Monthly Archives: August 2020

Sunset In Kansas

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It’s easy to forget, with all that is happening, but the racket known as democracy is the one thing not being forced to close by the local tyrants. The state of Kansas had its primary yesterday. The race of interest to white people was the Republican primary for the senate. Far left Rep. Roger Marshall faced off against the moderate former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Marshall, of course, had the support of both parties, as Kobach favors some minor limits on immigration.

Marshall won with the support of the usual GOP suspects. He got the endorsement of the U.S Chamber of Commerce, the Kansas Farm Bureau, the National Right to Life Committee. If he wins in the fall, the tech monopolies and agribusiness will get a much-needed voice in Washington, but the people of Kansas will remain unrepresented in both houses. Of course, President Trump did nothing to support Kobach. Instead he spent his time tweeting about something.

It used to be that the three “I’s” controlled American politics. That was Israel, Ireland and Indiana. The money men, working class whites and heritage whites controlled the political process. It’s still the three “I’s” today, but they stand for Israel, India and the investor class. Politics is now controlled by the Israel lobby, open borders fanatics and the financial class. Even the very mild skepticism for open borders by someone like Kobach is completely out of bounds.

This race was interesting for another reason. Mitch McConnell organized a $15 million ad campaign against Kobach. The ads claimed he was a white nationalist who employed invisible Nazis on his staff. It is a great example of how today’s heated rhetoric from the Left becomes conservative dogma tomorrow. No one should be surprised if the GOP slips in some language into their platform condemning your ancestors and supporting the black lives matter nonsense.

The other interesting McConnell angle is that he now runs the GOP. Trump is not even a figure head at this point. He is a non-factor. Both parties are now preparing for the Biden presidency and will make sure a guy like Trump is never allowed to step foot in Washington ever again. They said Nixon ushered in the imperial presidency. McConnell is now ushering in the legislative supremacy. Both parties have locked shields to impose their will on the executive branch.

That really is the story of the last four years. Disaffected whites rallied to put Trump in the White House to send a message to both parties. It was not that people were charmed by Trump or thought he was a great man. White people backed the pompous and crass Trump as a rejection of official politics. A good chunk of whites were sick of the wars, the open borders, the corporate piracy. Voting for Trump was a rejection of the status quo in an effort to wake up the political class.

The political class responded by making sure this never happens again. Look around at Republican races since 2016 and you see a maximum effort to eliminate anyone that supports populist policies. The Democrats, of course, have spent the last four years turning Washington into a circus of conspiracy theories. Instead of cutting a deal with Trump, which would be easy, they are working with their friends in the GOP to undermine Trump at every turn.

In the fullness of time, the 2016 election will be viewed as the last legitimate presidential election in America. Using the excuse of the pandemic, states are ushering in vote by mail schemes. As Gandhi once said, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” What that will mean moving forward is the wrong votes will be shredded by the party men counting the votes. There will be no way to audit this process, so voting will become ceremonial.

Then there is the fact that the vote counters will be the wokest of the woke. If you vote the wrong way, your name will be leaked to the right people and before long you will be facing the mob. The point of the secret ballot is so people feel free to be honest in their choices. The point of the mail in vote is to make sure you know someone will be looking over your shoulder as you fill in the ballot. Feel free to vote your conscience, but they will feel free to make you suffer for it.

One other thing from the Kansas race worth noting. The party man got the support of the National Right To Life Committee. There is no better example of the corruption inherent in democracy than the anti-abortion movement. For generations they have been hoovering up millions and have nothing to show for it. A candidate opposing abortion may as well claim he opposes leprechauns riding unicorns. It is the most meaningless position in politics.

In the end, it is another reminder that there is no voting your way out from under a corrupt ruling class. The only solution for that is the hangman. If the interests of white people were represented in the ruling class, then they would be represented in the House and Senate. The ruling class of America no longer has any connection to the average white American, so the interests of white people are ignored. There is no solution to that problem at the ballot box.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Our Sound And Fury

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An old axiom is that the first casualty of war is truth. The facts of the matter stop being important, so both sides feel free to say what they like about the other and the issue at the center of their dispute. Similarly, truth is an early victim of partisanship, as the partisan is only interested in the interests of his group. By extension, one can say that truth is always an early victim of politics. The sides have their interests, which are tied to the people whose interests are being served.

