Understanding Our History

Posted on March 15, 2024 by thezman

One of the weird things about the Cloud people is how they talk about history as if it is a spirit force or a god. In his State of the Union speech, Biden kept saying things like “history is watching us” and “history requires us” as if “history” was the name of the guy controlling the simulation. He is not the only one who does this. In fact, he never talked like this until the rest of the Cloud people started doing it.

One reason for talking about history this way is it gives them a false sense of moral authority for their various schemes. They claim that history moves toward some paradise, so if their schemes advance us toward that paradise, then they must be on the side of history. It is all nonsense, of course, but nonsense has been the fuel of fanatics and lunatics since the dawn of time.

Even with a sober-minded ruling class, however, there would still be this need to shape history so that the present feels inevitable. Much of what has brought us to the present crisis is the shaping of history to fit the causes of the moment. Our progressive ruling class has been rewriting history since Gettysburg, maybe even since the Battle of Naseby, because the future is certain, but the past is unpredictable.

That is the show this week. I am taking a brief stab at reframing American history in a way that not only helps us understand how we got here but justifies why we must do that which must be done to restore sanity. I am stealing for another “Z” man, Howard Zinn, and creating a dissident version of American history. Maybe more like taking a first stab at the idea of creating a Dirt People history of America.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
All History Is Bullshit
Real Founding
The Civil War
The American Empire
Democratic Empire

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Missing Lagos

Posted on March 14, 2024 by thezman

Edit: A friend of ours, Judd Blevins, is under attack by the usual suspects and could use some help in his fight. He is a good man trying to serve his community, but the freaks and weirdos are trying to ruin it. Here is his story and a way to send him a few bucks.

This week was the final escape from Lagos, which had been in the works for a few years but took off toward the end of last year. I am not a young man anymore, so I cannot just pack up and leave when the spirit moves me. Not only do I have commitments to fulfill, but I also have stuff. When your stuff fits comfortably inside the trunk of your car, moving is about waiting until the sun goes down. When you need a truck for your stuff then you have to put some thought into it.

Baltimore has been my home for twenty years. I lived there longer than anywhere else so despite the harms of Charm City, there are some things I will miss. The thing I will miss the most is the look when I say I am from Baltimore. One time in Ireland I told some locals I was from Baltimore, and they did not believe me. They had seen the series The Wire and could not accept that I lived in what they saw. I showed them my license and some photos. They were terrified of me.

There are other things I will miss, like the constant sound of basketballs striking the sidewalk at all hours of the day and night. I exaggerate a bit here, but the thud of a ball hitting the sidewalk is like a weird metronome to the place. So much so that I created a special filter for my podcasts to remove the sound. No matter when I record, there is, now was, that sound of a ball striking cement. Oddly, Baltimore produces few college basketball players, despite it all.

Another thing I will miss is the shouting. The first time I was in Copenhagen, I experienced an eerie feeling the first day walking around the city. It struck me that the reason for this is the relative quiet. No one was shouting. The Danes quietly go about their business on the streets. If they need to speak to someone, they go up close to them so they can talk without shouting. Even on public transport the Danes are quiet, not Japanese quiet, but never shouting or blaring music.

Baltimore is the other end of the spectrum. It is perfectly normal for a man to stop on one side of the street and scream at the top of his lungs at another man on the other side of the street. At first it is to get his attention, but after that they will hold forth like it is perfectly normal for two men to be screaming at one another on the street, because in Baltimore it is normal. People also scream at each other from their house windows, open car windows and even rooftops.

One reason for the shouting, but certainly not the only reason, is the constant sound of alarms from emergency equipment. This is another filter I have created for recording podcasts that I may never need again. It is not just the police sirens, which are common, but other sorts of emergency vehicles. Often, I would see the local fire department take their trucks out and blast the sirens for no reason, other than to make a racket and drive the things around the block a few times.

Probably the hardest thing to get used to will be locks. In a place like Lagos, anything not locked up or locked down will be stolen. Even if it is worthless someone will pick it up and carry it away. When we had an office in the city, we would leave old computers on the sidewalk, and they would vanish. The only thing that did not disappear this way was dead bodies, but the scenes from Haiti suggest that this is something that happens in the next stage of social development.

For the last week I have been locking doors after I pass, because it has become second nature at this point. Yesterday was a nice early spring day here in the hills, but leaving the door open to let the air in was too much. Instead, I opened the window of the office so I could keep an eye on things. Perhaps in time I will forget what it was like to live on guard every minute of your life. I may now understand how men who did long stints in prison feel when they get released.

Something I am not sure I will miss is the general stupidity of the place. The best example of this is car inspections. When I moved to Lagos, I had just bought a new truck, but it was registered in the prior state. I learned I needed a safety inspection before I could swap plates. Getting a safety inspection on a new car seemed weird, but how long could it take? It took all day. The guy crawled all over the thing and even wrote up some things that came from the factory as questionable.

I asked the guy why he was doing this as in other states a safety inspection is just a walkaround to make sure every important bit works. The guy told me with compete sincerity that the cars were safer in Baltimore. He could have said it was the law or that his boss required it, thus acknowledging the idiocy of what he was doing, but no, he was fully on board with the policy. Baltimore combines the mindset of the postal clerk with the intellectual dexterity of the population.

