The Dissident and the Christian

Posted on April 15, 2022 by thezman

It is fair to say that this is the worst time for Christians and Christianity in the West since the Roman empire. In order to promote equality, liberal democracy has created protected classes of people who cannot be criticized. The other side of this are people who must me mocked and ridiculed. Christians were the first group placed in this category and remain the popular object of ridicule in the West. There is no prohibition against overt hatred of Christians in most Western countries.

We are not feeding Christian to lions in gladiatorial pits, but you can be sure some elements of the ruling class have thought about it. Back in the Obama years, much of the health care bill was designed to torment Christians. For example, forcing Catholic groups to pay for abortions and prophylactics. There was no public health reason for these provisions. They simply satisfied the demented and sadistic impulses of the people who put together the program.

In some Western countries, practicing your faith is close to illegal. Päivi Räsänen is a Finnish politician. She was charged with crimes against democracy for tweeting out a picture of a Bible and quoting it in public. She was eventually acquitted by the courts, but that was not the point. Persecution is about the process. This was true under communism and is even more true under liberal democracy. Hell is being in the control of ideological fanatics staffing a bureaucracy.

The fact is the managerial elites of the West are not irreligious. Ideology is just religion that replaces God with man. Our elites are fanatics for liberal democracy and they will murder anyone who questions it. Christianity has always been their primary target because the Christian’s first loyalty can never be to man or the institutions and ideologies he creates. Liberal democracy, of course, demands absolute obedience to the state and the people who run the state.

It is not just the secular elites that make war on the Christian. The big churches have been taken over by the ideologues. Anywhere you see a rainbow flag it is either a gay bathhouse, a public school or a Protestant church. The Pope cares more about climate change than the Catholic faith. Even the Baptists have seen their organizations taken over by far-left radicals. The great challenge for most Christians is in finding a church that is not run by a far-left lunatic.

Culture is to a great degree a trickle down affair. The hostility toward Christianity among the Cloud People has infected the Dirt People. Church attendance has been in decline for a few generations. Close to 30% of Americans have no religious identity. This means they have no experience with religion. About 40% of people who still identify as Christian no longer attend church. Overall, about 40% of Americans still belong to a church and attend services on a regular basis.

In Europe, Christianity is just about dead. Only 1.4 percent of the population of England attends Anglican services every Sunday. Fewer than one-in-ten Germans say they believe in God. For most Europeans, Christianity is as alien as Islam. They know nothing about it, other than what is taught in history class. Given the entrenched self-loathing that has been imposed by America, Christianity is part of the hated past where evil Europeans tried to enslave black bodies.

It is not all bad news for Christianity. The faithful are slowly realizing that for their faith to survive this age, it must live outside this age. Christians are reverting to what all persecuted minorities must do. They are learning to live in the shadows and think of themselves as the outsider. Traditional Catholics seek one another out and form up shadow communities. Bible study in America is becoming a private affair organized by small local communities of believers.

These defensive measures are what will form the basis of a revival. Anything that is open to everyone is valuable to no one. Christianity was at its most powerful when it was exclusive and required sacrifice from the believers. One of the main reasons for the decline of the Western churches is their success. Once it was easy to be a Christian, it stopped being a powerful force in society. Its return to a persecuted, underground movement is the only path to renewal.

This presents a challenge and an opportunity in dissident politics. Many people waving the dissident banner have yet to shed their liberal disdain for Christianity. Some have manufactured bizarre conspiracy theories about the Church. On the other hand, many sober minded dissidents have soured on their faith, due to the take over of the churches by liberal democratic fanatics. One reason many dissidents have soured on the world is they have seen what happened to their churches.

In America, this is compounded by the problem of evangelical politics. In the 1970’s, in reaction to the cultural revolution, evangelicals decided to engage directly with politics in order to get their guys in office. This was a disaster. Many of the evangelical activist groups became profitable grifts for the leaders. The pols who took advantage of the evangelical vote sold out those voters. They convinced believers that their faith required them to accept liberal degeneracy.

The debacle of Christian political activism cannot be overstated. The neocons were able to take over largely with the support of evangelicals. Even now, after the disaster of the Bush years, many of these groups still care more about Israel than the condition of their own people. When the typical dissident sees stuff like this, he wants to hoist the back flag and start slitting throats. It is a reminder of just how easily these people were turned into weapons against the West.

That said, there is a slow rapprochement between the secular dissidents and the growing number of dissident Christians. The former is coming to understand the defining role not just of belief but of structured rational belief. The latter is coming to terms with the reality of their situation. For the West to survive and resurrect itself after the horrors of liberal democracy, it will need a new set of core beliefs, based in the old ways shaped by the experience of the crisis.

This is where dissident Christians can contribute the most to the cause. The sin of despair is one of the worst, because it is deliberate. One deliberately decides that salvation is impossible. It is the state immediately before suicide. The only reason to be a dissident it to maintain hope that through the struggle, reason and decency can be restored in the West. Without hope, the dissident has no reason to exist, which is why despair must become a mortal sin for dissidents.

You see more and more dissidents and dissident Christians willing to circulate in the same platforms. Gab has become the social media exchange for both dissidents and dissident Christians. Nick Fuentes and his groypers blend dissident political critiques with overt Christian beliefs. For the first time in a long time church attendance has ticked up in America. These are grim times for the defenders of civilization, but we still have hope because that is what must carry us through.

