Who Does The Measuring

Posted on January 31, 2024 by thezman

In the 1980 campaign, Reagan would regularly say that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. It was a pithy line that got at something that was always missed by the politicians at the time. That is, the economy is not the same for everyone. You can have a good economy but there will be people who are not doing so good. The reverse is also true. Even in the Great Depression, there were people doing fabulously well.

That is the problem facing the political class this year. According to their court wizards, the economy is growing at a blistering pace. The fourth quarter of last year saw growth at over three percent and inflation falling down to two percent for what the wizards call personal items, while overall inflation was under two percent. The definition of “personal items” is one of those things that makes sense to the people doing the counting, but not to anyone who is doing the actual spending

Does it feel like the economy is growing at a blistering pace? Most people do not think the economy is great. In fact, most people think we are in difficult economic times, despite relatively high employment. This was one of the top reasons people voted for Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire. Under Trump, people perceived the economy as strong while under Biden it seems to be weak. The main reason is inflation. Every trip to the store sees prices higher than the last trip.

For the sake of comparison, the last time Americans experienced significant retail inflation was in the 1970’s. The court wizards back then used different rulers for measuring things like inflation, but everyone agrees retail inflation was higher than what we have experienced the last few years. The economy also grew at a faster rate most years during this time. The recession of 1974 was followed annual growth of near five percent the following years.

Five percent growth in 1976 did not keep Gerald Ford from losing to Jimmy Carter and it did not keep Reagan from beating Carter in 1980. The reason is GDP is not a great way to measure the economy. The formula for calculating GDP is Consumption + Government Spending + Investment + Net Exports. If inflation is roaring, consumption and government spending will also be roaring. You can have a growing GDP while people are seeing their budgets ravaged by inflation.

Of course, we live in the managerial age and managers can always be counted on to do one thing very well and that is lie about what they are doing. In the case of the economy, the court wizards keep tinkering with how they measure things like inflation to make the number look smaller. Shadow Stats keeps track of these changes and reframes official economic numbers in the old way of measuring them, so that we can compare today with the past.

When we take an honest look at the economy over the last few years, we see that inflation was comparable to the 1970’s, but not quite as high. People who buy food will tell you that prices are rising again, despite some relief last year. In the end, we could replicate the 1970’s in terms of the pattern and duration, even if overall inflation figures are not quite the same. The reason people think the economy stinks, despite the official numbers, is that is does stink for people who buy things.

That brings us back to that Reagan quip and another key point. The American economy over the last thirty years has transformed into something that is really good for people in finance, government, the academy and corporate governance, but it has not been great for people who make things and fix things. The nurse practitioner, which is really a government job, is doing great, but her patients who work in the honest economy are finding it hard to pay those health insurance bills.

Returning to that magic formula for measuring GDP, if the Investment side grows, but consumption remains flat, then GDP rises. Since government always grows and that growth is fueled by the Fed creating debt through the banking system, GDP is just about guaranteed to grow every year, even if the economy is in recession. Put another way, debt-driven government growth not only corrupts the nation but it corrupts the way in which we can measure the corruption.

This corruption has been highly effective. The typical American has barely noticed that it requires two incomes to have the life that used to be possible on a single income, at least for the middle-class. The baby boomers grew up in one income, intact two-parent homes, but they lived as adults in two income, often broken homes. The relative material prosperity came at the cost of social capital. The new way of measuring things masked the real trade-offs that came with the new economy.

We may be reaching the end of the line with the new way of measuring things, which is why people are not buying the official numbers. Those bulging baby boomer portfolios cannot mask the fact that their kids are saddled with debt and are struggling to maintain a lifestyle the parents took for granted. Of course, the next round of young people will enter adulthood in debt and looking forward to paying the pensions and health care costs of eight million retired people.

What all of this gets to is that measuring is necessary, but it is not how things are measured that matters. It is who does the measuring. That was the subtext of that Reagan quip half a century ago. Americans are pessimistic about the economy because it is not good for them. It may be great for the people doing the measuring, but that does not change the fact the typical American is not experiencing great times. That is because of who is in charge, not how they got there.

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The Setting Sun

Posted on January 30, 2024 by thezman

According to news reports the United States is about to get more directly involved in the slowly evolving regional war in the Middle East. The Biden administration is planning to authorize attacks on Iranian assets in response to the attacks on the American bases in northern Iraq and Syria that killed three American soldiers. The nature of the attacks on Iranian assets is unknown, but reports suggest they will focus on militia groups that operate in the Iraq and Syria, allegedly backed by Iran.

Most of the analysis suggests that this is part of a game by the neocons running Biden policy to instigate a war with Iran. They want this game of tit-for-tat, hoping Iran will take the bait and do something the administration could then use as a reason to launch a full-scale attack on Iran itself. Others suggest the administration will avoid hitting anything important in order to avoid escalation. The United States is not prepared for war with Iran, so will try to avoid it.

