Communal Salvation

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The dominant issue in the West is immigration. The ruling elites are obsessed with filling up our lands with people from other lands. It’s nearly impossible to get members of the elite to discuss the matter, much less explain their reasoning. A politician or party that embraces immigration reform, even mild reform, is treated like a Holocaust denier. Even climate change, which is pretty much a religion at this point, is more open to debate than immigration.

Wholesale, uncontrolled immigration has become a spiritual good. It’s not a means to an end, as is often argued by critics. There’s no doubt greed drives some of it, but money is the not the goal for most open borders fanatics. Across Europe and now in the US, immigration is scrambling the political calculus, hamstringing the major parties as fringe parties surge. Yet, they refuse to debate the topic. Yet, the topic remains a taboo.

There’s an old line about fanatics that they cannot change their mind and they won’t change the subject. A corollary to that, with regards to immigration, is that immigration fanatics won’t change their mind and will never permit the subject to be raised in their presence.

That’s what comes to mind when reading a story like this one if the Imperial Capital Gazette:

In a gesture of German goodwill, the administration in this medieval city leased a newly renovated apartment building here to humanely — even comfortably — house dozens of desperate ­asylum-seekers. The newcomers from Syria and other war-
ravaged nations would enjoy freshly redone floors, cute balconies and shiny, modern appliances in a cheerful building near a timber-framed pub.

Then Meissen’s goodwill went up in smoke.

On a cool night six weeks ago, suspected right-wing arsonists struck the building, scorching its interior and rendering it uninhabitable days before the ­asylum-seekers were to move in. The attack added Meissen, a gothic castle town of 30,000 on the Elbe River, to a string of German cities caught up in an escalating rash of violence against refugees.

The acts include an ugly spate of arson targeting refugee centers as well as physical attacks on refugees themselves, marking the return of what critics say is an unnerving brand of xenophobia to Western Europe’s most populous nation.

A normal person would look at this and think, “Maybe it is not such a great idea after all to import tens of thousands of aliens and plop them into unsuspecting neighborhoods.” Of course, normal people would wonder why the locals never got a say in this great social engineering program launched by their government. What good is democracy if you don’t get a say in who is and who is not allowed into your country?

Immigration is one of those issues that exposes the big lie of democracy. There’s nothing more important to the life of a nation than deciding who is and who is not permitted to settle in the nation. The whole damn point of having countries is to keep the other people out. If the people are going to have a say on anything, it is the question of whether or not a country is going to remain a country.

Yet, the elites say that is not permitted. The rubes can vote on who gets to move some commas around the tax code. The rubes can vote on who will run the regulatory state. You can pick your own breakfast cereal, but the people in charge run the store, set the hours and decide what’s on the shelves.

The reason for all this is the people in charge believe, with the fanaticism of a convert, that they have a moral obligation to help the poor on your dime. This interview of Bernie Sanders is revelatory:

Ezra Klein: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing …

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. …

Ezra Klein: But it would make …

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me …

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

In other words, open borders is about getting grace on the cheap by, on the one hand, bringing in the world’s poor, but avoiding the cost by dumping them into the proletarian neighborhoods. Sanders, for all his faults, should be lauded for leaving his religion in the synagogue and sticking with the economics.

You see this in the Post article:

The attacks are undercutting Germany’s image as the country leading the effort to aid a record flow of refugees into Europe, highlighting the rising social tensions in the region amid the avalanche of asylum-seekers. At the same time, the violence has ignited a heated national debate over what pundits here say is a rise in overt racism and intolerance — in a nation highly sensitive to both because of Nazi-era atrocities.

All this is happening as Germany takes in more asylum-
seekers than any other nation in Europe — a number set to reach an estimated 500,000 this year alone — while quickly running out of places to house them. As a result, the national government in Berlin is turning to insular and almost wholly white enclaves to take in the newcomers, who are mostly from the Middle East and Africa.

The creepiness here is that they don’t give a damn about the immigrants getting the business from the locals. What matters is the goodthinkers in Germany are being embarrassed by the conduct of the bad thinkers. Again, it’s a spiritual exercise, not a political or economic one.

The mistake immigration patriots make is in thinking the motivation behind open borders is simply monetary. There’s no doubt that greed-heads like Mark Zuckerburglar are in it for the cash, but most of these people are in it for salvation. They no longer believe in God, but they still believe in salvation and their brand of salvation is communal. To save themselves, they must save the world, however much it cost you.

Obama: The L. Ron Hubbard of Modern Liberalism

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On a few occasions, here and elsewhere, I compared the recent spasm of monument desecration by the American Left to what we are seeing with ISIS in the Near East. It is an easy comparison. One group of fanatics is attacking the monuments of the past because Allah commands it. Another is attacking symbols from the past because the void where God used to exist in their cosmology commands it.

