Lesson Of Trump #2

Posted on January 19, 2021 by thezman

One of the ironies of the Trump phenomenon is that his most ardent supporters and his many opponents focused on the man, when it was never about the man. Ten years ago, no rational person would have picked Donald Trump as the face of populist discontent, much less the most consequential political figure in generations. When he ran, it was assumed it was a publicity stunt, as he had spent his life as an entertainment gadfly, finding ways to draw public attention to his real estate schemes.

Yet, as the Trump era draws to a close, both his supporters and his enemies have developed a political cult around the man. His supporters are sure he has some last trick up his sleeve to do something to save the country. His opponents are sure he has some trick up his sleeve to steal their democracy from them. So much so, in fact, they have turned the tiny internet fad called QAnon into a subversive conspiracy. There are more anti-Q fanatics now than genuine followers of it.

The thing is, Trump was always an opportunist. In fact, he is the extreme expression of the opportunist, which is how he went from Queens landlord to one of the most famous and successful real estate developers in the world. Real estate, especially the business of high-profile resort properties, is about opportunity. You find a deal before everyone else and cash in before the next big thing. Trump got rich finding the next big thing before everyone else realized that it was the next big thing.

Trump got into politics for all the same reasons everyone else runs for office in a modern liberal democracy. He wanted affirmation. Unlike the narcissistic robots that fill up both parties, Trump saw an opportunity outside the system. The swelling ranks of disaffected whites, unhappy with both parties, looked a lot like a neglected property with tremendous promise, if the right investor came along. Most important from Trump’s perspective, they were a motivated seller.

The first eager seller was Ann Coulter, who was one of the most prominent celebrities to get on the Trump train. Well before anyone thought Trump was a serious threat to the Republican nomination, she was saying he would not only win the nomination but win the general election. Queen Ann completely bought into Trump being the daddy she had been waiting for her whole political life. She went to war for Trump the man, believing he was the answer.

She was not alone in thinking Trump was the savior. The alt-right that had been forming up on-line in the Obama years also went all in on Trump. They convinced themselves he was the American Pinochet. Mike Enoch of The Right Stuff jumped on the Trump train with the same enthusiasm as Ann Coulter. Richard Spencer was a full-blown MAGA man. The alt-right went to war for Trump in the 2016 election, so much so that even Hillary Clinton felt the need to notice them.

The trouble is, Trump was never that man. He could never be that man. He could never have won the nomination and the general election if he was that man. Only an opportunist with no regard for what he was saying could have gamed the system the way he did in 2016. Unlike Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot who came before him, Donald Trump won because he was not constrained by the truth. Like every opportunist, he was only focused on exploiting the opportunity.

Of course, when this reality became too obvious to ignore, many people jumped off the Trump train and became droning critics. Like jilted lovers they could not stop talking about how the mean old orange man did them wrong. They were not wrong to point out Trump’s faults. Their error was in thinking he was their savior or that any man can be the savior in this political system. They were sure and remain sure that you can vote your way out of the defects of liberal democracy.

There are three lessons here. One is that Trump could never have existed without the realty of the masses that supported him. He was just a front runner, a guy who jumped to the head of a wave of people coming to terms with the fact that we are entering a new era of politics. With or without Trump, those people exist and will continue to exist with the same grievances and concerns. Just because the dull knight vanquished their champion, does not mean they cease to exist.

Another lesson is there is no way to reform this system. The sort of person who can win an election is either a careerist sellout like every member of the GOP or an outlandish outsider with no ability to govern. The only way forward for dissidents is to focus on building outside the system. A third of all adults and close to half of white people no longer think the system is legitimate. Every day the people in charge convert more people to this view with their authoritarian actions.

The final lesson here is that the old political labels are no longer relevant. That is what the Trump era demonstrated. It is no longer about conservative versus liberal or red team versus blue team. It is not socialism versus capitalism. It is about those who live in the lie of liberal democracy and those who live in the truth. If you live in the truth, you not only oppose the people running the system, but you also oppose the system that allows these criminal aliens to rule over us.

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Lesson Of Trump #1

Posted on January 18, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday post is up on Taki. The general theme this week will naturally be about the installation of The Pretender onto the throne. I also have a movie post up behind the green door. If you are not a subscriber, you need to be.

As the military begins the process of installing The Pretender as the figurative leader of the American Empire, it is a good time to take stock of what has happened over the last five years. From the perspective of political psychology, the world all of us inhabit today is a vastly different one from the world of 2015. This includes the dissident right, which has been transformed by the Trump experience. In the before times, politics was all shades of gray, while today it is in black and white.

An obvious example is Conservative Inc. The Obama years were tough for those rackets, as it became clear to many conservative people that these guys cared more about how the Left thought of them than in advancing their issues. Compounding it was the refusal to address the failures of the Bush years. Even so, they really thought they could keep peddling hyper-violent Progressivism to conservatives, as long as they decorated it with pictures of Reagan.

