The Old Circus

Posted on October 7, 2021 by thezman

One of the things you can count on, one of the universal constants of American politics, is the Republicans will always find a way to save the Democrats from whatever mess they have created for themselves. It is the reason the Republican party exists. They are the guys at the back of the circus parade with shovels. They scoop up what gets plopped onto the streets by the Left. The main job of the GOP is making sure the suckers in the suburbs never lose faith in the system.

We have an example of how this works with the Build Back Better scheme the Democrats have been working on for six months. They don’t have the votes to pass it on their own under the normal procedures and many of their own members are worried that it will make them unemployed. Not everyone in plutocracy is onboard with the Great Break the radicals have planned. Therefore some Democratic pols have been instructed by their owners to oppose it.

The squabbling between the far-left crazies, close to half the House Democratic caucus at this point, and the slightly-less-crazy members has resulted in a deadlock. The Inner Party cannot find a way to get agreement on passing the Build Back Better bill or agreement on kicking it down the road. Worse yet, they have to raise the debt limit to avoid a government shutdown. They either need the Republicans to help them raise the debt ceiling or they need a deal with the crazies.

Just as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, here comes the Republican Party to the rescue, offering to help them raise the debt ceiling. You see, it is against conservative principles to let the government shutdown, so the Republicans will graciously give the other side all the time they need to hammer out their great restructuring of American society. They are waving this around as a victory, claiming they owned the libs or some such nonsense.

Now, none of this matters all that much as the Republican Party is just an ornament to decorate the system. They have no power and no desire to exercise power even if permitted to wield it. That should have been made clear during the Bush years when they had control of both houses and the White House for six years. Instead of doing anything they promised for generations, they did the exact opposite. It was the least “conservative” period since the Johnson administration.

Of course, the Obama years and the Trump years should have made clear to even the dumbest white person on the municipal golf course that voting for the Republicans is a statement against interest. The party got the majority in the House after 2010 and remained rolled up in a ball until Obama left town. When Trump arrived, they sprang into action to block his every move. Then they threw the 2018 House elections to make sure the Trump administration got nothing done.

That is the good news about the current circus in Washington. No one seems to care all that much other than the crazies on the Left. Trump is holding rallies and people are attending, but he is not talking about the circus in DC. The mouth-breathers in Conservative Inc. have tried to get people interested in this issue, but the rest homes have been quiet. It looks like Covid has wiped out most of their supporters, those unwilling to wake up to the reality of the racket.

Even regime media is struggling to pretend this is interesting. They can’t figure out how to attack the freaky left-wing Senator from Arizona, who is one of the senators holding up the works. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) ticks many identity boxes, so they have to tread lightly with her. Joe Manchin is just a Republican playing Democrat, so they can’t do anything with him either. The fact is, the regime media is overrun with kooks now, so they are not very good at selling the party message.

Prior stand-offs over the debt ceiling and the budget have been big news, but this one has no interest, suggesting that there has been a change in sentiment. One possible reason for that is many normal people are now fully aware that they had been throwing their vote away on Republicans. They may hate Biden and chant his name at public events, but they are no longer Republican by default. They will support Trump as a symbol of their team, but that is as far as it goes.

That could be good news. On the other hand, the lack of media hype about this fight in Washington could be a sign the system is fully aware. That is, they now realize they can operate in spite of public opinion. People who gladly went along with bizarre mandates like mask wearing and accepted the 2020 election are not going to be fertilizing the tree of liberty anytime soon. If you have an unlimited supply of imaginary voters and no one cares, then why pretend public opinion matters?

Both things can be true at the same time, so that may be what we are seeing with this edition of the political drama. The old Red Team – Blue Team politics of the last thirty years has finally run out of road. What replaces it remains to be seen, but watching octogenarians play a pointless game of legislative chess is no longer what engages the general public. The supporters of Red Team may have finally wised up and the supporters of Blue Team just want their stuff.

Either way, it is a probably good sign. The best thing that could happen for normal Americans is that the Republican Party dissolved. Once the fight is purely “us and them” with the latter part being the people running the system, regardless of label, then a genuine politics is possible. As long as normal people have the escape hatch of compromise, they will always take it. If the disinterest in this is the prelude to disillusionment, then things can get interesting again.

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Emotional Appropriation

Posted on October 6, 2021 by thezman

One of the weird aspects of this age is how important people appropriate the emotions and feeling of others and make them their own. They will make statements about their feelings on a subject, but those feelings are not really their feelings because they cannot actually be experiencing the feelings in questions. Our Cloud People have normalized emotional appropriation as a way of projecting to the Dirt People that they have genuine human emotions.

