The Revolution In The Clouds

Posted on August 31, 2022 by thezman

An enduring question on this side of the great divide is over the motivation of the Cloud People as they go about their war on the Dirt People. Is there some grand plan behind the war or is it some weird instinctual thing? Are they motivated by base instincts like money and power or is it something spiritual? There is the “deep state versus emergent behavior” angle but also the simple question about whether these people have the self-awareness to grasp what they are doing at all.

For example, the war on Russia was launched six months ago and at the time it was clear to most people that the cost to the West would be high. The question was about the cost to the Russians. Given the dismal history of economic sanctions and the public utterances of Russian leaders, sober minded people saw the sanctions regime as a high risk and extremely low reward gamble. That quickly became an all risk and no reward strategy that was doomed to fail.

Despite the obviousness of it all, the West kept doubling down on the program as if they were on the right side of history. Now people are getting gas bills in Europe that are five and ten times normal. Europeans are posting their utility bills on-line as a desperate effort to get attention to the issue. For reasons no one has bothered to explain, Western media is not treating this as an important story. They are not grilling Western leaders on the situation or even asking them questions.

Are these people just so cut off from reality that they simply do not know what is happening in their countries? Is someone like Liz Truss so insulated from reality that she is unaware of things called electric bills? Since no one has bothered to ask her about the issue, it is possible she does not know. It seems crazy but staggering ignorance would explain why this is happening. The Cloud People do live vastly different lives from the Dirt People.

That does not explain the media silence. Scan the British media and you would come away with the impression that there is no economic crisis. It is all stories about the royals, local celebrities and childish political drama. The German media has bland stories about the latest ten point plan from the party. Those are stuffed in between press releases from the Gaia cult like this one. They worry that people freezing to death in their homes this winter could anger Gaia.

What in the world is going on here? The worst economic catastrophe to befall Europe in generations is being ignored. Is this a strategy by the Cloud People or are they just so cut off from reality they do not see this as a big deal? This lunatic from the German Church of Gaia wants to tax meat at a time of soaring food costs. Is this nut so ideologically blinkered that he does not see how this looks? Normal people will be forgiven for thinking he is a deranged sadist.

This is where another motivation creeps into the picture. Maybe what lies behind all of this is a seething hatred of the Dirt People. The reason they are not focusing on the crisis is they are showing restraint. In private they are laughing at the prospect of Dirt People heating their homes with candles this winter. Those shop owners going out of business gives them a sexual thrill. This crisis is the revenge of the Cloud People on the Dirt People for not dying off during Covid.

That last bit is further proof that vengeance may be the real motivation behind these abusive polices we see in the West. It was clear from the start that the Covid polices were something of a tantrum by the Cloud People. They made people humiliate themselves with masks and social distancing out of spite. The vaccine mandates now look like an attempted genocide. Deaths among the young and healthy are at frighteningly high levels across the West.

There have been times in history when the people concluded that their rulers were corrupt, stupid or tyrannical. In the furor leading up to the revolt the rabble-rousers would caricature the rulers as ruthless and vindictive. In reality, the rulers were either incompetent or simply unlucky. In order to properly revolt, the people needed to be convinced that their rulers were more than just stupid. They were bad people who deserved what was coming to them.

We may be experiencing the first example where a ruling class is evil, but the rabble rousers among the ruled cannot bring themselves to accept it. It is the mirror image of the revolutionary model where all restraint is lost among the ruling class while the people desperately try to maintain the status quo. The people at the top have all the money and power, which for some reason has led them to revolt against the system that makes their status as elites possible.

The other side of this revolution in the clouds is the placidity of the Dirt People in the face of this war of extinction. Perhaps this is what has driven the ruling class into a murderous rage. No matter how hard they try, they cannot rouse the people to defend themselves or their culture. The rage is not exactly at the people, but at the ruddy sunset of the West. Modernity has made the people so feeble; they can no longer defend themselves from predators.

Regardless of the reasons, the revolution in the clouds will continue until the Dirt People can be roused from their stupor or they simply succumb. One way or the other, the revolution can only end with the death of the Cloud People. Surely, they must see this, which means that is the ultimate aim. Self-abnegation is the highest virtue of the new religion and one way or another, they will achieve it. The only question that really matters is if they will take Western civilization with them.

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The Ukraine Grift

Posted on August 30, 2022 by thezman

One of the puzzles of the war in the Ukraine, debated by those watching through sources outside of Western media, is why are the Ukrainians doing what they are doing in this war. Their tactics make little sense and suggest the over all strategy is something other than what has been stated. In fact, official statements from the Zelensky government have become absurdly strident. They bring back memories of Baghdad Bob during the American invasion of Iraq.

The initial phase of the war had the Russians dashing in, probably hoping for a negotiated settlement based on the Minsk accords. Some think they underestimated the Ukrainian capabilities and willingness to fight. There are lots of people who claim to be psychics, knowing what was in the minds of the Russian planners, but no one knows what the Russians expected. All we know is they got a bloody nose in the opening weeks and had to reconfigure their war plans.

This is the nature of war. The old line about no war plan lasting first contact with the enemy is a cliché because it is true. The Russians had to change gears and they did that in the early spring. They settled into a strategy of shelling the Ukrainian positions with their superior artillery and missile systems. They also gained air superiority so they can hunt down Ukrainian targets all over the country. This is a low-cost way to slowly and methodically grind down the Ukrainian military.

Here is the puzzle. Why have the Ukrainians not responded to this change in tactics so as not to be slowly ground down by the Russians? Logic says they should have withdrawn from the Donbas to more defensible positions. This would have preserved their best troops and much of their equipment. They could have appealed to the West for better air defense systems to protect their army as they prepared for a counter offensive at some point in the future.

