The Machine Stopped

Posted on April 29, 2023 by thezman

There will be no show this week as events have conspired against me to the point where I simply do not have the time to do it properly. Even though the show is freely available, I take pride in my work. Putting out a crappy show just to put up something is worse than not doing a show in my view. While the perfect is the enemy of the good enough, you still have to have standards.

In order to do the show each week, it takes about four hours of time. Putting aside any prep work, it takes about ninety minutes to record the show. It is very hard to talk for an hour, so you have to take some breaks. There are always weird noises and interruptions to slow things down. The kittens now have the habit of crashing onto the desk whenever I sit down to do anything, so that slows up the process.

Once the show is recorded, it has to be edited. When your studio is your home office, there are always weird noises that get picked up by the mic. The mic is also much more sensitive than my ears, so editing brings surprises. Last week, one of the kittens was sitting on the desk while I was recording. The mic picked up his purring so it sounded like I was doing the show from a lion’s den.

Editing takes about ninety minutes on good days. Since I am not a sound engineer, there are times when it takes me half an hour to edit out some weird background noise or my own weird noises. If you want to know how poorly you speak, spend a couple hours every week editing your own voice. I can now recognize my verbal tics just by the shape of the sound graph.

On top of the four hours to put the show together is prep time and compiling it for the various locations. Uploading to sites like Rumble only requires a few minutes, but it is not always trouble free. Most weeks it takes an hour to get everything compiled and uploaded to the various platforms. Add it all up and the one-hour show is up to five hours of work each week, spread out over a few days.

This week I was thrown a curveball by the day job. A client had been working on a project for months, but forgot to tell me about it. They needed me to do something that would normally take a couple of weeks, but I had a week to get it done. This week I have been strapped to a screen twelve hours a day. As the deadline grew closer, the work required to finish the project kept growing.

By the time Wednesday rolled around I had done nothing on the show and I had no time to do even a slapdash job of it. Around midnight Wednesday I decided to call it a day and do the show on Thursday. I had got ahead of the project, so I figured I could take the morning to knock out the show. Thursday morning more bad news from the salt mine hit my desk and that meant no free time at all.

The next plan was to do it Friday afternoon or evening, but there is a limit to how much you can use your brain. Around five yesterday I realized that my brain was no longer working very well, so that was it for me. I popped open a Guinness becasue nothing heals the brain like alcohol. As the great philosopher once said, beer is the cause of and cure for all of life’s problems.

A funny thing happens to you when you get consumed by a project. It is as if you have been in exile on a remote island. All of the daily tasks you do out of habit fall by the wayside as you focus only on the work. I have 160 unread e-mails in my work account, which is something that I never let happen. I answer work e-mails right away and then move them to a folder. I am done for the day when the inbox is empty.

Of course, you realize that some of those daily tasks are not important. A man’s schedule is like an empty drawer. It will be filled with many useless things that for some reason you think are important. A week like this revealed a lot of pointless tasks on the schedule that can be removed. On the other hand, feeding the cat and taking out the trash are not things that should be ignored.

The other thing a week like this brings to the front of the brain is that the number of capable people is shrinking. For this project I was dealing with a group of people I only met this week. Only one from this new group was competent. He was not always easy to reach becasue he is competent so the demand for his time is infinite. Luckily, he knows this and is also conscientious.

This is something happening all over. The reason Elon Musk could fire eighty percent of the Twitter staff is they did nothing useful. It was not just that they were there for social justice causes, but that most of them were useless. This is always a problem, but it seems to be getting worse. Every company is loaded down with useless people and must rely on a tiny minority to keep the machine running.

It is always a good idea to remember that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men, but I do wonder what happens when the capable retire. For now, there are enough capable people to keep the plates spinning, but at some point, they simply stop either because they are dead or they are tired of carrying the burden. The Western world is headed for a great reset, but not the one the rulers imagine.

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Technical Difficulties

Posted on April 28, 2023 by thezman

The show will be delayed. Perhaps this afternoon or tomorrow, God willing.

Technical Difficulties - Productivityist

More Bank Shenanigans

Posted on April 27, 2023 by thezman

Just as the last bank crisis was fading from memory, a new bank crisis is emerging, this time staring First Republic Bank. Despite upbeat earnings, the bank’s stock has collapsed this week. The market cap has fallen below one billion for the first time in the bank’s existence. They are currently begging the big banks to shift some of their deposits into Republic to stem the outflow. Depositors are worried that the Feds may shutter the bank, putting their deposits at risk.

If this sounds like the crisis that brought down Silicon Valley Bank or Credit Suisse, that is because it is the same problem. Large depositors and insiders got worried and began to shift their money out of the bank. Because there are no secrets in this age and the plutocracy is relatively tiny, it does not take long for word to get out and the other large depositors begin to pull their money. Banks that rely on large dispositors will always be prone to these sorts of bank runs.