This raises an important question. Could the United States ever reach a point where it could have a winnable war with Iran? Conventional wisdom does not contemplate this question, as conventional wisdom remains stuck in the 1990’s when the American military was able to blitzkrieg the Iraqi army in Desert Storm. Since then, it has been assumed that every opposing army is no better than the Iraqi army and the results would be the same if they messed with the U.S.

The war in Ukraine should have dispelled that myth. Modern war is not much like Desert Storm, especially when it comes to powerful countries. Iran is a powerful country in the region and she can project power well outside her borders. The fact that the Houthis are firing relatively inexpensive missiles at Israel all the way from Yemen should give everyone pause when thinking about a war with Iran. The Iranians have a vastly better missile program than the Houthis.

In other words, missile technology has changed modern war. The Israelis are finding this out in the now bogged down war in Gaza. They are able to take out most of the rockets and shortrange missiles with their air defenses, but not all. The cost of defending against these missiles is very high, while the cost of producing rockets and missiles is relatively low. That is the major change in modern war. It is about the relative cost of technology between weapon systems.

This brings us back to the dreamed of war with Iran. The dream says it will not be a regular war with an invading army but a massive air assault. The dream of the shock and awe campaign never dies. The trouble is the Iranians have very good air defenses that can take down cruise missiles. Again, this is a lesson from the Ukraine war where the Ukrainians were initially able to defend against Russian missiles. The Iranians would not be able to defeat every missile, but many of them.

This is where things get tricky. The Russians learned that the only way to effectively use their missiles was to first defeat Ukrainian air defenses. They did this by flooding the system with missiles and cheap Iranian drones. Those attacks on Ukraine energy facilities were about draining the stock of Ukraine air defense missiles. Once the Russians depleted the Ukraine air defense, they then started attacking the launchers, radar stations and command centers.

It took the Russians about a year to defeat the Ukraine AD system. They launched an estimated seven thousand missiles of various types and massive numbers of cheap drones that they now produce on their own. The United States has about four thousand cruise missiles it could throw at Iran. It does not have cheap drones it can use to flood the Iranian air defense system. It is not clear how many dummy missiles the United States has for attacking air defenses.

You can quickly see the problem. The way to attack a modern air defense system is not with super smart and super expensive missiles. The air defenses simply keep pace so the cost-benefit ratio never changes. The way to defeat the Iranian air defense system is the way the Russians defeated Ukraine’s system. You throw masses of relatively cheap missiles and drones at it until they run low on ammunition and then you attack the air defense system itself. The U.S. cannot do this.

Then there is the reverse problem. The Iranians have built up their anti-ship systems to the point where they could hit U.S. surface ships operating in the Persian Gulf, which presents an obvious problem. American ships have sophisticated air defense systems but they are not equipped with unlimited missiles. Iran could throw waves of drones at these ships, much as the Russians did to the Ukraine system. This is also what the Houthis have been doing in the Red Sea.

There is a bit of irony to all of this. The long-forgotten Iran – Iraq war was a foreshadowing of the future battlespace. Both Iran and Iraq had relatively expensive aircraft they could deploy against enemy positions, but they dared not risk them against relatively inexpensive air defenses. Iran in particular was able to neutralize the superior Iraq air force this way. The result was something like we are seeing in Ukraine where both sides relied on artillery and massive mine fields.

The microprocessor revolution has allowed air defenses to catchup to even the best air assault weapons in terms of effectiveness. More important, it has allowed air defenses to surpass air power in cost effectiveness. On the other hand, cheap technology has resulted in cheap drones that can evade and overwhelm expensive air defense systems with the result being a stalemate in the air. Like land war after the introduction of the machine gun, air war is now a war of attrition.

The post-Cold War assumption was that American technology was such a force multiplier there was no need to focus on the production of cheaper weapons, especially cheap air weapons. America’s high-tech air force and missile systems would own the skies in any war. The result of this technological revolution is that American air power is no longer unchallengeable and that means the American military is no longer an unstoppable force that can bully the world.

One final change makes war with Iran unlikely. In the two Iraq wars, the United States could muster forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In the first war they also had forces in Turkey, but the Turks refused in the second war. This created a logistical problem leading to a much slower invasion. In a war with Iran, the Saudis would not host American troops and the Turks would certainly not do it. In other words, America no longer has the local support for a land war in the region.

This is why there will not be a war with Iran. Even if the United States does something stupid and attacks Iran itself, the Iranians know time is on their side. America cannot maintain those bases in Iraq and Syria much longer. Iran can use local militias to attrit those facilities until they must be withdrawn. In the next decade the United States will not be a player in the region. This is why the Saudis are in BRICS and why Iran can bide its time and avoid a war with the United States.

The Biden administration will put on a show by attacking caves and bunkers in Iraq and Syria, but avoid hitting anything important. There is a good chance they warn Iran in advance in order to make sure nothing bad happens. A flunky from the administration will come out and explain why these attacks were important and the slobbering toadies in regime media will dutifully repeat it. Meanwhile the sun sets a bit more on the American empire in the Middle East.