No one really seems to know how much Western military gear has flowed into Ukraine, but the best guess is more than enough to supply a million man army. The Europeans dumped a fair bit of old equipment onto Ukraine, but they have also supplied a fair bit of modern equipment as well. The Russians have modern equipment, but the militias, who are doing the bulk of the fighting, are relying on Soviet era tanks and armored personnel carriers so this old stuff is not worthless.

Of course, one of the lessons of this war is that old planes, trucks and tanks can be repurposed as unmanned vehicles. The Russians are actively converting their old aircraft into crude drones. They are not as good as the high end stuff, but it is better than scrapping them. Ukraine could have been doing this as well if they had pulled back from the Donbas and been preparing for a counter offensive. Instead, the old equipment has been hurled into the meatgrinder of the Donbas.

The elephant in the room whenever discussing the war in the Ukraine is the massive amount of corruption. We know from the Trump years that many American politicians were on the payroll of corrupt Ukrainian firms. We know the State Department is full of Ukrainian operatives. We know that what ties these people to the Ukrainian government is highly corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs. Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, an oligarch controlled energy monopoly in Ukraine.

That is the key to unriddling the Ukraine war strategy. The key players in American foreign policy only care about harming Russia. The neocon obsession with Russia goes back generations now. They have made clear on multiple occasions that their only goal in the Ukraine is to inflict as much damage on the Russians as possible. This has come from senior people in the Biden regime, as well as various characters operating in the unofficial foreign policy establishment.

Take the Russia obsessed foreign policy establishment and join it to the hyper-corrupt Ukrainian regime and you have the makings of a grand grift. The other piece of it is the Military Industrial Complex, which will sell NATO countries trillions in new arms over the next decade, to replace what is going to Ukraine. The Ukraine has become a massive money laundering scheme. Billions flow into the place with little or no accounting and much of it ends up in anonymous bank accounts.

This is where the Ukrainian ware strategy fits into the scam. The neocons need a narrative to sell the politicians and the public. The “heroic Ukrainian defenders willing to fight to the last man” is the story they initially sold. Over the last few months, the new story has been “If the heroic Ukrainian defenders just had better weapons, they could take the fight to the Ruskies!” The myth of the wonder weapon, of course, works nicely in the Raytheon brochure.

Meanwhile, the actual Ukrainian fighters are hunkered down into massive, fortified locations while the Russians shell them day and night. Reports from the front suggest few of the weapons are making it to the men. CBS did a report suggesting that only 30% of weapons have gone into battle. They were forced to recant, but their reporting comports with what others have said. The fact is, no one knows where this stuff is going or if it is even useful to the soldiers.

The whole thing relies on defending a one thousand mile front in the Donbas against an endless artillery barrage. Imagine a front that stretched from New York to Miami and along the way cities have been turned into massive, fortified bunker complexes and you have a good idea of what is happening. The Russians shell these fortifications at will and the Ukrainians have no chance to take the fight to the Russians. They just have to sit there and take the pounding for public relations reasons.

Even by current standards, this sounds amazingly cynical, but stop and think about what happened during the Covid panic. The people who made tens of billions on a dangerous, experimental vaccine are not going to blink at sacrificing tens of thousands, maybe millions, of Ukrainians to make billions in profits. The people who turned America into a pirate’s cove are taking the strategy global. Everything is a grift and no grift is too bloody or monstrous.

At some point, a marketing plan with the phrase “to the last Ukrainian” in it will run out of Ukrainians to sell it. There are ongoing shakeups in the Ukrainian leadership so that part of the grift may be starting to crack. There are growing rumors of defections in the military as they wake up to what is happening to them. Of course, the truly terrifying winter that lies ahead for all of Europe cannot be ignored. The reality of Ukraine will become apparent and then what happens?

History says not much. Covid is a good guide. There is no doubt that trust in the institutions has declined as a result of the Covid scam. The ongoing effects of the vaccine could blow up into a major scandal. None of which has moved people into the streets, but there has been a cumulative effect on the public psyche. A collapse in Ukraine would be another blow to the regime. Still, it is hard to see this being the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but crazier things have happened.

The Death Of Bourgeois

Posted on August 29, 2022 by thezman

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it a visit to an old topic that deserves a better airing. Sunday Thoughts is on holiday, but there are new posts behind the green door about various things. SubscribeStar and Substack.

Spengler famously described a civilization as having a birth, life and then a decline into death, much like the life of man. One of the features of decline is the elite stops being elite in term of talent and ability. They may sit atop society and hold power over the people, but they are no longer a genuine elite. They simply hold positions in a system created by those who came before them. They are the inheritors of status that they did not earn and they lack the ability to earn.

This reality is becoming increasingly obvious as we see highly credentialed morons stagger from one blunder to the next. Europe is about to go into a modern version of the turnip winter because European leaders picked a fight with Russia, the primary energy supplier to the continent. The people leading Europe do not decorate themselves like African potentates, but they are every bit as ridiculous. They are like children wearing their parents clothes, pretending to be adults.

The decline of the elites has become so obvious that even some former neocons are starting to notice the problem. Victor David Hanson has a piece in American Greatness bemoaning the decline of the elites. He clings to his old civic nationalists beliefs, so that has left him in a no man’s land of sorts. He cannot take the trip over the great divide, but he cannot sign onto the latest thing. He is left to argue that better people at the top would somehow fix the system.

What civic nationalist critics fail to see is the elite incompetnace is a product of the system, rather than a plague upon it. The crisis in the West is not caused by failed leadership but rather the elites are a product of the same forces behind the general crisis in the West. A bourgeoise culture evolved in the 20th century that naturally leads to a flattening of talent. The elites seem mediocre because bourgeoise society, taken to its logical end, is the celebration of mediocrity.