Of course, what we think of as truth is tangled up in the language. In communist countries, the full expression of partisanship in their political struggles meant the language was often humorously dishonest. More than a few men were condemned to death for the crime of being “a bourgeois traitor to the proletariat.” In war time, enemies are described in the most absurd and grotesque terms. often, those epithets stick with the losers as we see with the last European war.

This connection between language and truth is useful, if we can step out of our own partisan sensibilities, in assessing the rationality of a society. North Korea is a good example of this. The gap between official truth and actual truth is so broad in many cases, it lurches into caricature. Iran is another example. Her leaders make claims that strike most people as deliberately ridiculous. This wild language is the result of a great gap between official truth and the actual truth.

Of course, this is turning up in our own society. We live in an increasingly unreasonable age, so the claims of partisans become increasingly unreasonable. The absurdity of calling Trump a dictator, for example, could be excused as fashionable exaggeration, but the people doing it are not exaggerating. Similarly, they are deadly serious when they claim he and his supported are racist, who want to bring back slavery. Their absurd language, reflects absurd beliefs by absurd people.

There is an argument that healthy politics will necessarily have a high degree of exaggeration, as the participants seek to persuade. Since persuasion is the key to democratic governance, the people coming up with these outlandish arguments are, in a fashion, displaying support for the system. They still believe in the fifty percent plus one model, so they pull out all the stops to convince others. Their over-the-top language is, in effect, a signal of their support for democracy.

Maybe there is some truth to it, but we have lots of examples outside the narrow realm of retail politics to suggest otherwise. Look at the great conflagrations on the streets of our cities this summer. Much of it has been organized by people who claim to be opposed to fascism. That’s their reason to exist. Like the communist of old, they oppose fascists and defend democracy. The fact that there are no actual fascists in America does not seem to matter much to them.

The closest thing we have to genuine fascist in modern America are the people claiming to be anti-fascists. The old commies considered capitalists and the middle-class as enemies to their cause. Modern communists have corporate sponsors, are loaded down with consumer goods and come from the middle-class. It’s as if they are on some weird vacation where they get to pretend to be left-wing radicals from a century ago, while not giving up their Wi-Fi access and vegan lunches.

Those corporate and political sponsors of the ant-fascists are defending a political-economy that would be very familiar to the old fascists. Our modern ruling order is a combination of political and corporate interests, with the welfare of the people being the stated objective of both. Large swaths of political power have been handed to corporate giants, in exchange for defense of their corporate interests by the state. It’s why every corporate ad tells us how much the care about us.

America is a fascist country now. It may lack the snappy uniforms and martial order one tends to associate with fascism, but the political-economy of the country is much closer to fascism than Marxism, Capitalism or Republicanism. It is feminine, bourgeois and passive-aggressive, but fascist nonetheless. It will not be long before the official creed of our liberal democracy is, “Everything for the community, nothing outside the community, nothing against the community.”

Now, it should be noted that there are people who occasionally hoist the banner of fascism, but their claims are just as disconnected from reality. Usually, they begin and end with antisemitism, as if that is the only characteristic of fascism. If their politics advance much beyond that, it looks much closer to a crude form of Bolshevism than anything one could classify as fascism. The fascists of a century ago would have viewed them as just another enemy on the street.

For example, one camp of the former alt-right that still goes in for the fascist language and aesthetic wants a centrally planned economy. They want one government bank to provide all banking services, like the post office. They have even flirted at times with the term National Bolshevism. Putting aside the historical partisanship, no fascist, when fascism was a real thing, would have embraced this type of economics. In fact, they would have rejected it as anti-fascist.

Then there is another camp that embraces the ethno-state. Richard Spencer gets the credit for popularizing the idea, but it was not his invention. The idea has been around in Europe since at least the 19th century. The Bolsheviks, of course, would have completely agreed with the notion of a unified people. They would have limited it to the proletariat, but they supported the end of the nation-state. The fascists, in contrast, completely rejected the elimination of the nation state.