The Year Of The Fink

Posted on January 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: The Sunday podcast is back as a morning performance this week, but could shift back to evenings as needed until I get settled in the new place. There is a post about firing old white guys and post about rug merchants. Subscribe here or here.

If you are one of the many schemers in Washington, or you dream of becoming a schemer in Washington, this is a troubling time. By now Trump should be in exile, having had to quit the presidential race due to his many legal troubles and the collapse in his support due to those legal troubles. A more acceptable candidate was supposed to have emerged and pushed Trump out of the race. This was the narrative the schemers in Washington have lived by for over a year.

In what is becoming a regular feature of our politics, the narrative did not turn out as written and the scramble is on for a narrative update. There are still the court cases in Georgia, New York, Florida and Washington. The last two are in Federal court, but the Mark Steyn case tells us that we may all be dead before they get going. The Georgia case may fall apart due to racism. Apparently, racism made the DA turn the case into a chance to give her lover public money.

Of course, the big hole plowed through the narrative was the first two contests of the primary season, where Trump won easily. By the time Iowa came around all but three non-Trump candidates had quit the race. After Iowa it was the neocon offering, but she was trounced in New Hampshire, thus leaving Trump as the presumptive nominee, assuming nothing untoward happens this spring or summer. Few in Washington expected this to be the state of affairs at this point.

This is what makes the Texas border showdown an interesting thing. All of a sudden, we get word that Mitch McConnell is telling his party that the politics of immigration have flipped and they need to rally to Trump on the issue. Then Greg Abbott finds his inner confederate and defies the Feds with regards to the razor wire he had installed in a public park that sits along the border. Finally, we have every Republican governor rallying to his side in this fight with the Feds.

The first thing to consider here is that the Republican Party is the party of scheming perfidious finks, so whatever they are doing is not on the level. This is a party that selects for people who live to fink. They should just rename the party to “The Fink Party” but that would be a degree of candor no fink could muster. That also means that their sudden embrace of immigration and Trump’s position on it is not on the level. They are up to shenanigans because it is their nature.

One angle is that they suddenly realize that immigration is important to the voters despite the best effort of regime media to anathematize the issue. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire listed immigration as a top concern. This never happens. Voters always put economic concerns at the top, because people are practical. This means immigration has leaked into the domain of the practical. All of a sudden, the Republicans have to pretend to care about immigration.

There may be something more perfidious afoot. Those court cases are still ongoing and one of them is scheduled to start in March. That means Trump is still in legal jeopardy and could be removed from the ticket. The issue is timing. They could not conjure an alternative in the primaries, so maybe they are looking to get a replacement ready, perhaps as his running mate. In other words, maybe word went out that there is a casting call for who will be Trump’s future replacement.

From the scheming weasel point of view, this is a good save to the official narrative that had Trump dropping out by the end of 2023. He cruises along winning delegates, picks a regime approved running mate and then is convicted in the summer. The party then does some hand ringing and decides to expel him from the party and tab his running mate as the party nominee. “We really hate to do this but with Trump facing jail time, we have to go with his top choice to replace him.”

It sounds like 4-D chess, but these are people who traffic in finkery. Shenanigans are like water to a fish or oxygen to a human. We know the collection of flunkies who ran in the primary did so becasue they were told Trump would be removed. They admitted as much during the debates. It is not unreasonable to think word has gone out to the governors that there will be a new casting call for players in the updated version of the Never Trump narrative that remains a hit in Washington.

Then you have the fact that what Texas is doing is mostly a show. This area they are walling off from the Feds is a tiny portion of the border. The park itself remains wide open to the Feds. If they wanted to do it, they could take down the razor wire, but thus far they have not done it. As for the states voicing support and sending national guard units, this is a cost-free gesture. They risk nothing in doing it, as even the national party thinks it is okay to sound butch on immigration.

One other factor suggests there are shenanigans afoot. There was the rumor that Trump might consider Haley as a running mate. This seems to have come from Washington and probably has a kernel of truth to it. The party may be offering to support Trump in his legal and political fights, if he agrees to a running mate that is on good terms with the regime. There has no doubt been discussions about this between the party and the Trump campaign.

All that said, Trump has proven to be one of the most resilient and lucky political figures to come around in generations. He is probably shrewd enough to avoid picking a running mate that could be his replacement. That just means the shenanigans will take another turn this spring. The regime hates Trump with the intensity of a thousand suns so they will never relent. What the first month of the political year tells us is that 2024 will be the year of the fink.

The Mutant Supremacy

Posted on January 26, 2024 by thezman

Bit of a weird show this week. Getting close to the big move. As a result, things are a bit up in the air in my life, so not much time for planning shows. That means I am winging it until I can get settled into the new place. That and the day job has some new twists, which always adds some stress. I am heroically keeping it all together to produce fine quality dissident content for your listening pleasure.

Kidding aside, the inspiration for the show this week came while listening to the coverage of the New Hampshire primary. The media really wanted Haley to have a good night, so they were pumping air into her tires by having her voters explain why they were voting for the miserable old witch. None of these people struck me as the sort anyone would call normal or even stable.

