The Great Transition

Posted on April 7, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about an old post I did on Vladimir Putin as the antidote to Peter the Great, a post about the Amazon series The Bondsman, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, Trump stunned the world by following through on what he has been promising since he came down the escalator in 2015. He imposed across-the-board tariffs on every country in the world—except Russia. The reason Russia was excluded is that they are already sanctioned to the maximum. The tariff knob does not go past one hundred, so they were not on the list. Every other country was hit with a tariff, even Israel, which should cause some people to rethink things.

This set off the Great Trump Stock Market Crash, which promises to continue this week as the rest of the world responds to the new world order. The old trading models no longer work, so the default fallback in these conditions is cash. The quants were working feverishly last week to update their models in order to find the bargains that will inevitably be sitting there, waiting for the lucky. The smart money thinks the floor is a twenty percent correction, followed by stability.

The yesterday men and the crazies are sure this is the Great Depression, because their history of the world starts in the 1930s. It is a stylized history, such that every modern event can be jammed into the 1930s, the 1960s, or the 1980s. Since they are sure Trump is secretly Hitler, this must be the 1930s—even though we have witnessed many stock market corrections in the last thirty years. The COVID crash, the mortgage bubble, and the dot-com bubble are easy examples.

In reality, what we are seeing is the long-overdue return to normalcy, where American economic policy is aimed at benefiting the American people, rather than abstract concepts from economics departments. If Canada has tariffs on American goods, then the United States should have tariffs on Canadian goods—unless it can be shown that the American people benefit in some way from the imbalance. The same is true for every other country in the world.

One of the weird things about decades of American trade policy is that it has created the same sense of entitlement as government racial policy. Just as nonwhites think they are entitled to be near white people without conditions, the world thinks it has a right to access the American market without conditions. This is most obvious in Europe, which has taken this lopsided arrangement for granted. They have also assumed they are entitled to American defense, while doing nothing in return.

The logic behind this arrangement has always been nonsense—but people love to believe in nonsense, especially their own. We see this with the free trade crowd, who are claiming tariffs will only harm the American people. If that were true, then the rest of the world should have been miserable for the last thirty years. Further, if that were true, then the rest of the world now has a chance to usher in a golden age for their people by eliminating their tariffs instead of raising them.

The truth of the matter is that all economic policy is about trade-offs—especially in global trade. This is why it is called trade, rather than “free.” Having a tariff-free relationship with Canada could make sense if the Canadian government could be trusted, as the American and Canadian economies are so similar. The same is not true for Mexico or Bangladesh. Trade is never just about money—it is also about culture and the national interests of the trading countries.

Of course, what we are seeing is not really about trade so much as it is about getting the American financial house in order. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary and architect of the Trump economic policy, has made this clear. Normalizing American trade relations is just one arrow. Another is the mass reorganization of government that kicked off in January. For the first time in the life of anyone reading this, the size and scope of government will be reduced.

Another arrow is the changes in the tax code that are slowly working their way through both houses of Congress. The Senate passed its version of spending and tax cuts, so now it is on to the House. What is shaping up is a two-pronged approach: one is to put into law the cuts made by the DOGE boys, and the other is a radical revamping of the tax code to reflect the new economic approach. Removing taxes on tips and overtime, for example, is part of the Senate model.

What we are seeing is the most radical alteration to the American economic model since the 1980s. The reason for it is that the old model is unsustainable. As Bessent pointed out, there is a limit to borrowing. For a long time, the American model relied on creating unlimited credit money in the banking system and massive federal borrowing. We have reached the limits of this model. Now, that model threatens the integrity of the American economy, so changes must be made.

More important are the changes in how we think and talk about the economy. For the longest time, the economy has been treated as a god. Americans were expected to tolerate anything to please it. If the economy demanded Haitian cannibals in your town, you had to accept it. If the economy demanded that the quality of your hand tools decline, you just lived with it. If the economy required you to work two jobs to make ends meet, then you did it. The economy was a remorseless god.

This sort of thinking makes sense to an alien overclass that sees the United States as an opportunity to be exploited. It does not make sense if the ruling elite feels a connection and obligation to the people. Shifting from the old transactional model of economics to a nationalistic model requires a new language. Simply pointing at a graph that trends upward is no longer enough. The political class will now have to possess some economic literacy.