The easy example here is the public person who has a rare moment of honesty and posts what they really think on Twitter. This sets off the familiar drama on-line in which people rush to their favorite platform to express their outrage. The fact that they have no reason to care, much less be outraged, goes unnoticed. Eventually, the director of this drama tells the star to waddle out on stage and issue an apology. In that apology, the star claims to feel things that cannot be felt.

For example, they always say something about feeling remorse for the pain they have caused, despite the fact this is impossible. You can feel remorse for causing harm to an actual human, but not for anonymous zombies on-line. Further, the people claiming to have been harmed were not harmed. In fact, the opportunity to play along in the drama was the highlight of their day, maybe their life. Like the famous people, they got to appropriate the feelings of others.

None of the emotions expressed in these offense-apology dramas can be real, because it does not involve real victims or real offenses. The star of these shows often says, “I apologize to those I have offended” but the statement itself says they are not sure who they could have offended. You can only apologize to real humans to whom you have committed real harm. An apology to imaginary people is an imaginary apology for an imaginary harm. It is all just emotional appropriation.

A recent example of this is the football coach caught dancing with a woman not his wife after a football game. For some reason, football fans were “outraged” as if we have suddenly been thrust into Victorian times. The owner of the team that employs the coach was scandalized, calling it “inexcusable”. The coach then apologized to imaginary people for something no one, other than maybe his wife, should have an interest, much less an emotional investment.

Another common example of emotional appropriation is the Cloud Person taking pride in something that does not exist. Politicians will talk about different communities, for example, as if they are rural villages with a well-defined character. The “trans community” is a current favorite. The politicians will claim to be proud of their support for the trans community. You cannot take pride in something you had no part in creating and you cannot be proud of something that does not exist.

Pride, ironically enough, is one of the most important emotions for our modern emotional appropriators. College presidents are always talking about how proud they are of their community. They are just hired fundraisers who drift from job to job, never creating anything but trouble. Yet, they will take pride in the work of others as if they had a hand in it. The fixation on the sin of pride by the Cloud People is one of those things that reveals much about our age.

The sin of pride, for those deprived of proper religious training, is considered a rebellion against God. The person committing this sin attributes to himself the honor and glory that is due to another, usually God. Since our Cloud People worship the arc of history, it sort of makes sense that they inappropriately take pride in that which is the product of generations of history. Pride has been called the cancer of the soul. It is considered the first and most serious of the deadly sins.

One reason for these weird public displays of emotion is that we have shifted from a male dominated culture to a female dominated one. Maintaining a stiff upper lip, especially in public, is a male attribute. Women, on the other hand, have always been encouraged to show emotion. This is why all public people feel a need to show emotion in public. It is how they project their piety. In order to gain status, you must show how much you care, which often means blubbering in public.

Another issue here, though, is the people who now dominate public life are not capable of real human emotion. They don’t do things, for example, for which they could take genuine pride. They don’t have a concern for the welfare of others. This is the age of the public sociopath. Caring about real people is a sucker’s play in this age, so the ambitious try to avoid it. The result is we get these weird dramas where the Cloud People appropriate the emotions of others.

In the novel Brave New World, humans in the imagined future went to something called the Feelies, which was a theater-like experience. They would be simulated to feel strong emotions via the use of various inputs. The people went to these things to feel things like grief and anger, because they had no way of experiencing these emotions in their regular lives. The combination of their genetic engineering and taking the happiness-producing drug called Soma blocked normal emotions.

Something similar happens today. The Cloud People are mostly sociopaths at this point, incapable of having normal human emotions. The general population, however, has been plucked from normal human community and thrust into a synthetic solution of consumerism that does not allow for the normal human experience. In order to keep the system running, the Cloud People are constantly creating synthetic emotions they can display and use to stimulate emotion in the Dirt People.

This is the appeal of mass media in general and social media in particular. Just look at the name “social media”. It is a replacement for the normal human socialization that would occur in natural human communities. The most emotionally unstable people are intensely on-line. They lack the normal structure of human community to keep them balanced so they seek an alternative on their phone. The result is a population on a roller-coaster of emotional appropriation.

Emotion is not much different from what comes from taking stimulants. The first hit is the best hit. The most intense emotions we feel in our lives are at the extremes, so the emotionalism of this age grows more intense. Public emotion in a liberal democracy is the opiate of the people. Therefore the emotional appropriation becomes more prolific and the drama more intense. We are shaking ourselves to pieces in an effort to feel that which has been normal for the life of man.

The Escapists

Posted on October 5, 2021 by thezman

One of the things about liberal democracy that is hard to see from the inside is how the system must be all consuming. The people trapped in such a system are forced to engage with it constantly. You are not allowed to live outside of politics. Everywhere you go there are people preaching the latest gospel, demanding you engage with it, usually demanding you not only have an opinion, but you have the right opinion. There is no escape from politics, because politics is everywhere.