Happy Easter.

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The Long Dark Winter

Posted on April 14, 2022 by thezman

The government released the latest inflation data and the results were the worst we have seen in forty years. The retail number came in at 8.4% and the wholesale number clocked in at 11.2%. Of course, the retail number excludes the things that people buy, like food, fuel and housing. These numbers also rely upon the new math rather than old math used the last time inflation was an issue. By the old inflation standard, retail inflation is over 15%.

The political class is poleaxed by these numbers as they have been assured that inflation at these levels was impossible. Modern economic theory says that inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods. We now have top men in place to keep an eye out for this. They just need to manage the money supply to keep inflation under control. This assumption led the top men to assume inflation was transitory, the result of supply chain issues.

That should be the first red flag when looking at the economic data. Those top men that are supposed to have a handle on the money supply say they are as surprised as the rest of us that food has doubled in price. A month ago, they were talking about a series of exceedingly small rate hikes. Now they are talking about a series of substantial rate hikes to prevent inflation from going even higher. You get the sense that there is both panic and confusion among those top men.

One reason for this is the long period of historically low interest rates. What the Federal Reserve did forty years ago to tame inflation was remove money from the system by raising borrowing rates. The real creators of money are the banks, who create money through lending. By raising their cost of money creation, they create less money and the result is fewer dollars chasing goods. At its peak in 1980 the 10-year Treasury was going for 15% versus 2% currently.

In other words, getting rates back into the normal range means three or four times the current rates. The world is simply not prepared for such a thing. Think about what happens to the real estate market if rates simply double. Refinancing comes to an end and homes sales collapse. No one is trading out of their home with the 3% mortgage into a home with a 5% mortgage, at least not on purpose. This would be the new reality throughout the financial world.

The other problem with this approach is the massive government debt. The way government handles debt is not like normal people. They issue bonds, pay the holder interest, but never pay them off. Instead, they issue new bonds to pay off the old bonds and the cycle begins anew. Rolling debt like this works as long as the market for new debt looks like the market for old debt. If the Federal government has to start borrowing at two or three times the old rate, it is big trouble.

The other way the Federal reserve can tackle inflation is to sell its massive holdings of equities, treasuries and other assets. The latest balance sheet from the Fed says they are holding about $8 Trillion in assets. They can begin selling which removes cash from the system. Keep in mind that the value of the S&P 500 is about the same as the Fed balance sheet, so this is a powerful option. They added about a trillion in equities during Covid as a way to juice the markets.

Of course, this is not without consequences. If they liquidate that trillion in equities, they hoovered up during Covid, the market will go down. The tens of millions of retired people living on their investments will not be pleased. If they liquidate some of their $4 trillion in treasuries, those assets will lose value, which means the cost of borrowing by the government goes up. This is why monetizing the debt is like eating the seed corn during tough times.

Another problem for the Fed is the politicians have started a global economic war against the majority of the earth’s population. Exporting excess dollars to places like China, India and Russia is no longer possible. In fact, dollars are starting to come back to America in response to sanctions. When Washington declared war on the globe, the globe declared war on the dollar. At least in the short term, exporting extra dollars to the rest of the world is not a viable option.

This is why there is panic in Washington. Biden’s official approval rate is 40% and Congress has an approval rate of 20%. Now they are faced with grim choices that promise to be very unpopular. They can support a war on inflation that will result in a deep recession or they can let inflation rob the public. Worse yet, it is not all that clear the Fed can wage an effective war on inflation. Like a bug trapped in the spider’s web, they have nothing left but panic.

While the suffering of the political class brings joy to most everyone, this means normal people are going to suffer for an extended period. The gap between wholesale inflation and retail inflation says prices will keep rising. The war on the world will also put pressure on commodities like energy and fertilizer. That will put upward pressure on prices at all levels. Wages are not keeping pace, which means everyone is getting poorer by the minute.

When Joe Biden ran for office, he promised a long dark winter. Most people assumed he flubbed his lines, but it turns out he was telling the truth. The long dark winter of mismanagement and manufactured crisis now promises to extend into the summer and autumn. Worse yet, the people who created this mess are now tasked with solving it. It looks like the label for the Joe Biden regime will be the long dark winter of American decline.

The Plague

Posted on April 13, 2022 by thezman

Over the last several years, America has experienced a new phenomenon in which people critical of official dogma suddenly endorse the dogma. An alternative form of this is where people who have made a career debunking claims that appear in the media suddenly become the most faithful consumers of media propaganda. It is as if a new virus has entered the system that causes the victim to switch sides or reveal themselves to be a double-agent all along.

The Trump phenomenon was the first example. When Trump famously came down the escalator to declare his candidacy, many assumed it was just a publicity stunt from a guy known for showmanship. Some went a bit far in criticizing it but Trump is one of those guys who can rub some people the wrong way. Once it was clear that he was a serious threat to be nominated, it also became clear that those harsh critics had contracted this new mind virus.

Granted, we did not know it was a mind virus. When Bill Kristol started waving around Hillary Clinton signs, it was just assumed he was bitter. In fact, that was the assumption about all of the neocons who were ranting about Trump. He had torpedoed their guy Jeb Bush so their attacks were just sour grapes. Jonah Goldberg was sure his old lady was going to land a job in the next Republican administration so Trump was a huge blow to his plans.

