there in the middle of it, leading their war bands. A lot of it may have been ritualized, rather than actual combat, but that’s speculation. What’s clear is ti was small scale.

Prosperity changed that as better organization and better agriculture allowed for more men to be full time warriors. Greater prosperity also meant better weapons. Ranged weapons made the full speed charge, by men on foot, a losing proposition, unless you could put your men on horses or in chariots. Speed meant you could have formations and then flanking maneuvers, which required strategy and execution. Each innovation led to more innovations. The ways of war changed as military technology and tactics evolved.

Changes in military technology often have unforeseen consequences. The introduction of the machine gun in the Great War is the best example. Even with the new artillery, war was expected to be men advancing on one another over open fields. This was the way war was fought and the way the French were prepared to fight it. They even had their officers in colorful uniforms so they could be seen by their men. The machine gun made this style of war utter insanity, but no one thought about that until the bodies piled up.

The machine gun, along with fantastic improvements in artillery, resulted in trench warfare that was hopelessly expensive and bloody. That led to new tactics and new weapons. The tank, for example, was developed to counter the trenches and barbed wire. Eventually, planes became another answer to fixed defensive positions. All of these new weapons eventually led to new strategies.The Battle of Cambrai, in which the British used tanks, artillery, infantry and air power is one of the first examples of combined arms tactics.

The point to all of this is that war evolves and not always in ways that are predictable or even imaginable. Every new advance in weapons and tactics leads to responses and new weapons and tactics. The most recent example if the “little green men” that suddenly popped up in Crimea. Instead of an invading Russian army, a pro-Russian mercenary force appeared out of nowhere to lead a revolt against Ukrainian control of the region. It was, to a great degree, an example of Fourth Generation Warfare.

A question to ponder is what happens when energy weapons become a practical response to ballistic missiles and drones? The US military has been making steady progress developing mobile laser systems, able to knock out ballistic missiles. They are a decade away from anything usable, but it is not unrealistic to imagine a time in the near future when it is possible to knock out incoming missiles. This sort of technology has a funny way of advancing quickly after it gets deployed.

Of course, a weapon that can render another weapon obsolete is a very dangerous weapon. The reason ground-based, anti-missile systems are such a sensitive subject is because they throw off the balance of arms and require a response. A missile defense system in Europe, that could plausibly knock down Russian missiles, would require the Russians to make a lot more missiles, in addition to other plans to counter this new weapon. That’s a big unknown so everyone treads lightly.

Logically, the sudden advance in military technology 100 years ago, along with the lethality of the new technology, should have made war less likely. Cannonballs and bayonet charges are terrible things, but they pale in comparison to massed machine gun fire on advancing infantry. It would seem blazingly obvious that unless you have an answer for the machine gun, much less the new artillery, you don’t willingly go to war. That’s not what happened. Two great industrial wars latter and the West was just about dead.

That’s an important lesson to keep in mind while thinking about what’s happening with military technology, as well as military strategy. Laser weapons may be a ways off, but drone technology is here and changing how we fight wars. A sky full of flying death robots, capable of working in concert or independently, to bring death to an enemy is going to change how nations go to war. It means new weapons and new ways of fighting. Even the Arabs are adapting to drone warfare. Imagine what the Chinese are doing.

Of course, the new responses do not have to be strictly military. The Million Mohammedan March into Europe surely included jihadis willing to die for Allah. Maybe some of those jihadis were trained by Syria, at the behest of Russia. If you are Russia, you have to be looking at the truck attacks and thinking that could be an effective weapon. If you cannot win the technology fight, maybe the answer lies in some other area of the battlefield. New technology may result in a proliferation of asymmetric warfare waged by state actors.

It’s fun to speculate, but flying death robots alone change the way the world will be fighting wars in the future. Things like carriers can quickly become white elephants in a world where a swarm or drones can fall out of the sky or come up from the depths of the ocean. Everyone forgets about the coming proliferation of a independently controlled torpedoes that can literally roam the ocean looking for targets. The microprocessor goes from being a force multiplier to a force nullifier.

It would be nice if the proliferation of killing machines worked as a deterrent to war, but that is not the lesson of history. The one exception has been nuclear weapons, which probably kept the the Soviets from invading Europe and the US from systematically undermining the Russian government, as we see going on today. The new technology does not promise to destroy the world so it probably will not be much of a deterrent. If anything, as we have seen with the neocon warmongering, it will make everyone reckless.

