The Corpse Of Democracy

Posted on September 8, 2022 by thezman

The results are in and despite what you have observed in your own life and on-line, Biden’s Gates of Hell speech was a huge success. According to a new poll close to 60% of Americans now think Donald Trump and his nefarious “MAGA movement” are a threat to our democracy. Not only that, 60% of Republicans do not think the MAGA movement represents the majority of the party. It looks like it is all over for Trump and the tens of millions who support him.

Now, most MAGA people will dismiss the poll as just another example of the craven efforts by the regime to prop up their chief stooge. This is, of course, the result of Putin’s propaganda and disinformation campaign. These conspiracy theorists questioning the veracity of polling, especially this poll, are just doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin and are probably semi-fascists. They are semi-fascists because they do not know they are being turned into fascists by the Trump movement.

Granted, the details of the poll are not available so there is no way to examine the crosstabs to see if it supports the press release. The only clue in the press releases is that the poll was weighted toward self-identified Democrats. It also subtly suggests that only 25% of the self-identified Republicans in the poll agree with the claim that Trump is a danger to the planet. There is growing evidence that the dispossessed are no longer identifying as Republican, so there is that.

In all seriousness, this is the sort of story that underscores the problem with mass democracy in the mass communication age. This poll could be a complete fraud, but there is no way to know. More important, your favorite news site is never going to check or question it. They just pick it up as a part of the automated service they use to plug into news feeds like Reuters. The left-wing news highlighter Matt Drudge is running this poll in red at the top of his site.

As de Maistre said, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” Drudge is a left-wing partisan, but his site is like most news sites these days in that it relies on feeds to populate itself. Even with site-created content, there is little editorial control. It is easy to inject a false opinion into the system and see it get repeated a million times in minutes.

Of course, there is the other problem. Who cares if a majority of people are falling for the latest conspiracy theory? That is, after all, what all this hysteria about Trump and the MAGA movement is, when you examine it. It relies on the assumption that there are sinister, unseen forces at work behind the scenes. The old people wearing red Trump caps at the diner are not just people who hold contrary opinions. They are part of an invisible army of fascists and evil doers.

Imagine a poll that reported a majority of people thought there are little green men visiting earth on a regular basis. You do not have to imagine it. There was a big global survey half a dozen years ago that claimed a majority of people on earth think there are little green men out there. A majority of Americans believe in ghosts. More people think psychics are real than think Ron Paul is real. Big Foot is ten times more popular than the vice president of the United States.

The point is, most people are stupid, at least when it comes to understanding things that have no direct impact on their lives. They may know accounting or chemistry, but they can also think disagreeing with the government is bad for democracy. This has always been the argument against democracy. Most people lack the desire or capacity to master the material necessary to make good political choices. Giving them a ballot is like giving a toddler a hand grenade.

Of course, opinions change. Fifty years ago, when Joe Biden entered politics, few people thought he should be elected to anything. When he ran for president in 1988, he was laughed off the stage. In 2008, he was seen as a joke candidate to give the media some entertainment. In 2020, his own party preferred an item from the museum of communism, but then everyone changed their mind all of a sudden. The same change of heart happened on election night. Opinions change.

Clearly, a polling outfit would know that their polling is a snapshot in time and may not mean anything in a week. That Reuters poll also reports that close to 60% of the respondents think the speech will make things worse. Half never bothered to watch it and two thirds think Biden is a bum. In other words, the poll is invalid on its face, but it makes for a handy false opinion, so it gets minted and passed onto gullible dupes like the rent boys running the Drudge Report.

This is the problem with mass democracy in a mass media age. Our culture, including the political process, is a giant lie machine. Imagine if people went about their day with people from the state following them around with a bullhorn, constantly shouting random slogans at them. This is what we have today. We are awash in nonsense from the mass media but are expected to have sensible opinions. It is no wonder that the political system is unresponsive to the public will.

It is the irony of mass democracy. The stated point of democracy is to make government more responsive to the public will. Instead, it reveals that the people who are in charge have no interest in the public will. They serve other interests. That means those who oppose the prevailing order should ignore the public will as well. Instead, the focus must always be on who decides. The solution to the ills of democracy is to let democracy murder itself and be ready to bury the corpse.

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Gas Pains

Posted on September 7, 2022 by thezman

According to the European Union, Russian imports accounted for 62.4% of all energy imports in 2021. Currently, the number is 58.2%. Obviously, the current figures reflect the impact of sanctions and unexpected delays in supply like the stoppages in the Nord Stream pipeline. The EU states that 58% of its energy consumption comes from outside the European Union. A little bit of math says that the EU nations get about 35% of its energy from Russia.

What this means is that a ten percent hike in prices from Russia is a three percent hike in the wholesale price to the European Union. Not all countries get the same percentage of energy from Russia and energy is a traded commodity within the European Union, so prices vary. France is far less dependent on Russian gas than Germany, but the French are not immune to energy markets. The rising tide of energy costs will swamp all European boats.

Currently, natural gas prices in Europe are roughly 300% higher for the year, but off the peak of last month. The reason for that is the EU is stepping into the natural gas markets to bring down the price. They do this through various ways, but ultimately, they will end up printing money to subsidize gas prices. In Britain, things are not quite so bad as gas prices are only 200% higher for the year. The new UK government plans similar interventions as the European Union.

Now, there are two reasons for prices to go up. One is speculators think there will be future shortages or future spikes in demand. Most energy is traded in the market with futures contracts, so it is like a casino. This is where governments can intervene in the market and impose caps. Even if you think gas will be higher in six months, you cannot buy or sell a contract to that effect. Government imposes a cap and subsidizes the utility companies for any shortfall.

The other reason prices go up is supply disruptions. Russian natural gas is the cheapest in Europe, but its availability has declined. That gas has to be replaced so European buyers must go to more expensive sources. This not only means a higher price, but it drives up prices for those products. This in turn drives up prices for the next level and the next level after that. Artificially replacing the cheap product with an expensive one alters the entire energy market.