We now think that Trump triggered the forgotten Trotsky gene. All of those old neoconservatives and their progeny who had been posing as conservatives for fifty years have the Trotsky gene. Trump triggered it and as a result they instinctively returned to their natural state as hyper-violent leftists. At least it was assumed that Trump triggered it. Further evidence suggests that a virus of some sort was in the air that was the real cause of the neocon reaction.

Ironically, it was the presence of another virus that revealed the presence of this prior virus in the population. The Covid panic, which was fostered by the managerial state, triggered a reaction in some of the harshest critics of it. Instantly, people who had made careers in media criticism, usually around the issues related to the humans sciences, became totally trusting of the media. Everything in the press regarding Covid was treated as holy writ.

Strangely, this uncritical acceptance of media messaging was particularly hard on the old HBD community. These are the people who spend their days thinking about the biological diversity of humanity. As a result, they spent decades picking apart the blank slate claims in the media. Their message for generations has been that you cannot trust the media to talk honestly about biology. Then all of a sudden, they accepted all media claims about Covid without question .

It was not just the HBD people who were gripped by this madness over Covid, but they were the hardest hit by it. This is when the possibility of the cause being a virus started to make some sense. People whose psychological immune systems have been tuned to defeat a specific sort of media agitation were probably most vulnerable to a different form of media agitation. It is why they have never recovered from the infection, despite the revelations.

The war in Ukraine has brought a new outbreak of the virus. Many who chanted “fake news” during the Trump years are now festooned with Ukraine symbols and carrying on like the remaining Biden supporters. In fact, the most fanatical supporters of the regime are people who used to be Trump partisans. Sean Hannity, for example, is demanding nuclear war over Ukraine. He repeats whatever is in the mainstream media regarding Ukraine as if it is gospel.

Granted, the talks show circuit types are mostly carny folk who go where they think they can get an audience, but there are more sober minded examples. Victor David Hanson has been uncritically repeating media claims about the war. He seems to be fond of the narrative that says the Russians planned to sack Kiev, but the Ukrainians heroically defended their capital. He is lending his credibility to nonsense made up by children at the New York Times.

The war in the Ukraine is another clue that we are dealing with a virus that causes the victim to trust the mass media. Many of the people who got Covid all wrong at the start are now on the wrong side of the war in Ukraine. They either have staked out the wrong position or they are accepting media narratives. This madness transcends ideological orientation. The victims, once infected, lose the ability to critically judge what is being presented to them.

Further evidence of a virus, and that it may be deliberate, is the sudden chanting of the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” by the media. Maybe the virus has a different impact on sociopaths than it does on other people. Media people infected by the virus become paranoid, sure that a secret cabal is feeding them lies. Perhaps the virus causes a moment of clarity which then induces madness. This is a topic that needs further research.

The cause remains unknown, but the madness we have seen over the last half dozen years points to some common cause. Perhaps this is just a symptom of modernity or maybe this is what cultural collapse causes in people. A mind virus of some sort is always a possibility, given what we have witnessed. Regardless, a plague has spread across society causing the subversives to go public, the skeptics to become trusting and the media to go insane.

The Limits of Cynicism

Posted on April 12, 2022 by thezman

People who follow French politics are talking about the upcoming run-off between Macron and Le Pen as a possible replay of 1981. In that election, François Mitterrand scored a stunning upset of incumbent president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, to become the first socialist to win since the Second World War. Mitterrand ushered in a new era of French politics that prevails to this day. It is a cynical, divide and conquer politics that serves a narrow elite at the expense of the nation.

Like Americans, the French have been facing the problem that elections seem to have no bearing on public policy. They vote in new people and new parties, but the polices never seem to change. Macron has not been much different from Hollande, who was not much different from Sarkozy. In fact, each French president since Mitterrand has followed a predictable internationalist course. As a result, France has been swamped by immigrants and looted by international finance.

It is a good reminder that elections in a democracy have consequences, but rarely in the way people expect. Mitterrand’s upset victory ushered in a new brand of politics that every ambitious French pol seeks to emulate. Something similar happened in the United States in the 1992 presidential election. Bill Clinton represented a new generation of political leadership. He ushered in a new form of politics that infected both parties and the political mechanism upon which they rely.

Like in France, American politics is deeply cynical now. Elections are viewed with disdain by the politicians. It is something they must endure so they can get on with what they view as the important parts of politics. The important part of politics is advancing an agenda that serves the narrow interests of the managerial elite. This is why elections have no bearing on public policy. The office holders may change and the parties may swap positions, but the elites never change.

That is the source of the growing hostility the political classes of the West have for the people they theoretically represent. Macron is a prime example. He is in trouble politically because he carries himself like a man who is doing the French people a favor by paying attention to them. Not long ago he said that you are not French if you do not follow his rules with regards to Covid. He joked about using the administrative state to torment those who question his policies.

There is that cynicism at the heart of politics in the modern West. No serious leader thinks such things, much less says them out loud, if he has any regard for the people he claims to lead. More important, no serious leader acts this way if he thinks the opinions of the voters matter. When the game is rigged, or at least seems that it is rigged, then it no longer makes much sense to pretend public opinion matters. This is the truth of the cynical politics of the modern West.