Oddly, this reveals some Dirt People wisdom. Silicon Valley Bank did not cater to the Dirt People, so Dirt People did not put their money in the bank. Instead, Dirt People end up at the big banks. The whole too big to fail thing in the prior financial crisis taught the regular guy a good lesson. The big banks are friends with the regime, so the regime will always protect them. If you want to protect your money against shenanigans from crooked bankers, put your money in a big bank.

The trouble comes when insiders in a particular industry, like the tech sector, want to conduct shenanigans away from the prying eyes of other oligarchs. This is why Silicon Valley Bank existed in the first place. It was the bank for the connected in the tech sector, so they could conduct shenanigans amongst other tech insiders. If you wanted to know what would be promoted as the next big thing in tech, you needed to be at that insider table, so doing business at SVB was necessary.

Since the American economy is nothing but shenanigans by insiders, it means all of the other areas have their insider tables too. That is where these other regional banks come into play. They will serve the large developers in a region, for example, who will park lots of cash in these banks. Those developers will draw in local warlords and potentates to their shenanigans, who will put their cash in the same local banks, so that moving money and information is simpler.

The information portion is the key to modern shenanigans. The reason the hedge funds operate in sleepy villages in Connecticut is that it is much easier to conduct shenanigans in person at a dinner party or on the golf course. If you are in New York, someone could hear you talking or you may be tempted to trust the wrong person via e-mail, so it is much safer to deal in person out in the leafy suburbs, free from the hoi polloi and the ambitious government regulator.

You can be sure this used to happen at Silicon Valley Bank. Part of what they provided to clients was introductions to other clients. One tech insider could socialize with another insider at his friend the banker’s house. If after a few drinks there were some shenanigans, who would know? This sort of thing plays out across the economy and regional banks often operate as junction points. A part of their service is putting likeminded investors together for shenanigans.

In the world of shenanigans, there is no honor, so when the money could find better deals outside of tech startups, they no longer needed Silcom Valley Bank and they pulled their money. A similar problem is happening in the commercial real estate sector, which is facing tough times. The work from home craze kicked off by Covid is here to stay, so that has cratered demand for office space. Crime waves in cities are killing urban commercial and retail properties.

The big drag on commercial real estate, as far as the banks are concerned, is the way in which property owners manage debt. If you own an apartment building, you never pay down the debt on the property. Instead, you keep borrowing against it as rents pay down the debt. That is the source of income. Of course, there are investors, who get paid from these periodic withdrawals of equity. Commercial real estate is not about the rents, but the equity, which can be pledged as collateral.

Imagine you have a property worth a million dollars. The rents far exceed the cost of maintaining the property, so it has a remarkably high cash flow. It means you pay taxes on those profits. If on the other hand, you take a mortgage against the property, the cash flow decreases, along with the taxes, but you now have a pile of cash to do things like buy another property. As rents pay down the debt, you periodically refinance the property to create a big pile of cash.

The trouble is interest rates are going up at the same time that occupancy is going down, which is driving down the value of properties. The bank is not only demanding more in interest payment, but they are also willing to loan less against the property, because of the declining occupancy. What is happening in commercial real estate is similar to what happened when the housing bubble popped. All of a sudden, lots of people are upside down on their mortgages.

This is what is pressuring regional banks. A bank that primarily works with commercial real estate is seeing a sharp decline in deposits, but also a sharp decline in many of the assets they are holding on their books. This is why everyone is suddenly nervous about the regional banks. Many of them were tied into the regional real estate markets, which are now in decline due to rising interest rates. First Republic Bank is probably the first shoe to drop in what will be another banking crisis.

Of course, the question that lingers over all of this is whether the Federal Reserve can keep the plates spinning while they work out decades of bad policy. As of this week, the Feds are not coming to rescue the local banks. They were not going to rescue Silicon Valley Bank until they had no choice. Commercial real estate has just as many powerful oligarchs as the tech sector, maybe more. That means everyone is going to be betting on yet another massive bailout of the banking sector.

All of this is a good reminder that America stopped being a market economy a long time ago due to the outsized role of banking. When you have control of the global currency, you can conjure money from thin air. When you have that power, you use it to command things of the economy that otherwise would not exist. That means this command economy is going to keep faltering as the people commanding it lose their power to command it to do things it should never have done.

The Gods Have Gone Crazy

Posted on April 26, 2023 by thezman

The primary difference between a god and a man is that the gods have powers that no man can possess. It is not that the gods are bigger, faster, and stronger than men, even though that is often the case. It is that the gods can violate the rules of nature or even harness nature itself. Gods can defy gravity, change the course of rivers, or make it go dark in the middle of the day. The gods are gods because they get to make exceptions to the rules that bound the life of man.

Of course, this is not the only role of the gods. If the gods violated the rules of the universe all the time or helped man violate those rules, then the rules would be meaningless and all that would matter is favoring the gods. A big part of what makes the gods is their enforcement of the rules. What man can expect is the rules to apply at all times and all places. It is the exceptions that remind him that his world is the creation of the gods, and he has to respect them.

