The Crisis At The Window

Posted on August 10, 2023 by thezman

For about six months, starting last winter, Western media talked about a Ukrainian counter-offensive that was supposed to change the direction of the war. These stories coincided with stories about the delivery of various types of equipment, along with expert opinions from retired generals. Late in the spring Washington sent reliable toadies over to Kiev to see the plans and then talk to the media about how the Ukrainians were preparing to deal a death blow to Moscow.

As we get into the heart of August and the third month of the offensive, it is clear to most everyone that it has been a disaster. First came the images of Western armored vehicles trapped in minefields. Images of burning tanks were then followed by video of Ukrainian soldiers struggling to escape the same minefields after their armored vehicles were disabled by mines. Then came weeks of reports in the West about revised tactics that achieved nothing along the front.

As things stand, the most enthusiastic Ukraine supporters say that the counter-offensive has managed to capture about ten square miles. In reality, the Ukrainians failed to make it through the security zone of Russian defenses. This is the area in front of the first defensive lines that are used to slow an attack. In the south, Ukraine managed to capture a few abandoned villages, but relentless Russian attacks from artillery and airpower turned those into Ukrainian cemeteries.

At the start of the offensive, independent observers and Russian sources said the Ukrainians had enough resources to continue their offensive into August. At that point they will have exhausted men and material. At that point, they would have no choice but to stop offensive operations and fall back into defensive positions. Otherwise, they would be forced to cannibalize their lines and leave themselves open to Russian attacks in other areas along the line of contact.

That may have been a generous assessment. Over the last couple of weeks Russian forces in the north have steadily pushed the Ukrainians back. Ukraine has just moved their northern headquarters west to get clear of the Russian advance. They have also ordered the evacuation of Kupyansk, an important town located on the bank of the Oskil River in the Kharkiv Oblast. Reports suggest the Ukrainians simply lack the manpower and equipment to defend the area.

Washington is in a panic because they promised everyone that the Ukrainians would easily smash through Russian lines in the south. The plan was to rush through to the Sea of Azov, thus severing the land bridge between Russia and Crimea. Once that happened, attacks would begin on Crimea. The Russian army would either revolt after the humiliation or simply collapse, causing political chao in Moscow. It is hard to believe, but this was the official narrative.

Interestingly, the narrative was not just another pack of lies from the Kagan cult, but an official assessment from the Pentagon. It has been Western military doctrine that the way to defeat the Russians in a land war is with a rapid, concentrated attack on their defensive lines using armor and infantry. Here is a paper on the topic from 2017 and here is a recent video discussing it in connection with this war. This strategy actually goes back to the Cold War days.

The short version is that Russia organized its army around groups of 800 to 1000 men that operate independently within the defensive formation. These units have, tanks armored personnel carriers and artillery. The NATO strategy was to send overwhelming force at these units, forcing them to retreat in order to preserve their equipment. Russia is known for trading land for resources. They did this in the Kharkiv region last year and in the Kherson region last spring.

What Washington did not notice is that the Russians have moved away from the Battalion Tactical Group to more flexible arrangements based on the situation, terrain, and their own resources. In the south when Ukraine launched its main attack, they did not face battalions, but divisions. Further, the Russians had prepared complex defensive positions designed to trap advancing armored columns. In other words, the Russians read that paper and were ready for it.

Another thing Washington did not notice is that the Russian army has changed in other ways since the Cold War. They have a wide range of electronic warfare systems that work well against modern weapons. They also have incorporated drones in massive numbers that are highly effective against Western armor. The internet is full of videos where a Lancet drone takes out a Ukrainian armored vehicle. The Russians have quickly become the masters of drone warfare.

The main reason the Ukrainian offensive is a catastrophe is the side with the trillion-dollar annual budget has not updated their understanding of the Russian army since the last century. They have not bothered to notice what has been happening on the battlefields over the last eighteen months. Instead, the world’s most expensive military has gone along with the crackpot plans of the Kagan cult, either not understanding what is happening or indifferent to the inevitable results.

The Ukraine war is becoming a microcosm of the crisis of competence. It is not just the scarcity of talented people in the ranks. They still exist in sufficient numbers to keep the system operating reasonably well. The issue is the selection pressure at the top is for true believers and sycophants. The only way to get in the room to discuss the Ukraine war is to be fully on board with the dream of destroying Russia or be willing to humiliate yourself by telling these people what they want to hear.

Imagine the tag team of Victoria Nuland and General Milley replicated throughout the managerial system. Nuland is the maniacal imbecile in charge for no other reason than zealotry, while Milley is the oleaginous flunky with the credentials to provide legitimacy to the rantings of Nuland. The competent are driven from the room, leaving this combination to chart public policy. The general decline in competence that is driving demographics, is driven by this combination at the top.

In the movie Braveheart, Longshanks returns from France to confront his son who was charged with putting down the Scottish revolt. His son has his “advisor” with him, who makes the mistake of speaking out of turn. This is what has happened in the West, except Longshanks died of a heart attack and his son is in charge. The advisor now busies himself telling the son what he wants to hear. Meanwhile, outside the castle walls, the kingdom rattles toward collapse.