In America, this is most evident in the concept of messaging. In modern American political jargon, messaging is a form of crowd control. The crowd is the mass media, which takes its cues from the inner party. The e-mails go out, the spokesmen give pressers and this is what shapes the daily narrative in the press. This is then supposed to herd the public in the direction of the official policy. Good polls confirm to the political class that their messaging is working.

An example is from the chief messenger, Jen Psaki. Note that she struggles to read the catch phrase of the day. It turns out that saying “Putin price hike” out loud sounds rather silly and childish, even to someone without a soul. The expectation is the official media organs will use the phrase while reporting on the inflation numbers and the general narrative will be that the cause of inflation is Putin. The Democrats probably plan to campaign on the slogan “Putin price hike” this fall.

Think about the cynicism on display. Psaki knows what she is saying is a lie and everyone in the room knows it is a lie. Further, she knows that no one thinks what she is saying is anything but a lie. The stenographers in the press pool know that she knows that they know she is lying. When they work on the official narrative at their respective media organs, they will know they are participating in the lie. In other words, everyone knows everyone is lying but they keep lying.

This is only possible in a deeply cynical system populated with people motivated by malice toward the public. The people running the global economic war resent that they have to pretend to care about public opinion. They can barely contain their loathing for the people outside the castle walls. Shark-eyed dingbats like Jen Psaki exist because she is actually what passes for a friendly face in this system. Even she can barely conceal her contempt for the public she is addressing.

French political observers suspect this election is signaling the end of the cynical politics ushered in by François Mitterrand. Cynicism is an effective short term strategy in politics, but it eventually runs into the Lincoln limit. That is the old line about fooling all of the people all of the time that is attributed to Lincoln. It was also a popular advertising slogan in the 19th century. This is appropriate given that the cynical politics of this age is basically just a sales campaign organized by fraudsters.

In America, we may be seeing similar signals. The cynical politics of the Clinton machine gave as a degenerate (Clinton), a simpleton (Bush) and a vacuous airhead (Obama) as president, all with the claim that they were accomplished men. If not for Trump the fourth in that series would have been the wife of the degenerate. Now we are being sold a mumbling vegetable as the most popular man in history. Joe Biden may be the limit of the cynical post-Cold War politics.

Germ Warfare

Posted on April 11, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up and it is related to the post today. There is the Sunday podcast up behind the green door. A reminder that there will be no show in Friday due to the holiday.

One of the most underdiscussed parts of the current crisis is the war being waged against the infectious disease known as neoconservatism. It started in 2015 when Trump launched his bid for president. Even though he was never able to articulate it, he was running as a rejection of Bush and by extension the neocons. It was his win in the South Carolina primary, after he had unloaded on George Bush, which sent the neocons into a panic and started the Republican civil war.

It has been an interesting civil war in that it was mostly the party against Trump but it has turned into an old versus new since he left office. He had some allies in the party, for sure, but most were too afraid to be open about it. Some, like Lindsey Graham, pretended to be his ally so they could hell subvert his presidency, especially on the foreign policy front. Graham was sent in from the usual suspects to keep Trump in line on those issues.

Even so, there has been a slow realignment going in within the party as well as within what is left of the conservative movement. On the later front, the neocons have completely shed their skin and joined the Left. Bill Kristol runs something called the Bulwark, which no one reads. His other efforts are aimed at undermining his former party through the Republican Accountability Project. They used to be Republicans Against Trump, but that was too obvious.

Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes were both fired from Fox News for a lack of interest by the viewers. Hayes ran The Weekly Standard into the ground and now he runs something called the Dispatch. His partner in that is Jonah Goldberg, who was also jettisoned from National Review. Of course, they brought on the soy-faced wojack David French, who has stop pretending to be a Christian and instead has embraced the religion of post-Marx identity politics.

The return of the neocons back to their ideological home on the Left has left a void in what is left of conservatism. For two generations they were a golem for neoconservatism, despite their pretensions. Without their animators, they have been left to stagger around without purpose. There is a long debate among establishment intellectuals about what can replace it or reform it. Most likely, it is just pushed over the side in favor of something new and organic.

The crisis in the system is showing up in the primaries. The donor class is pouring cash into the Wyoming congressional primary. The neocons are rallying their supporters among the plutocrats in an effort to undermine the party. The effort in Wyoming is based on getting registered Democrats to cross over and vote in the Republican primary on election day. In other words, Liz Cheney is just a cat’s paw for the Trotskyist murder cult that has decamped for the other party.

Probably the most interesting race thus far is in Ohio, where you have three flavors of populists running for the open Senate seat. There is an old boomer running as if it is 1985 but he is rich and has party support. There is Josh Mandel, who will quickly morph into Lindsey Graham if elected. Then there is J.D. Vance, who is trying to run as a post-Trump populist. It is a three-way race at the moment and it reflects the currents within the Republican Party.

Gibbons will probably win the primary mostly because old white people will never come to terms with current realty. Instead, they will cling to the civic nationalist fantasy of voting our way out of the problems of democracy. The fact that just as many are easily fooled by Mandel hammers home this point. Both are creatures of the legacy talk radio culture. Only the actuarial tables will fix this problem within the Republican electorate.

