The Road To War?

Posted on December 4, 2017 by thezman

The base assumption of the armchair generals and foreign policy experts is that war on the Korean peninsula is suicide for all involved. The South Koreans know that the North Koreans have the capacity to inflict massive damage. The North Koreans know that any war with the South brings in American air and sea power, which means the end of the Kim regime. Even assuming the Chinese step in to prevent a North defeat, the end result is monstrous for all concerned. As a result, we have a standoff.

That all sounds good, until you read something like this in the National Interest. Gordon Chang’s analysis may be off base, but you cannot ignore the fact that Washington keeps pounding the war drums. It really does not matter if people outside Washington are listening. What matters is that official Washington seems to be gearing up for war. The Trump administration has been slowly building up offensive assets in the region. We now have three carrier groups operating within striking distance of North Korea.

Maybe it is all a bluff, but why would Washington bluff, if they accept the various war narratives popular with the foreign policy experts? If the North Koreans are sure that the South does not want a war, why would they think that Washington is doing anything other than bluffing? The whole point of saber rattling is so the other side thinks there is at least some chance that the guy rattling the saber is serious. More important, the guy with the saber needs to think he is serious too. Otherwise, you get Obama’s red lines.

There are also the unknowns. In this case, no one really knows what South Korean and US military intelligence knows about the North Korean military. It is a safe bet that the US has had spy satellites parked over North Korea. It is also a safe bet that the South Koreans have been cultivating sources in North Korean. None of this information is made available to the public. In other words, Washington may be responding to things entirely unknown to the public.

One thing that is known is that North Korea knows they cannot win a war against the South. The proof of that is how they have organized their military. Those artillery pieces on the border are a one-time threat. They get about 72 hours to inflict as much damage as possible, until US air power takes them out. If they play this card, they forgo their opportunity to send their infantry and armor south. Instead, the North will have to wage a defensive war, hoping the South elects a negotiated end rather than an invasion.

This means their best card to play in this game just about guarantees their destruction, either from a land invasion or an extended air campaign. It would certainly end the Kim family dynasty. That makes the threat significantly less credible. The US can pressure China or make a deal with China, to get help putting the screws to the Kim regime, knowing that the Koreans only have a doomsday card to play. In other words, the doomsday card prevents a US invasion, but does not prevent economic war.

Of course, it is possible that the math has changed for the Chinese. Right now is peak China economically and demographically. Now is the best chance they will have to resolve their Korean problem. A decade from now, when China has an aging population and the North Koreans have the ability to strike Beijing, the Americans may not be interested in helping with this problem. The best time to address tough problems is when you have the resources to address them. There is no better time than now for China.

There is also the Trump factor. Previous presidents have been willing to accept the options presented to them by the foreign policy establishment. Trump is psychologically incapable of accepting the options presented to him for anything. Everyone who has done deals with him says the same thing. Trump thrives under pressure, so he puts everyone under pressure. He is sure he can wheel and deal with anyone under pressure, so that is how he changes the negotiating table. He creates uncertainty and puts everyone under the gun.

That seems to be what he is trying to do with Asia. On the one hand, he is encouraging Japan to build out their military and take a more active role in policing the region. This puts enormous pressure on China. He is helping the South Koreans get ready for war, which puts pressure on the North and on their relationship with China. All of a sudden, the US is doing things vastly different in Asia. Trump’s willingness to change course on a dime, adds an air of unpredictability to him, which always makes Asian leaders nervous.

No one outside the Trump inner circle knows what is in the works, but the steady buildup of offensive assets in the region is not just saber rattling. To send a message, you send a carrier group and hold some joint exercises with the South Koreans. Maybe after a North Korean missile launch, you pass some more sanctions and give a bellicose speech. What Trump is doing looks a lot like the preparation for a decapitation strike or maybe a sustained air campaign to cripple the North Korean regime. It looks like war prep.

Family Friendly

Posted on December 4, 2017 by thezman

If science suddenly noticed that birds were laying fewer eggs, they would ring the alarm and warn of a coming bird-apocalypse. The assumption would be that humans were doing something to make the birds unable to reproduce. The same would be true of any species that saw its fertility decline. The starting assumption of biology is that all living things are built primarily to reproduce. That is the biological imperative. With one exception, a drop in an animal’s fertility must be due to some exogenous factor. That exception is humans.

In the West, human fertility rates have steadily fallen for over a half century. This is celebrated by our betters as the hallmark of human progress. Anytime the subject of fertility rates is raised, the knee-jerk response is to start hooting about women being more educated and having more options. The underlying assumption is that stupid people have lots of kids while smart people have few children. The implication of this is that the people who built Western Civilization were stupid, because they had high fertility rates.

