The Cost Of Custodialism

Posted on January 10, 2022 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. It ties in with the post today about the cost of the custodial state. Behind the green door is the weekly podcast.

In his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argues that societies collapse when their investment is sustaining their societies reaches the point of diminishing returns. The complex systems they evolved to solve the problems they have faced come with a cost. Complexity itself brings a cost, as maintaining any complex system has special requirements. These costs are not fixed. They increase over time and at some point, they exceed the benefits.

In modern life, this is obvious in software systems. They are initially created to solve a specific set of problems like accounting or tracking parts in a warehouse. Over time they become increasing complicated as they are expanded to solve other problems like tracking costs or forecasting cash flows. They are patched, upgraded and modified continuously until they reach a point where the cost of maintaining them is greater than the cost of replacing them with something new.

This idea of diminishing returns is useful in thinking about how the custodial state is evolving and how it will end. There is a cost to making sure you are not using the wrong pronouns or teaching your kids the wrong values. There is a cost to bullying people into taking certain medicines or avoiding certain foods. Of course, there is a cost to dreaming up these new taboos. The American university system, which is the primary source of production for this stuff, is not cheap.

In prior societies, the care, custody and control of the population was not much of a concern to the ruling class. The duty of the king, for example, was to make sure his lands were safe from threats. Otherwise, his people were on their own as far as raising crops and managing their affairs. They had duties to their lord, but those were in terms of labor and produce. The church made sure everyone followed the cultural rules, but the cost of that was paid for through rents as well.

Even in liberal societies of the 19th and early 20th century, the people in charge did not invest much into making sure people had the right thoughts. Public education was focused on improving the workforce. Public safety was about securing the property and safety of rich people. Public administration was still largely focused on collecting taxes for the state. In 19th century America, social reform was a private affair, financed by the wealthy as a form of public piety.

It is in the 20th century things began to change. Public education became universal in the West and shifted from the basics to moral and social conditioning. When politicians say that parents should have no role in the training of their children, this is not the radical idea that many claim. Inside the ruling class, this is just assumed and has been for a very long time. A century ago, Progressive reformers assumed education was necessary to train people to be good social democrats.

The little light on the dashboard of your car telling you that you are too close to another car and the warnings about drinking the contents of the shampoo bottle are all part of the custodial state and they come with a cost. The federal government spent over six trillion dollars in fiscal year 2021. That is 30% of the GDP. State and local government spent another three trillion. Roughly half of the U.S. GDP is consumed with the cost of governance. This is true throughout the West.

This is not the end of it. Regulatory costs do not show up in the government budget, but they show up in private budgets. When companies impose vaccine mandates, they are incurring a real cost. Some percentage of their workforce will quit. The cost of hiring and training employees is substantial. Then there is the cost of making sure everyone has the Nth booster shot. This is just one example, but there are thousands of these sorts of costs incurred by every business.

One way the managerial system has made this work is through socializing the costs around the world via the currency. The U.S. exports the cost through dollar production and trade. They create money which is spent on foreign goods. This exports the inflation to the foreign producer, but some of it comes back as foreign investment in government bonds and equities. American asset values go up while the quality of life goes up without causing domestic inflation.

This is one reason European consumer culture lagged behind America. The individual countries with their own currencies could not do this trick. Once the Euro was in place, consumerism in Europe took off. The consumer culture of the West, a feature of the custodial state, was made possible by shifting costs to low cost countries in the newly “free” east, South America and Asia. The spike in inflation suggests this has run its course and the West can no longer export the cost of custodialism.

The problem we see with Covid, is the custodial state comes with an ideology that justifies it and drives its development. Covid was a real problem, but the system wildly overreacted because it exists to manage these problems to an ever increasing level of detail that has now taken on a life of its own. The extreme example of this is New Zealand, where the ditzy Prime Minister has said that her Covid tyranny is now a permanent feature of life. She is the Kiwi den mother.