One part of it is democracy. The core assumption of democracy is that all opinions are equally valid, if not equally correct. The former is a moral claim while the latter is an empirical claim. The problem is you cannot suppress a moral claim with a factual one, so bad opinions can flourish like weeds alongside good ones. Before long it is impossible to tell the good from the bad. In fact, any effort to pull the weeds from the garden is met with howls of protest.

Of course, democracy in the modern sense is only possible in a society with a large middle-class, like post-war America. Prior to the war, egalitarian notions had little purchase in American society. Men were equal before God and equal before the law, but few people confused that with equality of talent. Nonwhites were systematically excluded from everything important because whites naturally assumed they lacked the ability to perform the duties of citizens.

The great explosion of middle-class life after the war changed that view. In a world where most white people could expect a nice house in a nice neighborhood and their kids would have a better life, natural equality started making sense. As the bulk of white Americans entered the material sameness of middleclass life, they began to adopt the spiritual sameness of bourgeoise life. When the observed differences were the result of effort, it is not a big leap to egalitarian civic nationalism.

Late 20th century America became a bourgeois-ocracy. Middle-class values dominated not just the popular culture, but elite culture. The world of deeds gave way to the world of clever words. When the plumber’s house is not that much different from the lawyer’s house, there has to be something other than material prosperity to distinguish the lawyer from the plumber. The result was a growing collection of soft things, moral signifiers to distinguish people within the bourgeoise space.

As an aside, the drive to impoverish the middle-class is not the result of a ravenous elite seeking to enrich itself. It is the result of an insecure elite trying to create distance between itself and the vast middle-class. Think of the college student that comes home with a nose ring and blue hair. The point is to put space between herself and her family with the exaggerated gesture. Our sophomoric elites are doing the same things, except you will eat bugs and walk to work.

Putting that aside, this need to distinguish oneself within a system that champions sameness is part of what drives the current thing. People within the elite of a bourgeois-ocracy struggle to distinguish each other within the elite. The reason they rush from one weird fad to the next is the fear of melting into the bland, gray nothingness that is bourgeoise culture. They are not weird for material gain or even spite, but out of fear of being smothered by the great nothingness.

This excellent essay in First Things about the intelligent is pre-revolutionary Russia gets at an aspect of this phenomenon. In a world where deeds count for very little, the only thing left is posturing. In pre-revolutionary Russia, liberals were happy to sign on with the radical terrorist, even though they were often the victims. The reason is the pose was a way to signal their existence. They sided with radicals because that let them stand apart from the crowd.

The modern intelligent, with her pronouns in her profile, is simply hoping to create barriers in the gray nothingness. On the one hand, it signals moral status within the gray nothingness of bourgeois life. On the other hand, it creates the sense that there is a moral barrier to entry. The gross people at Target do not use the proper pronouns, while the cool people using Instacart never deadname anyone. The meaningless gestures are supposed to give meaning in an otherwise meaningless culture.

The crisis in the West is not due to faulty elites. The elites are the product of a long decline into a bourgeois-ocracy. The replacement of the vertical relations with horizonal ones was always unnatural and unnatural things cannot last. The mediocre elites are just the natural result of mediocre people spawned by the socio-political culture that values mediocrity over greatness. Nature selects against the mediocre and therefore the bourgeois-ocracy is trundling to its natural end.

The Paper Bag Test

Posted on August 26, 2022 by thezman

Note: Since Friday is usually podcast day and there is no podcast this week, I thought it would be good to spring something from the behind the green door. For those with a paywall account, this is a repeat. For the vast majority here, this is entirely new since you have failed to sign up for a paywall account. Perhaps seeing the error of your ways, you will reconsider your decision.

Here in Greater Lagos, there are several grocery chains. The small moonbat community is serviced by Whole Foods, of course. They empty their wallets buying exploitation-free artisanal pickles. A step below that is Wegmans, which targets the same sort of shopper, but a click down the socioeconomic ladder. The Wegman’s customer lives in a nice suburb and supports most of the current fads.

The next step down is Giant, which is owned by the colossal Dutch conglomerate Koninklijke Ahold Delhaize N.V. They also operate other regional brands such as Stop & Shop and Food Lion. Interestingly, the Food Lions in Lagos are positioned near ghettos, so their customer base is the polar opposite of Whole Foods. In the South, Food Lion is the standard suburban grocery store.

After that comes the specialty shops and local players. Aldi has started to turn up, offering a warehouse experience for food shopping. In Europe, an Aldi is like a big convenience store. They are not as big as an American grocery store, but they serve the same function. The ones I have experienced in America are a cross between Dollar Tree and Walmart’s food area.

The point is we have a lot of options. I tend to go to the Wegman’s near my office because of quality and selection. It is a little more expensive than the Giant, which is across the street, but the trade-off is worth it to me. The staff is also nicer than the people who work at Giant. For some reason, the people who work at the Giant stores near me are surly and unpleasant.

Starting on August 1st, Wegman’s has stopped using plastic bags. I found this out the hard way when I hit the checkout. I use the self-checkout. All of the plastic bag holders were empty. I asked the clerk, thinking it may be some weird shortage issue and instead I got a lecture about the environment from a moron. Interestingly, she said it was a new law in the county, which I know is a lie.

That says the lecture was part of her training. She was forced to memorize the official answer by store management, which she repeated when people bitched about the new plastic bag policy. Put another way, this means the company knew their customers would hate it and they knew the policy was not defensible on its own terms, so they had to produce a justification.