The whole “women are more educated” argument is not really an effort to understand why fertility rates, especially white fertility rates, have fallen. Rather, it is an effort to not understand it. It is a deliberate distraction, a way of shifting the focus from a problem that cannot be addressed by the Left, whether it is the materialist Left of Europe or the spiritual Left on America. To even acknowledge that the purpose of women is to have children gnaws at the extreme egalitarianism that animates the Western Left.

To some degree, efforts to level off fertility in Europe make sense. There are lots of people on the Continent who do not always get along with one another. Generations of warfare pounded home the message that stable societies, respectful of national borders, is the way to keep the peace. Keeping fertility rates at something just above replacement was an understandable goal. In America though, that is not an issue. The country is mostly empty space with lots of room to expand. Americans should be breeding like Africans.

It really is an odd thing that has happened in America over the last fifty years. Starting in the 1960’s, motherhood became something close to a badge of shame with our cognitive elites. This rather quickly oozed into the upper classes and then the middle class. As a result, public policy has been altered to discourage childbearing. Just look at the hysterics from Progressive women anytime they do not get their way. They immediately start howling about how they will not get easy access to abortions and free prophylactics.

This came to mind when I saw a tweet by the left-wing political science professor George Hawley, commenting on the GOP tax bill. He linked to an essay he posted about public policy and fertility rates. For those familiar with this territory, the points he makes and the errors he commits are all familiar. France may have a TFR of 2.08, but the French people do not have that TFR. The invader population has rocket high fertility rates, but the French, well, not so much. Steve Sailer touched on one aspect of this in a Taki post.

A similar pattern, though less pronounced, is seen in the US. White fertility rates are below replacement, while black fertility is still above replacement. Although the homicide rates among blacks probably requires a different definition of “replacement.” Hispanics have the highest fertility rates. In other words, simply looking at TFR for a country that is slowly being overrun by a third world population will lead to errors. In majority white countries, the salient issue is not TFR, but white fertility rates, relative to the whole.

Putting that aside, we return to the original question. Two questions, actually. Is it simply that whites are choosing to die out or have whites simply wandered down a cul-de-sac, in terms of public policy, which is having adverse effects on white fertility? One way to tease this out is something that Steve Sailer did after the 2012 election. He looked at how white women voted, relative to their marriage habits. In places where white women can and do marry, stay married and raise children, whites vote Republican.

Another way of putting this is that where affordable family formation is highest, you get more families. Despite being run by a cult, Utah is a wonderful place to raise a family. It is like the set of Leave It to Beaver, but the size of a European country. At the other end, a state like Massachusetts is wildly expensive and hostile to family formation. Those who do choose to marry and start families, often move to other states. The decades long migration, north to south and east to west, has largely been driven by cost of living.

None of this answers the basic question. Is it crackpot public policy driving down white fertility or is some weird desire for extinction? The latter is impossible to know, so the prudent course is to assume the former is the correct answer. That is basic logic. This means any movement that is explicitly for preserving the nation’s racial character should promote public policies that are explicitly and overtly pro-family. That is the part of Hawley’s post that is correct. The GOP should be fanatically pro-family, not pro-business.

This especially holds for the dissident right. The alt-right is all over the map on public policy, because they get bogged down squabbling over aesthetics. Oddly, the best thing they could do, in terms of “optics”, is cast themselves as the extreme end of the pro-family spectrum. Redefining pro-women to mean pro-mother would go a long way toward rallying white Americans to their cause. After all, being for something always trumps being against something, even when the thing you oppose is awful. Positive always beats negative.

The Church Of Cuck

Posted on December 2, 2017 by thezman

Back in the salad days of Buckley Conservatism, it was largely understood that the butch wing of the coalition was the so-called religious right. These were the people willing and able to muster big crowds for pro-life marches and organize grassroots support for local candidates. The free market types and foreign policy hawks lived on campus and in the bureaucracy. As a result, they were always apologizing to the Left, over their alliance with those disgusting dirt people in the Bible Belt.

That was a long time ago in a different country. Official Conservatism no longer has a religious right and they no longer care about social issues. National Review, the flagship publication of “movement conservatives” is edited by a homosexual activist who champions the gay agenda on the site. Occasionally, someone from this crowd will make some noises about social issues, but it is mostly nostalgia. Gentry Conservatives talk about abortion to be reminded of better days.

It is not just a matter of the Official Right dropping social issues and social conservatives from their thing. It is more that the religious right has become infected by the same parasites as the rest of the old Reagan coalition. In the 1980’s, Christian organizations decided to fully join the political system and as a result they became political organizations themselves. This opened them up to infiltration. The religious right is now full of cucks.