One thing that Baltimore has that I have seen no where else is street walkers, by which I mean people who walk in the streets rather than on the sidewalk. You see it the most when it snows and the cars are less controllable. The locals will walk in the middle of the streets. Even in the summer this is common. They will saunter along in the middle of the road without a care in the world. Of course, they jaywalk at a pace that suggests they take pleasure in holding up traffic.

Finally, the last thing I will miss is the tropical summers. Starting in mid-June Baltimore turns into a jungle. Jungle as in weather. It rains almost every night and is suffocatingly humid all day. Yeah, it is hot and humid in the South during the summer, but that weather in a city is a special form of miserable. Baltimore is below sea level, so it is a concrete heatsink in the summer. In fact, the Baltimore – Washington area is a giant metro area plopped into a swampy jungle.

Lots of people reading this will say it gets miserably hot where they live in the summer, and that is probably true, but hazy, hot, and humid in Lagos is unique. I have been in the South in summer. I have been in Texas during a heatwave. I have spent August in Florida and that is about as close as it comes to Lagos. The big exception is Florida has the beaches and lacks the haze. If you want to know what Hell is really like, spend a summer in Lagos and you will sin no more.

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Suicidal Thoughts

Posted on March 13, 2024 by thezman

The French National Assembly approved the security accord with Ukraine struck by Emmanual Macron last month. The vote was largely symbolic and as much to do with the summer elections as policy with Ukraine. The mythical “far-right” has been doing well in the polls due to immigration and the economy, so Macron hopes to make the election a referendum on supporting Ukraine. The opposition sat out the vote, so the bill passed with a wide margin.

The security agreement means little, as it is mostly about sending equipment and money to Ukraine, something France has been doing for ten years, along with the rest of the NATO countries. The new thing here is that it opens the door for France to send troops into Ukraine with the approval of Kiev. Macron has been talking tough about doing this, but he has been cagey about if it will happen. So far, he has been trying to round up support from other NATO countries.

Meanwhile, the Russians have made clear that anything used by Ukraine in their war effort is fair game for Russian strikes. Putin recently made it clear what that means in an interview with Russian media. He said, “It would be right for Macron to remember how it ended for Napoleon and his soldiers, more than 600,000 of whom were left lying in the damp earth.” Obviously, Putin is referring to the famous defeat of the French army by the Russians that brought down Napoleon.

A reasonable question is just what the French could bring to the table if they choose to send troops into Ukraine. The French military is equipped with all the latest high-tech gear and it has over one hundred thousand people, but that includes the Foreign Legion and reserves. Realistically, the French army is about ninety thousand regular military, but how many are combat ready is unknown. France also has troops stationed around the world in former colonies.

Then there is the division of labor. The French military is split in thirds among the Air Force, Army, and Navy. There would be no role for the French navy in this war, so that leaves about sixty thousand people. Of course, they could bring in the Foreign Legion, which has most likely been operating in Ukraine since the start of the war and France can call up its reserves, so using the base of one hundred thousand is about right, using publicly available figures.

Realistically, what this means is the French could put twenty thousand ground troops in the trenches after months of preparation and assembly. Most of the French military, like every military, does not fight. Instead, they support the fighting units, with logistics, equipment repairs, planning and intelligence. To put that number in perspective, Ukraine is losing about thirty thousand men per month and that is according to the optimistic figures provided by Western sources.

Now, the French could bring in their Rafale jet fighters and CAESAR 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzers, which in theory would help Ukraine. The problem with the howitzers is the fact that there are no shells for them, and many have already been destroyed in Ukraine. The jet fighters would have to operate out of Ukraine airfields, which would need new air defenses and upgrades in order to base these planes there without the Russians destroying them on day one.

If you look at the other militaries in NATO, you see a similar story. In most cases, they would not be able to field anything without U.S. help. Even in the cases of countries like France and Poland that have significant military assets, they are not built for what is happening in Ukraine. If the French were to send troops into Ukraine to actually fight the Russians, they would be wiped out in a month. This is something that military planners have known long before the war started.

Surely the French military knows this, so they must have told Macron that his scheme to send in French troops is madness. On the other hand, generals are politicians and that means they tell the politicians in charge what they want to hear. We saw that with General Milley in the run-up to the Ukraine summer offensive. He told the politicians it would work and when it failed, he retired. That could be happening here. They could be telling Macron what he wants to hear.

Another possibility is that this is a bluff. Again, this new security deal is nothing new accept the Ukrainian permission to bring in French troops. Even that is symbolic as we know French troops have been operating in Ukraine. The Russians put a missile inside the hotel where French “mercenaries” were quartered. We also know that French troops were trapped in Mariupol when the Russians captured the city in 2022, so nothing really changes here other than the language.

If it is not a bluff and it is not just domestic political theater, then the most likely plan here is to try to repeat what was done in Syria. When Washington tried to regime change Syria, the Russians came into support Assad, who was able to weather the storm, but faced a Western backed army in the south. The U.S. then put troops, including French troops, in Syria as a trip wire. The idea was to buy time and hope to wear out the Assad regime.