The main reason grocery stores switched to plastic bags was that they are superior to the old paper bags. Plastic bags let you carry more stuff. They rarely rip. They also make useful gloves for picking up after the dog. Paper bags rip and they really show their stuff when it rains. Carrying your stuff to the car on a rainy day is an exercise in frustration with paper bags.

Of course, the cranks behind these schemes will counter that you can always use the grimy canvas sacks that have become one of their totems. They apparently believe that if there is a climate rapture while they are shopping, Gaia will be able to home in on their grimy canvas sacks. Gaia also commands them to impose their weird morality on the rest of us, so you better fall in line bigot.

What makes the Wegman’s scheme more ridiculous is the fact that they are now charging for the paper bags. Each one is a nickel. There is a ceremonial reconciliation at the end of the checkout. This is another one those clues that the scheme is driven by something other than business interests. The people behind it want you to know that they are compelling you to obey Gaia.

It was clear that the law of unintended consequences is kicking in. Because packing paper sacks is a hassle, fewer people were in the self-checkout. The lines for regular checkout were longer. This means the store will be faced with staffing up or losing business due to people not wanting to wait all day to checkout. It also means more customer hassles to be addressed by the staff.

The most obvious result will be many people going across the street to the Giant, which is there to sell food, not preach the gospel of Gaia. No doubt the people at Wegman’s will see this as a triumph. They have finally purged those hidden fascists prowling the cereal aisle of their stores. It is the price they are willing to pay for the war on white supremacy and climate change or whatever.

The whole thing is another example of how this stuff works like a religion. The people who produced this crackpot idea are not doing it to make money. They are not doing it to curry favor with a specific audience. It is a public act of piety. This is all about proving their faith because they really do believe this stuff. Rational arguments to the contrary are just seen as proof of their eternal goodness.

It is one thing, but multiply this by hundreds of examples and it is not hard to see why everyone is so salty. We live in a world where a small cadre of lunatics are trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. Not only are those beliefs insane, but they keep changing almost as if the point of the religion is to be a nuisance. The Church of the Public Nuisance now controls public life.

Natural Excogitating

Posted on August 25, 2022 by thezman

There are two strains of thought on this side of the great divide with regards to the behavior of the people in charge. One camp, the dominant camp, thinks there is an organized campaign run by a small group of people. The so-called deep state pulls the levers resulting in the things we see happening in the world. The other camp, the much smaller camp, subscribes to the emergent behavior doctrine. What we see is the result of the hive mind that dominates the managerial class.

By any reasonable standard, the deep state side has the easier claim. Spend a week following the main regime media organs and a pattern emerges. On a Monday, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other legacy operations will be running with the same theme. The next day, all of the next tier media operations are running with the Monday theme. By the end of the week, the media narrative has become conventional wisdom, maybe even holy writ.

For example, the midterms are coming up and the uniparty is a little worried that the rubes may be catching on, so they have the media doing their fear, uncertainty and doubt act to wrap up the summer. Here is the Post claiming the red wave nonsense is fading fast. Totally by coincidence, the Times has a similar story. They say it is abortion that is killing Republican chances. Here and here are supporting sources for the same claims made by the big media sites.

The effect of what certainly looks like an orchestrated campaign is supposed to be a collapse of opposition to the regime. Alongside these posts about the dimming Republican hopes in the election are stories about how Glorious Leader has magically made student debt go away. NBC claims that almost half of Latino debt will be wiped away by Glorious Leader. A debt jubilee that targets an important uniparty demographic just when Republican hopes are fading. What a coincidence!

Whether any of this is true is hard to know. It really does not matter if it is true because by next week it will be gospel. Just look at the Russian collusion hoax. Regime media still carries on as if it is obvious that Trump was in league with Putin, who used his super powers to rig the election. He did not rig the 2020 election, which was the cleanest in human history. Only election deniers think otherwise. He rigged the 2016 election, which only QAnon thinks is real.

The point is, spend any time consuming the main media organs of the regime and it certainly looks like it is all coordinated. Add to it the known fact that the activist we call journalist have been caught coordinating their work. Ezra Klein operated a secret group of four hundred far-left activists working in the media. The point was to coordinate their activism across many platforms. This is the sort of thing that supports the deep state idea, but also the claims about its nature.

The thing is though, there is little evidence that spooks from the wilderness of mirrors are behind these operations. When people hear the phrase “deep state” they think of men in stuffed chairs discussing how best to hide the alien space craft that just landed in the desert. The deep state rigged the food pyramid so normal men are filled with soy and therefore easy to manipulate. The deep state is not paranoid weirdos working in the media, sharing the hive mind.

That is the argument against the deep state and for the hive mind. That really is the nut of the emergent behavior argument. Fill a room with people who line their clothes with aluminum foil and very weird things will emerge. The people who work in the media believe completely in the deep state argument. They just think it is run by guys name Prescott and Pemberton. They are raising a secret invisible Hitler army to implement the final final solution.

The further you go up the system, the cultural and ideological diversity thins to the point where it becomes a hive mind. In the media, you cannot survive unless you support the latest things. The selection pressure is for compliance. A process operates across the high ground of the empire. Walk into the C-suites of a large company and it is power skirts, soy faces and a unified commitment to the latest thing. Woke capital emerged from within capital. It was not imposed on it.

The appearance of coordination is the result of a shared set of beliefs by the people who run the important bits of the empire. If tomorrow they suddenly converted to Islam, their women would be wearing head coverings and the men sporting beards. They would carry on as if they had been Islamic since forever. Anyone asking about the sudden conversion to Islam would be called a blasphemer. The New York Times style guide would be relabeled the sharia style guide.