As the figures in the first paragraph indicate, there is no way to replace Russian natural gas in Europe at this time. The global supply of LNG simply does not exist to replace Russian gas, even if the infrastructure existed, which it does not. Even if it did, the cost of liquifying, then transporting gas to Europe is much higher than getting it via pipeline from the lowest cost producer on earth. Replacing Russian gas will result in a massive spike in the cost of living and the cost of doing business.

That is the other piece of the puzzle. Much of the European standard of living depends on hidden subsidies to European business. The German government, for example, secured extremely cheap Russian gas for German industry. In the past, this gas has been purchased with euros, which magically appear when needed. The same trick happens with the American dollar. This means every time someone takes euros for payment, they are paying a hidden tax.

Now, the world must buy Russian gas in rubles. The reason for this is the West has been systematically stealing Russian assets, including their foreign holdings, in response to the war. The Russians did the prudent thing and stopped taking dollars and euros for payment. All European customers for Russian gas have to first buy rubles on the market and then buy their gas from Russia. This is why the ruble has been the best performing currency in the world.

This has another consequence. When those euros suddenly appear out of thin air, their relative value to the ruble changes. The euro is worth about sixty rubles at the moment, down from a peak of 150-1 earlier in the year. If more euros magically appear, the ratio of euros to rubles changes, unless the Russian central bank increases the number of rubles in the world to match the euros. This would then lower the value of the ruble compared to other currencies.

Russia is not obligated to create more rubles. They have inflation like everyone else, so they could choose to let the ruble adjust, which means the euro buys less gas and that means that hidden tax suddenly shifts back to the Europeans. In other words, those magically appearing euros no longer eat away at the profits of the seller but erode the purchasing power of the buy. This then drives up the cost of everything, especially the energy products purchased from Russia.

How many euros need to magically appear? Current estimates say about 1.5 trillion new euros are needed to bridge the gap. Then there is the liquidity problem that is facing Europe markets. The extra euros needed to buy energy cut into the cash reserves of industry. This impacts their credit rating, which drives up the cost of borrowing and we quickly arrive at a financial crisis. The only known solution is to make more euros magically appear.

As an aside, the United States faces a similar problem. Gasoline prices were artificially lowered through the release of the strategic petroleum reserve. Instead of making dollars magically appear, they made oil magically appear. That is scheduled to end, coincidentally, just before the November election. That means the supply of domestic crude will drop and that means prices go back up. It also means the price of home heating oil will go up in time for winter.

Putting that aside, the energy crisis in Europe is quickly becoming a financial crisis, which in turn can easily become a currency crisis. The euro has been a junior reserve currency for twenty years, but it is not the reserve currency. It can quickly decline to becoming just another currency in the world. The hidden profit, the seigniorage, that came with being a reserve currency goes away. That means more cost heaped onto the European economy in the form of inflation.

Incredibly, it does not stop with bad policy. A plan being debated is to create a mechanism for financing current energy costs with future energy profits through a subsidy system to consumers and suppliers. The first step is a cap on what utilities can charge consumers. The gap between that cap and the real cost will be met with loans from the central bank. This way it does not have to be treated as pure money creation, but as an asset on the books of the central bank.

In exchange for these forced loans, the utility will be allowed to maintain the high price when the energy markets return to normal. In other words, this is a hidden debt imposed on consumers. In exchange for a smaller increase now, they will get a small decrease in the future. That means, in theory, a much larger profit for the utility in the future when prices decline. They can now use that hypothetical profit in the future as collateral to borrow money today.

This is not a new scheme. In the United States, something similar happened with cigarette taxes imposed after the tobacco settlement. States used the promise of more tax revenue in the future to create tobacco bonds. The buyer got a piece of the future tax revenue in exchange for cash today. Of course, those tax revenues did not materialize and the states took a bath. On the other hand, Goldman Sachs made billions from the scheme so it was all good.

What all of this tells us is that the Western economic model, rooted in the dollar and American military, is something of a Ponzi scheme. Assets are sold off for quick cash, but money is created to fill the hole based on the promise of some future bonanza that never materializes. This, in turn, means more money creation through the magic of debt, which inflates the credit bubble further. Europe is going to solve its energy crisis today with a financial crisis tomorrow.

The End Of Grifts

Posted on September 6, 2022 by thezman

Eric Hoffer famously said that what starts out in America as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation. As we saw with Covid, it can often be all of these things at the same time. When Hoffer made this observation, mass media was still in the analog age, so things moved slower. A movement would linger for while in the corporate stage before devolving into a racket. In the digital age, these things can happen simultaneously and instantaneously.

The reason for this is America is not an actual country, like France or Sweden, but an open outdoor bazaar held together by a merchant class. As Coolidge supposedly said, the business of America is business. That means everything is treated as a business, even things that should never be a business. It is the worship of the marketplace where everyone assumes the right answer will magically arise from the transactions that occur in the marketplace. The invisible hand is our god.

The trouble is, there are things that are true that people would like to think are not true, so those market results will be at odds with reality. There are things in every society that should never be exposed to market forces. They are too important to let the fickle mobs in the marketplace decide. In theory, this is supposed to be a bedrock assumption of the American form of government. There are things like natural rights that are beyond the reach of the political process.

The corrosive effect of marketism on the political process is clear in the political industrial complex that has consumed the political system. Billions are made every election cycle in politics. What should be a straightforward process whereby the parties and candidates make their case to the voters, is instead run by a massive political industry of consultants, advisers, technicians and the media. All of these people are in the process to make money from politics.

Here is a useful example in a legacy site called the American Spectator. The post is an argument in favor of something called rank choice voting. This a system that requires voters to list their preferred candidates in order of preference. The first choices are then counted up and you get the normal total. In some systems, if no candidate gets fifty percent of the vote, then the second choices are tallied up and added to the candidates total. In other systems, this is automatic.