That racket smashed onto the rocks of the Trump experience. Traffic for the old school neocon sites collapsed. The Weekly Standard folded. These people revealed themselves to be a blend of old school confidence men and petulant, nasty liars who hate the people they claim to represent. They still have an audience of chumps unable to smarten up, but otherwise Conservative Inc. has no audience. They exist because the Left thinks they are useful for now.

Further to that point, Libertarian Inc., a subsidiary of Conservative Inc., has also been exposed as a long con. The stripping of our ancient liberties by global enterprise should have been a great cause for libertarians. After all, systematically stripping people of their ability to exist is pretty much what libertarians claim to oppose, but the major organs were silent. A combination of graft and perfidy kept them focused on echoing Progressive talking points about the evil Donald Trump.

This has revealed something else. The dissident right is not ready to be the Dissident Right, despite the growing numbers. This is a problem that dates to the 1980’s when Conservative Inc. started to purge dissenters from their ranks. Instead of working to build new structures outside of and opposed to official structures, dissidents kept trying to get back inside the official tent. The result has been a ragtag army living on the land outside the walls of the city. It remains so.

Probably the biggest change, one we see evolving in front of our eyes as the military is called in to install The Pretender, is that the parties are a fiction. Until very recent, most dissidents thought the way forward was to work through the two-party system and get “our guys” into office. Again, this dates to the 1980’s. Buchanan tried and failed to unseat the neocon Bush. Perot tried and failed with his third-party to cleanse the land of the neocons. Trump tried and failed to reform the Republican Party.

The reason all these efforts failed is the party system is a fiction. The core of each party holds the same opinions on the important issues. They are bankrolled by the same collection of billionaires and international interests. The parties have tentacles that reach into various camps, but the main body of the system serves the people who bankroll American politics. A politician with close ties to the CCP can maintain his seat because the Chinese are a major backer of both parties.

This is the big change for dissidents. Trump was the last opportunity to keep dissidents engaged in the fiction of democracy. His own perfidy and his treatment by the political class has disabused dissidents of their faith in the system. The people in the streets at the Epiphany Uprising were not there because they still believe in the Republican Party, Donald Trump, or the system itself. They were there, being cheered by tens of millions from home, because dissidents lost their faith in the system.

Further to that, it is finally dawning on dissidents that what motivates the Cloud People is not what motivates the Dirt People. For generations, the Right insisted that the Left is driven by the same logic as everyone else. This was always false, and part of the long con played on the public. This is, in part, why conservatives lost every battle in the culture war. The people on the other side of the barricades, celebrating their victory over us, are not us and they do not think like us.

This is probably the most important lesson of the last five years that is finally sinking into the thick skulls of the dissident right. The Cloud People are not motivated by greed or a lust for power. They have those things. They are motivated by a sense of identity that starts with a hatred of the Dirt People. Their sense of self begins with not being anything like the people over whom they rule. This is why they hated Trump. He was an intruder from the other side injected into their world.

While many are disappointed with the Trump years and Donald Trump the man, the last five years have been a clarifying experience. The anger, emotion, disappointment, frustration, even the violence, are the result of a fog lifting. Five years ago, most people were sure about politics. Now that the fog has lifted, people are looking around and seeing it was always a big lie. The people who perpetrated these lies are on the other side of those barricades, giving the rest of us the finger.

Rambling Man Vol 1

Posted on January 15, 2021 by thezman

Whenever I go on a livestream or do the letters show, I get e-mail from people saying that the podcast should be more conversational. Instead of reading and commenting upon articles, it should be more freewheeling. These are probably a matter of taste, but there is some logic to the suggestion. Listening to someone on a show or podcast is like being in a conversation with them. The good interviewers are the voice of the audience, asking the questions the listener would ask the guest.

As an experiment this year, I thought I would do a show a month where I pick a few topics from the moment and say whatever comes to mind. No prep. No notes. No set up using a news article. All I did this week is take three topics that came up in my daily life and riff on them for the show. There is no editing, other than to remove weird noises that come up when you record from home. People may have noted the sirens from time to time in the background of shows. Welcome to Lagos.

The one topic of the three that I could probably talked about for hours is just how our rulers expect society to function under this new regime. One thing I did not mention is the fact that somehow things have not fallen apart already. It is going on a year now with the lock downs and riots. They say half of all restaurants are gone for good and the small retail sector is wiped out. The airlines are at 50% capacity and hotels are below that in terms of occupancy. How is the economy still standing?

Now that The Pretender is about to be installed, I am assuming the Democrats will start demanding everything open back up. They are that shameless. Still, they spent a year convincing their drones that Covid is the black death. Lots of people are now deeply invested in being afraid. Turning the economy back on will not come easy. That and the damage is mostly done at this point. If you are a business that survived this, then you can keep surviving. It will take years for the lost to recover.