The fact that J.D. Vance is in the conversation says that some people are waking up to the reality they face as a people. Vance is not a charismatic politician and there are genuine concerns about his sincerity. He was a Trump-hater back in 2016 so people should be wary of his judgement. Then again, he is not unusual in that many people have gone through a similar conversion. Vance often sounds like a guy who suddenly realized he had been lied to his whole life.

None of this is to suggest that the Republican Party is about to become representative of the people who vote for it. That will never be allowed. The point of the party is to make sure the majority population has no representation in government. If that arrangement is threatened, then it is mail-in voting for every state. It is just increasingly difficult to keep the old grift going. The old Red Team versus Blue Team dynamic is collapsing.

We are at the start of a volatile period in politics. The great tide of discontent that will sweep the primaries this autumn will bring in all sorts of people. The war between the ruling class and the people will shift to Washington, where there will be more than a few Marjorie Taylor Greene types roaming the halls of Congress. The main result will be the final purge of the neocons from the Republican side. The process that began in the 1960’s is about to come full circle.

Parallelism

Posted on April 8, 2022 by thezman

From time to time a debate breaks out in outsider politics between those who prefer meta politics and those who prefer activism. The former takes the view that it is ideas that drive history so getting the ideas right is the priority. The latter notes that we live in the real world not the world of ideas. Keeping the groomers out of the schools, for example, is what matters now. You are not going to talk them out of it so you have to get involved in order to solve the immediate problem

This is a debate that has haunted conservative politics and it was something that haunted radical politics until the 20th century. Conservatives never solved the problem and it eventually ruined them. The reason is they committed to participating in a political system that leaves no room for conservative ideas. Once you sign onto the long list of left-wing taboos and mob rule, there is nothing worth defending. Conservatives became the tax collectors of liberal democracy.

For dissidents this is a bigger challenge. There is no solution to the problems of liberal democracy at the ballot box. Most Americans have no representation in politics as both parties are committed to destroying normal life. This fall the Republicans will win the election and everything will get worse. Whatever promises they have made will be broken on day one. They will set about giving the oligarchs whatever they want while pretending they are doing their voters a favor.

Even knowing this, people want to do something. This is even more true for dissidents who are more political than normal people. The reason you end up on this side of the great divide is you have engaged with politics and learned from it. Walking away entirely seems like quitting to most people. On the other hand, participating just empowers the people who want you dead. This is the dilemma that ruined the conservative movement and haunts the dissident right.

This leaves only one option and that is building a counter culture. Channeling activism into building a parallel society bridges the gap between ideas and activism. In a way, this is what we see globally with the alliance of non-Western powers. China, Russia and India want to create a parallel system that can challenging America. The same thing has to happen domestically. It is a bigger challenge for obvious reasons, but parallelism is the only way forward short of revolution.

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Opening
Old Man Reminisces
Ideas Versus Actions
The Conservative Dilemma
Parallelism

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The Praetorians

Posted on April 7, 2022 by thezman

The video of former president Obama visiting the White House recently made clear that the current president is not really in charge. Joe Biden was seen staggering around the reception looking for anyone to acknowledge him. It was possible he had no idea where he was at the time. Biden’s increasingly deranged public rantings suggest he is reaching his expiry date. The question being quietly debated in Washington is when and how he will be removed from office.

The fact that this question has been normalized since before he was installed in the position speaks to how much things have changed in America. No one really thinks Joe Biden is in charge of himself or the executive branch. It is just assumed that he is a place holder who will be replaced in his first term. Every president represents a coalition of elite interests, but none have been viewed as a figurehead. This is a big change that in time will be seen as an inflection point.

There is plenty of speculation about the when and the how the real decision makers will remove Biden from office. Maybe they have a Lee Harvey Oswald in training, one of those Trump loving white supremacist from their mythologies. That would justify another round of state sponsored terrorism. Maybe they just force him out due to poor health in the hope of making him a sympathetic figure. Of course, who replaces him is another fun question to ponder.

That is all fun stuff to debate, but the question no one bothers to consider is who is making the decision on Biden? No one has provided a clear explanation for who picked him back in the primary. It was clearly not the voters. The party forced everyone to quit after the South Carolina primary, but how did that work? If it was just the party why did they wait so long? The timing suggests someone came to the aid of the party with new tools.

We got a hint of who is really calling the shots recently. The government of Pakistan has not been enthusiastic for the sanctions regime against Russia. Last week, some powerful Pakistani generals suddenly backed a no-confidence vote for prime minister Imran Khan in the parliament. Khan was wily enough to see it coming so he dissolved parliament before the vote and called for new elections. People who know Pakistan suggest he will win that vote and remain in power.

Everyone assumes the reason the Pakistani generals tried to topple Khan is they got word from America that it would be good for business. Aligning with America against Russia would mean new bribes and equipment. That promise could only come from the American military. There is little interface between the American political class and the Pakistani political class. There are close relations between the respective military and intel agents of both countries.

We only have to go back a couple of years to the color revolution against Trump to see the same finger prints. The lead in that caper was the intelligence community, but we learned that the top brass of the military was in the loop. General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said this. The FBI, CIA and Senate Intelligence Committee were at the center of the Russian collusion hoax and spying operation against the Trump campaign.

