Fifth Column State

Posted on January 4, 2024 by thezman

No one knows for sure who coined the term “fifth column” but it seems to have originated in Spain during the civil war. Legend has it that Franco said in a telegram that there were four Nationalist columns approaching Madrid, and a fifth column waiting to attack from the inside. Given that the telegram was discovered long after the phrase was in use suggests another source, but maybe Franco used this phrasing in other formats and that is how it got into circulation.

A fifth column is a group of people that conspire to undermine a larger group from within by disguising themselves as supporters. It is not just random individuals who disagree with official policy, like protestors. The members of the fifth column coordinate their efforts with an outside group, usually an enemy of the group. Unlike spies, who are usually motivated by greed or resentment, the members of the fifth column have a primary loyalty to the outside group for whom they work.

This is all relevant today as the client list of Jeffrey Epstein makes the rounds and is used by partisans in the usual partisan way. Lost in the usual bellowing is the fact that Epstein was an agent of a foreign state. The most likely explanation for his existence is that he was paid to get dirt on prominent Americans. He was running what people in the wilderness of mirrors call a honey trap. He used girls and boys to play on the sexual weaknesses of his targets on his island in the Caribbean.

Of course, the foreign state for whom Epstein worked was Israel. His long-time paramour was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Ian Robert Maxwell, whose real name was Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch. Maxwell was a high-level intelligence officer for Mossad his entire life. So high level, in fact, that when he died, all of the living leaders of Israel showed up at his burial. More important, six former heads of Mossad were there, and Maxwell was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

It could very well be a one in six million coincidence that Epstein was hooked up with the daughter of the most prominent spy in Israeli history, but the law of parsimony says that this was not a coincidence. It does not take long to see gaps in Epstein’s official biography, so we know he was not a middling school teacher who suddenly discovered he was an investment genius. Someone was underwriting his operation, and the most likely culprit is the state of Israel.

Espionage is as old as nations, so it should come as no surprise that Israel spies on America and Americans. It relies on American stupidity and generosity to underwrite the Zionist project, so informational asymmetry is important to them. It is why Israel stole nuclear material from a United States company, even though it resulted in a massive contamination of an area around Pittsburgh. The Apollo Affair was just part of a program to use America to further the Zionist project.

The Epstein case and the Apollo affair have another link. Unlike most espionage cases, the people doing the treachery were not motivated by greed. The oldest and most successful way of turning someone into a spy is to give them money. As George Washington said, no man is so virtuous as to refuse the highest bidder. Most men with secrets to sell are not particularly virtuous. In the case of Israeli spying, money was not the primary motivation for these crimes.

This is where the fifth column concept comes into the picture. One of the most aggressive and powerful lobbies in Washington is the Israel lobby. This is something everyone knows, but most people are afraid to discuss. Pat Buchanan was anathematized for pointing out the obvious. The Israel lobby does not limit itself to bribing politicians. It is everywhere in America. These documentaries (here, here) done by Al Jazeera a few years ago are a good primer.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, is one of the wealthiest and most powerful lobbying groups in America. Their primary reason to exist is to convince Americans, especially politicians, that the interests of Israel are the primary interest of America, and therefore can never be questioned. It is right there on their website, so it is not as if they are hiding it. Prominent Zionist like Joel Pollak and Ben Shapiro make this precise argument every day.

Up until now, no one has cared about this as the cost of underwriting Israel was small and times were generally good. Times have changed and people are naturally wondering if a luxury item like money to Israel is a good idea. Billions in Israel funding is jammed up in Congress because the line of foreigners demanding billions is getting long and the needs of Americans are not being met. Millions of foreigners are flooding over the border and Biden is worried about Israel and Ukraine.

What all of this points to is a defect of democracy. The American concept of democracy is a continent sized town hall meeting. It is a marketplace of ideas where competing interests hash it out with one another. Since it is a marketplace, it means everything, and everyone is for sale. This is how foreign interests like the Israel lobby are able to turn the instrument of American democracy to their favor at our expense. It is also how economic elites can undermine public will.

Imagine you are the king of a country and one of your advisors, a fellow with unusual headgear, is constantly lobbying you on behalf of a principality. At first you think he just favors that prince but then you learn he is related to that prince. Not only that, but he is also part of a network that is loyal to that prince. You will have that advisor sent to the tower because that person has misrepresented himself and he has worked to undermine you to the benefit of a potential rival.

In American style democracy, this logic is flipped on its head. The people’s representatives all come with a price tag on their chest. Anyone, foreign or domestic, can buy their loyalty. The reason the Israel lobby exists at all is the system rewards those who lavish politicians with money. It is the reason that every congressman quickly moves from representative of his people to Washington to Washington’s representative to the people of his district.

It is why America is a fifth column state, because it is defined by the players who operate like fifth columns. Israel is just one of the best at the game, but every country has a similar operation going in Washington. People forget that the Chinese bankrolled the Clinton operation. Charlie Trie was just a good ol’ boy from Arkansas, when he was not a bagman for the Chinese government. When everything has a price, nothing has any value and that is what we get from our political system.

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Imperial Outlook

Posted on January 3, 2024 by thezman

One of the many complaints in the brief against conservatives is that they care more about Israel than they do about the southern border. A similar complaint comes up with regards to the war in Ukraine. Professional conservatives do not care about the things that normal people think are important. Instead, professional conservatives, like Ben Shapiro, spend their days convincing normal people that the concerns of Israel or the Kagan cult matter more than the opioid problem.

While this is true, professional conservatives are not the ones spearheading this approach to politics. Look at the other side and you see the same. The people we call the Left spend their time telling the world that the mundane things that can and should be addressed by government must take a back seat to the bogeyman. Joe Biden is kicking off his campaign by visiting places where the bogeyman was seen doing the things they claim the bogeyman does.

In other words, it is not just so-called conservatives who spend their time focused on things over the rainbow. It is that our politics, in general, deliberately shifts the focus from the local and practical to the distant and obscure. No one running for anything talks about the fact that America has a $34 trillion dollar debt and that we spend almost $15,000 per person per year on medical services. America is a sick society that is becoming too broke to mend itself.