The Pretender’s script writers say he will ask for a trillion dollar relief bill, but given the mess that is Congress, that will not happen easily. Mitch McConnell is a massive d-bag to everyone, not just his voters. He will use every trick he can to hamstring it. The Dems are a fractured party right now and we’ll see that clearly over this bill. Even if they pass it, you can run a country this way. Throw in their efforts to criminalize dissent and our rulers look like they are carelessly smoking on a powder keg.

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. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: An Albanian Communist Temptress
22:00: Contemplation On The Madness
42:00: The Number Of The Crazy
57:00: Closing

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

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https://youtu.be/dTHJa9vtQhI

It’s Not All Bad News

Posted on January 14, 2021 by thezman

There are several remarkable things happening in response to the massive push back from Americans to the oligarchic coup we are seeing unfold. The one getting the most attention, of course, is the hysterical reaction by the political class. Their rhetoric is so out of sync with reality it suggests mental illness. One thing not getting noticed is how Conservative Inc. appears to collapsing right in front of us. Look at the flagship of that racket, National Review, and it should have tumbleweeds on it.

Their first big think piece in response to the epiphany protests was something so bizarre that it could have been from the Babylon Bee. Put aside for a second that most people in America have no memory of Reagan. These are people endlessly howling about the need to court nonwhites and that nonwhites are their future. The typical black is 27 years old and the typical Hispanic is 11 years old. Talking about Reagan to these people is like talking about Frederick the Great or Napoleon.

Look into that piece and the writer’s cure for what ails the country is the exact thing 75 million people voted against twice. Being the party of global enterprise at the expense of the culture and spiritual welfare of the people is why the Republican Party is headed to the dustbin of history. Tone? The GOP has been obsessed with tone policing everyone for generations now. The reason people voted for the loudmouth is they are sick of being told they cannot speak out against what is happening.

Of course, the slovenly Kevin Williamson has been pounding away at Trump and Trump voters in service to his paymasters in the uniparty. What you have to admire about Williamson is that he is loyal to his paymasters. Most pens-for-hire show a little reluctance, as their conscience tends to gnaw at them. Not old Kev. He was bought to be a foaming-at-the-mouth Trump-hater back in 2015 and he stays bought. The Iranians use guys like this to clear mine fields.

His most amusing post of the bunch thus far is this one, where he lays out his big strategy for the collection of rent boys and house slaves called the conservative movement. Down in the middle he writes, “The big technology companies are the most successful thing going economically in the United States; the Europeans, who have nothing to compare to a Facebook or a Google, resent them and fear them; Democrats hate them, blaming Facebook for the election of Trump in 2016.”

This is what most people used to call a bald-faced lie. The Democrats love the tech oligarchs every bit as much as National Review and for the same reason. They both get gobs of cash from the Silicon Valley oligarchs. The tech companies are systematically erasing anything resembling dissent to the official orthodoxy. They are even erasing people Williamson would call allies. For old Kev, the only allies are those who can keep his refrigerators stocked. He’s happy to be an organ grinder’s monkey.

Of course, you see nothing on National Review concerning the most relevant issue of the day, which is tech censorship. For a collection of people who amusingly insist they are a movement, you would think they would have something to say about the thing everyone is discussing. The one exception is the piece they get from Victor David Hanson, but he has no role in the editorial stance of the site. In fact, he is notable in being the last actual conservative writing for the site.

Of course, Conservative Inc. is not just National Review, but it has always been the canary in the coal mine. The more vibrant and active sites are shifting into the populist camp as they realize there is no future with the National Review types. The average age of a NRO reader is over 70 now. You’ll note that most of their stories get few comments and that is because many nursing homes no longer provide free internet access to their patients.

All of this is good news. The National Review type has always been a hindrance to the genuine right-wing, because they operate as the “good” conservative. That is, the Left anoints them as the opposition, so money and attention flow to them. Meanwhile, the genuine opposition to the Left is begging for scraps and attention. Stripped of that credibility, it is no longer possible for them to play that role. The money will continue to dry up and National Review will go the way of all legacy media.

All of this points to something much bigger. What has unfolded since the election has opened the eyes of millions of people. Despite the rhetoric from their cult leaders, even many lefties are getting nervous about what is happening. They live close enough to reality to know what lies ahead if we keep on this pace. For Conservative Inc., it means they no longer have an audience hoping that a settlement can be negotiated with their friends on the Left. Principled surrender is no longer an option.

Techno-Democracy

Posted on January 13, 2021 by thezman

A popular way to understand the problems of the present is to compare current times to the past. It is popular to say there is nothing new under the sun. That is certainly true regarding the human condition. The mix of people changes over time, but the types of people are fairly fixed. What changes is material progress. There are new things, and those new things are often very important. Those new things create new challenges for those old ways of thinking and acting.

For example, advances in weaponry changed how people related to the people in charge of their society. The crossbow suddenly made it very easy for one man to kill another man from a distance. Even a farmer could quickly learn to use the weapon and be deadly accurate with it. The traditional bow required training and was not as accurate as the new weapon. Suddenly, an angry peasant could take out the king, which changed how the king looked at the peasants.