Christianity changed this relationship a tiny bit. The old gods were relegated to folklore and the new God was the only god. God was not playing an active role in the affairs of mankind, but more of an observer. Even so, God was the great enforcer of the rules of nature, by not violating those rules, outside of miraculous circumstances that lie beyond the ability of man to comprehend. God made the world. It operates by fixed rules and only God can make exceptions.

This is an important concept to understanding the world. Human society is based on the idea that the rules apply to everyone, except the sovereign, who is allowed to exempt himself from the rules and make exceptions to the rules. The king, for example, can pardon a condemned man, even though the man broke the rules. The king is the only member of society to judge himself because he is the only member of society responsible for maintaining the rules of society.

Like the gods, this special position falls apart quickly if the king is making exceptions to the rules to the point where the rules are meaningless. The king goes from being the sovereign to being a tyrant. What defines him is not the rules and his role in the enforcement of the rules, but rather his lack of rules. This is the fundamental definition of tyranny. There are no rules, just the caprice of the ruler. Everyone lives in terror of being on the wrong side of the tyrant.

If one wanted to produce a universal definition for hell, it would start with the complete lack of rules. After all, if the Devil has rules, then you can theoretically appeal to those rules for relief. There is some hope that you can end the torment by complying with the rules or finding a loophole. On the other hand, if there are no rules then there is no hope for appeal as there is no rule to which you can appeal. There is nothing but the desire of the Devil to inflict torment upon you.

The point of all this is that order depends upon rules, but it also requires an enforcer of those rules and that is always someone with the power to make exceptions. If that person or entity abuses that power, we slowly move out of the world of order and into the hellish domain of rule by tyrant. The tyrant flips the concept of the rule of law on its head so that the rules become dangerous. Today’s lawful action can be deemed unlawful tomorrow by the tyrant.

We see this in miniature on the social media platforms. YouTube creators must spend time self-policing their old content because even though they complied with the rules at the time, the rules change constantly. That old video about Rumble was within the rules two years ago, but all of a sudden, it is now a violation of the rules, so you can lose your channel as a result of it. This applies across all social media platforms. The “terms of service” is a license to unleash hell on the platform users.

The same people turning the rules of the internet into a jumble of exceptions administered by petty tyrants are doing the same to the law. It used to be that you could have an opinion about the powerful people. You could get a bunch of your friends to hold a rally in order to express that opinion. In theory you can still do these things, but it is impossible to know if it is legal. Years after the fact the state of Virginia is prosecuting Charlottesville protestors for carrying tiki torches.

Of course, the people turning the law into a dangerous labyrinth are also redefining the phrase “new world order” to mean unpredictable chaos. America is supposed to be the keeper of the rules-based world and the defender of order. Instead, the Washington regime spreads chaos around the world, mostly by violating the rules they demand others follow and punishing those who do follow the rules. Washington has become the global tyrant, the great violator of order.

What one finds behind this spread of lawlessness and chaos are people appropriating for themselves the right to make exceptions. Whether it is trivial things like the rules of social media, the mundane things in our courtrooms and boardrooms, or the big things on the global stage, it is always the same people turning the rules into an unnavigable jungle of exceptions. They have declared themselves gods and have driven the rest of us mad with their endless exceptions.

They may be crazy, but they are not gods, despite their claims. They are just the ruling class of the American empire. Ironically, a founding document of the American experiment provides the remedy. “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

This is what we see happening in the world. The emerging global powers, along with smaller powers like OPEC, are abandoning the old gods of the unipolar world for the new gods of the multipolar world. The new gods promise to respect the rules and avoid exceptions without consent. The same must happen inside the West and eventually in the heart of the American empire. There will be peace only when there are new rules that are enforced by new men who know they are not gods.

The New Iron Curtain

Posted on April 25, 2023 by thezman

Since about the time he took over the primetime slot for Fox News, people have been predicting that Fox would fire Tucker Carlson. The regime toadies said he would be fired due to his reckless heresy. He talked about taboo topics and questioned official dogma, which can never be allowed. The so-called conservatives repeated the same lines, as is their habit. Normal people, of course, know that anyone speaking truth to power is not going to last long in the modern media.

It turns out that Tucker was not fired for anything he said in particular, but most likely as a result of the lawsuit Fox settled with Dominion Voting Systems. It is possible that as part of the settlement, Fox agreed to get rid of people hated by the regime. The first to go was Dan Bongino, who was sacked before the ink was dry. Carlson got the axe Monday morning, which suggests it took them a while to find evidence to fire him with cause, thus voiding his contract.

On the other hand, the lawsuit could simply have frightened or embarrassed the plutocrats who own Fox News. They are regime members, after all, which means they care first and foremost about regime opinion. Tucker has no doubt been a problem in this regard for a long time. This embarrassing lawsuit, punishment by the regime for Fox not falling in line, may have frightened the Murdoch clan. Firing Tucker is a way to win back support of their social class.

