You Own You

One of the odd developments in the technological age is that it looks like the Europeans will be taking the lead in taming the tech giants. Americans have been brainwashed into worshiping business, so any resistance to what the tech companies are doing to us is met with howls of protest. Even the American left is in the tank. Things are different with the Europeans, who maintain that old socialist distrust of capitalists. That’s what you see in stories like this one, where the Euros are trying to reign in the socials.

Leading journalists from more than 20 countries joined a call Tuesday for European MPs to approve a controversial media reform aimed at forcing internet giants to pay for news content.

European Parliament lawmakers return in September to discuss the proposal, a first draft of which was rejected last month after a fierce debate.

The so-called copyright and neighbouring rights law aims to ensure that producers of creative content—whether news, music or movies—are paid fairly in a digital world.

But the plans have been firmly opposed by big US tech firms such as Google and Facebook, as well as advocates of internet freedom.

An open letter signed by more than 100 prominent journalists from major news outlets warned Tuesday that “this fleecing of the media of their rightful revenue” was “morally and democratically unjustifiable”.

“We have become targets and our reporting missions cost more and more,” said the letter written by AFP foreign correspondent Sammy Ketz and published in several European newspapers including France’s Le Monde.

“Yet, even though (the media) pay for the content and send the journalists who will risk their lives to produce a trustworthy, thorough and diverse news service, it is not they who reap the profits but the internet platforms, which help themselves without paying a cent,” the letter said.

“It is as if a stranger came along and shamelessly snatched the fruits of your labour.”

The editorial urged the European Parliament to “vote massively in favour of neighbouring rights for the survival of democracy and one of its most remarkable symbols: journalism”.

Major publishers, including AFP, have pushed for the reform—known as Article 11—seeing it as an urgently needed solution against a backdrop of free online news that has wiped out earnings for traditional media companies.

The thing that no one ever seems to discuss is that companies like Facebook don’t make anything and their service is barely adequate. What they are doing is exploiting a natural monopoly so they can monetize the creative work of their users, including their personal information. Social media companies are skimming operations that operate on the fringe of legality. These companies harvest all sorts of information from users even trying to harvest your medical and financial records

Social media companies have figured out how to transfer the value of creators from the owner to the tech giant. After all, Google’s search engine can only work if there is something worth finding. The search engine has value, but so does the content. The same is true of the content on FaceBook or Twitter. The only reason to be on those platforms is the content generated by users. The platform is a tiny portion of the value, but the platform owners consume all of the revenue from the system.

This is why, as an aside, newspapers and magazines are going broke. It’s not the only reason, but it is a big reason. If the New York Times took down its web site today, just shut it down completely, subscriptions would suddenly spike. The reason is, the entire liberal ecosystem relies on the New York Times for content and direction. It is the home church of the Progressive cult. Their regular readers would go back to buying the paper like the old days. If all newspapers followed suit, the internet gets quiet all of a sudden.

Putting that aside, there is a simple reform that addresses the abuses of the tech giants, as well as some of the other problems created by technology. You own you. That means your personal information, your image, your words, they all belong to you and anyone using them must have written permission. If Facebook wants to sell your demographic data to some marketing company, they must have your written permission and not just through the abuse of leonine contracts. You have to consent to each sale.

This is not a new idea. Your credit record is not something the credit bureau can distribute without your permission. The propaganda on TV shows, where the cops instantly access the suspect’s credit card and personal records, is just part of the conditioning campaign against privacy. In reality, they need a warrant and it is hard to obtain. A lender must get your written permission to obtain your credit records from a credit bureau. It’s not just for privacy reasons. That information is your property and you have right to control it.

The thing is, this is a very easy solution to the abuses that have arisen from the technological revolution. The doxxing phenomenon popular with the bubble heads of Progressive media would go away with better property protections. All of sudden, they would be forbidden from using the images and personal information of people they wish to harass. Unless they could show that the information they obtained is in the public domain, they would be liable for any damages, plus the criminal use of stolen goods.

Again, this is not terribly difficult to navigate. If it is not yours, then you need permission to possess it. This is the rule with personal property. If you are found in possession of stolen goods, you are charged with a crime. It does not matter if you did not know they were stolen, because you knew the property was not yours. In other words, unless you are the lawful owner of the property, the burden of proof is on you to show you had a right to possess it. The principle is used in security clearances, so it is not an untested concept.

The result of tighter property laws, with regards to personal information, would be the end of social media as a profitable business. No one should weep for them as they are not technology companies in the conventional sense. They are parasites that exploit bottlenecks and gaps in the law to skim from the public. The internet was much more free wheeling and open without companies like Google and Facebook. The reason for that is there were no stickup men creating bottlenecks in order to rob the users.

Think Local

For most of human history, we understood that people are not the same. Different people had different customs, different gods, different material habits and of course, they looked different. When describing the people of a foreign land, writers and storytellers would spend a lot of time describing these differences. Julius Caesar, in his commentaries on the conquest of Gaul, was at his best describing the looks and dress of the p. It not only made his tale interesting, but it also made a point. The Gauls were not Romans.

In one of life’s ironies, as the left imposes the blank slate and extreme egalitarianism on society, science is unearthing contrary evidence on a near daily basis. It’s fair to say we now have a mountain of science supporting the claims made by our side of the great divide, with regards to human diversity. That mountain grows larger with every new bit of evidence from the human sciences. This report about Neanderthals and Denisovans is another big piece of data explaining the diversity of man.