This week, while campaigning in an Alabama church — as a Bible-believing Christian, I’ll note that this story is already off to a questionable start — Judge Roy Moore, the state’s embattled Republican Senate candidate, faced down a rather spirited heckler. “The entire time, all the girls are lying?” the man shouted, right before he was escorted out of the event. “Why would they lie?” If you’ve been following our very depressing national news cycle, you know the story: Moore, age 70, has faced multiple accusations of sexual misconduct dating back four decades, two of them involving underage girls, including one alleged assault of a fourteen-year-old. No charges have been filed, and that’s unlikely to change; the statute of limitations on any potential crimes stemming from the allegations appears to have long ago expired. Moore, for his part, argues that his accusers are part of a coordinated hit job orchestrated by Washington-establishment insiders. “They don’t want to hear about God,” he declared this week. “And they don’t want to hear about the Constitution of the United States and its foundational principles in God.”

We’ll get back to the Constitution — and Moore’s understanding of it — in a moment. But for now, let’s hear what the pastor of the church said, his doughy chin raised high, once the heckler had been neatly dispatched: “I would remind everyone,” he sniffed, “that this is a worship service.”

The opening two paragraphs reads like something you would find in Mother Jones or The Nation. It is the sort of framing that the Cult of Modern Liberalism has used against Christians for generations.

I’ll get this out the way: If you’re in Alabama and you want to vote for Roy Moore, vote for Roy Moore. But let’s at least try to keep things real: If you vote for Moore, you’re doing it because he’s not a Democrat, rather than because he’s some holy soldier on a special mission for God.

I would be willing to wager that the first draft of this was something like, “If you’re voting for Roy Moore, you’re doing it because he is not a Democrat. Just don’t call yourself a Christian.” That was the tone of the piece and the underlying message. To come right out and say it would require something resembling courage and that is a mortal sin in the land of the cuck. After all, the merchant wing of the movement is going to be peddling Jesus themed wine and cheese baskets as part of the next fundraiser.

The fact is, there can be no interpretation of the events in Alabama that would lead a committed Christian to support the Democrat over Moore. Moore is staunchly opposed to abortion. The Democrat is willing to install Planned Parenthood approved abattoirs in the nation’s grammar schools. Even the most isolated “Bible-believing Christian” can understand the difference between a venal sin and a mortal sin. Moore’s sins, whatever they were, are trivial, compared to supporting wholesale baby murder.

In fairness to “Bible-believing Christians”, the authoress of the NR piece is just some bubblehead hired to write down what she is told. Still, many of the people now claiming the mantle of leadership in the religious right are more concerned with their relationship to Washington than their relationship with Jesus. That is because party politics is always about compromise. If you choose to get in bed with one party or the other, you are going to get up with their fleas, or worse. That is what happened to the religious right and the GOP.

The Southern Baptist Convention being overrun by howling lunatics is the most recent example. A generation ago, the sorts of people hooting about white supremacy would have burst into flames if they walked into a Baptist church. Today, they feel perfectly comfortable walking the halls of their well appointed offices of the SBC. It is because the people in charge now feel more at home with Progressive loons than they do with the people in the pews of their own churches. These churches are run by cucks now.

It goes back to the old line from Robert Conquest. “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” In the case of American churches, they stopped being explicitly Christian. Once they diluted their purpose by getting into politics, they were made vulnerable to infiltration by Progressives, who naturally seek to corrupt the organic institutions of a society. Once the religious right went exclusive with Northern conservatives, they were open to infiltration by Northern Liberals.

Welcome Back Z-Man

Posted on December 1, 2017 by thezman

It is good to be back in full swing. One of the things I’m learning about the podcasting thing is I need to take breaks. It’s easy to start hating it when I’m doing one every week. It takes maybe ten hours each week to put it together, but I have lots of other things in my life so those ten hours can start to feel precious. It’s a short trip from there to feeling like it is a chore or even a burden.

That means there is the temptation to take short cuts or get into easy routines. Taking some breaks is a good way to keep it fresh and fun. That last part is most important to me, since this is just a hobby. What I found with the blog is taking a couple days off each week keeps it fun. My hunch is the trick with podcasting is to take half a dozen weeks off during the year. That way, it remains a fun hobby that I enjoy doing well.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. There is also a bonus track on Gab, where I talk about the relative size of audiences. If you are not on Gab, you should be. Despite their flaws, they are the good guys fighting to keep the lamps from going out in the West.

For this week, Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the four longer segments from the show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android phone commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones.

This Week’s Show

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