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Back To The Future

Posted on August 9, 2023 by thezman

The 1970’s are remembered by those who were around during that era as an economically depressing time. Inflation was the defining feature of the economy, but the gas crisis was a close second. Gas lines, inflation, urban crime and history’s worst clothing styles was the 1970’s. When someone wants to produce images that are supposed to capture the mood of the period, inevitably they show people in the hideous costumes of the era, standing at a gas station.

Nixon taking the dollar off the gold standard gets the blame for inflation, but in reality, it was the interplay of energy and the dollar that caused the problem. The reason we have the petrodollar is to solve the inflation problem. This made official what had been unofficial since the end of the war. The dollar was the world’s reserve currency because it was used to trade energy on global markets. The Louvre Accord, which followed the Plaza Accord, stabilized the dollar internationally.

It is not an accident that soon after the dollar stabilized and became the default currency for international trade that the Soviet Union collapsed. The Soviets were dependent on food imports, and they raised the cash for food by selling energy products, mostly crude oil, on global markets. When oil prices declinedin the 1980’s, the Soviets suddenly found themselves struggling to raise enough dollars, which further strained an already fragile domestic economy.

The energy – currency link is an important concept to understand when thinking about what comes next for Western economies. A steady and consistent flow of energy products, along with a stable dollar, is what has allowed the West to borrow massive sums in order to underwrite the domestic economy. We are now entering a period of erratic and inconsistent energy flows, along with an unstable dollar. This is largely due to the decline of the American empire.

The energy markets are the first issue. Washington’s war on Russia has destabilized energy markets through efforts to cripple Russian energy sales. While this has failed, it has created distortions in the markets. For example, Germany now must import expensive LNG to replace the cheap pipeline gas from Russia. Meanwhile, India and China enjoy cheap energy from Russia. All of which is traded in rupees, yuan, and rubles, rather than dollars and euros.

Added to this is the realignment of the Gulf countries. Led by the Saudis, the oil producing countries have aligned themselves with their most dependable partners, Russia and China. The Saudis are now willing to trade in currencies other than the dollar, which is an enormous change. While it does not mean the end of the petrodollar, it is a step in that direction. It also means the dollar will not be the only currency used in international trade, thus lowering the demand for dollars.

Then we have the growing problems in America’s domestic energy supply which are largely due to bad policy. The growth in domestic supply has stopped. New investment is in decline as a result, so the decline in domestic supply will continue. This will inevitably drive-up global prices, but also flip North America from a net exporter to a net importer of energy products. There is only so much oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and it is at its lowest level ever recorded.

Of course, inflation is already an issue. Despite the happy talk from the government, anyone who buys things sees the problem. Food inflation remains an issue, despite low energy costs over the last year. Now that oil is creeping back up with a target of $100 per barrel, inflation will become even more obvious. Add in the softening of the economy and you see the signs of stagflation, which is the combination of high inflation and economic stagnation.

The one thing missing from this picture is brown leisure suits. While gas lines are unlikely in the near term, reckless foreign policy could easily result in the disputes with the Saudis turning into rocket high gas prices. Aggression towards the Chinese will result in shortages and inflation in other parts of the economy. This is coming at a time when the bulk of Americans are losing trust in the economic and political system, not just the people pretending to run the system.

That is where the parallels between the 1970’s and this period stop. The economic and political crisis of the 1970’s was largely due to the American political class adjusting to new global realities. Europe and Asia were back online economically, but the global currency arraignments were still tuned for the 1950’s. The West was also on the cusp of the microprocessor revolution, which would require the freeing of capital from old industry so it could flow into the new technologies.

This crisis is largely due to incompetence. The Russians were happy to sell their energy and agricultural products to the world at a good price. They just wanted the West to respect the territorial integrity of the Russkiy Mir. The Chinese are happy to be the manufacture of the world, as long as Washington refrains from trying to overthrow the Chinse government and that of its neighboring allies. The Saudis were happy with the petrodollar as long as America stayed out if its domestic affairs.

All of this is happening in the shadow of a rapidly growing debt problem magnified by higher borrowing rates. The deficit is over $31 trillion, a number that is inconceivable to most people. Debt payments are now at one trillion per year. The ongoing baby boomer retirement is going to drive both numbers higher. In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran on the promise to end deficit spending and clear the national debt. Half a century on and the problem is worse than anyone imagined possible.

America is now entering a period with the economic and social aspects of the 1970’s, but this time it is set in the world of the film Idiocracy. The main cause is not changing global conditions, but a suicidally incompetent ruling class. In the 1970’s, the solution was better policies. Fifty years on, the solution is an entirely new international order to replace the old order, which also means replacing the American ruling class with a new ruling class capable of navigating the new order.

What all this means is that this version of the 1970’s will bring us far worse things than denim leisure suits and velour car interiors. Add in the demographic problems and the picture is far grimmer than that 1970s’ picture. Instead of a 20-something in a terrycloth jumpsuit standing in a gas line, the image of this age could be a 60-somehting boomer in a golf shirt lined up at a food bank. In the end, we may look at the 1970’s as a warning about what was ahead for the American Empire.