An example in our age is how technology has made it nearly impossible to know who is making the laws. We have a labyrinth of laws regarding immigration, but no one knows who offered up these laws or when many were created. Exactly no one has ever heard their congressman or senator promise them to increase immigration from Somalia, but it happened. Someone in the law-making system tucked that provision into a bill that no one read, and we suddenly have infinite Somalis.

The truth is, the reason we have the open borders system we have is that a million rats in the system have been gnawing away at the borders for generations. A defense bill will have tucked within in it an obscure passage that removes some provision of a previous bill on immigration. In the farm bill some other gremlin will slip in a provision that replaces that one removed in the defense bill. The old bill that became law years ago is still there but amended over time to be the opposite.

The irony of this is that the argument in favor of liberal democracy is that it opens the law-making process to the public. Laws are proposed in a public forum by legislators, who are elected by the people. Those laws are then debated and voted on by those representatives of the people. If the people do not like how their representative voted they can vote him out of office. Unlike palace intrigue and laws passed by the whims of a king or dictator, it is all out in the open.

This would certainly be true a century ago. The reason is the bills were written by hand and read out loud. Legislators had private correspondence, but it was also written by hand and carried by horse. The only way to conduct business in a parliamentary body was in person and out loud. It also meant the bills were short, as no one was going to write a 6,000-page bill by hand. An American could sit in the gallery and literally watch the laws be written and debated in the Congress.

Today, we have no idea who is writing the bills. There is a vague sense that it is the army of squires in Washington, taking dictation from monied interests. The names of these people are unknown to us. In fact, they are unknown to the legislators who vote on the bills presented to them. None of the bills passed by Congress are read by the men and women voting on them. They simply get an executive summary and calls from their donors as to how they are supposed to vote.

It is not just law making where we see the democratic process overwhelmed by the technological progress of this age. Here is an example from the courts. A century ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment protections only apply to your immediate dwelling. They do not extend to your land. At the time, this meant that the government could walk onto your land and look around for crime. They could not go into your house, but they could walk all around it.

At the time, this seemed perfectly reasonable. You can’t reasonably ask someone to not look at something in plain sight. Modern technology, however, has now taken this bit of common sense and turned it into another tool of the police state. The government can install cameras on your property and record your comings and goings. A century ago, this outcome was impossible to imagine, so no one imagined it. Technology does not just make dreams come true. It makes the unimaginable into reality.

Here is the thing. We have no idea who decided that the court permitted this new intrusion on our privacy. Clearly, the court did not say it is okay for the government to install cameras on your property. Someone in the system looked for a way to do this and found that court ruling. No one knows who that person is because it is probably a collection of people. Like the rats eating away at the border, these rats gnaw away at other aspects of civil society.

A reason America is in crisis is that no one knows who is responsible. The left-wing rioters we saw in the summer were not acting irrationally. Sure, they were mostly rental mobs, but let us suppose they were motivated by legitimate grievances. Where can they go with them? To whom would they make their appeal? The Right is now facing the same dilemma. Where do they go for a redress of their grievances? Who can they blame for the censorship regime we have now?

Since aggrieved citizens cannot put a name to the problem, they are left with attacking the system itself. Technology plus liberal democracy has ended up with a war between the system and the people. Technology has made the democratic process a black box that even the legislators do not understand. It is a system in which no one is responsible for anything, so the system itself becomes responsible. The only option for the disgruntled is to smash the system.

The Big Lie

Posted on January 12, 2021 by thezman

The expression “the big lie” gets tossed around a lot in modern times, usually defined as the means with which the Nazis fooled the people. In reality, the expression was coined by the most significant man in history to explain how the people who tried to prevent the catastrophe of the Great War ended up being blamed for it. The big lie is a falsehood so big that no one would think it possible to state such a lie. In other words, it is believed because it is so outlandish it must be true.

One of the many ironies of this age is that the people the most significant man in history accused of employing the “the big lie” have spent generations since that time redefining it to mean Nazi propaganda. In popular culture, the Left will apply the expression to some inconvenient facts pointed out by their many enemies. They claim a famous propaganda minister associated with the most significant man in history is the guy who coined the expression to describe his own efforts.

That is the real trick of “the big lie” that gets missed. The audaciousness of it distracts the attention of people. Instead of focusing on the facts of something happening in society, their eye moves to some other related thing. It’s no different than how a magician uses distraction to get the audience looking one way while he some other sleight of hand. Even though you know he does not possess magical powers, you are amazed nonetheless.

We see this in how the term “fascist” is used in this age. The Left in the West has always accused their enemies of being fascists, even when there were no actual fascists vying for political power. For a period, fascists and communist were locked in a bitter struggle for the soul of socialism, so it makes sense. In America is never made much sense, as we never had fascists or a communist party of note, but for the Left everywhere, it is always monkey see, monkey do.