As is always the case, the hot take people are rushing forth to give their hot take on what happened and why. Some claim it was due to a lawsuit from one of the usual suspects that triggered the move. Zombies from Conservative Inc think it is due to Tucker using mean words that hurt their feelings. Others claim that the Murdoch family was scandalized by Tucker questioning the J6 narrative. David French thinks it is all about him because David French is a narcissistic simpleton.

The most likely explanation is that Fox either agreed to clean house as part of the settlement or they got the message being sent by these lawsuits. Fox getting sued over election stuff is ridiculous, but the full might of the regime was brought to bear so that it was clearly impossible for Fox to get a fair trial. The judge ruled against them at every turn, so Fox had no choice but to settle. There is another case out there as well, so they have to play ball or face bankruptcy.

This may seem farfetched but consider that the New York Times was sued by Sarah Palin for defamation and won, despite their own emails admitting that they defamed Palin and did so knowingly. Granted, the judge in the case told the jury to rule in favor of the Times, but it is a good example of how the courts treat the media. It is incredibly hard to sue the media, even when they willingly lie about you. Yet somehow the court went the opposite way in this Fox News case.

What is happening right in front of our eyes is the weaponization of the court system by the regime to suppress dissent. They cannot shut down a cable channel or throw their hosts in prison, but they can lawfare into bankruptcy any organization that violates the ideology of the regime. In other words, they told Rupert Murdoch that he can run his operation as he sees fit, but they will sue him into the poorhouse if he steps out of line or fails to get rid of people who violate regime dogma.

This is merely the highest profile example of this new control mechanism. The Alex Jones case is another example. Jones was tagged with a billion in damages for saying nutty things about the school shooting in Connecticut. Like the Fox News case, the particulars were just an excuse to force Jones into a morality play in which he was the villain, and the jury was instructed to condemn him. He never stood a chance at trial because the trial was rigged from the start.

The same thing is now happening to VDare. The state of New York is suing the group because they do not like their politics. You can read the case documents here and what you will find is a prime example of lawfare. What Laquanda Adams is doing is using the process as a punishment. On the one hand, it will cost VDare millions of dollars to defend themselves. On the other hand, it is an effort to scare away potential donors who may be hauled into court as well.

New York did the same trick to the National Rifle Association. They used the court system to batter them into bankruptcy. This is made easier by a court system filled with judges who think this is a great idea. Even if a judge is uncomfortable with these Stalinist tactics, they understand power. If they want to stay on the bench or move up the ranks, they have to do what the regime demands. If the regime can take down Fox News, they can take down a judge.

Lawfare is not a new thing. Shakedown operations like the alphabet soup gang have been using lawfare for decades. They would jurisdiction shop for a court that would hear their novel legal theory. Then they would judge shop for one of their co-ideologues and before long a heretic is in an unwinnable court case. The most recent example of this sort of grift is the Charlottesville civil cases. The whole stinking affair was an affront to civil society and the rule of law.

What is happening now is that these small-time rackets have been institutionalized into a tool of the regime. Since they can use the court to take away all of your money for any reason they like, they can suppress the speech they dislike by threatening to impoverish anyone that entertains unapproved speech. Since the law is the last resort for the weak seeking protection from the powerful, the regime has effectively closed off the last civil route to challenging regime policies and programs.

In effect an iron curtain is descending across American society. On one side are the regime leaders and their toadies. They get to indulge in the material benefits of the shrinking American pie. On the other side are the common people struggling to come to terms with what these people have done to their country. For now, the real power of that iron curtain is that the people on the losing side refuse to believe it is there and instead keep operating under the old rules.

Death Of The Blue Check

Posted on April 24, 2023 by thezman

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One of the more bizarre but illuminating aspects of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been the panic over his changes to the blue check. Here is CNN reporting on it as if it is a natural disaster. Here is a Sara and Rebecca over at Axios hissing and snarling at the new policy as if it is a crucifix. Here are two airheads at MSNBC cheering the SpaceX explosion as they issue a fatwah against Musk over his new polices. This jock-sniffing weirdo at Slate has declared Musk a business failure.

The reason for the panic is Musk has gone ahead with his plan to make the blue check into a badge of access, rather than a symbol of moral goodness. If you want extra features on the Twitter platform, like longer posts and the ability to edit a tweet, you pay Musk for Twitter Blue, his premium service. Premium members get a blue check next to their fake name on their profile. This means all of the blue checks will be losing their blue check unless they pony up for the premium service.

To a normal person, this seems reasonable. Twitter is a business, and a business needs to earn money. Gab has been issuing badges to their premium users and their donors for a long time. Many sites have switched to a pay wall for commenting. If you want to comment on a post, you have to pay for the privilege. Many people hate this, as they have been conditioned to think everything online is free. Everyone becomes a communist when it comes to paying for content.