Just because that failed to work does not mean it is not a great idea, so that could be what is happening here. France and some other NATO countries will garrison troops behind the lines, daring the Russians to advance further. Macron seems to have developed an obsession with Odessa, so parking French troops there would be a red line that NATO would draw this summer. This assumes the Russians would not put a missile on these garrisons.

The trouble with this scheme is that time is not on the side of the West. This has been the fundamental mistake from the start. The reason Boris Johnson was parachuted into Kiev to scuttle the peace deal in April of 2022 was that the neocons were sure that Russia could not sustain a long war. All the Ukrainians needed to do was weather the initial storm and then Russia would run out of gas. Instead, the reverse has proven to be true, and it is the West that is being bled white.

This is one of those times when logic says it must be a bluff or merely a political stunt in the context of the elections. Rational people cannot accept the irrational option, but the history of this war says that is the way to bet. For the last two years we have seen Western leaders pick the worst option, as if they have a death wish. Maybe that is the way to understand this thing. It is a long slow suicide of the West, and they will not be stopped until they bring the whole thing crashing down.

Death Of The Middle Man

Posted on March 12, 2024 by thezman

Imagine you are a rich guy, maybe a banker working at an investment house, and your neighborhood starts to have a crime problem. Maybe you get mugged on the way to your car or perhaps you start hearing about break-ins in the area. All of a sudden, your safe world is no longer safe. You think that maybe it is time to hire some private security to enforce the rules, but you find that they do not exist. All of a sudden, your cash is not all that important to maintaining your lifestyle.

That is the position of Western political elites as they come to terms with the reality playing out on the Ukraine battlefront. The West has lots of cash. They can literally create what they need from thin air. Sure, it has created inflation for the Dirt People, but only a sucker cares about them. Ukraine is what matters. Even though Congress is slow walking the next pile of cash, there is still plenty to send Ukraine. The EU and now the U.S. are plotting to “loan” Ukraine the money.

The trouble is dollars and euros are not much use on the battlefield. What Ukraine needs is machines, ammunition for the machines and men to run the machines, but that is something the West is struggling to produce. CNN has a story up that reports the Russians now produce three times the number of artillery shells as America and Europe combined, which is probably an understatement. The production numbers cited are more theoretical than actual for the West.

The industrial aspect of this war has been a topic of discussion around here since the war started, but like the rich guys living in their fantasy world of wealth and access, the political class of the West has not thought about it. Making stuff, inventing stuff and fixing stuff is for the Dirt People. Cloud People need their time and energy to think about new ways to describe the glorious future or turn bits of invented money into more bits of invented money so they can underwrite their lifestyle.

What the war in Ukraine is doing is reminding the world that the strength of a country is not magical numbers in reports that no one reads, but the hard cold reality of making stuff, fixing stuff, and inventing new ways to make and fix stuff. You can probably throw in food production, which is a form of making stuff, but a unique form, along with digging stuff out of the ground, like energy products and minerals. Countries good at these things will be strong countries.

The West no longer does these things. America and Europe still grow lots of food but the war on food production, as part of the Gaia cult, is threatening to kill off whole swaths of farm production. The war on digging up the ground is mostly about aesthetics, as the Cloud People hate seeing people do dirty work like farming or digging minerals out of the ground. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. has dropped by half over the last half century, despite the population growing by a third.

This is why the West is losing this proxy war with Russia. Despite having a far smaller population and smaller GDP, Russia still makes things and has the facilities and work force to make more things. If you can grow your own food in vast excess, supply your own energy needs, plus much more for export and you make things that people around the world want to buy, you are going to be immune from the machinations of the money changers in New York and London.

It goes beyond this though. China is the world’s biggest manufacturer and the world’s biggest consumer market. India is the second largest consumer market, and it is emerging as a manufacturing powerhouse. Russia is now the fifth largest economy in the world, despite the sanctions. What is happening here is the places where things are made and dug out of the ground are getting rich, which means they can also buy things, like the stuff they make for Western markets.

What we are seeing here is the death of the middle-man economy. For the last half century, America has positioned itself to be the money lender, the regulator, and the facilitator of economic activity, rather than the producer. To finance this, much of the manufacturing base was auctioned off and the economy became reliant on the production of credit to the global economy. To a lesser degree, the EU has done the same thing, as the junior partner of the United States.

What the war on Russia is revealing is that in a street fight, the banker has no chance against the guy who works on a factory floor. Sure, the banker has a Brazilian Jujitsu trainer and access to the finest steroids, but the working man knows how to fight and win, so it can never be much of a match. Further, in the contest of countries, it is the rules of the street that matter, not the rules of the boardroom. The competition of nations is always a street fight.

Long ago, the paleos made the point that you cannot have an economy based on everyone doing each other’s laundry. The great transition from an industrial economy to a service economy was cheered by the Cloud People but people like Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot warned that it was unsustainable. A generation on and the world is learning that those old guys were right. A country that does not make things, fix things, and invent things is no longer a serious country.

Twenty years ago, Yuri Slezkine observed in his book, The Jewish Century, that the American economy had been transformed into one that primarily served the interests of the facilitators and middle-men. Jews, he argued, were unusually skilled at these tasks and that is why they have been so successful. According to the Atlantic, the golden age of American Jews is ending, and probably taking America with it. It turns out that the middle-man economy is not sustainable.

