The Great Mistake

Posted on June 16, 2021 by thezman

Note: I was on the Restoring Order podcast last night. It was a lively conversation about events of the day. The audio on my end was not good for some reason. It was like I was making an old fashioned long distance call. Patrick has me connect with Skype, which is probably the reason for the poor sound.

The renewed interest in the origins of the Covid virus is a good reminder of several threads running through the modern political discourse. The most obvious being the reactionary nature of the establishment Left. Trump pinned the blame on China, so the establishment Left made it their mission to defend China. This fit in well with their corporate paymasters, who are happy to wash the feet of the Chinese government in exchange for access to Chinese consumers.

Of course, that leads into another subplot to the modern age. The willingness to submit everything to the marketplace, real and imagined. This is a root cause of the current crisis in America. Just because it is good for the economy in the short term to do business with China does not mean it is good to do business with China, but in the hyper-marketized world of today, no one questions it. Like everything else, right and wrong is left to the market to decide.

The hyper-market also leads to another issue. When all that matters is the highest bidder, then nothing matters. In the case of Covid, many of the people responsible are Americans, who are doing business with China in order to get around the ethics rules in the United States. You see, when morality is decided by the highest bidder, things like patriotism are just another commodity. Even Ben Shapiro’s version of patriotism is just another item to bought and sold.

The Chinese have figured out that they can buy all the technological vigor and creativeness from the West. They just invite researchers from the West to work in Chinese labs with the promise they can follow their curiosity, free of the ethical limitations placed on them in the West. Manufacturers took the same bargain, except the promise was they could pollute the environment and treat the workers like it was the 19th century. Apple led the way on this decades ago.

This was something the Soviets always tried to exploit. Their interpretation of Marxism told them that Western capitalists cared only for quick profit, so they could be easily bribed. The West would sell the Bolsheviks the rope they would use to hang the capitalists. It did not turn out that way as in the 20th century morality was still a thing that operated outside the marketplace. Even capitalists felt a loyalty to their people and their country. Most of them did, leastways.

That was then and this is now. China is like a kid in a toy shop these days, as everything in the West is for sale at discount prices. Everything must go and no offer will be refused. Need a member of Congress who sits on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence? Short on cash? No problem! How about someone to run cover for letting a deadly virus loose on the world? You are in luck, as they are in stock and priced to sell! Everything must go!

All of this disguises a much more serious problem. Anyone familiar with Chinese business practices knows that following the rules is not their thing. You see, China has always been a culture that is organize around power. The people with power threaten severe punishment for breaking their rules. Success is usually defined by navigating around the rules, while avoiding detection by the powerful. Violating the rules is not just a necessity. It is a way of life.

This is why China is the world’s most prolific patent thief. It is why they are the world’s primary exporter of counterfeit goods, as well as narcotics. Nothing about these practices strike the Chinese as wrong. In fact, they think it immoral to respect the abstract rules and conventions that form the basis of prohibitions on making knock-off consumer goods and illicit drugs. Western ethics, as far as the Chinese see it, are just more rules to work around for fun and profit.

When the product is women’s fashion, it is tolerable. When it is the rules governing serious biological agents, then it is a different matter. Now we can add the handling of nuclear technology to the mix. The one thing we can be sure about with this story is that the Chinese are lying about it. The second thing we can be sure of is they are paying American journalists to repeat the lies. The way to bet is this nuclear “accident” is a lot worse that being reported.

A culture that prizes rule-breaking above all else is not compatible with technology that requires strict adherence to a specific set of ethics. When those ethics are rooted in a long cultural tradition, the conflict is even more acute. If you think Covid was bad, imagine a Chinese version of Chernobyl. Instead of giving the world a case of the sniffles, she starts pumping out radioactive waste. A society that is willing to pollute its own air is not going to flinch about dumping nuclear waste.

China has always been a coercive society. The central authority has total power and there is no way to challenge it. The West has always been based on persuasion, but willing to stoop to inducement. When truth telling does not persuade, then propaganda is used to persuade. When that fails, then offering rewards or punishments is what works. These two types of societies are not just alien. They are incompatible with one another at every level.

It is becoming clear that welcoming China into the global “community” was a terrible blunder by the West. Assuming the American empire figures this out, it will take a generation to reset the relationship with China. If the next lab leak lives up to the Covid hype, then generations of obsequiousness will prove to have been a great mistake of the empire. If it is something worse, then we will know that the truly great mistake happened in the fall of 1969.

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The Final Chapter

Posted on June 15, 2021 by thezman

Note: I will be on the Restoring Order podcast tonight at 7PM Eastern time. The show will run for about 90 minutes. You can watch it here. I also have a new post up behind the green door. This a review of the political movie Duck Soup.

The 2020 drama The Courier is one of those films that is remarkable for what it does not do, rather than what it does do. It is a straight forward drama unburdened by Progressive politics. It sticks fairly close to the original story, without inserting magical people or performing a sex change on the principals. In fact, all but two of the characters are white males. The two females are supporting roles. In today’s climate, that is something close to a miracle.

