News Roundup

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Something I did not cover in the show is the fate of the most popular president in human history, who has come down with Covid. This is interesting for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that Biden used to angrily lecture us that only unvaccinated people could get Covid. It seems like a long time ago, but he was the leader of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” chorus.

On a personal note, I was one of the few people pointing out that this mRNA technology had never worked very well in livestock. The boost in immunity was short-lived and tended to have a much higher rate of negative reactions. In livestock, the latter can be counted as a cost of doing business, but we do not do that sort of math for humans when it comes to vaccines.

Now, that does not mean the vaccine was all bad. For someone like Biden who is very old and frail, the risks are worth it. Even with the very mild variants kicking around, Covid is still a killer of the very weak. The same applies to the flu. If you are over seventy, getting a flu shot is a risk worth taking. For everyone else, unless you have a special medical condition, the vaccine was never a good idea.

Putting that aside, you see the problem we have by the near total silence from the Republican party on this issue. They could be using this to hammer Biden, but they were onboard with the vaccine mandates too. The same is true of the conservatives, who forgot all about their principles during the panic. All of these people believe the same things, they just disagree over the presentation.

The greatest boondoggle in human history will be flushed down the memory hole because no one in the managerial class will speak out against it. Most have already forgotten the whole thing. Those who know got the message a long time ago and they keep quiet to keep their position. It is like how everyone knows the reality of crime, but no one ever talks about it in public.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

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  • Election Laws
  • Lagos Confederates
  • J6 Committee
  • Indian Polling Company
  • The Census
  • Racists!
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  • Tom Nichols
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The New Right And Old Enemies

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From a dissident perspective, the squabbles between the professional conservatives and their critics in what they are calling the New Right is like see something of a proof of dissident critiques of conservatism. Many of the charges levelled at the professional conservatives are borrowed, without attribution, from dissidents. The main charge, that conservatives have conserved nothing, was a mainstay of dissident discussion before Trump arrived to discredit the conservative establishment.

The term “New Right” itself is borrowed from the old alt-right. Back in 2016 when the alt-right was morphing into old school white nationalism, those not interested in going in that direction were labeled the alt-light. Guys like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobic started calling their thing the New Right as a way to add legitimacy to their activity on social media. Sohrab Ahmari appropriated the term and uses it to describe those criticizing institutional conservatism.

Putting that aside, the back and forth between various groups is useful in understanding what happened with American conservatism. If there is going to be some new force that rises up to challenge the status quo, it will need to avoid the errors made by conservatives in the last century. The debate also provides an avenue for understanding the much larger trends that have led to this point. Ideas matter and it is the ebb and flow of ideas that animates history.

This post in the Claremont publication American Mind by Michael Anton is a good example of how ideas shape actions. Anton is responding to this post by someone calling himself Michael Watson. Those old enough to recall the purging of the paleocons by the National Review crowd will recognize the pattern. Instead of addressing the criticism coming from their right, the conservatives accuse the critics of being anti-Semitic and thus disqualified from the debate.

For his part, Anton responds in the predictable way. He endorses the central claim that any criticism of certain people is off limits, thus his job is to prove that his ideas do not fall into that bucket. The paleos went down this road back in the 1980’s when they insisted that criticizing Israel and Israeli influence in American foreign policy was not an attack on Jews. The neocons were undeterred and paid off enough conservatives, primarily Bill Buckley, to make the charge stick.

For those interested, Bill Buckley produced a special edition of National Review to condemn the paleos. He then turned it into a book. No doubt that American Enterprise, Heritage and other conservative money machines bought skids of the book as a reward for his efforts. Here is a transcript of Buchanan being interviewed on PBS about the charges levelled against him. Thirty years on and we see the same tricks being used by institutional conservatism to guard their right.

Interestingly, Anton makes no mention of the fact that Watson is a member of the neoconservatism cult. He is the associate director of the Center for the Future of Liberal Society at the Hudson Institute. For those interested in the deep state theory of everything, their wiki page is a cornucopia of material. For those interested in anti-Semitism, it reads like something from Kevin MacDonald. It is a good example of how relentless pursuit of group interest can easily look like conspiracy.

Anton has his reasons for avoiding the elephant in the room, but the elephant is at the heart of the debate. Neoconservatism has never made any sense as a subset of Anglo-Conservatism, as its primary focus is international. Conservatism is the elevation of the near over the far, the local over the distant. The singular focus of neoconservatism is the ancient enemies of the Jewish people, both near and far. Given the lack of anti-Semites locally, it is obsessed with distant enemies from the past.

The temptation is to hang all of this on the Jews, but the fact is neoconservatism has become a weird subculture that revolves around the concept of Israel. Many of the biggest neocons are not Jewish. Watson is obviously not Jewish. Bill Buckley was obviously not Jewish. Large swaths of the Evangelical subculture are obsessed with supporting Israel at the expense of everything. Since the Cold War, this subculture has driven conservative politics, right into oblivion.

For this reason, it is easy to see why many on the so-called New Right are loath to take on the neocons. They have a lot of money and they lack a soul. They will say the nastiest things about anyone who crosses them. Taking on a well-heeled collection of sociopaths with institutional power is dangerous. The trouble is, there is no air for a “new right” until the Right is purged of this pestilence. Neoconservatism has to be read out of politics in general, not just right-wing politics.