Without Merit

Posted on August 8, 2023 by thezman

Every human civilization has some mechanism to find talented people who can be of service to the ruling class of the society. The system can be formal, like the Chinese exam system or graduate school in modern America. It can also be informal, as it was in the Middle Ages when a talented young man could be noticed by his lord and given a chance to raise his own status. The Hundred Years War created fortunes for many common men who fought on behalf of their king.

This search for talent is not only internal. Jews in Europe found that there was always a noble in need of smart and literate men. The Hoffaktor in Germany was almost always a Jewish banker who not only kept the finances of the house he served, but he also maintained connections with other court factors. In return for these services, these Jewish men were often awarded lands and titles. The endless search for talent by the ruling elites is why we have Ashkenazi Jews.

This is important to keep in mind when members of the chattering class talk about the meritocracy and the role it plays in the current crisis. This column by David Brooks titled, “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?” is a good example. Brooks speaks as a member of the meritocracy, which he defines as the highly educated and highly connected urban class that runs the institutions. His column is mostly a self-congratulatory call to action to address the growing unrest.

The place to start is the assumption on behalf of Brooks and no doubt his intended readership that he is a member of the meritocracy. He ticks many of the boxes he repeatedly insists are requirements of the meritocracy. He is the child of wealthy foreigners, and he went to the right schools. He has avoided anything that looks like productive labor. He has no loyalty to his host country. He sent his son off to serve in the army of a foreign country.

By the standards of the people who throw around the term “meritocracy” as a compliment, David Brooks is a good example. The question is what service is he rendering to the ruling class? He has no useful skills, and he has never tried to do anything that requires sacrifice on behalf of the ruling class. His career looks like the life of a self-indulgent fop from the British literature. What has David Brooks ever done to merit consideration of the ruling class?

The first clue is a quote from Thomas Edsall he uses in his post to explain why he and his fellow meritocrats aligned against Trump. “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.” That right there captures the Cloud People – Dirt People divide.

Opposing Trump was never about practical things like the priorities of government or the general welfare of the people. It was class struggle. The meritocratic class view their membership in that class as a sign of their moral goodness. Their ability to worm their way through the labyrinth of credentialling mechanisms in order to fill up their resume with the best associations is proof of their virtue. A perch at the New York Times is no different from an assigned seat in the front pews.

Hatred of Trump, and it was real hate, was a defense of the optimates versus the populares on purely class grounds. The problem is the optimates are a polite fiction, a fig leaf for the tiny ruling elite at the top of the system. The role of thoroughly impractical men like David Brooks is to maintain both a moral code that benefits the ruling elite and to provide a barrier between the optimates and the populares. Trump crossing that barrier was viewed as a violation of this system’s integrity.

That is the heart of the Brooks post. The headline is misleading as at no point does he genuinely suggest the meritocrats are the bad guys. Instead, he explains how people could possibly make this mistake, because their highly exclusionary systems do seem to violate their alleged moral code. Note he quickly moves along to the part his readers expect from a Brooks column. That is the part where he says the Dirt People are undereducated rubes who need to be put in their place.

In fairness, he probably sensed this and finished with “We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?” Fools grabbed onto this thinking it revealed some genuine self-reflection and perhaps a sign that the managerial elite is coming around to the criticisms leveled at them. In reality, it was another blow on the shofar to rally the people of the meritocracy.

That is how the Cloud People view things. Like the children of Israel camping in the wilderness of Sinai, they await the final instructions. They have seen the destruction of the Dirt People and they can see the ultimate end of their leader. What comes soon is the Promised Land where the meritocrats will build a kingdom of priests and a holy nation that serves the gods of the new religion. The Dirt People will be gone and what will remain is the righteous led by the meritocrats.

That is the purpose of these men of the meritocracy. Their role is to keep the dream alive and encourage the elites to push forward and faster. Whether any of this is possible is never considered. Those debates are left to the Dirt People and once they are gone, all doubt will be gone. In the end, the meritocracy is nothing more than a cheering section for a system that serves elite interests at the expense of the people and nations on which they feed.

The Clash Of Realities

Posted on August 7, 2023 by thezman

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Imagine a scenario in which there are two people talking. Person A says, “I am very thirsty” and Person B responds, “There is a store around the corner.” Now imagine a member of the secret police reading these lines in a transcript without any other information about the people. Stripped of all context, these sentences do not mean anything, and they are not obviously connected to one another. They could easily be viewed as random sentences or perhaps coded messages.

Of course, both Person A and Person B would understand the exchange because the receiver of the first message had a lot of other information. Maybe he knew that Person A had been exercising or that it was a hot day. That is why he mentioned that there was a store around the corner. Of course, Person A understood the response because he knew that Person B understood what he meant. These sentences made sense to both parties because of shared knowledge.

As an aside, secret messages work the same way. The messages are designed to make sense only within a specific context. The sender assumes the receiver will have the key that provides the context. Often, the key is the context that makes the messages intelligible. To someone without the key, the message is meaningless gibberish. In more sophisticated codes, the receiver needs the key as well as the larger context of the message.

Getting back to the example, that exchange is something called the cooperative principle, a concept from linguistics. The parties in a casual conversation rely upon a commonly held set of assumptions. In most situations, the listeners and speakers act cooperatively to facilitate communication. They mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way. There is an assumed base of shared information upon which their exchange rests.