The story itself is familiar to those who grew up in the Cold War, even if you are not familiar with this particular story. It is the story of Greville Wynne, a British salesman turned spy, who traveled in and out of the Soviet Union in the 1960’s for business, but he was also carrying top-secret information. We get the familiar cat and mouse stuff that is a staple of spy movies, along with the human drama that comes from a reluctant civilian caught up in the spy game.

It is a solidly told spy drama with competent acting and directing. What makes it remarkable is what it says about the current age. There are people alive today who recall the events portrayed in the movie. Most Americans alive today lived through some portion of the Cold War. Despite this, that era feels as familiar as the Middle Ages or Ancient Greece. The Cold War West, at least the English speaking portion, is not just a different time. It is a different world.

The weird thing about the Cold War is that as soon as it was over, there was no reminiscing about it or how it altered society. It was so quickly forgotten that young people could be forgiven for not knowing it existed. Young people in America know more about civil rights stuff and certain events in World War II than they do about what happened just a few decades ago. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union has been hurled down the memory hole.

It is an odd thing, given that the Cold War was the longest American war. It lasted roughly from March 5, 1946 to November 9, 1989. Most people date the start to the speech given by Winston Churchill at Westminster College in Fulton Missouri during a tour of the United States. This is when he uttered the famous words “Iron Curtain” which became synonymous with the Soviet Union. The end, of course, is marked as the day the Berlin Wall came down.

For close to half a century, the United States was on a war footing. Rather than demobilize after the defeat of Japan and Germany, America retooled the entire nation to fight communism in general and the Soviets in particular. For two generations it was the superstructure of society. The economy, the culture and politics operated within the struggle against Russia. It is the American empire’s Peloponnesian War, except this time the democracies beat the Spartans.

One reason why this event was so quickly forgotten is that it appears to have been a necessary restraint on the worst elements in American democracy. Like a dog that got off the leash, there has been no turning back for those elements, suddenly freed from the restraints of the Cold War. The crusades against the Muslims were an attempt to put the crazies back on the rope, but it failed. Those crazies are now threatening to take over the whole country.

Every society has a portion that is mentally unstable. They are functional and can be put to good use, but they need structure. Religion has been the primary way to keep the unstable on the straight and narrow. With the decline of Christianity, mass movements in America have been the alternative. The various social reform movements in America, dating back to the 19th century were a way to give the unstable the structure they needed and put them to good use.

Of course, without a limiting principle, mass movements quickly turn into a disaster as the fanatics never know when to quit. They always look for some next step in their quest for salvation, The obvious example is how the temperance societies turned into outright bans on alcohol. Reducing public drunkenness was a worthy goal, but banning alcohol completely was lunacy in stilts. We are seeing this happen today with crazies rampaging through the streets, howling like lunatics.

That really is what the Cold War was for America. Without it, if the Cold War had never happened, America probably would have descended into anarchy and civil war by middle of the 20th century. The threat of thermonuclear annihilation forced the responsible to keep the unstable in their cages. It also gave these unstable people options into which they could express their fanaticism. The obsession with ancient grudges, for example, could be expressed as neoconservatism.

You could write the story of America as the story of fanaticism. The first waves of fanatics landed in what is now New England to build their paradise in the wilderness of the New World. They eventually conquered the rest of the continent in the name of one cause after another. Then they conquered the rest of the world, first in the name of democracy then to free the world of competing lunacy. With no more worlds to conquer, the fanatics are destroying themselves.

If you look around at the various tribes of lunatics in the pantheon of modern leftism, the quest for structure is clear. The Antifa goofballs are motivated by alienation and atomization. They are urban consumers with no purpose other than to consume. The females howling about male privilege are unmarried and childless, thus lacking the structure in which a woman can blossom. The Left is nothing but stray dogs looking for home, longing for the leash.

This is why the so-called conservatives wanted the war against the Muslims to be the new Cold War and why they rant about Russia today. As the late John McCain used to say, they want to be part of a cause bigger than themselves. A holy cause provides a reason to instill discipline. It may be what is behind the ruling class paranoia about imaginary white supremacy. It gives them a purpose and therefore a structure to their otherwise disorganized minds.

Like the Muslim panic, these new panics – and Covid can be viewed in this light as well – will fail due to a lack of reality. The Muslims were never a serious threat to anyone but themselves and maybe their neighbors. White supremacy is a figment of the fevered imaginations of liberal women who read too many bodice rippers. Even China is looking like a poor stand-in for the Devil. These are not real threats, so they can never be the organizing issue of a new American creed.

What may be happening is the end of one plot line in the American story. The fanatics who conquered the wilderness to build an empire are in the last chapter. The rest of the country is now tasked with how to wrap up this story line. Maybe it will be a new religion for the fanatics to join. Maybe it will be a reactionary response that relies on force to subdue the fanatics. Maybe it is a Hobbesian end for a people who suddenly realize they have no reason to be in the same country.

False Choice Society

Posted on June 14, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. When possible, the Monday post here will be related to the Taki post. Of course, there is the Sunday show behind the green door for those interested.