Currently, it is a handful of neoconservatives in the foreign policy elite who are running the war against Russia. None of the decisions thus far have involved anyone outside that narrow group. It seems rather clear that no one bothered to consult the financial class about the sanctions regime. No one in Congress has been in the loop or has bothered to ask any questions about it. The lack of debate or dissent is an important clue.

Another unnoticed clue is the highly coordinated mass media campaigns that have become a staple of American life. After George Floyd’s overdose, we were deluged from every corner with antiwhite propaganda. The content providers had a BLM campaign ready to go and the rioters were organized and ready. We have just witnessed the same coordinated media campaign on behalf of Ukraine. Where did the TV presenters get those Ukraine lapel pins?

Operation Mockingbird was a CIA program early in the Cold War to manipulate the media. Half a century ago, the far-left activist Carl Bernstein wrote a long article on the collusion between the CIA and the mass media. Today the mass media is full of “retired” intelligence officers working as pundits. The point is that the secret police infiltrated the media long ago and continue to run it. The fifty intel agents who swore Biden’s laptop was fake agree with this.

Like the Q source that Bible scholars think is a written collection of primarily Jesus’ sayings, the people in charge remain a mystery. We can know they exist from the clues we can see. The common elements that exist in these various events suggest a common set of hands. Those hands come from the wilderness of mirrors that is the intelligence community. This community is like a miasma that permeates all of the ruling class institutions.

It is tempting reduce this to a handful of shadowy players who operate from a hidden lair, but in reality it is probably a collection of people. It is called the intelligence community because it is mostly an informal collection of people and institutions that come together for a common purpose. The change we have seen recently is that it is the intel community calling the shots, rather than the semi-permanent political elite using the intel community to remain in power.

In the fullness of time, the Biden period will be seen as the time when this shadowy group of figures became the Praetorian Guard. They moved from keeping the elites in power to picking the elites who will hold office. That arrangement was a disaster for the Roman Empire and given the situation with Biden, this arrangement is looking like a disaster for the Global American Empire. That said, there is no sign of a Constantine out there, so this is the new normal.

World War III

Posted on April 6, 2022 by thezman

The war that the Global American Empire has launched against Russia is just the beginning of a global war it believes will bring about the end times. That sounds extreme but the top foreign policy people of the regime are quietly talking about regime change in both Moscow and Beijing. The main focus right now is Moscow, but they also have Beijing in their crosshairs and maybe even New Delhi. They believe the war is the final phase of the end of history.

This sounds insane given that Russia has more than enough nuclear weapons to reduce the empire to dust. Despite this reality, the people in charge of the empire have the current figurehead demanding Putin be arrested for war crimes. This is a new reality that needs to be acknowledged. Joe Biden is not in charge of anything. That was made clear when Barak Obama visited the White House recently. Biden was completely ignored by everyone, including Obama.

Putting that aside, the Global American Empire seems to have determined that the next war to end all wars and usher in the end times will be a financial one. Their response to Russian defensive measures in the Ukraine have revealed this thinking. The Ukrainians have been begging for air cover, heavy weapons and even troops. What Washington has organized for them is a series of Twitter campaigns intended to cancel Putin and all Russians, along with an organized economic war against Russia.

In a way, Ukraine is the proof of concept for the empire. They are fully committed to an economic war with Russia that transcends Ukraine. What happens a month from now when the war is over? The Russians will destroy the Ukrainian army in the east and that will force a deal. Either Zelensky is killed by his own people or he flees. The alternative is Russia simply partitions Ukraine along ethnic lines and imposes the deal on Ukraine that matches what has been proposed.

Will these sanctions last forever? Will the West simply acknowledge reality and strike a deal with the Russians? It seems pretty clear that Washington will not allow Zelensky to make a deal with Russia, so what happens when the Ukrainians get tired of dying and kill Zelensky instead? Will his replacement be recognized? These simple questions make clear that this war Washington has launched against Moscow goes well beyond the events in Ukraine. It is a war of conquest.

There is another front in this war. Beijing correctly understands that they are also in Washington’s death pool. This is why they have backed Moscow and why they will probably look to join the fight sooner rather than later. The reason for that is they know the empire cannot win a two front war. Slapping sanctions on Russia will impoverish the imperial subjects in Europe, but not those in North America. A trade war with China, on the other hand, will hit Americans very hard.

China also has the long term objective of capturing Taiwan, which will open the way for China to being the dominant power in the region. Look at a map and it is clear that Taiwan is the Malta of the China Sea. Whoever controls it controls access to the Pacific and control of the sea lanes to Asia. As long as the Global American Empire controls Taiwan, China is a landlocked power walled off from the sea by countries financially and militarily tied to the American empire.

There are some questions that are unanswered at the moment. One of them is whether China would prefer a shooting war with America or an economic one. If it is the former then the only way to do that is to make a hard play for Taiwan. That would start with blocking access to the Taiwan Straits. This would force the United States to send the navy to open the straights, which would expose those ships to attack. This would give both sides reason to organize for war over Taiwan.

If it is an economic war, then the logical play is to openly and aggressively defy the sanctions regime on Russia. This would lead to sanctions from Washington, which would be answered with sanctions from Beijing. The Chinese could pick a range of strategically important products to withhold from the West. This would have a real impact on the imperial subjects living in North America. Imagine a shortage of clothing and vehicle tires or a shortage of car parts.

