The Grand Conspiracy

Posted on June 16, 2023 by thezman

The funny thing about conspiracy theories is they are a fairly good measure of both social trust and trust in civic institutions. In societies with low trust and corrupt government, people tend to assume things are not as they seem. In high trust societies, people tend to accept things at face value. They also tend to accept what is told to them by the authorities, rather than assume they are lying.

Before the Russian revolution, conspiracy theories were common. Of course, lots of people were conspiring to topple the system, but people assumed that the system itself was not as it was presented. Of course, the Great Fear was a period in the French Revolution where rumors and conspiracy theories about the aristocracy ran wild, ultimately leading the storming of the Bastille.

We seem to be entering a similar phase. People are more likely to believe a rumor about Biden taking bribes than to believe anything he says. For a growing portion of the public, it is assumed that everything that comes from the regime is a lie. The use of the word “regime” is a huge change. It is a word that implies rule by men rather than rule by a system of laws, customs, and institutions.

Of course, it is not helped by the fact that the president is a doddering old fool who barely knows where he is most of the time. The absurdity of this man being in charge of anything raises the question about who is calling the shots. That leads to wondering why they are using a decrepit old man as a puppet. Before long you are down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and shadowing actors.

The coming election will give rise to more conspiracy theories. When a regime begins arresting its opponents, only desperate toadies believe what it says. This leaves the field open to alternative explanations for what is happening. We are entering that phase that occurs before every great period of unrest. The age when rumors and conspiracy sound more convincing than observable reality.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

The Deep State
Trump Indictment
DeSantis
The Zombies
Joe Biden Stuff
Gavin Newsome
What Is Happening
Closing Song (Link)

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The Animal Farm Option

Posted on June 15, 2023 by thezman

Note: American Renaissance is having its annual conference in August at the usual location in Tennessee. It is a great event and anyone who is interested in the sort of politics discussed here should make it there at least once. You can sign up for the event at the American Renaissance website.

Way back when the Democratic Party stepped into the 2020 primary to make sure Bernie Sanders would not be the nominee, there were two questions. The first is why they selected Joe Biden, a broken-down old weirdo with limited appeal? They seemed to have better choices. The other question was how realistic was it to expect Biden to live through the election, much less his first term?

The answer to the first question is that he is stupid and controllable. Joe Biden was always known for being one of the dumber figures in Washington. Age has not improved that, so he was the one option who would not ask too many questions. Barak Obama often made jokes to his staff about Biden being an affable simpleton who would say whatever he was told to say.

In fairness to Biden, American presidents are figureheads, for the most part. They are the spokesman for a group of people. This group is their donors, institutional backers and party allies. The president is the spokesman for the team he represents. In office, that team fills the thousands of jobs in the executive branch, formulates policy and provides the president with options and advice.

The two main problems with Biden were that he was so old he would not be a very good spokesman and he was so stupid he would say the quiet part out loud. This was balanced out by the fact that he no longer had the ability to understand what was happening around him. This meant the team could do what they liked without worrying that the boss would take exception.

That answers the first question. The second question is more complex. Surely, they knew Biden was declining mentally. That was obvious. The thing about losing your faculties to old age is it can go quickly. They probably knew he was not suffering from Alzheimer’s, so they figured he could be propped up for at least one term. The media could be counted on to cover up much of it.

The bigger issue is his physical health. The presidency is a fulltime job that requires long hours even for a puppet. There is a reason that presidents seem to age so quickly over their first term. Even if Biden is not making any decisions, he still has to maintain an appearance schedule. Many men can keep the pace into their late seventies, but it was clear in 2016 that Biden was not one of those men.

The logical answer to this problem then was to drag his dying carcass across the finish line to get rid of Donald Trump then figure out how to dump Joe Biden. The only problem with this idea was the next in line is Kamala Harris. She makes Joe Biden sound like Cicero. Worse yet, she has the behavioral instincts you have come to expect from video of the waiting area of Spirit Airlines.

Maybe that is why they decided to run Biden for a second term. Perhaps they convinced themselves that he was physically fit enough to make it another four years. Maybe the doctors said they can keep his brain functioning enough to make it seem like he is aware of his surroundings. Maybe they had no other answer and just decided to kick the can down the road.

That is what makes the bribery scandal puzzling. Someone put the information about this bribery scheme into the hands of the Republicans and told them to use it. Chuck Grassley is one of the most compliant, go along to get along, people in Washington, so if he is on the Senate floor accusing the sitting president of taking bribes from foreign actors, it means he has institutional support.

At this point, people may wish to believe that a brave whistleblower has supplied this information to the Republicans, but that only happens in Hollywood. The FBI could easily have disappeared the documents so that Congress could never demand to see them or even ask about them. The FBI has no reason to participate in this highly choreographed outrage show starring Ted Cruz.

The question is, why are the people who have spent generations framing innocents and derailing ambitious politicians now undermining Joe Biden? Have we reached the point in the Praetorian Guard phase of the empire where the FBI changes rulers simply as a way to show they can change the ruler when they please? Is this part of a scheme to remove Biden from the ticket in favor of another option?

The answer may be less specific and more about process. It is clear that both parties and official Washington have grown weary of the primary system. For starters, it means the army of consultants and choreographers spending time with the Dirt People in God-awful places like Iowa and South Carolina. Grubbing around in these backwaters for votes is unbecoming of a ruling elite.

The bigger problem is the unpredictability. Fortifying a general election for democracy is not too difficult, as we saw in 2020. You just need to target a few relatively small states with enough resources. Fortifying the entire primary process for democracy is much more complicated, expensive, and unpredictable. Maybe it is time to return to the old convention model and select nominees in the shadows.