One of the underappreciated aspects of liberal democracy is that it always pits morality versus objective facts, always creating a false choice. Every public debate is between one camp that demand we do “the right thing” and another camp that insist on doing “the correct thing”. The right thing is defined as the moral thing while the correct thing is the factually accurate or effective thing. The choice is failure while on the moral high ground or succeed and be seen and inhumane or indifferent.

This false choice predates the rise and spread of liberal democracy, so it is not accurate to lay the blame there. The debate that evolved over economics that grew up out of the industrial revolution is the origin. The Marxists were never making an economic argument back in the 19th century. They started with a moral claim that capitalism is built on exploitation of the workers. This was inherently immoral so it must lead to class struggle, crisis and then revolution.

This lack of an economic plan of any sort should have been obvious, but the followers and Marx were not interested in practical matters. The appeal was always the morality of the program. It was the chief selling point. This was made manifest in Russia when the Bolsheviks seized control of the state. Suddenly they were faced with solving the sorts of problem governments are tasked with doing. They had no economic platform from which to work, just gobs of Marxist theory.

The reaction to Marxism was Austrian School economics. Unlike the Marxists, the Austrians had a very detailed analysis of economics. Their model explained the basics of how goods and services flowed through an economy. This factual accuracy made it possible to form public policy and test the result. Over the course of the Cold War, Austrian economics became the primary weapon against Marxism. It stripped communist economics of the claim to empirical authority.

The trouble with Austrian School economics is it also striped morality and group preference from public debate. Every want and desire had to be justified by an economic argument. Rotten results that may make sense according to the laws of economic could not be contested. The out of control consumerism we see, for example, just has to be tolerated. The spread of degeneracy cannot be opposed, because the market dictates what is right in society.

American society has been squeezed in this vice for a long time. One side makes arguments that make some sense from a moral perspective but are completely unworkable as a practical matter. The other side counters with what appear to be factually correct arguments, the results of which are unsustainable. Worse still, neither side has a way to counter the other. The result of this dynamic is a system that is morally indefensible but shaking to pieces by moral fervor.

Ironically, both jaws of this vice are built on false assumptions. The Marxists fall victim to Hume’s guillotine. The value of a good or service is no doubt the sum of the labor it requires to produce it. It does not follow that anyone in society or society as a whole should agree. The other jaw makes a different error, assuming that human beings act from economic self-interest. They can, but they more often act from biological reasons, especially group biological reasons.

The dynamic resulting from this false choice seems to be reaching an end point, where neither side is sustainable. The moral claims made by what is called the Left have veered so far into the ridiculous that it looks like satire. A century ago, it was easy to sympathize with the groups the Left claimed to champion. Workers being ripped off by unscrupulous employers had a strong claim. Men is bizarre outfits claiming to be a third sex are clowns no one can take seriously.

A similar fate has befallen the so-called Right. When massive global corporations are stripping people of their lights, often by funding street gangs to assaults people going about their business, it is laughable to defend the “free market” system that produced these companies. When state sponsored financial concerns are buying up houses to create new renters, in the name of capitalism, the so-called free market is just as ridiculous as the men in dresses.

Liberal democracy has become an octopus with its tentacles wrapped around various parts of society. One tentacle is the moralizers assaulting us with the latest fads from corporate HR. Another tentacle is consumerism strip mining the traditions and history, the social capital, that are the foundation stones of society. Another tentacle is finance capital skimming a bit from every transaction without adding anything back. Every tentacle has a corresponding one to help it fight off attacks.

That is the primary defense of the system. All critics are herded into this set of false choices the system maintains. If you do not like that state-sponsored hedge funds are hoovering up single family homes, you have two choices. One is you can throw in with the loons and their bizarre defense of bourgeoise decadence. The other is you can waste your time making an economic argument claiming that the “market” will solve the problem if we worship it more.

The point of democratic systems is for the public to have a say in how public policy is formulated and a veto over the final result. In reality, it offers false choices controlled by a narrow elite. The narrow elite hides in the shadows of a mythical beast called the general will or the invisible hand of the market. It is a curtain behind which stands the ruling class. In the end, it is looking like what Marxism and liberal democracy have always claimed to oppose.

The Struggle Continues

Posted on June 11, 2021 by thezman

This week has been nothing but a struggle. For some reason, the PC I use to record the show reconfigured itself one night. That meant all of my audio settings were set to the default. That meant I had to spend too much time relearning how to set them back to what I prefer. I think I got them back to pretty much where they need to be, but the audio may sound a little weird in places.

It was also hard finding material that I found interesting. Maybe it is just the summer doldrums setting in early, but life seems boring of late. Part of it is the media is busy making the Vegetable-in-Chief sound like a statesman, which is far less exciting than it sounds. The novelty of having a dementia patient in the White House has worn off and we are left with the reality.

That reality is that there was never any reason for Biden to be president, other than he was the only option they had to replace Trump. Once he scrawled what he thinks is his name on the executive orders they put in front of him, there was nothing left on the agenda. The long temper tantrum no longer has a reason, so the stasis of late empire decline is back, which means nothing happens.