There are good arguments for both scenarios, but no one seems to know how China sees this war unfolding. They have certainly studied it. Back in 2013 the Pentagon learned that the Chinese have been studying the relative human capital between China and the GAE. To their shock and horror, they learned that the Chinese do not think diversity is our strength. The Chinese have also been studying Pearl Harbor, which suggests they are thinking about a shooting war as well.

China is not the only other front in this burgeoning global economic war. India has been hostile to the empire since the war on Russia started. Saudi Arabia has also been unpleasant about the sanctions regime. Most likely the pending Iran deal has been scuttled to keep Riyadh from changing teams. Then you have the global south, which will suffer first in this war. How the West keeps them from moving north en masse is a question no one seems to ask.

What Washington has done is organize the West for a global economic war against the rest of the world. It is a conflict of visions. China and Russia imagine a multipolar world while Washington demands a unipolar world. This conflict began and will end around the global economic arrangements. Of course, economic disputes often lead to military disputes, so that is always on the table. No one knows if Washington has thought this through, but we do know who will pay the price.

The Worst Generation

Posted on April 5, 2022 by thezman

For the most part, generational politics are a self-defeating enterprise, because you end up attacking your allies. It is hard to attack people about whom you know little, but it is easy to find fault with those you know well. Every generation strains against its parents and every generation strains to teach its children. This is why it has been encouraged among the majority populations in the West. It is an effective way of keeping a natural majority from forming up in opposition to the ruling elite.

That said, there is something useful to thinking generationally. Oswald Spengler relied upon a form of generational politics to put forth his theory of history. Of course, we have the old adage, “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”. This describes the inability of grandchildren to manage the wealth passed down to them from their grandparents and parents. This is Spengler’s argument in a nutshell. A civilization rises, accomplishes what it can and then falls into decline.

We are witnessing the end phase with the Global American Empire. It is not exactly a three generation cycle, but the basics are right. One theory of American history says the empire was founded at Gettysburg. That would mean the current generation of rulers is the fifth or sixth generation. On the other hand, some argue the Second World War is the founding of the empire, so that mean the third generation is in charge. The concept still works and is closer to the old adage.

Even if we place the start of the empire in the middle of that last century, the men who founded it were men of the prior age. Roosevelt was born in 1882 so he was an old man during the war. His Secretary of State during the war was born in 1871 so he was even older than his boss. Roosevelt’s Secretary of War was Henry Stimson and he was born in 1867. The point here is the generation that created the American empire were not the “greatest generation”, but their grandparents.

The best example of the distance between the generation that created the empire and the present is in the biography of Cordell Hull, FDR’s Secretary of State. He was born in a log cabin in Tennessee. He was a rising man of his community at 16, when he gave his first political speech. He fought in the Spanish-American War. His father killed a man in a blood feud. Hull is a bit of an outlier, but most of the people in that regime were tough guys who earned their position.

When the next generation took over for the founding generation of the empire, they were mostly men who fought in the war. Then as now, avoiding war was the instinct of the politically inclined, but they needed to have at least worn the uniform. JFK was in the Navy during the war. Johnson was in the war as was Nixon. Of course, Eisenhower was the last man of the founding generation to serve as President. Reagan was the first leader of the empire who had not worn the uniform.

The point here is that when we put aside the pedantry of the generational lines, we see the old adage comes into focus. Spengler’s observation about the life cycle of a civilization becomes clear. That founding period was made by tough men who had to endure great hardship while forging the empire. Their children inherited the empire, but many paid a price while it was being forged. They at least understood the enormous cost to their ancestors and appreciated it.

It is the third generation that is in charge now. This is incredible, given that their grandparents were born in the 19th century. Nancy Pelosi’s father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. was born in 1903. He dodged both wars, by the way. Joe Biden’s parents were a bit younger, born during the Great War. Senator Mitch McConnell’s parents were the same generation as Biden’s parents. In other words, the geezers of the gerontocracy are the third generation and their staff is the fourth.

It is the third generation that followed the type we see in both Spengler’s formulation and that old adage about business. When the Boomer politicians took over in the 1980’s and 1990’s they started to auction off their inheritance. The first step was the financialization of politics. The old “coalition of interest groups” system was replaced with naked graft. Wealthy interests bought the political system because the new generation of leaders had no emotional attachment to it.

That last bit is what distinguishes the third imperial generation. They have no attachment to the system they inherited. It is just something that they were born into so they take it for granted. Their parents at least knew people who had to shed blood for it and they had their grandparents around to contextualize their position. The current rulers of the empire are the spoiled grandchildren of the patriarch. They just want what they want because they feel entitled to it.

We see this in the increasingly reckless management of the empire. Hundreds of millions had to suffer because the spoiled rulers saw Covid as a chance to remake society in their image. Their parents and certainly their grandparents would have been ashamed of this behavior. Those prior generations were capable of shame because they understood the cost of being wrong. They paid it. This generation has never had to suffer so much as a hangnail in their lives.

This reckless and childish behavior is on full display with Ukraine. They are throwing a tantrum because their scheme to dissolve Russia has failed. The Russians finally had enough of the meddling on her border and invaded Ukraine. The whole thing could be resolved peacefully, but the spoiled American ruling class must have its way. While they bang their rattles on their highchairs, millions of Ukrainians suffer. The collective West is getting poorer and more dangerous as a result.

