Everything Is Broken

Posted on September 30, 2021 by thezman

Way back when the government kicked off the Covid panic, smart people pointing out that shutting down the world to bend the curve was not a cost free way of addressing the problem. In fact, it was a very expensive and risky solution to a problem that was best addressed through traditional means. The world has a pandemic every 15 years and a severe one at least once a generation. Humans have figured out to tough out these naturally occurring events.

Shutting down the world and making people stay home from work is a novel invention, so there was no way to know what would happen. Human societies are tough, so it took a while for the problems to manifest. Initially, those who could work from home worked from home and those unemployed were supported with subsidies. This could never be a permanent condition, so we have been trying to transition back to normalcy for the last six months, but things are nowhere near normal.

The Brits have gasoline shortages, and they are facing a winter with spiraling natural gas prices, because the energy supply chain is a mess. Keeping people at home meant keeping people out of their cars, which collapsed fuel consumption. The trucks and truck drivers were put to other uses and now that demand is returning, they suddenly have a shortage of trucks and truck drivers. This will soon hit other parts of the supply chain as demand suddenly increases for goods and services.

In the US, ports are a mess as they face similar supply chain problems. The ports in America are weird systems. The labor is unionized, but the unions are pretty much run by the government under an array of consent decrees. Demand for labor is driven by the ships in port needing to be loaded and unloaded. The stevedoring firms hire when they need to unload a ship, but they keep few fulltime people. They simply draw from the pool of longshoremen that operate at the port.

During the shutdowns, fewer ships came into port, so fewer people were needed to unload ships and fewer trucks were needed to cart the goods out of the port. That is why ships are stacked up at the ports now. The system for unloading those ships had atrophied during the pandemic, so it is now over-capacity. This leads to shortages and price disruptions throughout the economy. For example, America has been suffering an aluminum shortage for close to a year.

A good example of how throwing wrenches into the system has unpredictable long term effects is the automobile industry. When the government shut down the country, the travel industry was flattened. The car rental firms did the prudent thing. They liquidated their car fleets. After all, if you make your money renting cars and no one is renting cars, those cars are direct hits to the bottom line. In order to weather the storm, they sold off their fleets and furloughed their staff.

The trouble is a big source of used cars is the car rental industry. They get cars on programs from the manufacturers. They can be three, six or nine month programs where the company takes the new cars for a monthly fee and then returns them to the manufacturers after the term of the program. Those cars end up in the new car dealer lots as discounted used cars. Look around the car lots in America and what you see is lots of empty spaces where cars used to sit.

Once things opened up, the car rental companies went looking for cars, so they went to the used car auctions. Other shortages have made it impossible for the manufacturers to get cars to their own dealers, much less supply program cars to the rental fleets, so that left the used car market. Used car prices are now spiking to record levels because the supply chain is a mess. It will take years for this to normalize, and the cost will be in the tens of billions.

Of course, everyone who buys food has noticed that food is suddenly much more expensive and there are weird shortages. Like everything else, the broken supply chain is the main culprit. Those trucking companies suddenly put out of business by government fiat did not sit around waiting to open up again. They fired their staff, sold off their trucks and found other ways to survive. Rebuilding the many small links of the supply chain will take years and show up in higher food prices.

In a modern liberal democracy, every event requires a response, and every response requires a response and so on. The smallest pebble tossed into the water can potentially result in a flood. In this context it means government jumping in to mitigate the consequences of their fix for something else they broke. Inflation will get calls for more spending, which will get more inflation. The central banks will then try to redirect that inflation from goods to assets.

In other words, the shutdowns have created a dynamic of chaos that will take years to settle out, assuming no further shocks. The Biden administration is promising another meteor strike with their Build Back Better nonsense. You see, they broke everything and now see it as a chance to remake the world in their image. When crazy stupid people want to try to make the world, the only thing that can follow is chaos. We may be at the cusp of an age of unimaginable economic madness.

This is a good example of something said by Will Durant. “Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.”

In the fullness of time, after the West is a ruin of its own making, this age will be remembered as a gross and sustained violation of that sentiment. If over the last thirty years the people in charge had done nothing but entertain themselves with their toys, none of this would be happening. Instead, they kept trying to prove nature wrong and overturn the wisdom of ages. Reality does not take kindly to this amount of abuse, so there will be consequences.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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Reruns

Posted on September 29, 2021 by thezman

Long before the cock crows I am out and on the road to a secret meeting, so I am unable to post as usual. Instead, here is the paywall podcast that I do on Sunday and post up on SubscribeStar. Those supporting the cause will have no doubt listened and memorized it, but for the vast majority who are not kicking in the value of a cup of coffee, here is a portion of what you are missing.