It is too soon to know if these changes can make it through Congress. The winners under the old exploitative model will not go quietly. No one knows if the American public will tolerate the pain that must come with the transition. It is not all bad news, though, so the pain may be limited. Energy costs are falling—crude is under sixty dollars a barrel. This could tame inflation enough for the Fed to cut rates. Low taxes and cheap energy will go a long way toward cushioning the transition.

In the end, Bessent is correct. America cannot continue to create credit in the financial system and borrow trillions to hire government workers. We either have an orderly transition back to a normal economy, or we have a disorderly transition. The name for that is collapse—and that is vastly worse than a stock market correction. This is the reason the economic elites are backing this move. They know that the people who suffer the most from failure are the elites.

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Radio Derb April 04 2025

Posted on April 4, 2025 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

01m04s Jared spreads terror
06m04s Atheism goes woke
16m53s Lawfare all over
22m13s Human rights lunacy
32m59s The Scopes centenary
33m52s Civil war? Nah
35m18s It is so flat!
36m27s Signoff with Maria

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. That was a fragment of Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 in the big band version, and this is your sensitively genial host John Derbyshire with some commentary on the week’s news.

To begin with, a couple of segments on the culture.

Continue reading →

The Great Z Death

Posted on April 4, 2025 by thezman

One of the downsides of writing and talking about the current scene is that you often want to kill yourself or kill someone. There are only so many stories about a crazed judge issuing an equally crazed rulings you can read before you want to spit on your hands, raise the black flag and start slitting throats. To paraphrase the late comic George Carlin, there are a lot of people who need to be killed.

It is why it is a good idea to look away from the daily car wreck that is the public square from time to time. It is why I quit Twitter. I will post links to my work there, but otherwise it is on mute. The most popular figures on that platform exist to irritate everyone else, so being active on that site is like inviting people into your home so they can break things and urinate on your carpets.

It is also why this week’s show is deliberately lighthearted. I randomly selected questions from big book of questions and answered them without preparation. I am not sure how many I got through, but it is probably about twenty. The book has three hundred questions in it, so I will probably revisit this format in the future when I feel like raising the black flag and slitting throats.

I have not read all of the questions. For the show I started at the first one and kept going until I ran out of time. I skipped some of them because they were not interesting to me, but that still leaves plenty of material. The interesting thing about the ones I cover in the show is that they have no link to current events, but they relate to things far more important to daily life.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
Anger Management
The Book Of Questions
The Questions

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Artificial Tay Tay

Posted on April 3, 2025 by thezman

Note: Last night, Paul and I did a whole show on AI and the possible consequences of humanity being enslaved by robots. You can watch the replay here and here.

An unresolved mystery in popular culture is why Taylor Swift has become a megastar on the level of Elvis and Michael Jackson. There are plenty of simple explanations like her songs resonate with young females or she is non-threatening, but those apply to many pop stars, yet none have reached the heights of Swift. There is an answer, and it lies in the fundamentals of human psychology, but that answer also suggests that Swift is the death of the pop star phenomenon.

The place to start is with the most popular answer to why Swift is the biggest pop star of the 21st century: her lyrics. The most popular explanation for Swift’s popularity with young females is her songs resonate with them. Yet when you look at her most popular songs, they predate her supposedly young female audience. Her biggest hit is from seventeen years ago. Her next biggest is from eleven years ago. Most of her big hits are from over a decade ago.

That is the strange thing about Taylor Swift. Everyone assumes that her core audience is young females, but in reality, it is middle-aged single white women. Taylor Swift is a middle-aged woman performing hits from over a decade ago. She is a strange mix of current fads and recent nostalgia. Look at her audience and it is the young-ish females you see kicking around the cubicle farms of corporate America, and thirsty males who think a Taylor Swift concert is an opportunity for them.

As to the lyrics of the songs, there is nothing to suggest they are the hook that reels in her core audience. They are echolalic babbling. Pop music at its best is doggerel set to a simple but catchy tune. Most pop songs, especially female power pop, have a simple chorus that expresses a simple emotion, while the rest is gibberish. That is what you see with Taylor Swift songs. Her music also comes with helpful expositions so the listener can contextualize the simple chorus.

The point here is that there is nothing unique about what Taylor Swift is doing to explain her massive popularity. Her formula is the same as every female pop star when it comes to the music itself. Watch a Swift concert, however, and it is clear that the audience is not there for the music. They are there to see Swift. Like Elvis seventy years ago, Swift is popular for being Taylor Swift now. Her popularity rests on being a social phenomenon to her audience.