There are plenty of easy targets in the neocon space. Thirty years ago, neoconservatism was run by smart and clever men. Today it is populated with cranks and crazies who are easy to mock. More important, their schemes have resulted in an evolving economic and political disaster. Pinning the economic war against Russia on the neocons is easy money. The New Right would be wise to borrow a trick from Saul Alinsky and make the neocons own the Ukraine disaster.

Of course, this comes to the other elephant in the room. Conservatism is a business and the neocons have a near lock on the flow of money. They control the billion-dollar think tank racket. They control access to big donors. The reason that First Things continues to publish a nut job like George Weigel is money. His war mongering lunacy and bigotry is out of step with the site, but institutional conservatism likes him so he is tolerated in order to avoid offending the money men.

The golden rule says that the man with the gold makes the rules and that is the problem that any alternative to institutional conservatism faces. Either it accepts poverty as the price for political commitment or it builds a parallel funding mechanism. Whether or not the New Right understands this is unclear. The only way to achieve the latter is to take Alinsky’s advice and focus on the problem, personalize it and then polarize it, forcing people to pick sides, thus neutralizing it.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Managerial Morality

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Note: There is a new post up on both Substack and SubscribeStar. It appears there are lots of people on Substack who would never sign up for SubscibeStar and plenty of people on SubscribeStar who have no interest in moving to Substack. Green door content will be posted on both so pick your poison.

In the classic comedy, The Jerk, there is a scene in which the main character, played by Steve Martin, is in court. He is being sued because the invention that made him rich is supposedly causing everyone to go cross-eyed. He invented a thing to go on the bridge of glasses that prevents them from falling forward when you look down. In the scene, Martin looks around and sees that everyone in the court, including the judge and the jury, are cross-eyed like the people suing him.

This is what Elon Musk is going to face in the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor when his case against Twitter goes to trial. That assumes it ever gets to a trial, as there is a good chance his lawyers see the writing on the wall long before that point and there is some sort of settlement. The Twitter legal team features a former chief judge from the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor. No doubt there are others with connections to the small club that is the Delaware bench.

Like the Steve Martin character in that movie, Musk is about to learn that the laws and procedures do not matter. What matters is who decides. Every judge on the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor was put there by a politician. Those politicians were selected for their loyalty to a system that many deny exists. That system is the managerial system that governs America. You do not get into office with a chance to wield real power unless you are trusted by the system.

System is probably not the best word for what we are seeing. It is more like a mindset, a set of shared beliefs. The judge in the Twitter case, Kathaleen McCormick, will look out at the players and see that Musk is not her sort. He is not the type of person she thinks should be a winner in this world. She thinks this because everyone she knows thinks this about Musk. She may not be able to say why she thinks Musk is a threat to our democracy, but she is sure of it.

It was not always this way for Musk. He was once the darling of the managerial class, celebrated in popular culture as a modern day Thomas Edison. He was serving Gaia with his electric cars and hyper loops. His battery plants would magically allow us to stop raping Mother Earth for fossil fuels. His reward would be to one day travel the stars in his rocket ships. Musk was the way to the glorious future. When he spoke out against Twitter, he suddenly transformed into the terrible past.

This is what stumps people about managerialism. There was no official pronouncement from the leader of the managers. The supreme leader of managerialism did not read out a fatwa against Elon Musk. There is not even an anonymous memo circulating that says Musk is now on the proscribed list. It is a thing that just happened. One day, people with power were showering Musk with your money. Then all of a sudden, they all agreed that Musk was a threat to our democracy.

Another example of the managerial mindset is in this story about the law firm that won the recent gun case in the Supreme Court. The two lawyers who won the case were met with a termination letter after their victory. The law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, represents the most important people in the most important matters. There is a revolving door between Kirkland & Ellis and the Department of Justice. Former AG Bill Bar was a Kirkland man, as were many on his team.

Why is Kirkland & Ellis dropping second amendment cases? No one has made an official announcement on the issue. The attorneys who won the gun case stated that they were told the firm was dropping their gun clients. No one came to the partners of Kirkland & Ellis and made them an offer they could not refuse. They simply decided that their conscience could no longer allow them to handle these cases. Then they were celebrated for it by their friends down at the club.

This is the first domino. All of the other big forms will drop second amendment litigation because they will all be struck by the same crisis of conscience. Much the same has happened in the insurance industry. Insurers refused to do business with the National Rifle Association. Many banks have also joined the boycott. Again, there was no memo sent out from the secret lair in the hollowed out volcano. No one is forcing these big players to do this. They just think it is right.

It is one of things the paleos got wrong about managerialism. Perhaps wrong is too strong a word for it. More like they did not anticipate it. Burnham, a former communist, focused on the material aspects. He never addressed the culture of managerialism that was evolving along with the managerial system. Later paleos started to approach this topic, but they never fully embraced the idea that this class that rules over American society has reached class consciousness.

That class consciousness is not simply an awareness of their position with regards to economic and cultural relations. It is a moral community now. To be in the managerial class requires accepting a set of beliefs about what is right and wrong. Good people accept climate change. Bad people are deniers. Good people think guns are bad, while the bad people talk about their second amendment rights. The good people saw Trump as a threat to our democracy. The bad people voted for him.