What I’m trying to do with the paywall content is settle into a routine where twice a week there is a written post and on Sunday a podcast. That way, people kicking in five bucks or more per month can feel like they are getting their money’s worth. For now, the paywall stuff is lighter stuff. At least once a week is a movie review or commentary about popular culture. The Sunday show is all news stuff.

Item #1 The Ungrateful

The Undefeated: Jaylen Brown on why it’s important for the Celtics and NBA to hire African American head coaches – Link

Item #2 Indians

WSJ: Ancient Footprints Yield Surprising New Clues about the First Americans – Link

Item #3 The New Religion

Reuters: Washington cathedral to install stained glass with racial justice theme – Link

Item #4 Mushrooms

Reason: Oregon Legalizes a Breakthrough Treatment: Magic Mushrooms – Link

The Nature of Tyrants

Posted on September 28, 2021 by thezman

In the West, the morality of the state has been determined by how much or how little it respects the basic rights of its citizens. During the Cold War this was a critical measure used to justify foreign policy. The American government claimed it was within its rights to overthrow South American governments that got too chummy with the Soviets because they would endanger the rights of their people. On the other hand, they would back anti-communist dictators because they were better than communists.

There was a lot of lying and dissembling on this issue, but the principle was important to Western governments, so they made a big show of it. In America, for example, this meant protecting property rights from the excesses of the state. As a practical matter, it meant the state had to prove they had good reason for violating your rights before the court would permit them from doing it. They had to get a warrant, for example, before tapping your phone or riffling through your papers.

Government is always a blunt instrument and men are not angels so to avoid office holders and bureaucrats from abusing the rights of the people they first had to demonstrate there was a compelling government interest in declaring your backyard a wetland or banning a certain activity. Put another away, it was the duty of the government to make the affirmative argument. Citizens did not have to justify their rights to exercise them. They were assumed.

Property is a useful metric in this regard because it is simple and the economic basis of Western society. Even in feudalism property rights were respected, because ownership was what made the system possible. The right to speak out or organize are up for debate to some degree, but the right to own the fruits of your labor is the starting point for social organization in the West. It is what makes communism alien and why it has always been the domain of outsiders and subversives.

In the United States, property rights barely exist now. This story about the Feds smashing into a private business and taking their stuff sounds like something from North Korea or maybe Australia. For reasons they feel no need to explain, they broke into a private bank vault and stole the property of the customers using the service and refuse to return the property. By any reasonable moral standard, this is theft and worse, it is legal plunder. The state is plundering the citizens.

Like all criminals, conmen and sociopaths, the state is throwing up a dust storm of legal points to distract from the moral point at the center. In a just society, is it appropriate to take the goods of the people without first demonstrating that the state has a reason for seizing that property? The answer is obvious. By Western standards, this is immoral and the sort of thing that justifies revolution. In fact, it is this sort of behavior that justifies the very existence of the United States.

This is not an atypical story. The Federal government now routinely seizes the property of citizens without justification. Nick Fuentes, the young firebrand nationalist, had his bank accounts seized by the government. They have not explained why they took his money, and they refuse to even acknowledge it. One day he had money in his account and the next day it was cleaned out. The bank finally told him it was the government, but it took them weeks to get around to telling him.

The general violation of property rights is now the norm. The tech oligarchs, for example, strongly oppose private property. If they don’t like what you are saying on your website, they will steal your domain name. They will collude to limit your ability to hold a job or have a bank account. What used to be a sacred right of all people is now up for debate with an unelected oligarchical class as the judge and jury. What is yours is theirs and what is theirs is theirs and they own everything.

It is tempting to call this feudalism as people have a cartoonish understanding of the term and the times from which we get the term. The fact is the typical feudal lord had a greater respect for property rights than anyone in authority today. The authority of the lord was rooted in property rights. He respected the rights of small landowners, because he expected his lord to respect his rights the same way. The upper cast of modern society has no respect for the people in the least.

This is the critical thing to understand about the modern authoritarian. They no longer respect what used to be the common morality of the West. The ultimate constraint on feudal excess was that universally accepted morality with regards to property, the law and governance. Most people were illiterate, even the rulers, so the letter of the law was not paramount. It was the spirit of the law that mattered. In fact, it was this respect for the spirit of the law on which authority rested.

Today, the people in charge have no respect for the law or the concept of law, so their agents just do as they please. In fact, they take pride in trampling the rights of the people, because it pleases their masters. The goons prosecuting the January 6th protestors, for example, take a sadistic pleasure in the torment they are inflicting on the people caught in their trap. Their intentional cruelty has become a positional good, something that elevates them in the eyes of the oligarchs.