Burn The Boats

Posted on March 11, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the Super Tuesday results and a post about my thoughts about moving from Lagos. The Sunday podcast was posted late, as I was tied up on some projects. Subscribe here or here.

One of the things the paleos missed when they began to flesh out managerialism in the last century is how it assumes the qualities of democracy. This is something Robert Dahl picked up in his analysis of American government against the standard of democracy he developed. While the institutions of America were not democratic and could never be democratic, the people in these institutions were motivated by a democratic sense in that they wanted to act according to public will.

This explains, in part, how our institutions have grown increasingly authoritarian over the last three decades, while the people running them have become obsessed with defending what they call “our democracy.” They do not view democracy as a process, but rather as a goal. The truly democratic society is open, and the people freely exchange the right ideas. Defending democracy in this sense means dragging the people to this place, by force if necessary.

This democratic sensibility within democracy is important in understanding the reckless behavior of the people running the institutions. If one were to pick a single word to describe the cause of the current crisis it would be “reckless”. Whether it is reckless foreign policy adventures or poorly conceived domestic fads, the ruling class seems to take pleasure in reckless projects. They operate like gamblers with unlimited credit that they assume will be repaid by others.

The Ukraine war is the latest example. When the Russians threatened war, it was over the Minsk agreements not having been followed. They had a specific set of claims against Ukraine, and they wanted help from the West to enforce those claims, but instead they got bellicose threats from Washington. In retrospect, we now know that the West wanted war with Russia. Deliberately picking a fight with the world’s biggest nuclear power is about as reckless as it gets.

For two years the West has steadfastly refused to have any dealings with the Russians, instead demanding total surrender. Every few months the West seeks some new “red line” to cross, hoping to provoke the Russians. Now the French are recruiting the micronations of NATO to send troops into Ukraine. The whole point of this is to bait the Russians into responding in a way that will then let NATO pretend they are being attacked by Russia so they can invoke Article 5.

Project Ukraine is a pointless and risky adventure, but even as the Russians gain the upper hand, the Western managerial elite remains addicted to it. Like drug addicts, they crave only the next hit of foolish risk in this thing. So much so that they look for new ways to make it so they cannot change course. There is a burn the boats mentality to this project, where they seek out policies that further commit the West to the project in such a way that no one can apply the brakes.

This burn the boats mentality is everywhere. The immigration crisis is not simply about border management, something that could be fixed. It is aimed at making it a permanent crisis, a permanent project for the managerial class. Tens of millions of illegals now roam the countryside, raping and killing Americans. Even if a new president wants to fix the problem, he will still be left with the tens of millions of criminal aliens unleashed on the cities and towns of America.

One of the defenses of aristocratic rule is that it is naturally cautious. The king has an investment in his country and people in that he directly benefits from them. Who he is as a king depends upon the health and welfare of the people and the land on which they live, so he is not going to be quick to risk either of those for novelty. In fact, he is going to be cautious of change, especially in domestic affairs, because he has everything to lose and little to gain.

This is not true in democratic systems where the rulers have no investment at all, as they can be replaced at the next election. Hans Hermann-Hoppe noted that in democratic systems, the people holding office often despise the office they hold, as they gained it only as a steppingstone toward some other goal. The people have nothing but their vote, so they are willing to take great risks. The result is a system that is willing to take enormous risk for theoretical and ephemeral gains.

America is not a democracy, but a sense of democracy is there in the institutions controlled by the managerial class. What we have is a managerial polyarchy, where the elites use the institutions to chase the mirage of the democratic society. Because the goal is not real, it is maximally alluring. This is why the elites are willing to trample the democratic process to defend “our democracy.” What they are defending is not a real thing but the imagined end point of history.

It is that democratic spirit that makes them so risk happy. This burn the boats approach to public policy comes from the sense that this condition of society is temporary and therefore the positions held by the elite are temporary. In a real sense, those positions are temporary, as all managers keep their resume up to date for a reason. Throw in the fact that failure never comes with consequences and the result is a ruling elite that operates like a desperate gambler looking for a score.

The great lesson in democratic risk taking is Athens in the Peloponnesian War where the Athenians were determined to spark war with Sparta. It was the Athenian decision to roll the dice on an invasion of Syracuse that led not only to the end of the war but the destruction of Athens. Given the similarity between America and Athens, it is fair to assume the same fate awaits the American empire. Democratic empire will turn out to be a suicide pact crafted by people addicted to risk taking.

Robots & Retards

Posted on March 8, 2024 by thezman

The show this week was pre-recorded as I am probably swinging from a truck as you are reading this. Moving day(s) has arrived. Through it all, I have had to deal with a lot of people I would not otherwise interact with and I kept noticing that the quality of people has dropped sharply. I will post about my experience renting a moving truck, which will cause even a sunny optimist yo have dark thoughts.