The weirdest of these weirdos were the ones who changed their registration so they could vote in the Republican primary against Trump. It means last fall they changed from Democrat to either Republican or undeclared. They had to have done that by October, so it they were plotting this months in advance. Think about the sort of nutjob who would do something like that?

That is the show this week. I ramble on about the various segments of the voter base and tease out what percentage of the vote is the mutant portion. The truth is, it is these mutants who make up about ten percent of the population, but are responsible for ninety percent of the problems. Unlike the thirteen who do fifty, these people have real power and cannot be avoided.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Who Are These People?
Small Differences
The Numbers
The Troublesome Ten
Death To The Mutants!

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The Death Of Pop

Posted on January 25, 2024 by thezman

Note: A British man named Sam Melia has been convicted of speaking freely and faces prison time for it. He is a married man with a young family. If you feel inclined to kick in a few bucks to help him out, do so here. You can also buy something from his family’s online shop. Their tea is exceptional.

Heard a good new song lately? Given the demographics of this site the answer is most likely negative but there are some young people here. If their answer is yes, it is going to be something from the hip-hop genre. Of course, given the demographics of this site they would probably not admit to it. This was the number one hip-hop song last year, in case you are curious. This one was number two, suggesting that the worst form of music has managed to get worse.

When it comes to what most people reading this would call popular music, the results are not much better. This was the most played “rock” song of 2023. One cannot help but wonder if it was created by AI due to its generic power-pop sound. This is the second most played “rock” song, which is not terrible, but it sounds more like a country tune than a rock song. In fact, it was number three on the country charts. This song was the most played song on the country stations.

You can go through the music charts and listen to the top-10 in each category each year and find songs that are pleasant and songs that are hilariously terrible. Miley Cyrus should cut back on that five pack a day habit and spend the savings on some people who can write music that make some sense. The fun part about scanning these music lists is there are many comically stupid entries that got pushed into the top-40 by the mega corporations that control the music business.

When it comes to what most people reading this consider rock-and-roll, the landscape has been barren for a long time. Who is the best guitar player in a rock band that is under the age of forty? No one knows. He probably does not exist because rock music does not exist as a genre anymore. If you want to hear that sort of music you are going to be buying or streaming stuff from thirty, forty or fifty years ago. Even young people who want that style reach back to the oldies.

The question is why has the popular music landscape become a barren desert of corporate product? There are still plenty of young whites who would listen to knew guitar music. Blacks still like things like soul and rhythm and blues. Even blues music could have an audience if anyone bothered. This post by Brian Niemeier goes into the reasons why popular music, especially rock music, has collapsed. He did an earlier post on the same topic discussing different reasons.

Not discussed is the culture of the managerial class. The people running the music business are no different from the people running the other centers of cultural production in that they have had the antiwhite bug for a long time. The music industry went all in on hip-hop in the 1990’s. Part of it was the belief that it was a fresh market and part of it was cultural. For managerial types, hip-hop was cool because it was not white, while rock-and-roll was pale, male and stale.

One result of the money drying up for all forms of music that appeals to white people is white people stopped making that music. They stopped learning to play instruments, stopped forming garage bands and stopped cutting their teeth at clubs. Elementary school bands are full of Asian girls playing violin. There has been a steady decline in the sale of musical instruments over the last few decades, even though technology has made it easier to record at home and make it sound good.

For rock music, this has killed the feeder system for generating new sounds and new acts that made the genre possible. Even if young people were still dreaming of being a rock star, the clubs where they would learn how to perform have dried up. The culture around going to club to find new sounds and new acts has also dried up. When the music industry shifted to hip-hop and corporate pop, they also shut down the development system for creating various genres of rock music.

We are starting to see this in other areas. The military is worried that white guys from the South are no longer signing up as in the past. This decline in white participation is due to the same factors as the decline in white music. If you make your institution openly hostile to white people, they will politely avoid your institution. Before long, you will lose the ability to win them back. A good rule of life for institutions is that once you go black the whites are never coming back.

Race is not the only reason for the decline of rock music. As those Niemeier posts explain, the industry is suffering from systemic failure. There lies another useful example that applies elsewhere. The federal government failed in its duty to maintain a marketplace for music. They allowed corporate players to monopolize radio stations, which coincided with the consolidation of the music business. The result is a narrow system that operates as skimming operation.

We see this in tech. Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems and office productivity products. Innovation is non-existent in this area. Apple and Google own the mobile telecommunications industry. Despite the hype, there has been nothing interesting in mobile computing for a decade or more. The whole tech space is consolidating to the point where every business will be forced onto one of a few clouds of the cloud computing leviathan.

Of course, all of this can be chalked up to the end of empire. Empires are the result of failed societies, not successful ones. The Roman Empire grew out of the rubble of the failed Roman Republic. For half of its existence the Roman Empire operated like a mafia bust-out operation. The same is happening with the American empire, which grew out of the republic that died at Gettysburg. The main difference with the American empire and prior empires is speed due to the state of technology.