The Declaration of Independence is a remarkable document that is mostly remembered for the opening lines. Even though those lines have been abused by the very tyrants that now rule over us, the document is a remarkable expression of Western thought and Anglo-Saxon morality. After the long bill of indictment against the king, a list familiar today, there is this line. “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

The beauty of that line is that it qualifies the moral depravity of the tyrant by juxtaposing it against the nature of a free people. A people who sit idly by as their rulers trample their ancient rights are getting the government they deserve. A free people, in contrast, must hold their prince to the highest moral standard. It is immoral for them to do otherwise, as it violates that which defines them as free people. Every tyrant issues his own death warrant to the free people he seeks to oppress.

Female Trouble

Posted on September 27, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it is a nice companion piece to the regular Monday posting. With Halloween approaching, it is a good time to focus on witches and the trouble they are causing. That and it will sell a few books for Ed Dutton. For those with a soul, the Sunday podcast is up behind the green door.

Early in the Covid panic it was clear that some people were embracing the panic for reasons that had nothing to do with public health. The harridan assaulting people in the grocery store over the bizarre new rules was doing it because suddenly she had a purpose to her life. This was starkly obvious with the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who made herself harridan-in-chief. All of a sudden, inconsequential people had purpose and meaning to their lives.

The infamous TikTok videos featuring chubby nurses in scrubs dancing around on empty hospital floors had a similar motivation. White women with mundane lives working in hospitals were suddenly “front line workers” in the war against the great plague threatening humanity. Most of the women working in hospitals just went about their lives but many suddenly saw themselves in a different role. They were no longer just faceless nurses doing menial work. They were heroes.

Of course, another big driver of the live action role playing was the urban legends being traded on social media. In the early days it was not uncommon for someone to claim she knew several people who died from the virus. Statistically that was like saying you knew several people killed by dwarfs. Even today it is rare for someone to know someone who actually died from Covid much less many people. Even so, it became a common sighting on social media.

For many people, Covid and the drama surrounding it quickly became the purpose of their lives, giving them a reason to get up in the morning. The Covid skeptic, in fact, was largely a creation of the people embracing the panic. The panic players needed a foil, someone at whom they could direct the lines “Don’t you understand that people are dying!” when on the Nextdoor app. The people happy to be left alone were dragged into the Covid drama to be the needed villain of the story.

You see this with the vaccination business. For as long as we have understood vaccinations, it was known to be a defense against you getting infected. If you got the vaccine you were protected. It did not matter if everyone around you was not vaccinated, because you were vaccinated. That was the point of the vaccine, but that has been changed. Vaccines are now a collective good so the unvaccinated can be the needed villain in this drama.

The latest turn in this weird game is a new phenomenon in which women are sure they have Covid but they keep testing negative. The women suffering from this new and dangerous malady in the war against Covid describe it as “spooky” because they really want to test positive, but they keep testing negative. What is clear about the women afflicted with this new plague is they are heavily invested in Covid. In their time of greatest need, Covid is letting them down.

What is going on here, of course, is something that has been happening in small ways for some time. We have an abundance of unattached females in the population desperate for attention. They jump on every fad in the hope of making themselves the star of some minidrama related to it. You can probably mark the Virginia rape hoax as the beginning of this pattern. A crisis invented by political grifters was made real by a couple of women desperate for attention.

It is tempting to blame this on mass media. Ten years ago, this Covid panic could not have happened as we have far fewer intensely on-line people. The SARS and Swine flu epidemics are proof of it. In those outbreaks, social media was still in its infancy and mass manipulation with it had not been mastered. Those epidemics were serious and required a public response, but they never become full blown panics like Covid, because the tools were not available to do it.

In reality, social media is a symptom. Stand around in public and look at what people are doing as they wait. You will see far more women banging on her mobile device than men, unless the area is full of mothers. The moms will be tending to their children and gossiping with the other moms. There are plenty of men intensely on-line, but it is usually directed at things like sports. For women, they are on-line for the drama and the growth of social media has been in response to this demand.

This suggests that the witch problem, as described by Ed Dutton, is not entirely a problem of selection and biology. That is, the potential for witchery is a constant feature of Western societies that can be unlocked under certain conditions. We have not been selecting for witchery, but rather creating an environment that summons forth the demon from the female population. The internet is turning into a doomsday device that summons exaggerates the worst elements of humanity.

Worse yet, history does not offer an easy answer. In better times, a round of witch trials and the liberal use of the scold’s bridle would do the trick. In this crisis, the witches have already taken control. That means the witch trials are of men who failed to properly compliment a female coworker who was feeling blue. She then goes to the head witch in human resources and the victim is dragged in for interrogation. Instead of witch trials we have warlock trials.