There are two rather obvious problems with this system. One is it adds a layer of complexity to the voting system. A central tenet of all democratic systems, even those that limit the role of voting, is that voting is clear and open. In the rank choice voting systems, you can get a minority candidate winning the election, despite most people voting for some other option. Put another way, it is not clear to the users of the system how their inputs will affect the outputs of the system.

Therein lies the other problem. This added complexity becomes a bonanza for the army of grifters in the political system. Now that the social media consultant racket has run its course, they get to jump on the ranked choice voting scam. You can be sure that all of the pinheads with “social media influencer’ in their bio are now thinking about removing the Ukraine flag so they can make room for the letters RCV. This “innovation” is quickly becoming both a racket and a business.

The proof of this assertion is the man behind that post. According to his bio, Eric Wilson is a digital-first political strategist based in Washington, DC. He was a Technology and Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, located at the Harvard Kennedy School. In other words, his post at The American Spectator is simply advertising for his services. Ranked choice voting, according to Eric Wilson, is good for the people, because it is profitable for him.

It cannot be emphasized enough just how terrible ranked choice voting is for a country that is quickly losing trust in its systems. With normal voting it takes some jurisdictions weeks to count the vote. The Alaska election he holds up as a great example took weeks to sort out after the election. Imagine that in a big corrupt state like California or New York. It will take years to resolve an election. There are still court cases going on over the 2020 presidential election.

Of course, this can only add to the sense that voting is rigged. Every innovation, like mail in voting, early voting, ballot harvesting and drop box voting has come with an observable increase in shenanigans. The states at the center of the 2020 election scandal were states that suddenly embraced innovated voting methods. Imagine a state like Pennsylvania suddenly switching to ranked choice voting a week before the election and you have the beginnings of armed revolt.

Of course, the promise of chaos is exactly why the consultant class want yet another way to muddy the waters on election day. Chaos is good for business. The fact that it is bad for the health of society is besides the point. Those racks of donuts are not going to buy themselves, so that means Eric Wilson needs steady work. If that work is bad for the people, well, too bad for them. They should have figured out a way to grift on the collapse of their country like Eric Wilson.

This is the problem with marketism. When everything must be exposed to the marketplace, everything quickly becomes a racket. When the governance of your country becomes a racket, you no longer have a country. That is why the people at the top of the racket so fiercely oppose anything that looks like community. It offers an alternative morality to that of marketism. If people begin to put something ahead of making a quick buck, the market could collapse.

That is where things are headed. Politics is a massive racket run by conmen, grifters and sociopaths who care only about a quick buck. The system staggers on because of the cultural inertia behind it, but eventually, it must succumb. There are also ideologues that take advantage of this to push their agenda. We see that with the neocons and their efforts to blow up the world. With no one in power interested in the wellbeing of the system, the system will eventually collapse.

Notes From A Dissident

Posted on September 5, 2022 by thezman

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week is a late take on the Biden speech from Hell that is getting the memory hole treatment. Sunday Thoughts is on holiday, but there are new posts behind the green door. SubscribeStar and Substack.

There are a lot of ways people on this side of the great divide describe the difference between one side and the other. The term “red pill”, borrowed from the Matrix movies, is the most popular term, but it has lost much of it meaning. People will talk about their awakening, but the term “woke” is now owned by the crazies and therefore indicates mental illness rather than political awareness. Another popular term is “based” but like “red pill” it has been overused.

These terms generally focus on the race issue, which is more accurately stated as the biology issue or biological realism. The main bridge over the great divide is the acceptance of biological reality with regards to sex, ethnicity and race. People on this side of the great divide accept reality, with regards to the human condition, as it appears and reject the various social constructs of the orthodoxy. This makes sense as it is the most obvious and easiest to grasp.

There is another aspect to the phenomenon of waking up to the reality of the world and choosing to live in the truth. That is the nature of modern society. It takes a while, but people who make the journey to this side of the divide eventually come to figure out that the biology issue is the leaves of the tree. The root of the tree is the vast managerial system that allows a tiny minority to wield power. We do not live in a liberal democracy, but rather in a large imperial corporate state.

A useful example to illustrate the point is this long post in the Claremont Review of Books by Christopher Caldwell. As John Derbyshire has pointed out, Caldwell is a skillful social critic who has a knack for making important insights in such a way that the average reader can grasp them. He is a man who lives within the system even though he is a critic of the system. Unlike most mainstream pundits, he does not spend his days signaling against the people on this side of the divide.

Therein lies the important bit. Despite his ability and willingness to critically analyze the system in which he lives, he remains a man of the system. He is on that side of the great divide, not this one. The tell is the default position. Christopher Caldwell assumes his compatriots are mostly working from good intentions and mostly trying to get things right, even if most are highly partisan. Therefore, he can trust their depiction of events in the Ukraine and build his analysis accordingly.

In the second paragraph, he states, “Since June, thousands of computer-guided artillery rockets have been wreaking havoc behind Russian lines.” People on this side of the great divide who have bothered to follow the war will see this as material placed in the Post and Times by military contractors. The so-called “wonder weapon” narrative has been a running joke among those relying on more trustworthy sources. Even the Ukrainians have started to mock this claim.

Right after the wonder weapon narrative, is the narrative that claims Russia is a gas station run by peasants. “With western European help, Washington has used its control of the choke points of the global marketplace to impoverish Russians, in hopes of punishing Russia.” The sanctions regime has made the world poorer and the Russians have not been spared, but it has been an inconvenience. The claims from the Post and Times about the Russian economy are nonsense.

Noticeably lacking is the perspective of the Russians. The official narrative says that the Russians are reactive cavemen with no ability to think long term. That is what Caldwell assumes to be true, because his friends in the system say it is true. The truth is Russia, China and India are the long term planners. It is the West that wakes up every morning, reacts to what is happening and then gets busy fabricating new narratives so they can win the media war that day.