Anyway, that is the show this week. It is about how the decline in intelligence will impact our live and society. The people who think AI will solve it or that robots will pick up the slack have not thought about the problem hard enough. All of those things will make the decline worse for the people with anything on the ball. Imagine Idiocracy by terminators are in charge instead of morons.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Introduction
The Great Dumbing Down
Short Example
Long Example
Society Example
Authoritarian Anarchy

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Three-Legged Blob

Posted on March 7, 2024 by thezman

The abrupt retirement of Victoria Nuland caught everyone by surprise as she was just recently in Kiev promising to blow up the world. Naturally, everyone assumes there must be a clever reason for her sudden departure. The statement put out by Anthony Blinken reads like the statements that come from ball teams when they fire a manager, which has led to speculation that she was sacked. Alternatively, some suspect she is just the first rat off the sinking ship that is project Ukraine.

As is always the case with regime-ology, the answer is going to be a guess from a set of possibilities, rather than a clear answer. In this case, Nuland is a senior member of the Kagan cult, by virtue of her marriage to Robert Kagan. The entire foreign policy establishment is controlled by neocons. Her now former boss, Anthony Blinken, is a neocon, and her replacement is also a neocon. Whatever the reason for her departure, it is not because the administration has turned on the neocons.

The place to start is with the reality of American foreign policy, which is not controlled by the political class but by three distinct parts of permanent Washington. The most important part is the foreign policy establishment, centered around the State Department, which is where the Kagan cult is based. They control the foreign service and the thicket of think tanks and quasi-academic outposts that recruit and develop those who will serve in the foreign policy establishment.

Nuland’s career is a great example. She started out working for Strobe Talbott in the Clinton administration then worked in the Bush administration. She got bumped up in the Obama admi8nistration where she ran Ukraine policy. She took a holiday during the Trump years, but came back when Biden was installed. Notice that the changing of administrations had no impact on her career. Note also that her replacement is also a protege of Strobe Talbott.

Next you have the military industrial complex which is based in the Pentagon and represents the interests of the military and the vast array of companies that make weapons for and supply services to the military. Their primary concern is to keep the flow of money coming from the taxpayers. If war is good for business, they are in favor of war, but if war is bad for business, they oppose war. Unlike the foreign policy establishment, the MIC is mostly free of ideologues.

Finally, you have the intelligence community. Like all bureaucracies, they have succumbed to Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy. Their primary concern is with maintaining the flow of money and avoiding political oversight. They are happy to help the Pentagon and the State Department in their endeavors, but always do so in a way that serves the narrow interests of the intel community. Like all intelligence services, this is the most cynical and calculating of the three.

Project Ukraine has always been a State Department operation. The Pentagon has gone along with it as it meant more money, but the events of the last two years have strained this relationship. The flow of weapons to Ukraine has drained the armories but has not resulted in new cash for suppliers. Similarly, the spooks have supported the project because a return of the Cold War is good for business. No one writes novels about James Bond spying on MAGA people.

Until now, the three legs of the blob that controls American foreign policy have been working together on Project Ukraine. They were happy to tell the political class what they needed to hear, at home and abroad, in order to get the political cheerleading they wanted for the project. Six months ago, the Pentagon told the pols that the great counter-offensive would smash the Russian lines. A year ago, the spooks said the Russian were in political disarray.

The events of the last six months have put the lie to all of it. The Russians have broken through Ukrainian lines and have the initiative everywhere along the front. Ukrainian losses have spiked higher as Russia gains control of the air space. We are now hearing Ukrainian leaders talking about evacuation of major cities this summer, expecting a major Russian offensive. Two years of grinding away at the Ukraine army is showing results and the tide is now turning strongly in favor of Russia.

The first sign of trouble was the stalled package of aid which House Republicans refuse to pass that would hand sixty billion to the Pentagon. This money would be laundered through Ukraine back to the Pentagon and then the arms dealers, but the MIC’s favorite political party has been stalling. The reason is the cupboards are bare, so the MIC is not going to get much from this scheme. The only reason the Republicans are stalling is they have the full support of the MIC on this.

Last week, the CIA planted a long piece in their favorite regime outlet, the New York Times, in which they made clear that they have gone well beyond what should have been expected with Project Ukraine. The article detailed all of the great work they have done inside Ukraine going back to 2014. Not long after, we get the leak of the German military plotting a strike on Russia. The source of that leak is probably based in Asia and could very well have ties to American intel.

That leaves the foreign policy establishment, which remains committed to the project for ethnic and ideological reasons. The trouble is they are now left holding the bag for a project that could turn into a massive political crisis. For two years the politicians were told this will be a huge win for the good guys. Instead, the bad guys are about to win, and it is putting the political future of the collective West in jeopardy. Losing the first global conflict of the 21st century will not go unnoticed.

That brings us back to Nuland. Given that she is part of the Kagan cult, which is a subculture within the greater neocon subculture, it seems unlikely that she was fired for performance, even though her departure is out of the blue. Further, she is a fanatic and fanatics see only that which supports their fanaticism. It is unlikely that she looks at what is happening and sees failure. At every failure in the project, she and the rest of the neocons have found reasons to plow ahead.

Instead, what this suggests is that things are much worse for Project Ukraine than anyone is letting on in public. Anticipating political panic in Washington this summer, the neocons have decided to stash the architect of the disaster in retirement, thus making it hard for the Republicans to subpoena her. This makes it tough for the Republicans to lay the blame at the feet of the White House. The new guy will be given some latitude because the Republicans are this dumb.