In fairness, a candidate who ran on a platform of deregulating the health care rackets and restoring order to the legal system would have no audience. Over several generations the people have been conditioned to care more about the bogeyman and Israel than their own neighborhood. A practical candidate could go into a suburb strewn with trash and illegal aliens promising to clean up both and the locals would demand to know his position on the war in Gaza or abortion.

This was not always the case. Within living memory congressional candidates would show up in their district to ask for votes. The whole “kissing babies” thing was a joke because it was a real thing that happened. Not only did politicians mingle with the voters, but office holders also responded to questions and complaints from them. Not so long-ago elected officials held town-style gatherings where normal people in the area could show up and ask questions.

Nothing like that happens now. The closest you get is Trump flying around to rural airports to hold his raucous rallies. Joe Biden will run his 2024 campaign from his beach mansion in Delaware. Occasionally they will produce a television event that makes it seem like he is in front of real people. Most likely these will be done using modern technology as he is incapable of forming a sentence now. His avatar will talk about the bogeyman and maybe Ukraine or Israel.

What we are experiencing is an inverted version of America. The founding of the country was by people who had the exact opposite view of the world. They came to the new world for selfish reasons. They did not want “freedom” or “liberty” and they did not give a damn about American values. They wanted cheap land and an opportunity to provide a better life for themselves and their family. Their patriotism, if it existed at all, was focused on the things close to them.

Well into the 19th century the typical American had little reason to care about the federal government because it was far away and did nothing that was of a great concern to the average person. The town council, on the other hand, was important because it did important things. People cared about those offices and who held them because those people had the power to do things that mattered locally, and the people were primarily focused on local matters.

The point here is that empire does not just invert the sensibilities of the ruling class but also the people in the empire. Throughout the Cold War, Finland was sandwiched between the two great empires. As a normal country with normal citizens, they focused on what was best for Finland and the Finnish people. They did not worry themselves about communism versus capitalism, other than when they needed to placate one or the other side of the Cold War.

Now that Finland has submitted itself to the empire, the primary focus of the Finnish state will be the bogey man and the enemies of the empire. Finnish politicians will feel the need to have a position on Israel. They will shake their fists at the current enemy of the empire. Meanwhile, the borders will be left open, and the social capital will be monetized and hauled away by the usual suspects, but Finns will feel good about hating the current bogeyman of the empire.

It is the nature of empire to flip the normal relationships upside down so that people focus on what is far away rather than what is near. Right now, conservatives are cheering that Harvard replaced their black lesbian president with someone who looks like he is from an antisemitic pamphlet. Meanwhile the public schools are full of pedophiles and drug dealers. No one should care about Harvard’s president, but they should care about who is running the local schools.

It very well may be that the antidote to the problems of empire is to stop thinking like the subject of an empire. When people care more about the school board elections than the presidential election, it is no longer possible for the beneficiaries of empire to frame elections around the issues of empire. Imagine if the next GOP debate was about the color of crime rather than how much everyone loves Israel. Of course, no one currently in the race would qualify under that system.

This is why empires must always run their course. The empire is born and soon the focus of everyone is on the maintenance of the empire. The people in the empire come to define themselves in terms of the empire. The empire then fades, and the people have to relearn how to be normal again. The empire must end before people can replace their imperial identity with something new. It is why the only true patriots are those who oppose the Global American Empire.

The Myth Of Dual Loyalty

Posted on January 2, 2024 by thezman

Over the holidays, a bit of controversy erupted when in an interview, Tucker Carlson noted that certain people, like Ben Shapiro, are much more concerned about Israel than the people of the United States. The bat signal was immediately lit, and Israel supporters started chanting about how Ben Shapiro is a patriot and Carlson’s criticism smacked of the old dual loyalty “canard” from a mythical time in America’s past when Jews were forced to live under a cloud of suspicion about their loyalty.

Because this is the media age, it was not hard to see the invisible hand of coordination in the responses from the usual suspects. Here we have Andrew Klavan posting the same thing as Ben Domenech, who posted the same thing as Kurt Schlichter who said the same this as Chris Loesch and you get the idea. A memo went out to their Twitter influencers to boost the idea of Ben Shapiro being a patriot. The object of his patriotism, however, is never mentioned.

This is an old trick to avoid the actual question. The pro-Israel lobby is not addressing the issue at the heart of Tucker’s criticism, which is that people like Ben Shapiro and his defenders care more about people in other countries than Americans. Instead, they want Tucker and his fans to address this made-up idea that Jews were subject to bigotry in the past on the grounds they have dual loyalty. Instead of addressing the point, they shift the focus to another topic.

Of course, the concept of dual loyalty itself is the result of a similar tactic used in the past to shield Zionist from criticism. The “dual loyalty” concept is a product of the 20th century, created by the Israel lobby to obscure the fact that we suddenly had this new force in politics that demanded the government care more about the interests of Israel than the interests of Americans. People who raised questions about the Israel lobby got smeared as antisemites.

For most of American history and probably European history, the concept of dual loyalty was unknown, for the simple reason people understood that a man who chases two rabbits catches none. You can have only one true loyalty. You may have conditional loyalty to other people and ideas, but those conditional loyalties have to give way to your primary loyalty. You were primarily a Christian, an Englishman, a loyal subject of the empire or a Jew. That is the nature of loyalty.

That was always the criticism of Jews, that their first loyalty was always going to be to their people, no matter their conditions. In America into the 1970’s it was common for people to note, often approvingly, that Jews stick together. The implication was that they cared primarily about their people. Jewish comedians had jokes about this that had a punchline, “but is it good for the Jews” that played on this well-known and generally accepted reality of the Jewish people.

It should be noted that into the 20th century this was same reasoning was applied to Catholics, who were assumed to be primarily loyal to the Church. This was a carry over from the schisms within Christendom. Protestants in Protestant countries could accuse Catholics of being loyal to the Pope rather than the king. Even today, Catholic judges have to answer questions about their faith. Jewish liberals attacked Amy Coney Barrett for being a faithful Catholic, especially on abortion.