It is clear the Republicans are headed this way. They have been quietly changing rules at the state level anticipating another Trump run. The party will rule him ineligible in the fall and have his delegates become super delegates controlled by the central committee at the convention. This not only solves their Trump problem, but it also solves their problem with the base, which increasingly hates the party.

This Biden bribery story may be the road the Democrats take to move their nomination process out of the primaries. Sometime during the primary process Biden decides to drop out of the race. Maybe it is the bribes or maybe it is his health. The Democrats, pointing to the Republicans as a model, take the Biden delegates under control of the committee and select the nominee at the convention.

The media will be told to promote this as the next evolution in our democracy and a huge hit with the voters. The ratings for the conventions will be huge! This will be proof that the concept works and both parties will rapidly move from the primary system back to a convention model where insiders in both camps select nominees acceptable to the other camp of insiders. The voters are then left to choose.

If this sounds farfetched, just look through the farmhouse window. Mr. Pilkington and Napoleon are having a good time because neither of them is concerned about your thoughts on the subject. They are more concerned that the other is cheating at the game they are playing. One way to solve that problem is to make sure neither is tempted to make an appeal to the masses.

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Death Of The Hired Man Society

Posted on June 14, 2023 by thezman

One of the criticisms of the public company model is that the managers tend to think in the short term rather than long term. This was a popular critique of American business in the 1980’s when Japan was on the rise. The Japanese magically thought long term, which allowed them to benefit from long term investments in industry. Sinophiles made similar arguments about China as she rose economically. The Chinese think long term, it was said, while America thinks short term.

Up until Trump came to town and started making bad noises about China, those same Sinophiles made this point about democracy. The democratic West, they said, was hobbled by the short-term thinking that arises from regular elections, while China avoids this problem through one party rule. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times was fond of making this point. China’s system was winning because the Chinese were not thinking from one election to the next.

Of course, the real reason Japan and China rose from the ashes to challenge American industry is that connected people in the United States saw a profit in helping these countries at the expense of America. They flung open the gates, so to speak, on deindustrialization of America, which led to the shifting of manufacturing to low-cost places like Japan and then Korea and China. It turns out that both China and Japan were the beneficiaries of short-term thinking.

Putting that aside, this difference between short and long-term thinking with regards to how an organization functions does matter. A business with lots of fixed assets, for example, will have to think long term, while a business with no fixed assets can operate in the moment. The reason for this is the former has assets that are not easily transported or converted into cash. The latter is not tied down this way, so it does not have to worry about long term asset protection.

You also see this in how the people in a business think. The person who has been with a company for a long time will often take the long view. This is exclusive to privately held companies, where the owner is directly involved. Those long-term employees take on the owner’s time horizon. The people who move from job to job are opportunists, making what they can from their current situation and then moving onto the next opportunity in which they make little investment.

This is why small business tends to be better at customer service than the big chain stores that now dominate life. That small business owner thinks in the longest of long term, his own life and that of his children. The business owner sees his business as an extension of himself. The hired man, in contrast, looks at the business as just a place he toils for money. Who he is exists outside of what he does. The customers are no more meaningful to him than the coffee pot.

This mindset is what harmed Trump in office. He spent his life leaping from one real estate or media opportunity to the next, never stopping in one place very long before he leaped to the next opportunity. His opportunistic thinking makes him a special campaigner, but it made him a terrible president. To be successful, a president must think about his legacy, which is the longest of long-term thinking. That means forcing through big changes with your name on them.

Ironically, Trump reflects what is wrong in Washington. His opportunism is different from the people in permanent Washington only in its presentation. The people who run the government are all hired men with the time horizon of hired men. None of them have ever built anything or even left footprints on the beach. The point of their existence is to never be tied to anything, so they can flit from one opportunity in the system to the next opportunity, building the resume for the next job.

One of the weird things about life in Washington is that it is an insult to ask one of these people what they do for a living. Lewd acts are met with less offense than asking one of these people what they do for work. The reason for that is they do no work in the way in which people in the dreaded private sector think of it. The resume of the Washington man is a list of places and people with whom he has a connection. Where you are and who you are with is what matters in Washington.

Of course, the politicians for whom this army of hired men in Washington allegedly work are hired men as well. In theory, at least, the elected official is a servant of the people, temporarily holding an office. The whole business about the people paying the salaries of the elected officials is supposed to remind the office holder that he is just a hired man, easily replaced at the next election. The fact that 97% of incumbents win reelection does not change the fundamental mindset.

Therein lies the problem with the American managerial state. The politicians and the army of policy makers all have the mindset of the hired man, but they also live consequence free lives. Victoria Nuland, the architect of the disastrous Ukraine strategy, will never pay for being terrible at her job. Anthony Blinken will bounce from this job to a turn at the Kennedy school then maybe a comfortable ambassadorship somewhere in the Gavin Newsome administration.

Imagine a business owner hiring a general manager that he can never fire. Once the general manager figures out that he can never be fired, he is no longer going to think much about the business, beyond how it benefits him. His hired man mentality will be turbocharged by his immunity to consequences. This is what has happened in Washington over the last few decades. Personal success is now fully detached from the outcome of public policy.

This is why Washington is so hostile to white people. They see white people as the owners, and they are the general manager who cannot be fired. They gnaw away at the assets of the owner but resent that the owner exists. That is why they are so comfortable using terms like “whiteness” and “white power structure.” Everyone they know is in the same position and harbors the same resentments, therefore this language of resentment comes naturally to them.

What this points to is the truth of managerialism. Managers are essential in every enterprise, but they can only exist at the pleasure of the owner. The CEO must respect the shareholders. The hired man must respect the owner. To do otherwise turns the relationship on its head, putting the dispensable above the permanent. That is the root of the current crisis. America is ruled by easily replaceable men, while the owners are treated like day workers.