On the other hand, there may be some unknown unknown at play. In politics, people who suddenly retire do so for a cash grab or to avoid scandal. The fact that someone was able to put that recording of German officials in the hands of the Russians suggest there could be other material of a similar nature. It is not as if Nuland has ever been careful about talking about her schemes. It may be that she was caught on surveillance again, perhaps when she was in Kiev last month.

There is always the possibility that she looked around at the politics in Washington and decided that there was nothing more to gain. The neocon war against their historic enemy is a long-term project. It is a forever project and Ukraine was always just one chapter in the long story of their struggle. They could have decided that all the juice was squeezed from this lemon, and it was time to move on. She will return to the hive and begin plotting the next project for a future administration.

What all of this suggests is that behind-the-scenes things are far bleaker for Project Ukraine than has been revealed to the public. The game now is what we always see in managerialism and that is blame shifting. The CIA fired the first shot with that Times article and now the neocons are scurrying for cover. As always, the goal of this blame game will be to leave the politicians holding the bag. Perhaps Biden’s usefulness all along was to be the fall guy.

Oriental Managerialism

Posted on March 6, 2024 by thezman

Saving face is a phrase we tend to associate with oriental cultures, but it is an expression used in the West. The idea is that one wants to avoid being publicly disrespected in order to maintain your dignity. This means either doing something in response to a slight or committing a ritual act when you fail. Famously, committing suicide is an act of saving face in order to avoid the shame of public humiliation for having failed in your duties.

Even though the concept is oriental it is not entirely alien to the West. In fact, face saving has become a cultural aspect of the managerial elite. We just saw this with Victoria Nuland resigning her post. She had failed to destroy the ancient enemy of her people, so she was allowed to resign and save face. If she had been fired, it would be a public acknowledgment that she had failed. Her standing and that of her cult would be lowered as a result, so she was allowed to save face and quit.

This idea of face saving is not entirely alien to the West, but it is not a natural thing the way we see it practiced by our elites. Western societies are moral societies, held together as much by a set of agreed upon codes, passed down from one generation to the next. Publicly shaming someone for his failure to live up to the prevailing moral code is part of reinforcing that code. Letting someone save face undermines this so it is not natural in Western societies. We punish the sinner.

This oriental idea of face saving is behind the phenomenon of failing up which has come to define the modern managerial class. Someone like Victoria Nuland, for example, has been a failure at every stop in her career, but at every stop she has been allowed to save face and move to some new position. You can be sure she will assume a spot at a think tank or university. If Trump wins in November, she will get a media gig to criticize his handling of Russia.

The norm for Western society, with regards to someone like Nuland, is she would have been flushed out of the system as a warning to others. Go back far enough and she may have been killed or exiled. Maybe after she had demonstrated enough contrition she would be rehabilitated to a limited degree. That would include publicly admitting to and accepting that she was a failure. This is now alien to the managerial elite, even though it remains the norm with the Dirt People.

This idea of face saving is behind the cancel culture stuff that soon became a pogrom against normal people who held normal opinions. For our elites, simply being exposed as having broken the new rules was enough to compel a self-imposed exile of some sort, in order to save face. The accused was allowed to depart and save face, without suffering more than a minor loss of social standing. This offered the hope of rehabilitation once everyone forgot about it.

Since this is alien to normal people, it did not work this way so tougher measures were rolled out to punish the hooligans and running dog obstructionists. Banning people from Twitter, for example, was viewed by the people we call the left as an extreme punishment, because the victim lost face. The fact that the victim just respawned as a new character was seen as proof of their evil, because good people wish to avoid losing face and would have accepted their punishment.

People have noted that the response of the West to the Ukraine war is a globalized version of the cancel culture and censorship pogroms. Most of what Western leaders did over the last two years was about “isolating” Putin. It was as if they thought excluding him from the cool kid table would humiliate him to the point where he would either resign or be deposed. It never occurred to them that he and his government did not understand what any of this meant.

The question is why has face saving crowded out the old, natural way of policing the ranks of the elites? Part of it, obviously, is the way in which the managerial elite now see themselves individually and as a group. Many still see themselves as a minority and they brought the minority viewpoint into the elite. Minorities are always aware of their standing with regard to the majority, so saving face is important. Many originate from face saving societies, so this comes naturally.

There is also the bourgeoise nature of the elites. Our ruling class is not filled with an aristocratic sense of position. Instead, they view themselves as having scored the better on the test, relative to others. In other words, they are a system dependent elite, while an aristocracy is an independent elite. The former are full of angst about their position in the system, so they obsess over it. The latter sees the system as an expression of their natural position atop their society.

Like all middle-class people, our bourgeoise managerial elite is riddled with self-doubt about their standing. As you see in any middle-class suburb, the primary obsession is with noticing what everyone else is doing in order to make sure you are seen as part of what everyone else is doing. Conformity is a defining feature of bourgeoise culture and is thus the defining feature of the managerial elite. The so-called “Karen culture” is a natural product of an elite harvested from the middle-class.

The formation of a middle-class is most likely a lagging indicator. The independent farmer is something that arises late in an agrarian society. The urban middle-class was a late development in the industrial age. Our bourgeoise managerial elite with its oriental outlook probably signals a late stage of managerialism. The committee mentality and face saving are all part of a general decline in competence, which also suggests we are in the late stages of managerialism.