The clever trick about this “dual loyalty” stuff is it not only shifted the focus from Jews onto their critics, but it made noticing what everyone, including Jews, had accepted for hundreds of years into a taboo. Noticing that Ben Shapiro was an emotional wreck over the Hamas attack, but he blatantly states that he does not care about the health and welfare of the white people is somehow immoral. It is a form of the motte-and-bailey argument that is so popular with the Left.

Of course, guys like Ben Shapiro and Joel Pollak do not have dual loyalty, despite having dual citizenship. It is impossible to have dual loyalty. Their primary loyalty is to their people, which is why they wear the funny little hats. That is the point of the hats, to tell the world they are not of the world, but separate. This is an age-old way people identify with a specific group and show their loyalty to that group by physically separating from everyone else in society.

There is nothing immoral about this and there is nothing immoral about noticing it, but it does raise questions, which is why we have the “dual loyalty” stuff. Tolerating a minority whose primary interests lie outside the majority must be limited. That limit is the interests of the majority, whose primary loyalty is to themselves. It means Ben Shapiro cannot pretend to speak for the interests of the majority. He must appeal to them as an outsider on behalf of outsiders.

This creates an obvious problem, so what people like Ben Shapiro prefer to do is conflate the interest of Americans with the interests of Israel so that questioning the behavior of Israel is equivalent to burning the American flag. To their credit, this rhetorical game has worked on many people. Anyone questioning the proportionality of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack or criticizing the wholesale killing of civilians is unironically accused of being unpatriotic.

The fact that Tucker has not been hurled into the void over this speaks to the changing nature of public consciousness. America and the West are heading into a time for choosing in which people must think about the question of loyalty. Are you more loyal to an abstract concept or to people who look like you, sound like you and share your same concerns about your community? We are entering a time when people begin to think about their hierarchy of loyalties and their identity as people.

It also speaks to the fact that the old pseudo-loyalties are breaking down. When the concept of American has been watered down to the point where it often means caring more for strangers than your own family, it is not hard to see why increasing numbers of Americans are no longer moved by calls to patriotism. Ben Shapiro waving the American flag and Israeli flag in front of the suckers is not working because the suckers are no longer moved by the American flag.

It is natural for minorities to put the interests of their minority group first, as their identity is tied to their minority status. In a society composed of minorities, there can be no patriotism as everyone’s primary loyalty will be to their group, so the good of the whole is always a secondary consideration, if it is considered at all. In other words, America will be populated with people who think about their people, just as Ben Shapiro thinks of his people, but they will just wear different hats.

2024 Predictions

Posted on January 1, 2024 by thezman

It is that time of year again when I slaughter a goat, examine the entrails, and reveal to the world what will happen in the coming year. Given that last year’s hit rate was spectacular, the entrails tell me you should send a donation to the Seer of Lagos for providing this valuable service. There is no “black swan” prediction in the mix as by definition any such prediction would no longer qualify as a black swan event if it were to happen, so 2024 will be white swans all the way down.

Trump Will win Iowa and Ron DeSantis will finish second with Haley finishing a disappointing third place, tied with Ramaswamy. In New Hampshire, Trump will win the state with DeSantis finishing tied for third place with Ramaswamy, who will start talking about himself as having momentum. Trump meanwhile will win South Carolina and Michigan with more than half the vote. He will demand that the other candidates drop out of the race, with Ramaswamy being the only one to do so.

In the spring the convictions will start to come in from the various kangaroo courts accusing Trump of being a big meanie. This will have no impact on his polling, but the media will begin to form a narrative where the party feels it has no choice but to disqualify Trump and expel him from the party. The Supreme Court will take one of the 14th amendment cases, but hold off on delivering a verdict, giving the Republicans time to figure out how to expel Trump and relieve the court of this burden.

This will create chaos in the party as voters will accuse the remaining candidates of being in on this new round of election rigging. Someone will stand up at a Haley campaign event and caller her a rigger. With the remaining candidates so unpopular, the party will look outside the field and ask Glenn Youngkin to join the race. He will be quietly guarantied the nomination, as the party will control the Trump delegates and their own super delegates, thus having control of the nomination…

On the Democratic side, Biden will win the early primaries, mostly because he is running unopposed. In the spring he will have a serious episode that calls into question his fitness to hold office. This will be something more egregious than his shaking hands with invisible people, a thing he now does often. It will be something that the media cannot ignore. This will lead official Washington to intensify calls for the GOP to nominate Youngkin as a unifying candidate.

What no one will discuss in public is that Youngkin has deep ties to the military industrial complex, the neocons, and the intelligence community. He is this generations version of George H. W. Bush, a guy who does what is required to satisfy the rubes in fly over country, but is primarily loyal to the permanent ruling class. What Youngkin represents is a final attempt to claw back some order from the gathering chaos. Conservatives will rally to this idea, as they are this stupid…

The Federal Reserve, having convinced itself that inflation is not real, will relent to pressure from the usual suspects and begin a program of cutting rates in the first quarter of the year. By summer it will become clear that inflation is real, and it never went away just because the Fed stopped believing in it. People will begin to compare Jerome Powell to Arthur Burns, who fell into the same trap in the 1970’s when he failed to raise rates enough to control inflation…

By summer Argentina will collapse under a combination of social unrest, political unrest, and economic chaos. Javier Milei was a fun protest vote, but Argentines will soon learn that having a clown in charge is actually worse than having crooks in charge and they will begin to protest the government. The political class will use its real power to undermine his government. The economy will crater as foreign investment vanishes and the cost of borrowing soars…

In the first reported sighting of the heretofore mythical Ozark Mountain Shark, Paul Ramsey will be attacked by said shark while tending his property. He will not be injured, but the shark will warn him that if he does not paint those pink walls in his studio, he will come back with friends, and it will not be pretty. Faced with having to repaint the studio, Paul will abandon the format and instead start a new YouTube cooking series in which he only uses the microwave…