Another problem in addition to the direct cost is the cost of what managerialism does to the population of a society. Public services are declining rapidly as the people in those jobs no longer feel any duty to them. Like children shirking their chores, people in the custodial state stop caring about their work. The great Covid sick out we are experiencing is a glimpse of things to come. If your needs are the responsibility of the custodial state, why should you work hard and be conscientious?

One of the realities of Soviet communism was that it was more expensive to maintain than it was worth. It was a system that had a 70-year run and if you net out the years through the war, it was a two generation system, give or take. There have been kings that have served longer. The reason it was short-lived is it turned social capital into the fuel to maintain the system. Worse yet, it consumed the means of producing social capital, which accelerated the collapse of the system.

The Western system took longer to form up than communism. Its development was retarded by the necessity of the Cold War. In the thirty years since the end of communisms the custodial system has evolved quickly. Along with it the social costs have gone up and the stock of social capital has declined. In the 1980’s, no one saw the collapse of the Soviet empire coming, but the signs were there. Similarly, Western custodialism is headed to collapse for the same reason.

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The Return Of The King

Posted on January 7, 2022 by thezman

This week the Power Hour makes its triumphant return just in time to celebrate one of the newest, but most solemn festivals, Insurrection Day. Given the way they have been carrying on for the last year, it is surprising that a congressional idiot has not suggested making it a federal holiday. Then again, that would make it more difficult to brainwash school children into thinking that this is the time when orange Nazis tried to burn down the ~~Reichstag~~ Capitol and seize power with Big Lies!

The absurdity of this ridiculous drama conceals something interesting about the psychology of the political class. They seem to require an Alamo-type event to rally their minds around as they lash out at their enemies. Charlottesville, another trivial affair, has been a rallying point for them. They got three years out of that one, so January 6th will probably be with us through the next presidential election unless some new political tragedy is engineered by our good friends at the FBI.

Part of it is the fact that the ideology of liberal democracy does not provide the sense of struggle required to keep everyone engaged. Like communism, liberal democracy has evolved into a revolutionary mindset without a defined end. It is just a process that goes on until something magical happens and we reach utopia. The commies came up with perpetual revolution to solve this problem. Liberal democracy is evolving a culture of permanent crisis to keep the believers engaged.

Charlottesville and now January 6 are legends that can be told around the campfires as reminders of the struggle. They both have the same elements. The cause was the good people were not vigilant, which allowed the bad guys to form up. Both stories have a point where things could go either way. Both have the point when the righteous swept the villains from the field and triumphed over evil. Both have their martyrs, although the January 6 martyrs are imaginary.

Of course, the more you examine it the more you see that the overlap between ideological zeal and insanity is quite large. These people cannot exist in the world as it is, so they have created a fantasy world. This world of imaginary villains is one where they can pretend to be on the side of angels in the great struggle. By itself it would be harmless, but this madness comes with a fanatical drive to control society. These people are crazy and highly motivated to take over society.

Communism eventually sidelined the fanatics. That is largely what happened when the Brezhnev faction deposed Khrushchev. The more sober minded saw that rule by true believer would get everyone killed. They were still left with an unworkable system full of logical contradictions, but they were able to stabilize it for a generation. It remains to be seen if liberal democracy can pull it off. Biden is the closest analog to Brezhnev and he is a doddering old fool incapable of doing anything.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Insurrectionism
- NYT: Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized in Effort to Aid Trump – Link
- NYT: Jimmy Carter: I Fear for Our Democracy – Link
- NYT: Prosecutors Move Quickly on Jan. 6 Cases, but Big Questions Remain – Link
- NYT: One Single Day. That’s All It Took for the World to Look Away From Us – Link
- Daily Beast: The Real Tragedy of Jan. 6 Is That It’s Still Not Over – Link
- Bulwark: Did the January 6th Coup Fail? – Link
- Salon: Republican voters don’t actually “believe” the Big Lie about January 6 — they’re in on the con – Link
- Mother Jones: A Key Reason Jan. 6 Rioters Aren’t Facing Sedition Charges: They’re White – Link
Martyrs
- AP: Ashli Babbitt a martyr? Her past tells a more complex story – Link
Paranoid Delusions
- Boston Globe: The coup is still underway – Link
- WaPo: If American democracy is going to survive, the media must make this crucial shift survive – Link
- Salon: Mussolini seized full power 97 years ago: Does Donald Trump long to follow suit? – Link
- NyMag: Conservatism and Fascism Are Not the Same Thing – Link
Authority Appropriation
- Twitter: Doctor Hailey Banack – Link
The Pigs & The Farmers
- New Republic: Inside D.C.’s Rowdy New Progressive Scene – Link