Because Christopher Caldwell is firmly rooted on the other side of the great divide, his analysis is inevitably controlled by it. Like the people from the movie living in the matrix, he is basing his understanding of the world on a general falsehood. He rests his analysis on a fabricated reality that serves the interests of the system but is no more connected to reality than a science fiction movie. His analysis is true as long as the rules of the system remain unchanged, which is impossible.

Notice also how Caldwell just accepts that the reason Washington has been meddling in Ukraine is they seek to promote democracy. Again, this is a conveniently self-serving claim from the people running foreign policy, but it has no basis in fact. The same people eagerly excluding vast numbers of Americans from the political system are certainly not spreading the hope and joy of democracy. Caldwell assumes the best from his friends in the system, so he accepts their claims.

None of this is to suggest Caldwell is a bad person or that he is stupid. It is that he lives in the false reality of official orthodoxy. On that side of the great divide, these things are true because they are necessary for the current narrative. On this side of the great divide, these things are false because they are false. It is the motivation behind these false narratives that is the starting point for dissident analysis, which results in an entirely different view of the war and the world.

That is what it means to be a dissident. The people who are constantly droning on about reality being a social construct are living in a social construct. Theirs is a world where things are true because the rules of the narrative require them to be true, but once the narrative is no longer operative, the rules change. It is how the people threatened violence against those refusing the Covid vaccine can so easily shift to blaming the whole fiasco on the people who criticized it.

Perhaps the better way to put it is that the last stop on the train that carries people to this side of the great divide is the understanding that the genuine crisis in the modern age is the contradiction between reality and official orthodoxy. To return to the movie trope, freedom only comes from destroying the matrix. There is no reform within it, because there is no reality within it. The myth of the modern age is that the modern age is in anyway attached to the reality of the human condition.

The Northman

Posted on September 2, 2022 by thezman

The Northman got a lot of attention when it was released, mostly because the usual suspects were scandalized by the lack of diversity. There are no black people in the film and the protagonist is a man. Worse yet, the female characters are feminine and the male characters are masculine. There are no homosexuals, transgenders or people speaking truth to power. In other words, a crime against the faith.

Of course, this became the story rather than the fact it is one of the best made moves in the last ten years. It is a film made by adults for adults, which has become such a rarity that reviewers struggled to describe it. Compounding it, the film requires some cultural literacy, which is rare among the movie reviewing community. Most of the reviewers think comic books are adult literature.

The Northman is a classic tale. A wronged man commits his life to getting revenge on those who wronged him. He sets out on a journey to exact his revenge, but the journey turns into something else. The black and white world of his imagination gives way to the moral ambiguity in which all of us exist. The story of revenge becomes an exploration of the deeper themes that define the human condition.

In this film, the story is based on the legend of Amleth, which comes from Scandinavian sources that have been lost. What we have comes from the Saxo Grammaticus, a 13th century Danish theologian. Amleth is the young son of a king. He sees his father killed by his jealous uncle, who takes both the crown and his brother’s wife. The son escapes only to return as a man who then gets his revenge on his uncle.

That is pretty much it for the plot of The Northman, but that short trip is one fantastic ride that reminds you that movies do not have to be lectures. They can be incredibly well done stories that leave the viewer thinking about the larger issues raised in the movie, but never explicitly mentioned. That is art. It holds a mirror up to you and your world so you can see things from a different perspective.

It is fair to say The Northman is art. We see Amleth as a young boy, full of curiosity and wonder until he witnesses the murder of his father. Next, we see him as a fully grown man, but more beast than man as his rage makes him a killing machine. We are left to guess what happened to make him into a berserker, but in a few minutes, we have two important plot points of his character arc.

Amleth takes part in a raid in the Kievan Rus and after the fight, he meets a Seeress who tells him that he will take his revenge on his uncle and that his path is intertwined with a Maiden-King. Now we have an important element. Amleth is not just a man on a revenge quest, but a man following his destiny. He no longer has a choice and must wrestle with this as he sets off on his journey.

This is not something you expect to see in a modern movie. Instead, it would have been filled with emotive exposition. Half the film would have been taken up explaining the back story and his emotional state. This film assumes you are mature enough to fill in the blanks and understand the bigger meaning of the story. This is not just a story about a man, but a story about man and his relationship to the world.

One of the clever things about the film is that it blends the dreams and visions with the live action in such a way that you are not always sure if what you are seeing is real or the imaginings of the hero. Toward the end, Amleth faces his mother and comes to realize her role in his father’s death. The way it is shot suggests it could be all happening in his head rather than in the real world. You cannot be entirely sure.

What really makes this movie stand out is the bigger themes. Amleth starts as a man with a lust for revenge. Then he learns that he will get his revenge, but that it is part of a bigger story of which he is only one part. His struggle is in accepting his fate and fulfilling his destiny, even when he seems to have other options and it comes at some cost to those he loves.

This is a theme that comes up often in our literature. If man can have a destiny, does he have free will? If you cannot escape your destiny, then why think at all about the choices that are presented to you? On the other hand, if your revealed destiny is one of many possibilities, are you obligated to fulfill it? Is the revelation part of the calculus or is it a challenge?

This gets to the biggest question of all. What is the point of life? Is it better to live a long and unimportant life or live a short and consequential life? Would you rather die a broken down old or die a young hero? Our nature is to live, but to live for what? This is the choice presented to Amleth. He could have remained a berserker. He could have abandoned his quest for revenge for a simple life. He could accept his destiny.

The Northman is about the oldest questions of human existence. What is the point of our lives and how should we use the time we have? For men, the choice is always between the long quiet life and the short exciting one. If it were only up to men, the latter would be the easy choice, but men cannot be men, or even exist, without women and women naturally want a man to choose the former.

That is what makes The Northman a great film. It presents a classic tale in a way that allows the intended audience to think about the big questions. It is not a lecture or an escape from reality, but a well told story. It is up to the adults in the audience to make of it what they will. That is probably what upset the critics. They no longer have the adult capacity to appreciate this film, so they flung their poo at it.