The only potential for something interesting to happen is if they snuff out the vegetable and install Harris. She is revealing herself to be dumber and shallower than anyone imagined. She is fumbling the softest of questions from the most obsequious of reporters. It seems impossible, but she may have less cognitive function than her boss and he is close to brain dead.

All that said, in clown world there is always another act warming up off-stage, so something will come along to provide content. Now that the Covid restrictions are lifting, all of the pent-up mayhem from our vibrant community can blossom. At some point, the media will have to take notice of that reality. Even conservatives are starting to notice that diversity may not be a strength.

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.

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!

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Uptight Whitey
17:00: No Dignity (Link)
32:00: Libertarian Bashing (Link)
47:00: Immigration (Link)
57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th2qwSBy7ws

The New Reactionaries

Posted on June 10, 2021 by thezman

Way back in the golden times, when Barack Obama was president, it became obvious that Team Obama had no affirmative reason for his administration. Everything they did was tied to some past grievance. It was like they were working form a long list of boo-boos the Left had suffered going back to Reagan. Every initiative seemed to be linked in some way to what the Left perceived to be a failure. It was as if they had a secret list of grudges that they were determined to avenge.

For example, the Iran policy never made much sense on its own. The so-called conservatives tried to scream “communism” at it for a while, but that did not make it any more rational. Then they claimed that one of Obama’s controllers had personal ties to Iran, so she must be an anti-Semite. In reality, the Iran policy was about the old wound from the Carter years. The old lefties around Obama blamed that for Reagan winning in 1980 and sending their world into a tailspin.

The Russia policy was another example of how an ouchie from the 1980’s still haunted the minds of Team Obama. Given how the Left has made Russia the universal bogeyman it is easy to forget that Team Obama was determined to make Putin a trusted ally in 2008. They had Clinton present Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a red button with the English word “reset” on it. You see, they were going to do relations withy Russia as they always should have been done.

The entire first term of the Obama administration was built around settling old scores like this from the last quarter century. Even his signature issue, health care, was overwhelmed by the need to address the slight from 1993. The final bill was rooted in two objectives. Getting something passed, thus avenging the 1993 failure, and spiting the people they believed were responsible for the original failure. The final bill looked nothing like what the party promised for decades.

It has long been a left-wing slur that all opposition to them is reactionary. Their opponents are not trying to solve problems or address some truth, but instead they just want to rollback reforms and return to some imaginary past. The more cynical want to rollback reform so they can continue to exploit the masses. The Left has always used the word reactionary as a way to dismiss opponents. By dismissing the person, they felt they could dismiss their objections.

What has happened over the last several decades is that the American Left has become completely reactionary. It has no purpose for holding power other than to hold power and prevent change. You see this with Team Biden. They have party media organs run stories like this one about Russia. You see, Biden does not have to be in control of his faculties when dealing with Putin. He just hates the man and that is all that is needed when dealing with Russia.

The Left is the moral center of our democracy, so as they have grown increasingly reactionary, everything orbiting around them has followed. So-called conservatism has not had a new idea since the Contract with America. Instead, they just rhetorically oppose whatever the Left is saying at the moment. Of course, that is always limited to economics and war mongering. Conservatism stopped being a cultural force in the 1980’s, so it has nothing to say on those matters.

In fact, you can probably look at the bizarre cultural fads whipsawing American society as a reaction to the collapse of conservatism. Into the 1980’s, the Right actually opposed the Left on cultural matters. They never won, but they did fight. The conservatives quit on their stool in the 1990’s and ever since the Left has been poking them with one more bizarre fad after another. “Seymour, try poking them with the tranny stick. Maybe that will get them to fight back.”

The only thing that matters to the so-called conservatives is making sure their racket keeps them in the lifestyle they feel they deserve. That is why they never muster a discouraging word about anything. To question the status quo is risk their position, so they are intolerant of any dissent. Both the official Left and official Right are now in a defensive crouch. The razor wire fencing, which remains in place, and the soldiers guarding it, has become a symbol of our reactionary ruling class.

American liberal democracy has reached an end point. It was built around a Hegelian struggle between two sides that believed in the same promised land. One side was always straining at the leash, trying to rush forward. The other side was on the other end of the leash, being pulled forward by the enthusiasm of the other. In Buckley’s formulation, one side was the train, and the other side was standing in front of the train yelling stop, but never really meaning it.

That struggle ended at the end of the Cold War. With the end of the long twilight struggle with communism came an end to the long struggle within the dynamic of the American ruling class. Now they are literally just a collection of old men haggling over old slights. The one thing they agree upon is nothing can dare threaten their status atop the system, even the collapse of the system itself. Otherwise, they are now defined by what they oppose and what they used to oppose.

Hacks

Posted on June 9, 2021 by thezman

The term “standing head” is a newspaper term that goes back to the days when the papers were printed by typesetters. It means regular or recurring content, such as the headline for a feature like “Box Scores” in the sports section or “aspiring rapper” in the crime blotter. The term is used to so often that the old typesetters would have it as a block ready to use when needed. It also came to be known as a trope, stereotype, or a euphemism that was commonly used in the news.