Of course, the hunt for invisible Nazis and white supremacists is another modern form of witch hunting, mostly led by women. You have a sprinkling of socially retarded males in the group, but the main players in the hunt for insurrectionists are hysterical females imagining themselves being ravaged by a Nazi. In the old days, the witch problem was quickly addressed, so they never got hold of the levers of power. Today, the executive suits are littered with brooms.

Putting all of that aside, what Covid has revealed is that we not only have female trouble, but we cannot ignore it forever. The madness unleashed over the last year is finally showing up in practical ways. Prices for essentials are spiking, car production has stopped due to shortages. Shortage of things are turning up again, just as the brooms are coming out for another round of female empowerment. There is a limit to tolerating this and that limit is rapidly approaching.

Three Crises

Posted on September 24, 2021 by thezman

The day job has me so busy I have no time to do much of anything, so my news consumption has been cursory for the last few months. What I notice is that all of the stuff the mainstream press is howling about falls into three main buckets, the three crises of this week’s show. There is other stuff like the handwringing about the little blonde girl murdered by her boyfriend or some new Covid scam, but the main pages tend to be filled with the three main buckets.

There is a fourth bucket that is starting to turn up and that is the condition of the financial system, but that is still in the background. It is hard to know what is happening in the economy, since we can no longer trust the data. The only thing we can trust is the stock market and that is being levitated by central banks. It used to tell us about the state of the economy, but now it tells us only the state of money pumping and the spigots are never going to be turned off.

It looks like the news next week will be about the legitimacy question as someone leaked a draft copy of the Arizona audit report this morning. This was done so the media could promote the regime lines about the election. When the real report is released, it will not support the coordinated headlines this morning, but by the time the real report is out it will be “old news” and ignored. People will be left with the official narrative and never learn the truth. This is a standard ploy.

What these people do not realize is that this undermines the credibility of the system rather than knocking the critics for a loop. After all, it should be the job of the media to ask who leaked the draft and what was her motives. Someone in the media should ask why the exact same story is in dozens of news sites at the same time. Of course, no one will ask, and the critics will take the silence and the obvious coordination as proof that their claims are correct. The coordinated lies just make things worse.

There is also the knock-on effect of tuning out. I’ve noticed in my daily life that more and more people are just tuning out the news. If it is all predictable storytelling, then what is the point of tuning in for any of it? I know when I look at the main sites it feels like they did not change since the last time I looked at them. “Turn off, tune out, drop out” would not be a bad slogan for dissidents. It would also be a nice bit of irony if the end of the revolution begins with a slogan from the start of it.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. 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: China
22:00: Immigration
42:00: Legitimacy

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/3OkBYCyUTBw

The Arc Of Trust

Posted on September 23, 2021 by thezman

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was running for president, the people planning to vote for him were sure the media was biased against him. They focused only on the bad stuff and ignored the good stuff. The people voting for Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, thought the bias claim was absurd. They thought the media played it as fair as was possible in a matter of opinion. The big media players went out of their way to prove that they were just neutral observers reporting the facts.

It seems quaint today, but if you wrote your local newspaper complaining about unequal treatment, you could expect a reply pointing out the examples in the newspaper of both sides of the debate. If not a direct reply, there would be a length reply in the letters column addressing the issue. Newspaper columnists would often take the time to address the “alleged bias in the media”. Back then, it was important to the media that people thought they were neutral observers.

Fast forward twenty years and the people planning to vote for Bush still thought the media was biased, but by that point, conservatives were so sure of the bias they no longer felt a need to prove it. The center of gravity with regards to the media had shifted after the Clinton years. Even the people who were voting for Gore conceded that many parts of the media were biased, but their new line was that “right-wing” media, like Fox News and Drudge, was just as biased.

In twenty years, we moved from a world in which the consensus was that the media was mostly honest but a little biased to a world in which the consensus was the media was biased in favor of one side. Put another way, a tin foil hat crazy in 1980 thought the New York Times was out to get their guy, while in 2000 a tin foil hat crazy thought Fox News controlled public opinion. By this point, the mass media was no longer trying to prove they were neutral observers.

Twenty years on from the Bush election, everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton looks at the media as the marketing department for the DNC. Further, the only people who think the media is not deliberately lying about everything are the nutters who watch conspiracy outlets like MSNBC or CNN. The most popular “conservative” TV media performer is Tucker Carlson who dedicates a fair chunk of his airtime to pointing out the litany of lies that come from the mass media.