She is a social phenomenon because she brings other things to the female pop star formula that suggest she may be the last human pop star. The first thing to note is Swift is what young guys call “mid”. Now that she is pushing forty, she is getting a bit dumpy, but even in her prime she was a solid seven, the sort of girl old women would describe as pretty, which meant not homely but not sexy. In fact, her unique quality in the pop ranks is she lacks anything resembling sex appeal.

There is one caveat here: she has naturally unique eyes. This may be why she is so wildly popular with near-middle-age white women. White women put enormous importance on their eyes because it is hugely important to white people, who have a staggering variety of eye colors compared to nonwhites. A woman’s eyes are what will catch the attention of a male, which is why there is so much diversity in the eye color of people from Europe, especially northern Europe.

Women’s makeup puts the focus on the eyes. In some countries, like Iceland, women use makeup so you cannot help but focus on their eyes. In a land full of the most beautiful women on earth, the eyes are what matter. As women age, they tend to focus more on their hair and makeup, with the eyes being the focus. It is also why overweight women tend to wear a lot of makeup. The otherwise average-looking Taylor Swift is an appealing role model for her audience due to her eyes.

There is also the fact that Swift seems to be a boring person. There is no drama in her life or sex tapes leaked on the internet. The few interviews she gives are as compelling as watching paint dry. The closest she gets to drama is dating a football player who is not the quarterback or a superstar. For the women who could not land the star quarterback in high school, this makes Swift weirdly relatable. For her audience, Taylor Swift is the mirror who says they are the fairest of them all.

There are other things leading to Swift’s stardom, but the picture that emerges from these general observations is that it is a formula. Pop music has always relied on these formulas, but they were based on wisdom and experience. Now they can be based on massive data sets crunched by artificial intelligence. The data from who consumes different types of pop music can be combined with the human sciences, the history of pop music, and the software to create the music.

Soon, maybe even now, music executives can ask a couple of DOGE kids to create a pop star maker. They will be given access to the history of pop music, demographics of the current audience, and the quickly growing body of information from the human behavior sciences. They will then produce the attributes of stars in each music genre, their target audience, and expected revenue numbers. In other words, templates for every form of popular musical star.

Instead of hiring actors to play the part, like the boy band producers did in the last century, the music execs will ask their AI engineers to create them. The technology can already produce the audio, and the video will be here soon. That means in weeks an artificial Tay Tay can be beamed to the mobile devices of the target audience and through social media. Their reaction to the “new act” can be used to subtly tweak the “artist’s” algorithm based on those responses.

This may sound absurd but watch a Taylor Swift show and what you see are people holding up their mobile devices. People under the age of forty experience the world now through their mobile device. Theirs is already a meta-existence when it comes to experiencing things in the meatspace. This is accelerating with each wave of people entering adulthood. What matters to them most is not flesh and blood humans, but the avatars in the alternative reality of the internet.

Even if it does not reach the point of replacing humans entirely, it is easy to see why the pop star will not survive much longer. Taylor Swift is proof of concept. She is highly controllable, does not create drama, and ticks the necessary boxes that the formula says are required to be a star. Mass-producing many versions of this with cheaply acquired talent and software is the logical next step, maybe even allowing fans to create their own version of their favorite act.

That is the other thing AI will bring to music. Based on prompts and reactions from the target audience, the act can quickly evolve to their liking. The same process by which you prompt AI to create an image can be silently incorporated into the production of the next Taylor Swift. Not only can AI make the next Taylor Swift, but it will also allow the listener to create their own Taylor Swift. Artificial intelligence will allow everyone to have their own artificial reality in which their Taylor Swift speaks to them.

All of this assumes that some as yet unforeseen consequence to the rollout of AI does not bring the roof down on all of us. Even what we can contemplate opens the doors for life-altering consequences. Technology has destroyed the societal consensus. Just imagine what happens when we have our own popular reality stars. Even so, what Taylor Swift tells us is that the pop star as a human phenomenon is dead. She is the proof of concept that will lead to the Artificial Tay Tay.

Essential Violence

Posted on April 2, 2025 by thezman

Note: Paul is back from vacation, so that means we are back tonight for the Wednesday livestream, which you can find here and here. You can also watch on Twitter, but there is no link until it is live. Just go to Paul’s Twitter page. The show kicks off at 8:00 PM EDT and the topic tonight is AI.