In the modern age, the word “hacked” has become a standing head, in that it is something like a catchall answer for all sorts of things. If a celebrity gets drunk and posts N-bombs on Twitter, she claims she was hacked. If a company loses customer information, they claim it was hackers. Whenever someone does not want to take responsibility for their own mistakes, they fob it off on hackers. Hackers are the digital version of Loki the trickster.

One reason for this is that the modern media seems to select for narcissistic dullards at all levels of the system. This is not just the airheads who read the teleprompter on television during news shows. Throughout the media, the system rewards those willing to fall for the most ridiculous nonsense if it comes from authority. The more gullible and naïve, the greater the access. The more willing a “reporter” is to repeat verbatim what he has been told, the greater the access.

When some official tells a “reporter” that the problem is due to hackers, the reporter never questions it. After all, they are selected for their obsequiousness, so they never question authority. They are also too stupid to see the hacking claim is ridiculous, so even if they were feeling rebellious, they would not know what to ask. That was a big part of the Russian hacking nonsense back in 2016. Even those who play the skeptic role in the media were too dumb to see the absurdity.

It appears we have another version of that involving the Colonial Pipeline shutdown form a couple of weeks ago. The company claimed they were hacked by wily Russians, probably the same Russians who were in league with Trump. They had no choice but to pay those hackers millions in Bitcoin to get unhacked. The story was obviously rather fishy, but no one in the media questioned it. After all, hackers are the universal hobgoblins of this age, so why question it?

Now the FBI is peddling a story that is so ridiculous that it should come with a laugh track, but it is being promoted by the media. Here is a tweet from a simpleton in the White House press team. claiming the FBI got the crypto back from the hackers by using their special James Bond skills. This is a follow up tweet from the same simpleton claiming the hackers used a server in California to store their ill-gotten loot from the Colonial Pipeline hack.

The absurdity of this is a good example of the credulity of the media. We have these super-villain hackers from Russia, who foolishly leave their crypto lying around on American servers for the FBI to locate. This is right out of the bad Hollywood script department where the villain always makes a rookie error, like leaving part of the Death Star easily accessible to the enemy. In this case, we have people expert at cracking security, but use no security in their own operation.

Then we have the claim the FBI recovered the exact same Bitcoin that was paid to the hackers by the company. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of how crypto works knows this is a nonsense claim. In order to know that the FBI would have to tie the address to a person and that person to the crime. If they have proof that the person is the culprit, then they can just arrest that person. There is no need for their dramatic caper where they seize the crypto from the server stash.

Probably the most laughable bit of the story is these super villain hackers from Russia were using a Coinbase account. Again, everyone with the slightest knowledge of crypto knows Coinbase is mobbed up by US security. In order for them to remain in existence and become a publicly traded company they had to give the FBI and NSA free access to their system. Yet these super-villain hackers from Russia decided to use the NSA’s preferred crypto vendor to fence their ransom money?

Of course, people who have used crypto exchanges like Coinbase know that they use multifactor authentication. That means you need more than just a user name and password to access your account. Typically it means entering a code that is texted to the phone registered with the account. That means the FBI had the phone number and user credentials of the hackers. That only makes complete sense if the hackers were located at Langley or the Hoover building.

Everything about this story from the FBI, DOJ and the company is utter nonsense, but none of it matters. In our precious democracy, no one in the media dares utter a discouraging word about anything from official circles. Even if one of the stooges in the media got rambunctious, they are too stupid to know who to ask about the claims made in these stories. The mass media is now fully staffed with toddlers, trusting everything they are told by the people in charge.

The old Hoffer line about mass movements become rackets in America gets overused, but it is amazingly accurate. Democracy in America is just a racket, an ongoing bust out enabled by an army of hacks in the administrative state. Real hackers are never caught, because they work for the people running the system, like the pirates working for the crown during the age of sail. Meanwhile, the hacks in the system are always ready to look the other way, as long as the paycheck clears.

In fairness, calling it a racket seems unfair. Most of the people involved are simply too stupid to run a racket. Most of the people involved are like Geoff Bennett, the guy from NBC in those tweets. He is a gullible doofus who checks the right boxes on the casting form, so he gets to play White House reporter. Anyone with something on the ball is boiled off or they are cast on the other side of the dynamic. They get to make up official whoppers for the media to report. This is the hack-a-rama.

La Gran Mentira

Posted on June 8, 2021 by thezman

One of the selling points of liberal democracy is it is supposed to create a marketplace of ideas, where the proponents debate their proposals. Politicians get grilled by an adversarial media on their positions. Like the market for goods and services, the marketplace of politics is supposed to weed out the crackpots and zealots, so the people can choose between sane options. In practice, there is no marketplace of anything in liberal democracy, just approved positions.

This Breitbart story is a good example. It is an interview with Senator Marco Rubio, who has been assigned the job of selling an anti-populist message as Trumpian. It is the old Karl Rove big tent nonsense about needing to sell the party to nonwhites. Because of what happened in 2016 and 2020, they have retooled the message. Instead of focusing on Trump’s loss, they are focusing on their anomalous gains down ticket and crediting that with the Hispanic vote. It is the new Big Lie.