The Terrifying Narrative

Posted on June 13, 2023 by thezman

Depending upon who is doing the reporting, the great Ukrainian counter-offensive is now entering its second week, or the pre-counter-offensive probing maneuver is winding down in preparation for the long-awaited counter-offensive. However, it is described, the Ukrainians are conducting largescale offensive operations at several places using the Western armor. We know this because of the images of German Leopard tanks on fire that we are seeing online.

It is far too early to draw any conclusions about the success or lack of success of this new operation, but it is clear that we are seeing another example of how Western leaders came to believe the narratives they created in the information war. This is an increasing phenomenon where the information production centers of the managerial class create narratives so compelling that the managerial elite confuses these manufactured realities with genuine reality.

In this case, the manufactured reality said that the Russian defensive lines were undermanned and under supplied. Despite the daily display of firepower, the Russians are running out of everything. On top of that, morale in the Russian ranks is low due to the fact the Russian army is composed of conscripted peasants. The narrative that evolved over the last six months of hyping the offensive is that as soon as Western tanks appeared, the Russians would scatter.

This explains why the Ukrainians used the most advanced armor in their assault on Russians lines in the south. The images of destroyed Leopard 2 tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Finnish mine clearly tanks that have been all over the internet the last week tell the story. This frontal assault with the best Western equipment was supposed to be a promotional vehicle for the benefits of arming Ukraine with the weapons it needs to drive the Russians all the way back to Moscow.

What happened instead was a disaster for Ukraine. In the south, they launched attacks on three areas, all of which got bogged down in minefields. As the Ukrainians tried to maneuver out of the minefields, the Russians attacked them with Lancet drones, KA-52 attack helicopters and artillery. Depending upon who is telling the story, Ukraine has already lost between fifteen and thirty percent of its Western armor and has yet to reach the first line of Russian defenses.

If we accept the Western number as fifteen percent, it is clear that these offensive operations will have a short duration. Keep in mind that the action so far has happened in the security zone of Russian defenses. This is the extreme outer layer used to detect how the enemy is approaching. Ukraine has yet to penetrate this area, which is lightly defended relative to the proper defensive lines. In order to reach the defensive lines, it means suffering massive losses in men and material.

What is remarkable about this is that the United States has spy satellites positioned over Ukraine. They have been providing Ukraine with intelligence from satellites for over a year. NATO has been providing targeting information along with the guided munitions they supply Ukraine. The United States operates the Global Hawk surveillance drone over the Black Sea. In other words, the West has been watching the Russians build their lines in real-time for months.

Despite what they clearly see happening, the narrative prevails. You see it in this detailed report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It goes into great detail about Russian defensive preparations. Woven throughout the report, however, is the familiar talking points about the inferiority of Russian equipment and the condition of the Russian military. When asked who they believe? The official narrative or their lying eyes, the writers chose the former.

That is the important part about understanding the power of narrative within the Western managerial elite. Disconfirmation is always met with an organized effort to force the contrary information onto the narrative. Maybe the narrative is tweaked to account for the new data, but the final chapter never changes. The good guys always win in the end and the West is always the good guys. After all, the lesson of history is that the good guys always win.

What we see happening is the narrative makers are converting the results on the battlefield into a new chapter of the story. In this chapter, the West supplies Ukraine with nuclear weapons. Note that this is cast as a defensive action. The superpower cries out in pain as it supplies Russia’s opponent with nukes. Note also that this policy paper is not produced by a random crank. AEI is one of the most influential and well-funded think tanks in Washington.

If that is not terrifying enough for you, there is now talk of letting NATO members “voluntarily” send troops into Ukraine. The Poles have already sent thousands of volunteers, but now there is talk of bring the Baltic states into the mix. The idea is to provide F-16 fighter jets with Western trained pilots from the eastern members of NATO in order to provide air cover for Ukrainian offensives. After all, the Russian army is ready to collapse so they just need one final push.

One of the enduring mysteries of the Great War is how the rulers on both sides kept at it despite the obvious futility of the war. Both sides remained convinced that the other was running on fumes. All they needed to do was keep up the pressure and the other side would eventually crack. They were right, in that the Germans did eventually crack, but not until the continent was reduced to rubble. Imagine if both sides even had crude nuclear weapons. That is where we are now.

That is the terrifying part of this war. Western leaders have become immune to reality, so they embrace narratives produced by people with their own interests. The neocons want to blow up the world. The military industrial complex wants to keep selling expensive weapons. The Ukrainian dictator needs the war to keep going in order to avoid assassination. Everyone involved has a reason to believe the narrative over their lying eyes, so reality remains on the sidelines.

The hope is that events on the ground will reach a point where the remaining sane people in power feel they must step in and stop the madness, but this Ukrainian offensive suggest reality is no match for a good story. Western managerial elites have evolved to the point where they now live in a world of their own creation. It is not hard to imagine them standing in front of a window with VR goggles strapped to their faces as a mushroom cloud forms on the horizon.

The Reality Of Model Dependent Reality

Posted on June 12, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about what is happening with the war in the Ukraine, a post about the The Sound of Music and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

One line of attack against various forms of socialism has been that these organizational models run contrary to human nature. Humans naturally want to keep the produce of their labor, so any system that requires them to give over their labor to the whole is going to require a great deal of force to implement. Similarly, humans are not equal in ability, so there will always be unequal outcomes. A system that supposes no one is in charge and everyone is equal is unnatural.

Libertarianism has a similar problem. Like communism, it assumes things about humans that are not true. This is why there are no libertarian societies. As Hans Hermann-Hoppe observed, there is no way to go from the present to a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. More important, there is no way to maintain a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. Like communism, libertarians imagine a world that is odds with the human condition.