The shame of it is that like the remaining passengers on the Titanic, most Americans would enjoy some good tunes as the empire sinks under the water. That is not looking like it is going to happen, given the state of music. Who knows? Maybe Miley Cyrus will get lucky and made a good song for end-stage America. Or more likely, maybe a cage full of monkeys with some instruments will be the new Oliver Anthony and create an authentic anthem for this age.

The Clash Of Visions

Posted on January 24, 2024 by thezman

The New Hampshire primary turned out about how most sober minded people expected, with Trump cruising to victory. As expected, regime media and those in the anti-Trump cult have quickly moved onto other things. Even though the narrative on this election has been wrong so far, these people were sure the gods would deliver them from the terrible Orange Man in New Hampshire. Now they will update the script for the South Carolina primary in a few weeks.

Even though the New Hampshire primary was not a surprise to normal people, it does have a few things worth noting. One is the turnout. In 2016 when all of this was new and exciting, about two hundred and sixty thousand people voted on the Republican side, with Trump getting one hundred thousand votes. This time, with the results known in advance, three hundred thousand voted on the Republican side and Trump got one hundred and sixty thousand votes or fifty-four percent.

Further, exit polling says that only about a third of the people voting would call themselves “MAGA”, by which they mean part of the Trump movement. We do not have similar polling from 2016, but it is reasonable to say that most of Trump’s vote during those crazy days would declare themselves part of the movement. You also have to consider the fact that even Trump’s most loyal fans would find it weird to ask them if they were part of the MAGA movement, as if it is a club.

Even so, it says that people were voting for different reasons this time. Various anti-Trump groups poured money into the state to boost other candidates. Mikki Haley spent over twenty million on ads. The DNC spent millions last year getting their voters to switch to undeclared so they could vote in the GOP primary. About half of the Republican primary voters were undeclared, so it is reasonable to assume many will vote Democrat in the general.

What the regime tried to do with a fair bit of success is turn the Republican primary into a general election by flooding the voting booth with Democrats. It explains why Haley dropped her “tough conservative gal from the South” routine and morphed into “I want to speak to the manager” feminist hero. Her people had her go out and praise Hillary Clinton because they knew that half the voters probably voted for Hillary over Trump and would like to do it again.

It also tells us something about the dynamics of this election. This is not the 2016 election where people voted for Trump for the same reason the drunk guy in the crowd mooned the king or shouted derogatory things at him. In 2016, Trump was for many voters a harmless protest vote. In 2024 it means something different because things have gotten much worse since then. Note that for the first time primary voters put immigration at the top of their concerns.

There is something else here that may be driving a new dynamic in this election and that is the open shenanigans in this process. Think about the sort of person who schemes up a plan to get Democrats to vote in the other party’s primary a year in advance in order to subvert the will of the voters. This is a level of sociopathy that few people think is possible. Serial killers are not this devious. The people claiming to defend democracy are now out front with these schemes.

Of course, such a scheme only works if there are people willing to do it. Years of interacting with people who put up signs on their lawn promoting the latest thing is slowly changing how normal people see things. Thirty years ago, the typical suburban peasant thought they just needed find the right person to say the truth the right way and these people would see the light. Today, the typical suburban peasant thinks the woman with the BLM sign might be better off in another country.

What the typical suburban peasant is waking up to, even though he cannot articulate it, is that we are living in a clash of visions. The people on the other side of that sign explaining all the things that go on in that house have a view of the world that is completely different from most people. That vision often assumes that the people without such signs are what stands between them and the future. The vision of the self-anointed says the benighted are the problem.

This is because when they talk about “democracy” they are not talking about the mechanics of picking office holders. They imagine a society in which all of the moral questions have been solved. The only thing left is figuring out how to quickly attain diversity, inclusion and equality. Further, they assume that everyone must want this, unless they are evil, so the only reason we have not “made progress” is that these evil people are using shenanigans to confuse the masses.

In contrast, the typical suburban peasant imagines a world where he has a job he enjoys, friends to grill with and watch ball games and a chance give his kids a better life than he got from his parents. For him, democracy is about picking the best office holders who will take turns buggering through the problems. In most cases, the typical suburban peasant prefers the guy who will do very little, as things could always get worse so best not to rock the boat too hard.

It is not just that one vision is radical and utopian and the other conservative and pragmatic, but that the former sees the destruction of the latter as a proper and necessary part of their program. What we are seeing in this election could be a sign that the typical suburban peasant is waking up to this reality. It is not just that the middle-aged white woman with the BLM sign is wrong, but that she represents a danger to the life and welfare of the typical suburban peasant.

Whether or not this awakening among the typical suburban peasant is happening can be debated, but we can be sure he has yet to arrive at the solution. There can be no compromise in this clash of visions. When the ends of one side are the destruction of the other, the only plausible response for the other side is to seek the same. As more suburban peasants wake up to the reality of sign lady, more will inevitably arrive at the only solution that guarantees their survival.