On the sporting front, the Lagos sportsball club will win the annual sports bowl, prevailing over the club from San Francisco. Both of the Japanese stars the Dodgers signed over the winter will have season ending injuries. The sporting god are never kind to the big spenders. In the other football, the one played with feet and round balls over in Europe, the Premier League, which is the highest level of the English football league system, will file for bankruptcy…

The Israelis will keep trying to escalate the Gaza war in order to draw in the United States, but the Iranians will not take the bait. Russia will start to upgrade the Syrian air defense systems as a way to both defend against Israeli attacks and to open another front in the proxy war with the Global American Empire. The Saudis agree to move forward with Russia and China on developing their nuclear program, signaling an end to the Saudi-American relationship that has defined the region…

The concept of antiwhite will become mainstream as the media continues to push the culture war in advance of the elections. Normal white people will begin to talk publicly about the war on white people. The “great replacement” will go mainstream, and the usual suspects try to scream it down with the usual language, but normal white people will shrug off these tactics. For the first time in generations, the claim of racism will not terrorize normal white people…

The entertainment industry will have its worst year in memory as the combination of antiwhite content, reduced inventory due to the 2023 strikes and changing habits results in a lower box office and accelerated cable cutting. Not only will people cut the cord, but the internet services will see a drop in subscription numbers. Content owners are insulting their customers and pricing them out of the market. The market for video content is tapped out and will begin to decline.

The Biden administration will intensify efforts to confiscate Russian assets currently frozen in Western banks. The stated goal is to free up money for Ukraine, but the real point is to bring Russian to the table. The administration wants to avoid a total collapse in Ukraine by “freezing” the war. The Russians are not stupid so they have no interest in that idea, but the West thinks the threat of confiscating Russian assets could force the Russians to reconsider their position.

This will fail as the Russians will see it as an opportunity to remind the rest of the world that their money is not safe in Western banks. The Russian army will continue to grind down the Ukrainians all along the line of contact. Yulia Tymoshenko, the “gas princess”, will become a serious threat to Zelensky as Washington quietly backs her play, which in turn leads to a political collapse in Kiev. By the end of the year, Zaluzhny will give his Mannerheim speech, which he spoke of last year…

My book will be the number one Christmas gift in 2024…

Looking Back At 2023

Posted on December 29, 2023 by thezman

It is that time of year again when I look back at all of the things I got wrong and promise to do better next year. Well, not all the things I did wrong, just the things I got wrong in last year’s prediction post. Everyone loves making predictions, because everyone forgets about them, but few take the time to revisit their predictions. An iron law of the universe is that you learn more from your mistakes than your successes, so it is a good time to take a look at those mistakes.

As far as the effects of the sanctions on Russia and what it will do to Europe, I was amazingly on target. Gasoline in Germany is about ten dollars per gallon and is expected to go higher in 2024. On the other hand, India and China are experiencing an unprecedented boom in cheap energy. On top of that, the Indians are reselling their refined crude to Europe at a premium. The European economy is in recession now and it is all due to waging war on its energy supplier.

As far as America, I was wrong about how inflation would play out. It seems we got a pause and now it is picking back up again, just as the Fed signals it is ready to start cutting rates in 2024. I still think we end up in the Arthur Burns trap, but the timing of it may be a bit different. I was wrong about interest rates, and I was wrong about the economy as a whole. At least on paper, we have not gone into recession, which seems to be due to relatively cheap energy.

I nailed the Trump story from the start. The lawfare against him has played out as I have been saying since 2021. The party did try to rally around the sacred black man, but he turned out to be too ridiculous even for the Republicans. Instead, they have gone all in on the brown woman. They are trying to fake poll her into contention or at least make her a credible looking loser. War Karen is at 25% in New Hampshire, so they can pretend she is the winner when Trump is gone.

On the Democratic side, I was all wrong. If you want proof we live in a simulation run by sadists, look no further than Joe Biden. The mere fact that this deranged simpleton is president is proof enough. The fact that the party has not removed him from office and found a better actor for the role suggests the simulation is broken. Unless something wild happens in early 2024, it looks like Joe Biden will be on the ballot. The robot historians will never be able to sort this one.

I got the Kanye West stuff mostly right. He is not in bankruptcy, but he must be running out of money as he is now groveling to the usual suspects in Hebrew. You just know that he will be seen in front of a pile of shoes soon. I was wrong about Cozy getting nuked, but they have no traffic now, so close enough. Ethan Ralph was the last guy on there with an audience and he is now on Rumble. Maybe my 2024 prediction will be Cozy shuts down for good.

I did not finish my book. I learned a good lesson on this front. Writing a book is like any other project in that you have to see it through to the end. If you take a break there is a good chance you will never come back from break. I got about three quarters through it and realized I wanted to revisit some of it. I thought maybe I was rushing things, so I took a break and before long other things filled that time slot. One thing I am doing now is setting aside time in the schedule to finish it in 2024.

My Ukraine predictions were a mixed bag. I was wrong about Ukraine pulling back to more defensible positions, even though that was the sensible thing. I was also wrong about NATO escalating by introducing “advisors” into Ukraine. Washington has sent a three-star general to take over planning and there are rumors of NATO people operating in country, but nothing has been confirmed. Putin mentioned Poland maybe taking parts of Western Ukraine, but the Poles have not mentioned it.

It is too soon to tell how all of this will play out in Europe, but the landscape looks bleak for the pro-America parties, so this is an incomplete. The West did try to regime change Serbia this month, so I can take a win on that one, but otherwise I was ahead of my skis on how this plays out politically. I will take the win on the failure of American weapons and what it does to the reputation of the MIC. Western wonder weapons were a colossal failure in Ukraine last summer.

I was joking about human sacrifice being the next social fad, but boy did I hit it out of the park on the Alex Jones stuff. The guy is now facing over a billion in fines for offending some degenerates in Connecticut. That case is a great example of how managerialism and mass media converge create an alternative reality. The mass media has ignored this case, so few people are aware of it, even though it is the most egregious corruption of the law this country has ever seen.