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Electric Boogaloo

Posted on January 6, 2022 by thezman

In the history of motoring, no owner of a sports car has ever said, “This car would be perfect if it sounded like a washing machine instead of a sports car.” In fact, a common complaint from sports car enthusiasts over the decades is that their favorite model does not have a sexy enough exhaust note. A big part of owning a sports car, even a budget model, is the sound it makes when driving. Watch a car show or YouTube car channel and exhaust sound is always mentioned.

Even if you are not into sports cars, the sound of the engine revving is something everyone associates with a sports car. The sound of the car shifting gears, the echo of the exhaust in a narrow canyon, is a big part of the experience. Similarly, driving enthusiasts prefer manual gearboxes to automatics, even though they will tell you that computer controlled automatic transmissions are far superior. The manual gearbox allows the driver to feel like he is part of the machine.

With that in mind, the world’s premiere sports car makers are promising to take all of that away in the coming years. They say they will stop building internal combustion engines and go completely electric. Most have already abandoned manual gearboxes and the rest promise to do so shortly. The supercar makers are investing all of their time in electric motors and self-driving technology. Their goal is to make the elite sports car into something close to an autonomous vehicle

That means the sports car driving experience will soon be like sitting in front of your laptop to the sound of kitchen appliances. Car shows will have soft looking men and women climbing into futuristic vehicles then sitting there in silence as the vehicle goes about the business of being a car. Presumably, the sports models will come with a VR system so the driver can pretend to be driving an actual sports car or maybe it will just have a screen to see what it used to be like.

The question is why? Again, no one can find a Ferrari owner saying he wishes his supercar sounded more like the kitchen juicer. No one has ever daydreamed about driving his blender through the countryside. People into motoring do it for how it makes them feel and it makes them feel alive. It reminds them that life is for living, not ticking boxes on a spreadsheet dreamed up by a sadist with a graduate degree. That’s the thrill of driving a fast car to your limit.

Granted, there is a group of people who claim to be sports car enthusiasts who think electric sports cars are a great idea. They like telling people that electric cars have a flat torque curve, meaning they can accelerate faster than a normal car. BMW has made a lot of money selling them Z-series sports cars, the ones that look like a clown’s shoe, because these are people who are dead inside. Their enthusiasm for sports cars is superficial and performative.

Of course, there is the environmental angle. The Gaia worshippers claim that electric cars are better for Mother Earth. These are the people who tote their groceries home from the market in grimy canvas sacks. These are the people who wear ornamental face gear thinking it wards off evil spirits. The people who have made a childish fear of the bogeyman into both a science and a religion love electric cars. They also think everyone should live in pods and ride the bus.

Putting aside their superstitions, electric cars are not eco-friendly or a more efficient use of natural resources. Electric comes from power stations. The most common powerplant fuels are coal, natural gas, and uranium. In the United States, only 20% of electricity comes from so-called renewables like solar. These “good” sources of electric like solar are a blight on nature and environmentally toxic. The long term costs far outweigh the costs of conventional energy production systems.