In 19th century America, it was popular to argue that there are four boxes for maintaining political liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and cartridge. There is also a version that has just three boxes, which drops the jury box from the model. The soap box is public speech used to persuade the ruling class. The ballot box is the democratic process. The jury box is the legal process, and the cartridge box is violence. The order of the boxes is important as it is both a warning and a promise.

The warning here is directed toward the public. Skipping any of these steps will inevitably be self-defeating. The sorts of people who want to litigate everything, for example, are the sorts of people who will litigate away your liberty. We see this with the inferior court judges. They are like all self-defined underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people they opposed. These people are always more dangerous than present tyrants.

The other side of this is directed at the people in charge. Their status as a ruling elite depends on making sure that the traditional rights and protections of the people are maintained in those first two boxes. Once the people abandon the soap box and the ballot box for the jury box, it is not long before they reach for the cartridge box, and there is no turning back from that one. Of course, an elite that uses the jury box to undermine the ballot box is asking for the cartridge box.

That is what we see in the West: the use of lawfare by the managerial class to both circumvent the soap box and the ballot box. The latest example is in France, where the courts have willy-nilly decided that the most popular politician in the country is no longer allowed to participate in politics. Marine Le Pen was found guilty of trumped-up charges and sentenced to what amounts to internal banishment. Her punishment is like what happened to Khrushchev in the 1960s.

This is the pattern in the West. Romania arrested and then banned the most popular politician in the country for the crime of winning the election. Germany is planning to ban the AfD for the crime of being popular. The new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has publicly stated that one of his goals will be to work with the EU to overthrow the Hungarian government. Of course, the UK has declared itself an apartheid state by imposing a two-tiered legal regime aimed at the opposition.

The most famous example of the managerial class abuse of the jury box to circumvent the soap and ballot box is Donald Trump. They tried to remove him from office in his first term, then rigged the 2020 election to deny him a second term. When he did not get the message, they used lawfare against him in the same way we see in Europe, except that Trump managed to win at the jury box. Note they reached for the cartridge box when they failed at the jury box.

The assassination of Trump is a good reminder that it is almost always the case that once either side of the political system reaches the jury box, one side or the other will reach for the cartridge box. The jury box is where irreconcilable differences are confirmed to both sides, no matter the result. The reason there is always the smell of sulfur around attorneys is not only due to who they serve. It is also because sulfur is an essential element of gunpowder.

What we see happening in the West is a reminder that the last box in that formulation is essential to preserve the three other boxes. The 19th century French social thinker, Georges Sorel, explained that political violence is not a sign of chaos, but a healthy antidote to political oppression. It is often the creative destruction needed to free the political marketplace so it can produce healthy politics. Violence also has the effect of energizing the people to defend their ancient liberties.

Thomas Jefferson made a similar point in his famous letter to William Smith from which we get the famous quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Jefferson was not justifying political violence for its own sake. He pointed out that violent resistance is often a necessary reminder to the ruling class of what lies ahead if they ignore the soap box and the ballot box. Shays’ Rebellion was a warning and a promise.

It may be why American oligarchs joined the Trump team. When Luigi Mangione popped out from behind the car to gun down that insurance executive, it let every oligarch know the cartridge box remains an option. If French judges and politicians suddenly come down with lead poisoning, maybe the poseur class in Paris will suddenly rethink their position too. If not, then it guarantees the French end up at the cartridge box anyway.

This is the most likely end for the West as a whole. The Trump reforms will surely fail, as reform is almost always an effort to relieve the pressure of general discontent while maintaining the status quo. In Europe, the ruling class is nakedly hostile to the native population, hellbent on pulling the roof down to spite the people. They will not be talked out of their positions, and they will not be voted out of them. Since the courts are now owned by the managerial class, it leaves the last option.

The irony of all this is that the great lesson of Western history is that liberty only comes when the people join to spill blood. As the sun sets on Western man, this truth is becoming clearer with each outrage by the ruling class. The people endlessly yelping about “our democracy” are killing the West. It is only through the blood of these parasites and vermin that the new Western man will regain his lands and liberty. After the jury box comes the cartridge box.

No Peace

Posted on April 1, 2025 by thezman

After a flurry of peace talks in Saudi Arabia, the Trump peace initiative regarding the war in Ukraine seems to have run out of steam. The last round of talks stalled over the conditions required to create a Black Sea ceasefire. The Russians laid out the conditions they would require, the conditions they agreed to in 2022 under the Black Sea grain deal. Ukraine flatly rejected those terms this time. The Europeans have also made clear that they will never agree to peace.