The Iron Law of Conservatism

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The British journalist, and sometime National Review editor, John O’Sullivan stated that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. This observation is conveniently named O’Sullivan’s Law and is based on the observation that non-liberals will hire liberals into their organization, while liberals apply ideological tests. The result is liberals eventually take over non-liberal organizations while ruthlessly defending their own turf.

What O’Sullivan was observing is the natural tendency toward entryism among members of mass movements. It is the corollary to proselytizing. The true believer seeks validation so they are always trying to recruit members to their cause. It’s why Mormons knock on doors offering to show you their magic underwear. This also manifests itself in the inclination toward undermining organizations seen as a challenge, often by infiltrating and co-opting them. When an institution flips to their ideological camp, it is seen as validation.

The irony here is that O’Sullivan and other Buckley Conservatives confused their temporary, ad hoc response to communism, with Anglo-Saxon conservatism. The former existed in the temporary space of the Cold War, while the latter is the baseline of Western Civilization. It’s why Buckley Conservatism is now just Progressivism with a blood lust for Arabs. Once the Cold War ended, their reason to exist ended with it. It turns out that Buckley Conservatism was not expressly right wing after all.

That raises the question of what it means to be expressly right wing and introduces this video from Alt-Lite provocateur, Gavin McInnes. The summary, for those uninterested in watching it, is McInnes putting up a board displaying the various figured on the Alt-Right and Alt-Lite. He has a line dividing the two camps. On one side are those who are Western chauvinist, rallying around a group of ideas. They are “inclusive” of anyone that embraces Western civilization and they are not hung up on race or heritage.

The other side mostly agrees with that, but adds in the fact that those ideas were invented by white people and that matters. The West is the result of white people so to preserve Western Civilization you have to preserve white people. There’s also the “JQ” issue, according to McInnes, where the Alt-Right places Jews outside the white camp and outside Western Civilization. He soft-sells it, but the point is that one side is pro-white and the other side is Pro-West, but both sides largely agree on the philosophical stuff.

That’s fine and maybe it is correct. To his credit, McInnes makes clear that it is more of a continuum, than two distinct sets, but he invests a lot of time talking about a vaguely defined line between the two camps. Richard Spencer is over on the side near the fringe Nazis and Paul Joseph Watson is over on the other side, closer to something McInness never bothers to address. The whole shtick is mostly about distinguishing himself from the bad guys on the Alt-Right so the Left is left unmentioned.

To be fair to McInness, he is still young enough to dream of having a big time job at a big time media operation. He got a taste of it at Fox News and he probably hopes that one day he gets a shot to host a show on some other mainstream cable platform. Frankly, they would be wise to dump one of the Jon Stewart Mini-Me shows they have and give a guy like a McInnes a shot to be the normie version of Stewart, but that’s a topic for another day. The point here is McInness is treading lightly.

The defect with the Alt-Lite is the same problem the Buckley Conservatives had a generation ago. They have no antibodies to resist entryism, because they lack a timeless definition of what it means to be Alt-Lite. Western Civilization, after all, includes Karl Marx and Hitler. Nazism is just as much a part of the West as John Locke. In fact, Hitler currently casts a longer shadow than any of the men of the Enlightenment. On what grounds can the Alt-Lite reject Hitler, but embrace the slave owning Jefferson?

The same is true of anti-racism and egalitarianism. How can these be rejected when they are inventions of the West? Of course, the Alt-Lite makes no attempt to reject these as that would get them in trouble with the Left. That’s what opens the door to, and requires them to accept, the defining feature of the dominant orthodoxy. That feature is the blank slate. As McInness goes to pains to point out, if a hotep brotha is on the Trump Train, he has a place at the table of the Alt-Lite, a cherished place.

That’s the fatal flaw that was the undoing of the Buckley Right. The Alt-Lite has no affirmative argument. Instead, it is a list of things it is not and most of those things are to their Right. That firewall they are building to their Right, just as Buckley did with Kirk and with the paleocons, comes at the expense of any defensible line of demarcation between themselves and the Left. That leaves them open to entryism, corruption and subversion, which is why the leading opponents of Trump are all Buckley Conservatives.

That brings us back to the beginning. O’Sullivan was mostly correct, but he left out the most important part of the rule. That’s the definition of Right Wing. What is it that forever separates the Right from the Left? What is the thing about which there can be no meeting in the middle, between Left and Right? The great divide that can never be crossed, is biology.The Left embraces the blank slate and rejects biological reality. The Right accepts biology, human diversity and all the truths about the human animal that arise from it.