Then there is the practicality of electric cars. Fueling a normal car takes a few minutes while charging an EV takes hours. Again, no one is sitting around saying, “I’d like to spend hours at a roadside station talking with people who tend to loiter at rest stops while my electric car is being charged.” Then there is the fact that you have to install a charging station in your home. Imagine buying a car and being told you have to install a filling station in your backyard in order to use it.

In other words, the natural demand for electric cars was zero and remains low even with the push to manufacture demand. There is a novelty factor, for sure, but if no one had bothered to push the production of electric cars, they would not exist. Tesla exists as a way for Elon Musk to hoover up billions in government money, not because he found an unexploited niche in the automobile market. What he found was a clever way to become a rent seeker and the P.T. Barnum of the technological age.

It would be easy to go through all of the arguments in favor of electric cars and show them to be ridiculous or plain wrong. That is not the point. The point is despite the obvious, Western elites are hell bent on forcing us into electric cars. Those super car makers are not marketing to the hoi polloi. They cater to the global elite and they think the global elite believes in the miracle of electric cars. They are catering to their audience and their audience is our ruling class.

The point of this exercise is not to argue against electric cars, but to point out that practicality and self-interest are not what motivates the ruling class. All of them mouth the platitudes of Gaia worship because that is the prevailing orthodoxy. It is a way for them to signal their adherence to the faith. The local officials installing charging stations at the local school, yet ignoring the broken pipes and boarded up windows, are not thinking practically or responding to the demands of the people.

The electric car grift is useful in thinking about how partisanship in a liberal democracy becomes ideology then something closer to theology. The old partisan divide of the last century, good whites versus bad whites, has become a basket of beliefs untethered from practical reality. That basket of beliefs now forms a religion that bounds and defines the ruling class. The managerial class now has its own religion to control and define the members.

The Administrative Crisis

Posted on January 5, 2022 by thezman

A feature of modern society is the vast administrative state that manages every aspect of modern life. Modern people take it for granted, as they have never known any other way to live, other than being guided by massive bureaucracies. No one alive today remembers a time when there was not a bureaucrat behind every bush ready to shout instructions or warnings. A big part of what the paleocons call “managerialism” is the vast system of administration that runs society.

It is tempting to say that the Romans had a big administrative state. Diocletian expanded the empire’s civil and military administration. He established administrative centers around the empire, especially near the borders, in order to extend control from Rome to all areas of the empire. He is often referred to as the father of bureaucracy and what we think of as civil administration. People may also point to Byzantium, which expanded this concept into a complex form of rule.

There are two big differences between these older forms of government bureaucracy and what we live under today. One is the old system was not built around an ideology like we see now. Our administrative state is built around the idea that society can be managed scientifically by an army of experts. The other difference is the modern administrative state is about training the citizen to achieve his fullest potential within the liberal democratic order, to be a good liberal democrat.

Interestingly, the administrative state in modern liberal democracies looks and acts much like the bureaucracy that evolved with the Soviet system. Both were driven by ideology and both were designed to micromanage the life of the people. The fascist systems that sprung up in the interwar years showed the signs of developing an administrative state as well. Like communism and liberal democracy, fascism embraced the rational management of society.

The other not so obvious similarity between liberal democracy and communism is their respective administrative states evolved as a response to democracy. Running a country where everyone has a say can only be done if the overwhelming majority are saying the same thing. Therefore, a primary duty of the state is to train people to hold the same beliefs, to share the same common sense. The administrative state is as much about promoting ideology as administration.

Something else that is unique to the modern age is the scale and reach of the state in terms of its ability to control activity. Those old forms of imperial bureaucracy were mostly built around protecting the interests if private rulers. Vast swaths of life were left to the people to sort for themselves. In modern systems, the state protects the interest of everyone, so the activity of everyone is heavily regulated. 19th century prisons offered more freedom than the modern Western democracy.