This is what Musk faces in the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor. He may have the facts on his side with regards to the fake accounts. He may have the law on his side with regards to the terms of the deal. He has all the money in the world, which should count for a lot. None of that may matter as the people making the decision have all decided that he is a bad guy. Like every issue for the managerial class, Musk is now a moral signifier. Where you stand on him is where you stand on everything.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Questioning Reality

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There is a growing sense that there is a crisis in science, with science being broadly defined to include the soft sciences. The reproducibility crisis, as pointed out by the statistician W. M. Briggs, is close to universal. Across the academy, there is a plague of faulty and fraudulent studies being produced. Worse yet, the systems for controlling fraud seem to be encouraging it. Peer review now means nothing more than politically acceptable in the soft science fields.

Briggs offers one reason for what is happening. He notes that engineering is not having this problem. The reason is the bridge has to actually work as predicted or the engineers suffer a heavy price. Engineering is not science, but it relies upon the sciences to produce practical things. Those practical things must hold up to reality, which controls what comes out of engineering as accepted theory. In other words, everything in engineering gets tested against reality.

The academy, on the other hand, never has to face reality this way. Even in the hard sciences, reality avoidance is common. Theoretical physics has entered a world that is beyond the ability to test. Math is still math, but much of what is done is purely speculative or requires unproven assumptions. In the soft sciences, the rules have collapsed entirely and most of what comes out is narrative framing. The “science” is limited to providing cover for current fads.

Another reason for the crisis in the sciences is modeling. Anyone who has worked with models knows that the model maker can quickly become a god. He creates a model of the world based on what he would like it to be rather than as a reflection of the bit of reality he is trying to understand. Of course, model makers often have a boss who needs to be pleased. That boss could be in a corner office or the boss could be an angry mob of blue-haired harpies patrolling campus.

The point is you can make models do anything. The model maker is like a script writer in that he can make the rules do what he needs to reach his desired end. Bad script writers use clunky plot devices to solve problems for their characters. Bad model makers create a set of rules and data selection methods to close the gap between theory and reality. Since the model will never be tested against reality in the soft sciences, bad model makers can quickly become stars.

Here is where the question of causality comes into play. Is the corruption of the academic domain a symptom of larger societal trends? Has the steady decline of standards in society dragged down the academy or has the corruption of institutions subverted society, including the people in the sciences? Is it simply the natural product of multiculturalism, which needs narratives to hold it together, due to the lack of natural social bonds found in homogenous societies?

You can model this many ways, depending upon how you as the model maker feel about these topics. The last bit is a clue to the problem. The rise of narratives in social discourse tracks with the rise in diversity. Read anything from a century ago and it is free of the narrative structures we find common today. A story about an athlete was mostly the facts about his life. He was not cast as a character in a drama about social justice or the fight against exploitation.

The ubiquity of narratives gets lost in the flood of them. There is a real war going in Europe and the political class speaks of nothing but narratives. They have meetings followed by press conferences to inform the public on the status of their latest narratives and the battle of narratives surrounding the war. Meanwhile, the Russian army slowly grinds down the Ukrainian army. The same can be said of the energy crisis, which is ignored in favor of narratives about climate change.

You get the sense that the people talking about their narratives and messaging, a subset of narrative framing, think that if they get enough people to believe their story, reality will bend to that story. Put another way, if they can model reality with a set of rules and assumption in such a way that only their preferred conclusions are possible, then reality will have no choice but to comply. Like the model makers, the narrative creators have become gods in their creations.

This does not answer the question of causality, but it is clear that the problem of modeling in the sciences has a related problem in the public realm. In elite society, the focus is no longer on the things that are true, like the axioms of mathematics, but rather on the things that are true within the context of accepted rules, like the equity in the distribution of advanced degrees in the sciences. One is true whether you believe it or not, while the other is only true if you accept the assumptions.

A century ago, smart people understood this difference. Models of realty had to account for those things that are axioms of the universe. Over that time a steady shift has gone on where objective reality is excluded from the discussion of the narrative and at the same time, the narrative challenges objective reality. Put another way and getting back to the Briggs post, models are no longer tested against reality, but reality is being tested against the models.

This helps explain why supposedly serious academics sit in front of congressional committees and claim to not know the definition of a woman. They are not simply clinging to fashionable politics. At the heart of it is the claim that reality simply does not comport with the new model of society, so we have to dismiss that bit of reality, in this case biological sex. Just as the model makers can feel like a god, the narrative makers believe they can bring reality to heel.

There is a lot here that deserves further examination, but it is clear that the crisis in science correlates with the crisis in the West. The causality is not clear, but what is clear is that what passes for the smart fraction is no longer willing or able to accept that there are things that are true regardless of opinion. They are questioning the very basics of reality by claiming there is no difference between relations of ideas, their models and narratives, and matters of fact and observable reality.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

War With Iran

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Note: My Taki post is on different topic from today’s post. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door. It is also on Substack for paying members there. Going forward, I will post the pay-per-view material on both sites. Some people prefer Substack and other people prefer SubscribeStar.

The Middle East has been quiet of late, mostly due to the fighting in the Ukraine and the economic war being waged against Russia by the West. The endless squabbles in the Levant have had to take a backseat to events in Europe. That may be about to change as the looming war between Iran and Israel inches closer to reality. Some see Biden’s trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia as a prelude the coming conflict as both countries have been allies with the United States against Iran.