This describes the cooperate principle of communication. The four maxims of this principle are quantity, quality, relation, and manner. Quantity is the amount of information communicated to the other parties. The quality of that information is the truthfulness of what is being communicated. Relevance is the relationship of the information to the topic or situation. Manner is the clarity of communication. Grice’s maxims explain how people efficiently communicate to one another.

This structure for how people communicate is vitally important in a society in which the people are expected to participate in the governing of society. In a monarchy, horizontal relationships are subordinate to the vertical social structures. One does not have to understand the king in order to understand the relationship. The customs and social structures provide most of what the king would ever need to communicate to the people and what the people need to communicate to one another.

In other words, in an aristocratic system, the context so dominates the daily life of the people that verbal communication is reduced to the pragmatic. There is no need to discuss, much less debate abstract concepts that require lots of additional information in order to make sense to the participants. In a democracy, those clear social structures are gone and what must replace them is a large common understanding. Everyone has to operate from the same set of truths and assumptions.

This gets to why America is in such an agitated state, despite the relative peace and prosperity of the age. The people in charge seem like they are not just speaking a different language but doing so from a different reality. That is because for the most part, they are using a different language and they do operate in a different world from the bulk of the people. The managerial class is defined by the managerial elite and therefore operates by a different cooperative principle.

Take the word “democracy” which is used all the time by the regime. To normal people, this means majority rule. In a democracy, the government does what the majority of the people want, with some exceptions. Normal people accept that some things like slavery are not up for debate. Even if the majority wants to bring back slavery, it is an immoral practice, so it is not permitted. Otherwise, normal people assume democracy is the will of the people expressed in the laws.

To the managerial elite, democracy means the process by which the majority or an assumed majority is convinced to support elite opinion. This is why they are inspired to redouble their efforts whenever they lose at the ballot box. Democracy requires them to work harder to get their desired result. Expediency may require them to go around this process using the courts or administrative fiat. The assumption is that enough people already agree so it is close enough to justify action.

This one word shows how the elite and the commoners do not share the same basis of understanding when it comes to politics. The elites see democracy as the process of working toward their desired end. The people assume it is the process by which elites discover the common will. These are two entirely different and incompatible views of the democratic process. Inevitably this leads to a large number of words and concepts lacking a shared understanding.

More critically, the managerial elite deliberately flouts the principle of commonality to trick the people into supporting the opposite of what they desire. Normal people are used to flouting the principle of commonality, as it is a central part of comedy, as in sarcasm or satire. The managerial elite, however, violates the principle in order to trick the common people, but also to signal intent to the rest of the elite. It is why every new social fad comes with new insider jargon.

The regularized flouting of the principle of commonality in political discourse is not entirely due to deceit, even though it is often a happy accident. The managerial elite in particular, but the managerial class in general, lives in a different shared reality than the people over whom they rule. More important, the managerial class is increasingly aware of the class difference. Much of what defines the ruling class is the shared knowledge of the difference between them and the rest.

This is why political discourse is increasingly frustrating, but also pointless. The gap between how the media, for example, talks about the Trump indictments and how normal people talk about it is too large to cross. The shared reality of the media imagines Trump leading an armed rebellion against the system. The shared reality of the normal people is of a man being tormented by the ruling elite. There is no commonality here, so the communication is cognitively meaningless.

What this suggests is that the clash between the rulers and the ruled is much more than a clash of interests. It is not simply about one side wanting different ends than the other side or wanting more from the result than the other side. Those sorts of conflicts rest on a set of commonly accepted principles. This clash is due to the managerial class living in a different contextual reality from the people. The current conflict is not a clash of interests, but a clash of incompatible realities.

Terrible Choices

Posted on August 4, 2023 by thezman

Most online political commentary is either analysis of what is happening in the world or dire predictions about where things are heading. The response is often some form of “Well, what can we do about it?” On this side of the great divide, this is usually a rhetorical question, as the person asking knows what he wants to do. He wants to get himself and the site on an FBI watch list.

As we see with the lawfare against Trump, the regime is determined to do what it likes and there is nothing that can be done about it. The best Republicans are cowards, while most are sociopathic criminals. The former mews about what is happening, while the latter claps and cheers on their friends across the aisle. The two-party system is just two faces of the same monster we call the regime.

That means the formal tools citizens have to affect politics are useless. You can vote yourself silly but the system gets worse. In fact, this is exactly what has been happening the last couple of decades. The system gets worse, so more people get engaged in elections, but that makes things worse. Record turnout in 2020 gave us a deranged old men run by the Kagan cult.

Even so, people still think in terms of elections, so the show this week dives into what would be required to use the system to reform the system. Then we get into the informal tools that can be used to effect change. These are not great choices. There is not a lot of joy to be found in the options that are available to us. The reason is a system in crises is one that leaves open only the terrible choices.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

The reality of current society
Solving the easy problems
Systemic social problems
The Terrible Choices
The Inevitable

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Diet And Superstition

Posted on August 3, 2023 by thezman

A paradox of the modern age is that the average person in the West knows more about the natural world than the most learned man of prior eras, but people remain as superstitious and irrational as ever. This is true even in the human sciences, where doctors continue to tell patients that they should make sure to eat plenty of vegetables and avoid fatty foods. Much of what people experience as medicine is the same old oogily-boogily that has been with us since forever.