After Ukraine and the EU rejected the terms, Putin said some things that got little note in the West but were clearly a signal to the Trump administration. The first was at a meeting of Russian industrialists where Putin told them that despite talks with Washington, they should not expect the end of sanctions. The new world order, so to speak, is one in which the Russian economy will operate independently of the West and within the framework of BRICS.

That was a clear signal to the Trump people that ending sanctions was not a carrot and new sanctions are not a stick. The Russians have moved on from the old model where their economy was connected to the Western model. Despite the last three years, the West remains convinced that sanctions are working, and that Russia desperately wants back into the Western economic model. Until the Trump administration sees the folly in this, negotiations with Russia will go nowhere.

Another thing Putin said was in response to a question at a public event about the Trump effort to get a ceasefire. Putin said there will not be a Minsk 3. This is a reference to prior deals with the West over Ukraine. In Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, the Russians agreed to get trapped Western advisors in the war zone free of the Donbass militias in exchange for a peace deal that never materialized. In both cases, the West just poured more weapons into Ukraine.

This is a very sore subject for Russians. They see these prior deals as efforts to trick and humiliate them. When Trump publicly asked Putin to let the trapped Ukrainian troops in Kursk escape, it set off alarm bells in Moscow. It looked like the same old tricks from the Western tricksters. That is the reason Putin made a point of saying there will never be a Minsk 3. He was telling the Russian public and the Russian elite that he will not be fooled a third time.

That has led to two other things Putin said last week. One is he said the Russian army is ready to finish off the Ukrainian army. That is a bold statement, out of character for Putin. He has been warning of a five- or ten-year war since the West cancelled the Istanbul agreements. To now talk about a quick end of the war suggests that something big is on the drawing board. It could also mean the Ukrainian army is in far worse shape than is being reported.

This comment about the end of the war came with a comment about putting Ukraine into what amounts to receivership. Putin suggested that the post-war process would start with the removal of the Kiev government and put the administration of the country into the hands of a UN group. This caused Trump to call NBC’s Manjaw Crazyeyes and rant about being “pissed off” at Putin. He said he is planning to apply new sanctions to Russia in response to these statements.

What all of this points to is that the Trump peace initiative is dead. The Russians were willing to listen, but now that it is clear that Trump has no leverage over Ukraine or Europe, there is no point in continuing the charade. The war in Ukraine will end by military means and then maybe there can be a negotiated settlement. That was the point Putin was making last week. Whether or not the Trump administration understands this is unknown.

The Pentagon, on the other hand, at least the permanent elements, independent of the administration, does get this. They wrote a long, mendacious thriller for the New York Times where they blame the failure of Project Ukraine on the Ukrainians and to a lesser extent the Trump administration. It is a long post worth reading for no other reason than it is a great example of narrative fantasy. It is written like a spy thriller because it is mostly self-serving fiction.

If you want to know why Western politicians seem to be so clueless about so much, it is because they rely on the storytellers called the media for their version of reality. All over Washington, staffers for elected officials read that Times story, shocked to learn that the American military has been running the war from the start. Normal people have known this since day one because the internet exists and people use it, but elected officials get their reality from the media.

The main point of that work of fiction is to make clear that the Ukraine failure was not the fault of the Military Industrial Complex. All the weapons were, in fact, wonder weapons that totally crushed those primitive Russians. NATO tactics were the best and completely baffled those drunken Russkies. The people who brought you the F-35 want to make clear that when the Russian flag is in Maidan Square, it was the fault of the people who refused to let the American military win the war.

As an aside, if you can get past the self-serving fiction, the article reveals just how close we were to extinction. There were people willing to go all in on attacking Russia, which would have provoked a nuclear retaliation. Unsaid, but implied, is that there were people willing to go nuclear, maybe even preemptively. If the Trump administration is serious about changing foreign policy, a top priority must be hunting down those people and permanently removing them from society.

Putting that aside, what all of this tells us is that there will be no negotiated settlement to the Ukraine war, at least not until things on the battlefield change. Perhaps when the Ukrainian army begins to break in a major way, reality will get over the media firewall into the brains of the political classes in the West. Maybe the Trump administration understands this, maybe not. It does not matter because they are not in control of events, so they can only stand by and watch.

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