When he was inaugurated, Ronald Reagan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time, we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.” Those words were rooted in Reagan’s reading of people we now call paleo-conservatives, who were early critics of managerialism.

Fast forward to now and what is called conservatism is a celebration of the administrative state. In the Bush years, they were pushing what they called “big government conservatism” which was an explicit endorsement of scientific management of society. Their claim was that they could harness the power of the administrative state to achieve what they claimed were conservative ends. Green eyeshade conservatism had given way to administrative conservatism.

Covid has revealed that the overwhelming majority of people in modern Western democracies just accept that their fate is in the hands of the state. The proper response to Covid was to redirect resources to hospitals to treat sick people, but otherwise let nature take its course. In the administrative state, no aspect of life is left unmanaged, so an army of experts was unleashed to put nature back in her bottle. The crisis of Covid is that nature won and the administrative state failed.

The crisis of the administrative state began to form up on the horizon at the end of last year as the economy began to do weird things. Prices for consumer goods started to spike and the supply chain began to break down. It was assumed that modern monetary management had made inflation a relic of the past. An army of experts trained in our best universities managed the supply chain, so goods and services could be efficiently managed in response to economic conditions.

Even more bizarrely, the labor markets no longer make any sense, according to the rules of the economic elites. Millions of people have left the workforce despite millions of unfilled jobs. Wages have started to creep up, but that has not had any impact on the employment situation. Of course, rising wages and rising retail prices is exactly what modern economic planners said was no longer possible. As with Covid, nature seems to be resisting the efforts of our experts.

The reason that the vast administrative state has been accepted by people is it looked like it was working as promised. The various financial crisis did not result in bread lines like they did in the past. Instead, men in suits pulled levers in the Federal Reserve and Treasury to navigate around the crisis. The retail economy was brimming with new products and services, making life more comfortable. Managerialism has been accepted because it seemed to be working.

The question that has never been tested is whether the administrative state can withstand an internal crisis. Managing through a natural disaster is a very different thing than managing an irreconcilable contradiction within the system itself. This is what the administrative state is now facing. If the problem of this age is the system, there is no systemic solution. In fact, every effort by the system to address the crisis is seen as contributing to the crisis.

This is what brought down the Soviet system. All systems become sclerotic over time, as any software engineer will tell you. The social software of the Soviet empire became so burdened with patches and workarounds that it eventually crashed. The software of a society is the internal logic of it. When those rules begin to fail everyone questions the system itself. This sets of a dynamic where the system fails, a patch is made and confidence declines until eventually no one trusts the system at all.

We may be seeing something similar with liberal democracy. In order to justify itself, it looks for crises to manage, often creating them, but lurching from crisis to crisis is making it less competent at the basics. As people begin to lose trust in the software of liberal democracy, the system administrators are releasing poorly thought out updates and lecturing the users about their conduct. The result is a spiral of increasing incompetence and decreasing trust in the system.

At the heart of the current crisis is a question never asked. That is, can the administrative state survive its own failures. A bad king in a monarchy can be replaced by the next in line. The bad office holder in a republic can voted out of office in favor of someone new. What happens when vast swaths of the administrative state have become gangrenous? How is that addressed. How are the rotten bits removed and who is given the authority to remove them?

Coup De Jour

Posted on January 4, 2022 by thezman

One of the iron laws of the universe is that whatever the America Left is warning about is usually something they are plotting. Alternatively, whatever they are accusing others of doing is something they have already done. The Russian collusion stuff is the most recent example of this. They accused Trump of plotting with a foreign government, the Russians, but we learned it was official Washington all mobbed up with the Ukrainians, Chinese and anyone else with extra cash.

Of course, for the last year the ruling class has been yammering about the insurrection and the ongoing threat to “our” democracy. Meanwhile, they have been dragging people off to secret dungeons, harassing citizens for their politics, throwing people off social media and all the things we associate with a thug regime. Go back further and they spent four years claiming the 2016 election was rigged and then committed massive election fraud in the 2020 election.