Denny was an inter-species love child.

Her mother was a Neanderthal, but her father was Denisovan, a distinct species of primitive human that also roamed the Eurasian continent 50,000 years ago, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Nicknamed by Oxford University scientists, Denisova 11 — her official name — was at least 13 when she died, for reasons unknown.

“There was earlier evidence of interbreeding between different hominin, or early human, groups,” said lead author Vivian Slon, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

“But this is the first time that we have found a direct, first-generation offspring,” she told AFP.

Denny’s surprising pedigree was unlocked from a bone fragment unearthed in 2012 by Russian archeologists at the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.

Analysis of the bone’s DNA left no doubt: the chromosomes were a 50-50 mix of Neanderthal and Denisovan, two distinct species of early humans that split apart between 400,000 to 500,000 years ago.

Advances in the ability to extract DNA from fossils is one of those revolutions in science that does not get enough attention. Hucksters like Stephen Jay Gould got away with their schemes mostly because there was a lack of hard evidence to support or contradict theories about early humans. That is changing as material science and genetic testing improves. The political narrative about the origins of man is falling apart, giving way to observable reality about the diversity of man.

“The very fact that we found this individual of mixed Neanderthal and Denisovan origins suggests that they interbred much more often than we thought,” said Slon.

Paabo agreed: “They must have quite commonly had kids together, otherwise we wouldn’t have been this lucky.”

A 40,000 year-old Homo sapiens with a Neanderthal ancestor a few generations back, recently found in Romania, also bolsters this notion.

But the most compelling evidence that inter-species hanky-panky in Late Pleistocene Eurasia may not have been that rare lies in the genes of contemporary humans.

About two percent of DNA in non-Africans across the globe today originate with Neanderthals, earlier studies have shown.

Denisovan remnants are also widespread, though less evenly.

“We find traces of Denisovan DNA — less than one percent — everwhere in Asia and among native Americans,” said Paabo.

“Aboriginal Australians and people in Papua New Guinea have about five percent.”

Taken together, these facts support a novel answer to the hotly debated question of why Neanderthals — which had successfully spread across parts of western and central Europe — disappeared some 40,000 years ago.

Up to now, their mysterious demise has been blamed on disease, climate change, genocide at the hands of Homo sapiens, or some combination of the above.

But what if our species — arriving in waves from Africa — overwhelmed Neanderthals, and perhaps Denisovans, with affection rather than aggression?

A point that Greg Cochran has made is that Neanderthals and Denisovans had evolved some highly useful traits that allowed them to survive in areas inhospitable to African populations. As modern humans spread through Eurasia, they mixed with these earlier populations and picked up some of these genetic advantages. They could also have simply observed things the Neanderthals had learned. The smarter and more clever humans then used acquired skills to dominate their new environments.

Recent research showing that Neanderthals were not, in fact, knuckle-dragging brutes makes this scenario all the more plausible.

Our genetic cousins executed sophisticated hunting strategies in groups; made fires, tools, clothing and jewellery; and buried their dead with symbolic ornaments.

They painted animal frescos on cave walls at least 64,000 years ago, well before most Homo sapiens arrived in Europe.

Far less is known about Denisovans, but they may have suffered a similar fate.

Paabo established their existence with an incomplete finger bone and two molars dated to some 80,000 years ago.

Among their genetic legacy to some modern humans is a variant of the gene EPAS1 that makes it easier for the body to access oxygen by regulating the production of haemoglobin, according to a 2014 study.

Nearly 90 percent of Tibetans have this precious variant, compared with only nine percent of Han Chinese, the dominant — and predominantly lowland — ethnic group in China.

Some things cannot be acquired through imitation, like the ability to breathe at extremely high altitudes. This may not seem all that important in the grand scheme of things, but if all human attributes are genetic, then it probably means the social diversity we see in humans has a genetic basis as well. If local populations can have local traits, then it goes a long way toward explaining the great diversity in human social organization. Even today, the way Africans prefer to live is different from how Eurasians prefer to live.

Of course, what this new data tells us is that the differences between populations are not uniform. Those modern humans who encountered and mixed with Denisovans have a lot more in common with one another than they do with their ancestors in Africa. The same is true of those populations that mixed with Neanderthals. The mixing of Denisovans and Neanderthals would explain why Asians and Europeans have more in common with one another than either group has with Africans.

None of this argues in favor of any political agenda, but it does argue against the assumptions underlying the neoliberal order. Humans are not interchangeable and the differences we see are genetic and the result of local evolution. It turns out that the Left was sort of right when they said, “Think globally, but act locally.” People are the product of their local environment. The best thing to do, for the sake of global harmony, is to leave people in their local environment, so they can live locally, among their people.

The Original Sin

The original sin of modern conservatism is that it never came to terms with the reality of the Left’s race delusions. Last century, Progressives concluded that the obvious racial disparities in the world were solely due to racism, specifically the racism of whites toward the world’s non-whites. Everything that defines the American Left now is based on this assumption. This a lie, not a sin. The sin was that the American Right, or at least those who came to define the Right, never honestly challenged this claim.

Instead, Buckley-style conservatives accepted this two-part assumption about the world and tried to fit their ideas within it. This was mostly expedience. By going along with the Left’s egalitarianism, they could have a place at the table. With the Civil Rights Movement, the Left claimed the moral high ground on the matter of race. Confronting them on the reality of race would have required courage the conservatives did not possess, so they chose to make an accommodation with the Left. Cowardice became a feature of the Right.