Look, the primary attraction of the comparison is it makes Progressives nuts when you point out this comparison. Their near total lack of self-awareness coupled with total ignorance of their ideological movement causes them to think they are pure logic machines, the exact opposite of the sky-god worshiping barbarians. It’s a classic example of the hive mentality of cults. Hold a mirror up to them and they shriek in horror.

The joking aside, I do think the Left has jumped the fence and is no longer simply a political ideology. This is fairly obvious with the reaction to Bernie Sanders, who is an old school commie. Bernie is focused on economics, not culture. When pressed, he mouths the Cult-Marx platitudes, but he’s clearly not into it. His defense of American jobs with regards to immigration sent the Vox boys into hysterics.

It’s tempting to think of the modern Progressives as tarted up commies from the previous age, but there are a different breed of cat. Theirs is a spiritual movement, more than economics or even ideology. They see salvation through egalitarianism and multiculturalism. Leveling the economic playing field is simply not important to them, especially since most are in the managerial elite.

An example of what I mean is early on in Obama’s tenure, he talked about creating a domestic army to address the laundry list of ills he thought needed attention. He was not thinking about a teacher corp pr civilian conservation corp. He had something closer to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in mind, an army of young people scolding the non-believers. In other words, they were building a mass movement.

That has eventually turned in Organizing for America, the off-the-books campaign operation that Team Obama used to coordinate, outside the view of Congress, their operations of the 2012 election. Presidents have campaign operations, but this was a radical departure in that it was intended to live on long after Obama left office. It would allow him to co-opt future campaigns by maintaining a private agit-prop operation coordinating with groups like the SEIU and the vast army of non-profits like Planned Parenthood.

This story in the Times about how Obama is doing something different folds in nicely with his dreams of being the spiritual leader of global liberalism, defining the morality of the New Religion and by extension, the nation.

Publicly, Mr. Obama betrays little urgency about his future. Privately, he is preparing for his postpresidency with the same fierce discipline and fund-raising ambition that characterized the 2008 campaign that got him to the White House.

The long-running dinner this past February is part of a methodical effort taking place inside and outside the White House as the president, first lady and a cadre of top aides map out a postpresidential infrastructure and endowment they estimate could cost as much as $1 billion. The president’s aides did not ask any of the guests for library contributions after the dinner, but a number of those at the table could be donors in the future.

The $1 billion — double what George W. Bush raised for his library and its various programs — would be used for what one adviser called a “digital-first” presidential library loaded with modern technologies, and to establish a foundation with a worldwide reach.

Supporters have urged Mr. Obama to avoid the mistake made by Bill Clinton, whose associates raised just enough money to build his library in Little Rock, Ark., forcing Mr. Clinton to pursue high-dollar donors for years to come. Including construction costs, Mr. Obama’s associates set a goal of raising at least $800 million — enough money, they say, to avoid never-ending fund-raising. One top adviser said that $800 million was a floor rather than a ceiling.

What Obama does not want to be doing in his retirement is grubbing for money. What he enjoys most is standing in front of adoring crowds telling them his inner thoughts. Obama speeches have always been an interior monologue broadcast to whoever is within earshot. If the Obama Foundation is a self-perpetuating financial engine that keeps him and his wife in a lifestyle they believe they deserve, Obama is free to spread the gospel.

One top aide said Mr. Obama respected Mr. Bush’s decision to limit his time in public after leaving office, but also admired Mr. Clinton’s aggressive use of the spotlight to press his agenda.

“My sense is that he’s probably a blend of the two,”’ said David Plouffe, one of Mr. Obama’s closest former aides and a member of the library foundation board.

In response to a question from Mr. Doerr at the February White House dinner, the president told the group that he wanted to focus on civic engagement and opportunities for youths, pushing guests for ideas about how to make government work better, Mr. Hoffman recalled in an interview. The president asked if social networks could improve the way society confronted problems.

In their conversations with Mr. Obama and his advisers, people from Silicon Valley and Hollywood are pressing for a heavy reliance on cutting-edge technology in the library that would help spread the story of Mr. Obama’s presidency across the globe. Ideally, one adviser said, a person in Kenya could put on a pair of virtual reality goggles and be transported to Mr. Obama’s 2008 speech on race in Philadelphia.

Some discussions at the dinners have focused on the role Mr. Obama might play internationally after the diplomatic opening with Cuba, the nuclear deal with Iran, the confrontations with Russia and the drawdown of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama is not the hardest working guy in the world, something I actually admire about him, so I question whether he will really want to be the spiritual leader of his own cult. His people clearly think that is his future. Undoubtedly, Organizing for Action will be a part of this initiative. That will allow Obama to control the Democrat Party by wielding financial and spiritual power long after he is gone from office.

Progressive Awakenings tend to run out of steam after a decade or so. The reason is the charismatic leaders tend to die off. Wilson was a vegetable at the end. FDR dropped dead. JFK, MLK and RFK were all shot in the 60’s and there was no one to pick up the torch.