The carnivore diet is the latest bit of nonsense to make the rounds. Search the topic on YouTube and your recommendations will suddenly be packed with videos of men wearing lab coats or standing in front of dry erase boards, explaining how this diet is based on the science of cavemen. They claim that humans are made to eat meat, not bread or vegetables, so we should only eat meat. This will cure the things that ail you in the modern age, like obesity and unhappiness.

This is pure nonsense. Modern humans are the product of a long process that continues to this day. That process is called evolution. The ancestors of modern humans survived on what they could find. We know that species that can survive on a varied diet are more adaptive than species hooked on a narrow diet. If you can eat anything, you can live anywhere. If you can only eat bamboo shoots, then the only place you can live is in a Chinese zoo.

Modern humans inherited this ability to eat just about anything, which is why modern humans were able to spread across the globe. Anyone who says humans were designed to eat meat is either ignorant or crazy. Humans certainly adapted to the food that was available, but the reason they could do this is our ancestors were able to eat just about anything. In some areas, humans lived primarily on fish, because there was a reliable supply of fish for them to eat year-round.

Adaptation is important. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued in their book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, that as humans settled down and learned to cultivate animals and plants, adaptation accelerated. As grains became a bigger part of the diet, people adapted to the new food and lifestyle. If our caveman ancestors were meat eaters, it does not matter because our direct ancestors evolved to be omnivores living mostly on grains they made into bread and beer.

Now, this does not mean you cannot lose weight or lower your glucose levels by changing your diet. People in the modern age get fat for the same reason people got fat in the Middle Ages. They consume more calories than they need to perform their work, so some of the excess is stored as fat. That is another useful adaptation of humans that gets treated like magic. Storing fat is what helps us be so adaptive. Carrying emergency food around under our skin is a huge advantage.

This is why being fat was looked upon as a sign of success. Look at old photos of rich people and they are often quite fat. Women dressed in a way that made them look plump, even if they were slender. Fat people had extra food and time to eat it, which meant they were prosperous. Skinny people spent their days laboring thus burning lots of calories, but they had only the food they needed to keep laboring. In this age, Indians still regard tubbiness as a sign of prosperity.

Modern Americans, of course, view fat people as moral failures because they cannot control themselves at chow time. Chris Christie is an object of scorn mostly because he is a big fat slob. He even had his mouth stapled shut in an effort to lose weight and give his family some peace and quiet. Somehow, he managed to get around it and he remains a big fat noisy slob. In this age, the only fat people we like are the fat comics who make fun of their own fatness.

This probably explains the superstition around diets. The sales pitch of the carnivore diet is no different from what preachers during the Great Awakening were selling or social reformers of this age are selling. The subtext is always the same. We have strayed from the proper path, and we must return to it or else. In the case of diet, it means returning to some imagined time when we ate a different way. In the case of social reforms, it is getting back to the righteous path.

It is not just fad diets where we see superstitions about food. Many YouTube videos are sponsored by companies selling some sort goo in a jug that is supposed to give you energy and vitality. “Hey, you are a busy and important person, who just happens to be laying on the couch watching YouTube videos. You don’t have time to have a proper meal, so have a jug of green slime instead. It will not only give you the electrolytes plants crave, but it will also give you energy to watch more videos.”

These companies selling meal replacement and ready-to-cook meals delivered to your door are not really selling food. These companies are selling lifestyles. They are no different from the people selling perfume or ripped blue jeans. The people selling gourmet food kits are promising you a lifestyle if you adorn yourself with the accoutrements of the people who supposedly live that life. Fashion is a cargo cult and food fashion is not an exception.

Of course, the root here is happiness. The leisure classes in ancient Egypt had codes of conduct that were designed to give meaning and purpose to life. Cicero and Ovid wrote guides on how to live happy lives. People in comfortable lives have time to worry about abstract things, so there are people there to supply them with satisfying answers to the vexing questions of existence. Idle hands do the Devil’s work and the buying and selling of self-help books keeps those idle hands busy.

Getting back to food superstitions, not all of it is nonsense. If you are a big fat slob like Chris Christie, the carnivore diet will result in weight loss. It may put cows on the endangered species list, but that is a different issue. Cutting out carbohydrates does funny things to the body. It is why people feel like they have the flu for the first couple of weeks on all of these no-carb diets. Lacking carbohydrates for energy, the body begins to burn fat for energy, which takes a couple of weeks.

Weight loss comes mostly from the reduction in calories. If you eat a big fatty ribeye steak, you will not be hungry in a few hours. If you eat five donuts, you will be starving before the next mealtime. You consumed the same number of calories, but one was fat and protein and the other was all carbs. People who go on no-carb diets end up eating far less than they used to eat, so they lose weight. If you are a fat person, the trade-offs, at least in the short term, probably make sense.