This mistake has haunted Buckleyites for fifty years, because there is no way to fit conservative ideas about society and culture with what amounts to race delusion. The fact that race is real, ethnicity is real and human diversity is immutable, means differences between the races are eternal. Worse yet, by casting the issue in moral terms, opposition to the Progressive race program was by definition immoral. After all, if racial differences can only be due to white racism, any white resistance to reform must be racism.

There was always another problem with Progressive race delusion. Eventually, the Left would run out of ways to address the immutable racial differences. That means they would run out of possible explanations, leaving them with just one conclusion. That is, racism is what defines white people, so the only way to achieve social equality is to get rid of white people entirely. This is why the media is full of over-the-top anti-white rhetoric. The Left is now entirely defined by a visceral hatred of white people.

This leaves conventional conservatism with nowhere to run. When the Left howls about white privilege, the white guys of Conservative Inc. have no response, since they cannot get away from the fact that most of them are white. Then they have the neocons, the shape-shifters of American politics, who will be white and non-white depending upon how they want to play an issue. The result is that any resistance of the Left is automatically a white guy thing and therefore immoral. The prevailing morality is now explicitly anti-white.

As their ranks dwindle, the Buckleyites seem to have some sense they are now in a blind alley, but they are baffled as to why. Super-cuck David French thinks conservatives should try to out-hustle the race hustlers. Roger Clegg would like to hide under his bed until the issue goes away. That is the default position of conservatives on most things now. The swarthy cohort  of the Buckleyites thinks the way forward is to bore everyone to death on the issue and this guy has decided to hold his breath or something.

The conservative position on the Left’s anti-white turn is a combination of pleading, groveling and wishful thinking. The reason is they cannot do anything else as long as they accept the Left’s egalitarianism and blank slate assumptions. If all the problems of the world are due to white racism, and all other efforts failed, it is only logical and moral to get rid of white people, or at least make them sub-citizens. If the problems persist, then killing off the whites is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing that can be done.

Buckley conservatives have written often about the original sin of race, but the real original sin was their unwillingness to confront Progressives on their racial delusions. Whatever American Progressivism was in another age, in this age, for more than half a century, it has been a cult based on the belief that whites are the root of all evil. It is a toxic religion that makes Bolshevism look optimistic by comparison. There was never any reason to accommodate it, other than expediency and greed. Now it is the ruling ethos of our age.

The opposite of race delusion is not a different form of race delusion. That is the problem with colorblind society argument. There can be no such thing as a colorblind society as long as humans populate society. Man is tribal and hierarchical. These are defining features of our species. To think otherwise is at odds with biological reality. The dream of the colorblind society we hear from civic nationalists is just as nutty as the Left’s delusions about racial justice. Egalitarianism is not simply wrong, but it is also toxic and perverse.

The foundation stone of western conservatism is the unblinking acceptance of the human condition, without reservation. The point of society was to mitigate those aspects of the human condition that interfere with a peaceful and prosperous existence. The original sin of the Buckleyites is they agreed to abandon that core understanding. The result is a movement composed of hollow men, inexorably shuffling toward their demise, as they plead for a second chance. Sin pays its wages in death, but reality is eternal.

The Encirclement

If something gets lodged under your skin, the body will react by trying to push it out, which involves swelling and inflammation, due to the presence of microorganisms on the foreign material. Along with the normal renewal of skin cells, the object will move closer to the surface and eventually, with your help, be expelled. If that does not work, the body summons cells call macrophages that surround the object to isolate it from the body and eventually dissolve it. Sometimes you just end up with a calcified object there forever.

Human organizations work a similar way when they are infiltrated by something seen as hostile or even just foreign. The foreignness is automatically assumed to be hostile and treated as such, until it can be assimilated or expelled. Instead of macrophages, the organization finds a way to isolate the interloper, so that everyone knows it is unclean and he knows he is not welcome. That is what we are seeing with Donald Trump and the American political class. They have surrounded him and are trying to isolate him.

The effort to isolate Trump started early, when anyone who took a job with his campaign was treated like a leper. That turned out to be a stroke of luck for Trump, as it forced him to hire outsiders, who were not locked into old thinking. The only establishment man to support Trump was Jeff Sessions and he is looking like a mole for the political establishment. Even into the general election campaign, Trump was forced to use outsiders and washed-up insiders like Kellyanne Conway, hoping for a second chance.

Once he won the election, the political establishment adjusted its tactics. Paul Ryan rallied the dweeb army inside the GOP to basically ignore Trump’s agenda. That is why nothing happened on the border wall, immigration, or infrastructure. The point is being made that working with Trump would be death for any Republican. In fact, the leadership went out of its way to make sure nothing Trump wanted was in the last budget. The message was being sent that the people in charge saw Trump as a hostile outsider to be resisted

Even as the evidence of a sedition plot to alter the 2016 campaign mounts, you will notice that the grandees of the House GOP are stone silent on the matter. If this sort of thing had happened to Obama by Bush people, sniveling wimps like Paul Ryan would have been sent out on every talk show to condemn Bush and apologize to Obama. Instead, the only guys pushing the story are back bench types like David Nunez, who has come to terms with the fact he has no future in the party. He has nothing to lose so he can talk about it.