Reality, Politics And IQ

Posted on March 5, 2024 by thezman

One of the stranger parts of fringe politics is the fetish by some who deny the accepted view of Ashkenazi intelligence. Long before empirical support for the claim was available, Americans assumed Jews did so well because they were smart and they worked hard, avoiding the vices that can lead to failure. For the last half century or so, psychometry has provided another primary cause. Ashkenazi Jews have, on average, a significantly higher intelligence than the rest of us.

There is a subculture within the anti-science subculture that denies this. Much like those who deny the reality of evolution, they spend their time picking nits at the claims by the HBD people with regards to Jews and intelligence. More often than not these are people who have only a superficial understanding of the material, but they are sure there are gaping holes in the Jews-are-smart argument. This post from a person calling himself Academic Agent is a good example of the genre.

The argument in that post is not original. Some versions of it have been kicking around for a long time among antisemites. For some reason, they cannot accept that their favorite enemy is winning because they are smart, among other things. Perhaps losing to a tiny minority of morons feels better for some reason. Here is a more sophisticated version of the same argument. Here is a much less sophisticated version of the same argument from Vox Day.

Putting aside the motivations for this line of reasoning for a second, the question at the core of it is what is the proof of Ashkenazi intelligence? The HBD people have been responding to these arguments against Jewish intelligence for a long time as well and it turns out that the answer comports with observation. Here is one that goes through the test data and here is an updated version from the same author. The person called Thuletide linked above has admitted his error here.

While the data supports the argument that Jews are the most intelligence ethnic group this leads to another question. What is the gap? This matters as the general claim is that Jewish success is primarily driven by a large IQ edge. Some have argued it is a full standard deviation, while others say it is closer to half that. Here is a post diving into that debate and the data supports the lower figures. Genetics is also pointing to a gap of roughly half a standard deviation.

None of this should lead one to believe that the only reason Ashkenazi Jews perform so much better than everyone else is intelligence. The fact is, IQ is roughly half of what determines life outcomes for people. Personality traits, culture and dumb luck all play a role in the success of a person. Naturally, this applies to groups of people. It is just that having all of the good behaviors is never enough. One has to have the right genetic stuff, so to speak, in order for the other stuff to make a difference.

If the parsimonious explanation for Jewish success is high intelligence, plus things like Jewish culture and clannishness, why are some antisemites determined to “debunk” the claim that Jews are smart? Again, if you think your enemy is a blockhead and your enemy is winning, it does not speak well of you. Logic says the antisemites should be embracing the Jewish IQ narrative, maybe even using it as a reason for excluding Jews from their proposed societies.

The most likely reason here is the need to think of politics in purely moral terms, which is what Carl Schmitt observed with the friend-enemy distinction. Friends and enemies are not determined by the facts of the various political positions. Those political positions indicate moral positions. Friends are the good guys, striving for the good moral ends, while the enemies are the bad guys, those who either seek to prevent reaching the promised land or have evil intentions.

Another way to see what is happening here is to look at the news coverage of a new book called “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.” The authors have been making the rounds, peddling their brand of bigotry to the entirely sympathetic media figures interviewing them. Replace “white” with “Jewish” and these guys would be famous antisemites. They are making the same argument, just swapping out the ethnicities and their relative roles in the moral drama.

In other words, the reason the antisemites keep attacking the Jewish IQ stuff is they associate intelligence with good things, but they cannot allow their enemy to have good qualities, so they have no choice but to strip this from their enemy. The antiwhite bigots do the same thing, but instead assign what they view as negative qualities to their enemies, things like rage or closed mindedness. You cannot hate people you respect, so politics requires you to demonize your enemies.

What all of this points to is the impossibility of the diverse society. Those guys peddling their antiwhite act to like-minded media drones are telling us that they cannot live in the same society as rural white people. The antisemites are a bit more candid about it, as they have been marginalized for a long time. Even so, when they argue against Jewish IQ, they are saying that they cannot live with Jews. Repeat this with more groups and you end up in a war of all against all.

Putting the purely political, there is a larger different reason behind the IQ-denialism you see in posts like the one from Academic Agent. Intelligence as a biological fact strikes them as determinism, which contradicts their liberal conditioning. For most of human history humans knew the apple to did not fall far from the tree, so the idea of men having superior genetics would not be shocking. In fact, it is the assumption that is the foundation of inherited rule, the norm for mankind.

Liberalism, however, assumes both equality and malleability. In order to have a liberal society, everyone must be able to participate in it. This means everyone must have the ability to participate. Since we can see that all men are not equal in talents, the only acceptable explanation is systemic. This means a genetic basis for intelligence or identifiable human qualities is intolerable. If we are our genes, then the liberal project comes crashing down under the weight of biological reality.

Given that most of the liberal skeptics have liberal priors, it stands to reason that some of them will embrace views that seem to contradict their anti-liberal claims. That is what you see with the people arguing against Jewish intelligence. They are not necessarily antisemites or even anti-science. It is that that they cannot accept the fact that you cannot will yourself beyond the limits of your biology. They do not accept the Jewish IQ claim because they cannot accept it.