Time To Move On

Posted on September 1, 2022 by thezman

Anyone who has been through a breakup, like a divorce or the dissolution of a business partnership, knows they take on a life of their own. There is rarely one thing that sets the relationship off on the path to destruction. It is the accumulation of small things that build to an undefinable point where the relationship shifts from natural cooperation to natural opposition. Actions that used to build cooperation suddenly become points of contention until the two sides realize the relationship must end.

This is the dynamic in which most civic nationalist now find themselves with their old partner the “founding documents.” For longer than the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, the civic nationalist has looked at his citizenship as defined by the partnership with the founding of America. The Declaration and to a lesser extent the Constitution have been his life partner. These documents and the mythology that has been created around them are what make him whole.

These documents, along with the founding itself, exist within the larger definition of America that the civic nationalist will defend with his life. There is some variation in that some of them still promote the melting pot idea while others are in the creedal camp, but all of them are married to the general concept of America. They will defend America from critics on all sides, mostly from the Right, of course, but they will even make some noises about defending their love from the Left as well.

The problem is America does not love them anymore. Those founding documents, the marriage certificate of the relationship, no longer matter to America. The reason America keeps them locked away and rarely mentions them is they are just not that important because the relationship is not that important. America is ready to move onto to the new vibrant stage of its life. That means leaving behind the old phase, the marriage to the civic nationalists.

Like a jilted lover, the civic nationalists cannot accept it. Here is an example in a legacy publication defending the Declaration. The elevation of the Declaration over the actual founding documents of the country was the result of a prior rough patch in the relationship during the last century. The Caesarism of Roosevelt needed to be addressed, like an infidelity in a relationship. The solution was provided by Harry Jaffe, a second rate scholar who peddled bromides to third rate thinkers.

There was no way to square what the progressives had done in the first half of the twentieth century with the text and spirit of the Constitution. There was no way to challenge them as they controlled the important bits of society. The solution was to embrace a form of Jacobinism. America was now defined, so the theory goes, by the egalitarian spirit of the Declaration. This also allowed them to embrace the tyrant Lincoln as their new Moses.

The new vision of America the civic nationalist created in response to the authoritarianism of the new regime was made to look like tradition by rewriting the founding history. The real founding document was the Declaration. The Constitution was an imperfect compromise to get started. The Civil War was an effort to address the big flaws to bring the document in line with the Declaration. The Gettysburg Address was a restatement of the genuine founding ideal.

This is utter nonsense, but it kept the relationship going. Like the cuckold who convinces himself the wife is taking night classes at the university so she can get a better job once the kids are in school, the civic nationalists occupied themselves with the Lincoln fantasy. Meanwhile, the America they loved was getting busy with every left-wing fad that came out of the academy. She was no longer even trying to pretend that she cared about the relationship with the civic nationalists.

There are some civic nationalists who see the problem. They hope to refashion the relationship around something they call common good conservatism, which creates an open marriage between themselves and the Constitution. America can still carry on with the latest thing, as long as it does not threaten the marriage. The common good civic nationalists will step in to enforce discipline when needed. They imagine the cuckold finally gaining the courage to call his wife home.

In fairness, there are some within the civic nationalist space who sense that the relationship is over and it is time to move on. They mostly focus on the old originalism idea embraced by the legal wing of civic nationalism. Originalism seeks to elevate the text of the Constitution over legal aspirations to the contrary. The problem is they are left to defend a document that was flawed from the start and has been butchered by previous efforts to minimize it.

The hard cold truth is that the America the civic nationalists claim to love is not around anymore and she is never coming back. In fact, she never really existed. It was a creation of the last century. The America of the founding died at Gettysburg and was buried in Reconstruction. It took two wars in the 20th century to create a replacement, which maintained the trappings of the original, but was fundamentally different from the republic fashioned by the Founders.

The crisis of the present is not over the strains in the old relationship with the America imagined by the civic nationalists. It is the result of the America formed in the 20th century having no rationale in the 21st century. The America of the civic nationalist is dust in a grave, left untended in the 19th century. Not only is she never coming back, but she also cannot be replaced with anything similar. Like the cuckold whose wife has left for good, the civic nationalists need to move on with their lives.

Whatever comes next is going to be fashioned by those who close the door on the past and accept the present, along with what future can be made of it. There are lessons to be gleaned from America’s past. There are lessons to be gleaned from the Franco-Prussian War and Revolutions of 1848. Those lessons only matter if they are put to use understanding the present in order to create a future. That future is not going to include the founding documents moldering away in a museum.

The Revolution In The Clouds

Posted on August 31, 2022 by thezman

An enduring question on this side of the great divide is over the motivation of the Cloud People as they go about their war on the Dirt People. Is there some grand plan behind the war or is it some weird instinctual thing? Are they motivated by base instincts like money and power or is it something spiritual? There is the “deep state versus emergent behavior” angle but also the simple question about whether these people have the self-awareness to grasp what they are doing at all.

For example, the war on Russia was launched six months ago and at the time it was clear to most people that the cost to the West would be high. The question was about the cost to the Russians. Given the dismal history of economic sanctions and the public utterances of Russian leaders, sober minded people saw the sanctions regime as a high risk and extremely low reward gamble. That quickly became an all risk and no reward strategy that was doomed to fail.

Despite the obviousness of it all, the West kept doubling down on the program as if they were on the right side of history. Now people are getting gas bills in Europe that are five and ten times normal. Europeans are posting their utility bills on-line as a desperate effort to get attention to the issue. For reasons no one has bothered to explain, Western media is not treating this as an important story. They are not grilling Western leaders on the situation or even asking them questions.

Are these people just so cut off from reality that they simply do not know what is happening in their countries? Is someone like Liz Truss so insulated from reality that she is unaware of things called electric bills? Since no one has bothered to ask her about the issue, it is possible she does not know. It seems crazy but staggering ignorance would explain why this is happening. The Cloud People do live vastly different lives from the Dirt People.