This is part of the planned isolation. It is not about policy or ideology. That is the mistake many make when wondering why Trump’s own party hates him. Certainly, the greedy bloodsuckers who bankroll the GOP hate his immigration stance, but they love his trade and regulatory positions. Trump has done more for the wallets of Silicon Valley and Wall Street than any president in history. No, the reason official Washington hates him is he is not them. He is an outsider, the nullification of why they claim we need them.

Then you have the phony-baloney Mueller operation. The original point of the thing was to cover-up the malfeasance of guys like Rosenstein, Comey, Strzok, and the rest of the conspirators in the effort to subvert the last election. It has quickly become a weapon to attack anyone associated with Trump. The whole point of going after Michael Cohen, for example, is to send a message to everyone in the private sector with ties to Trump. The Manafort case is the modern equivalent of the show trials during Stalin’s purges.

It is a bit ironic that the left is now trying to paint Trump as Nixon. It is almost as if it is a coordinated narrative. This and this are surely coincidental. After all, the left ran Nixon out of town for just mentioning stuff that we now know President Obama was doing in the final years of his presidency, but consistency and accuracy are not the issue. Like Nixon, the left hates Trump because he dares speak for the dispossessed. He may be a billionaire, but he talks like a commoner and speaks for the forgotten white American.

The result thus far is a stalemate. Unlike Nixon, Trump is not careless in his dealings, and he seems to know what he is facing. Team Trump is like defenders of a city, surrounded on all sides, but strong enough to repel an assault. Official Washington is the besieger, camped outside the walls not entirely sure how to proceed. They think they can wait it out, but supplies are not infinite. They also have to spend time and resources policing their berserkers, who keep rushing to the walls. Both sides make noise, but nothing happens.

What should worry the establishment is they have thrown everything they can at the walls, but Trump remains popular. In fact, he is more popular now than when he took office and more popular than Obama and Bush at similar points. It is why the Democrats are trying to tamp down impeachment talk. They know this is exactly the sort of thing that will motivate Trump voters in November. It is why the Prog media is full of blue wave stories. They are hoping they can gaslight the typical GOP voter into staying home in November.

For those still clinging to the idea of old America, with the orderly resolution of disputes through orderly elections, the only good result is one where Trump folds and decides to sign off on the neoliberal agenda. If Trump gave up on the wall and his immigration push, his base would abandon him, and the great replacement could accelerate. There is no scenario where the people in charge peacefully go along with doing what is best for heritage Americans. There is no reasoning with fanatics and hired killers.

The fact is the ruling class of America despises Trump and see him as a traitor to their class. His willingness to speak for heritage Americans, people the rulers now see as hostile and foreign, is unforgivable. He is the foreign object in the political body. That is why they see him a cancer on modern politics. There is no living with cancer, at least not for long. It is either killed, removed or it kills you. That is how our rulers see us and it is how they see Trump. The siege continues until it is broken, or the walls are breached.

The Wrong Stuff

A regular feature of the news, going back decades, is how the military is struggling to meet its enlistment goals. One reason for this is the Left’s antiwar past, which is a big part of their origin myth. The geezers in the cult still continue about how they protested the war in college. There is also the fact that the Left needs to believe the tide is turning their way and the people are rushing to their banner. That means the sort of white men who join the service are in decline. The result is regular stories about the lack of recruits.

The thing is though, volunteer armies do not have a great history. In the French Revolution, there were lots of people ready to fight for the revolution, but nowhere near enough to man the massive armies required to fight the rest of Europe. Wide-scale conscription was necessary to meet demand. The same was true during the Napoleonic Wars. In the 20th century, both world wars were fought with conscripts. For example, 70% of the US soldiers were drafted, despite massive public relations efforts to get men to enlist.

America has been running the world with a volunteer army for about fifty years now, but the cost has been enormous. Official spending numbers put the defense budget at about $600 billion per year, but lots of stuff is off-budget. The microprocessor has also been the great force multiplier. The United States has the most technologically advanced war machine in history and a fighting ethos to go with it. That just raises the cost of operations, relative to the overall fighting strength, in terms of manpower and material.

As a result, there is a general consensus that the current US military configuration is inadequate to continue ruling the world. This is a big part of Trump’s push to delegate some of the tasks to Europe and Asia. There really is no reason why the EU countries need any support from the US to police the Continent. The Russians have nukes, but the bear is poor, and the people are in no condition to fight a war. In Asia, the Japanese and South Koreans could do much more to help deal with Chinese aggression.

There is another problem though, one that the Europeans have, but are not willing to acknowledge. That is the lack of men willing and able to fight. This is problem American warmongers are beginning to notice in America. Right-wing Progressives are noticing that the struggle to meet enlistment goals are not just rhetorical. The military is struggling to find young men willing and able to do the work of a modern soldier. Those with the talent are wising up to the reality of this age and the rest simply have the wrong stuff.

For starters, the sorts of men excited about taking orders from a girl are not the sorts of men you want fighting your wars. That only works in Hollywood propaganda. That propaganda, however, has had an impact on the culture. As a result, a decreasing number of men are physically able to meet the minimum requirements. A boy who spent his formative years playing video games and being asked if he would prefer to wear a dress, is unlikely to have the ability to make it through basic, much less be a good soldier.

Then you have the fact that white guys are starting to figure out that the government is their enemy, so signing up to fight for the government is not in their interests. Part of it is the fact that the public has figured out that the neocon response to 9/11 was a scam. They did not care about keeping the country safe from Islam. They only cared about keeping Israel safe from Islam. Importing millions of Muslims after 9/11 did not go unnoticed. A volunteer army relies on patriotism to fill the ranks. Fighting for strangers does not cut it.