In isolation it is not a very interesting thing, but the media is a canary in the coal mine for the state of the culture. Forty years ago, most people thought they could trust the important institutions of society. Wackos were the ones claiming the government was covering up conspiracies and doing nefarious things in the shadows. The bulk of the population trusted the system, even while acknowledging the flaws. After all, humans are not perfect, so no system is perfect.

Today, the center point on the trust scale is over toward the lack of trust end but it depends upon the institution in question. Few people trust the media, so the center is way over on the skeptical end. Most people think the government is a blend of incompetence and dishonesty, but many still think the system can work with the right people in charge of it. Big business is another institution whose trust has collapsed, especially among right-wing people.

At this point on the timeline, the military, the economy, and technology are the only three institutions that people generally trust. Despite twenty years of failure, people still think the military can defeat any enemy if allowed to do their best. White people still proudly send their sons to fight. That is changing as it becomes clear that the people in charge are rabidly antiwhite and jarringly incompetent. We may be in the midst of a great sea change in white attitudes about the military.

That leaves the economy and technology as the things most people think they can trust to be what they claim. The bad news gets all of the attention, but most people still live pretty well in this country. Inflation and shortages are concerning, but most people accept that it is just temporary and will work itself out in time. Similarly, despite the damage done by the Covidians, people still trust technology to come up with reliable solutions to problems. The vaccination rate is proof of that.

The fact is people can remain content as long as their bellies are full, and they feel secure in their person. The lunacy of the Covid response was annoying, but few people felt it threatened their way of life. People were not being evicted from their homes or going without food. The entertainments were maintained, so they had things to keep them occupied while stuck at home. The Juvenal quote gets overused but that is because it is true. The last two years have proved it.

The question, however, is can a society keep the bread and circuses going when trust in the main institutions is collapsing? Trust in the economic system is a function of its relative performance. If no one trusts the political system or the mass media that promotes it, can we survive a serious economic downturn? Can we survive learning that much of what we were told about Covid was a lie? Can we still trust the economic system when we are ruled by corporate oligarchs?

The point of this is that when you take a long view, relative to a human lifespan, it is hard to see a bright future for the American empire. The arc of trust now bends inexorably toward a world where only fools trust their institutions. The future is a world where no one can trust anything or anyone and the only way to maintain order is through force. If the people at the top of the institutions see it this way, it would explain why they are so enthusiastic for authoritarianism.

Crisis Of Culture

Posted on September 22, 2021 by thezman

Imagine you are interviewing for a job and during the course of the initial interview you learn that the future boss is a big fan of F1 racing. This grabs your attention because you are also a fan of auto racing, especially Formula 1. You mention this to the interviewer who then tells you he is also a big racing fan. He jokes that he got the job because the big boss is a F1 fan. Eventually you get the job and find out that many of your coworkers are race fans, weekend gearheads and so on.

Now, an interest in motorsports has nothing to do with the work of the company or any of the jobs in the company, but the culture of the company, driven in large part by the big boss, has a strong connection with motorsports. Over time, even those with little interest in the hobby get interested because so many people at the company have a strong interest in the topic and talk about it often. As a result, the selection pressure favors gearheads and boils off those who were not gearheads.

This is not an uncommon phenomenon. Every company has a culture, even the largest corporations, and it usually stems from the founding stock of the company. A big part of mergers and acquisitions is to assimilate the acquired company into the culture of the purchasing company. In the case of a genuine merger, one culture eventually dominates the other. Truly merging two cultures is impossible unless they are so close that the differences are superficial.

Something like a company-wide interest in motorsports is a useful way of understanding the much deeper aspects of organizational culture. The sorts of people who into car racing are going to have a set of common personality traits. Race fans will tend to be more risk tolerant and more interested in problem solving. If the big boss was a woman into her church, the company culture would reflect the nature of women who are active in their church. That company would be more conservative.

The culture of an organization is ultimately about how the organism as a whole goes about solving the problems for which the organization was formed. In the case of a company, the primary challenge is profit, but every industry has peculiar challenges when it comes to holding down costs and maximizing sales. The culture of the company evolved to meet those challenges. Successful firms have evolved internal processes upon which it relies to solve these daily issues.

This is important in understanding the nature of a crisis. In business, there are good years and bad years, no matter how well run the firm. The business cycle is immutable, it seems, and it is often industry specific. The firms with a good company culture are built to ride these waves, minimizing losses on the down swing, and maximizing profits on the upswing. The not so well run firms face a crisis in the down years, struggling to hold on, but party like rock stars during the good times.