This is how you can discern the future in regime rhetoric. Regime-ology, like Kremlinology in the Cold War, is becoming a skill in this age. You read the regime organs like the Washington Post or New York Times not for the literal content, but for the esoteric content, the stuff between the lines. In order to be prepared for what they will do next, we have all been forced to be Straussian. Of course, we also have the opposite rule of liberalism to guide us.

This is why the stories about a potential military coup are interesting. This one from December got the ball rolling. It is framed as a warning of a possible coup by the imaginary army of insurrectionists, but clearly the authors are imagining themselves as a triumvirate saving “our” democracy. A couple of weeks later, the Pentagon assured us that they are ready to send troops into Washington and seize control of the government if people vote the wrong way in the next election.

You do not have to be a geezer to recall a time when such talk was strictly forbidden by the mass media and political class. In fact, they went out of their way to assure themselves and the public that no one in the army would ever think of such a thing, much less suggest it. You see, America was a republic with civilian control of the military, so such a thing was impossible. It was often implied that the greatness of the military was the result of its republican virtue.

It used to be that the far-left would have been berserk with anger over the suggestion that the military would be needed to secure “our” democracy. They hated the military and saw it as the enemy of democracy. An indication of just how much the Left has changed over the last decade or so is their reaction to that column. They think it is wonderful that the military is publicly expressing their loyalty to “our” democracy and promising to crush the alleged enemies of it.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at these ridiculous sissies in regime media cheering for a military coup. One of the interesting features of the managerial class is their assumption that the institutions exist to serve their interests. They never think for a second that the men with guns defending “our” democracy may realize they no longer need the managerial class to run the administrative state. Meetings are for men in suits, not for men in charge holding guns.

Putting that aside, this coup talk offers some insight into what the people in charge are plotting for the near future. The upcoming midterm election is of little interest as it just means the Republicans gain some seats. The focus is on the 2024 election, which they now view as the great battle between “our” democracy and the imaginary insurrectionists, otherwise known as Trump voters. They have no intention of allowing Trump to win and take office again.

This strikes normal people as a bit strange. After all, what was plain in the Trump years is he is no threat to the regime. If he returned to office, he is not going exact revenge on those who wronged him. He will crawl on his belly for their approval. The regime, on the other hand, cannot see this. They always project their own qualities onto their enemies and in this case, they assume Trump would seek murderous revenge. After all, that is what they would do if they were him. They will not allow it.

This offers another insight into regime thinking. They assume Trump would act like they would act if in the same position. That means they assume he will have them jailed and tossed into dungeons on made up charges. They see this as a threat to “our” democracy, which then justifies any means necessary to stop it. This is how the 2020 election was fueled by widescale fraud. They told their election volunteers that any means necessary was acceptable.

Looking ahead, what this suggests is that a military coup of some sort is in the cards within the next decade. Since the generals are all super-woke, it probably means something like a hybrid civilian-military junta. The leaders of the Democratic party will lock arms with the military leadership to “defend our democracy” by overturning the elections and imposing a form of martial law. Some Republicans will be arrested as conspirators and insurrectionists.

There is another thing evident in these posts that offers some insight into what will happen in the near term. These super-woke generals are just as delusional as the super-woke regime leaders. Would the rank and file in the armed services support a scheme to “defend our democracy” from Boomers waving flags? The most likely result would be a schism in the services. Instead of being a show of strength, a coup would turn into another display of weakness and incoherence.

Another iron law of the universe is that managerial regimes become decreasingly competent over time. This was what brought down communism. The Soviet system was so corrupt it was no longer functional in the end. That is the most likely end for the regime’s coup plans. The will is there but the system has simply become too incompetent and corrupt to do it. There will be tanks in the streets, but they will be broken down and abandoned like the regime itself.