Even so, through the Cold War, a popular way to make sport of the Left in America was to mock their absurd use of the word “fascist.” It was only the hardcore cranks who used the term, so even the conventional Left would mock them for it. The left-wing crazy was the guy making his own clothes and growling his own food, so he was not a prisoner of the fascists running society. The joke relied on the fact that America was a bourgeois society, so we did not have fascists or communists.

Of course, the term is everywhere now, as the rulers and their loyalists wage jihad against our ancient liberties. The excuse for their excess is they are fighting fascists, so it is okay. They have internalized their mythology about themselves and the world around them to such a degree they really think Donald Trump was some sort of fascist dictator plotting to seize power. They are sure that the peaceful protest at the Capitol was their version of the Reichstag fire.

This is the modern version of “the big lie.” Look around at what is happening and it is as close as any western society has come to fascism in 80 years. The people stripping the rights of Americans are not government employees, but corporate powers. The vitriol from the politicians may be the signal to act, but the people trying to destroy Trump and his supporters are corporate actors, not the state. Corporatism is a foundation stone of fascism and that is what is usurping the authority of our system now.

In other words, the big lie here is that the people allegedly under assault are the people wielding power. That is a lie so big that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” The people with a monopoly of power are crying out in agony as they crush their enemies. Their claims to be on defense are a lie to distract from the fact they have assumed total power. Amazon can offer murder for hire to prime members and no one can stop them.

This is the “the big lie” in neon. The people who are engaging in a modern version of fascism are claiming to be the great enemies of fascism. This leaves the genuine opponents of genuine fascism without a language they can use. Calling what is happening Marxism is so stupid only the dullards accept it. The communist would not have allowed the tech giants off the leash. They would not have been slavishly in support of the financialization of the economy.

Another part of this big lie is that over time the fans of the most significant man in history have accepted the premise of the big lie as their big truth. That is, fascism exclusively means opposition to nonwhites. The result is we have the self-proclaimed fascists reinforcing the premise put forward by the actual fascists that they cannot possible be fascists, because they are not white. In this version of the big lie, the fascists have created an enemy and put him to service in their cause.

The thing with a lie, big or small, is it is like trying to conceal a body. Like a body after a murder, no matter how well you hide the truth, no matter how many layers of lies you throw on it, its absence is noticed. This is the problem facing our new fascist overlords as they scramble to consolidate their power. Whatever this new system is, people know it is not democracy or constitutional government. No amount of lying can change that realty and eventually, there will be a word for it.

The Game of Life

Posted on January 11, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is a post up behind the green door on the movie Pulp Fiction, which clocks in at #95 on the top-100 list. There is a post up at Taki on the change we are seeing in the political climate.

What has gotten the most attention on this side this past week is the hypocrisy by the ruling class and their histrionic flunkies in the media over the peaceful protest in the Capitol last week. The first response of normal people is to note how the same people raging about these protests were celebrating violent riots in the summer. In what remains of the internet, people have been posting examples of people in politics or the media saying the exact opposite of what they said a few months ago.

Normal people have been programmed to think hypocrisy is important, even though it is clearly not important to the people in the ruling class. Normal people are taught that a civil society operates by a clear set of rules that apply to everyone. When the people in the ruling class have one set of rules for normal people and a different set of rules for themselves, normal people get mad. The ruling class, however, does not care, as there is one set of rules for them and another for the rest of us.

This focus on hypocrisy has left something unnoticed. That is the increasingly overwrought behavior of our rulers. They have become a collection of hysterical drama queens, who carry on like the world is about to end. This is the one thread connecting all of the insanity we have experienced from our rulers recently. Their reaction is wildly out of proportion from what is expected. The actual news, when you think about it, is always about their emotionally charged reaction to mostly normal events.

If we go way back to the 2016 election, the political class reacted as if the most important man in history had come out of his cryogenic chamber in Paraguay and seized control of the government. Instead of analyzing why it was there preferred option was rejected and making the normal adjustments, they concocted wild fantasies about invisible Russians and carried on like teenage girls for four years. It has already been forgotten, but they really believed that Russia stuff.

The Covid stuff is another great example. The local tyrants have used this minor public health issue to feature themselves in a drama of their own creation. In this story, they are heroically fighting the great virus enemy. They are rallying the people in a great cause to prevent the extinction of mankind. The media slavishly reports on their great deeds as if they are out slaying dragons or facing the Black Knight. The buffoonish governor of New York even had a book written about his heroism.

What should be a minor public health issue has been turned into a great drama acted out by emotionally unstable people. According to the CDC, over 250 million people have been tested with 22 million confirmed cases. Total deaths in 2020 were in line with what you would expect, given the country’s demographics. A little higher due to Covid and a little higher due to the reaction. Sober-minded people would have treated this as a very bad flu season. Our hysterical rulers treated it as the end times.