The reason for this is democracy can only derive its authority from the general will, which must be expressed through public opinion. That is the basis of all democratic systems of government. Truth itself is fifty percent plus one. If people refuse to participate by not voting or not having an opinion, they must be assumed to be in the opposition to whatever is being proposed. Democracy off all kinds is a binary system where you can only be for or against the current issue.

You may not want to engage in the current issues because you simply don’t care, but your lack of caring can only be read as opposition. After all, if you supported the latest fad, you would make that clear. Your indifference gives support to those who oppose it, so your reasons are unimportant. What matters is your indifference is standing in the way of the cause. Both sides, therefore, feel it is their duty to force you to pick a side, as otherwise you are on the other side.

This binary view of the world that is forced on everyone inside a liberal democracy is a form of totalitarianism. The conventional definition of a totalitarian system is one that exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. The merely authoritarian system seeks only to control the state. Totalitarian systems seek to change the world and human nature with total control of public and private life. Man in a totalitarian system is a prisoner of enforced consent.

In contrast to the masculine nature of communist systems, liberal democracy is a softer and more subtle expression of control. The old communists would send men around to beat nonconformists. Millions were sent off to die in camps because they needed to be examples to the others. In liberal democracy, there is the same need for examples, but instead of torture and murder, the system uses psychological weapons against the intended victims. They get nagged into submission.

We see this with the Covid cult. In the Soviet Union, citizens would have been dragged off to get their shots and that would have been the end of it. There would be no need for vaccine passports, as internal passports were compulsory. In liberal democracy, the system seeks to nag and torment people into compliance. It is a passive-aggressive assault on the mind of the citizen. You are told you have choices, but if you choose incorrectly you are tormented by the system.

Note also that the point of compliance in liberal democracy is the same as in the communists forms of totalitarianism. Compliance is a moral issue. No one in charge cares about the health of the people. In fact, they secretly hope the white population dies from Covid. What matters to them is that you agree. They need your affirmation because they get their sense of authority from the general will. No matter your reasons, you not getting the vaccine is viewed as rejection of their morality.

This fear of and intolerance for opposition is the hallmark of totalitarian regimes and it is the operating ethos of modern liberal democracy. It is why the system has become entangled with digital life. It allows them to search for what the Soviets called refuseniks, people who refused to agree with the system. In liberal democracy, the refusenik is a “denier” of some sort or possibly a conspiracy theorist. The search for such people using digital tools is the highest priority.

The term “conspiracy theorist” is instructive. History is full of conspiracies, and these are taught in the schools. One of the most famous is the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar by Roman senators. It is used as the archetypal example of the political conspiracy. Despite the fact that conspiracies are the norm in human history, a person who traffics in them is anathematized as a dangerous weirdo. More important, anyone questioning official dogma is called a conspiracy theorist.

This is all part of the central demand of liberal democracy. Like all totalitarian systems, it cannot tolerate deviation or doubt. The authority of the people in charge is dependent on the general will. That is not only what puts them in charge, but it provides the systems of power they control. The indifferent in some small way question this moral authority by withholding their consent. This is why in a liberal democracy; you can never escape politics. You are only permitted to agree.

It is also why the liberal democrat has a special loathing of those who are indifferent to their moral claims. The person who mocks or dismisses their morality is assumed to worship different gods and have a different moral code. His source of strength is outside the liberal democratic order. That person is the true danger because he carries with him an alternative truth. That alternative truth is a direct threat to the system and the people who control it, so it must be destroyed.

This is why Christianity collapsed in the West as liberal democracy was imposed on it by the America empire. Christianity places the ultimate authority, the basis of right and wrong, outside of politics. To allow such an alternative source of morality is impossible in the liberal democratic order. As a result, all forms of Christianity have been swept from the public square. This is why Muslims reject liberal democracy. They know it is a direct threat to their faith.

Perhaps the most important innovation in the realm of totalitarianism is the lure of popular participation. In the communist systems, the party was supreme. In the liberal democratic order, the system attempts to draw everyone in with the promise that they can change things by participating. This flushes the opponents out into the open, who foolishly take the bait. This is the main role of mass media. They promise to amplify your opposition, but only serve to identify you as a heretic.

The Soviet Union made the great turn into decline when it began to run out of enemies it could use to focus party efforts. Once the people figured out that they could only live in the shadows and must always avoid engaging in politics publicly, the system was starved for energy. It settled into a long period of decline and eventually collapsed when faced with the crisis of the 1980’s. Convenient opposition, the handy heretic, is the fuel that powers the totalitarian system.