In both cases, what we see is a clash between the model-dependent reality of the ideology and reality itself. It is not hard to imagine a society that operates by the sorts of rules the ideologue prefers. The trouble comes when you try to implement the scheme on flesh and blood human beings. As with every model, there are going to be things the model must ignore in order to make sense. In real life, the things that exist outside the model tend to land in a death camp.

It is becoming clear that liberalism, as in Western liberalism or liberal democracy, has the same problem as communism and libertarianism. That is the model makes perfect sense and answers the main problems of human organization. In reality it falls prey to what the other great ideologies have found impossible to address. That is, it requires things from human beings that do not come naturally to man. Like those other models, the only available solution is coercion.

The madness that is gripping the West can be viewed from two angles. One is that the system has been taken over by spiteful mutants who exist to trample the underlying assumptions of the liberal order. These are the people who intrude in on your private space and tell you how to live and think. They also seek control of the common space in order to impose increasingly deranged rules on society. These people are overrunning the liberal democracies of the West.

What this tells us is that the model does not contain within it the tools to defend itself against these people. While the current madness is novel in many respects, it is part of a wave that began long ago. You can draw a line from the abolitionist fanatics to the pride parades of this age. All along the way, liberalism has had no way to defend itself against these people. For that matter, it had no way of dealing with communists and fascists, other than extreme illiberal violence.

The other way of looking at this problem is that something within the liberal order cultivates the spiteful mutant. Perhaps as Ed Dutton has proposed, scarcity requires a firm hand on the spiteful mutant. They must either be controlled or culled from the population, which keeps their numbers and influence at a minimum. Liberalism results in material excess, which in turn eliminates the apparent need to control the spiteful mutants and so they multiply like rabbits.

A simpler answer is that the liberal model is lacking something that is critical to understanding the human condition and human organization. Like communism, not accounting for an essential bit of reality leaves a choice. You either change the model or you change reality. As anyone who has worked with model makers will tell you, the model maker is like God in that he loves his creation and will do anything to preserver it, no matter how terrible it seems.

In this long post in defense of liberalism and conventional conservatism, Harvey Mansfield provides a clue to the problem. He writes that the goal of liberalism is a society where no one is in charge in the sense that anyone is compelling anyone else to sacrifice for the common good. The liberal model of reality “yields a fundamental right to consent that protects all other rights from infringement by rulers.” In other words, human society is purely voluntary.

Therein lies the two critical flaws in the liberal model. The first and most obvious is that it assumes a human society of equals. No one is in charge because no one can compel another to act either against his own interests or in the common good. This not only flies in the face of observable reality, but it contradicts the point of society. Human beings organize into groups for more than material benefit. The group provides structure to the individual identity, which provides a rationality to existence.

Human organizations possess properties not present in the members. The most obvious is culture. Just as individual atoms do not possess temperature, individual humans do not possess culture. Temperature is the product of atoms interacting with one another. Similarly, culture is the product of humans interacting with one another, not just in real time, but over generations. In other words, essential to what makes us who we are and our lives worth living is our people.

As Mansfield explains in his post, liberalism does not account for this bit of reality and instead substitutes what amounts to magic. The private and public choices of the members will magically address the common good. The decisions of members in their private deliberations and ad hoc public choices will somehow result in conditions that preserve the society. As with other models of human reality, liberalism inevitably falls back on magic to solve its problems.

The other critical flaw is the assumption that a society in which no one is compelled to act in the public good is possible or even desirable. The reason communist systems failed is they finally accepted a truth of the human condition. That is, human societies are always hierarchical. Whether it is the party, the ruling class or the aristocracy, a group of people will rule over the rest. What reality tells us is that coercion is just as much a part of the human condition as left-handedness.

This is why Western liberalism looks a lot like communism in practice. On the one hand, the model requires everyone to pretend that no one is in charge, and everyone is voluntarily submitting to the rules. On the other hand, a model-dependent elite is making the rules and ruthlessly imposing them on the whole. As with communism, the “good of society” is easily confused with the good of the ruling elite. Instead of abandoning the model, the ruling class works around the flaws.

The liberal model of society is failing because like all models it leaves out the bits of reality that make the model messy or impossible. On the one hand, it has no defense against the illiberal tyrants that are multiplying like rabbits. On the other hand, it lacks a method to compel members of society to act in the common good or to even conceive of a common good. As a result, the liberal model is leading to the destruction of the people who conceived it.

Finally, the growing similarities between the liberal model and the communist model are rooted in two common assumptions. The first assumption is that the point of human organization is the liberation of the individual. This means freedom from political coercion, as in an aristocracy, freedom from economic coercion, as Marx explained and now freedom from cultural coercion, as we see with our woke rulers. None of this is ever explained or justified. It is simply assumed to be true.

The other assumption is that these models must never be opposed. It is why the great champions of communism and liberalism sound more like religious fanatics than reasonable advocates. Once one accepts the moral claims about human freedom, one is compelled to attack anyone who questions these moral claims, as to do otherwise suggests doubt. If you accept that maybe liberation is not the point of society, these models fall apart and take their champions with them.

In the end, the answer to the flaws of model-dependent reality is reality. Once one accepts the reality of human organization, the political models fade away and what you are left with is an understanding that human society is only possible when the members feel a duty to maintain it and defend it. Anything or anyone which undermines this primary mission must be removed from society. In other words, the point of human society is to preserve itself and thereby preserve the members.