The most recent example of the overwrought behavior by our rulers is the reaction to the protest last Wednesday. The “storming of the Capitol” was really just a bunch of people walking past the cops and going inside the building. Sure, juvenile pranksters livestreamed themselves doing shenanigans, but other than the Pence aide murdering Ashli Babbitt, it was nothing more than a frat house prank. It was nothing like the Kavanaugh protests just a short time ago.

The reaction by the rulers is as if a rebel army laid siege to the Capitol and set fire to most of the city. The FBI has been tasked with hunting down, in the most dramatic way, all of the protestors. Their media lackeys are now calling the Capitol protestors “insurrectionists” and demanding they be destroyed. Instead of calling it a protest, they are calling it a siege. Again, the image is of a foreign army attacking the center of the empire, like the Gauls sacking Rome in 387 BC.

For the inauguration they have now deployed army and national guard units. The media lackeys are bragging that they will be prepared and enthusiastic about using lethal force if any protestors turn up that day. Pelosi has been trying to get the Army to remove Trump from office. She apparently thinks he could launch a nuclear attack. We have come a long way from the America where citizens were expected to petition their government for the redress of grievances.

What we are seeing is the reaction of people who are no longer engaged in normal life, but instead are playing the game of life. They are immersed in a live action role playing game operated by juvenile narcissists. The ruling class gets to imagine themselves as world historical figures and every event puts the world on a knife edge. Their actions will determine the outcome. The entire ruling class is swept up in these false dramas that they get to play, while the rest of the country suffers.

Another clue is how they echo one another in the use of dramatic language to describe mundane events. One uses some over-the-top language then the rest of them are repeating it, maybe adding on some more dramatic language. The “protest” went from “riot” to “insurrection” to “horrendous insurrection” in a few cycles. They are competing with one another to show their loyalty to the group. What matters to them in this game is the opinion of the people in the game, not the rest of us.

America has reached a point where the ruling class and its various support structures is no longer connected to the people over whom it rules. They are inside Versailles or the Winter Palace, imagining what is happening outside. Meanwhile, outside, the world is nothing like the rulers imagine. The people outside look at the palaces and try to understand what is happening inside, based on the noises and behavior they see from the organs of the state.

That really is the root of their anger. The outside broke though the wall and gently reminded them that life is not a game and they are not great men. In the game they are always the winners, but in real life they are judged by their actions. It may take a while, but they will be held accountable. This is what angers them. They hate this reality, which is why they cling to the alternative reality of their fantasy, but reality does not go away when you stop believing it.

Sad And Angry

Posted on January 8, 2021 by thezman

Popular revolts in occidental countries tend to build slowly and then have a series of tremors before there is some clarifying event. The reason for this is people unhappy with their conditions tend to look for simple answers first and then apply themselves to getting relief from the system within the rules. They identify the problem or what they think is the problem and then go to the people in charge with it. In modern liberal democracy it means engaging in the political process.

Then either by serendipity or a confluence of events driven by various actors, there is an event that causes the scales to fall from the eyes of the people. In isolation, the attack on the Bastille was a non-event, but in the context of the historical moment, it was revelatory. The 1980 strike at Gdańsk Shipyard in Poland is a more modern example of a small event ushering in a paradigm shift. People thought one way before the event and they thought a different way after it.

Events this week will prove to be one of those times where people quickly went from one view of their world to another. There have been many left-wing and wingless protests in Washington. Just a few years ago the Left filled the Capitol with protestors over the Kavanaugh nomination. Those come and go and they are forgotten because they have no connection to larger trends under the surface. It is just part of the way the inner party torments the outer party in Washington.

The storming of the Capitol opened a lot of eyes. The people in the media demanding mass executions of Trump supporters were just six months ago gloating over left-wing mobs burning cities. Six months ago, official Washington was telling us the cops were a problem and now they are demanding they open fire on protestors. When a black criminal died in police custody, they demanded vengeance. When a white veteran is murdered by a cop on video, they think it great fun.

This week has been clarifying, because it has confirmed what people have been slowly realizing at a subconscious level. The manufactured outrage of George Floyd would have passed unnoticed, if it had not been followed by the orchestrated campaign by corporate America to promote hostility to white people. If that had passed, then people may have forgotten about it, but that was quickly followed by the Covid lock downs and then the election fraud. The road to epiphany now seems clear.

Many on this side of the great divide have predicted we would end up at this point eventually, but no one has every relished it. The events of this week were not just an epiphany for the MAGA-hat wearing normies. It has been an eye-opener for many on this side, as well. Unless you have something wrong with you, you held out some small hope that the prediction would turn out to be wrong. That hope is gone now and with it comes a bit of sadness over the finality of it.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In a way, it is like the passing of an old relation who has been sick for a long time. Long ago you reconciled yourself to the inevitable and in your own way said your goodbyes. The waiting, however, becomes part of your normal so when the time comes there is a hole. Into it flows the remaining sadness at the finality of it all. That’s where we are now. What comes next is getting on with the new tribal politics of the future, free of nostalgia and sentimentality.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Sad And Angry
22:00: Strangers (Link) (Link)
37:00: The China Syndrome (Link)
47:00: Reality Never Dies (Link)
57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

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https://youtu.be/lNQ0R3PbT1M

The Blood Of Patriots

Posted on January 7, 2021 by thezman

Yesterday, Ashli Babbitt was shot in the neck and died while protesting inside the Capitol with other protestors. A group of angry Trump supporters had got into the building and were making a racket. This is not an unusual occurrence. During the Kavanaugh hearings, Democrats organized mobs of screeching women to harass Republicans in the halls of the Capitol. Party media was there to celebrate it as the purest expression of democracy. It was power to the people time.