The main reason to suspect war is closer now than ever is a leaked document about Israel’s plan to attack Iran. There is a great deal of mystery around who leaked it and why, but the assumption is that it is real. The main reason for this is the Israelis have been actively practicing for an attack on Iran. They have demonstrated that they have the technical ability to operate long distance missions deep into Iran to conduct attacks on targets related to the nuclear program.

Another clue is that the Saudis have started to allow Israeli commercial aircraft to operate over their airspace. If you look at a map, the best way for Israel to attack Iran is through Saudi airspace. The other route is through Syria and Iraq. One reason the IDF keeps attacking Syria is to test their air defense systems. Syria uses the same Russian SAM systems as Iran. Ideally, the Israelis would bypass those systems and only have to deal with the Iranian air defense system.

Of course, the Israelis have been trying to get the United States to attack Iran since the launch of the crusades against Islam in the Bush era. Long forgotten, but the scheme advanced by the neoconservatives was to use Iraq as a staging area to launch a full-scale invasion of Iran. This made a lot of sense as the United States had a huge army right there looking for work. The trouble is that army was losing the war with Iraqi insurgents so the scheme collapsed.

Even since the Israelis have mostly been working to prevent the United States from cutting a deal with Iran over their nuclear program. They strongly opposed the deal made by the Obama administration. Most of the foreign policy establishment opposed it as well, which is why they had Trump cancel the deal. Biden tried to revive it but his efforts have been stalled by incompetence. With negotiations off the table, the other options to stop the Iran nuclear programs are back in play.

This is where events in the Ukraine may play to the advantage of Israel. It is clear that the Russians will eliminate the Ukrainian army in the east. It is also clear that the economic war with Russia is a disaster. The Biden administration could use a change of scenery with regards to foreign policy. They are looking for some way to put pressure on the Russians and an attack on her client states in the Middle East could do that and shift attention away from the Ukrainian debacle.

From the Israeli perspective, an attack on Iran is not cost free, but the benefits clearly outweigh the liabilities, assuming it works. If they can destroy Iranian nuclear facilities, the response from Iran will be worth it. The Iranians could launch missiles into Israel and unleash their militias in Lebanon and Syria, but they have no way to inflict corresponding damage to Israel. They would eventually run out of missiles and the net effect would be a big win for the Israelis.

Washington would most likely use this as a way to pry the Saudis away from any deal to join BRICS. Iran would know that the Saudis let Israel “violate their airspace” to conduct the attack so any rapprochement would come to an end. Washington has used the threat of Iran to keep the Saudis onboard. An Israeli attack would force the kingdom to renew cordial relations with America, which would require them to get onboard the sanctions regime against the Russians.

This may sound like 4-D chess but recall how every TV news anchor was chanting “Keev” and wearing a Ukrainian flag on their costume in February. The neocons think long term and they never give up on a project. They probably have a disinformation campaign ready with claims about how Iran plans to close the Persian Gulf and attack Saudi oil supplies. Even if it does not lead to war with Iran, it would shift the focus from Ukraine and justify the economic war against Russia.

To a normal mind, this is crazy but the people running American foreign policy thought staring a war with Russia was a good idea. The people who were sure Russia would run out of missiles after a week are sure an attack on Iran can work. They are the same people who thought occupying a place called “the graveyard of empires” for a quarter of a century was a great idea. In American foreign policy, the more ridiculous the idea the more likely it is to be embraced.

The other piece of the puzzle is the fact that the United States has emptied out the warehouses for the Ukrainians. A war involving Israel would spur Congress to throw billions at the military to restock the shelves. War is big business and the business of the Global American Empire is war. It is not hard to imagine a consensus forming around letting Israel attack Iran when all the people in the room think they can get rich from the fallout of such an attack.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Managerialism

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Arguably, one of the most important political concepts to come out of the 20th century was James Burnham’s theory of managerialism. It is important mostly because it is a set of accurate observations that allow for a further understanding of what is happening in Western societies since the Second World War. Once you understand that our society is organized like a corporation, with senior management and a large layer of middle-management, things make much more sense.

The trouble is most people do not want to see this. Instead, they indulge in reductionist theories about secret cabals manipulating the system. Others pretend that the system is what is advertised and you just have to vote harder. Still others insist we have drifted into something randomly called socialist, Marxist or communist, not because the system possesses these qualities, but because those words are epithets. Despite being incredibly useful, the concept is hardly used.

One reason for this is the managerial class controls access to that which has value in modern society. If you want your ideas to get heard, you must pass muster with the people who keep the gates of the system. Just as in a corporation, you are not going to get to speak your mind around the bosses if they are not going to like what you have to say about them. Management always gets conservative about its position within the organization which means it is naturally defensive.

Another reason this idea languishes on the fringe is that most political commentary comes from mediocrities excluded from the elite track. The commentariat is populated with people unqualified to run a hotdog stand. As you see in the dreaded private sector, middle-management tends to be a cheering section in this system. Unlike a private company, the managerial class never has to worry about making a profit, so the cheering section can be stuffed to the gills.

There is also the fact that the commentariat is devoid of people who have experience in the dreaded private sector. Someone like Sohrab Ahmari struggles to understand managerialism because he never read the source material and he has no idea what goes on inside a company. He cannot see the parallels between the corporation and the corporate state. It is extremely hard to use a concept when you do not understand it and lack the capacity to comprehend it.