Let’s Check In On The News

Posted on June 9, 2023 by thezman

The world can go a long time without anything important happening, but then all of a sudden, we get a lot of history in a short period of time. Of course, it just feels this way to us humans with our short lifespans. In those slow periods, lots of things are happening, but they go unnoticed. They build up over time and then all of a sudden, everyone notices them all at once, along with other things.

We may be in one of those processes. The regime is about to arrest another political opponent for the crime of being a political opponent. Trump is not the first to be jailed by the current regime. Dungeons around Washington continue to hold political prisoners waiting for their rigged trial for January 6. Jailing Trump is merely another red line that this regime has been willing to cross.

Most everyone reading this remembers when Americans mocked countries that engaged in these sorts of shenanigans. America was not perfect and there were many cases of people getting abused for their politics, but nothing like this. Victims of the system could expect the public to be outraged. They could also expect people in the system to give them a fair hearing and maybe redress their grievances.

All of a sudden none of that is true. America is one of those countries we used to mock for their lawless disregard for orderly governance. This is just one of the “all of a sudden” events we are about to experience. The war in Ukraine is about to pack a whole lot of history into a short period of time. Months of official lies are about to bob to the surface in all sorts of unpleasant ways.

Of course, our world has been changing in other ways that have largely gone unnoticed but will be noticed all of a sudden. Pat Robertson going to the great fundraiser in the sky is a reminder that we are on the cusp of a great demographic turnover. All those old guys who made their bones in the great interregnum, maybe made it possible, are about to exit the stage. The past is receding quickly.

Years ago, I wrote something about this age being like a point where multiple rivers meet in a great confluence. Instead of rivers, it is long and short social cycles that are ending at the same time. The long cycle is Western liberalism. Another longish cycle is the American empire. A short cycle is the baby boom generation. There are others, all reaching their denouement in this age. It will be a wild ride.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Peaceful Separation
RIP Pat Robertson
The Campaign
Trump Goes To Jail
World War III

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Full Show On Rumble

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Alien Liars

Posted on June 8, 2023 by thezman

One of the weirder aspects of the Biden administration is their zeal for pushing the idea that space aliens are regularly visiting earth. This week a regime media outlet pushed this story about a whistleblower’s claims regarding crashed alien vehicles. This builds on prior stories put into the media by the Pentagon regarding unidentified flying objects spotted by miliary pilots. Tucker Carlson mentioned this in his debut video on Twitter this week, as part of his show on government lying.

Even by the standards of this age, the space alien stuff is weird. The whole space alien thing ran its course decades ago. People with a need for escapist fantasies can just claim to be a third gender now. They get special privileges and most important, the validation they seek. Why bother with claims about getting probed by little green men when you can throw on a sundress and prance around Target? The current year has plenty of options for the mentally disturbed.

Putting aside the motivations behind this stuff, the question is whether there can be any truth to the claims. Is it possible for intelligent life from another planet to visit earth and is it possible for us to know about it? People naturally assume the answer to both questions is yes, but that is wishful thinking. Once you consider the physics involved, the odds that we are getting alien visitors drop significantly. The odds of us knowing about these visitors fall to zero.

The first thing to consider is where these aliens are located. If what we know about life is correct, then the conditions for life must exist on many planets. This is just a matter of calculating the probability of a planet having the stuff that we see on earth. If there must be many earthlike planets in the universe, there must be at least one that has produced life as we understand it. If a planet can support life, it means it will have evolved life and, in some cases, intelligent life.

We have been scanning the heavens for such planets. The most Earth-like planet that we have found so far is called Kepler 452b. It got this name because it was spotted by the Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler 452 is a sun-like star that is roughly 1,400 light-years from Earth. The planet we call 452b is in orbit around this sun in what is called the habitable zone of the star. This means the planet is close enough, but not too close, to contain liquid water, which is a prerequisite for life.

Right there we see the first problem for space aliens. If they have mastered the ability to visit our planet, it means they are travelling 1,400 light years. If we assume they can travel at near the speed of light, that takes 1,500 years to make the trip, assuming no bathroom breaks along the way. You can already see the problem. Either these extraterrestrial visitors have figured out how to exceed the speed of light or they have lifespans that dwarf the human lifespan.

Let us consider the last option first. Bowhead whales live much longer than humans, so they are an object of study for this reason. This species has a genetic mutation that helps repair damaged DNA. They also possess a gene that seems to aid in the repair and regeneration of damaged cells. Taken together, these make the animal highly resistant to diseases like cancer and extend its life. It may be possible to apply these mutations to humans, thus extending human lifespans.

The longest-living vertebrates on earth are Greenland sharks. The oldest known specimen is estimated to be 390 years old. Currently, people studying these animals think their base lifespan is around three hundred years, but it is possible that they can live as long as six hundred years. As with the Bowhead whales, there is probably a set of genes that allow this animal to avoid disease and repair its DNA. That could mean humans will one day use the same technology to extend human life.

The point is, we are probably inching up to the point where we can extend human lifespans well beyond what nature provides. More important, we will soon be able to slow the aging process. What would be the point of living to 150-years-old if you are decrepit and fragile like Joe Biden? Even so, that is a long way from the lifespan we will need to visit Kepler 452b. Assuming our space travelers will want to come home, it means living thousands of earth years.

If the people of Kepler 452b are visiting earth, it means they have a conception of time and space that is far beyond our comprehension. Think about the man who dedicates his life to a project. He sets out knowing it will take a long time, but he also assumes it will be finished or at least show progress before he dies. Realistically that is a project with a fifty-year arc. Now imagine a man who sets out on the same project, but his target date is five thousand years into the future.

This brings us to that other issue, the speed of light. Currently, we have no idea how to keep humans in space for more than a relatively short time. Zero gravity does weird things to the human body over time. Bones stop producing new bone tissue, as bones are no longer needed to fight gravity. For some reason, the immune system begins to slow and perhaps even stop functioning altogether. Then you have the radiation of space that damages human DNA.