On a positive note, I nailed my escape from Lagos prediction. It was a close call as I closed in December, but it still counts as a win. I have a bunch of things to do before I can live in the house fulltime, but those are progressing. As is always the case, every small project turns out to be more involved than expected. Given that what comes next will be the 2024 predictions, I may write those up in the new place. If you are going to make predictions, do it from atop a mountain lair.

The lesson every year when I look at these predictions from the past year is that the safe bet is that current trends will continue. Something unexpected has to happen for a trend to stop or change direction. Those “black swan” events are rare, which is why we have the expression. Of course, it is all about perception. Many people saw the mortgage crisis coming, but the bankers did not and they were the driving force behind that trend so we got a crisis.

The things that are nearly impossible to predict are the stupid things that take on a life of their own, like the Ukraine war or Covid. The people responsible for these things passed dozens of warning signs and ignored the obvious choices in order to find the worst choice possible. It is not in our nature to think people can be this willfully stupid and destructive, so we cannot imagine such things. Yet, these are the people who rule over us, so they will determine what happens in 2024.

Ungovernable Costs

Posted on December 28, 2023 by thezman

Over Christmas, when people are not paying attention, the oligarchs have been busy updating their terms of services. These are “agreements” you must accept in order to use their service, which in most cases is a monopoly. In those rare cases when there is more than one supplier of the service, they work together in order to have identical terms of service agreements. The terms of service agreement is slowly becoming the constitutional order of the country.

One of the noteworthy changes comes from Amazon, which announced they would start packing ads into their video content. Until now, subscribers to their service did not get ads in video and audio content as they paid an annual fee. Now Amazon Prime users will get to pay the annual fee and get to see ads in their content. No doubt that for this additional service, Amazon plans to raise their annual fee in 2024. After all, it costs money to pack those ads in your content.

This is a familiar pattern. Cable television came with the promise that in exchange for a monthly fee you would not get ads. That remains somewhat true for premium services, like HBO, but with the end of over-the-air television, all of the ad-based channels are on a pay-for-view services now with their ads. If you want video content you pay for a service like Hulu or Apple TV so you can watch the content you used to have on your cable service, with all of the ads.

Sporting events are now ad platforms where a small portion of the presentation is the game you are trying to watch. An American football game is officially one hour, but with stoppages it lasts about ninety minutes. With ads and long breaks for proselytizing about the latest thing, the games take over three hours. Even the calling of the games is now packed with ads and lectures. “This description of what just happened is brought to you by our good friends at Pfizer” is a real thing now.

It is not just video content where we see this. It used to be that stadiums were named after a local famous person or the place where they were built. Maybe the owner of the thing named it for himself. Now they all have stupid names for fly-by-night companies that disappear once the suckers get wise. Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh is now something called Acrisure Stadium. According to the company, “Acrisure is a fast-growing fintech leader that operates a global insurance broker.”

This tendency to tax you this way, and it is a tax, will soon be into every nook and cranny of your life if you let it. Agree to a lease on a new car and the entertainment system will soon require you to watch a video ad or take some sort of survey before you can start the car. When the car makers transition to options as a service, they will come with ads you must endure to use them. Turn on the heated seats in winter and you will be hit with ads for the latest sexual dysfunction drugs.

The people on the other end defend this dynamic on the grounds that their costs go up, so they have to find new ways to generate revenue. Amazon could keep it honest and raise their annual fee or separate it from the bundle of services they call Prime, but that would risk information symmetry. Their users could then decide if the fee is worth the content, rather than thinking about the free shipping or other stuff. Packing in ads muddies the waters and thus makes the user easier to fleece.

That is why it is best to think of the service economy as a tax economy, rather than a traditional marketplace. Like the government, these firms are deliberately entangling you in their service so they can take a little here and little there. Government is a protection service that is always adding fees, levies, and new taxes to the cost of the service in the same way we see with technology services. Like government, these services always first seek to be a monopoly.

Of course, this is why governments are supposed to prevent monopolies and oligopolies like we see today. Part of the protection racket that is government is to prevent privateers from preying on the people. It used to be that these terms of service agreements were limited by the courts. The one-way contract was always assumed to be the powerful preying on the weak, so the courts stepped in on the side of the weak to make sure the deal was fair. That no longer happens in America.

Putting all of that aside and just thinking about this process as a form of taxation, the question is why are these taxes rising? Inflation is one possible answer, but this process predates the rise in inflation. For a long time, they said we had low inflation, under two percent most years, yet the system is flooded with new taxes and new ways to tax people through new methods. Fifty years ago, ads were easily avoided, but today it is nearly impossible to live an ad-free life.

One way to start thinking about this is to look at the government in terms of per capita spending in constant dollars. Fifty years ago, the federal government accounted for about $4,500 per person. Today it is $20,000. Again, this is in constant dollars, so expansion of the money supply is included. That extra government comes with secondary and tertiary costs. It means millions of pages in new rules, which means millions of new expenses for complying with those rules.

Then you have the cultural effects. All of these new fads that are religiously enforced by these massive corporations are not free. It cost money to rearrange all of the video services to promote black content during the George Floyd campaign. It cost InBev real money to associate their brand with pedophiles. In other words, the cultural revolution as currently fought by the managerial system is packed with hidden costs and those hidden costs and paid for by thousands of hidden taxes.

When you start to think of these small changes cumulatively, they point to an inherent defect of the managerial system. The point of the system is to expand control of society which means ever expanding costs. This starts to crowd out other things, productive things like making stuff in factories. This requires new ways of raising revenue, which brings its own costs. Most importantly, the raison d’être of the system needs constant maintenance, which explains the culture war.

In other words, managerialism slowly crowds out the productive elements of society in favor of those that serve the system. This means the cost of the system grows while the effective tax base shrinks. Before long you end up with a society in which everyone is spending their productive hours either watching ads for penis pills or producing new ways to force people to watch ads for penis pills. At some point it must reach a crisis where the costs exceed the ability to tax.