This is not the reason for the blue check panic. People forget that the whole point of the blue check was to prevent people from using your online identity to either ruin your brand or exploit people in your name. You provided identification to Twitter so they could verify that you were the real you and then they put that tick mark next to your name so everyone could know the moron behind those idiotic tweets was you and not some other moron pretending to be you.

It did not take long for the activists to turn this mundane feature into something like the star from Dr. Suess story, the Star-Bellied Sneetches. You see, the good people were willing to post online under their real name, so they were happy to submit their ID to the Twitter police for inspection. The bad people with their heretical ideas and penchant for blasphemy, posted under fake names. They hid in the shadows, ashamed of their actions, because they are the unclean!

Of course, like the Dr. Suess story, it could not end there as plenty of bad people were willing to show face and get the blue check. Soon the blue check was revoked from the bad people as a way to show the world they were bad. The blue check was now a badge of moral purity. The blue checks were inside the hive walls, while the no checks were the undifferentiated other outside the walls. The blue checks were now the priestly class of the Twitter platform.

It did not stop there. Twitter rigged their system so that the blue checks would get more attention and more followers. Musk has not confirmed it, but he has hinted at the possibility that the large bot army controlled by Twitter was used to artificially elevate blue checks over no checks. RamZPaul saw his engagement and follower count spike after Musk took over and deleted the old rules. Many no checks saw their follower counts double in weeks after Musk took control.

In effect, Twitter created a massive online safe space for the blue checks where they not only could avoid “violent language” but also have the robots reassured them through artificially boosting their engagement. In other words, they created an online version of the world they imagine is possible in real life. In fact, much of the tech censorship regime assumes that they can create a narrative so powerful that it changes physical reality itself.

That is why they are in a panic over the new policy. This barbarian has entered the temple and stripped them of their status. Worse yet, he is auctioning off their privilege to the great unwashed. Many of the former blue checks are carrying on like they have been physically assaulted by Musk. Since they are sure their narratives can be made real if you silence the opposition, they no doubt think what Musk is doing to Twitter foreshadows a new holocaust in the real world.

This strikes normal people as completely nuts, which is why normal people struggle to accept that these people really do believe this stuff. When the scolds claim that your speech is violence, but their violence is speech, they are not lying. They concocted the term “stochastic violence” to describe it. The former blue checks howling in agony are experiencing real pain. For them, the holocaust of the blue checks on Twitter is more real to them than physical reality.

What is happening at Twitter is a microcosm for what must happen in American society if we are to avoid disaster. The managerial class is the blue check army made flesh, and they must be stripped of their status by the real owners of society. Maybe they get lucky, and the rich guys follow the lead of Musk and begin taking back control of society by purging their organizations of these false priests. If you are hoping for a soft landing, the Twitter example is the place to start.

The Twitter example also shows how difficult it is to root out these people once they sink their roots into an organization. It is like casting out a demon. Musk may eventually have to take Twitter through bankruptcy in order to save it. Scaling this up to society as a whole will require far more than a billionaire shit-poster. Even so, it does provide a path to avoiding the great disaster that comes from allowing these spiteful mutants to run wild through the culture.

Asked & Answered

Posted on April 21, 2023 by thezman

Something I did not discuss in the show, but it will be a topic going forward, is the candidacy of Robert Kennedy Jr. It may be the greatest example of history repeating itself, but with a wry smile, we will ever see. Most people will think of his father’s run in 1968, but it more closely matches his uncle’s run in 1980. Ted Kennedy decided to challenge Carter because Carter was weak.

Many have noted the parallels between this age and the 1970’s. Trump is a good analog for Nixon. Biden is Carter. We have stagflation due to mismanagement of the money supply and reckless spending. The politicians have thrown open the jails and stopped prosecuting criminals, so the cities are falling into chaos. We now even have a standoff with the Russians. It is like old times.

Of course, the irony is that the people in charge today were in the streets causing trouble back in the 1970’s. It is as if their last hurrah is going to be reliving their youth at your expense, one last time. The grand finale will be a Kennedy challenging their Jimmy Carter, thus ushering in the end of the madness. Or will it be a Sirhan Sirhan, this time in drag, assassinating a Kennedy to kick-off the madness?

All of those things are superficial, but the parallels are interesting. A more serious storyline is that the Democrats may now have a Trump of their own. Kennedy is promising to run as a populist. Many of his big issues are popular with the sort of people who will vote for Trump in 2024. He will also tickle the fancy of old white people who still make up a big part of the Democratic base.

If the party was willing to nuke Bernie Sanders for Hillary Clinton and do so again for Joe Biden, they will probably do the same to Kennedy. This time they have full control of all the regime tools. On the other hand, Kennedy is making that a point of his candidacy, so it promises to be a very ugly fight. It will take a heart of stone not to enjoy the havoc Kennedy will cause in the 2024 election.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Fuentes
RamZPaul And Generational Solidarity
DeSantis Versus Trump
Cofnas Versus MacDonald
Christian Nationalism
Christian Dissident
Drinking
Death of Philosophy
What Must Be Done

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The Never Ending Fantasy

Posted on April 20, 2023 by thezman

For months now, the collective West has been talking about the great Ukrainian counter-offensive that is due any day now. This started when they realized they were not going to talk the Russians into launching a big winter offensive. Instead, the Russians kept grinding down the Ukrainians at places like Bakhmut. When that became too obvious to ignore, the West shifted to this new narrative. Western media now tells us the great Ukrainian counter-offensive is nigh!