We got a real world test of this claim in February. Russian tanks crossed into the Donbas and instantly every talk head on television was sporting a Ukraine lapel pin and chanting “Keev” like they had a novel form of Tourette’s. It was as if someone updated their firmware overnight. In a way, this is what happened. Everyone was suddenly imitating the others in the hive. It was not a conscious act. There was no discussion or dissent from the program. It was the latest thing.

Just consider what is happening with the Covid vaccine. When Trump announced the program, the hive condemned it as orange poison. Trump exits and suddenly the hive claims the vaccine the universal elixir. They literally spent two years forcing people to take the shot. Now that it is clear it was a fraud from the start and is causing serious health problems, they are pivoted back to blaming Trump. The hive now believes the vaccine debacle was caused by the Trump conspiracy.

When you see these people swinging wildly from one invented reality to the next, it is hard to see the hand of Pemberton and Prescott. Instead, it looks like a murmuring of starlings, rushing in and out of the trees. What controls them is the undefinable, but omnipresent hive mind. They believe the same things, so they react the same way to events, even events they create. The Covid mania makes much more sense when you think of it as a manifestation of a shared reality.

Of course, both sides of this debate can be right. Our ruling class is largely controlled by a shared reality, a new secular religion, but elements inside the hive scheme to manipulate events to their advantage. Here we have Google blithely admitting to running a psychological warfare campaign on the people of Europe. Clearly, the people inside Google excogitating this scheme know what they are doing. On the other hand, they think this is perfectly normal. It is their nature.

This is why it is probably not good to go all in on the deep state or the emergent behavior explanation for what we are seeing. Both are correct to a point but fail to explain the whole. Instead, it is best to think of the people in charge as members of a religious cult and part of that cult is a hatred of normal people. The religion of the Cloud People naturally leads to coordinated efforts to harm the Dirt People. They do this because they have to. It is their nature.

The Reality Jubilee

Posted on August 24, 2022 by thezman

The Biden administration is gearing up to offer some sort of college debt jubilee as their answer to the student debt crisis. The details of the scheme are being leaked to generate interest in the forthcoming announcement. The idea is to use printed money to buy votes from the millions holding student debt. Coincidentally, this comes just as the regime begins the fall campaign. Currently there is $1.6 trillion in outstanding college debt, most held by the Federal government.

There is no economic sense behind the idea. A debt jubilee is just another way of dropping cash onto the economy. With roaring inflation and supply chain problems, this is pretty much the opposite of good policy. The net effect of the program is to put more money in the pockets of the debtors. They will spend the money, just as they did the stimulus checks, which puts upward pressure on prices. Of course, this will come after the midterms so it makes sense to the politicians.

The reason there is $1.6 trillion in college debt is that the government has been mucking around in the education markets for several generations. Financial aid, like public pensions, quickly became a good way to buy votes. Opposing it on economic grounds, while factually correct, looked like you were opposing it on moral grounds, which makes you a monster. It quickly became a political racket that grew out of control and now we have a multi-trillion dollar monster.

The madness of college financial aid is obvious when you look at the rise in tuition costs over the last thirty years. They have grown at multiples of the official inflation rate and that is excluding hidden fees. There was a time when a student could work his way through college. It was a struggle, but it was possible. Today, the cost of tuition alone dwarfs what a student can make working fulltime. In other words, in the effort to make college affordable, it was made increasingly unaffordable.

This is a well understood phenomenon. If the government starts issuing subsidies for the purchase of new BMW’s, the price of the cars will increase. The increase will track with the subsidy. The people running BMW are not stupid. Once they know the buyers can afford the premium, they will raise prices. This very same thing just happened with the subsidy for electric cars. The electric car makers raised prices to match the new subsidy from Washington.

The remarkable thing about this is everyone knows it is true. The reason the people animating Biden’s corpse have been slow to pull the trigger on this scheme is they know it will be bad for the economy. The timing is to get the applause before the election, then have the public pay the price after the election. They figure that in two years people will forget all about it. Come the 2024 election, the corpse animators will have some new scheme to sell the public.

Even more remarkable is the fact that some people in the media know it is true, but most are innumerate so they do not understand the material. Some of the former group will ask the Biden people about the math and the Biden people will make up a whopper about how the definitions of commonly used economic terms have changed so shut up bigot and clap louder. There will be no serious discussion of this scheme and the economic condition of the country will decline a bit further.

Critics will settle for blaming the voters, especially those rotten kids down at the coffee shop with their nose rings, philosophy degrees and college debt. “The people are voting themselves a raise from the public fisc!” It is a good example of the perverse effect of democracy on the public mind. The people responsible for the terrible governance get a pass, while their victims get the blame. When the people work through bad policy, the “leaders” take credit for the result.

If Joe Biden were the dictator, installed by the ruling class after the old dictator was deposed, there would be no question about who to blame. This is why they remain berserk over the 2020 election controversy. If the people think the game was rigged, then there is no way to shift the blame for the results onto the voters. It turns out that the best way to avoid the wrath of the people over the manifest corruption of their leaders is to give them a ballot and tell them they are in charge.

Putting all of this aside, the college debt crisis hides a much bigger problem going on that you can see in the college numbers. As the cost of a credential has gone up, its value has declined. One reason for that is the dilution of it by handing them out to anyone who qualifies for debt. The other reason is the changing complexion of the student body. The diversity push has changed what the credential means, which has diluted its value to the core market.

The people not going to college are the people who should be getting the additional training from the education system. That is the cohort that is dropping out of the system because the cost-benefit relationship has turned negative. The result is a swelling number of credentialed idiots carrying debt they can never pay. They are also more likely to stop paying, knowing you will not dare go after them. The moral inversion of the education system is creating new downstream problems.