In the small scale this happened in many American cities in the middle of the last century with the first waves of the cultural revolution. Progressive governments shifted from providing protection to social experimentation. This led to chaos, so business and taxpayers moved out of the cities. The shrinking tax base meant the only choices were to roll back the experiments or raise tax rates. They always chose the latter, so taxpayers continued to feel until many cities were insolvent.

What we are seeing now is those city experiments conducted on a continent sized country, enlisting the oligarchical power of corporations. The result must be the same as you cannot have an economy based on people lecturing one another on the latest thing any more than you can have an economy based on protecting people from muggers and drug dealers unleashed by the state. Just like the cities, the country will reach a point at which everyone agrees it is ungovernable.

Unfrozen Caveman Conservatives

Posted on December 27, 2023 by thezman

The remarkable thing thus far about the 2024 presidential election is that the so-called conservatives, and therefore the Republican Party, have gone into this process without having prepared for it. They have experienced two presidential cycles that went entirely against their interests, yet they have not done anything over the last eight years to prepare for this cycle. Their plan, if you want to call it a plan, is to pray the other party eliminates Trump for them via lawfare.

We know with a fair bit of certainty that the party told the collection of munchkins showing up at debates that they expected Trump to be disqualified. In the first debate, the zombie-like Asa Hutchinson blurted this out during the questioning. In the last debate, Ron DeSantis said something along the lines that the option for voters is what was onstage due to Trump’s legal troubles. It was long rumored that he decided to run based on the assurance that Trump would be eliminated.

Now, that is a plan, of sorts, but only if you think the only problem you have as a party is this one man wrecking your fun. Get rid of the bad man and the party, along with the so-called conservative movement, can go back to the old times. They are even bringing back the neocon nutters to promote a dingbat. It is as if they think they are just one more court ruling from going back to 2000 when they could pass off a simpleton to their voters as the updated version of The Gipper.

Of course, Trump is not an isolated phenomenon. He exists because of what the so-called conservatives did in 2000 with George Bush. The populist revolt within the Republican Party is the response to the bait and switch, along with massive amounts of lying, by the party and so-called conservatives. The reason millions continue to support Trump, despite all of his well-documented flaws, is that the “party of Lincoln” thought they could fool all of the people all of the time.

The reason the party is unprepared for 2024 is their intellectual engine ran out of fuel back in the Reagan years. In retrospect, the 1980’s were the last gasp of the old bourgeois liberalism that defined America into the 20th century. Buckley style conservatism was a bug fix, a cumulative patch, to the progressive software of the 20th century and once that work was done, conservatism had nothing left. It was a room full of people trained to fix something that was about to be replaced.

It is why conservatism looks like a collection of unfrozen cavemen unaware of the time that has passed while they were frozen. National Review still puts out nonsense about how progressive cultural production is actually conservative. That is when they are not swearing that blacks will start voting Republican any day now. The reason that so-called conservatives are locked into the 1980’s is they evolved for the moment and once the moment passed, they no longer had a purpose.

In retrospect, conservatism of the Buckley sort was a reaction to one narrow set of claims made by progressives in the 20th century. Put another way, it was a delayed response to the reforms of the FDR generation, who were sure that government could right the wrongs of American society. Through force they could fix race, poverty, inequality and the trade-offs of the marketplace. Conservatism was a response to the failure of this project to achieve its aims.

With the end of the Cold War and the arrival of the Clinton machine, the old left of government reformers was replaced by a new generation of reformers. These were the sons and daughters of the managerial elite who were marinated in the ideas of post-Marx culturalism, once called political correctness but now called woke. It is the totalitarian project to cleanse the world of whiteness by harnessing the power of the institutions, like a team of horses pulling the reformers.

Conservatism has no answer to this because conservatism was evolved to fix the bugs of the old progressive software. As a result, the Bush years were not spent addressing the cancer unleashed by the Clinton machine, but instead poured trillions of new dollars on federal agencies as they ramped up the cultural revolution. White people sensed things were getting worse as a result of the Bush presidency. The Obama years confirmed this and thus the populist revolt began with the 2010 election.

What white people in America faced in the 1970’s was a government that was terrible at the basics of government, but focused on righting the wrongs of the world. The antidote was conservatism that promised to reverse this. What white people face today is an army of antiwhite bigots running the centers of cultural production and protected by the federal government. They need a movement and party that promises to reverse all of this, but instead they get unfrozen caveman conservatives.

That is what you see on the debate stage at these debate shows. With the exception of Vivek Ramaswamy, who is a Trump catspaw, the rest are some versions of what you can see at the Reagan Museum. They skim over some of the cultural issues, but refuse to address the racial issues. If any of them noticed that there are no more white people in television ads, he would rocket up the polls. None of them mention these things because for all of them, the present is a foreign country.

Nature abhors a vacuum, which is why Trump exists. The system is lucky in that Trump is not very good at politics. A more skillful political animal with Trump’s instincts would be the Red Caesar the system fears. The inevitable failure of Trump to scratch the itch that has needed scratching for decades will not make the itch go away. It will simply lay the groundwork for a more skillful and more cynical version, because in the end no political system can survive making war on itself.

Liberal Intolerance

Posted on December 26, 2023 by thezman

There are certain assumptions about the world that modern people take for granted, without thinking about in any detail. These assumptions are about how things ought to be arranged in a modern society. Things like the rule of law and freedom of speech are just assumed to be social positives. Deliberate violations of these liberal principles are a sign that a society is in trouble or corrupt. No one ever wonders why this is the case as it is just part of the shared reality of modern life.

You see this in this essay by Paul Gottfried, which is a response to Canadian historian Ricardo Duchesne, who has taken Gottfried to task for his defense of the old bourgeois liberalism of the past. It is a good essay on the general topic of liberalism and whether or not it is to blame for the current crisis, but of interest here is the assertion that things like religious inclusiveness, individual freedom, and constitutional government are in of themselves good things and signs of progress.

Gottfried does not spend any time arguing these points, as he just assumes them to be good things that a good society ought to seek. This is not peculiar to Gottfried, as most everyone assumes the same thing. Go around a public area in the West and ask people if they favor more or less freedom and they will always pick the former. The same is true for the rest of the principles we associate with liberalism. The moral framework of the West is just assumed to be right and reasonable.