That does not explain the media silence. Scan the British media and you would come away with the impression that there is no economic crisis. It is all stories about the royals, local celebrities and childish political drama. The German media has bland stories about the latest ten point plan from the party. Those are stuffed in between press releases from the Gaia cult like this one. They worry that people freezing to death in their homes this winter could anger Gaia.

What in the world is going on here? The worst economic catastrophe to befall Europe in generations is being ignored. Is this a strategy by the Cloud People or are they just so cut off from reality they do not see this as a big deal? This lunatic from the German Church of Gaia wants to tax meat at a time of soaring food costs. Is this nut so ideologically blinkered that he does not see how this looks? Normal people will be forgiven for thinking he is a deranged sadist.

This is where another motivation creeps into the picture. Maybe what lies behind all of this is a seething hatred of the Dirt People. The reason they are not focusing on the crisis is they are showing restraint. In private they are laughing at the prospect of Dirt People heating their homes with candles this winter. Those shop owners going out of business gives them a sexual thrill. This crisis is the revenge of the Cloud People on the Dirt People for not dying off during Covid.

That last bit is further proof that vengeance may be the real motivation behind these abusive polices we see in the West. It was clear from the start that the Covid polices were something of a tantrum by the Cloud People. They made people humiliate themselves with masks and social distancing out of spite. The vaccine mandates now look like an attempted genocide. Deaths among the young and healthy are at frighteningly high levels across the West.

There have been times in history when the people concluded that their rulers were corrupt, stupid or tyrannical. In the furor leading up to the revolt the rabble-rousers would caricature the rulers as ruthless and vindictive. In reality, the rulers were either incompetent or simply unlucky. In order to properly revolt, the people needed to be convinced that their rulers were more than just stupid. They were bad people who deserved what was coming to them.

We may be experiencing the first example where a ruling class is evil, but the rabble rousers among the ruled cannot bring themselves to accept it. It is the mirror image of the revolutionary model where all restraint is lost among the ruling class while the people desperately try to maintain the status quo. The people at the top have all the money and power, which for some reason has led them to revolt against the system that makes their status as elites possible.

The other side of this revolution in the clouds is the placidity of the Dirt People in the face of this war of extinction. Perhaps this is what has driven the ruling class into a murderous rage. No matter how hard they try, they cannot rouse the people to defend themselves or their culture. The rage is not exactly at the people, but at the ruddy sunset of the West. Modernity has made the people so feeble; they can no longer defend themselves from predators.

Regardless of the reasons, the revolution in the clouds will continue until the Dirt People can be roused from their stupor or they simply succumb. One way or the other, the revolution can only end with the death of the Cloud People. Surely, they must see this, which means that is the ultimate aim. Self-abnegation is the highest virtue of the new religion and one way or another, they will achieve it. The only question that really matters is if they will take Western civilization with them.

The Ukraine Grift

Posted on August 30, 2022 by thezman

One of the puzzles of the war in the Ukraine, debated by those watching through sources outside of Western media, is why are the Ukrainians doing what they are doing in this war. Their tactics make little sense and suggest the over all strategy is something other than what has been stated. In fact, official statements from the Zelensky government have become absurdly strident. They bring back memories of Baghdad Bob during the American invasion of Iraq.

The initial phase of the war had the Russians dashing in, probably hoping for a negotiated settlement based on the Minsk accords. Some think they underestimated the Ukrainian capabilities and willingness to fight. There are lots of people who claim to be psychics, knowing what was in the minds of the Russian planners, but no one knows what the Russians expected. All we know is they got a bloody nose in the opening weeks and had to reconfigure their war plans.

This is the nature of war. The old line about no war plan lasting first contact with the enemy is a cliché because it is true. The Russians had to change gears and they did that in the early spring. They settled into a strategy of shelling the Ukrainian positions with their superior artillery and missile systems. They also gained air superiority so they can hunt down Ukrainian targets all over the country. This is a low-cost way to slowly and methodically grind down the Ukrainian military.

Here is the puzzle. Why have the Ukrainians not responded to this change in tactics so as not to be slowly ground down by the Russians? Logic says they should have withdrawn from the Donbas to more defensible positions. This would have preserved their best troops and much of their equipment. They could have appealed to the West for better air defense systems to protect their army as they prepared for a counter offensive at some point in the future.

No one really seems to know how much Western military gear has flowed into Ukraine, but the best guess is more than enough to supply a million man army. The Europeans dumped a fair bit of old equipment onto Ukraine, but they have also supplied a fair bit of modern equipment as well. The Russians have modern equipment, but the militias, who are doing the bulk of the fighting, are relying on Soviet era tanks and armored personnel carriers so this old stuff is not worthless.

Of course, one of the lessons of this war is that old planes, trucks and tanks can be repurposed as unmanned vehicles. The Russians are actively converting their old aircraft into crude drones. They are not as good as the high end stuff, but it is better than scrapping them. Ukraine could have been doing this as well if they had pulled back from the Donbas and been preparing for a counter offensive. Instead, the old equipment has been hurled into the meatgrinder of the Donbas.

The elephant in the room whenever discussing the war in the Ukraine is the massive amount of corruption. We know from the Trump years that many American politicians were on the payroll of corrupt Ukrainian firms. We know the State Department is full of Ukrainian operatives. We know that what ties these people to the Ukrainian government is highly corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs. Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, an oligarch controlled energy monopoly in Ukraine.

That is the key to unriddling the Ukraine war strategy. The key players in American foreign policy only care about harming Russia. The neocon obsession with Russia goes back generations now. They have made clear on multiple occasions that their only goal in the Ukraine is to inflict as much damage on the Russians as possible. This has come from senior people in the Biden regime, as well as various characters operating in the unofficial foreign policy establishment.