Interestingly, the people at the top of the managerial class and especially those seeking to reach the top are ignorant of the concept. They have achieved class consciousness to the extent that they naturally identify with the others in their class. They mark themselves with their dress, their language and political beliefs. The latter jumps out at the lower ranks where they tend to embrace the most extreme versions of elite opinion as a way to gain attention from the bosses.

The idea that animates the people in the system comes from Gramsci. They seek to control the centers of cultural production and they are aware of it. They want to control official truth in all areas of society. They do not see themselves as controlling access to and the benefits that are derived from property, capital or information, even though that is exactly what they are doing. Controlling institutions is about controlling access to what is valuable within the domain of the institution.

This means the managerial class has achieved class consciousness, in that they consciously identify with those in their class. They see themselves as distinct from the rest of society. On the other hand, they suffer from false consciousness in that they think they are motivated by altruistic reasons, like the spread of liberal democracy, individual freedom and equality. In reality, these social causes are a defense mechanism to protect their power over society.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Background
  • The Terms
  • Marxism
  • Burnham’s Innovation
  • Managers
  • The Managerial Class

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Odysee

Shark Sightings

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The sharks are begging to accumulate off the coast of the Biden administration, as his popularity falls along with his cognitive functioning. The current polling has him at or near the lowest ever recorded for a sitting president. His party is in a panic over the upcoming midterm elections. There is an obvious shift going on in the media where they signal that it is time to think about what comes after Joe Biden. Now the first dorsal fins of potential replacements are showing up in the water.

The first fin to pop up was that of Gavin Newsom, the current governor of California and former mayor of San Francisco. He recently ran an ad in Florida telling the locals that their state is terrible, they smell like feet and the smart ones should leave the filthy place and come to California. Presumably, his team thinks this is a way to pick a fight with Ron DeSantis, who has become a bogeyman for his cult. They seem to have forgotten that Florida is a critical swing state in elections.

Newsom turning up at the White House while Biden is visiting Israel suggests that the people in charge wanted to send a message. A child of extreme privilege, Newsom got richer by partnering with the fourth so of oil tycoon John Paul Getty. They started a winery and then a private equity firm that targeted entertainment properties catering to the managerial elite. Newson got bored with that and bought himself a mayoral office and then the governorship of California.

To his credit, he is one of the few politicians alive today who has ever signed the front of a paycheck and done any sort of real work. Granted, these are silly businesses that look like they were underwritten to make his resume look good. Boutique wineries and hipster restaurants are different from making car parts or fixing refrigeration units, but it at least looks like real work. He will no doubt run as a self-made man who knows how businesspeople struggle in these difficult times.

Another fin in the water is Gretchen Whitmer. She is up for reelection and has been getting lots of favorable news coverage. She gets to speak to important Democratic party groups and was on Biden’s short list of VP choices. He passed on her as she is too ambitious. The people around Biden had him select Harris as a form of life insurance policy. Just as no one would take out Obama with Biden as VP, no one is going to take out Biden with Harris as VP.

Whitmer’s resume is the dreary stuff we have come to expect. She has been on the dole her whole life. Her biggest claim to fame is the kidnapping hoax, which may have started as a campaign trick. It is hard to know, but so far, we know it was orchestrated by the FBI and not the patsies they put on trial. Her former lawyer seems to be involved with the FBI handlers. The whole thing is a seedy example of FBI corruption but also how big a role they play in politics.

The final fin in the water of Kamala Harris. Up until a few weeks ago, she was programmed to chant about how she looked forward to running with Biden in 2024 whenever asked about it. Someone swapped out her response code with a new response designed to give the impression she hopes Biden dies soon. This is probably the only way she ever becomes president. Even with support from Biden she stands little chance of winning the nomination on her own in 2024.

The main reason for looking at this is to note the long term planning that goes on with presidential candidates. Rich people thought Newsom could be president twenty-five years ago so they have been grooming him for this moment. That is a long term commitment to a project. The same is true of Whitmer. The kidnapping hoax is the sort of thing you do when you think she can run ten years hence as a tough independent female who stood up to the patriarchy as a governor.

The other interesting thing about the fins sticking out of the water is the Democrats are going to look for a white person in 2024. Harris ticks the brown boxes, but the wrong brown boxes as far as Democratic voters are concerned. Look around at other potential fins in the water and they all look like great whites as well. The Left’s commitment to diversity is like Pelosi and Biden’s commitment to Catholicism. It is a ceremonial item that has no bearing on how they live or think.

This is something the dullards in conservatism, which is pretty much all of conservatism, never seem to grasp. The chanting about white supremacy, antiracism, diversity and so on is a uniform these people wear to signal their commitment to their class. Fifty years ago, they walked around in brand new work clothes to signal their solidarity with the working man. Today they wear the language of diversity, inclusion and equity to show their solidarity with the swarthy fellows tending their gardens.

Putting all of that aside, the next six months promise some good political entertainment as the number of fins in the water reaches critical mass. While there is no reason to vote for Republicans, there are enough people mad at the economy to switch both the House and the Senate this fall. That will lead to a public debate about what to do with the aging Joe Biden. Do they let him serve out his term or do they push him down a flight of stairs after the election?

A year ago, the way to bet was on the unexpected tumble, but Harris has been so bad that swapping Biden for her is probably a bad bet. The people running the White House need Biden in place as they secure new places in the next regime. That means they put out word that Biden is re-thinking his 2024 plans. Sometime in the winter he announces his retirement after his first term in office. That also shifts the focus from the failures of Biden to the future failures of the next regime.