Now, we do not wonder about gravity or the sun rising in the east and setting in the west because these are settled. Few people know why objects fall to the earth when dropped and even fewer know that they accelerate toward the earth at thirty-two feet per second squared, but they know about gravity. Like the sun rising in the east, gravity is a settled matter, so there is no need to debate it. The same is generally assumed about the basic principles of liberal democracy.

What would go unnoticed is the inclusion of religious tolerance in there with reasonable things like individual liberty. Most of the liberal project can be justified, as much as possible, by reason. We can make logical arguments in favor of a rights-based society and limited government. You can make a rational argument in favor of parliamentary rule over a king or dictator. The same cannot be said for religious tolerance, which is something taken for granted, but never examined.

Western societies are moral societies. Instead of being bound together by kinship or force, as we see with most of the world, what holds Western people into political entitles is a common morality. Sure, blood, soil and history play a big role, but every European pollical entity has included significant minority populations. At the dawn of the French Revolution, most people in France did not share the same language. They spoke various local dialects, and in some areas, deferent languages.

This is even more true today as the elites of the West preach open borders, pluralism, and democracy as the holy trinity. The only way this can work is if all the new people agree to the old moral code or the moral code is adjusted to accommodate the new people coming into these old societies. The new speech and thought laws are all about policing the new moral code which prohibits the old stock from thinking anything but happy thoughts about the newcomers.

This is the basis for pluralism. Anyone can be an American if they embrace the American creed, which is a secular way of saying they can be an American if they embrace the religion of Americanism. Vivek Ramaswamy and Ben Shapiro have based their lives on this assertion. They are just as American as the descendants of Quakers or 19th century German immigrants. They say this because they embrace the religion of America and therefore meet the moral criteria to be American.

The problem here should be obvious. If Americanism is the moral code of America and by extension the West in general, and it insists on a general universality, then there can be no tolerance for alterative moral codes. Not only can American liberalism not tolerate alternative moral codes internally, but it must be intolerant of alternative moral codes external to the West. If you want to know why the West has waged war on Islam and now Eurasia, there is the answer.

The reason that Western societies now function like secular theocracies is liberalism has evolved into a religion. It has crowded out Christianity from the public square because no society can have more than one moral framework. Just as science replaced religious explanations for the natural world, liberalism has displaced the explicitly supernatural basis for societal morality with an esoteric moral code based vaguely on things like equality and openness.

What this means is that the assumption that religious tolerance is a liberal principle or could ever have been a liberal principle is false. The opposite is true. Liberalism must drive out or suppress any alternative moral framework, because it is the moral framework that evolved to replace the old moral order. That means it is not just intolerant or Christianity, but any morale framework that places itself above the morality of the liberal order. Everything must submit to the liberal faith.

The question, of course, is why has the liberal project that started at the end of the Middle Ages evolved into something like a secular Gnosticism? Gottfried looks for things outside of liberalism, like Protestantism, while Duchesne looks for things within the liberal tradition like pluralism. In both cases and in most critiques of liberalism the assumption is there is a worm in the apple. The apple being the liberal project and the worm being some sort of corruption.

In reality, the problem may simply lie in the fact that you cannot have a moral order based on reason. Reason cannot be the authority for how people ought to treat one another or how government should be organized. Reason can only take us to the point where the people need to sort these issues for themselves, because the great diversity of man means there is no universally right answer to these questions. How we ought to act is up to us or our gods.

When the gods are removed and tradition is discarded, something that must happen when all things are subjected to the acid wash of reason, there are no standards against which to measure moral claims. That leaves force as the determining factor, which means the moral order is decided by people who see it as their purpose to impose their sense of the moral order. Liberalism must end with a ruling class of secular clerics engaged in a never ending sermon.

The Tool Makers

Posted on December 22, 2023 by thezman

Note: I did not fall off the roof or plunge to my death falling off a ladder. I simply got busy this morning and forgot to hit the post button. I must admit, I miss working with my hands, so this is a the best days for me right now. I hope everyone has a great Christmas and I will be back next week.

A feature of politics is listing all of the things that are worse than they used to be at some point in the past. The people are dumber. The economy is worse. The politicians are somehow dumber than in the past. That is because politics is about morality, what we ought to be doing or ought not to be doing. You engage in politics because you think we ought not to be doing whatever it is we are doing or we should be doing something that we are not doing and that is going to be trouble.

Marx observed that if we get the morality right, as in we all agree on what ought to be done, then there is no need for politics. Imagine if all of our politicians agreed on what needs doing, the priority of those things and everyone agreed with them. We would no longer have politics or politicians. Instead, we would have bureaucrats busy doing what they are charged with doing. That is not the way of things, so we have halfwits and lunatics yelling at one another and we call it politics.

There are lots of things that are wrong in this world, not the least of which is politics, but there is a lot going right too. I thought about that while on a ladder last night fixing something that needed fixing. I noticed that the top deck of the ladder had a nice tray for holding small bits. There were holes for holding screw drivers and a larger hole for holding a drill. The little tray has a magnet baked into the bottom so the little metal bits you place there will not easily fall to the floor.

The ladder maker rightly assumed that these things would be useful to the sort of person using the ladder. Odds are, most step ladders are used by HVAC guys and electricians, but that is a guess. These are the sorts of people who need drills, screwdrivers and little metal bits with them at the top of the ladder. Perhaps this is standard on all ladders now, but it is new to me. My tall ladder is from a different maker and has a slightly different take on this idea.

When I was a young man working construction, you had step ladders made of wood for electrical work and aluminum ladders for other work. The reason you used wood ladders of electrical work is to avoid being fried to a crisp if you made a mistake and grabbed hold of a live wire. I once cut into a 220 line I thought was cold and it was an electrifying experience. These days most ladders are made of fiberglass which is better, lighter and does not conduct electricity.

Thinking about this at the top of the ladder, it occurred to be that just about all of the tools I am using are better than when I was a young man. I have a cordless drill that has variable speeds and does not require a chuck key. Most importantly, it does not require a nine-mile-long extension cord. As a teenager working construction, I probably wrapped up six million feet of extension cord. The house is full of tools right now and I do not see an extension cord.