There are two types of crises. One is the normal challenges that face every organization regardless of its culture. The down times feel like a crisis to the well run business, but they have the tools to manage it, so it is a situational crisis. Getting through it is simply a matter of execution. For the firm lacking a culture prepared to address the down years, the crisis is structural. Their survival does not depend on their execution, because they lack the necessary tools. Instead, it relies on fortune.

Put another way, the crisis that truly threaten the existence of the firm is one with roots that go back to its origin. If in the case of the well-run company the nature of the business changes dramatically, it will face a genuine crisis for which it may not be equipped to solve. It then has a crisis with roots to its founding. The crisis that threatens the viability of an organization is always going to be one that started long before it was noticed and is a symptom of a systemic problem.

This is a useful way of thinking about how the managerial elite of the American empire is prepared for the future. The culture of the elite is, in many respects, a product of a bygone era in the empire. During the Cold War it was a bipolar world, but in reality, it was a unipolar world from the 1970’s until the end. The Soviets had turned conservative and were no longer a realistic ideological threat. The party was just holding onto power by minimizing risk. America was the center of the universe.

What this means is that for a few generations now, the system has been selecting for people who will serve an established system. In the early part of the 20th century, the system selected for creative people, risk takers and those willing to reconsider the old way of doing things. The old order was giving way to a new order. America was on the cusp of becoming a global empire and it needed talent at the top to help reorganize domestically and solve the challenges globally.

In the present crisis, the culture of the ruling class is lacking the tools to address the problems, but it also lacks the sort of people who will look outside the system. It has been selecting for highly conservative people, with respect to the culture of the managerial class, for generations now. It is why the system violently vomited up Donald Trump and continues to dry heave over the memory of him. The culture of the ruling class is built around adversity to change.

The old Hemingway line about bankruptcy is overused, but it reveals the truth about the dynamics of a collapse. In retrospect, the signs were all there, but the modes of thought at the time made it difficult to detect. The collapse of the Soviet Union is a great example of the Hemingway quote. It was happening a little at a time starting with Khrushchev and then happened all of a sudden under Gorbachev. The culture of the system prevented it from meeting the challenges of the age.

This may be what we are seeing today. The culture of the American ruling elite began to adapt to the unipolar world in the 1970’s. That is when the great outsource of the industrial base began as part of the financialization of the economy. It was formalized in the currency arrangements of the 1980’s and has remained static ever since. It is an old system built for an age that no longer exists. The crisis is the conflict between their view of the world and the reality of the world.

It is easy to see that America has a culture problem, but it is not what people think of when they hear the term. It is much deeper than the bourgeois degeneracy we see in the mass media. It is the structure of the ruling class. Their understanding of reality is rooted in a world that no longer exists. Its culture of problem solving is no longer compatible with present reality. Like the poorly run firm hoping to weather a downturn in the business cycle, they are counting on luck to save them.

The Shadow State

Posted on September 21, 2021 by thezman

Imagine if at your place of work, you began to suspect that many of your coworkers were members of a secret organization. At first you notice that when one has an idea, all of them suddenly adopt it. One day one will use a turn of phrase and then all of them are using it, as if on command. They display no outward expression of membership in a secret group, but their behavior suggests they are controlled by the same source, or they are coordinated by some unknown actor.

This would have been the experience of Donald Trump when he took office. He knew, of course, that many of the people he inherited were loyalists to the Bush crime family or the Clinton crime family. That was part of his campaign, rooting out these people as bad for the American people. What he did not understand is that even the people who appeared to support him in Washington were part of an informal club. The Bush and Clinton clans were just manifestations of this secret club.

That seems farfetched, but take a look at this post in Politico about what they call “the secretive consulting firm that’s become Biden’s Cabinet in waiting”. The short version of it is that a “consulting firm” operated as a shadow administration while the Democrats were out of power. When Biden was installed, in was from this shadow government that he picked key appointees. The source of funding for what amounts to a secret society is not mentioned, but it is not hard to guess.

In many respects, Biden represents a return to a trend that began under the first George Bush and has become more obvious over time. That is, the president is a figure head representing a faction within Washington. Up to Ronald Reagan, new presidents tended to bring key people from their home state, who took up key positions and helped vet new hires in the administration. Over time they were assimilated into the Borg, but initially they offered a fresh perspective and a change in direction.

With Bush I, that started to change. His administration was from the Borg as Bush no longer had ties to normal America. The Bush family’s closest relationships were not to local elites in America, but to the Saudi royal family, Mexican drug cartels and the American intelligence agencies. Bush was the first post-American president. He was followed by Clinton, whose administration was filled with members of the semi-permanent ruling elite based in Washington.