In a liberal democracy, a genuine opposition will refuse to engage the system and seek to live in the shadows. It will stay off the official social media platforms and avoid all contact with regime media. It will evolve its own language and its own moral structures outside of and independent from the system. The modern dissident will not stand athwart history yelling “stop”. He will stand outside of it, going about his business, building an alternative that is free from the bloody grasp of liberal democracy.

Cloud People Loathing

Posted on October 4, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki column is up. This one did not come out very well, but even the best have their off-days. I could not quite figure out where I wanted to go with the analogy, so it went nowhere. Maybe I’ll revisit it here this week. The Sunday show is up behind the green door for those with a soul.

A feature of the ongoing crisis in America is people realizing that things they assumed to be true are not what they had always assumed. The so-called red-pilling or awakening is usually related to the egalitarian issues, but it can also be about general politics, as we saw in 2016. Many rank-and-file conservatives discovered that professional conservatives were not what they claimed. Their attacks on Trump and populism were an awakening for many normal people.

Another part of the great awakening is the realization that things make much more sense if you start from the assumption that the people in charge are motivated by a hatred for normal people. The pointless and punitive measures with regards to Covid has opened a lot of eyes. The people in charge seem to be sitting around dreaming up ways to hassle people, using Covid as an excuse. The pandemic has been a two year party for the sadists among the ruling class.

You really see this with the so-called conservatives, who have evolved into nothing but a cult of loathing. That loathing is directed at the sorts of people they used to trick into supporting them. This is most likely connected, in part, to the fact that so many of the former suckers have wised up over the last five years. The Trump phenomenon broke the spell and there is no way the former suckers are going to go back to being conned by the grifters of Conservative Inc.

The glaring example here is the revolt of the neocons, who broke with Conservative Inc, and have now migrated back to their old home on the Left. Jonah Goldberg, who started out in life fetching coffee for the far-left crank Ben Wattenberg, is pretty much a middle of the road lefty now. Bill Kristol is openly supporting far-left candidates like Terry McAuliffe in Virginia. When you see Bush flunkies in bed with Clinton flunkies, it is not hard to see that conservatism was always a grift.

That is the thing about a grifter. They despise the person they are trying to scam, which is why they can be so ruthless. The grifter does not rip-off everyone. They target a mark and then use all of their powers to harm him, often just for the fun of it. People who have studied the confidence man have noted that the conman always feels like he is in the right and the mark somehow deserves it. You see that with the neocons, who cry out as they strike at the people they conned for so long.

Another example of this conservative loathing for normal people is this post from the corpulent Kevin Williamson. For a long time, his grift was to be the common man at National Review, where he wrote about the little people. Unlike the rest of that crowd, he was not the product of elite universities and connected families. He was from West Texas and flunked out of a state college. His job in Conservative Inc. was to be the populist affirmation of the latest conservative fads.

Conservatives are supposed to “stand athwart” this sort of corruption of the law by the Left, but here you have Williamson celebrating it. The reason is Alex Jones is associated with Donald Trump and populism. In other words, his hatred for the people who used to read him counts for everything. If it means goofball judges promoting nonsense lawsuits that undermine public order, Williamson is for it as long as it harms the people he loves to hate.

Kevin Williamson is a good example of how the loathing of normal people is linked to a deep self-loathing. He is famously obese. He often looks like one of those people who paramedics have to use a flatbed truck to transport to the hospital. The morbidly obese are driven by self-loathing. They eat to get the momentary hit that comes from high calorie foods, but this also fuels the self-loathing. The more they eat the more they hate themselves for it. The morbidly obese have a death wish.

Another reason that guys like Williamsons and David French, another good example, are so blatant in their hatred for normal people is they have always had to play the role of the Dirt Person for their masters in the rackets. They used to make Williamson, for example, dress like a rag-picker when he went on television. You see, he was playing the lucky dirtball, allowed to live in the master’s house, as long as he was a good boy and did what he was told. It is a degrading existence.

This is why he is obsessed with hating Trump and those associated with him. The 2016 election put the lie to his existence. He was just a houseboy for mediocrities like Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru. Imagine having to call them sir when out in public and you can see why Williamson is filled with rage. You also see why he drowns it in processed foods and invective aimed at normal people. He hates you because you remind him of why he hates himself and why he should hate himself.

No life is without some purpose and the purpose of these people has been to open the eyes of normal people about the reality of conservatism. Millions of people have realized over the last five years that these people are liars and crooks. Conservatism was always just a con. Like all conmen, the various characters of Conservative Inc. were motivated by a deep hatred for their marks. Like the rest of the Cloud People, they are defined by their loathing for the Dirt People.