Replacement Theory

Posted on January 23, 2024 by thezman

Imagine a medieval city is under siege and the prince of the city is in his palace supposedly working with his advisors on how to break the siege. The people of the city are rationing food as no one knows how long the siege will last. The prince and his people, however, are living the good life. Now, imagine that the prince is quietly plotting a way to fling open the gates of the city at night so that the besiegers can rush in and have their way with the people of the city.

It sounds like an impossible scenario, but that is the world in which we find ourselves with regards to the immigration issue. The Constitution gives the federal government control over immigration policy. Supreme court rulings have recognized Congress as having plenary power over all aspects of immigration. It is one of those powers exclusive to the federal government. Congress passes laws on immigration and it is the duty of the executive to enforce them.

Of course, that is not happening. Congress has been refusing to pass sensible immigration laws for decades now. Whenever the Republicans have power, they start talking about amnesty. When Democrats have power, they start talking about granting citizenship to every human on earth. Meanwhile, the executive branch does nothing to enforce the existing laws. Instead, they scheme with both sides to increase the flow of illegals, while waxing romantic about the glories of immigration.

Like the prince at the beginning, the sovereign is deliberately failing in its basic duty while scheming to harm the people. The recent court ruling that will allow the border patrol to dismantle the razor wire barriers installed by the state of Texas on one part of the border illustrates the problem. The Biden administration went to court so they can throw open the gates in order to encourage more illegal immigration. SCOTUS sided with them until the issue is fully resolved.

Now, it is important to note that the court ruling was limited and temporary, as the issue is part of a larger case in the Fifth Circuit. It is also important to note that this should have been a 9-0 ruling, but four justices are alarmed enough about the problem to break with a century of precedent. Again, immigration, including border control, is a power reserved exclusively to the federal government. Under normal conditions, this case never reaches the Supreme Court.

The immigration issue is not an isolated issue. People engaged with this issue often miss the fact that the federal government is derelict in its duties across the board and often colludes with those seeking to destroy the people. This Breitbart story on systematic corporate theft is a good example. These companies steal your activity, which is your property, in order to use it against you. The government literally exists to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

This Twitter thread about a firm called Pendulum, that exists to help powerful people use that stolen data to create disinformation campaigns, is another example of how the government not only ignores its duties, but colludes with the enemies of the people in order to harm the people. That company is literally a corporate bullshit generator, but instead of being a source of entertainment, it seeks to be one of the many hands of the state throwing open the gates to the barbarians.

The point of the ruler, the reason for this role to exist, whether it is a prince, a warrior-king, a republic or the present managerial elite, is to protect the people. That is the primary reason for there to be a ruler or ruling class. Government is a protection racket whether it operates by consent or by imposition. A prince who flings open the gates to the barbarians or a managerial elite that defines itself in hostile opposition to the people is a contradiction that cannot endure very long.

This is why the court will struggle with this immigration case. It has never had to deal with a federal government that deliberately undermines the rationale for its own existence in this way. Instead, the court is equipped to deal with disputes between the states and the federal government or individuals and the government. It always assumes that the issue at hand is the government trying to do too much. The prince flinging open the gates is truly novel.

This brings up another question. Is the failure of the political class with regards to immigration a cause or a symptom? In other words, is what we are seeing deliberate or simply due to the collapse of the political system? Politics is the puppet show the ruling class puts on for us, so maybe the political dysfunction we are seeing is a reflection of a ruling class that is in crisis. Maybe the reason the state cannot perform its basic functions is it no longer able to predictably accomplish them.

All of this is beside the point for the people. Like those people hiding in the city thinking their prince will come up with a plan to break the siege, Americans continue to assume the system will eventually right itself. In the days of princes, when the people lost faith in their prince, they abandoned him to his enemies. Just as it is axiomatic that the primary duty of the state is protection, it is axiomatic that whenever the state fails in this duty the people must find a way to replace it.

Another Shoe Drops

Posted on January 22, 2024 by thezman

Note: The Sunday podcast is back as a morning performance this week, but could shift back to evenings as needed until I get settled in the new place. There is a post about the classic film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and a post about time. Subscribe here or here.

The weekend brought news that the employment level in the imperial capital took a hit when Ron DeSantis ended his campaign for the Republican nomination. The army of Washington insiders DeSantis hired to run his campaign will now have to get working on the next bit of shenanigans to thwart Donald Trump. Similarly, his online surrogates will have to find a new way to pretend they are important influencers, but without the large financial cushion of the Republican donor class.

DeSantis suffered the same problem as Scott Walker in 2016 in that he is a competent administrator with a solid record as a governor, who could be relied upon as president to not go into the street and scare the horses. By objective measures, he ticks all the boxes you want for the job, regardless of his party. Like Walker, he is a man perfectly suited for the Cold War consensus. The trouble is the Cold War consensus is long gone, so men like this are an anachronism.