There is also the fact that whites are getting wise to what’s happening and public trust is plummeting. A volunteer army not only relies on patriotism, but it relies on civic duty. It is why we still call military service a duty. Some still call politics “public service” even though no one is so naive these days. The point is, like patriotism, civic nationalism is a social contract. Both parties have to uphold their end of the deal in order for it to work. It is why blacks lack patriotism, and they have never been willing to join the military.

The black issue is one to understand. We are constantly bombarded with propaganda about the heroic blacks in the military, but blacks have always been underrepresented in the services. Blacks, of course, are leading the charge against the national anthem. It is not just a stunt by coddled athletes. Blacks in America have never felt a sense of duty to the country, which makes perfect sense, given the nature of black identity. If you see society as dominated by the people you hate, why would you feel loyalty to society?

Then you have the much-celebrated browning of America. As of the last census, the majority of people under-18 are non-white. By the next census, it will be distinctly non-white. War fighting is a young man’s game. A military built to run on smart white guys with a sense of duty is not going to function when it has to rely on non-whites, who despise their host population. Inevitably, the military is going to start looking like a Chicano version of Stripes. No one says it, but everyone in charge sees the problem.

The response will be a greater reliance on high technology, but the cost of the robot warrior goes up faster than his effectiveness. No one bothers to notice that the space age war machine of the Unites States has been fought to a standstill by cave dwelling archaics in Afghanistan. Trillions have been spent trying to outsmart the locals and the graveyard of empires is going to win anyway. In the end, there is no replacement for human capital and there is no way to replace the premier human capital with cheap knockoffs from overseas.

Summer World Tour

As we head into the last week of summer, at least for most Americans, I thought a survey of the world scene was a good idea this week. Here in Lagos, it is the final week before the kids go back to school, so most everyone is getting in some outdoor fun before it is too late. I’m taking next week off so a show on lighter topics seems appropriate. Plus, the political scene in America is so ugly right now, I need a break from it. I think I will take a week off from consuming any news, with regards to politics or current affairs.

I think the plan going forward will be to mix up the format each week. One or two weeks will be the single topic type shows and the other weeks will be the variety shows. The feedback on the format has been about evenly split. Some prefer one style, while others prefer the other format. You can’t please everyone, but mixing things up works for me, as content is always a struggle. Sometimes the world is just not that interesting, while other times it demands out attention. This way I keep it interesting for me and for you.

I am looking forward to a bit of break. I don’t know about anyone else, but the censorship, the deplatforming, the barking at the moon insanity of the Left, all of it has really started to wear on me. I hate these people. I hate them mostly because they force the rest of us to share in their hatred. They could stew in their own juices, but instead they demand the rest of us pay attention to them. While thoughts of the day of the rope bring some pleasure, I really wish it did not have to come to that, but that’s the future and we all know it.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android 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. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Spotify

Google Play Link

iHeart Radio

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Odysee

The Warning Signs

An axiom of this age is that the Left always projects onto others the things that it is either doing or planning to do. A good rule is to listen to what they are saying, assume the opposite, and then try to piece together what they are doing. It is the Opposite Rule of Liberalism and it is an iron law of modern life. An obvious example is their howling about election interference. As soon as they started howling about Trump colluding with the Russians, you knew that it was the Left colluding with someone to rig the election.

This is due to something Eric Hoffer noticed about people who join causes. The fanatic is driven by self-loathing. They are attracted to causes, because it allows them to swap their hated identity with that of the group. It is also why they tend to jump from cause to cause, often contradicting previous opinions. Progressivism is a secular religion that is really just a dog’s breakfast of causes. Today it is all about trannies, non-whites, and the never-ending vagina monologue from white women, held together by a hatred of white men.

The point is that you can often get a sense of what the Left is up to by watching where they are casting the accusatory eye. That’s why this story is interesting. Fake twitter followers are a well know phenomenon. It is fairly obvious that many B and C level media personalities buy twitter followers. It would not be shocking to learn that lefty sites like the Daily Beast and Estrogen Post buy followers for their contributors. Are there really close to one hundred thousand people following this person? Seems unlikely.

Anyway, the fact that the NYTimes is focusing on fake YouTube views when their cult is waging an all-out assault on dissidents on-line, probably means that the view counts for lefty YouTube stars are fake. Just how fake is hard to know but given the “by any means necessary” attitude of the Left, there is no reason to think they would be restrained. Keep in mind that the NYTimes was buying traffic from Chinese click farms around the same time they started reporting on the phenomenon of fake followers in twitter.

Perhaps more ominously, this post from the Carlos Slim Journal, demanding Trump be dragged from office and hanged in Lafayette Park suggests the Left’s war on civilization is just getting started. Most people will focus on the rank hypocrisy and dishonesty, but the real focus should be the warning. The Left organized a wide scale conspiracy to rig the last election. The FBI and DOJ are currently running a wide scale conspiracy to hide their ongoing efforts to remove Trump from office and stonewall Congress.

As much as our side jokes around about Pinochet, it is the Left that may be plotting a coup in order to install an authoritarian government. Just look at the organized effort to ban people from the financial system. David Horowitz has just been un-personed by MasterCard and Visa. In the modern age, if you want to wage a civil war, gaining control of the banking system is the first step. Then you take over the internet. Without money or a means to reach a mass audience, fighting back in a civilized way is impossible.