It is this awakening that has put those rackets into crisis. Rich Lowry was finally demoted from his position. Daily management of National Review has now been outsourced to Bangalore. Massive pay cuts and layoffs hang over the entire enterprise now that the suckers have smartened up. A big part of this great awakening is that people are figuring out that it all makes sense when you realize that the people in charge hate you. Your only choice is to hate them back.

Declaration Deep Dive

Posted on October 1, 2021 by thezman

The Declaration of Independence is one of the most influential documents in human history, right up there with the Magna Carta and the Communist Manifesto. The main reason for this is it stands as the mission statement of the American empire, so its influence is imposed on the world. The same can probably be said for the Magna Carta, which we know about because of the British Empire and by extension, the Anglosphere which dominates the modern world.

The power of the Declaration lies in the opening sentence of the second paragraph, which is the legitimizing authority for the American empire. If an action or position can be couched in terms of equality or the defense of unalienable rights, it is justified. It is one of the deadliest sentences ever written, right up there with Rousseau’s “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Despite the massive abuse that has flowed from that unfortunate bit of rhetorical flourish, the document itself is an amazing expression of European political morality that should be at the center of dissident thought. Within it lies the moral framework that binds a people to their ruler, but also the moral imperative of breaking that bond when the ruler is corrupt or tyrannical. In this age of liberal tyranny, it is a highly useful starting point for the moral opposition to liberal democracy.

A central question of this age is can you have a peaceful and prosperous society without a well-defined people? If the answer is no, which surely seems to be the case, then the obvious question is can a people exist without a ruler committed to the preservation of the people? In this age, the rulers are committed to abdicating their responsibilities to the people on the grounds that there is no such thing as a people, at least there is no such thing as our people.

Since self-preservation is the primary duty of all life, the first duty of a human group with a common identity is the preservation of the group. Logically, a ruler that violates his duty to that prime directive, putting the very existence of the people into question, is a lethal threat to the people. Just as it is the duty of a life forms to do what they must to preserve their existence, it follows that it is the duty of a people to use any means necessary to preserve itself. It is self-evident.

The real value in the Declaration today is in its radicalism. In the 18th century the claim that a ruler has a duty to his people was not radical. It was assumed. The claim of natural rights could be viewed as radical for the age, but these ideas were in wide circulation at the time. Today, however they are radical. In fact, we are rapidly approaching a point where uttering these ideas in public will lead agents of the state to put you on a secret list. We are in a dark age now.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Me Talking A Lot

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Everything Is Broken

Posted on September 30, 2021 by thezman

Way back when the government kicked off the Covid panic, smart people pointing out that shutting down the world to bend the curve was not a cost free way of addressing the problem. In fact, it was a very expensive and risky solution to a problem that was best addressed through traditional means. The world has a pandemic every 15 years and a severe one at least once a generation. Humans have figured out to tough out these naturally occurring events.

Shutting down the world and making people stay home from work is a novel invention, so there was no way to know what would happen. Human societies are tough, so it took a while for the problems to manifest. Initially, those who could work from home worked from home and those unemployed were supported with subsidies. This could never be a permanent condition, so we have been trying to transition back to normalcy for the last six months, but things are nowhere near normal.

The Brits have gasoline shortages, and they are facing a winter with spiraling natural gas prices, because the energy supply chain is a mess. Keeping people at home meant keeping people out of their cars, which collapsed fuel consumption. The trucks and truck drivers were put to other uses and now that demand is returning, they suddenly have a shortage of trucks and truck drivers. This will soon hit other parts of the supply chain as demand suddenly increases for goods and services.

In the US, ports are a mess as they face similar supply chain problems. The ports in America are weird systems. The labor is unionized, but the unions are pretty much run by the government under an array of consent decrees. Demand for labor is driven by the ships in port needing to be loaded and unloaded. The stevedoring firms hire when they need to unload a ship, but they keep few fulltime people. They simply draw from the pool of longshoremen that operate at the port.

During the shutdowns, fewer ships came into port, so fewer people were needed to unload ships and fewer trucks were needed to cart the goods out of the port. That is why ships are stacked up at the ports now. The system for unloading those ships had atrophied during the pandemic, so it is now over-capacity. This leads to shortages and price disruptions throughout the economy. For example, America has been suffering an aluminum shortage for close to a year.

A good example of how throwing wrenches into the system has unpredictable long term effects is the automobile industry. When the government shut down the country, the travel industry was flattened. The car rental firms did the prudent thing. They liquidated their car fleets. After all, if you make your money renting cars and no one is renting cars, those cars are direct hits to the bottom line. In order to weather the storm, they sold off their fleets and furloughed their staff.

The trouble is a big source of used cars is the car rental industry. They get cars on programs from the manufacturers. They can be three, six or nine month programs where the company takes the new cars for a monthly fee and then returns them to the manufacturers after the term of the program. Those cars end up in the new car dealer lots as discounted used cars. Look around the car lots in America and what you see is lots of empty spaces where cars used to sit.