DeSantis also suffered from the fact that we live in a whirlwind of media bombardment with an increasingly stupid voting base. Part of the latter problem is demographics, but a big part is the internet. People lack the ability to pay attention for more than a few minutes so they make judgements on memes and hot takes. A boring guy who looks like he is passing a stone when tries to tell a joke is never going to go over well with a voting base that thinks Sean Hannity is brilliant.

There is an interesting contrast here between DeSantis and Ramaswamy, who also dropped out of the race. The former tried hard to be a pebble in Trump’s shoe, while the latter carefully avoided upsetting the guy who he clearly admired. Given his resources and experience, one has to wonder if DeSantis would not have been wise to follow the Ramaswamy plan, instead of the Bill Kristol plan. It suggests something about DeSantis that this was not obvious to him.

Putting that aside, the important bit in all this is that DeSantis immediately endorsed Trump, which is a bit of surprise. He also bashed Haley a bit, which is probably a bigger surprise, given their backers. If you listen to his speech, it is clear he is more cross with her than with Trump, who spent the last year mocking him. The reason is that Haley hoovered up his donors in the last few months of 2023, which meant she got the media attention and that sucked all the air out of his campaign.

That brings us to his endorsement of Trump. Clearly DeSantis knows the regime hates Trump and will not stop until he is dead or in prison. After all, the reason DeSantis decided to run was that he was told by regime members that Trump would be forced out of the race, so the field was open. Several of the other candidates blurted this out at various times and DeSantis people hinted at it as well. It seems odd that DeSantis would then endorse Trump on the way out of the race.

One way to read this is that the plan to remove Trump is still active, but that DeSantis will not be the guy they pick as a replacement. Like a ball coach who removes his name from consideration, when it becomes clear he is not going to get the job, DeSantis is salvaging what he can from the situation by endorsing Trump. In a few years maybe he can use this to tap into an even angrier voting bloc. If by some miracle Trump wins, then he can get a job in the administration.

Another way of reading this is that this is just one more bit of evidence that behind the scenes the regime is about to abandon their plan to remove Trump. The narrative said that by now a viable alternative would have risen up in the primary as Trump’s support fell after all of the indictments. Jack Smith planned to be preparing for a March trial at this point, so that would be the news. Instead, Trump is rolling through the early primaries and the only opponent is Haley.

There are other signs that the regime is losing faith in their narrative, so on the surface the DeSantis endorsement fits in here. The trouble is the court cases are still active and there is no clear way to pull the plug on them. The thing about this regime is they never give up on their narratives once they adopt them. Bill Kristol thinks we should still be occupying Iraq preparing for an invasion of Iran. It is unlikely that the regime will reverse course on the lawfare against Trump.

All of this seems to be pointing to a clash of visions in the summer. On the one hand Trump is rolling through the primaries on the assumption he will be the nominee, while on the other hand the narrative still says he will be removed. Imagine a scenario in which Trump is convicted in the summer, after he locked up the nomination, but before the convention makes it official. Imagine if it happens after the convention. Will the party be forced to remove him at that late date?

Back when Trump came down the escalator, brilliant observers noted that he was like the Mule from the Asimov novels. The logic of managerialism says that political forces like that which Trump represents are impossible. The days of the populist hero are gone, replaced with the expertise of the managerial class. Trump’s existence causes chaos because it contradicts the fundamental logic of the system. It is not what Trump says but that he exists is the issue for the regime.

This conflict ends one or both sides are destroyed in the conflict. The regime can never accommodate itself to Trump and what he represents. What he represents is the result of a system that is at war with the people over whom it rules. It is an irreconcilable difference in design and purpose. It is why old fashion politicians like DeSantis have no place in this age. In a time when compromise is impossible, there can be no room for those who seek compromise. This is the age of conflict.

Thoughts On Digital Tyranny

Posted on January 19, 2024 by thezman

Fifty years ago, people just accepted the fact that there were people walking around with nutty ideas in their head. You could easily avoid them, and you could trust that the “marketplace of ideas” would police the problem. Most people would recognize that this guy is a nut and ignore him. The small number of people who fell for things like conspiracy theories or libertarianism was small.

That is no longer true. It seems that the “marketplace of ideas” has been flooded with crackpots, many of them sporting credentials. Everywhere you go you feel the need to be on guard against the loonies ululating about the latest thing. In social settings everyone has to look over their shoulder before speaking, for fear that stating obvious truths will set of a firestorm of mental illness.

Of course, much of this is due to the digital age. It is much easier for the crazies to find you and inflict their craziness on you. The Gaia worshippers, who have always existed in one form or another, are everywhere now. Even mundane things give them a reason to start hooting about Gaia. There is no escaping the misinformed and the deranged because they have flooded the digital zone.

It is an interesting dilemma. The managerial elite is not wrong to worry about the tsunami of nonsense that has swept society. You cannot have any sort of self-governance when most people are misinformed. It is not even clear you can have an authoritarian society when most people are misinformed. How can you organize society when most people believe in nonsense?

A lament among people on this side of the great divide is that Western societies have become atomized and deracinated. That would be preferable to a world of misinformed people networked to the rest of us via technology. Imagine if the Gaia worshippers all suddenly lost their internet connection for a year. The world would suddenly become quieter and vastly more sober minded.