On the other hand, the 2020 election says that anything is possible so Biden running and winning in 2024 is not unthinkable. The beautiful people love firsts so he can be the first man in a coma to win election. Maybe the first man with a single digit approval rating to win reelection. After all, he was the first man to lose the first four primaries and still win his party’s nomination. He also got eighty million votes in the general election, which says that in America anything is possible.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Culture of Deceit

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A recent Gallup survey reports that confidence in institutions has fallen to an all time low among Americans. The only institutions trusted by a majority of people are small business, the military and the police. The last two are dropping quickly, which makes sense given the behavior of these institutions. A military full of drag queens and a police force siding with barbarians does not inspire confidence. Faith in small business simply reflects the fact that people continue to trust good people.

The normal reaction from the usual suspects is to blame their favorite bogeymen for the collapse in social trust. They will not use the term “social trust” as that risks entering a forbidden zone, but that is the topic. Trust in institutions is a proxy for social trust, how much people trust the people they do not know in their community. A big driver of the collapse in social trust is a generation of open borders. When your neighborhood is full of strange aliens, it is hard to trust anything or anyone.

As is often the case, the flood of aliens into your neighborhood is a symptom of a much bigger problem that lies at the heart of it. The people in charge simply cannot stop lying, which reflects on the institutions they control. The obvious example is the news media, which is approaching single digits in the Gallup poll. The fact that anyone trusts the media is an argument against universal suffrage. Many people, at least ten percent based on the survey, are too stupid to vote.

Putting that aside, the media has become a torrent of lies. Since the very beginning, the media has been partisan. In colonial times, newspapers were known to be advocates for one faction or another. This is what you should get in a society with a free press, free speech and a culture of debate. The partisans in the media make their case for their cause, often cherry picking the facts that work best for them. This is no different from what happens in a courtroom or a business meeting.

That is a vastly different thing than what we see today. Only a complete idiot trusts anything he reads or hears in the media. The starting assumption is not only that the facts are wrong, but the people behind them know they are wrong. It is not partisan zeal or human error, but a deliberate effort to deceive. The people endlessly going on about disinformation are the primary source of disinformation. They either promote the lies of government or they create their own lies.

This story about the war in the New York Times is a good example. Some version of this story has been floating around since the start of the war. It was cooked up by the usual suspects who have been championing war with Russia. The central claim is they have inside access to Putin’s inner circle is obviously false. His one source is not an independent Russian analysist, but a paid anti-Russian activist. The source makes this clear in his own bio.

The author of the New York Times piece is a notorious liar who runs interference for the neocon cult. Despite being a proven liar, he maintains a spot at the main news site in the empire. Certainly, his bosses know he is an activist and a liar. They keep him on because he tells the lies they like to promote. The point is, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying. No wonder trust has dropped to zero.

The media is an easy example. They are simply mockingbirds mimicking the sounds from the institutions they allegedly cover. Notice trust in medicine has dropped over the last year, which should surprise no one. They willingly went along with the Covid farce and the vaccine mandates. When people raised reasonable questions about the side effects of the vaccine, Big Medicine was right there to tell the media that those doubters were hooligans and troublemakers.

The fact that those concerns were legitimate and proven correct is a big reason people are now more skeptical of medicine. More important, telling the truth would have served the interest of medicine. Medicine is nothing but trade-offs between the risk of disease and the risks that come with the cure. Chemotherapy is terrible, but it is better than dying from cancer. Instead of being honest about this, they chose to lie which suggests these are people who simply enjoy lying.

No one expects the institutions to be honest all the time. Men are not angels and as long as the institutions are controlled by men, they will have all of the vices that are part of the human condition. What is new in this age is the culture of lying that has taken hold of the managerial class. They seem to take pleasure in lying to the general public, as if it is a status marker. If you cook up some outlandish whopper you get points in the social credit system of the ruling class.

In this regard, it makes sense why they selected Biden for president. In addition to his stupidity, Biden is a notorious liar. A big part of his affable simpleton routine while in the senate was his penchant for telling outlandish whoppers. Of course, he was always the hero of his tall tales. He is a man who has done nothing useful so he made up for it with glorious tales about himself. In a system increasing defined by a culture of deceit, it makes sense to have a notorious liar as the figurehead.

There is a cost to lying. The drop in trust is one consequence. The main cost is that a society low in social trust is harder to maintain than one with high trust. The cost of keeping America together is reaching a tipping point. Then there is the transaction cost of everyday life. In a world where no one trusts anyone, the cost of doing even simple things goes up. A big part of the drop in the standard of living is due to the collapse in social trust due to the constant lying.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Deep State Interface

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One of the weird things about this phase of liberal democracy has been the normalization of conspiracy theories. Thirty years ago, everyone, regardless of their political inclinations or what they thought of the other side, dismissed the claims of the conspiracy community. At best the deep state conspiracy was a plot device for a fantastical Hollywood script. At worst, it was a sign that the person may be struggling with mental illness.

Today most people think there is a deep state. In fact, the phrase deep state has become a normal part of discourse. In conventional politics it can mean anything from the leaders of both parties to nefarious forces controlling the institutions. George Soros is part of the deep state, even though the deep state is supposed to be a shadowy group of people unknown to the general public. Even secret societies need to be personalized, so the deep state has many public faces.