That last bit is important. Most people are willing to fight the good fight until it means coloring outside the lines. That is the water’s edge for most of the people the Left sees as their enemy. It is why the Left is always trying to provoke or invent a backlash. It provides them with cover to scare the normies and use any means necessary to “defend our democracy!” As is always the case, the Left seeks to turn civilization’s virtues into vices they can exploit to undermine society. Your reasonableness is their best weapon.

The thing to understand with the Left is that they are reactionary. Team Obama produced the scheme to rig the last election and when this became apparent to Team Clinton, they reacted by howling about “Russian hacking.” In other words, they immediately began to project their own hated activities onto others. Remember that it was the Left that started the Fake News idea, only to have people point out that the lefty news organs were nothing but fake news. The same was true of the AstroTurf chants over the Tea Party.

What all of this most likely means is that the Democrats are quietly working on their plans to impeach Trump as soon as they gain control of the House this fall. They have upped Pelosi’s Thorazine dosage so she does not blab about it during interviews, but the Left can’t help but get ahead of themselves, hence the NYTimes post. The plan is to impeach Trump in 2019 and then count on the NeverTrump loons in the GOP to join in and force the Senate to remove him. Given the nature of the GOP, this is a good bet.

This is a bit of a meandering post, but the basic point is that it is a mistake to take the Left’s chanting at face value. It is not just that they lie. Ideologues always lie. It is that they are psychologically incapable of concealing their actions. Again, that old self-hatred gets the better of them and they start dropping hints via projection. For two years now, the Left has been trying to convince us that Trump is a dictator, who plots with foreign agents to “harm our democracy.”  That should be read as a warning about what comes next.

That is what puts the Left’s howling about a civil war in perspective. They have been waging a civil war on the rest of us for a couple of years. They have normalized the idea of using public companies to strip people of their right to participate in public debate. They have normalized the idea of stripping people of employment due to their politics. They are now the proscribing people because they hold the wrong opinions. Banning people from using breathing is next. The only thing missing is a coup and a dictator.

The High Cost Of Size

All of the great political philosophies since the Enlightenment have focused on the problem of scarcity. The communists insisted that the abolition of private property would solve the problem of scarcity, so that the only problem would be figuring out how to divvy up the bounty. Libertarians insist that the sanctity of private property solves the problem of scarcity, by making sure the lazy, unfit, and inconvenient starve to death, so the survivors can eat them during lean times. Every ideology has a solution to material scarcity.

What no ideology addresses is the shortage of smart people. Now, there is never an abundance of smart people. Nowhere will you find a business or an organization complaining that they have too many smart people. In fact, companies spend a lot of time and money trying to attract and cultivate smart people. This is the driving force behind a lot of technological automation. It is not so much that it replaces basic labor or reduces costs, as it frees up the smart fraction to focus on the complex problems of the organization.

Now, there are many issues that arise from the natural shortage of smart people. One is that smart people are most valuable when their ideas can be implemented by people who may not be as smart, but have the aptitude to implement the ideas. A good architect needs engineers and engineers need managers, planners, and skilled tradesman. Otherwise, the architect is just a guy who draws stuff. The point is, an organization will not only want to attract the smart fraction, but they will also want to attract the not-quite-so-smart fraction.

Another issue is that the inevitable shortage of smart people will lead to putting not-so-smart people into positions for which they are not qualified. The Peter principle is a well-known concept in management. People in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. The guy who is good as the third in charge gets bumped up to being second in charge, where he is merely competent. Time and circumstances force his promotion into the top spot, where he is over-matched and is viewed as incompetent.

Then there is the problem of people being judged within an organization based on their social skills, rather than their intelligence and competence. The truly stupid are easy to spot, but the mediocre and below average are often hard to notice, because they are extroverts, or they are glib. It seems to be human nature to overestimate the abilities of those with high verbal skills. It is why lawyers always assume they are the smartest people in the room. They have high verbal skills and mistake that for intelligence.

Put it all together and an organization will start out with the normal shortage of smart people. As the organization grows, that shortage will become acute, forcing the firm to rely on a greater number of not-so-smart and mediocrities in positions that should be filled with smart people. The resulting increase in errors will place a further drain on the stock of smart people, as they have to compensate for the downstream problems. Exacerbating this is the increasing tendency to evaluate people on social skills rather than talent.

The result of as an organization gets bigger, it gets dumber. That seems to be the case with American intelligence organizations. Recently, screw-ups downstream from the upper echelon of the CIA, resulted in a very serious breach of security. This led to the exposure of at least thirty spies, all of whom were executed by the Chinese government. This is a serious failure under any conditions, but the cause here suggests the CIA is no longer capable of doing the basics. It is a big bureaucracy full of people way over their heads.

This is not an isolated incident. Diane Feinstein had a Chinese spy on her staff for over twenty years. Counterintelligence is a basic function of the CIA. Their job is look for anomalies in what foreign governments know, because that means the foreign government is getting access from obscure sources. If the guy at the poker table always folds when you have a good hand, it means he knows things he could not know through the normal play of the game. There is no excuse for missing the Feinstein spy.