Take the Russia obsessed foreign policy establishment and join it to the hyper-corrupt Ukrainian regime and you have the makings of a grand grift. The other piece of it is the Military Industrial Complex, which will sell NATO countries trillions in new arms over the next decade, to replace what is going to Ukraine. The Ukraine has become a massive money laundering scheme. Billions flow into the place with little or no accounting and much of it ends up in anonymous bank accounts.

This is where the Ukrainian ware strategy fits into the scam. The neocons need a narrative to sell the politicians and the public. The “heroic Ukrainian defenders willing to fight to the last man” is the story they initially sold. Over the last few months, the new story has been “If the heroic Ukrainian defenders just had better weapons, they could take the fight to the Ruskies!” The myth of the wonder weapon, of course, works nicely in the Raytheon brochure.

Meanwhile, the actual Ukrainian fighters are hunkered down into massive, fortified locations while the Russians shell them day and night. Reports from the front suggest few of the weapons are making it to the men. CBS did a report suggesting that only 30% of weapons have gone into battle. They were forced to recant, but their reporting comports with what others have said. The fact is, no one knows where this stuff is going or if it is even useful to the soldiers.

The whole thing relies on defending a one thousand mile front in the Donbas against an endless artillery barrage. Imagine a front that stretched from New York to Miami and along the way cities have been turned into massive, fortified bunker complexes and you have a good idea of what is happening. The Russians shell these fortifications at will and the Ukrainians have no chance to take the fight to the Russians. They just have to sit there and take the pounding for public relations reasons.

Even by current standards, this sounds amazingly cynical, but stop and think about what happened during the Covid panic. The people who made tens of billions on a dangerous, experimental vaccine are not going to blink at sacrificing tens of thousands, maybe millions, of Ukrainians to make billions in profits. The people who turned America into a pirate’s cove are taking the strategy global. Everything is a grift and no grift is too bloody or monstrous.

At some point, a marketing plan with the phrase “to the last Ukrainian” in it will run out of Ukrainians to sell it. There are ongoing shakeups in the Ukrainian leadership so that part of the grift may be starting to crack. There are growing rumors of defections in the military as they wake up to what is happening to them. Of course, the truly terrifying winter that lies ahead for all of Europe cannot be ignored. The reality of Ukraine will become apparent and then what happens?

History says not much. Covid is a good guide. There is no doubt that trust in the institutions has declined as a result of the Covid scam. The ongoing effects of the vaccine could blow up into a major scandal. None of which has moved people into the streets, but there has been a cumulative effect on the public psyche. A collapse in Ukraine would be another blow to the regime. Still, it is hard to see this being the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but crazier things have happened.

The Death Of Bourgeois

Posted on August 29, 2022 by thezman

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it a visit to an old topic that deserves a better airing. Sunday Thoughts is on holiday, but there are new posts behind the green door about various things. SubscribeStar and Substack.

Spengler famously described a civilization as having a birth, life and then a decline into death, much like the life of man. One of the features of decline is the elite stops being elite in term of talent and ability. They may sit atop society and hold power over the people, but they are no longer a genuine elite. They simply hold positions in a system created by those who came before them. They are the inheritors of status that they did not earn and they lack the ability to earn.

This reality is becoming increasingly obvious as we see highly credentialed morons stagger from one blunder to the next. Europe is about to go into a modern version of the turnip winter because European leaders picked a fight with Russia, the primary energy supplier to the continent. The people leading Europe do not decorate themselves like African potentates, but they are every bit as ridiculous. They are like children wearing their parents clothes, pretending to be adults.

The decline of the elites has become so obvious that even some former neocons are starting to notice the problem. Victor David Hanson has a piece in American Greatness bemoaning the decline of the elites. He clings to his old civic nationalists beliefs, so that has left him in a no man’s land of sorts. He cannot take the trip over the great divide, but he cannot sign onto the latest thing. He is left to argue that better people at the top would somehow fix the system.

What civic nationalist critics fail to see is the elite incompetnace is a product of the system, rather than a plague upon it. The crisis in the West is not caused by failed leadership but rather the elites are a product of the same forces behind the general crisis in the West. A bourgeoise culture evolved in the 20th century that naturally leads to a flattening of talent. The elites seem mediocre because bourgeoise society, taken to its logical end, is the celebration of mediocrity.

One part of it is democracy. The core assumption of democracy is that all opinions are equally valid, if not equally correct. The former is a moral claim while the latter is an empirical claim. The problem is you cannot suppress a moral claim with a factual one, so bad opinions can flourish like weeds alongside good ones. Before long it is impossible to tell the good from the bad. In fact, any effort to pull the weeds from the garden is met with howls of protest.

Of course, democracy in the modern sense is only possible in a society with a large middle-class, like post-war America. Prior to the war, egalitarian notions had little purchase in American society. Men were equal before God and equal before the law, but few people confused that with equality of talent. Nonwhites were systematically excluded from everything important because whites naturally assumed they lacked the ability to perform the duties of citizens.

The great explosion of middle-class life after the war changed that view. In a world where most white people could expect a nice house in a nice neighborhood and their kids would have a better life, natural equality started making sense. As the bulk of white Americans entered the material sameness of middleclass life, they began to adopt the spiritual sameness of bourgeoise life. When the observed differences were the result of effort, it is not a big leap to egalitarian civic nationalism.

Late 20th century America became a bourgeois-ocracy. Middle-class values dominated not just the popular culture, but elite culture. The world of deeds gave way to the world of clever words. When the plumber’s house is not that much different from the lawyer’s house, there has to be something other than material prosperity to distinguish the lawyer from the plumber. The result was a growing collection of soft things, moral signifiers to distinguish people within the bourgeoise space.

As an aside, the drive to impoverish the middle-class is not the result of a ravenous elite seeking to enrich itself. It is the result of an insecure elite trying to create distance between itself and the vast middle-class. Think of the college student that comes home with a nose ring and blue hair. The point is to put space between herself and her family with the exaggerated gesture. Our sophomoric elites are doing the same things, except you will eat bugs and walk to work.