Once things opened up, the car rental companies went looking for cars, so they went to the used car auctions. Other shortages have made it impossible for the manufacturers to get cars to their own dealers, much less supply program cars to the rental fleets, so that left the used car market. Used car prices are now spiking to record levels because the supply chain is a mess. It will take years for this to normalize, and the cost will be in the tens of billions.

Of course, everyone who buys food has noticed that food is suddenly much more expensive and there are weird shortages. Like everything else, the broken supply chain is the main culprit. Those trucking companies suddenly put out of business by government fiat did not sit around waiting to open up again. They fired their staff, sold off their trucks and found other ways to survive. Rebuilding the many small links of the supply chain will take years and show up in higher food prices.

In a modern liberal democracy, every event requires a response, and every response requires a response and so on. The smallest pebble tossed into the water can potentially result in a flood. In this context it means government jumping in to mitigate the consequences of their fix for something else they broke. Inflation will get calls for more spending, which will get more inflation. The central banks will then try to redirect that inflation from goods to assets.

In other words, the shutdowns have created a dynamic of chaos that will take years to settle out, assuming no further shocks. The Biden administration is promising another meteor strike with their Build Back Better nonsense. You see, they broke everything and now see it as a chance to remake the world in their image. When crazy stupid people want to try to make the world, the only thing that can follow is chaos. We may be at the cusp of an age of unimaginable economic madness.

This is a good example of something said by Will Durant. “Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.”

In the fullness of time, after the West is a ruin of its own making, this age will be remembered as a gross and sustained violation of that sentiment. If over the last thirty years the people in charge had done nothing but entertain themselves with their toys, none of this would be happening. Instead, they kept trying to prove nature wrong and overturn the wisdom of ages. Reality does not take kindly to this amount of abuse, so there will be consequences.

Reruns

Posted on September 29, 2021 by thezman

Long before the cock crows I am out and on the road to a secret meeting, so I am unable to post as usual. Instead, here is the paywall podcast that I do on Sunday and post up on SubscribeStar. Those supporting the cause will have no doubt listened and memorized it, but for the vast majority who are not kicking in the value of a cup of coffee, here is a portion of what you are missing.

What I’m trying to do with the paywall content is settle into a routine where twice a week there is a written post and on Sunday a podcast. That way, people kicking in five bucks or more per month can feel like they are getting their money’s worth. For now, the paywall stuff is lighter stuff. At least once a week is a movie review or commentary about popular culture. The Sunday show is all news stuff.

Item #1 The Ungrateful

The Undefeated: Jaylen Brown on why it’s important for the Celtics and NBA to hire African American head coaches – Link

Item #2 Indians

WSJ: Ancient Footprints Yield Surprising New Clues about the First Americans – Link

Item #3 The New Religion

Reuters: Washington cathedral to install stained glass with racial justice theme – Link

Item #4 Mushrooms

Reason: Oregon Legalizes a Breakthrough Treatment: Magic Mushrooms – Link

The Nature of Tyrants

Posted on September 28, 2021 by thezman

In the West, the morality of the state has been determined by how much or how little it respects the basic rights of its citizens. During the Cold War this was a critical measure used to justify foreign policy. The American government claimed it was within its rights to overthrow South American governments that got too chummy with the Soviets because they would endanger the rights of their people. On the other hand, they would back anti-communist dictators because they were better than communists.

There was a lot of lying and dissembling on this issue, but the principle was important to Western governments, so they made a big show of it. In America, for example, this meant protecting property rights from the excesses of the state. As a practical matter, it meant the state had to prove they had good reason for violating your rights before the court would permit them from doing it. They had to get a warrant, for example, before tapping your phone or riffling through your papers.

Government is always a blunt instrument and men are not angels so to avoid office holders and bureaucrats from abusing the rights of the people they first had to demonstrate there was a compelling government interest in declaring your backyard a wetland or banning a certain activity. Put another away, it was the duty of the government to make the affirmative argument. Citizens did not have to justify their rights to exercise them. They were assumed.

Property is a useful metric in this regard because it is simple and the economic basis of Western society. Even in feudalism property rights were respected, because ownership was what made the system possible. The right to speak out or organize are up for debate to some degree, but the right to own the fruits of your labor is the starting point for social organization in the West. It is what makes communism alien and why it has always been the domain of outsiders and subversives.

In the United States, property rights barely exist now. This story about the Feds smashing into a private business and taking their stuff sounds like something from North Korea or maybe Australia. For reasons they feel no need to explain, they broke into a private bank vault and stole the property of the customers using the service and refuse to return the property. By any reasonable moral standard, this is theft and worse, it is legal plunder. The state is plundering the citizens.