The Bearded Weirdo

Posted on January 3, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is up. This week it is about the fact that two years of Covid has revealed some unforgettable and unforgivable truths. Behind the green door, there is the first podcast of the new year.

Politics in a democratic society is always going to attract a lot of very strange people, but there is a range of acceptable strangeness. As a result, the weirdness tends to be normalized in that you just expect it. No one is surprised to learn that people in politics have the morals of carny folk, because politics is entertainment. We are not shocked by it unless the behavior falls way outside the norm. That is what makes the Jack Murphy scandal both amusing and interesting.

For those unfamiliar, Jack Murphy was a leader in the man-o-sphere scene, which is a broad term covering anti-feminism, the pick-up artists, men’s rights and the general discussion of manliness in the modern age. Murphy pitched himself as a bit from all of those buckets, but mostly the latter. He ran something called the Liminal Order and charged men $100 a month to learn how to be better men. He also had ornamental facial hair and worked for The Claremont Institute.

It also turns out that he produced gay porn and was into something called cuckoldry, which is a sexual fetish involving voyeurism and sex with strangers. If you are interested in the details of Mr. Murphy’s side hobbies, someone calling herself Megan Fox posted them at PJ Media. Of course, Jack Murphy is not really Jack Murphy, Irish he-man, but rather, he is someone named John Goldman, who is not Irish. It is hard to imagine how this story could get any more ridiculous.

Putting aside the seediness of it, this story raises a question that seems to be at the heart of most scandals. Did this guy not know how the internet works? He was selling gay porn on-line, so he had to know something about the internet. Did he really think that no one would ever look around at his internet life? It appears he made little effort to conceal any of this stuff. How is it possible he did not know he would get caught and why was he not prepared to answer for it?

You cannot write it off to hubris or ignorance. A quick search of his two names brings up this article from three years ago. He was working for the D.C. Public Charter School Board in 2018 as a finance manager. He was also posting as an alt-right character under his fake name at the time and the board found out about it. Interestingly, he was not fired from his job. In fact, the local ACLU came to his defense. Even so, he should have learned that there are no secrets on-line.

Another question that comes up in these cases is how is it possible that these guys keep getting away with these scams? Charging men $100 a month to learn how to be better men is crazy, but not uncommon. Mike Cernovich used to run self-help seminars where he would charge people to be their life-coach. Ross Jeffries in the 1980’s ran seminars where he taught the art of seduction. YouTube is full of guys peddling something like this to desperate men.

The answer to the question here is that there are a lot of men in a modern society who can find no role as men in society. Just as childless women hopped up on feminism often turn into on-line harpies, men living in a feminized society often turn into desperate suckers willing to pay anything for fraternity. Murphy/Goldman was simply exploiting this need for fraternity and male bonding. He is a con-man who finally found easily exploitable marks on the alternative right.

Far-left types and feminists find this story very amusing, as they assume it says something about the imaginary Right they think they are battling. They are correct that this is a phenomenon on the Right, but that is only because there is no place for naturally occurring males on the Left. Otherwise, there is very little that is right-wing about the man-o-sphere. The politics are decorations that are used as a lure to draw in the desperate males looking for brotherhood.

The best you can say about the man-o-sphere, with regards to politics and political inclination, is that it is uniformly anti-feminist. The gamers, the pick-up artists and even the groypers entered politics through the anti-feminism door. The ugliness of feminism has driven males away from mainstream and left-wing politics. This is why Murphy/Goldman had to transform himself from a standard issue on-line lefty into a Trump supporting right-wing anti-feminist in order to work his grift.

Behind all of this is the fact that he found an easy home among people who are supposed to be more prudent and intellectually rigorous. In 2021, the Claremont Institute made him a Lincoln Fellow. For some reason, everything involving the name Lincoln turns out to be riddled with sexual degeneracy. Putting that aside, how is it possible that they did not know he was a faker? They surely did a background check on him before inviting him to the team.