Those are just the easiest examples. When you look around, our language is now disconnected from our political reality. The labels used to describe the various sides in political fights historically meaningless. Those saying they are defending democracy are in fact trying to eliminate it. Those who supposedly want authoritarianism really want something closer to a bourgeois civic utopia. Conservatives fight anyone actually trying to conserve anything and liberals oppose actual liberalism.

The madhouse nature of our political language has a lot to do with the rise of mediocrity to positions of power. Maybe nature has withdrawn her favor and we are an increasingly stupid species. Maybe our system rewards the ignorant. Maybe there is some other reason for the dominance of simpletons in our politics. Stupid people communicate in basic language, so they have borrowed the crude juxtapositions of the last century and repurposed them into new partisan labels.

This is what makes this age so maddening to the sober minded. Even accounting for the fact that objectivity must yield to partisanship, there should be some truth content to the partisan rhetoric. Their partisanship should actually be in furtherance of their interests or the interests of the group they claim represent. The lies and misrepresentations should have some purpose. What’s the purpose of “Anti-fascism brought to you by Amazon World Services”?

Another possible explanation for all this is Fukuyama was right in a sense that we have reached the end of liberal democracy. There’s no way forward, so people rummage around in the past for the outfits of the ancestors and then go out on the public stage and reenact old fights. Politics is now a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

What Comes Next

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In July 1936, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were brought to Moscow to be interrogated for being part of Trotsky-led conspiracy. The pair had been part of the ruling triumvirate, along with Stalin, after Lenin was incapacitated with a stroke, but they had sided with Trotsky in the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death. As a result. their status had declined in the party. In 1932, they were found to be complicit in the Ryutin Affair and were expelled from the Communist Party.

Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, who later was head of the NKVD during the purges, to interrogate the two as part of a larger conspiracy involving Trotsky loyalists. Yezhov appealed to their devotion to the Soviet Union. They were, of course, subjected to physical and psychological pressure. Yezhov told Kamenev he had evidence against his son, which could result in his execution. Inevitably, they agreed to participate in what would be the first of many show trials against Stalin’s enemies.

The bargain Zinoviev and Kamenev struck with the Politburo was that they would testify against their comrades in exchange for their lives and their family’s lives. Stalin himself agreed to the deal in person, on behalf of the Politburo. They were tried with fourteen other defendants in the House of the Unions, which still stands today. All sixteen were found guilty of plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet officials. They were promptly executed in the basement of Lubyanka Prison.

This would be the pattern throughout the Great Purge. Political enemies would be turned against one another through a combination of terror, torture and the promise of forgiveness if they cooperated. The real purpose of forcing friends to denounce friends and family members to denounce other family members was to create an atmosphere in which no one could trust anyone. As Montesquieu noted, the motor that powers every despotic regime is a general fear of the ruler.

In the West, of course, the Left defended the trials as proper and necessary. In America, Progressive big shots signed onto a statement celebrating the trials. “The measures taken by the Soviet Union to preserve and extend its gains and its strength therefore find their echoes here, where we are staking the future of the American people on the preservation of progressive democracy and the unification of our efforts to prevent the fascists from strangling the rights of the people.”

You’ll note the familiarity of those words. Despite being written 82 years ago, the sentiments are the same as those of the modern Left. Other than the reference to the Soviet Union, those words would sound familiar on the college campus on in the halls of the New York Times. Modern Progressives see themselves as the defenders of the people against the enemies of democracy, by which they don’t mean elections, but rather the cooperative society of equals they imagine.

It is therefore no surprise that as the woke revolutions rolls on, the Left is now dreaming of show trials of their own. Instead of forcing their opponents to confess to imaginary crimes against the revolution, they want to drag their victims in front of the television cameras and force them to confront their racism. Undoubtedly, they will want to force these people to denounce their ancestors too. For good measure, maybe denounce some friends and family members as racists.

It may all seem ridiculous, but that is the way it goes with ideological movements running unchecked through a society. The original Bolsheviks who were eventually murdered by Stalin never saw it coming until it was too late. The Ukrainian farmers who supported the revolution never imagined the Holodomor. The Girondins, who had been the radicals of the French Legislative Assembly in 1791, became the conservatives of the Convention in 1792. They were purged and executed in 1793.