That was not the case yesterday, according to the media. Instead, it was a direct threat to “our” democracy. This is a bit ironic in that the protests are over the obvious corruption in the election system. The direct threat to democracy is the people demanding their elections be fair and honest. That’s why Ashli Babbitt was inside the Capitol making a racket. Her whole life she had been told this was how citizens angry at their government demand redress when the system fails.

That is how popular government is supposed to work. The people expect their government to be responsive to the will of the people. When they don’t like that they see, they vote for different people to hold office. If those politicians ignore the people, then the people go bang on their door and demand redress of their grievances. The politicians then come out and address their issues. That’s not it works now. Instead, they open fire on the people like they did yesterday.

Ashli Babbitt was not some drug-addled degenerate, like we saw last summer, when the ruling class unleashed their mobs on us. She was a veteran, serving 14 years in the US Air Force, and she was a high-level security official throughout her time in service. She was like most of the people at the protest, in that she had bought into what she was told about America. So much so she signed onto serve in the military and go overseas in various deployments.

Like most of the protestors, she was there because she had spent her life playing by the rules and defending those rules. She was there because the people in charge of maintaining the rules have been violating those rules. They ignored the official corruption in the 2016 election and they laughed about the grotesque fraud that was plainly obvious in the 2020 election. Like the rest of those protestors, she was angry that the politicians were not following the rules.

For her trouble, she died in a pool of her own blood inside what is supposed to be the people’s house in America. It is a bit ironic that a citizen exercising her rights would be murdered by an agent of a corrupt system that is now infringing on her rights. Murder is the right word here. The man who shot her was under no threat and was on the other side of a locked and barricaded door. The murderer was part of Vice President Pence’s security detail. The video, for those interested, is here.

There will be no charges against the murderer. Unlike the cops involved in the George Floyd case or any number of others, this coward will not be fired from his job or face criminal charges. He will probably get a medal. He will not have his face and address plastered all over the media, so that he can be attacked by mobs. There will be no media orchestrated campaign to defund the police over this. Most likely, the whole thing will be put on mute so that the public forgets it.

Of course, unlike George Floyd, Ashli Babbitt will not get three nationally televised funerals and be treated as a fallen hero. That honor goes to drug-addled criminals who overdose in police custody. In this America, patriots who served their country and exercise their rights get gunned down by agents of the state. This woman, this patriot, bleeding out in the halls of the Capitol, murdered by an agent of the state, is the perfect image of what has gone terribly wrong in America.

No doubt, millions of decent people who sympathized with her cause are saddened by this terrible tragedy. It did not have to come to this. This was not an accident. This was not a terrible misfortune. The people on the other side of that door, the people who celebrate the murderer of Ashli Babbitt now, they did this. They created this crisis that threatens to plunge to country into a death spiral. They had choices and they had plenty of warning, but they refused to listen and now Ashli Babbitt is dead.

Be angry, but also remember Ashli Babbitt. The Republican Party will not remember her or even mention her name. The media will work hard to make sure you forget her name and how she died yesterday. Dissidents need to remember her so we never forget why we are angry and why we are dissidents. We are angry with a system that thinks it is okay to murder citizens who play by the rules and exercise their rights as citizens to petition their government for redress.

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independent for 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Money Talk

Posted on January 6, 2021 by thezman

The magical fairy dust known as Bitcoin is back in the news as its price has soared to a record high in the last few weeks. Currently one bitcoin is worth 35,000 USD, which is close to double its value of a month ago. If last spring, when the Covid panic hit, you decided to get into Bitcoin, thinking it was a safe haven for your money, your return would now sit at 700%. Of course, if you were an early adopter when the price was a few hundred dollars, then you are now quite rich.

Of course, whenever Bitcoin is on the rise, the paladins of cryptocurrency are out evangelizing about the glorious future where currency is no longer controlled by those evil bankers rubbing their hands in their secret lair. Karl Thorburn has been making the rounds on this side of the great divide. Here is a podcast he did with Greg Johnson last week that is worth a listen. Bitcoin is popular among dissidents, because the bankers cannot get you deplatformed from it like they do with credit cards.