The great chain of causality is Biology→Culture-→Politics-→Economics. It’s why Libertarianism, in its current form, not right wing. The Reason Magazine crowd are sure that all you have to do to fix Haiti, for example, is end the licensing of barbershops and other small businesses. And legalize weed, of course. In other words, they get things backward and end up rejecting the human condition. This is the crack in the foundation of all Left Wing movements. It’s what they share in common.

Therefore, any ideology or political movement that does not accept the great chain of causality will eventually be subverted and become left wing.

Poof-Berries

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One of the many harms inflicted on us by the hive minded lunatics running our society is the binary world view. Everything is either all good or all bad. As such, everyone must either fully embrace something or completely reject something. Indifference, ambivalence and moderation are not permissible in a world run by zealous fanatics. The only things that matter, that can matter, are those things that require a moral position. Everything else falls outside the set of things that exist, at least to the hive minded.

The most obvious example is homosexuality. Like all normal men, I am mildly intolerant of homosexuals. I get that they cannot help themselves and I get that it is “natural” in the same way schizophrenia is natural. I’m fine with them doing what they must, just as long as they do it in private. Of course, that makes me a monster. In the hive, you must either fully embrace homosexuality and what comes with it, or you are a homophobe and not fit for decent company. There’s no room for indifference or mild intolerance.

Hive mindedness is much more of a female attribute, than a masculine one. That’s not to imply that all women are howling at the moon zealots. It’s just that the fairer sex is much more inclined to deal in absolutes. The reason is that men have ways to arbitrate disputes that do not require a transcendent set of rules. One chimp squares off with the other chimp and the winner is the one who was right about where to find the best bananas. Women don’t have that so they look for a set of rules to figure out winners and losers.

It’s why it was no accident, that as soon as the girls got the vote, and the boys were off fighting the Kaiser, the girls banned alcohol and prostitution. To quote Judge Roy Bean, “Drinking and gambling and whoring were declared unlawful. All those things which come natural to men became crimes.” Morality, at least in the modern age, is the set of rules the girls use to control the boys, which is why the prim-faced moralizers of today are running around trying to stamp out anything that smacks of masculinity.

That came to mind reading this teary-eyed tantrum on National Review the other day. It is supposed to be a take down of Mike Cernovich, but it reads like a fit of jealously by one girl toward another, after the latter stole the former’s guy. The only thing the writer did not do is call Cerno a “doo-doo head” and claim he had cooties. National Review calls itself the flagship publication of conservatism, yet it routinely publishes articles that would be rejected by Ladies Home Journal for being less than serious.

The primary complaint in the piece is that Cernovich is a brute. There are a lot of ways to dismiss Cerno, I’ve done it a few times myself, but attacking his excessive masculinity is strikingly bizarre. Why would the writer latch onto that, rather than the fact that Cerno’s book is generally awful? Or, why not do the point and shriek about Cerno being associated with alt-right figures? The reason is the writer of that piece is a boy named Ian Tuttle, who appears to have spent his youth with his underwear over his head.

 

Calling him a boy is mean, but it is not inaccurate. He popped out of college two years ago and landed at National Review. He should be working at his local newspaper or maybe a TV station, covering girl’s softball games or perhaps the local crime beat. Maybe in a dozen years, after having lived in the world for a while as an adult, he could think about writing opinion pieces for adults about adult topics. At that point, he would not be bawling about how a guy like Cernovich is a brute.

That’s not the world of elite opinion journalism these days. Rich people send their not-so-bright off-spring to college to major in journalism. Then those boys and girls find their way to the big news sites or the elite journals of opinion. There they type out the approved messages and show up on approved TV shows to repeat those messages. It is cheap content from people, who are happy for the job and will not make any waves by asking the wrong questions or thinking the wrong thoughts.

What’s nuts about this is that there are still some adults working at National Review. The guy approving these posts is Charlie Cooke, but he’s a ridiculous poof-berry too so perhaps he is the one who commissioned it. Even so, you don’t have the dorks write the articles ranting about excessive masculinity. You leave those to the lesbians or the more masculine writers on the staff. Otherwise, you defeat your own purpose. A squealing tantrum from a ridiculous poof-berry convinces no one.