Woven into this new narrative are bits of an old narrative. For example, there was talk of starting the counter-offensive early in order to send a relieving force to Bakhmut, like the Allies did to relieve Bastogne from the Germans. Instead, Ukraine just kept funneling troops and equipment into a death trap. According to the leaked documents, assuming they are real, tens of thousands of Ukrainians have died in Bakhmut, while the Russians have suffered about a tenth of the losses.

It looks like we are now getting a new narrative structure in time for the great Ukrainian counter-offensive and it is also from the Second World War. This new narrative structure builds on the D-Day landings. According to a post in Foreign Policy, Ukraine will try to break through Russian defenses in the South in order to develop a beachhead, from which they will then launch attacks into the Russian rear. Those naked Russians armed only with shovels will panic and run back to Moscow.

For those unfamiliar, the phrase “the longest day” comes from the 1962 war film about the landings on Omaha beach. Megastars of the day like Henry Fonda and John Wayne starred in the film. The movie was based on a book that claimed to be a non-fiction account of the landings. The reason for the title was that the landings were a near-run thing that could have gone either way. If they failed, it would have seriously harmed the allied war effort.

This is not the first time that Western narrative makers have plucked material from American war films. The chatter about relief of the Bakhmut defenders is the most recent example. Even though it did not happen as the script demanded, it was a good story, so the narrative makers are back at it with a new narrative plucked from the glory days of the American empire. Never mind that the Nazis are not exactly the bad guys in this telling of those old stories.

If this long discussed attack by Ukraine happens, it will go down as the most bizarre military operation in history. The lesson lost from those old military operations that are the basis of these new narratives is that secrecy is key. The Allies did not spend months talking about the invasion of France. They did not announce that they ordered Patton’s 3rd Army to relieve the defenders of Bastogne. The world learned of these events after they happened, not while they were planned.

This raises the possibility that this counter-offensive is just another clever story for the so-called leaders of the collective. One reason the West is running out of material for this war is they forced the Ukrainians to mount a counterattack in the south last fall, in order to provide material for their narrative. At that time, the story was the Russians were in full retreat, so the narrative makers wanted some content to use in support of their stories about the imminent collapse of Russia.

Theatrically, it worked, but the Ukrainians lost tens of thousands of men and much of their best equipment while attacking Russians defenses. For their part, the Russians were willing to give up ground, as it allowed them to pound the Ukrainians from a safe distance using their superior artillery. From a military perspective, it was a disaster for Ukraine, but it gave the narrative writers material. In this war of attrition, the West continues to fight a meme war to win the internet.

This has been the case since the start of the war. Policy makers in the collective West have spent as much time creating soothing stories for the political class as they have planning and executing the actual war. One of the things that comes through in this document leak story is that policy makers do not have a handle on what is actually happening on the ground. Again, the documents may not be real, but they fit a pattern of ignorance that has been the subtext of this war.

This is a pattern that goes back much further. The war in Iraq followed a similar arc as this proxy war with Russia. Back then, the narrative makers told the politicians that the Iraqis would “welcome us a liberators.” Many of the same people involved in that debacle are involved in this one. They also got everything wrong about the Afghanistan mission, as well as its ending. Of course, they deliberately lied about the origins of ISIS, painting them as freedom fighters.

As with those prior debacles, the planners are so sure of their preferred narrative that they never bother to think about updating it. In Iraq, they were sure democracy would spontaneously break out any day. In Syria, they were sure the Assad regime would collapse any day. They are still sure of it. In Iran, they have been sure the mullahs are done for going on half a century. Now they are sure Russia in on the verge of collapse and nothing will change their mind.

The thing is reality never shakes their faith in their fantasy. The failures in the Muslim world changed no minds in the collective West. None of the planners were dragged into court and made to answer for their lies and omissions. In each case, the dogs barked, and the caravan moved on to the next manufactured crisis. We see the pattern repeating with this proxy war on Russia. Being outlandishly wrong about events on the ground brings no penalty to the people committing the blunders.

In the fullness of time, if there are people around interested and able to write about this age, they may refer to this as the age of fantasy in the West. Rather than tend to that which was bequeathed to them by their ancestors, the West indulged in a series of fantasies that were increasingly at odds with reality. In the end, they managed only to burn through their inheritance, leaving the West in poverty. That may be the good ending to this never-ending fantasy.