Obama is young and in good health so he could possible keep the torch lit well beyond the normal active phase. He could set himself up in New York City and a mountain lair in Hawaii, where he can direct his followers and issue encyclicals to the faithful. Another book is on the way so it could perhaps be the Dianetics of the Left.

The Red Pill Revolution

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I’ve been fond of the red pill-blue pill formulation to describe what is happening with non-liberals in America. It’s popular with the hobbits of the Dark Enlightenment so I never use the terminology, but it is a good way to describe what is happening. It’s not disillusionment. That’s just a precursor to a healthy cynicism. What we’re seeing today is more of an awakening, where people suddenly confront a truth they used to think was nonsense.

It’s popular to compare the Trump surge with the Perot surge, blaming it on populist anger, which is another way of saying the losers are making a racket. That’s the George Will and Charles Krapphammer view of things. Both have been ranting and raving about this on Fox for a few months now. That’s an easy temptation and even easier when you get paid to mail in bite sized commentary for an hour each night. As Buchanan used to say, they have gone native.

Anyway, the thing people forget about Perot is he started as a third party guy, even though he had a special hatred of Bush. His campaign was never a fight within the GOP. That fight happened with the Buchanan challenge of Bush in the primary. Trump is starting as a Republican and while not making his campaign about challenging the GOP power structure, that’s how people are responding to it. If Trump were running as a third party candidate right now, no one would care.

Another big difference in this cycle is the Democrats are not desperate to win like they were in 1992. They were also going through a reform effort of their own in the Bush years. The DLC emerged as the “New Democrats” promising to drag the party to the center. That’s how Bill Clinton grifted his way to the nomination. The desperate could overlook his vulgarity and the reformers could overlook his near total lack of a moral compass. Everyone in the Democrat side just wanted to win.

It’s tempting to credit the Sanders surge as merely a late reaction to Clinton, who is about as appealing as rectal cancer. Even her friends describe her as a moral nullity so there’s room for a not-Clinton in the primary. That’s not what’s going on though, as Sanders has tapped into some of the things we’re seeing on the GOP side. One is immigration and the other is economic nationalism.

Sanders is pretty good on the national question, to the horror of liberal elites. He’s also an economic nationalist, a reminder to many Democratic voters that the party used to be about the working man. Within living memory, Democrats championed the middle and working classes, while today’s liberal is the champion of deadbeats, weirdos and corporatist plutocrats. A lot of Democrat voters are pissed at what has happened with their party and they are flocking to Sanders.

I think the biggest difference here is the role of the media. The primaries were over by the time Perot started talking about a run. It was the summer of 1992 when he became a story and started building a campaign. The press filled the summer promoting Perot because they wanted an interesting story. He was treated like a rock star, just about living on CNN. Eventually, Perot’s nuttiness was the better story and the press started making sport of him.

In contrast, the media has been hostile to Trump from the start. The Conservative media has been a mix of mocking, insulting and incredulous. This column by George Will is revelatory:

He is an affront to anyone devoted to the project William F. Buckley began six decades ago with the founding in 1955 of the National Review — making conservatism intellectually respectable and politically palatable. Buckley’s legacy is being betrayed by invertebrate conservatives now saying that although Trump “goes too far,” he has “tapped into something,” and therefore. . . .

Will starts out by asserting that conservatism was not always “intellectually respectable and politically palatable” and then he calls anyone not scandalized by Trump a subhuman. At least he did not demand they be shoved into ovens. He later goes on to say that a political party has a duty to defend its borders. This from a man who is an open borders fanatic. If you are a normal person who considers themselves a patriotic conservative, how can you not root for Trump over a man calling you a scumbag?

This where the red pill – blue pill concept comes in. Fox and the conservative media have been walking around thinking they are the authentic tribunes of the people. They truly thought they would be heroes to the cause by taking out Trump in the debate. Instead of their viewers throwing rotten cabbages at Trump, they were chucking them at Fox. Watching these folks, it’s clear they are off-balance and they don’t know what’s happening to them.

Unlike the Perot phenomenon, the Trump wave is as much about the general disgust with Conservative Inc. and the mainstream media as it is about populist outrage. A lot of people have started to figure out that Fox is there to move product and sell GOP Inc. to the gullible people on the Right. These are people who signed onto the Tea Party, but have been radicalized by the GOP’s efforts to marginalize them.

The reformer wants to save things. The revolutionary wants to destroy. Perot was leading a reform movement. Trump is leading a revolution, whether he knows it or not. Maybe that’s why guys like George Will are suddenly incontinent over Trump. Maybe they sense the danger. It’s hard to know, but the antics of guys like Erick Erickson are just throwing logs on the fire. Once you take the red pill, you cannot untake it so things will never be the same now that revolution is in the air.