In this revolutionary moment, we went from protesting the police to toppling statues within weeks. Words like “plantation” have been erased from the language and companies are demanding employees submit what amount to loyalty oaths to the new woke religion. If corporate monopolies feel free to fire those deemed insufficiently enthusiastic, how long before they are demanding employees rat out fellow employees for speaking against anti-racism?

Revolutions are not just the violent replacement of the old with the new. They quickly become purification rituals. As Joseph de Maistre noted, “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.” This is what leads the radical to go from revolutionary to executioner.

Make no mistake. The New York Times to did not commission that demand for show trials because they needed to fill space. They have gone through their own form of the Ryutin affair, along with the rest of elite media. The Bari Weiss resignation letter and Andrew Sullivan’s final column are repeats of the Boris Nicolaevsky’s Letter of an Old Bolshevik, in which a loser in the great struggle for the revolution describes the divisions that formed in the revolution.

Take the time to read that New York Times piece. The writer is barely literate. The text reads like something from a hip-hop performer or maybe a slam poet. The words are not intended to convey literal meaning. Instead, the column should be read out loud to the sound of jungle rhythms. It is a call to war by the savages of the revolution, who can only be satisfied by the sight of blood. It’s the woke revolution’s declaration of war against western civilization.

This being a feminized age, even the vulgar revolutionaries lack the stomach to follow through on their desires. The woke women of the revolution can bully the soft men off the stage, but they will not be hanging anyone. Instead, this revolution will be satisfied to humiliate and harass. Women are much more vicious than men, so they will not have the decency to execute their enemies. Instead, ritual humiliation will be the end point of the coming show trials.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!;

The New Economy

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Something that has been brought to the surface by the recent economic shutdown is that classical economics seems to have run out of answers. More precisely, we are seeing things today that classical and neoclassical economics said were not possible, at least not in the long term. All over the West, but particularly in the United States, we are seeing contradictions for which there are no explanations. It’s as if we have crossed into a new world that operates by different economic rules.

The best example of this is the debt carried by governments. For a long time, it was assumed that debt levels approaching GDP were unsustainable. In war time or a national crisis, a nation could run up huge debts, but must immediately address those debts after the crisis had passed. This meant austerity or inflation. Today, Japan has debt over 200% of GDP. Greece is at 170% and Italy at 130%. The United States was at 110% before the recent economic calamity.

Those who cling to the old economics keep predicting that sovereign debt will be the downfall of the West, but that’s like predicting rain in Arizona. Eventually, the prediction comes true, but when is what matters. As the John Maynard Keynes famously said, “In the long run we’re all dead.” Maybe there is some point where these debt levels have to be addressed, but everyone used to know this was not possible. Within living memory, trillion-dollar Federal deficits were said to be impossible.

All around the modern economy we see things that should not be happening. America has seen 50 million people file for unemployment. The streets are empty during work days in most cities. It has been an article of faith that wide-scale unemployment would lead to unrest. Instead of marches by unemployed workers, we have riots by the delinquent children of the ruling class. They are not demanding jobs. Instead, the jobless are watching the shenanigans on television.

Similarly, the stock markets are doing the opposite of what economics has said should happen on the cusp of a long depression. Apple became the world’s first trillion-dollar public company on Thursday, as a rise in its share price pushed it past the previously unthinkable valuation. This is a company that makes luxury goods financed on retail debt. Their core market is now unemployed. How is it possible for a “Good Time Charlie” business to boom in a depression?

There may be ways to explain these and other phenomena within the old rules of economics, but those patches to the old theory just create new contradictions that have to be addressed with new patches. It may simply be that the West, having moved past scarcity, has entered into a new world of economics. Just as quantum physics takes over for classical physics at the atomic level, the new economics takes over for the old economics at the post-scarcity barrier.

An example brought up in this brilliant discussion (Video and MP3) on modern finance is the elevation of transaction-creation over capital formation. A company like Tesla has a ridiculously high valuation, despite its many problems, because it creates lots of transactions and creates potential transactions. Everything from government credits to complex financial instruments are spun off by the activity of the firm. As a result, it creates lots of downstream financial activity.