Your Country As A Service

Posted on April 19, 2023 by thezman

In the money game, it is said that if you need hard money to control your ruling class, your ruling class will find a way around the limits of hard money. This is observationally true as every government in the history of man has found some way to corrupt their currency for short term advantage. For most of human history this has meant debasing the currency with cheap metal. In modern times, it means installing humanity’s worst schemers with the task of manipulating the currency.

That expression about money is a pithy way of pointing out that words on a piece of paper are never a restraint on the corrupt. The reason is the written law is just the formal expression of the unwritten law. Those words on the paper represent the spirit that organizes and limits the ruling class. If the people in the ruling class no longer abide by the spirit of the law, they will find a way around the letter of the law. This is something we can see plainly with the basics in America.

If you were to ask Americans to name the most fundamental freedom in the Constitution, they would surely say free speech. Some would point to other things, for sure, but the consensus would be speech. It is the thing America is most known for around the world. Europeans will often point to our first amendment right to speak our mind in public as the most important American right. It is the thing the world most identifies with being an American.

Despite that, the right to speak your mind is going away quickly. The most outrageous example is the recent trial of Douglas Mackey. He was arrested immediately after Biden was installed for the crime of mocking Clinton voters in 2016. Mackey operated the Ricky Vaughn account on Twitter, which was notorious for mocking the Left, especially the zombies who lined up to support Hillary Clinton. While obviously a satire account, it was comedy gold in the meme wars.

The government claimed that his jokes about the stupidity of Clinton voters denied these stupid Clinton voters the right to be stupid Clinton voters. That is not an exaggeration or a misrepresentation. The government offered no one who was denied their right to vote but managed to convince a judge and jury that these jokes tricked stupid Clinton voters out of their right to vote. The verdict is on appeal, but Mackey now faces ten years in prison.

Everyone involved in this case, except for Mackey, of course, made clear that they have no respect for the basic right of speech. The government found creative ways around the words on the page to charge Mackey. The judge found creative ways to rig the case in favor of the state. He then threatened the jury with lifetime sequestration when they were deadlocked. The jury then found a way to convict a fellow citizen of speaking mean words to rich people.

The thing about the Mackey case is not that it is rare, but that it is just a causal and blatant example of a pattern. Here is a new case where the Feds are charging people with holding the wrong opinions about Russia. They claim that these people were involved with Russian agents and spreading bad words to blacks. Most people would assume you have a right to spread bad words, even if they are about blacks and they come from a Russian citizen. It says so on the paper.

The recent Fox News settlement is another example of how thoroughly corrupt the courts are now. Fox was accused of doing fake news, a thing so common that the words no longer have meaning. The judge was determined to make sure they were punished, so Fox had no choice but to write a big check. Meanwhile, the New York Times manufactures fake news and deliberately defames people but enjoys blanket immunity from the court system.

Of course, the place where most speech occurs in the modern age is on the internet and the rulers are moving to close off that avenue. The Restrict Act is described as “a systematic framework for addressing technology-based threats to the security and safety of Americans.” The stated purpose is to let the government shut off services like TikTok, but in reality, it will let the party shutter any site they wish. It is the modern version of The Sedition Act of 1918.

There are two main differences between the assault on speech today versus the assault on speech a century ago. The most obvious is that The Sedition Act of 1918 was specifically aimed at anti-war speech. Today, the reason for stripping the rights of the citizens is personal and petty. The people in charge do not like being mocked by the peasants on the internet. The assault on your basic rights is part of a war waged from the top against the white middle-class.

The other main difference is that there was a clear limit on how long these limits on speech would last. This was a wartime act, and everyone agreed it was an exception to the general rule of open debate. In other words, the people who crafted the bill did so knowing the general rule was the default, but that in the extraordinary circumstances of the war, they were making an exception. Today, it is the reverse. The new default is you need permission to speak in public.

Looking back, this change in the spirit of the law, at least with respect to the ruling class, should have been obvious. The concept of the terms of service has proliferated with the spread of technology, despite running counter to Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. The contract of adhesion has always been a carefully regulated exception to contract law, but now it is the default. Everything you do is becoming subject to a terms of service agreement imposed on you by the powerful.

It is why appeals to the letter of the law mean nothing now. The people who view the letter of the law through the lens of the terms of service, naturally look at the Constitution the same way. As the issuing party, they get to interpret the words on the paper however they wish. Every judge is now operating like a content moderator at a social media platform. You are free to choose another country provider, but as long as you are in this one, they control your content.

The only difference is that YouTube sends you an e-mail whenever they willy-nilly change their terms of service. In a Country As A Service, you learn about the new rules as they are booking you for violating the new rules. Those weird e-mails have been replaced by the sound of the jail door slamming on some poor victim of the new rules against hate speech or mean content. You can guess what “your account has been suspended” will soon mean.

Obituary Thinking

Posted on April 18, 2023 by thezman

Elite over production is a concept invented by Peter Turchin, a Russian born academic, which argues that social unrest is often caused by too many potential elite members for the number of elite positions. These extra potential elites are under-employed and thus gravitate to things like radical politics. Over time, these excess elites chip away at the social order and eventually the order begins to falter. He claims that crises throughout history were due to the overproduction of elites.