You do not have to line your clothes with aluminum foil to wonder if there is not something going on off camera that explains what is happening. For example, the berserk effort by Western government to “decarbonize” the West looks like a suicide pact by a collection of cult leaders. How can these people really think it is good idea to shut down Dutch farming to save Gaia? How does returning Germany to using wood for heat make any sense? There must be something else.

Of course, we all know that there is no such thing as a deep state but it is not hard to see why people are open to it. It is sort of like the concept of space-time. That is, it is an invention of mankind to help explain the universe. The fact that it does not exist is not really important because it allows physics to explore the universe. At some point it will be abandoned for a deeper understanding. The same may be true of the deep state in that it works for now, even though it is not real.

For example, when you see an ad for something like plant based milk you are supposed to think, “why yes, I would prefer this over actual milk.” Then your brain reminds you that we have no need for plant-based milk. We have plenty of actual milk. The reason we have lots of real milk is we invented refrigeration so that we no longer have to rely upon things like almond milk. That is when that concept of the deep state fills in the blank and you begin to wonder what they are up to with this.

This is when someone chimes in about lactose intolerance, but you do not build a church for Easter Sunday and you do not build an industry for people who cannot digest milk enzymes. Similarly, you do not invest billions on meat made from twigs and bugs that “tastes almost like real meat!” Similarly, you do not bother inventing eggs made from grass that are almost like real eggs. These are solutions in search of a problem, perhaps a problem contemplated by the deep state.

Now, solutions in search of a problem are not new. The e-book was supposed to replace the real book, but there was never a need to replace the book. It was the result of two thousand years of evolution starting with the early Christians. By the 20th century it was the ideal solution to distributing the written word. That did not stop smart people from pushing the idea of the e-book. Innovation is as much about bad ideas and it is the few good ideas that are genuine improvements on the old ideas.

In the present age, the managerial class plays an outsized role in picking winners and losers, so there is money to be made exploiting their hopes and fears. This has always been the genius of Elon Musk. His projects all tap into the boutique beliefs of the managerial class. He is a futurist selling futuristic solutions to the problems of the future to people haunted by the prospect they will not see the glorious future. They are willing to spend your money to achieve their dreams.

Klaus Schwab is working the same grift. The World Economic Forum is a crackpot idea that appeals to the vanity of the managerial class. It did not get much traction until he was able to hook a few billionaires to attend his event. That was the validation needed to turn the thing into Burning Man for the managerial elite. They go to be seen with their analogs in the other parts of the managerial class. The deep state vibe is part of the appeal to people who spend their days in committees.

What has happened over the last thirty years since the end of the Cold War is the Western managerial class has evolved both a class consciousness and a messianic religion that binds them together. It is why they have become so paranoid about the people over whom they rule. A big part of being a Cloud Person is thinking about how much you disdain the Dirt People. Displaying your cloudiness is often just expressing your contempt for dirtiness.

This is why the concept of the deep state has caught on. From the perspective of the Dirt People, it looks like there is a secret set of hands guiding the movement of the clouds and the people inhabiting them. When all of a sudden, every chattering skull on television is chanting “keev” you cannot help but think it is scripted. The ads for food made from bugs make a lot more sense when you imagine a secret cabal plotting to kill off farming to please Gaia.

Like space-time, the concept of the deep state works because it allows for the further exploration of the environment in which we find ourselves. The fact that it is not a real thing, at least not in the way it is used, does not matter right now. Blaming Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates for the current crisis is fine. Waging war on the people profiting from the system is almost as good as attacking the system itself. For most people, raging against the deep state is comforting.

Just as the reality of the universe lies beyond the interface of space-time, the reality of the managerial state lies beyond the deep state. It is not a collection of super villains controlling the world. It is a system that produces the super villains it needs to control the population over which it rules. If Klaus Schwab did not exist, the system would simply invent him just as physics invented space-time. These bad guys are a necessary interface to the managerial system.

There is another aspect to the deep state interface. It is comforting. The people invited to the soiree’s like WEF and Davos get to think they are influencers, shaping the mind of the deep state actors. The Cloud People can be sure there is a powerful force guiding their hand. The Dirt People get the comfort of knowing there is a rational actor behind the movement of the clouds. Perhaps he is amenable to reason or perhaps he can one day be defeated by the Dirt People.

Maybe like space-time, the deep state interface will be useful in breaking the system open to expose its internal workings. On the other hand, it may come to be a great impediment to understanding the world. There are some who think space-time has inhibited our ability to understand the universe. Regardless, the deep state does not exist, but it is useful. Like electric cars and milk made from bugs, it has a purpose, even if we cannot be sure whose ends it serves.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Death Of Twitter

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Note: My Taki post is on different topic from today’s post. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door. It is also on Substack for paying members there. Going forward, I will post the pay-per-view material on both sites. Some people prefer Substack and other people prefer Subscribestar. There was also a rare Saturday post, which was going to be a Taki post but I changed my mind.

The Elon Musk versus Twitter drama is now heading to the litigation phase, as Musk has decided to pull out of the purchase agreement. The usual idiots have taken to social media to offer their hot takes on the issue. Critics of Musk think he made the great blunder they have been predicting. The far-left thinks this is a victory, when in fact it is the death knell for the platform. It is this fact that led Musk to pull out of the deal and take the issue into the litigation phase.