Of course, there is the matter of John Brennan. He spent 25 years in the CIA as a dangerously incompetence hack. He is known today for being the mentally unbalanced lunatic howling about Trump on cable chat show, but while he was CIA director, he had his e-mail account hacked and exposed by WikiLeaks. By “hacked” it is understood to mean he was recklessly insecure in the handling of his password and account access. The guy never should have been in a junior position, much less a senior one at the CIA.

There are over 20,000 employees at the CIA. Most will never do anything more than process paperwork. Even so, the sheer size of the organization makes it unwieldy for the task assigned to it. Intelligence work is hard. It takes an inventive mind, but also a disciplined mind. The supply of highly disciplined high IQ people willing to spend their lives playing cat and mouse for modest pay is small. Placing a small number of them in a vast stew of incompetents, mediocrities and bureaucrats does not make the stew better.

Fixing agencies like the CIA is simply a matter of making them smaller. Firing everyone with an even number at the end of the agency ID would be a good start. Sure, a few good people would be lost, but the high cost of the mediocre people would more than make up for it. One reckless bozo can cancel out the work of a hundred competent people. The remaining ten thousand people could be broken into five units of two thousand and you would have a better agency overnight. In time, it may even be trustworthy again.

Of course, this is why large organizations can never reform themselves and why fixing American government is impossible. That army of morons at Langley is a constituency within the vast sea of morons known as the federal government. No one reduces their constituency on purpose. Additionally, by the time this is an issue, incompetent boobs like John Brennan are in senior positions. The obsequious climbers have either pushed out the talent or simply swamped them. Government becomes a giant punching itself in the face.

The Futurism Is Not Bright

When I was a kid, I stumbled upon a book called Future Shock, by someone named Alvin Toffler. I remember the book for a few reasons. One is it was based on the idea that the pace of change was accelerating and that humans were ill-equipped to manage the onrush of the future. The other memorable part of the book was the claim that society was moving from an industrial age to a super-industrial age. The book was written in 1970, and I read it in the early 80’s, when it was obvious there would be no super-industrial age.

The book is close to 500 pages, and it could have been boiled down to 50 pages. In fact, it could probably be condensed into a blog post. The main point of the book was that societal change was accelerating. That point was made just about every way possible and then filled out with predictions that turned out to be all wrong. That was something else I learned from the book. Futurists are extremely long winded. That said, he sold millions of copies and became something of a rock star, so he knew what he was doing.

In fairness to Toffler, by 1980 he had figured out that his super-industrial society idea was a flop, so he came out with an updated vision of the future called The Third Wave. This book predicted that the developed countries would move from industrial to technological societies. He coined the term Information Age. In fairness, he was not wrong about most everything like he was in the previous book. For example, he predicted the end of the nation state and the growth of the global entity that transcended the nation state.

That said, he was still wrong about most stuff. For example, he predicted that technology would result in greater democracy with populations exerting greater control of society and instituting more local control. Pretty much the exact opposite has been the result of the technological revolution. I think we can also say that the idea of a managerial class rising out of the technological revolution was something that many conservatives were onto long before Alvin Toffler predicted it. Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941.

Anyway, that all came to mind when I saw this posted on Breitbart. George Gilder is a futurist, an economist, and an advocate of intelligent design. He is co-founder of the Discovery Institute. It is probably accurate to describe him as a techno-utopian, one of those guys who sits around thinking about the singularity. He has a book out predicting the end of Google and the rise of a block chain technology as the salvation of humanity from technocracy. The Breitbart piece is an effort to sell books to conservatives.

Gilder is also a rabid Philo-Semite. He wrote a book called The Israel Test, in which he credits everything good in the world to Israel. That won him endless praise from neocons and Buckley Conservatives. He has argued that antisemitism is the hatred of capitalism and excellence. The only reason to mention this is that like all futurists, Gilder is a bit of grifter. The futurism game is not any different from reading tarot cards or doing astrological charts. The idea is to tell the mark what they want to hear. Flattery always sells.

That is futurism’s main attraction. It allows the futurist, as well as his audience, to avoid dealing with present reality or learning much about past reality. They cherry pick from the past to create a narrative that results in the future of their making. When times are bad, the futurist peddles a future that is devoid of the bad things of today. When times are good, well, all the great stuff of today is going to be awesome in the future. There has never been a futurist that predicts doom. Those guys are called prophets, and we remember them.

In the 1970’s when American manufacturing was in trouble, Alvin Toffler wrote about a future of super-industry, where everyone had a super job. In the 80’s when things were looking up, the future was going to be even more super. The futurist is primarily concerned with future earnings, and no one is buying a book or paying for a speech about how crappy things are going to be in the future. That is why Gilder is out with a book claiming techno-feudalism is going to be replaced by a new utopian algorithm that makes everything super.

Now, what about his central claim about Google? That it is model for skimming off the economy is doomed to failure? The fact that he seems to not have the slightest idea how Google makes money or how it is arranged as a business is not encouraging. Comparing Google’s business model to Marxism is just marketing. It is boob bait for the bubbas that read people like Michelle Malkin. The book is probably littered with the usual abracadabra words and phrases that titillate the audience of Conservative Inc.

The fact is Google’s business model was a complete accident. Like most tech companies, it was supposed to be a pump and dump. Page and Brin wanted to sell their search engine once it gained popularity. When they could not find a buyer, they figured out how to turn it into a roadside bandit, charging tolls via ad dollars. They correctly saw that the search engine was a bottleneck, and the bottleneck is always the best place to skim from the users. Google simply taxes people on their way from one service to another.