Putting that aside, this need to distinguish oneself within a system that champions sameness is part of what drives the current thing. People within the elite of a bourgeois-ocracy struggle to distinguish each other within the elite. The reason they rush from one weird fad to the next is the fear of melting into the bland, gray nothingness that is bourgeoise culture. They are not weird for material gain or even spite, but out of fear of being smothered by the great nothingness.

This excellent essay in First Things about the intelligent is pre-revolutionary Russia gets at an aspect of this phenomenon. In a world where deeds count for very little, the only thing left is posturing. In pre-revolutionary Russia, liberals were happy to sign on with the radical terrorist, even though they were often the victims. The reason is the pose was a way to signal their existence. They sided with radicals because that let them stand apart from the crowd.

The modern intelligent, with her pronouns in her profile, is simply hoping to create barriers in the gray nothingness. On the one hand, it signals moral status within the gray nothingness of bourgeois life. On the other hand, it creates the sense that there is a moral barrier to entry. The gross people at Target do not use the proper pronouns, while the cool people using Instacart never deadname anyone. The meaningless gestures are supposed to give meaning in an otherwise meaningless culture.

The crisis in the West is not due to faulty elites. The elites are the product of a long decline into a bourgeois-ocracy. The replacement of the vertical relations with horizonal ones was always unnatural and unnatural things cannot last. The mediocre elites are just the natural result of mediocre people spawned by the socio-political culture that values mediocrity over greatness. Nature selects against the mediocre and therefore the bourgeois-ocracy is trundling to its natural end.

The Paper Bag Test

Posted on August 26, 2022 by thezman

Note: Since Friday is usually podcast day and there is no podcast this week, I thought it would be good to spring something from the behind the green door. For those with a paywall account, this is a repeat. For the vast majority here, this is entirely new since you have failed to sign up for a paywall account. Perhaps seeing the error of your ways, you will reconsider your decision.

Here in Greater Lagos, there are several grocery chains. The small moonbat community is serviced by Whole Foods, of course. They empty their wallets buying exploitation-free artisanal pickles. A step below that is Wegmans, which targets the same sort of shopper, but a click down the socioeconomic ladder. The Wegman’s customer lives in a nice suburb and supports most of the current fads.

The next step down is Giant, which is owned by the colossal Dutch conglomerate Koninklijke Ahold Delhaize N.V. They also operate other regional brands such as Stop & Shop and Food Lion. Interestingly, the Food Lions in Lagos are positioned near ghettos, so their customer base is the polar opposite of Whole Foods. In the South, Food Lion is the standard suburban grocery store.

After that comes the specialty shops and local players. Aldi has started to turn up, offering a warehouse experience for food shopping. In Europe, an Aldi is like a big convenience store. They are not as big as an American grocery store, but they serve the same function. The ones I have experienced in America are a cross between Dollar Tree and Walmart’s food area.

The point is we have a lot of options. I tend to go to the Wegman’s near my office because of quality and selection. It is a little more expensive than the Giant, which is across the street, but the trade-off is worth it to me. The staff is also nicer than the people who work at Giant. For some reason, the people who work at the Giant stores near me are surly and unpleasant.

Starting on August 1st, Wegman’s has stopped using plastic bags. I found this out the hard way when I hit the checkout. I use the self-checkout. All of the plastic bag holders were empty. I asked the clerk, thinking it may be some weird shortage issue and instead I got a lecture about the environment from a moron. Interestingly, she said it was a new law in the county, which I know is a lie.

That says the lecture was part of her training. She was forced to memorize the official answer by store management, which she repeated when people bitched about the new plastic bag policy. Put another way, this means the company knew their customers would hate it and they knew the policy was not defensible on its own terms, so they had to produce a justification.

The main reason grocery stores switched to plastic bags was that they are superior to the old paper bags. Plastic bags let you carry more stuff. They rarely rip. They also make useful gloves for picking up after the dog. Paper bags rip and they really show their stuff when it rains. Carrying your stuff to the car on a rainy day is an exercise in frustration with paper bags.

Of course, the cranks behind these schemes will counter that you can always use the grimy canvas sacks that have become one of their totems. They apparently believe that if there is a climate rapture while they are shopping, Gaia will be able to home in on their grimy canvas sacks. Gaia also commands them to impose their weird morality on the rest of us, so you better fall in line bigot.

What makes the Wegman’s scheme more ridiculous is the fact that they are now charging for the paper bags. Each one is a nickel. There is a ceremonial reconciliation at the end of the checkout. This is another one those clues that the scheme is driven by something other than business interests. The people behind it want you to know that they are compelling you to obey Gaia.

It was clear that the law of unintended consequences is kicking in. Because packing paper sacks is a hassle, fewer people were in the self-checkout. The lines for regular checkout were longer. This means the store will be faced with staffing up or losing business due to people not wanting to wait all day to checkout. It also means more customer hassles to be addressed by the staff.

The most obvious result will be many people going across the street to the Giant, which is there to sell food, not preach the gospel of Gaia. No doubt the people at Wegman’s will see this as a triumph. They have finally purged those hidden fascists prowling the cereal aisle of their stores. It is the price they are willing to pay for the war on white supremacy and climate change or whatever.

The whole thing is another example of how this stuff works like a religion. The people who produced this crackpot idea are not doing it to make money. They are not doing it to curry favor with a specific audience. It is a public act of piety. This is all about proving their faith because they really do believe this stuff. Rational arguments to the contrary are just seen as proof of their eternal goodness.

It is one thing, but multiply this by hundreds of examples and it is not hard to see why everyone is so salty. We live in a world where a small cadre of lunatics are trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. Not only are those beliefs insane, but they keep changing almost as if the point of the religion is to be a nuisance. The Church of the Public Nuisance now controls public life.

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