Now, Rubio is as dumb as a goldfish, so he is never going to question the script he has been provided by his handlers. He also plays the Hispanic role well enough for the white people being targeted with this trick. Of course, he has been reliably open borders and supports endless wars of choice. You would think the interviewer would mention his fierce opposition to Trump and his coziness with the neocons, but that never happens in the highly scripted media environment.

Another bit of nonsense the interviewer did not bother to mention is that Trump did not do all the well with Hispanics. In 2004, Bush the Minor got 44% of the Hispanic vote according to studies after the election. McCain got 31% in 2008 and Romney got 27% in the 2012 election. Trump also got 27% in 2016. In 2020 it bumped up to 31%, despite four years of pandering to Hispanics. His black support jumped more than his Hispanic support over the same time.

This is easily obtainable data. Rubio has been making this claim since Karl Rove stapled a new cover page on his 2012 GOP Autopsy last October, so there has been plenty of time to check the numbers. You would think a reporter would ask Rubio about the facts, but that is not how it works. Rubio is there to sell the Big Lie and so is any reporter granted an interview with him. The whole point of the Big Lie is to keep repeating it unchallenged until it seems like the truth.

Of course, the point of the Big Lie is to keep whites from noticing what is happening to their country. That was the real danger of Trump. His voters could see with their own eyes that everyone at his rallies was white. His voters were allowed to discuss immigration, trade, and the endless wars. Trump was a lousy President, but he was a dangerous catalyst. He got white people talking about and noticing things that threaten the ruling regime, which is why they hated him.

Another angle to the Big Lie in this case is that it is intended to separate Trump from the party voters. Taken at face value, the claim here is that Hispanics liked the Republicans running down ticket, but not Trump. You see, that is why Trump lost but the party clung to enough seats to avoid a blowout. The Georgia Senate run-off has been hurled down the memory hole. The point is to repeat the claim that Trump the person was the problem, so he has to go.

The fact is, Trump was always the white candidate. His support was over 90% white and he won in 2016 by tapping into disaffected white voters in states the Republican Party had abandoned decades ago. He was unable to build on that support in 2020, because he spent four years pandering to nonwhites. Putting aside the gross irregularities in the election, Trump failed to deliver to the people who gave him the improbable 2016 election and it hurt him in those key states.

That is the point of the Big Lie. The people behind it are only focused on one thing and that is preventing white people from noticing what is happening. The absurdity of having a neocon stooge like Rubio sell the lie is part of the magic. Whites are supposed to come away thinking Rubio was won over in the Trump years. After all, how else can you explain this rabid anti-Trump guy now praising Trump? Why would the pro-Trump site Breitbart be going along with it?

This is why the Republican Party must be destroyed. It serves no other purpose than to prevent whites from accepting demographic reality. That reality is this. About one percent of the GOP vote is black. Another 5% is Hispanic and another 2-3% is coming from other nonwhite groups. Generously, ten percent of the GOP vote is from nonwhites and this has been true for generations. No amount of outreach or wishful thinking is changing that mathematical reality.

The Democrat Party is the antiwhite party. About 27% of their vote is from whites, while the rest is from nonwhites. That number continues to drop. In 2008 whites were 32% of the Democratic Party base. In 2000 it was 34%. The combination of whites heading for minority status and the Democratic Party becoming viciously antiwhite is collapsing their white support. There is a chicken and egg debate here as to whether they are driving whites out of the party or responding to demographics.

This is ultimately what the Big Lie is intended to conceal. Despite the painting of Trump as a racist, his support with nonwhites improved. If he had been clear about whose interests he served, he not only would have won more white votes, but he would have won more nonwhite votes. Osama bin Laden was right. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” That is what the Big Lie seeks to conceal from the people who need to hear it the most.

The Panic Culture

Posted on June 7, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is the weekly Taki post. It is another take on the Covid panic and ties in well with today’s post. For the audiophiles, there is a Sunday podcast up behind the green door. Of course, if you buy me a beer, you get my secret writings.

Now that the Covid panic is finally winding down, it is a good time to look at how it quickly became a religion for many people. It is fair to assume that most people looked at Covid as a blend of public health and public policy. They do not know much about either topic, so they trusted what they were told. Others, however, embraced Covid and the rules around it like a new religion. The rituals and statistics quickly became the central point around which they organized their lives.

One of the first signs of this happening were the personal testimonials. By the late spring of last year, the Covidian had stories to tell. “I know of four people who have died from Covid this month” was a popular one. Despite the statistical improbability, millions were telling us about their personal war with Covid. The victims became younger as the age realty became apparent. Finally at the end, we are getting stories about the unvaccinated dying despite being healthy.

The joiner always personalizes her latest fetish. On the one hand, it lets her be the star of the story. We saw this after 9/11, where millions of people swore they knew someone in the towers. It is also a personal testimony to show how the believer has now given herself over to the faith. It is a show of piety. Of course, it also insulates the believer from having to explain herself. It is an appeal to authority in which her alleged suffering makes her the unquestionable authority.