This means our space alien friends have either figured out a way to conquer these problems so they can remain in space for thousands of years or they never had to contend with these problems. That means they are a life form that is beyond our comprehension, or they have conquered the limits of space-time. In the former case, it would mean they exist so far outside our understanding that we may not be able to see them, because our brains lack the ability to conceive them.

More likely and much spookier is that they have conquered space-time. This means that our conception of space-time is human specific. What we think of as reality is an interface we have evolved in order to navigate the much more complex reality that lies beyond our human ability to comprehend. These space aliens made the leap either to a novel interface that lets them travel vast distances in a short period of time or they exist outside our reality altogether.

As you can see from examining the space and time issues, the odds of these tales about space aliens being true are extremely low. Either the space aliens have lifespans so long that it places them outside of our ability to conceive of them or they exist outside of our conception of space-time. Even if we wish to pretend this is not true, it means they have advanced technologically beyond what we can imagine. They would have little trouble concealing themselves from us.

That brings us back to the real question with regards to space aliens. Why is our government suddenly trying to revive interest in the topic? Given the massive corruption and perfidy on display, we have to assume their motives are not good. These people lie about everything, so maybe they just like lying. Rolling out these fake space alien stories is how they entertain one another. Who knows? Maybe they are plotting to unleash a fake space invaders story on us.

Managerial Madness

Posted on June 7, 2023 by thezman

One of the lingering questions about the Covid panic is why did the West suddenly go insane over a regularly occurring phenomena? Pandemics hit the West every generation or so with varying lethality. Most are like Covid in that they are bad for the old and the sick, but mostly a bad flu for everyone else. Once it was clear that Covid was not the Spanish flu, much less the Black Death, the response should have been like those of the past, but instead we got a panic.

In the United States, the panic started when Trump announced the cancellation of travel to and from Europe. That was March of 2020. Europe quickly returned the favor and then the race was on to see who could be the most egregious with regards to abusing their subjects in the name of health and safety. In the United States that meant laughably ridiculous policies like mask mandates, social distancing and the forced closure of restaurants and barbershops.

Panics are what they are because they are irrational, so much of what happened at the beginning is just mass insanity egged on by the media. The nonsense stories about bodies stacked up in morgues kept getting recycled because there was an eager audience of panic-stricken people. Social media was full of people needing to feel like part of the story by spinning personal tales to support the narrative. Many people derived psychic pleasure from feeling like the end was nigh.

After the chubby nurses had finished their TikTok videos, someone had to notice that the hospitals were not overwhelmed. Forgotten now, but people got curious, defied the lockdowns, and went to their local hospitals to see what was happening. Contrary to the reports, the hospitals were not panicked triage centers. They were ghost towns because everything had been cancelled except emergency care. At some point, the staff had to know what was really happening, but they remained silent.

That is the biggest concern about the panic. We were getting good data on the reality of the virus by the autumn of 2020, and it was clear the virus was something like the Asian flu or Hong Kong flu at the worst. The doctors and nurses had to know this by late summer and early fall, but the public health officials insisted otherwise. In fact, we now know they colluded with the tech companies and the media to silence anyone pointing out the facts about Covid. Why did they do this?

The most common response to this question is to shout, “money or power” and then move onto another topic. No doubt some people made money from the panic, and it did give the managers a sense of power. The trouble is we had plenty of state governments go the other way on the issue of lockdowns. Ron DeSantis is going to make a big deal of the fact he did not succumb to the panic. He was not alone, but he had all the same incentives as other states but did not follow the herd.

Maybe the way to think of the money and power answer here is to put it in the context of the managerial society in which we live. The millions of administrators and their managerial bosses finally had their war. The people who populate the array of public and private bureaucracies dedicated to managing some aspect of your life were finally being called upon to defend the world from destruction. The army of public health experts were going to have their turn on the big stage.

The managerial madness that set in and stayed with us long past when it made any sense was not the crude form of money and power that is the most popular answer to every question regarding the behavior of our rulers. People were not taking bribes or gaining new authority in the system. Instead, the vast managerial class and their administrative underlings finally had the sense of control they had always imagined they should have over your life.

It is important to understand that the people who populate the big chairs in the big offices of this age have been bred for this life. They are like dogs selectively breed for certain sorts of work. Anyone who has owned a dachshund, for example, will tell you they have an innate need to dig. If you let them, they will turn the backyard into the surface of the moon trying to find whatever it is they think is there. The wiener dog lives to root around and find what lies beneath.

Like a working dog, the people in the managerial class are bred for their role, so they have that same desire. Instead of digging around the backyard, they desire to manage the life of people that fall under their area of management. In a crisis, that desire explodes in a mania of micromanagement. In other times, it expresses itself as an endless need to expand their roles and thus expand their control. The manager is bred to manage, and she will manage something.

This managerial madness also explains the manufactured crisis. The same people who went berserk over Covid made the predictable mistakes with Ukraine war. If who you are is defined by how you handle the unexpected, after all, you are the one your people come to handle the exceptions, then you will be tuned to seek out the situations that need your particular set of skills. A form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy has infected the managerial class resulting in endless crises.

The reason the system often feels like it is shaking itself apart is that we are plagued with people looking for a crisis to manage. That has resulted in people finding a crisis where none exists. The end point of a society run by managers is a society run by females standing on chairs shrieking at imaginary mice. This also explains why females now outnumber males in the managerial class. You see this most clearly in health care, where the demand for crisis managers is the highest.