Ramblings on Race, Racism and Race Realism

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If you live around a lot of diversity, you learn how to recognize others who live around a lot of diversity. It’s like the difference between the world traveler and the provincial who never left home. The change in perspective results in a change in demeanor. I’m comfortable in alien places because I’ve been around a lot of people not like me on a daily basis for a long time. I just don’t think it is strange to be the guy who sticks out like a sore thumb.

One of the things you learn when you spend a lot of time around non-whites is that not all white people are the same. That sounds odd, but it works like this. You get to know a lot of “Hispanics” for example and you quickly see that they are not a singular race and they often don’t speak the same language. Guatemalans are a different breed of cat from Cubans or Dominicans or Mexicans from El Norte. Lumping all these people into the bucket called “Hispanic” is mostly worthless.

That revelation leads to rethinking what it means to be white, black or Asian. Italians and Spaniards are called white, but they are not Germans or Swedes. Travel around America and you see that a place like Indiana is part Yankee New England and part Appalachian hick. The term “Hoosier”, by the way, was an insult for Virginia hillbillies. Head a few clicks north and you are into a different population of honkies altogether.

From an anthropological perspective, the old categories of race are falling apart. If you read Nick Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance, it becomes rather clear that race classifications based on skin tone don’t hold up. It’s better to think of people as belonging to large extended families. There’s lots of cross pollination between these large extended families, but at the edges where they interface. Swedes share a lot with Germans, but very little with Bantus.

The fact is, skin, eye and hair color are just one part of it. There are character differences that are just as rooted in biology as skin color. Those character and personality traits impact culture, which in turn has impacted biology. This article by Peter Frost is a great explanation of how biology, culture and environment work on one another simultaneously. Swedes are built for a culture built for the environment of Sweden, which is different from the Bantus, who were built for a culture built for flourishing in Africa.

The trouble with discussing any of this is that there’s a another part of the puzzle. Humans are built to distrust those who are not their kind. While it is as natural as left handedness, our culture eschews anything that even hints at racism. This is not illogical as we in the West live in multi-ethnic societies. Keeping the peace means suppressing the instinct to not like the “other” or the foreign. The argument from race realists is that you can take this too far and when you do the results are worse than naked racism.

I have no way of knowing if that is true, but I think it is probably time for people calling themselves “race realists” to simply drop the term in favor of something more biologically correct and less provocative. I’ll refer to myself as a biological realist, for example, because I think you cannot overcome biology with wishful thinking. This has the added benefit of handling the feminist lunacies.

“Fixing the schools” is a waste of time because 80% of education is the IQ and character of the student. Another 10% is family life and the rest is the community in which the school exists. Maybe the school has 2% of an impact and I may be generous here. Put the ghetto boys into a nice prep school, but somehow maintain the ghetto home and community life, and you get the same result as you get from the local public school. Maybe one or two end up better than otherwise.

Similarly, the people who left the Borderlands of England for the New World ended up in Appalachia. They recreated their culture from home, without the interference of the Crown. When those people migrated into the Midwest, they recreated their mountain culture in the new lands. Southern Illinois is not like West Virginia by accident. There’s a strong Scandinavian flavor to the upper Midwest for a reason.

It’s why America can never be a land dominated by a central government imposing a universal culture on the whole nation. The differences are simply too big between the people of Vermont and the people of Texas. No amount of hooting and bellowing from Progressive loons will change biology and culture. It’s another area where biological realism could gain some traction. You can shame the Yankee busy-body out of trying to impose his values on the world. Mention race and he loses the ability to feel shame.

That’s why HBD and race realist people need to free themselves from the plain old racists. The people attracted to your movement for the racism are mostly idiots who will cause you nothing but trouble. That and white nationalism is about the dumbest thing going, given the ethnic and cultural diversity among people who call Europe their ancestral home. The crackers from the hills have as much in common with the German low-landers as they do with Arabs.

That said, it’s probably easier said than done. Saying you don’t like black culture is fine, but most people will call you a racist, even if you are married to a black person or are actually black. Racism used to be an action. Then it became words, then thoughts and is quickly becoming a lack of enthusiasm. If you are not enthusiastic enough in your praise for non-whites, you’re called a bigot.

Thinking about it, the image that comes to mind is of a train slamming into a mountain. Whatever distance and uniqueness there is between the cars, the collision eliminates it, leaving a pile of twisted metal. That’s what has happened with public discussion of anything that relates to ethnicity. It’s slammed into the wall of Cultural Marxism and you can no longer tell the racist crackpots from the Progressive loons.

The Why Questions

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I’ve had some exposure to corporate security and one of the things I’ve noticed is that much of it is based on what I think of as the “why questions.” The protection of things like data is based on thinking about why someone would want the data. The more obvious the answer the more obvious the reason to guard the data. Banks put money in vaults because it is obvious why people would steal it.