Then there is the suffering that comes with every civic religion. Sacrifice is an important part of all religions. Membership is not supposed to be easy as the value of anything easily attained is always low. In the case of Covid, the goofy mask wearing, standing six feet apart and other nonsense was quickly and mindlessly embraced. It was a public sacrament, like taking communion. Of course, this gave the Covidian a chance to lecture the rest of us about the need to respect their piety.

The ascetic is an important part of every religion. The vegetarian makes a big show of not eating meat, because their role requires it. Similarly, the keto adherent will let you know she does not eat carbohydrates. Food-based cults are always popular with ascetics, because all of them require abstention. In the case of Covid, the constant slathering of hand sanitizer was the sign of their discipline. The Covidian never missed a chance to perform the ritual before every activity.

It is not an accident that the same people who tote grimy canvas sacks to the grocery store were the first to embrace the rituals of Covid. All civic religions in the modern age come with these piety symbols, usually with a corporate logo. Public television stations made millions giving members tote bags with the logo on them. Note that American sports teams quickly rushed out branded face masks. In a world of strangers, displaying your corporate overlord is important.

Hoffer famously pointed out that “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” He was wrong about this, in that our rackets and cults tend to come with a corporate sponsor. In our highly atomized and corporatized existence, the corporate logo provides legitimacy. The Apple logo replaced the Darwin fish, for example. The Church of Covid became a money making racket, a cult and it was sponsored by our corporate overlords.

Every religion has its apostles, and this was no different. The army of pseudo-intellectual poseurs that spring up in the media are always there to add authority to the latest narratives. All of a sudden, anyone with a connection to medicine or immunology was preaching from a digital street corner. The fact that none of them knew a thing about this disease or public policy did not matter. All that mattered is they were there telling us to repent or fear the wrath of Covid.

Probably the most obnoxious aspect of the civic religion is the martyrs. Because democracy turns deadbeats into civil servants and civil servants into priests, every politician quickly became a martyr to the cause. Every state with draconian Covid laws has a governor who publicly nailed herself to the cross. You see, they really hate passing these crazy laws, but they are suffering for all of us in this twilight struggle against the great threat to humanity known as Covid.

It is worth noting that Covid seems to have blended several strains of social pathology into a single event. We have the civic religion, but there is also the primitive fear of nature and nature’s wrath. Then there is the panic. This is what really gave the whole thing its juice. Like the satanic panics or the day care panics or the witch trials, the Covid panic caused most people to suspend their sense of disbelief. The lack of evidence became a weird proof of the danger.

Finally, what the Covid panic may indicate is that these ritualized panics will become more common and intense. If people will believe the flu is an extinction event, then they will believe just about anything. It is the old expression, people who believe in nothing will fall for anything. America and the West is now populated with gullible, deracinated primitives looking for a reason to exist. The future may be one crisis after another, each more bizarre and ridiculous than the last.

A Lazy Return

Posted on June 4, 2021 by thezman

The show is back this week and fair warning, it is not a great show. Like a lot of people, I am now in summer mode. Last summer was cancelled by our rulers and their Chinese handlers, so I am looking forward to having summer this year. I am not a summer person, but I do like the slower pace. Here in Lagos, the masks are dropping and the bareface is running free again, so it is feeling very summery all of a sudden. Even the homicide rate has got back to normal. Past normal actually.

It has been interesting watching the struggle for normalcy. At the stores, about 60% of people still wears masks, depending upon where you go. The ghetto was hit and miss on the masks all along, but the beautiful people places were energetically compliant with the masking and distancing. That is where you see the strongest resistance to the dropping of the masks. I suspect the mask could become a piety symbol for these people, which would be a good result of the Covid panic.

The workplace is where things are getting weird already. I was on a call with a client the other day and they are still doing the work at home thing. The boss wants everyone back, but he has been getting a ton of resistance. The plan is everyone has until the fall to get back to the office. I know a couple of women who are quitting rather than go back to the office, as they like being home with the kids. They realized that extra stuff and having a career was not a good trade-off.

In my office building, I would say close to half the tenants will not renew. Some went out of business, but others figured out that they could save the rent and let their people work from home, so that is the plan. There is a lot of vacant office space in this part of the world, so commercial real estate is heading for a long recession. That is a cyclical business anyway, so it probably does not matter. A few years ago, we were the only tenant in our building for a few months.

It is easy to see why the Covidians are fighting the return to normalcy. There will be no way to do pull this stuff again after people drop the masks and go back to living relatively normal lives again. They can scream themselves hoarse about variants and new waves, but there is no going back to masks now. The fact that Florida exists has discredited this forever. The Covidians will have to find a new reason to justify tormenting the public so they can feel like heroes.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: The Panic (Link) (Link) (Link)
22:00: QAnon (Link) (Link) (Link)
37:00: Little Green Shoots (Link)
47:00: It Will Not End Well (Link) (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Link) (Be Like Me)

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/d8wYbF-q9nw

Electric Elite

Posted on June 3, 2021 by thezman

Most everyone has looked down at the fuel gauge and suddenly realized the tank is very close to empty. Maybe it is the idiot light going on as you pass the sign that reads “last stop for food or fuel for X miles.” The worst one is when this happens in a rural area or at night. The prospect of being stranded on the side of the road for a very long time quickly crowds out other thoughts. It is a terrible feeling. Almost all of us are conditioned to make sure this never happens.