Compared to an old school car maker, Tesla makes little sense. The old school car maker was focused on building cars, which meant they focused on all of the processes to building a car, like supply chains and managing factories. As a result, they had massive balance sheets. The real value of the company was the massive array of assets it owned to build and sell cars. Tesla, in contrast, has a tiny balance sheet, as it is focused on generating economic activity.

The elevation of the transaction over capital formation is one of the unremarked aspects of the new economy. Wealth is now generated by either creating new ways to move information around the system or maintaining a gate through which information must flow to some other part of the system. In the new economy, information can be knowledge about some future transaction or the store of old information in a wealth containment vehicle, like money, assets, credit and so forth.

In the new economics, the demand for genuine innovation, the overcoming of scarcity in some way, is in low demand. Instead, the economy is dominated by middlemen who benefit from each transaction. Therefore, the innovator is one who comes up with a new way to accelerate the movement of information in the system, thus increasing the number of transactions. Facebook is worth billions not because it has a great product or service. Its value is in its ability to generate transactions.

Another aspect of the new economics that seems to contradict the old rules is the rise of credit as an asset. All over the global financial system credit sits on the books of banks, hedge funds and companies as an asset. The asset is taken at face value and often the nature of it is unknown. This was obvious in the mortgage crisis when debt holders had no idea what was in those mortgage pools. Credit is now just another store of information in the financial system.

In fact, certain types of debt are the preferred store of information. The financial system has an unquenchable thirst for US treasuries. Federal debt is now over 26 trillion, a number thought unimaginable just a few decades ago. When you add in unfunded Social Security and Medicare liability, the debt is multiples of that total. Despite this staggering debt load, United States treasuries remain the preferred collateral in the financial system. They are better than actual money.

An irony of this new post-scarcity economic order is that it seems to be evolving toward something closer to the old palace economies of the Bronze Age. All over the economy we see a great consolidation. Amazon is close to half the retail economy now. Five big banks control more than 90% of the financial system. The tech oligarchs are close to having a monopoly on the public square. In their respected spheres, everything flows into them and is distributed out as they see fit.

We have quickly moved from a situation where these new economic models were too fragile to regulate to a situation where they are too big to regulate. In fact, the phrase “too big to fail” is now just an accepted truth of the current age. Like the palace economies, these institutions are not here to serve society. American society now exists to serve these new institutions. As a result, these institutions are actively shaping our behavior to create transactions that serve their needs.

Whether or not this is sustainable is unknown. People who want to the think it cannot go on will find reasons to believe that. The answer though lies in whether this model can last in a world of informational symmetry. As automation takes over the economic system, will there be a way to create more transactions. After all, the robots will reach a point where they know the market value of all items before the market is set. No robot will be able to fool the other robots.

That is another aspect of the new economy that goes unexamined. It is just assumed that automation will idle the human assets the ruling class does not like. In realty, it will be the information class that suffers the most. In a world where financial transactions are conducted among algorithms on the block-chain, what is the need for guys working the phones in a brokerage? How would trades even happen if both sides know the future price of the item being traded?

As with anything new, there are more unknown things than known things. The new field of quantum economics is an effort to take methods and ideas from quantum physics to model economic activity. It starts from the observation that something like the efficient market theory contradicts the assumption that humans are rational and will attempt to maximize their utility. People know the odds, but they keep going to the casino anyway, buying sports cars and following new trends.

There’s also the possibility that reality has simply gone on holiday and will return to put all of this back in order. Some unknown crisis will reveal the massive cracks in the foundation of the current economic model. Everyone will suddenly snap out of the fog of plenty and rush for the exits. After all, the Bronze Age economic model was unable to hold up under the pressure of the Sea People. The current economic model may simply collapse under the weight of a billion Africans.

Media Update: The guys at Myth of the 20th Century had me on as a guest to talk about various things related to economics. I appreciate them having me on. They do a lot of interesting stuff, so I hope everyone will check out their material. Like so many, they have been condemned to the valley of the damned. That means no YouTube of Twitter, but you can download the latest episode here. They also have a Bitchute channel and a D-Tube channel.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!