Of course, all of this means the system can never be reformed. What needs to happen is a debt jubilee along with the abolition of all subsidies. Most colleges would close and half of the current students would drop out of school. The system would shrink down to its core of training bright young people and doing useful research. That can never be allowed to happen, so the system will stagger on like this until the printing presses can no longer keep pace and we reach collapse.

Objectively Partisan

Posted on August 23, 2022 by thezman

One of the consequences of partisanship is that it insulates the partisan from the rest of the world to the extent that their reality is deranged. They only know what the others in their group know and that is limited to what is best for the group. Civic nationalists decry partisanship for this reason. It makes objective truth impossible. Radicals, of course, embrace partisanship because they reject objective truth. It is why modern radicals literally speak of their truth.

The funny thing about partisanship is both sides are correct. Politics is about friends and enemies, which leaves little room for objectivity. In politics you want to advance your interests or the interests of your side. That often means doing so at the expense of those viewed as enemies. If the facts say you should yield in deference to your opponent, then you have no choice but to reject the facts. Otherwise, you lose and that undermines the point of politics.

The reality of politics in a participatory system is that the winners and those with some chance to win must be partisans and reject objective truth. The outsiders, those seeking to crack the nut of the political dynamic, must embrace what they claim to be objective truth, in order to wedge open the door of politics. In other words, appeals to truth are just another partisan tool. It is the outsider who can embrace objective reality, because he has no skin in the game of politics.

An example of this is this New York Times opinion piece by two extremist law professors calling for the abolition of the constitution. The very first sentence in their piece is a lie designed to advance their agenda. “When liberals lose in the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century — they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong.” Liberals so rarely lose in court that when it happens, it is literally news for months, as we see with abortion.

The point of the lie is to butter up the intended audience with a bit of flattery to let them know the writers are fellow partisans. “We keep trying to use reason on these odious monsters, but they are immune to reason, so here is what we do.” In effect, the partisan statement at the start is an appeal to abandon objectivity. The next sentence makes that exact demand and the next paragraph explains why. What they mean by “rejecting constitutionalism” is the rejection of objective truth.

Of course, in order to make that work logically, they have to provide a definition of “constitution” that is itself a lie. These legal scholars from two of the most important elite academies in the empire claim that a constitution is about “setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass.” You see, it is just an arbitrary set of “super rules” that were made up out of convenience. Most likely, the people behind it were bad people, being from the past and all that.

The argument in favor of a constitution has always been that it is a formalization of the superstructure of society. For any human grouping to hold together it must first answer the question, “Who are we?” The answer to the question must be filled out by a set of rules that define the answer. A constitution is what complex societies create to define themselves as a people. In one sentence the liberal tradition is discarded and relegated to partisan whimsy by these two radical legal scholars.

The rest of the piece is an argument in favor of overthrowing what remains of the liberal order and instituting what amounts to fascism. They imagine a totalitarian model of the law based on the tyranny of the majority. They make no effort to explain why fifty percent plus one is a sacred number. That is the partisan mind. The partisan never puts thought into analyzing his own statements of faith. Words exist for purely partisan reasons, to signal the who? whom? of politics.

Interestingly, the people chanting democratic phrases, while claiming to appeal to the will of the people, make clear that who decides is what matters. “Liberals have been attempting to reclaim the Constitution for 50 years — with agonizingly little to show for it. It’s time for them to radically alter the basic rules of the game.” The basic argument here is not against constitutions, but about who makes the rules. Objectively, this is a purely anti-democratic argument.

That is why the Left is immune to claims of hypocrisy. They can easily allow contradictory claims exist in their mind, as long as both claims advance the partisan agenda of their group. On the one hand they can demand democracy and on the other demand tyrannical control of the law. Both claims are useful in the partisan game of politics, so both can exist in the same toolbox. For the partisan, the contradiction makes reaching for the right tool easier.

Here is a great example. “No matter how openly political it may purport to be, reclaiming the Constitution remains a kind of antipolitics. It requires the substitution of claims about the best reading of some centuries-old text or about promises said to be already in our traditions for direct arguments about what fairness or justice demands.” The first sentence is self-contradictory. The last sentence is a promise to impose the values of a tiny minority on the population, in the name of democracy.

From the outside, the partisanship of Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, the authors of the piece, is monstrous. The only end is a bloodbath. These two are making the same basic claim as Pol Pot. The thing is, they are correct about one thing. It is who decides that matters, not how they decide. Constitutions must always be about who decides, first and foremost. This ensures the laws maintain this relationship between the rulers and their people.

That was the critical mistake of the Founders. It left open the door for others to decide and that is what led to the nightmare of the 20th century and the current crisis. At the other end of this crisis will be the answer to who decides going forward. Will it be vengeful aliens or the founding stock? In the end, the point of politics is not words on a paper but who puts the words on the paper. Ironically, that is the one objective truth that every partisan can accept.

The Wages Of Evil

Posted on August 22, 2022 by thezman

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it is a deep dive into the life of TikTok star and Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin. Sunday Thoughts is on holiday, but there are two new posts behind the green door about my weekend adventures. There is a longer analysis of what is happening in the Ukraine war and a review of the heretical movie, The Northman. SubscribeStar and Substack.

For a long time, Professor John Mearsheimer has been making the point that the war in Ukraine can easily lead to a much larger war. In fact, it could lead to a global war, maybe even a nuclear war. After all, the United States is provoking a nuclear power over the Ukraine and it is provoking nuclear powers that support Russia. China and India are both nuclear powers and both back Russia. Here is Mearsheimer’s latest analysis of how things can get very bad very fast.