Can this model last forever? Nothing lasts forever, but as a state protected monopolist, they will exist until the state decides otherwise. Given that Google has more than enough money to buy every elected official in Washington, no one in politics is in a hurry to break up Google. Throw in the fact that like the state security agencies, Google can spy on all of the elected officials and their aides, Google and the rest of the oligarchs will remain in power until the revolution. But that is not a promising future, so futurists ignore it.

The New Bull Connor

For a long time, Bull Connor was the symbol of southern racism, because he famously used fire hoses and dogs on civil rights agitators in Birmingham Alabama. Like most white people in the 60’s, he opposed the idea of racial integration, but it was his way of doing it that got him labeled as the ultimate racist. It was one thing to believe that integration was a terrible idea. It was another to take pleasure in a hatred of blacks for no other reason than their race. Hatred, even of that which should be hated, always has an ugliness to it.

Today, the ugly face of racial hatred is directed at whites and worn by social justice warriors, claiming to be fighting white supremacy. In reality they are just anti-white bigots who compete with one another over how much they hate white people. One difference between the anti-white bigots of today and guys like Bull Connor is he was happy to live his life in obscurity. He never set out to be a famous racist. Today’s social justice warriors see racial hatred as a path to fame and glory. It is the easy way into the high culture.

An example of this is Brandeis associate professor Dorothy Kim. She is someone passing herself off as a medievalist. In reality, she is a white-hating bigot and a social justice warrior, who lives to harass white people. Her current crusade is an attack on Rachel Fulton Brown, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago. Kim’s reason for attacking Dr. Brown is that she is a conservative white woman, who does real scholarship, rather than agitate for nutty causes. Kim thinks she can get ahead by hating the white woman.

Rachel Fulton Brown is a serious scholar who has written award winning books on arcane medieval topics. She has written this book and this book. Even if you are a fan of medieval European history, these are esoteric subjects, but that is how the stock of knowledge is developed and expanded. Dorothy Kim is a ridiculous person who writes nonsense like this. The only people talking about white supremacy are liars and lunatics. It does not matter which applies here, either should be disqualifying for an academic in civil society.

Dorothy Kim is not just focusing her attention on Rachel Brown. Kim is an all-purpose white-hater who whores herself out to the daffy girls of Progressive media, hired to popularize academic racism. Not content with attacking white people in real-time, the social justice warriors are now determined to rewrite history to make Henry VIII into soul brother number one. In that Daily Beast post, Mx. Kim goes out of her way to fall for the Cheddar Man hoax, suggesting she is dumber than her sparse work product suggests.

That is just the thing about the people like Mx. Kim. They are not just content to publicly attack white people for being white. There is a suicidal nihilism to the modern racist. Their project is as much about decreasing the stock of human knowledge as it is chasing white people from the white societies that welcomed them. What is offensive about Mx. Kim is not that she does not know things, it is that she knows wrong things and demands that the rest of us, as a matter of social justice, accept falsehoods as fact, fiction as truth.

That is another thing you see with the social justice warriors. They seek to replace accomplishment with moral fanaticism. Rachel Brown has reached her status by a long career of being good at her specialty. Mx. Kim is just not bright enough or willing to do the work, so she is attacking white people, in order to establish her bona fides as a culture warrior. Everything about Mx. Kim’s career to this point is a claim that she is a victim, by virtue of her DNA, and therefore must get free stuff from white people or else racism.

That is why these people are so vicious. Being a virtue signaling loon is a highly competitive racket. There is always someone out there preparing a nuttier claim than the nuttiest claim of the moment. Because the ideology of the social justice warrior is completely empty, a pure negative ideology, the result is a version of the mob screaming “Goldstein” in 1984. It is not enough to hate white people. What matters is that you are seen hating whitey and doing so with an enthusiasm that is without rival.

That is the ugliness that Mx. Kim shares with classic racists like Bull Connor from half a century ago. It was not that he opposed integration that made him ugly. It was that he was willing to abandon decency and order in his opposition to it. The willingness to sacrifice everything for a principle is fanaticism and it is just as much an enemy of civil society as the barbarian. That is what you see with people like Mx. Kim. She is a fanatic, ready to burn it all down in the name of social justice. There is nothing uglier than a fanatic.

Addendum: A commenter asked how people like Mx. Kim gets into the academy. The reason the social justice warrior has success is that Progressives are always fighting themselves. By that, I mean they are always at war with that which they fear about themselves or that which they are currently doing. The Left’s rage against Russian meddling corresponds with their own collaboration with Russian oligarchs in an effort to rig recent elections. Google the phrase “Opposite Rule of Liberalism.”

In the case of the academy, the people hooting about racism and white supremacy are relying on the innate racism of the modern academy. “Oh look! We have an Asian applicant in medieval European studies!” The white liberals in the field are so desperate for multicultural status points, they fall all over themselves to find and embrace non-whites, purely on racial grounds. They embrace anti-racism, because they hate their own racism, and the result is more of the self-loathing that drives the Progressive.

Multiculturalism has created a vast market for dull-witted grifters like Mx. Kim. She gets the attention that women naturally crave, but she gets to make a career out of it, thus making herself both a hero of feminism and multiculturalism. Her choice was working in a cubicle somewhere as a clerk or going into the promising world of social justice. it is not hard to see why she chose to be an SJW. It is also easy to see why she is so bitter and nasty. At some level, she knows she is a fraud, and she hates herself even more.