Running out of gas used to be a common thing in America. In the early days of the automobile, care did not have a gas gauge and gas stations did not always have gas, so it was a common scene. The first “gas gauge” was a marked stick the driver would stick into the tank. Until very recent, gas stations used this method to test how much water was in their tanks. Eventually, more sophisticated solutions were invented and then manufacturers install them at the factory.

Running out of gas is not very common these days. For starters, we have gas stations everywhere people live. They are about 120-thousand gas stations in America. If you live in an urban or suburban area, finding a gas station is not a challenge. The cars are also vastly more efficient today than the old days. Even sports cars get over 20 miles per gallon, so when the light comes on, you have about 40 miles to find gas. It is why it is very rare to see someone walking down the road with a gas can.

This old concern will become a feature of life shortly. Every car maker is determined to abandon the internal combustion engine for electric in the next decade. All of them have a five year plan to ditch the IC engine. Even the sports car makers are planning to drop the old engine and use electric motors. The roar of the engine will soon be replaced by the high pitched hum of the motor. Whether we wanted or not, the electric car will be forced onto American roads over the next decade.

The problem is that electric cars need to be charged. Right now, there are about five thousand fast chargers in America. The term “fast charger” is a little bit of inside humor the EV people enjoy. It takes about forty minutes to charge a car on a fast charger, so the word fast here is sarcasm. There are more slow chargers available, but slow should be interpreted as glacial. Those slow chargers take hours to charge. They are only useful as at-home options or at office parks.

Replacing the gas stations with fast chargers is no easy task. There is the cost, obviously, even if one assumes they could be profitable. That is not an assumption you can make at this point. The economics of EV charging stations are wildly different than those of a normal gas station. You do not need a lot of space for cars pulling into the pumps, fueling up in five minutes and then pulling away. You need vast spaces for cars pulling in and parking for an hour as they charge up the batteries.

Then there is the power grid. The current estimates say the cost to upgrade the power grid for electric cars is between four and ten trillion dollars. That is not money to be spent all at once, but it is real money. In modern America, most streets look like the surface of the moon and our bridges are literally collapsing. Like all aging empires, America is struggling to keep the plates spinning. How realistic is it to think we can upgrade the power grid over the next decade for electric cars?

Like the automobile makers, the nation’s utility companies have five and ten year plans for upgrading their part of the power grid. One cannot help but appreciate the Gosplan nature of this project. Like the car maker’s five year plans, the utility company plans always has a line in there for free money from the Federal Reserve. Unlike the car makers, the electric companies have not secured their free money. Slipping tax breaks into the code is a lot easier than printing trillions of dollars.

As with the Soviets, the central planners in America just assume whatever they dream can become a reality. The Soviets were sure they could find the right math to replace the role of prices in the market. Once they conquered that problem, the system would literally run itself. American central planners are sure they can find the right moral language to make their dreams pop into existence. If electric cars become who we are then all of the problems will solve themselves.

The electric car fetish is a good example of how markets are an illusion, at least in the broad sense the Austrian school economists argued. There never was a market for electric cars and there is not one now, at least in the organic sense. Instead, the market has been manufactured by government policy. Massive subsidies to the production side and subsidies to the demand side have created the market. Take those away and Elon Musk is back selling monorails to midsized cities.

It is also a good example of how elites have the dominant role in society. As with other things like immigration and the Covid panic, your opinion is never solicited, and it is never wanted. These are decisions made by a small cluster of policy makers at secret retreats and over cocktails at parties you will never attend. The American elite has decided the electric car is the future, so that is that. The fact that it could turn out to be another disaster like Covid is not a worry.

The argument against central planning has always been a simple one. It is impossible for the planners to account for all of the variables. Even the most basic of human systems is maddeningly complex. The truth of this is never a deterrent to the elites, especially those who are sure they are on the right side of history. The comically insane outcomes from the Soviet system never deterred the planners. The metric system did not teach American elites a lesson either.

Finally, the electric car fetish is a good example of what happens when an elite class enters into decline. They become rapacious and impractical. On the one hand, they seek to enrich themselves as quickly as possible, because no one in the elite feels a loyalty to the elite class or the society over which they rule. Everything becomes a smash and grab. On the other hand, they have become so insulated from the society over which they rule, they can no longer see their own folly.

America probably needs to spend five trillion over the next ten years to get the infrastructure back to first world standards. We need a Marshall plan for the roads, bridges, and utility systems. An aspiring elite would focus on that, rather than frivolous nonsense like electric cars. It would also be more scrupulous about who gets the money for the projects. That is not the future. Instead, it will be abandoned EV’s next to massive potholes and collapsing bridges.

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Monthly Archives: June 2021