It must be said that a fair bit of what went on during Covid was driven by corruption, stupidity, and avarice. The vaccine boondoggle was just a scaled-up version of the Sackler family opioid scam. It was not the genocide the Sackler’s committed against poor people, but there is still time. The negative effects of the Covid vaccines will not fully be known for a long time. A competent system would have stopped both, but stupidity and corruption make avarice the coin of the realm.

Even accounting for the simple answers, we are left with the question as to why the managerial class went mad with Covid. The simple answer here is that perpetual panic is the natural end to managerialism. Once your society is consumed by a ruling class that imagines itself as the indispensable answer to every problem, they eventually are consumed with the need for problems to solve. We are being destroyed by an out of control need to manage the next crisis.

Pandora’s Ballot Box

Posted on June 6, 2023 by thezman

According to Merriam-Webster, hope is a desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment. You want something to happen. You have little or no reason to think it will happen, yet you sense that it is going to happen. Hope and faith are traveling partners, in that hope is often the result of trusting a system or person. The system has worked in the past, so despite evidence that it is not going to work this time, you hope that it carries through again.

Hope and faith are the cornerstones of elections. In the best of times, people are left to hope that the guy who wins will do a decent job. Even when it is obvious that the winner will be a dud, maybe even crazy, people have faith in the system to carry us through the ineptitude of the office holders. Popular government requires people to believe that all of us are smarter than most of us. Every couple of years people hope this is true as they cast their ballots for people they barely know.

What we have seen over the last thirty years is that some people, the people we call the Left, have increasingly lost faith in the system. Their reason for voting is not the hope that it will continue on, but that this time it finally fails. Barak Obama was the turning point with his constant talk about hope and change. The whole point of his presidency was to destroy the old system and replace it with a new one. He was the change they had been waiting for.

The looming presidential election is looking like a similar inflection point for the people we call the Right. In 2016, most of them voted for Trump, hoping he would be a message to the system. People voted for Trump as a rebuke, an often crudely humorous rebuke, of official Washington. These people still had faith in the system, so they hoped that Trump could deliver the message. The people were unhappy, and Washington needed to address their concerns.

This time, much of the support for Trump is like the hope and change business that Obama ran on in 2008. People saw what happened in the Trump years and they have been following the aftermath. They no longer have faith in the system. The system produced this corrupt ruling class. The thinking is that another Trump term will cause so much anger in official Washington that they will go berserk. Everyone else will then see that the system is hopelessly broken.

There is still some faith in the system. Lots of the MAGA hat wearing folks think this time will be different, but a good chunk of his support is cynical. This is why his support is so solid, despite the presence of Ron DeSantis. People know that in a normal country with a functioning political system, DeSantis would be the far better choice, but America is no longer a normal country. Prudent administration is not the answer to a demonic ruling class hellbent on pulling the roof down on us.

On the other hand, Ron DeSantis is the hope and faith option. His support is entirely from people who still have faith in the system. Here is the venerable Paul Gottfried coming out in support of DeSantis over Trump. Josh Hammer, a member of the common good conservative club, is also supporting DeSantis. Pedro Gonzalez sounds like Bill Kristol in coming out in favor of DeSantis. Three people from three different perspectives making the same argument.

These folks and the others supporting DeSantis think the system is mostly fine, but it needs the right guy to get the right result. They hope DeSantis is that guy, because after all, he “got things done” in Florida. For his supporters, Florida is a model for how things ought to run. DeSantis is therefore the model for how an executive pulls the right levers in the system in order to get the desired result. The fact that Florida is nothing like Washington plays no role in their thinking.

DeSantis is the last gasp of conservatism. Until the catastrophe of the Bush years, the subtext to conservatism was that it needed to be presented to the Left in just the right way so as not to upset them. Conservatism had to sneak up on lefty with a pleasant-sounding program presented by someone they liked or at least they could not plausibly claim was Hitler. For the DeSantis supporters, their guy is Trumpism without the crude orange man that makes the regime so angry.

Of course, their support rests on the assumption that the right man can get in there and pull the right levers to get the right result. It also assumes that the people in opposition will go along with this. The shadow of ignorance about the nature of the people in charge hangs over the DeSantis supporters. They are sure that the other side wants what they want and that they do not believe what they say. They just need a good talking to and they will stop the nonsense.

The hard reality is that the people who run the empire want what they want, and they will not be talked out of it by an election. The reason they recoiled like a startled snake when Trump came to town is because they feared him. He represented a threat to their preferred order, so they sunk their venomous fangs into his presidency. They will do the same thing to the next guy if he proves to be a threat. There is no way to clear out this nest of vipers at the ballot box.

In the 2016 election, Michael Anton famously penned the Flight 93 election essay that allowed many on the Right to throw in with Trump. The essay was an argument in favor of Trump as one last desperate attempt to save the system. The fact that the Trump presidency ended like the famous flight did not register with many people. Some of them are now throwing in with DeSantis for the same reason. It is one last desperate attempt to save the system, in which they still have faith.

According to Hesiod, when Prometheus stole fire from the gods, Zeus took vengeance by giving the lovely Pandora to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. She was left with a jar and told not to open it. Being a woman, this meant she could do nothing else but open it and out came all the evils that plague the world. She quickly put the lid back on, but the only thing remaining was what is often translated as hope, but which could also mean deceptive expectation.

In 2016 the Dirt People stole fire from the gods in that they defied their masters and supported Trump in the primary then the general election. Instead of sending a jar containing plagues, they sent another ballot box. In 2020 that box was opened and out came the secret police to carry Joe Biden to the White House. Despite it all, some still cling that that ballot box, hope trapped inside, thinking that maybe this time when they open the box, their hopes will be realized.