The arc of family dynasties usually leads to the final generations declaring bankruptcy and selling off what they can to earn some money. For civilizations, it means some period of crisis while the rotten generations in the final phase make their mistakes and bring the epoch to a close. The Global American Empire is coming to an end but the West is not going away. A new generation of builders will rise up, create a new civilization and the cycle will begin anew.

Bretton Woods III

Posted on April 4, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up and related to this post. All of a sudden, macroeconomics is becoming an important topic again. The Sunday podcast is also up behind the green door.

The technical definition of money is “something generally accepted as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, or a means of payment.” For most people this has always meant the legal tender of their homeland. Until fairly recent, this was a coin with the face of the king on it. The better the reputation of the king, the more valuable his coin, because traders were more likely to accept it. A good king made sure his coins had a consistent amount of gold or silver in it.

The reason for that is precious metals like gold and silver were always the world’s reserve currency. Everyone in the world would accept gold and silver for payment, even in places that restricted the use of the metals. You could always take the metal to the king’s mint and exchange it for his coins. Granted, he took a fee for himself and you were charged the cost of minting the coins, but that was predictable. In the end, all currency was measured in gold and silver.

We no longer use gold coin for money. Every country in the world uses what the economist call fiat currency. This is a government-issued currency that is not backed by a physical commodity, such as gold or silver. Instead, it is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the issuing government. Money is now an expression of the government power behind it. The US dollar is the reserve currency of the world largely due to the fact the American government was the most trusted.

Hard money enthusiasts assume this means the United States can print as much money as it needs, but this is not exactly true. The international monetary system that evolved after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970’s is a framework that controls the exchange rate of the major currencies. Every major currency is based on the dollar, just as oil and gas are priced in dollars. The petrodollar was created in the 1970’s when the Bretton Woods system collapsed.

What the current system does, in effect, is link currencies to the supply of crude oil through the dollar. How much oil you can buy with your home currency is dependent upon how many dollars you can buy with it. It is not a direct link, as oil production rises and falls and the supply of dollars rises and falls, relative to other major currencies like the Euro or Chinese Yuan. In effect, America controls the world by controlling the price of commodities like crude oil and natural gas.

In the old days, minting coins was a profit center for the king. A strong king would restrict the use of other coins in his domain. His people had to take their foreign coins, gold and silver to his mint for conversion to his coin. In addition to the cost of production, he tacked on a profit for himself. This is called seigniorage and it works the same for fiat money as it does hard money. This profit from controlling the global currency is one way the United States has grown so rich.

One of the consequences of this system is the world has an insatiable appetite for US government debt. Because it is denominated in dollars and considered the safest of financial bets, it makes the ideal collateral. This has allowed the United States and other Western countries to run massive trade and spending deficits. The world wants the debt and the world wants to sell the West their products. US debt was 30% of GDP in 1980 and now it is 127% of GDP.

This is the subtext of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Russia and China, especially China, are tired of this arrangement. They correctly see it as to the advantage of Washington at their expense. This is why China is backing Russia’s play to demand rubles for its energy and agricultural products. This would pave the way for China demanding yuan for its products and the right to pay for energy in yuan. India is also quietly supporting what the Russians are doing for the same reasons.

This is why Washington is in no mood to strike a deal over Ukraine. It is not the only reason, but it is a big part of the plan to protect the dollar. If Washington can break the Putin government through financial war, China and India will drop their plans to buck the dollar in the global economy. A century after the Great War, the new global war is being mainly fought in finance. The West, led by America, is now at war with the world over control of the global currency system.

It is probably a war that the West cannot win. The reason is the same reason the king would put his face on his coins. Money is the physical expression of power. The strong king could enforce his monetary policy in his domain and his money had a predictable amount of gold and silver. In effect, his money was the representation of his people and the cultural that defined them. The legal tender of a country is the measure of that country’s wealth and power relative to the world.

The West no longer makes or invents anything useful. The power of the West is the legacy power to control the financial system. It is a system arranged by Mercurian people in order to control the Apollonians. The former are the people who operate as middlemen and service providers, while the latter are the people who grow the food, make the goods and keep the gears properly lubricated. The former operates in the West, while the latter exist outside the West.

Reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it and reality says that growing and making things counts for more than thinking of things. The reason Washington has not crushed the Russian economy is the world needs the stuff Russia pulls pout of the earth. In this economic war of attrition, Russian can feed itself and keep its homes warm, while Europe will have to hope America can provide the food and energy at a reasonable fee.

The most likely outcome of this global conflict is something people have suspected for quite some time. The global currency will become a basket of commodities like natural gas and crude oil. Maybe agricultural products will be in the mix. The reason for this is the world runs on energy and food. Bretton Woods III, as some are calling it, will be a new set of currency arrangements whereby money is based on its purchasing power for the agreed upon basket of products.

What this means in the short run is that the West is about to get poorer as governments are forced to cut spending and debase the currency to get out from under domestic debt obligations like pension payments. It also means the end of globalism as has been defined by Washington for three decades. Trade will continue, but between countries rather than independent global enterprises. Thirty years after the Cold War the world is about to start healing and return to something close to normal.

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