Like all criminals, conmen and sociopaths, the state is throwing up a dust storm of legal points to distract from the moral point at the center. In a just society, is it appropriate to take the goods of the people without first demonstrating that the state has a reason for seizing that property? The answer is obvious. By Western standards, this is immoral and the sort of thing that justifies revolution. In fact, it is this sort of behavior that justifies the very existence of the United States.

This is not an atypical story. The Federal government now routinely seizes the property of citizens without justification. Nick Fuentes, the young firebrand nationalist, had his bank accounts seized by the government. They have not explained why they took his money, and they refuse to even acknowledge it. One day he had money in his account and the next day it was cleaned out. The bank finally told him it was the government, but it took them weeks to get around to telling him.

The general violation of property rights is now the norm. The tech oligarchs, for example, strongly oppose private property. If they don’t like what you are saying on your website, they will steal your domain name. They will collude to limit your ability to hold a job or have a bank account. What used to be a sacred right of all people is now up for debate with an unelected oligarchical class as the judge and jury. What is yours is theirs and what is theirs is theirs and they own everything.

It is tempting to call this feudalism as people have a cartoonish understanding of the term and the times from which we get the term. The fact is the typical feudal lord had a greater respect for property rights than anyone in authority today. The authority of the lord was rooted in property rights. He respected the rights of small landowners, because he expected his lord to respect his rights the same way. The upper cast of modern society has no respect for the people in the least.

This is the critical thing to understand about the modern authoritarian. They no longer respect what used to be the common morality of the West. The ultimate constraint on feudal excess was that universally accepted morality with regards to property, the law and governance. Most people were illiterate, even the rulers, so the letter of the law was not paramount. It was the spirit of the law that mattered. In fact, it was this respect for the spirit of the law on which authority rested.

Today, the people in charge have no respect for the law or the concept of law, so their agents just do as they please. In fact, they take pride in trampling the rights of the people, because it pleases their masters. The goons prosecuting the January 6th protestors, for example, take a sadistic pleasure in the torment they are inflicting on the people caught in their trap. Their intentional cruelty has become a positional good, something that elevates them in the eyes of the oligarchs.

The Declaration of Independence is a remarkable document that is mostly remembered for the opening lines. Even though those lines have been abused by the very tyrants that now rule over us, the document is a remarkable expression of Western thought and Anglo-Saxon morality. After the long bill of indictment against the king, a list familiar today, there is this line. “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

The beauty of that line is that it qualifies the moral depravity of the tyrant by juxtaposing it against the nature of a free people. A people who sit idly by as their rulers trample their ancient rights are getting the government they deserve. A free people, in contrast, must hold their prince to the highest moral standard. It is immoral for them to do otherwise, as it violates that which defines them as free people. Every tyrant issues his own death warrant to the free people he seeks to oppress.

Female Trouble

Posted on September 27, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it is a nice companion piece to the regular Monday posting. With Halloween approaching, it is a good time to focus on witches and the trouble they are causing. That and it will sell a few books for Ed Dutton. For those with a soul, the Sunday podcast is up behind the green door.

Early in the Covid panic it was clear that some people were embracing the panic for reasons that had nothing to do with public health. The harridan assaulting people in the grocery store over the bizarre new rules was doing it because suddenly she had a purpose to her life. This was starkly obvious with the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who made herself harridan-in-chief. All of a sudden, inconsequential people had purpose and meaning to their lives.

The infamous TikTok videos featuring chubby nurses in scrubs dancing around on empty hospital floors had a similar motivation. White women with mundane lives working in hospitals were suddenly “front line workers” in the war against the great plague threatening humanity. Most of the women working in hospitals just went about their lives but many suddenly saw themselves in a different role. They were no longer just faceless nurses doing menial work. They were heroes.

Of course, another big driver of the live action role playing was the urban legends being traded on social media. In the early days it was not uncommon for someone to claim she knew several people who died from the virus. Statistically that was like saying you knew several people killed by dwarfs. Even today it is rare for someone to know someone who actually died from Covid much less many people. Even so, it became a common sighting on social media.

For many people, Covid and the drama surrounding it quickly became the purpose of their lives, giving them a reason to get up in the morning. The Covid skeptic, in fact, was largely a creation of the people embracing the panic. The panic players needed a foil, someone at whom they could direct the lines “Don’t you understand that people are dying!” when on the Nextdoor app. The people happy to be left alone were dragged into the Covid drama to be the needed villain of the story.

You see this with the vaccination business. For as long as we have understood vaccinations, it was known to be a defense against you getting infected. If you got the vaccine you were protected. It did not matter if everyone around you was not vaccinated, because you were vaccinated. That was the point of the vaccine, but that has been changed. Vaccines are now a collective good so the unvaccinated can be the needed villain in this drama.