On the other hand, the great capers are often based on going against the grain of the why questions. For example, why would anyone break into the office of a psychiatrist? There’s no obvious answer so in most cases the offices are not secure. Dr. Lewis Fielding’s office was burgled in 1971, because one of his patients was Daniel Ellsberg, a notorious enemy of the people, who was in league with lunatics trying to bring down the government.

This caper from Wall Street is another good example of how “why” questions control how people guard information. You can be sure there was not a lot of people wondering why hackers would steal press releases, but now we know why and you can be sure the security of such things will be much higher.

The other value of focusing on why questions, one useful for reading the news, is to see who in the press is asking or even thinking about the why questions in a story. The proof that our press is mostly a public relations department is that they never ask the people in charge a why question. They don’t want to know why.

The Hillary e-mail story is a great example of what I’m getting at with the why questions. The only question to be asked of Hillary and her flaks is “Why did she create a secret, off-the-books, email server?” The facts show there was a rush to create this thing in time for her to start at the State Department. That was not a random act. There’s a reason and knowing the reason is pretty much the entire story.

Now, normal people familiar with the Imperial Capital think they know the answer. She wanted to avoid FOIA requests and Congressional oversight. This has become so common in DC with the bureaucracy that it is fair to call it normal. When the people in the Borg are plotting malice or mischief, they do it through private chat, e-mail and even Facebook. Big fish do it strictly to avoid Congress, which is a violation of law by itself.

For Clinton, there are no good answers to the question. If she says it was for personal use, then we come to the next “why” question. “Why did she use cutouts to create the server and have it in her house instead of at the Clinton Foundation?” That would be the obvious choice. If she was worried about keeping her private affairs private, that would have been a simple, cheap and hassle free option, one she already had available.

Of course, the other obvious question is “Why did the White House let this go on?” We know the answer to this and maybe that’s why they never ask the question, but it’s laughable to pretend that the White House did not know about this thing. The same is true of senior people at the State Department. If the press was really the press, they would be asking this every day until someone offered an answer.

The big question, the one a real reporter should be asking, but we all know will never be asked, is “Why were they stashing classified material on this server?” We now know they had sensitive signal intelligence data, particularly satellite images. Why would they want that for private use?

My theory, just to be clear, is that Team Clinton was using intel to shake down donors. Look at the hundreds of millions that have poured in from foreign sources. Anyone with eyes can see that the Clinton charities are just money laundering operations. They have raised billions and much of it from foreign sources. Giving a foreign oligarch a heads up on who is watching him should fetch a big donation.

If that sounds outlandish, remember that these are the same people who green-lighted the sale of satellite technology to China for campaign cash. These are the same people who were stealing furniture out of the White House. Even their friends say that everything is for sale with them. Building a multi-billion dollar empire through the sale of intel is not a big leap for people like the Clintons.

My bet is the answer to the why questions in this case is much worse than we are seeing so far.

L’affaire Cankles

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Americans are conditioned to think that what is reported in the news is a fair representation of reality. Everyone understands there is considerable bias in the news, but everyone assumes it is deliberate. The news people know, for example, that Obama is lying about his Iran deal. They just like him and therefore cover for him on it. In other words, there’s no secret conspiracy or deep state maneuverings going on, just good old fashioned partisanship in the reporting. If you look close enough, you can figure out what’s going on in the world.

Palace intrigue, cloak and dagger capers and Byzantine conspiracies are for movies and history books. In the old days, conspirators worked behind the scenes to undo the king or subvert his enemies in court, but that’s long over. Most people today subscribe to Franklin’s maxim that the only way three can keep a secret is if two are dead. Only tin foil hate loons talk about conspiracies, the “deep state” and clandestine plots.

I’ve never been a conspiracy guy and I tend to think a conspiracy of more than a handful of dedicated fanatics is not going to go too far. Even something like the 9/11 attacks worked mostly because of sloth. There were plenty of people who knew something was not right, but they were too lazy or too stupid to do anything about it. Good old fashioned dumb luck had more to do with 9/11 than conspiracy.

That does not mean things are done in the open. Politics is thick with plotting and scheming. It’s all they do, even when it works against their interests. That’s what makes the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal interesting to watch. There’s a lot not in the public domain, but we keep getting these drips suggesting someone is doing the dripping. That someone has reasons and they have a boss, possibly in the White House.

The thing that the press never bothers to consider is what must have been known for a long time. Hillary Clinton was at State in 2009 and supposedly had the private e-mail system on day one. That means everyone at State knew about it. It means the White House knew about it. Further, all of these people knew it was unusual and maybe even illegal. The first question that comes to my mind is why did the White House let this go on? Why would State not blow the whistle on this?