Bush II and Obama were basically spokesmen for organization that existed in the shadows, like the one stocking the Biden administration. They were also the most shallow and unaccomplished men to reach office. Neither had done anything to that point that would warrant local attention, much less national attention. They could have been hired from a talent agency and trained to play the role. Obama famously used a teleprompter for all public utterances.

One reason the imperial capital revolted when Trump was elected is he was a break in the long evolutionary chain. By 2016, the people who actually run the government had come to see the president as window dressing to appease the masses. The real work of governance was done by the thousands of people who live, work and socialize in the world’s largest small town. From their perspective, he was a threat to their democracy, because their democracy had become one party rule.

A good current example of how things really work in American democracy is the case against former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. The judge in the case is Christopher Cooper, who is married to attorney Amy Jefress. She represents key players in the FBI Russia hoax like Lisa Page. Sussman’s lawyers are long time legal insiders serving the Democratic Party. The Lawfare Group, which was deeply involved in the Russia hoax, is helpfully providing commentary to the media.

The reason that there could never be a legitimate investigation of the FBI plot to overturn the 2016 election was everyone involved is connected to everyone who would investigate or prosecute the case. Washington is a separate society that is independent of the country over whom it rules. Again, if you imagine it as a secret club, politics makes a lot of sense. The part we see, campaigns, politicians, elections, is controlled by the part we never see, the semi-permanent ruling class.

There is also reason to suspect that many of the people working in politics are just as gullible as the people voting Republican. The FBI-organized protest last weekend looks like it was more for the people inside the wire than outside the wire. They wanted the rank and file in Congress to see the storm troopers cracking skulls and flag waving barbarians screaming for the cameras. The whole thing was an amusing flop, but it kept Ocasio-Cortez up at night, which was the purpose.

Long ago, Pat Buchanan observed that local politicians are often quite sensible, which is how they get bumped up to the House of Senate. The people supporting them hope they will be a sane voice for their interests. When they get to Washington, they quickly go native and become just another voice of the ruling class. Buchanan wrote it off to social influence, which is certainly true. The newly minted Congressman is quickly socialized into the culture and is then assimilated into the Borg.

Another reason though is the shadow government. These vast global consulting firms that operate in every western capital but are based in Washington operate like a secret society. They produce the people who get appointments in every administration, and they produce the candidates for spots on the bench. They don’t write regulations and legislation, but they develop and curate the people who do. They have evolved a system that is immune to the virus of elections.

What this means is that voting has become pointless. A system that is immune to voting is not going to be fixed by more voting. In fact, voting provides a false sense of legitimacy to the system. The dynamic of liberal democracy is that voting not only strengthens the system, making it even more resistant to elections, but it also encourages more voting. The more that people participate, the less their voice matters and the more shadowy the true ruling elite pulling the strings.

Public Tyranny

Posted on September 20, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. This week is a return to a topic that cannot be stressed enough, it seems. More important, the editor there insists on using lower case for Left and Right, which seems wrong to me. The word left is a direction, while the word Left is a proper noun for a political philosophy. Clarity seems to require capitalizing these words. There is also the Sunday Thoughts podcast up behind the green door. There are no grammar disputes in this week’s show.

Imagine if all of a sudden you were transported to a place where all of the walls are clear and no one was allowed any clothing, other than that which is completely transparent, like the walls of every structure. Everything about you, even your most intimate habits are on public view. Obviously, this would also mean that everything about everyone else is on public view. Further, your thoughts can be read by anyone and everyone, so that even inside your head is now public.

It makes for an interesting science fiction plot, because for most people such a world would be a nightmare. Even the most freakish exhibitionist has some need for privacy in his life. According to the Bible, the first thing man did when he became self-aware was cover himself. The story of Adam and Eve was created in a time of minimum privacy, yet people at the time understood that there is a natural human need to maintain a domain of life away from public view.

Even though privacy is something that exists to some degree in every settled society, we can be sure that it did not exist before humans settled down together. A group of humans hunting and gathering within a range would have no privacy. They would do everything as a group. Of course, this would have bound them together, as sharing is the nature of human relations. Since these groups were blood relatives, the lack of privacy probably helped them survive in the wild.

What this means is that the concept of privacy probably evolved along with human settlement, which means it is an asset for settled people. Once groups of humans began to cooperate so they could operate in groups larger than the Dunbar number, they must have evolved traits that maintained the small group cohesion, while preventing conflict between groups. The first private moment was one group not sharing what they truly thought of the other group.

It is not hard to see how privacy was an asset for people living in relatively close proximity in small villages. Lots of unrelated males, for example, would be cooperating, but also competing for mates. Similarly, the females would be weaving the social fabric of the village, while keeping an eye on one another to make sure they did not lose their mate to another female. The privacy of home life probably evolved as a way to avoid the poaching of mates within the community.