In the end, this is the great struggle of this age. On the one hand is the reality of the human condition and on the other is the liberal assumptions about the human condition, which are crashing into biological reality. What science is telling is that our ancestors were right about the human condition. The differences in people, individually and collectively, are immutable. That may be inconvenient for the liberal mind, but reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing it.

The Bunglers

Posted on March 4, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the color blue and a post about the generational revolution that is coming. The Sunday podcast was posted late, as I was tied up on some projects. Subscribe here or here.

Last week the media outlet Russia Today, which is analogous to PBS or the BBC, released an audio recording of what it claimed were senior German military officials planning how to launch a strike on Russia. Specifically, they were discussing how to attack the Kerch bridge in Crimea with German Taurus missiles, but doing so in such a way that would not implicate Germany. Later, the German government acknowledged that it was German air force officials, and the audio was authentic.

This should be a massive, government toppling scandal in Germany, but that would require government officials capable of shame. It would also require a free media, which no longer exists in the West. Instead, the German government ordered social media companies to ban people who posted the audio on their networks. The German media, has declared that the leak is part of a sinister plot by Putin to discredit the West and draw attention away from the death of Alexei Navalny.

Of course, this comes on the heels of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz blabbering in public about the French and the British having people on the ground in Ukraine to operate the long-range missiles they have supplied to Ukraine. That recorded conversation among German military officials confirms this. The Germans also admit that there is no way for the Ukrainians to use the German version of these missiles without German personnel doing the bulk of the work.

The fact that NATO people are providing direct support to Ukraine is one of the worst kept secrets of the war thus far. The United States has been providing targeting information to the Ukrainians from surveillance drones operating over the Black Sea and from satellites stationed over Ukraine. Most likely, American techs have been operating the Patriot missile batteries stationed around Kiev. The French have sent their mercenaries to Ukraine with many of them being killed.

Aside from the scandalous nature of the call and the fact that someone, presumably Russia, was able to capture the call quite easily, there is the question as to why the Russians would publish this audio. If you have the ability to listen in on your enemies without them knowing about it or caring about it, you have an edge. Now that this is public, every European country will be doing a security review and making sure to plug any holes they have in their communications.

Of course, there is the strong possibility that the Russians did not do the recording, but a third country was involved. Some of the principles on the call were in Singapore, which is known to have a first-rate security service. They may have recorded the audio and sent it along to the Russians. On the other hand, it could be someone inside the German government who is unhappy with Scholz. In the wilderness of mirrors, there are many potential suspects in this case.

However the Russians got the audio, they thought it was more important to make it public than to conceal the fact that they have it. The reason is they want the Europeans to know that they are not fooled by what is happening. If Taurus missiles hit Russian territory, the Russian will consider it an act of war. Technically, supplying the Ukrainians with the ability to strike Russia is an act of war all by itself, but providing the technical support to use the weapons seals the case.

Further, by releasing this audio, the Russians are letting the Europeans know that the Russians have been restrained to this point. They have known from the start that NATO people are on the ground helping Ukraine, but they have not raised the issue or responded to it with force. In other words, the Russians are telling the Europeans that they should not press their luck. This is especially important with the rumors of basing “Ukrainian” F-16’s in Romania.

There is some irony here. Ten years ago, the Russians captured audio of Victoria Nuland plotting with the American ambassador to Ukraine about how to topple the Kiev government and install a puppet regime. Nuland was just in Kiev to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the coup. She was also bragging about secret plans to strike Russia in the near future, so maybe the Russians took the opportunity to celebrate the tenth anniversary in their own way by releasing this audio.

Putting all of that aside for a moment, the truly shocking thing in this call is the fact that these complex weapons do not work very well. According to the Germans, they would need six months to get them ready to use, but then would need months to program them for specific targets. The lead time for getting them into Ukraine is not the issue, but the programming time is shocking. The Germans also admit that the Russians will quickly figure out how to defeat them as well.

These missiles cost between one and two million dollars each. The plan was to use two waves of fifty missiles on the Kerch bridge. The reason for so many is the dense Russian air defense systems in Crimea. Even assuming they could hit the bridge, there is no guarantee they would knock it out. The Brits used a truck bomb on it last year and the Russians rebuilt it in a few months. In other words, it will cost the Germans one hundred million dollars to maybe damage a bridge.

This is not a sustainable approach to war fighting. Another point in the call was that the Brits and French are now out of these missiles. It turns out that the missiles are not just expensive to produce, but it takes a long time. If this public relations stunt went forward, it would change nothing as the Russians would still be dropping thousands of rounds of artillery on the Ukrainians every day. The Russian air force would still be dropping massive bunker busting bombs on Ukrainian fortifications.

The other point worth mentioning about the call is the participants were strangely comfortable with lying. The point of the call was to devise a plan where Germany could launch missile attacks on Russia but do so in a way that would make it look like the Ukrainians did it. The casual way in which they discuss this scheme suggests these are men who are comfortable with lying. The call offers a rare glimpse into the sociopathic nature of the ruling elite of the West.

The primary takeaway from this affair is that it will have no impact on Western leaders, who are simply too incompetent to learn from their error. The German government will eventually go forward with this scheme. Maybe they get a public relations boost from it or maybe it fails completely. It will have no impact on the war. The institutional incompetence of the West is irreversible. The only question is whether they bumble the world into a nuclear war.

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