The Death Of The West

Posted on June 5, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about a disgusting and vulgar film with no redeeming qualities, a post explaining all of the letters and symbols in the slogan of the new religion and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Since the French Revolution, the West has been cursed by a political framing that operates along an axis. At one end we have the Left, the people demanding radical change to liberate humanity in some way. At the other end is the Right, the people not just opposed to change, but the defenders of the natural order. Both ends see the other as the bad guy in the relationship. For over two centuries, all political movements have been forced to pick a spot on the axis.

This often leads to some ridiculous alliances. Libertarians are supposed to be the polar opposite of communists. Hitler is the polar opposite of Stalin, which then puts Hitler in the libertarian camp. This causes those sympathetic to libertarianism to claim that Hitler was actually a leftist. After all, he was a socialist! While this is idiotic, it does underscore the problem with the Right-Left political axis. It fails as a way to describe politics over a long period of time.

It also precludes right-wing radicalism. By making change a left-wing phenomenon, it means the right-wing must always be for stasis. This is popular with the Left, as it lets them pretend to be the good guys, but it also turns the other side into mindless reactionaries with no reason to oppose change. It is also wrong in that the Right, in all of its forms, does not oppose change. What the Right opposes is experimentation that treats institutions as arbitrary objects.

There is a bigger problem with the Left-Right political axis. It eliminates the possibility for right-wing radicalism. If the only people who can contemplate a radical reordering are those who embrace change, then the logic of the political scale says that it is impossible for right-wing people to imagine radical change. Yet we know that people on the Right, however defined at the time, often want radical change. It may simply be a rollback of prior change, but it is still change.

For example, most people defined as right-wing in the current year would like to see the sexual revolution rolled back at least forty years. A growing cohort thinks it is necessary to roll things back to the 1950’s. A small, but growing portion of the right wonder if we should roll it all back to the very beginning. If a right-wing Joe Biden comes to power and rolls back the sexual revolution, even if it is just to the 1980’s, most people would see that as a radical change in the culture.

In fairness, you could call these people reactionaries. Granted, their reactions are incredibly slow, taking at least a generation to form, but strictly speaking they want to return to some point in the past, not break with it. Left-wing radicals imagine themselves making a clean break with the past and creating something new. The fact that it is not new in the least is another matter. One side wants to break from the past while the other side wants to return to what it imagines is the past.

That seems to solve the problem, but what about the people who think we must make a break with liberalism in order to save Western people? These are not people seeking a return to some point in the past. Some joke about the return of monarchy and feudalism, but they are not serious about it. Instead, they see the future as a clean break with liberal political traditions. The people now calling themselves post-liberal think we must produce something new to replace liberalism.

Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard scholar, and champion of common good conservatism is not entirely clear about the details of his post-liberal order, but he is quite clear in his rejection of liberalism. Patrick Deneen, who is a Notre Dame political science professor, has a new book in which he argues for overthrowing the liberal order and replacing it with a dictatorship of working-class, by which he means the people who actually work and sustain the culture.

Read what these post-liberals have to say about what we would consider to be the status quo and they certainly sound like radicals. Unlike the standard model of radicalism, they are not challenging the human condition. There is no post-liberal man in their conception of the future, other than to argue that mankind will be free of the utopian claims that lie within the liberal order. Mankind will be liberated from the relentless coercion of its liberators.

Dissidents, of course, seek something similar. The main difference is that the Dissident Right is willing to address the demographic issue. To be on the Dissident Right is to wrestle with the question of what kind of society is possible with the demographics we will have in the not-too-distant future? More important, are the possible options tolerable and if not, what must come next? Like the post-liberals, the Dissident Right is ready to leave the old liberal order in the past.

For all the usual reasons, the dissidents and post-liberals get called fascist by the people who claim to be on the Left. It is proof that the universe has a sense of humor that the most dogmatic defenders of the status quo and the holders of power are the people who claim to be on the side of revolutionary change. In the modern age, the antifascists are sponsored by major corporations, who are in a close partnership with government and the centers of cultural production.

Putting that aside, if we broaden the definition of the term “liberalism” to include all Western thought since the late Middle Ages, then we are left with a universe that includes Marxism, libertarianism, liberal democracy, anarchism, fascism and all the combinations of these ideologies. To one degree or another, all of them imagine a world where mankind is freed from the human condition. What we now call liberalism is the final form of this long ideological struggle.

This gets to a truth about the modern world and its opponents. That political axis that has been with us since the French Revolution is increasingly incoherent because it assumes something that is not true. It assumes that ideology is a constant of the universe and therefore politics is a war between competing ideologies. In reality, ideology is a novelty. For most of human history, the moral questions were decided by religion, not by men with utopian schemes.

What the incoherence of that old political axis may be telling us is that we are reaching the end of the ideological age. What the post-liberals are doing, even if most do not realize it, is challenging the moral claims of liberalism. It is not an accident that the champions of post-liberalism are overtly religion. Both Deneen and Vermeule are traditional Catholics. Their post-liberal order assumes the moral questions have been answered by a revived traditional church.

The signs of the post-ideological age are most evident on the global stage. The last ideological state is at war with Russia because Russia rejects liberalism. The Russians are happy to borrow from the West but wish to remain Russian. The West is preparing to attack China for similar reasons. China’s capitalism with “Chinese characteristics” is unacceptable to the West. Soon, the rest of the world will join the enemies list for the crime of rejecting the liberal moral order.

For over two centuries, the West has been defined by that political axis that was born out of the French Revolution. What most people think of as the West is that long ideological struggle that has given us what we call liberal democracy. With the end of the Cold War, the struggle was over and liberal democracy won. In reality, the Cold War was the penultimate struggle of a dying age. What was born with that political axis will die with the final rejection of it.

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