My hunch is the White House looked at this as mana from heaven. They had fall in their lap the best piece of leverage possible. Their political enemy was caught red handed mishandling classified information. Maybe it was not that way at first, but it was at least a very embarrassing thing that they now had on Clinton. It’s the sort of thing J. Edgar Hoover used to collect on people in case he needed leverage on them.

The most obvious explanation for why the White House kept this under their hat, so to speak, is it was great leverage for later. If they ever needed a favor from the Clintons or they needed to take down Hillary, they had the perfect weapon. Presumably they had the NSA or CIA monitoring the server, maybe even copying the traffic to and from it. Reports indicate the Clinton people did not encrypt the traffic, which is amazing. That means they may have other stuff.

Something people don’t know about how the government polices classified data is they have multiple counter espionage shops looking at everyone, using all the tools you read about. In the course of their normal work this off-the-books server would have been in briefings that make it to the President. At the minimum, they would have been in the briefing books.

That leads to why this is getting into the public now. In politics, a standard way to handle dirty laundry is to reveal it yourself to friendly media who will spin it for you. That way you get it out in the public on your terms, deal with the initial excitement and then declare it old news if anyone brings it up again. That does not appear to be the case here as Team Clinton has been absurdly ham-fisted in their handling of this thing. They are acting as if they don’t know who knows what about this thing.

That means the White House or State as the top targets behind the leaks. People forget that it was State that leaked the information on Valerie Plame to the press. Scooter Libby took the fall, but it was State that was playing politics. In the Plame case it was just good old fashioned blabbing that was the cause. In Watergate, Mark Felt allegedly conspired with the Washington Post against Nixon entirely out of spite. That could be the case here as the Clintons have a lot of enemies.

The other possibility that comes to mind is the White House is behind it. I tend to think this is the case as the leaks to the media have a DOJ vibe to them. The FBI is involved and what’s coming out is the sort of stuff that comes from an FBI investigation into the mishandling of classified material. That cannot happen without approval of the White House. This DOJ is so politicized they don’t take a crap without calling the White House.

That would raise the obvious question of why now? Maybe it is just serendipity. Things get out of hand in politics too. My hunch is they want to get Warren to reconsider and clearing the field of the 500 pound gorilla would change Warren’s math. Six months ago she was looking at running as the liberal insurgent. That’s not easy when the “centrist” is a vicious street fighter who had access to your raw FBI files. If the gorilla is suddenly out of the picture, Warren could run as the sensible liberal alternative to Bernie Sanders.

Plan B could be to back O’Malley, but he has a penis and is white. Joe Biden is too old and too crazy to be a serious alternative. It seems to me that unless they know Warren is ready to ride in as the white knight, it makes little sense for Team Obama to be leaking this stuff. Spite is always a possibility, but these guys are cold blooded when it comes to politics so I’m not inclined to think that’s the case.

There’s one other reason Team Obama could be behind this and that’s ego. A Republican in the White House would let Obama be the wise man of his party and function as a shadow president, questioning anything he does not like about the new guy. Clinton in the White House takes that away and it gives Team Clinton a chance to settle any old scores with Team Obama. With a Republican in the White House, Obama can walk around as the greatest living Democrat. That was worth $150 million to Bill Clinton. I’ll also note that Clinton did not help Gore and was not a great friend to Kerry or Obama.

I’ve written a lot about the comparisons between Hillary and Nixon. Their lives would make a great dual biography so the reader could compare the two in real time. Nixon was ultimately undone by enemies he knew, who were exploiting enemies he never imagined. Mark Felt was a nobody and no one had a reason to care about him. Alexander Butterfield was just a guy on Haldeman’s staff. More than a few great men have been brought low by minor figures just doing their jobs. Maybe that’s what we have here.

It would be great theater if in the end, Hillary goes to jail and Bill walks free.

Currency Wars

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I have a pet theory that a good way to understand history is to examine the currency arrangements. Historians will address the rampant debasement of the currency by the Romans in the third century, for example, but they never try to explain events through the lens of currency. I think you can argue that the history of money is the history of man in the sense that the arc of civilization is the mastery of money by the people in charge.

Two good examples are Charlemagne and Offa of Mercia. They were contemporaries and both reformed the coinage and mastered seigniorage. Forever after them, a key goal of the ambitious ruler was to control the coinage and use it as part of his arsenal against his adversaries. Closer to home, the history of the world post World War II is all about the dollar and its role as the reserve currency of the world.

Anyway, it looks like James Rickards was right a few years ago when he said the world is descending into a another currency war. That’s a great book, by the way. The Wall Street Journal reports that China is debasing its currency and sending shock waves through the emerging markets.

China’s devaluation of its currency jolted global markets Tuesday, hitting stocks and commodities and boosting government bonds.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.2% to 17402.84, erasing most of the previous session’s gains. The S&P 500 fell 1% to 2084.07. The pan-European Stoxx Europe 600 index closed 1.6% lower.