In the end, the cold logic of things like the carnivore diet are no more appealing than the cold logic of fashion. Imagine ads selling ripped jeans that say, “go in debt for these and you will feel better until the credit card statement arrives.” Instead, these diets are sold to people as magic elixirs. The sales pitch works, because we are not so far removed from our primitive past that we are immune to abracadabra words that promise to make the gods happy and therefore make us happy.

By Any Means Necessary

Posted on August 2, 2023 by thezman

There are many theories for why the Roman Republic became unstable and eventually collapsed into what we think of as authoritarianism. Given America’s republican history, the collapse of the Roman Republic has been something like Banquo’s ghost, especially for those who call themselves conservatives. Each new innovation is a threat to the republic. The progressives have the same fear, despite their obvious disdain for the republican concept. Caesarism haunts their dreams.

The funny thing about the fall of the Roman Republic is that it was largely the result of trying to save it. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he did not think of himself as the destroyer of Rome. He was saving Rome. Sure, he was violating important rules of the Republic, but Rome was too important to worry about petty things. While the idea of a republic assumes that the means justify the ends, saving the Republic was based on the ends justifying the means.

Caesar could not have existed if not for the example of Sulla. He became the key figure in the struggle between the optimates and populares factions. The former backed the supremacy of the senate, while the latter supported the popular reforms of Sulla’s former mentor, Gaius Marius. Sulla marched on Rome in an unprecedented act to defeat the populares and then did it a second time to deliver the final defeat at the Battle of the Colline Gate.

Interestingly, Sulla was made possible by the man he eventually defeated and who he once served in his own efforts to save the Republic. Gaius Marius was a general and a statesman who won the Cimbric and Jugurthine wars. In doing so he held the office of consul an unprecedented seven times. Prior to Marius, the custom was to retire from politics after reaching the position of Consul, but the Republic needed the skilled Marius, so to save the Republic exceptions were made.

Of course, the reason for those extraordinary circumstances was that the opposition in the Jugurthine wars had been able to bribe Roman senators. Jugurtha was a king of Numidia who claimed the entire kingdom of Numidia. This was in defiance of Rome, but he was able to first bribe some senators to get favorable terms and then he bribed Roman generals when war started. Rome needed to make exceptions for Marius because the best Roman citizens were no longer trusted.

You can probably start with the founding of the Roman Republic, the day Brutus stood and watched his own sons be executed for their role in the Tarquinian conspiracy, and chart the exceptions made until Caesar crossed the Rubicon. At first it was mostly personal corruption, small things that were overlooked to keep the peace. Over time it was exceptions to the rules for expediency’s sake. Each time an exception was made, it laid the groundwork for the next exception.

In the future, the robot historians will do the same thing charting the arc of the American republic as it made exceptions here and there, all in the name of expediency to save “our democracy” from some evil. In each case, the people breaking the rules or violating custom have justified what they were doing by claiming that they were breaking the rules in order to save the system. As with the Roman Republic, the American republic has fallen victim to those who claiming to save it.

We are seeing this with the latest batch of indictments of Donald Trump. In fact, the Donald Trump story arc is a microcosm of the process. It started with the so-called conservatives openly siding with their alleged opponents. You see, they were breaking their word because the greater good demanded it. This was the start of a process by which each new violation of the rules and customs is normalized and justified, thus making the next more egregious violation possible.

That process kicked off by Conservative Inc. has led to the last batch of indictments of Donald Trump, which now come with the promise of a rigged trial. The case has been assigned to one of the more corrupt and partisan judges in the system. Unlike the previous charges in Florida, which came with a judge that maintained the façade of impartiality, this judge is a crook and lunatic. This case may as well be held in the Oval Office with Hillary Clinton has judge and jury.

This now paves the way for the Republican Party to change their rules in order to keep Trump off the ballot. They will no doubt claim they are doing this to save the party or save the republic. You see, they are not succumbing to corruption or merely breaking their own rules. No, they are sacrificing in order to save the system from something they say is much worse than breaking the rules. In this process, there is always something worse than breaking the rules.

It is one of the ironies of the human condition. All human societies begin with the question, “who are we?” The answer is a set of rules that define who is in and who is not in the society. Inevitably, there are people who slither in seeking to undermine those rules by looking for loopholes and exceptions. Before long, some people start to see the rules as an obstacle. As the rules give way to this process, the only way to save the rules is to abandon the spirit of them entirely.

Of course, we have the expression “crossing the Rubicon” for a reason. When Caesar made the decision to march on Rome, the Republic was over, as there was no way to put it back together, even if Caesar was defeated. We see this happening with the political persecution of Trump. The people doing it are not going to be talked out of their next brazen violation of the rules. The only way to stop them is to physically remove them from society by any means necessary.

The Religion Of X

Posted on August 1, 2023 by thezman

Imagine if Elon Musk decides that he is a messenger from “Old Ones” sent to earth to start a new religion based around technology. The “Old Ones” are the spirits of Martians who have transcended this plane of existence. They have gifted Musk with certain abilities that have allowed him to become the world’s richest man, thus freeing him from all social constraints but also leaving him with the understanding of how normal people relate to the world and one another.