It is not just people who are sincerely misinformed. Spend time on social media and it quickly becomes obvious that there are people who take some pleasure in minting false information and passing it onto others. In an age when information is king, these people should probably be killed. They are the coin clippers of the digital age and should be treated as such. Death to the misinformers!

Of course, that would require a ruling class that is not chock full of misinformed and deranged people, which is obviously not the case. In fact, they may be the most deranged of all. Their efforts to combat “misinformation and disinformation” are only lowering trust in all information. What is needed is an informed will to power that will replace the ruling class with an informed one.

This Week’s Show

Contents

The Increasing Tyranny
Analog Versus Digital
Three Types Of People
These Groups In The Analog World
These Groups In The Digital World
Elites & Misinformation/Disinformation
The Great Firehose
Amnesia
Incompetence
Governing The Misinformed

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A Flower In The Parking Lot

Posted on January 18, 2024 by thezman

Note: Events are taking me on the road before the cock crows, so today the post is something from behind the green door. This post is from a a week ago when I had to rent a car. Something similar is happening this weekend but for entirely different reasons, so the post is appropriate.

We are expecting the white death this weekend and my car is useless in the snow, so I booked a rental for the weekend. God’s country is expecting five to eight inches of snow on Saturday and the tiny roads will not see a plow until late Sunday, so I needed something that could give me a chance to get off the mountain. I booked what the web site said was a front wheel drive Volkswagen or similar.

The key words are always “or similar” with rental cars and “similar” turned out to be a Jeep Gladiator, which is like a Jeep with a pickup bed on it. It did not cost more and they were happy to see me take it, so it worked out for the best. I can now haul some junk from Lagos to the new place. That and the thing is pretty much a tank, so I should have no trouble in the snow.

Standing in the lot waiting for the rental car guy to do his thing, I looked around at the cars and struggled to tell the models. I am not a car guy, but I used to know a Toyota from a Ford without much trouble. Car companies all had their distinctive styles, which was one way they differentiated themselves. Cars are a utility good, but aesthetics are what gets people to sign on the dotted line.

I was reminded of something a crazy guy told me when I was a teenager. He said that by the time I was his age, all cars would look the same. His reasoning was that the drive for efficiency would lead to a singular shape that was the most efficient both in terms of aerodynamics, but also in design cost. All the car maker’s efforts were converging on a singularity of sorts and all cars would look the same.

Crazy guy was mostly right. In the economy and mid-market range, it is hard to tell one model from another. It is not just the exterior. Inside they are all the same too. Options vary, but the options list from Toyota is no different from the options list at the other makers and the pricing is the same. Like the rental car page, we are reaching a point where cars are just small, medium, large and similar.

There are exceptions to this process. The Jeeps are outliers. Ford is selling a Bronco that is supposed to compete with the Jeep, but the best I can tell the Bronco is more like the other SUV’s on the market. The Jeep is a genuine off-road vehicle, even in this age of safety compliance and standardization. Driving this thing around is not quite like a pickup truck and nothing like an SUV.

Of course, there are sports cars. I stopped to grab the mail and there was a Corvette in the parking lot. Like the Jeep, it fills a category unique to itself. It is not in the same league as a Porsche or the high-end BMW’s and Audis. It is not a supercar, but it is not a muscle car either. I see a lot of the new models around so they must be popular with people who are not conformists.

I used to joke that if a man fell asleep in 1965 and awoke in the modern age, he would walk around a parking lot thinking the commies won the Cold War. The aesthetics of this age are dreadful and they are getting worse. That Corvette I saw in the parking lot was like a singular flower blooming against a black and white scene. The dreary cars around it threatening to snuff out the last bit of beauty.

The raises the question of why the car makers are not doing as they did in the past and making weird looking cars. The main reason is the economics of car making have stamped out all signs of adventurism. Every automotive executive knows the story of Saab and its last years making cars. The engineers and managers wanted to make cool cars, but that brought risk and that meant added cost.

General Motors owned Saab at the time and they were not interested in taking risks so they finally shuttered the Saab brand. When you learn about the story of how Saab died you cannot help but think that it was more than just economics. The ugly people at GM could not tolerate the free thinking that was the spirit of the Saab brand. They were the gray background swallowing up the colorful flower.

Of course, there needs to be a market for risk taking. America is no longer a place for young risk takers. It is a place for old fuddy-duddies who live in constant fear of risk because risk could mean the icy hand of death. America has always been a business and now it is a mature business with little tolerance for risk, so even if you wanted to make a funky car for the masses, the market would be small.

At the new place, I noticed that everyone seems to drive a Subaru or a pickup truck with most drives have one of each. The Subaru is great for bad weather driving on hilly country roads and the pickup is good for hauling stuff. I am not ready to be a Subaru man, so maybe I will like this Jeep enough to buy one. Maybe buy a red one so I can be that flower blooming in the grayness for a little while longer.

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