The basics of the dispute are simple. Twitter claims Musk is the breaching party and they intend to force him to abide by the agreement. They argue that they have given him everything he has asked. That means they will go into a Delaware court and ask a judge to compel compliance. Musk will tell the same court that Twitter is in breach of contract for falling to disclose information about their user base, which they are required to do as part of the sale.

No one really knows if the court can actually force Musk to go through with the purchase agreement and buy Twitter. In contract disputes, courts rarely compel one party to perform against their will. Instead, a monetary judgment is levied against the breaching party. In most cases, a settlement is reached before the court has a chance to decide the issue. In contract cases, litigation is a part of the process of negotiating the final settlement of the dispute.

In most contracts, especially complex ones like this, there is a liquidating damages clause that spells out the cost of breaking the agreement. In this particular case, we know there is a liquidating damages clause. Both parties agreed to a billion dollar fee if they break the agreement. There are conditions and the interpretation of those conditions will be part of the litigation. Musk has not offered to pay the billion and Twitter is not asking to be paid the billion so far.

All of this will make for good drama, but it obscures the fact that Twitter is a dead man walking, regardless of the outcome. That reality was made clear when Twitter agreed to the Musk offer. They were under no obligation to accept his offer. The board could have refused the deal. Management initially tried to add a poison pill in order to make it difficult for Musk to buy shares but relented after consulting with the board and the largest shareholders. They wanted this deal.

Musk said he made his best and final offer. He was a large share holder and had access to their public filings but also access to their management. In other words, he knew the peak value of the company and made a premium offer. Twitter had been saying their target price was $70 per share, but they quickly accepted the offer from Musk at $54 per share. In other words, everyone concerned knew that the $54 price was the best Twitter would ever get from anyone.

For its part, the market never bought the $70 claim or the $54 offer. The stock ticked up on news of the offer, but then traded down to below its prior level as news of the agreement got into the public domain. The day before Musk cancelled the deal, you could buy shared of Twitter at 60% of what Musk agreed to pay. The fact that no one was doing this says that insiders smelled problems. They knew Musk would never follow through on the $54 offer.

One reason for the skepticism is that Twitter does not make money and is unlikely to ever make money. The platform is useless for advertising so its only source of income is selling user data. There are plenty of players in that market. The big fish are Google and Apple, who control the mobile market. Since most Twitter users operate on their mobile device, Twitter data is mostly phone data. In reality, Twitter is just a derivative data stream that is rooted in the mobile data streams.

The bigger issue for Twitter and all social media is the barrier to entry has collapsed and disaggregation is upon us. Gab has proven this. They not only have a stable platform that is better than Twitter, but it was done on a shoestring by one committed guy, in the face of massive resistance by the usual suspects. The future is bespoke platforms of like-minded users. People are looking to be free from the blue-check harpies who have ruined the large social media platforms.

Those who have been on-line since the early days saw this coming. It is part of a natural cycle on-line. The first bulletin boards were big central places. They gave way to small places of like-minded people. Usenet splintered into a million sub-channels once it was possible to do so. The first message board communities were much like the big social media sites, but then over-zealous mods ruined them and the sites splintered into a million small communities.

This is why Twitter remains eager to sell to Musk. They have an inside view of what is happening and they know his offer is the best offer. In fact, they know half his offer is the best offer, which is why they will seek to cut a deal. Twitter is basically worthless as they own little in the way of unique infrastructure and their core product is now a commodity anyone can create. Their main offer is access to emotionally unstable people who want to lecture the rest of us.

Elon Musk may be a monorail salesman, but he is an extremely talented one who has worked the most sophisticated marks in the world. He is also the richest man on earth which means he owns the best legal talent on earth. He did not choose to enter the litigation phase because it is a sure loser. He understands that Twitter will have to disclose things in court that they would prefer to keep private. The fact that he is boasting about this on Twitter is a clue to his thinking.

Many assume this is just a way for Musk to lower the price, but he may be using this phase to bleed the company into bankruptcy. His people looked at the user data and probably saw that Twitter is past its peak. Like centralized internet platforms before it, Twitter is about to die from a thousand cuts. If anyone can put up a similar site for people of the same mind, then what is the point of Twitter? Musk can wait out the answer to that question in a Delaware court.

The fact is, Twitter should never have existed in the first place. It was just a novel implementation of the same old idea that has been with us since the dawn of the internet age. The dream of the virtual agora where the demos can debate the issues of the day and find a consensus has been tried many times. In every case, the demos discovered they did not like it and moved back into their own private warrens and subcultures to be free of the masses.

Familiarity breeds contempt and what the big socials have done is make everyone familiar with everyone else. The solution is what was there all along. The various communities build fences between themselves and the others. That way they do not have to be reminded of their unpleasantness. They can also pretend that those people on the other side are good people who mean well. Good fences not only make good neighbors they make human society possible.

This is why Twitter and the other big socials are doomed. Twitter is the most ridiculous and silly, so it will be the first to go. Facebook sees the writing on the wall, which is why they are betting on their virtual realty scheme. Sites like Instagram are just public bulletin boards that offer little interaction, so maybe they stagger on, but the days of big social media platforms are ending. The looming death of Twitter is just the first big step into the inevitable demise of the concept.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.