The point is that there are lots of things getting better, despite the best efforts of halfwits and lunatics who run our politics. These small improvements in things like ladders and hand tools exist outside of the domain of halfwits and lunatic. The guy who came up with a new top set on a ladder was thinking about how to make a better ladder and thus make life a bit easier for the ladder user. There are millions of people out there who spend their days finding ways to make things better.

Of course, the people thinking about how to make a better ladder are not the people you now see in TV ads. The smart guy in the movies is nothing like the genuinely smart guys finding small improvements in life. The guy in the TV ad is a figment of the imagination of people who hate the guy who made a better ladder. That is the most important fact in the word right now. No matter how hard the bad guys try to make the TV guy real, he is not real, while the ladder guy is real.

That is something to keep in mind, especially in what has always been called the season of hope in the Western world. Joe Sobran was right. The guy making a better ladder, a better drill, a better way to patch a hole in the wall, that guy towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. The people responsible for those TV ads are motivated by envy, because the guy making a better ladder, the guy who invented the ladder, is the image of superiority.

The lesson of history is that human capital is what wins out in the end. That is the iron law of the universe. It has held for ten thousand years and will hold for ten thousand years into the future. The halfwits and lunatics, the guys mocking you through TV ads and movies, will eventually submit to this iron law of history. Eventually, the guys using those better tools put down those tools and set about solving the problem of those people behind the problems of our politics.

Merry Christmas.

Green Door Content: Annie Hall

Posted on December 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: By the time this posts, I will be on the roof of the new place with the chimney man getting things ready for the new woodstove. I had the flue inspected and that is fine, but the cap needs attention and I am having the flue cleaned just to be sure. The following is a post from behind the green door to hold everyone over until I return, assuming I do not fall off the roof. If there is no Friday post, it has been fun.

If I were tasked with writing a summary of the classic Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall, I would be hard pressed to get past a paragraph. It is film starring a neurotic Jewish man, played by Woody Allen, and a mentally unstable woman, played by Diane Keeton, who wander around New York for ninety minutes speaking to one another as if they swallowed a 1970’s pop-psychology textbook.

The movie reminds me of the old quip about the James Joyce novel Ulysses. “A Jewish man who wanders around Dublin and nothing happens.” That is not a criticism. In fact, it is the best thing I can think of to say about the film. There is a chance that Allen was inspired by the Joyce novel and was attempting to recreate it for a New York audience, from an entirely Jewish perspective. Joyce is mentioned in this scene.

I did some digging around to see if maybe that was what Allen was doing with this film, but I found nothing to suggest it. Despite its status as a classic film and one of Allen’s best works, there is not much in the way of critical analysis. That is because there is not much to examine when it comes to things you expect in a story. It is just two neurotic Manhattanites wandering around for ninety minutes.

The film is classed as a romantic comedy, but it is probably better to call it a character study or perhaps an anthropological study. It is primarily about two people, presented as representative of the cultural elite of the time, as they struggle with their various insecurities and disconnectedness. Comedian Alvy Singer, (Allen) and Annie Hall (Keaton) are struggling with alienation in the modern age.

Alienation is the subtext of the film, but it is not entirely clear that Allen had the self-awareness to know this. Alvy Singer is the typical Jewish character struggling with his otherness in a world dominated by non-Jews. Allen hams it up quite a bit to the point where Alvy Singer is a satire of the Jewish guy who is sure that around every corner there could be a gang of Nazis ready to haul him away to the camps.

Once you get past the hyperbole, you get to the essential reality of the Jewish condition, at least as Jews see it, which is that they are always a people who dwell alone, regardless of where they find themselves. Who they are is defined by their outsider status so they must remain as outsiders or risk losing their identity. It is the essential contradiction at the heart of Jewish identity in the diaspora.

Alienation takes on a different form with Annie. She is presented as from a standard issue white middle-class family. At one point, Alvy jokes that she grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting. She is the modern atomized female, a creature of both feminism and the modern economy, who sees a therapist and spends most of her time dwelling on trivialities to escape from the loneliness of her life.

The two of them sort of fall in love, but their relationship does not work because of the self-absorption rooted in their alienation. Alvy only thinks about sex, while Annie has no interest in sex. In both cases, this leads to endless self-examination that is entirely superficial and pointless. These are two people who are alienated from themselves, so it is why they cannot have a normal human relationship.

Sadly, that analysis is far more interesting than the film version. Both characters are boring and self-indulgent. There is no reason to care about them because you have met these stock figures loads of times in film and real life. Annie is a neurotic dingbat who every man over thirty has met a thousand times. Allen is the classic Jewish guy who thinks his endless complaining makes him seem interesting.

That is the main problem with the film. It wants to be a social commentary, but it has nothing to say about the things featured in the film. You get some pithy commentary from Alvie who breaks the fourth wall throughout the film, but those are just gag lines that Allen used in his stand-up. Otherwise, you have no reason to care about the people, so you have no reason to think about their dilemma.

In this regard it is like other movies of this decade in that they were made by people who held themselves in high regard, so they just assumed anything they did or said was important by itself. They made films that were supposed to lead the horse to water, but it was hard to care about the horse, so the water never came into focus. Whatever Allen was trying to say about his time and place in this film remained unsaid.

That said, the film is visually interesting. Even after fifty years it feels like you are there in Manhattan with Alvy and Annie. You often think you can smell the stench of the urine-soaked hobos, which were a feature of the city at the time. This may be why the film shows up on the top-100 list, rather than other Woody Allen films which were graded higher at the time in terms of artistic merit.

In the end, Annie Hall feels like a professionally made film school project in that it is self-indulgent and the person doing the self-indulging is not that interesting. Woody Allen’s hang-ups and insecurities are interesting to no one but Woody Allen. A film about them, not matter how well done, is still just a film about a boring Jewish man who spends ninety minutes walking around Manhattan with an equally boring shiksa.

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