Even if we put mating aside, the creation of a private domain separate from the public domain is an obvious peacekeeper. In a small group, disputes can be solved by the leader imposing his will on the group. Once you get past a certain number, that is impossible and small disputes could easily become big disputes. The private domain is where Grog can tell the missus what he really thinks of Trog, without creating a feud with him and possible drawing in the whole community.

Another point in favor of the essentialness of privacy in large societies is the fact that authoritarians always seek to violate privacy. The communists, for example, would listen in on citizens and rummage through their lives. For this reason, the Founders put in the Bill of Rights the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” What constituted reasonable in this context was a direct threat against the security of society.

As a narrow tool of terror, violating the privacy of citizens is effective, but very expensive to maintain, which is one lesson of the Soviets. It is not just the practical cost of mass spying, but the cost to social trust. In a world where anyone can be a conduit for the state to listen in on your life, the willingness to trust strangers drops to zero. The only people you can trust are blood relatives and associates who have everything to lose by violating your trust. Criminal gangs did well under communism.

There is another angle to privacy. Privacy is the key to one’s identity. It’s why militaries march recruits around naked so much in their initial training. Criminal gangs, like some motorcycle clubs, will do the same thing to prospective members. Take away a person’s privacy and they can no longer stand apart from the rest. It’s hard to hold yourself distinct from others when they know even the most intimate things about you, which is why authoritarians love violating the privacy of others.

This may be one key to understanding why modern America appears to be having a nervous breakdown. The microprocessor revolution has had many consequences and not all of them have been good. It has made it cheaper and easier for authoritarians to pry around in the lives of others. Everyone lives in a world where they are tracked by agents of the state, who also act from private interests. They are even trying to tease out our thoughts from our internet activity.

Not only has technology made it easier for the state to violate your privacy, but it also has weaponized the worst elements in every society. People who call themselves “extremist researchers”, for example, are just busybodies encouraged to violate the privacy of their fellow citizens. For most of human settlement, there were rules to keep this type under control, because they endanger social cohesion. The gossip is a greater threat to the whole than any criminal, because they undermine social trust.

There are many things that are causing American society to crumble, but one big one is the inversion of privacy. The lives of citizens are put on display, but the facts of public life are routinely hidden in waves of lies. Activist organizations like CNN threaten to ruin private citizens if they refuse to be props in their charades, but also tirelessly work to prevent the public from knowing the truth about public policy. The collapse of privacy is turning America into a large-scale prison camp.

Unplugged: Dissident Sentiment

Posted on September 17, 2021 by thezman

An old and mostly true observation about revolutions is that they end up where they started with a new set of rulers doing pretty much the same things as the rulers they deposed in the revolution. Stalin was the Tsar decorated with the ideological trappings of the revolution. Napoleon was a secular version of the Sun King. The people hiding behind razor wire and armed men this weekend in the imperial capital are the authoritarians they claimed to have deposed last election.

One reason, maybe, for this is that changing the culture that created the old leaders is not as easy as the revolutionaries imagine. The character of a people is the product of many generations. The unwritten rules of society are simply second nature, habits of mind that no one needs to consider. Changing a lifetime of habit is not easy with one person but changing a population’s lifetime of habit is impossible. The best the revolution can do is change the people at the top.

That is what we are seeing in America. The long march through the institutions has not produced the glorious revolution, because altering the character of the people is not simply a matter of blasting new culture from the institutions. It turns out that the cultural Marxist were wrong, and culture does not emanate from institutions. The institutions are the product of the culture. Even adding lots of new people fails because those people bring their culture with them.

That does not mean the cultural revolution is harmless. For example, they have turned patriotism into a weapon. Our choice is flag waving, which means supporting the destructive ends of Conservative Inc., or flag burning, which means supporting the monstrous ends of Progressive Inc. Of course, the point of patriotism, the preservation of our land and people becomes increasingly impossible. What is natural and good gets twisted into a weapon used against the patriotic.

Altruism is another virtue turned into a vice. Since white people are not permitted to cheer for their own side, their natural altruism has one outlet. White people are conditioned to link their happiness to the happiness of nonwhites. A visitor from another planet would assume the white people in this area of the planet worship the black people and that George Floyd was some sort of prophet. Altruism has been warped into what John Derbyshire calls ethno-masochism.

These are thorny topics, because most people correctly sense that loving your country and caring about other people are good things. They are good things, but they are channeled toward bad ends by our present rulers. Battling this is one of the most important challenges in this age, but it is easier said than done. These are two issues where there are no simple answers. The best we can do is keep working the problem until conditions are such that an answer materializes from the conflict.