Oil and metals prices also fell sharply, while demand for haven assets pushed down bond yields in the U.S. and Europe, as investors worried that Beijing’s move signaled concerns over growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

The moves came after the People’s Bank of China on Tuesday pushed down the yuan’s trading range against the dollar, setting its daily fixing rate 1.9% lower. Investors reacted to the move by pushing the yuan down almost 2% from that level.

Financial markets saw it as a sign that Chinese authorities believe it is necessary to act to boost flagging growth, said Ewen Cameron Watt, chief investment strategist at BlackRock’s Inc.’s Investment Institute.

They call currency devaluation “beggar thy neighbor” for a reason. China, in an effort to boost exports, will start printing money, thus lowering its value against the dollar and other currencies. That will make Chinese products more competitive in US and European markets. This may be fine for the US and Europe as it means cheap goods and people like cheap goods for a while.

The trouble is everyone else will have no choice but to follow suit and debase their currency. It can easily become a race to the bottom. International management through central banks is probably enough to keep things from getting out of hand, but there are unknown unknowns. The biggest is the off the books carry trade market that is possibly over $9 Trillion USD now.

The entirety of this market is leverage. You borrow money to invest it in another currency. Presumably, settlement of both ends of the transaction leaves a profit, but big moves in the currency rates means huge losses. Those losses are covered by liquidating other assets to cover the loss. This can set off a cascading effect blowing up whole markets in days, even with the loss prevention systems governments have in place. The most obvious example is The Asian Financial Crisis of ’97.

Life is not a math problem and so economic problems become political problems. Brazil, which is already struggling, cannot withstand a currency war. This is not a country with a stable political and cultural foundation. The current president is already under fire so a deepening economic crisis will probably lead to political turmoil or worse. Military coup is the traditional way of doing things in Brazil so you never can rule that out as a possibility.

Currency wars never end well. The currency war that started in the 1920’s ended with depression and world war. The disorganized flight from the Bretton Woods system eventually led to the current system of towering world debt that may be about to tip over. The only way for the West to maintain their massive custodial states is through unlimited credit emissions. A full on currency war probably brings that to an end.

 

The Cost Shifting Economy

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Car dealers train their salesmen to focus the customer on the car payment and not the sticker price. There’s a number of reasons for it. One is that people will take a larger car payment that they want if they like the car. The difference between a $500 payment and a $550 payment is easy to justify when you’re in love. That’s a few thousand dollars more in car, but it only feels like fifty bucks.

The other reason is the dealer can bundle everything up so that the customer cannot negotiate each item one at a time. The last thing a dealer wants is to debate the trade-in, the interest rate, the dealer options and so on. A good salesman can sneak in some high profit items to the dealer, while hitting the customers peak tolerance for a car payment.

The mobile phone market has always worked on this principle. My first mobile phone was from a place in Boston that basically leased you a phone and charged you each month for minutes. They quickly figured out that was a loser and just included the minutes. That was late 80’s and it has been that way ever since. You “buy” the phone, but you’re really just making a down payment. The rest is financed through your monthly bill.

That’s about to change and it is another example of the cracks showing up in the cost-shifting economy.

Verizon Wireless today announced a new set of wireless data plans, and none of them are available with contracts or phone subsidies.

It’s not clear from Verizon’s announcement whether it’s going to completely stop offering contracts and device subsidies to new customers after these plans become available on August 13. Since the announcement doesn’t say anything about killing existing plans, it’s possible that the company could still offer traditional two-year contracts, but without promoting them. We’ve asked Verizon about this and will provide an update if we get one.Going forward, Verizon will encourage customers to either buy phones outright or pay for the entire device in installments. This differs from the model in which you get a discount of several hundred dollars off the price of a new phone but have to sign a two-year contract that can’t be broken without paying early termination fees. When customers own their phones outright, it’s a lot easier to switch carriers to get a better deal.

The mobile carriers have been subsidizing the phone purchase by financing it through the bill. That’s how the broke waitress can afford a $650 iPhone. Apple was shifting the cost of their phone to the carrier. The carrier, in turn, found a way to game the customer by tucking the costs in the monthly bill. They also put some interest in there too.

That worked fine in a growing market, but the market is saturated. They’ve run out of greater fools. Now the carriers are chasing price and that means the subsidies go away. The number of people will be willing to pony up $650 for an iPhone is probably much less than the number willing to pay $200. This will have the inevitable result of collapsing the margins of the phone makers as they have to chase price.

For a long time now the US economy has been based on the belief that growth is forever. When every business in a market is based on forever growth, when the market stops growing, it collapses and takes everyone with it. The housing bubble is a classic example, but large swaths of the tech economy have worked the same way. We’re running out of new people to pay for the old people now. The results are inevitable.