The latest turn in this weird game is a new phenomenon in which women are sure they have Covid but they keep testing negative. The women suffering from this new and dangerous malady in the war against Covid describe it as “spooky” because they really want to test positive, but they keep testing negative. What is clear about the women afflicted with this new plague is they are heavily invested in Covid. In their time of greatest need, Covid is letting them down.

What is going on here, of course, is something that has been happening in small ways for some time. We have an abundance of unattached females in the population desperate for attention. They jump on every fad in the hope of making themselves the star of some minidrama related to it. You can probably mark the Virginia rape hoax as the beginning of this pattern. A crisis invented by political grifters was made real by a couple of women desperate for attention.

It is tempting to blame this on mass media. Ten years ago, this Covid panic could not have happened as we have far fewer intensely on-line people. The SARS and Swine flu epidemics are proof of it. In those outbreaks, social media was still in its infancy and mass manipulation with it had not been mastered. Those epidemics were serious and required a public response, but they never become full blown panics like Covid, because the tools were not available to do it.

In reality, social media is a symptom. Stand around in public and look at what people are doing as they wait. You will see far more women banging on her mobile device than men, unless the area is full of mothers. The moms will be tending to their children and gossiping with the other moms. There are plenty of men intensely on-line, but it is usually directed at things like sports. For women, they are on-line for the drama and the growth of social media has been in response to this demand.

This suggests that the witch problem, as described by Ed Dutton, is not entirely a problem of selection and biology. That is, the potential for witchery is a constant feature of Western societies that can be unlocked under certain conditions. We have not been selecting for witchery, but rather creating an environment that summons forth the demon from the female population. The internet is turning into a doomsday device that summons exaggerates the worst elements of humanity.

Worse yet, history does not offer an easy answer. In better times, a round of witch trials and the liberal use of the scold’s bridle would do the trick. In this crisis, the witches have already taken control. That means the witch trials are of men who failed to properly compliment a female coworker who was feeling blue. She then goes to the head witch in human resources and the victim is dragged in for interrogation. Instead of witch trials we have warlock trials.

Of course, the hunt for invisible Nazis and white supremacists is another modern form of witch hunting, mostly led by women. You have a sprinkling of socially retarded males in the group, but the main players in the hunt for insurrectionists are hysterical females imagining themselves being ravaged by a Nazi. In the old days, the witch problem was quickly addressed, so they never got hold of the levers of power. Today, the executive suits are littered with brooms.

Putting all of that aside, what Covid has revealed is that we not only have female trouble, but we cannot ignore it forever. The madness unleashed over the last year is finally showing up in practical ways. Prices for essentials are spiking, car production has stopped due to shortages. Shortage of things are turning up again, just as the brooms are coming out for another round of female empowerment. There is a limit to tolerating this and that limit is rapidly approaching.

Three Crises

Posted on September 24, 2021 by thezman

The day job has me so busy I have no time to do much of anything, so my news consumption has been cursory for the last few months. What I notice is that all of the stuff the mainstream press is howling about falls into three main buckets, the three crises of this week’s show. There is other stuff like the handwringing about the little blonde girl murdered by her boyfriend or some new Covid scam, but the main pages tend to be filled with the three main buckets.

There is a fourth bucket that is starting to turn up and that is the condition of the financial system, but that is still in the background. It is hard to know what is happening in the economy, since we can no longer trust the data. The only thing we can trust is the stock market and that is being levitated by central banks. It used to tell us about the state of the economy, but now it tells us only the state of money pumping and the spigots are never going to be turned off.

It looks like the news next week will be about the legitimacy question as someone leaked a draft copy of the Arizona audit report this morning. This was done so the media could promote the regime lines about the election. When the real report is released, it will not support the coordinated headlines this morning, but by the time the real report is out it will be “old news” and ignored. People will be left with the official narrative and never learn the truth. This is a standard ploy.

What these people do not realize is that this undermines the credibility of the system rather than knocking the critics for a loop. After all, it should be the job of the media to ask who leaked the draft and what was her motives. Someone in the media should ask why the exact same story is in dozens of news sites at the same time. Of course, no one will ask, and the critics will take the silence and the obvious coordination as proof that their claims are correct. The coordinated lies just make things worse.

There is also the knock-on effect of tuning out. I’ve noticed in my daily life that more and more people are just tuning out the news. If it is all predictable storytelling, then what is the point of tuning in for any of it? I know when I look at the main sites it feels like they did not change since the last time I looked at them. “Turn off, tune out, drop out” would not be a bad slogan for dissidents. It would also be a nice bit of irony if the end of the revolution begins with a slogan from the start of it.