One of the problems with this sort of analysis is it assumes both sides remain as they are in terms of the abilities and points of view. The great unknown unknown in all wars is how the two sides will evolve in terms of how they see the conflict, themselves and their opponents. The actions and reactions of the players in a war creates a dynamic that is impossible to even think about in advance. The race to the sea at the start of the Great War is a good example of the unknowable unknowns.

We can already see this in the Ukraine. It is clear that Russia, the Ukrainian leaders and Europe expected a quick settlement. Zelensky made concessions at the start and was pretty close to taking the deal on offer from Russia. This deal was pretty much the old deal called the Minsk Accords. Then London and Washington intervened to sabotage negotiations, which came to a sudden halt. The West unleashed a tsunami of economic attacks on the Russian economy.

This forced the Russians to reevaluate their operation. Over six months they have switched from a short and limited war that would hopefully end in a peace deal, to a long war of attrition. The Russians are now slowly obliterating the Ukrainian army, in an artillery based meatgrinder. They also have changed their goals. There is little doubt that Russia will take most of Ukraine now. What they will leave as Ukraine will be a land-locked state with limited resources.

This has in turn created a new dynamic on the Western side. The reckless flood of weapons into Ukraine has now given way to a form of terrorism. Washington and London are now helping the Ukrainians target civilian targets in the Donbass. They have launched sabotage attacks in the Crimea and shelled a nuclear plant. None of these are effective military operations. They are intended to create havoc for the Russians and in the case of the nuke plant, possibly kill a lot of civilians.

The other reason for Washington to have Ukraine launch these sorts of attack is in the hope they will provoke a response. The facts on the ground are only going to get worse and public support in the West has started to collapse. Normal people do not care about the Ukraine, but they care about food prices and energy bills. The typical German does not see why his government should send billions to the crooks in Ukraine while he has to take cold showers to save energy.

If the Russians respond to these civilian attacks with an attack on civilian targets in the Ukraine, so the thinking goes, then public outrage in the West will bring opinion back around to supporting the war. A meltdown at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station would contaminate half of Ukraine. Western media would blame it on Russia, which would then warrant greater involvement in the war. This is the sort of lunacy that no one can plan for or even contemplate in advance.

Now we have a new unknowable unknown in the mix. The assassination of Darya Dugina, by Ukrainian terrorists, is the sort of escalation that can set off a dangerous dynamic in this war. Darya Dugina is the daughter of Alexander Dugin, the most important intellectual in the world today. His ideas about a post-Cold War East are credited with shaping the world view of Putin and his supporters. The attack was meant for him but killed his daughter instead.

There is no question that the attack was done by professionally trained assassins and that those assassins were working on behalf of the West. The Russians will blame this on Washington and London because they are not stupid. They will see this as Washington personalizing this dispute. That could very well mean they take the same view and we begin to see car bombings in Western capitals. The neocons better hire food tasters and install radiation detectors in their homes.

One of the early warnings about dumping arms in Ukraine is they could easily get into the hands of gangsters and terrorist. The Ukrainian are the most corrupt people on earth, so they have been selling this stuff as fast as they get it. Now imagine Russia letting Javelin missiles fall into the hands of Berlin-based Islamists who would like to do something big, like take out the motorcade of Olaf Scholtz. The idiots who cooked up the Dugin caper just put everyone’s name on a list.

This is exactly what Mearsheimer has been warning of for months. While everyone would celebrate a car bombing campaign against the neocons, these things never go as planned and quickly become a new problem. Killing Dugin would have angered Russia, but killing his daughter infuriates the world. It underscores the fact that Western leaders are gangsters without scruples. They will kill everyone if that is what it takes to reach the end times they are pursuing.

In the end, the larger story here is not the dynamics of war or how great powers can easily maneuver themselves into conflict. The real issue is the danger of having large empires ruled by alien elites. If the people running the American empire cared at all about the people, this never would have come to pass. They do no care so they do not think about the consequences to the people. It turns out that giving dangerous sociopaths like the neocons access to power is suicidal.

Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead

Posted on August 19, 2022 by thezman

I must admit that I have enjoyed the blow out loss of Liz Cheney much more than I expected to enjoy it. It has been known for a long time that she was going to lose her race, but somehow the Cloud People were not ready for it. They have been carrying on like this is a bolt from the blue. I suspect the midnight miracle of 2020 convinced them that if they wished hard enough, their election dreams will come true.

That has been the best part of it. The people bemoaning the result are the worst people and they are not hiding it. By worst people I mean conservatives. They are so angry that they are letting the mask drop and taking aim at the voters. It reveals that it was never been about Trump the man but about the people who support him. They hate the Dirt People as much as any of the other Cloud People.

For the better part of two years, Liz Cheney has made the straight forward argument that Trump is a menace and his voters are fascists. Conservative Inc. just nodded along, because they agree with her. They actually defended her as standing on principle, which is an amazing claim when you stop and think about it. It means one of their principles is that normal white people are monsters.

This result, along with the sagging poll numbers of the Republicans, suggests that there is a change happening with the Dirt People. Voting out an odious carbuncle like Cheney, just for the fun of it, is a rebuke to the party. Some percentage of the Dirt People are waking up to the scam that is the Republican Party and they are ready to act on it, even if it means the crazies keep control.

Time will tell if the current polling is real, but the fact is the Republicans are currently offering nothing to the voters. Mitch McConnell is publicly hoping the Democrats keep the Senate. He shot down a scheme to nationalize the election around issues like trade and immigration, probably because he knows it would work. The party of Liz Cheney is mad at its voters and maybe those voters are ready to get mad back.