We have Always Been At War With The South

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The descendents of Puritan Yankees are bound together over one thing and that’s a deep hatred of the South. They used to hate the South because it represented the Royalist side of English life. Once the North was able to destroy the South and Royalist culture, things calmed down for a while. But, the fevered lunacy of the North was revived with the importation of new crackpot ideas from the Continent and the Cult of Modern Liberalism was born. Soon thereafter they went to war with the South again.

This just in from old friend Lois Lerner:

Lois Lerner, the central figure in the IRS targeting controversy, called Abraham Lincoln the country’s worst president in an email disclosed in a bipartisan Senate report, according to USA Today.

“Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best,” Lerner wrote in an email dated March 6, 2014.Lerner, the former IRS director of Exempted Organizations, joked in one email that the 16th president should have just let the South secede, rather than fighting the Civil War.

“He should [have] let the south go,” Lerner wrote in response to a friend who disparaged Texas as a “pathetic” state. “We really do seem to have [two] different mind sets.”

The report also highlighted emails written by Lerner calling conservatives “crazies” and “a–holes.”

As I keep saying, the cultural heirs of those Yankee Puritans are not acting from facts and reason. They look at the rest of the country, particularly the South, as sub-human. In the 18th century they saw the South as an affront to God. In the 19th century they saw the South as a threat to God’s creation. They’ve dropped the references to God in the 20th, so the South became an obstacle to the Progressive paradise.

It should come as no surprise that Lerner is from Massachusetts, the epicenter of liberal lunacy. Her husband appears to be from Eastern Ohio, which was settled by Puritan lunatics after the Revolution. Another one of my themes is that belief is heritable and therefore fanaticism is as well. A whole lot of commies were the children of religious Jews for a reason. The believing gene is strong in the Tribe.

ISIS and the West

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The rise of fundamentalist Islam has perplexed and outraged the West for a few decades now. The prophesies all said the brown people would rejoice when the good thinkers welcomed Islam into the West. Instead, the muzzies have gone bonkers, rejecting the West and retreating into a medieval philosophy that rejects everything the West believes about the world.

I thought about that while reading this book review in the New York Review of Books. Why it is written by “anonymous” is a mystery to me. Maybe the Economist style is coming to America. It always seem to me that the propaganda arm of the custodial state should use that style. That way it is hard for the masses to dismiss the lectures. Anyway, the article is worth reading, but this bit is what got my attention:

The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast.

I’m highlighting that bit as there was a time when using the phrase “social justice” would get you laughed out of most rooms. Even lefty outposts like the New York Review of Books would flinch at that phrase. That’s because everyone knew it was a ridiculous idea, held only by the naive and stupid. Today, “everyone knows” the point of government is social justice. Go figure.

Interestingly, the “genuine economic growth” line has crossed the street in my life as well. There was a time when only black-hearted right wingers talked about economic growth. Decent people understood that there was much more to life than money. Now, even the most fanatical Progressives thinks that every tree must grow to the sky, no matter what.

I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise.

I’ve argued often that American Progressive faith has a lot in common with Islam. Some of my comparisons are meant to be snarky, but there’s a lot of points of comparison. One area is the inward looking nature of the two faiths. Progressives fixate on communal salvation in the same way Muslims do, the two just have different ends.

The main difference is that Islam knows a lot about the West. Most people don’t know that Islam was the the center of intellectual life before the Mongols came calling. The Sack of Baghdad in 1258 is viewed as the point at which Islam fell behind the West and the East culturally. Muslim Arabs are well aware of this, having grown up in the shadow of the West, often living in the West.

We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.

I’ve come to think of Progressives as the decedents¹ of the Puritans for a number of reasons. The one reason important here is the inward looking nature of both Puritan and Progressive culture. The Puritans saw salvation as a community activity. Internal discipline and cohesion were paramount so they focused on it exclusively. A certain studied ignorance of the outside world was critical to maintain discipline. That’s a Progressive quality as well.

The result is the people in charge not only misunderstand the world beyond their understanding, they have no way of understanding it. To understand the draw of Islam to young Arabs, you need to consider the possibility that life in the West is not on the road to paradise. You also have to contemplate the possibility that there are many ways to be happy as a people.

The innate intolerance of Progressives prohibits this sort of speculation. There’s also the deep rooted belief that bad things happen to God’s people when those people fail in their duty as God’s servants. That means 9/11 was America’s fault for not abiding by the Progressive virtues. The rise of ISIS was due to bad US policy in the region (Bush). The muzzies lack agency of their own so they are not blamed.

That’s why Progressives are so vexed with ISIS. President Obama, peace be upon him, has been running policy in the region for a long time. Everything has been done properly and yet these people hate us as much, if not more, than they did in the Bush years. Their “analytical spade” hits bedrock very fast because it does not exist. They have not thought for a second that the Muslims could have a point of two to make.
¹Yes, that is on purpose.