All joking aside, that’s one reason Buckley Conservatism is circling the bowl. It is chasing an audience that is locked up by their masters on the Left. Liberalism is the secular religion for the girls, mostly single white girls. They try to cobble together a coalition of hues for political reasons, but it is mostly a religion for cat ladies and the women who intend to be cat ladies. Buckley Conservatism is trying to fish in those waters, but that hole is all fished out and take that however you like.

Donald Herbert Walker Trump

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Way back in the olden thymes, conservatives during the Reagan years had a real fear that the Rockefeller Republicans would not only undermine the conservative agenda, but find a way to corrupt the Reagan administration. It was an unwarranted fear. Those Progressive Republicans were a dying force in politics. Reagan was a man of his age so his conservatism does not always make sense to the modern ear, but he stuck to his guns for the most part. He was a politician, so he compromised when he had to.

Then George H. W. Bush was ready to take the reigns of the movement and the party, despite being a Rockefeller Republican. Bush was a Progressive by any measure, but he supposedly got religion in the 1980’s, and to be fair, a lot of people went through that transformation. There were even old Jewish guys, who used to support communists, that were suddenly changing teams to join the new emerging majority. Bush spent a lot of time convincing the voters he was just like Reagan and they had nothing to fear.

The ’88 election was a landslide for Bush and a lot of sensible people thought that he would be the finishing touches to the new conservative majority. He would smooth out the rough patches and put a shine on other aspects to it. His famous pledge to never raise taxes was the cornerstone of his pitch. Wiser heads, the paleocons, saw what was coming, but most did not. That’s why when Bush broke his promise, a year into his presidency, his voters were crushed. Bush was a liar.

History is written by the victors and that means the Left, so we’re always told that Bush lost in ’92 because Clinton was sent by the void where God once existed, to bring joy and bliss to the blessed and smite the wicked. The truth is, Bush lost because the core of his voters rightly saw him as a liar and a fink. Many people I know, including myself, voted third party as a protest. Yeah, it meant a degenerate would win the election, but at least we knew what we were getting. Liars like Bush always find new ways to screw you.

Unless you have been in a cave, you know where this is heading. Trump won the nomination and the presidency on one core issue. He would be the President of the United Sates, not the President of the world. That was his line. He repeated it often. It allegedly captured his one core belief. What is good for America is what is good for Americans and the government should always be working to further the interest of Americans, over the interests of foreigners.

The fact that something so obvious and sane has to be explained speaks to the the degeneracy of our age. But, we live in a time when we have to debate physical reality with people who insist things like biology and math are a plot by a mystery cult of white men to keep down women and non-whites. Still, Trump running on a platform of rationality, and winning on the platform, gave a lot of people, including me, a spark of hope. Maybe what comes next does not have to be what always comes next.

Yesterday, the alt-right and even many seasoned geezers like me took a body blow when Trump abandoned everything he said over the last two years and embraced the idiocy of yet another war in the Middle East. Not only is he embracing the lunacy of the traitorous neocons, he is risking war with Russia. His “reason” for condemning himself to ruin is that his daughter got the sads over seeing pictures of dead kids in Syria. She takes to twitter over this latest agit-prop and in a day daddy is launching missiles at Assad.

The United States has no interest in Syria. There are no good guys to back. There’s no “solution” to what ails that part of the world, short of another flood. Syria is a mess because it is full of Syrians. The only sane policy is to make sure it remains full of Syrians. Let them kill each other there, not in Paris or Portland. If the Russians want to build their pipeline there and pay the price for it, good for them. If the Saudis want to stop them, best of luck with it. This is not an American problem. It is their problem. Let them own it.

This brings us back to Bush. He spent the remainder of his presidency trying to rebuild his standing with conservatives. He even scored what was pitched as a stunning victory in the First Gulf War. But, you only get one shot to piss away your integrity and Bush did not miss that opportunity. He entered the general election as a weak incumbent and Clinton used his broken pledge in commercials to remind everyone that Bush was an untrustworthy liar. Imagine that. Clinton beat Bush on the integrity issue.

It’s not too late for Trump. This may be one of those times where a President learns that his advisers are not politicians for a reason. They lack political sense. Trump does have a habit of learning quickly from his errors. That’s not the way to bet. He is now getting tongue-kissed by the Establishment. Like all men with out-sized egos, vanity is his greatest weakness. If Trump is enjoying the praise from his adoption of the “invade the world” position, imagine what happens when he accepts the “invite the world” half.

Maybe Trump recovers and avoids the fate Bush I, but I have my doubts.