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Liz Cheney
Finks
Trump Rage
Christian Right
Stochastic Violence
Race & Crime

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Stochastic Reality

Posted on August 18, 2022 by thezman

One of the stranger things to come from the collection of sub-cults that make up the modern Left is the concept of stochastic terrorism. In the hands of the believers, it is not so much a concept as an incantation. They chant it online in response to anything that contradicts their beliefs. On Twitter, for example, they believe that if enough believers chant it in response to a tweet they do not like, the gods of on-line moderation will strike down the offending tweet and maybe the tweeter.

Taken literally, it is a meaningless expression. The first dictionary definition of stochastic is random and the second is “involving chance or probability.” The word comes from the Greek word “to guess” and has been used in various fields to describe a range of probabilities within a process. Terrorism, of course, is the use of violence and fear to achieve an ideological aim. Taken together, stochastic terrorism would literally mean random violence to achieve a political aim.

As is often the case, it has two meanings in the cult of the modern Left. One is the purely emotional definition, which is always the primary one. Stochastic terrorism is anything that upsets the user by disconfirming her beliefs. Someone posting crime statistics, for example, is accused of stochastic terrorism because crime statistics contradict left-wing beliefs about society. The phrase is simply a way to mark someone as a heretic or blasphemer.

Just as Eskimos allegedly have many words for snow, the modern Left has many ways to identify a blasphemer. The logic behind the claim about Eskimos and snow is they spend a lot of time around snow, so they have to master the topic. Similarly, the modern Left imagines itself surrounded by demonic enemies trying to hold back the tides of history, so they invest their time in studying those enemies. The result is a long list of words to describe the eyes in the darkness.

In this case, there is a larger meaning behind the incantation. What is meant by the phrase is that people posting unapproved things on-line are setting a range of possibilities by injecting the heresy into the system. Some unknown percentage of people exposed to the heresy will act on it. Some unknowable percentage of those people will commit an act of violence. Posting crime stats will eventually result in a white man killing a black body.

In other words, if a causal link can be imagined between speech and action, then the link is as real as if the speaker commanded the actor. We have quickly moved from the entirely implausible to the probable and then to highly probable. In the mind of the believer, what follows is the inevitable. You posting a graph about crime stats on Twitter will inevitably lead to violence against black bodies, which means you are the cause of crime against black bodies and therefore a terrorist.

This strikes normal people as insane and it is insane. It is another bit of evidence to suggest what we think of as the modern Left is a form of mental illness. The believers are in an imaginary war against imaginary enemies. Instead of walking down a public road, ranting and waving their arms at an invisible entity, they are on the internet harassing normal people just trying to have a conversation, in the belief that the conversation is part of a plot.

This is certainly true of the people on Twitter, which is something of a bug light for the mentally unstable. Mass on-line culture draws in the unstable looking for structure and they find it in the many subcultures. The institutional Left has weaponized these people as a defense against public scrutiny. Wherever normal people gather to talk about what is happening in the world, these weaponized crazies try to prevent it. They have been tuned to think normal people are the cause of their misery.

Further upstream, there is a logic to this idea of stochastic terrorism. The managerial elite struggles to justify their position, so they conjure these ideas as a way to legitimize their defensive actions. If unapproved thoughts can lead to unapproved actions, then their censorship actions are justified. They are not censoring speech. They are protecting the vulnerable from potential violence. No matter how improbable, they must prevent your words from causing the next 9/11.

This fits a general pattern with the American Left. The structure of their thought is to act on the hypothetical, rather than the actual. Look around at the range of issues popular on the Left and all of them are based on a firm belief in the hypothetical. It is possible that climate change is caused by humans. We do not know, but we have to pretend we know and act accordingly. We do not know if racism is a real thing, but we have to assume it is and make war on it.

This gets to something else about the American Left. They firmly believe they can immanentize whatever they can imagine. They create a mental construct, like what is behind the stochastic terrorism incantation. The construct is that speech leads to a range of actions. Then they leap from this model of reality to believing it is reality, more real that observable reality. Rather than interact with the real world, they operate within the constructed world as if it is reality.

This is how entirely novel ideas become bedrock truth in a an instant. Ten years ago, a man in a dress was a crossdresser. Then someone produced an alterative reality in which humans are assigned a gender at birth. Note the replacement of the word sex with the word gender. The former is used on living things while the latter is used for inanimate objects like pipe fittings and electrical connectors. The misappropriation of language is integral to their world building.

Once you cross from the biological reality of sex to the conjured reality of gender, the imaginer is free to reinvent humanity. The man in a dress is another gender and people can choose their genders. Reality becomes a video game where the player can create any character they like. It is a form of escapism, but this alterative reality quickly supplants actual reality for the player. Overnight, normal people find themselves around people who are sure biological reality terrorism.

The question is why now? What has gone wrong in the West leading to this epidemic of delusional madness? Is it a novel parasite that leads some people to slip from the bounds of reality into these imaginary worlds? Is it new at all or just an old part of the human condition we used to control? There is the possibility that mass communication has allowed these deranged people that have always been with us to form up in ways that were previously impossible.

It is hard to know, but what is clear is that these people are much better at conjuring alternative realities than the world is at defending reality. This increased ability to conjure alterative realities and then act on them means the odds of them conjuring a cataclysmic reality has gone up. Put another way, the longer they are allowed to freely create alternative realities, the more likely they are to conjure one that ends in the destruction of the West.

That gets to the universal of the Left. They project onto the world the things they hate about themselves or fear they may be doing. The emergence of stochastic terrorism as an incantation suggests that at some level, they sense their repeated rolling of the dice on reality must come up snake eye eventually. In other words, their very existence will result in some random act of destruction. If the death cult that is the Left rolls the dice enough times, they will get their wish.

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