Musk’s new religion, the Church of All Worlds, combines the hedonistic elements of libertarianism with incomprehensible elements from Western epistemology to give the new religion a mysterious quality. Initiates learn the insider language of the religion and how to use the new phrases to signal their status in the religion. Most important, they learn that they are an elect chosen to ruthlessly rule over the rest of mankind and punish the weak for their weakness.

You see, in Musk’s new religion, he is the holiest of holy because he is the richest and most powerful man on the planet. Everyone’s holiness quotient is measured against the standard of Musk. Therefore, weakness and vulnerability are considered the worst sins and punished by the Church of All Worlds. This is not a religion promising salvation for the oppressed, but a religion promising the believers salvation from the oppressed by licensing violence against the weak.

For those sure that the word “religion” means only what they believe, this will not sound like a real religion. After all, the definition of religion is exactly what they believe, so by definition anything calling itself a religion that does not exactly match their beliefs is a false religion. Others might point out that Musk’s new religion lacks the essential elements of a religion like a liturgy or a holly book. Others will argue that the “Old Ones” business is just warmed over paganism.

Most people, however, will be troubled by the fact that his new religion seems to justify kicking people while they are down. This religion of the elect, or “master race” as Musk prefers to call his followers, is providing a justification for the strong to attack the weak, which is the opposite of what people think of with regards to religion. Thousands of years of conditioning have taught us that religion promises the weak salvation from the torments of this world, especially from the predation of the strong.

Sensing that his new religion is not working, he changes the name of the new religion from the Church of All Worlds to X. Atop his megachurch he has installed a giant neon X that you can see from space. He changes the definition of weak to include those who choose not to join the new religion. Their doubt is their weakness. The weak can enjoy earthly power if they give up their old ideas and join X. Those who refuse remain fair game, but the door is always open to them.

That sounds a bit better, even if the new name strikes everyone as stupid. His new religion still celebrates the abuse of the weak and vulnerable, but it gives them a path out of their condition. All they have to do is stop fighting the tides of history and they can enjoy the benefits of being on the winning team. Musk and his lieutenants will still be at the top and the material life for the convert will not change that much, but they will avoid having mobs of black-clad street activists attacking them.

In this way, Musk’s new religion incorporates that old Christian concept of salvation but retains the Nietzschean notion that the strong must dominate the weak. The believers still get to demonstrate their superiority by attacking the weak, but they get to view it as salvation from the wicked. The weak now have a clear path out of their condition, so if they remain in their condition, they must secretly reject the new religion. Their condition is proof of their rejection of and attack on the elect.

This new configuration also opens up whole new areas of scholarship for otherwise useless people to explain why the weak persist in their weakness. Weakness studies leads to weakness experts, who make a living explaining to the faithful why the weak are actually a threat to the strong. In fact, the weak are proof of a conspiracy against the strong, thus making the weak a public display of violence against the strong. It is a matter of self-defense for the strong to attack the weak!

Probably the most important innovation in the religion of X is that it turns success within the new moral order into proof of strength and moral fitness. Those at the top are free to think poorly of those below them, who are thankful for the reinforcement, as it justifies their own shabby treatment of those below them. In this way, everyone in the religion has a sense of moral superiority over someone, but also a strong motivation to maintain the rules of the new moral order.

The trouble with the religion of X is that it could run out of weak people, so it has to create a mechanism to make sure the supply of weak people is steady. This is where the weakness studies people really show their stuff. They police the lower ranks of the religion for troublemakers, declaring them weak while focusing the attention of the lower ranks on them. This maintains the supply of weaklings and serves as a reminder to the faithful that the price of strength is eternal vigilance.

Eventually, a schism develops between the wing of the faith that is in it only for the debauchery and those who are in it to destroy the world. The latter camp is actually stronger than the former camp, but they continue to insist they are the weaker party, which triggers a mob from the former camp to attack them. Musk is killed and the church collapses, leading to a civil war. This ends when a new powerful group, led by a man claiming to be a descendent of Musk restores order.

The Antiracist White Nationalist

Posted on July 31, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the rise and fall of Nick Fuentes, a review of the classic buddy comedy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

With some obvious exceptions, the people who use the term “white nationalist” use it to mean “people they do not like.” These are people who imbue their language with emotional meaning, rather than descriptive meaning. Just as Eskimos supposedly have a long list of ways to describe snow, the people fond of using the term “white nationalist” have a long list of words for people outside of their cult. The term has no meaning other than “danger! danger!” to the rest of the cult.

Before the term became a cult signal, it used to have meaning. A white nationalist is an American term for a white person who wants to live in communities free of nonwhites, especially black people. Having lost the fight over “civil rights” in the middle of the last century, and not understanding the implications of it, these people organized around the idea of separate lands for people of European descent. They want intentional communities organized around race.

Of course, the people who use the term “white nationalist” as a slur acknowledge that the people calling themselves white nationalists primarily want a white homeland exclusively for white people, but they also claim the reason for this desire is an irrational hatred of nonwhites, especially blacks and Jews. In this way, the term “white nationalists” is shorthand for people who hate nonwhites. It is why you can be a nonwhite white nationalist now.

Putting aside the bizarre claims by the usual suspects, if we assume that white nationalists want to live away from nonwhites, then it makes sense that the areas with the least number of nonwhites are the areas with the greatest number of white nationalists or at least white nationalist sympathies. In fact, this assumption is a cornerstone of civil rights law. Diversity is a moral good, so it is the standard against which people and organizations are judged.