It is an elegant theory, in that it is simple, not necessarily beautiful. It also seems to explain the present crisis in the West. Look around at any large corporation or government facility and you will see lots of credentials. Look around the local coffee shop and you can see many of the same credentials. America has far too many people with advanced degrees than it needs. Look around at radical politics and it seems to confirm that too many elites leads to trouble.

There are several counter arguments to this claim. The first is that our elite appears to be getting dumber. We assume that intelligence correlates with social status and in a healthy society it should, but we have a lot of insanely stupid people in positions of authority and influence. If the insane and stupid are occupying elite positions, then it suggests the excess elites are even more insane and stupid. A few hours on social media seems to confirm this observation.

This conforms with the observation that humans are getting dumber, and the process may be accelerating. Again, anecdotes abound. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is struggling to get a rocket to the moon, a feat accomplished by men half a century ago using materials from their garage. The Concorde achieved supersonic speeds as a passenger-carrying plane last century. We now struggle to keep the slow airplanes in the air and from smashing into one another.

Another counter to the Turchin theory is that what he terms an overproduction of elites is what fuels the dynamism of the West. Those extra elites may go off into radical politics, but they also go off to invent new stuff. The computer revolution was driven in large by people excluded from the elite. As the elite becomes more exclusive, the smart and capable form their own elite outside the system. In time, they are able to challenge the old elite and even replace it.

Then there is the issue of how one defines elite. Elizabeth Warren, for example, is as dumb as a goldfish, but she is in the Senate, which classifies her as elite. John Fetterman, a man unable to communicate with his fellow humans, was just released from a lunatic asylum into the Senate. Even before his trip to the asylum, he had never held a job, but he qualifies as an elite. When your elite contains brain damaged lunatics you have to rethink how you define elite.

As Ed Dutton has shown, many of the people who circulate inside and just outside our elites are people with deleterious genetic mutations. In lean times, these people are excluded from elite society, often excluded from society as a whole, because they pose a risk to the fragile order. In times of plenty, they are tolerated and therefore proliferate over time until they reach critical mass. These people spend their days on social media bombarding the normals with their madness.

Of course, all of these observations can be right. We may be producing too many potential elite members, while at the same time the elite becomes increasingly deranged, owing to the proliferation of spiteful mutants. Selection shifts from the willingness and ability to compete with the best to the willingness and ability to navigate a world populated with spiteful mutants. This would explain why it feels like our elites have gone mad all of a sudden.

Another factor is the commodification of elite perception. A century ago, it was rare to encounter someone with an advanced degree. Most Americans could live their life never having met a college professor. College degrees were rare, and many people never finished high school. Today, everyone is expected to finish high school and then attend college. Even advanced degrees are becoming common. Most college sports coaches now have a graduate degree.

In other words, a marker for elite status has been turned into a commodity that has value only to the diploma mills selling them. This is obvious when you look into the people promoting social causes. You see lots of credentialed lunatics. By lowering the barrier of entry to college, the system has been flooded with the mentally unstable, who ultimately fall into areas that promise to provide clarity and structure. Political causes are a form of self-medication only found on campus.

Then you have the fact that the material difference between most people who see themselves as the elite and the rest of society is quite small. A century ago, a Senator was a rich person who lived a life that was clearly different from the average person, not just materially by socially. Rich people went on holiday and had hobbies, while the average person had to work and spent what little time off they had doing inexpensive local things with friends and family.

Today, people on welfare go on vacation. If you are Elizabeth Warren, it must seem outrageous that Spirit Airlines exists at all. She is a member of the world’s most exclusive political club and she spends time every day begging for money, often having to fly commercial to do it. The psychological impact of this narrow gap in standards of living between the elites and the rest leads to some of the craziness. They have to have some way to signal their elite status.

This commodification of elite markers, things like education and display items, is made possible by the credit economy. The proliferation of highly credential public nuisances is only possible because of the student loan system. Remove this from the equation and half of the colleges go bankrupt in a month. The surviving colleges contract dramatically in order to remain solvent. The college diploma quickly goes back to being a symbol of privilege or unusual individual talent and commitment.

The same can be said for the material side of things. The reason that the middle-manager and his wife can live in a McMansion in a new suburb is the flow of cheap money into the housing markets. When every man can live like a king, every man begins to see himself as a king. Before long he is taking hormones and demanding you call him a queen. This is where elite over production comes back into focus. Cheap money produces an excess of people who think they are special.

All of these explanations for the present madness are interesting and they seem to hold up under scrutiny. The cafeteria of social decline offers something for everyone, so you can indulge yourself according to your inclination. In the end, it may be that Spengler was right to think of civilization as an organism. It has a life cycle. The American empire has reached its old age and therefore is riddled with many of the maladies that eventually kill off a civilization.

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