One problem with Bitcoin is right there in those huge gains. There are wild swings in its value as people rush in and out of it. Three years ago, Bitcoin had a similar surge then lost half its value over the next six months. A similar boom and bust happened the following year. As a means of exchange, it suffers from the same problem that all commodities suffer. That is, it tends to increase in value over time, but it also suffers from the cyclical tendency we see in these booms and busts.

One reason for this is that all cryptocurrencies are designed around a math problem that gets exponentially harder to solve as time goes on. Put another way, each new coin costs more to produce than the previous coin. If the first coin cost X, the next coin costs x+n with n being the slight increase in cost to produce it. If the first ten coins average out to 10 USD and the next ten are 20 USD, then the average value of each coin has gone up by 50% just by the mere fact of their creation.

Demand for Bitcoin, however, has tendencies that do not always correspond with the supply of Bitcoins. That explains the cyclicality. For reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent value of Bitcoin, demand rises, so the price rises with it. At some point, people with Bitcoin begin to cash in and the price starts to fall, leading to a rush for the exit as we see with any asset bubble. Like hard money, Bitcoin has cyclical tendencies that get increasingly wild over time.

The other problem with Bitcoin, in terms of it replacing dollars or euros as a currency is that it is not actually money. It can be used as a medium of exchange, but only because governments tolerate it for now. Otherwise, it lacks the key attribute that has defined money since the Phrygians started producing coins. It lacks the backing of a sovereign who will enforce its value. Legal tender is an item that must be accepted as payment and that is enforced by a government with a monopoly of force.

Now, this does not mean that things like gold or precious stones cannot be used in exchange, but they are not legal tender unless the government of the jurisdiction where the exchange occurs agrees to it. In the United States, for example, it is illegal to demand payment in gold. The legal tender of the United States is those bits of metal and paper we carry around with us. A check or credit card is just involving a third-party (the bank) to pay the merchant in dollars.

Now the crypto-evangelists always respond to this point by saying that governments can’t do anything about cryptocurrencies. That’s the beauty of them. Because their creation is independent of government and their value is set in the marketplace, the state cannot prevent people from using Bitcoin. They will also note that Bitcoin is anonymous, so the state will have a tough time tracing the source of Bitcoin, even if they try to crack down on its use and possession.

This argument has several problems, one of which should be obvious. The government can simply arrest people for using Bitcoin and throw them into prison. If merchants are told it is unlawful to accept Bitcoin, they stop taking Bitcoin. There is a reason no merchant accepts gold dust for payment. Not even a pawnshop will accept gold as a form of payment and most of them trade in raw gold now. One necessary quality of money is that it be widely accepted for payment.

Governments have a primarily interest in protecting their monopoly on the supply of legal tender. This goes to something called seigniorage. This is the profit the sovereign makes from the issuing of money. In the days of gold coin, the miners of gold brought their bullion to the king’s mint, where it was turned into coins. The value of the coins was more than the value of the bullion. This is one way the king could finance his government, without having to physically control the gold supply.

In modern times, seigniorage has evolved into something else, namely the stability of the money supply, especially in relation to other currencies. A stable money supply makes for stable credit markets. The standing and legitimacy of a government is determined by the stability of its currency. This is why central banks have become the most important institutions on the planet. It is also why the major central banks will never cede control of the currency to cryptocurrency.

Note that stability does not mean fixed. The supply of money in its various forms can expand and contract. When the Fed changes interest rates, they are changing the supply of one or more forms of money. This is done in concert with the European Central Bank within an agreed upon structure. This means the supply of money is stable in that it is predictable. In the Covid crisis, everyone knew the central banks would aggressively expand the money supply in response.

The response to this is usually something about the immorality of government manipulating their currencies to finance debt. While true, the morality of the crypto advocates is not the morality of the people in charge. Since the people in charge have a monopoly of force, it is their morality that matters. The golden rule of power is that no one is ever talked out of retaining power. The United States gives up its control of the currency when someone more powerful takes it away.

There are other problems with crypto that prevent it from becoming anything more than a digital tulip bulb. Money, by definition, is self-verifying. You can examine currency and determine if it is authentic. Crypto requires a third party to validate the coin. That is done by examining its provenance. Each use becomes part of the coin’s validation, so it carries the history of its usage. The argument here is that government cannot access this, but the threat of prison will easily solve this problem.

The bottom line is money is about power. A ruler powerful enough to issue his own coin is powerful enough to enforce its use. The more powerful the king, the more valuable his coin, even outside his realm. This has always been true and will remain true. The reason the dollar is the world’s reserve currency is that the rulers of the American empire are the most powerful and the most predictable rulers on the planet. The Euro is the second reserve currency for the same reason.

That said, crypto is not worthless. For dissidents looking to get around the financial restrictions placed on them by agents of the state, crypto is a solution. If you are looking to invest in a risky asset, Bitcoin is a good play. Over time it will keep going up, but in between it will be a rollercoaster. If you like that action, then crypto is a cheap way to get it. If you want to anonymously fund a dissident, crypto is also a good way to give someone money without easily exposing your identity.

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Monthly Archives: January 2021