For example, if you want to find the state that like black people the least, you will look for the state with the smallest black population. A state with few black people is, at the minimum, unwelcoming to black people, so they do not move there. The most likely reason for the unwelcome mat is the locals do not like black people. By this reasoning, Montana is the most racist state in America. Look at this map and you see ten states that have a black population below three percent.

Interestingly, half of those states voted for Joe Biden in the last election and half voted for Donald Trump. Eight of the ten states with the highest black population voted for Donald Trump and are reliably Republican. This is often pointed to as proof that white nationalism is all about hating blacks, because these states are where we tend to find people who call themselves white nationalists. They say familiarity breeds contempt, but it may also breed white nationalism.

A more granular way of looking at this is by congressional district. The most far-left district in the country is New York’s 15th Congressional District. It is ninety-seven percent diverse, but the largest group is Hispanic. The second most left-wing district is New York’s 13th Congressional District, which is fourteen percent white. Number nine on the list is Nancy Pelosi’s old haunt. It is just four percent diverse. There are many such examples on the top-50 antiracist congressional districts.

Interestingly, when you do the same exercise for Jews, you find that the states with the smallest Jewish population vote Republican. The one exception is Florida which is number eight on the list, but trends Republican. That said, there are many solidly Democratic states that have a tiny Jewish populations. Outside of a few states, the Jewish population is so small that they go unnoticed. You are more likely to meet an alien abductee in Oklahoma than meet a Jewish person.

What this tells us is that if you are a white nationalist, you want to move to Montana, Wyoming, or Utah. These three states are in the bottom ten in terms of black population and Jewish population. Mitt Romney is the face of white nationalism. Of course, if you set the Jewish threshold at one percent, then the world is your oyster, as long as you do not mind the daily antiracist lectures from your all-white neighbors in places like Oregon, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire.

This runs counter to the official narrative, but it is something people have observed for generations with regards to antiracism. The higher the percentage of blacks in any given area, the lower the percentage of antiracists and the higher the percentage of accused white nationalists. On the other hand, the lower the percentage of black people, the higher the percentage of white antiracists. If you want to live like a white nationalist but sound like an antiracist, move to Oregon.

When you look at the data, something else becomes clear. The states that are most reliably Republican are those with the highest black populations. It speaks to the racialization of white politics. If you are black, you vote Democratic no matter where you live or how you live. Whites, in contrast, vote Republican if they are in close proximity to enough blacks to form a community. Maryland and Delaware are the exceptions, but there are larger factors at play in both states.

This is something that drove the flight of white people from the cities into the suburbs in the last century. As black populations grew in American cities, there reached a tipping point where whites began to abandon the city altogether. The legendary quantitative blogger La Griffe du Lion analyzed this with regards to urban crime. Once the black population in a city reached twenty percent, white crime victimization soared and white flight to the suburbs soon followed.

The great paleoconservative writer Joe Sobran said, “In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan.” This was true in the sense that they talk like MLK but live like the KKK. The thing is though, the people labeled as the KKK tend to live closer to the antiracist ideal. The typical “white nationalist” will meet more black people at her grocery store than the typical antiracist will meet in his lifetime.

What all this tells us is that the racialization of politics has resulted in a bizarre cognitive dissonance among the most active participants. The most race aware white people live in the most diverse places. The most antiracist white people live in places that are so white they glow in the dark. What this suggests if you are worried about becoming a white nationalist is you should move to Oregon or Vermont. The surest way to not become a white nationalist is never meet a black person.

Reparations

Posted on July 27, 2023 by thezman

One of the things to look forward to in the next election will be Gavin Newsome lecturing Tim Scott on the importance of reparations. This assumes Tim Scott will be told to oppose the idea by the party. By next fall reparations could be an ancient conservative principle so we could see a contest between the two parties over who is promising the bigger reparations check.

Either way, it is a safe bet that the subject will be mainstream by next year. The effort to normalize the idea has been going on since the George Floyd riots. California is working on a reparations report. The idea is to release a big official looking study that will be the basis for the following debate. This was popular back in the middle of the last century whenever the progressives were plotting shenanigans.

Part of the plot will be a role for white people to play in the manufactured drama that will play out on cable television and the internet. Sean Hannity will take a week off for a new firmware update and come back with a new set of lapel pins and a new vocabulary to oppose the idea of reparations. It will be the old Washington Generals routine that is the defining feature of the so-called conservative movement.

Despite having a compliant opposition, it will not be easy for the regime. While most blacks support the idea of robbing their white neighbors, a large percentage oppose the idea, probably sensing it is a bridge too far. It is one thing to send whitey off to a reeducation class every year. He is still being paid to attend the DIE training. It is quite another to take food off his kid’s plate.

The bigger problem is it will put the lie to the race issue. If you demand money from whites to make blacks whole, then whites are going to assume this either closes the books on race or it is just an act of vengeance. Either way, it means unshackling white people from the guilt of racism. White people either pay the debt, so no more demands, or they see that the debt can never be paid, and it is time to move on.