You can look at this two ways. One is they were desperate for attention, so they just invited in someone who seemed to have a big audience on-line. Charlie Kirk, who is as dumb as a hamster, was also a Lincoln Fellow. In other words, it is the old guys trying to get some street cred by inviting in those who they think are the cool kids on this internet thing they have been reading about in the papers. They never thought to look into his background to see if he was also selling gay porn.

The other answer, the most likely one, is they knew he was a fraud, but they did not care as he was willing to play ball. It was the old quid pro quo. They would grant these “internet influencers” some intellectual legitimacy in exchange for them spreading the right message to their followers. They knew he was not an Irish he-man, but that did not matter, so they did not look any further. They just wanted access to his audience, so they never bothered to ask any questions.

That is a good lesson for anyone involved in political activism. Politics attracts a lot of weirdos, because we live in a liberal democracy, which favors carny folk. That means you have to know the back story of the people you wish to trust. If it does not add up or they are lying, then you are best to avoid the person entirely. The same way one judges a new coworker or new neighbor should apply more so in politics. The old Cold War term, “trust but verify” should be the way in dissident politics.

In the end, this story is nothing but a bit of momentary amusement, but it is another good sign as we head into the next phase of dissident politics. This scandal is not on this side of the great divide, but on the normie side. Murphy/Goldman had no influence on this side as this side has become much more skeptical about these guys who are on-line political entertainers. That suggests there is a maturing in dissident politics and an awareness of the weirdo problem.

Happy New Year

Posted on January 1, 2022 by thezman

The 2022 Predictions

Posted on December 31, 2021 by thezman

A clever way to make smart predictions is to start with the assumption that the near future is not going to be much different from the present. Current trends will extend out over the near term. On the other hand, if you want to get a lot of attention for yourself, you can make bold crazy predications that confirm deeply held suspicions. “Next year we see hyperinflation!” will get the gold bugs and Fed watchers excited. Everyone likes to hear that their dreams will come true in the coming year.

The trouble with either of those approaches is they are not motivated by the desire to figure out what may be coming in the new year. Sure, most things will probably be the same as last year, but so what? What matters is what will be different. Similarly, pretending the Great Pumpkin will rise from the pumpkin patch and finally deliver on his promises is just cheap theater. So, with that in mind, let us cut open the goat and read what the entrails tell us about the coming year.

The signs say chaos is coming for the political class in 2022. The administration’s half-hearted effort to tamp down the Covid panic will be met by shrieking from the Covidians and much of the media. This is where we start to see some deep fissures in the coalition as many are tired of the restrictions while others cannot let it go. This will lead to criticism of the administration from some on the Left and a corresponding bit of return fire from the inner party.

Adding to the chaos will be the collapse of all support for Kamala Harris. She never had a constituency in the party and the prospect of losing the House and Senate means they need to get a replacement done before the election. The fact is Biden is in rough shape so the question is who will pick his successor. The inner party will make this a central part of the fall campaign. They hope the new heir apparent will get their people energized and take people’s attention away from the economy.

The fall elections go poorly for the Democrats. They lose over thirty seats in the House, but the result is not a landslide as many whites sit out the election. The icy hand of demographics begins to show up in formerly safe republicans areas. The Democrats take the loss as an opportunity to force Joe Biden to resign. His deteriorating condition and his successor secured, leads to a coordinated push to have him retire from office after the new year, allowing his successor to run for two terms.

I will finally escape Lagos.

The instability of the imperial leadership begins to show up globally. Ukraine experiences civil unrest, especially in the east. The Turkish economy collapses and we see widescale protests against the government. Israel decides now is the time to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Ethiopia collapses into chaos because Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed overplays his hand in peace talks with the Tigrayan rebels. As a result, east Africa collapses into famine and civil war.

I finish my book and I become more popular than Jesus.

Back on the home front, first quarter inflation comes in much hotter than expected, forcing the Fed to speed up their tapering schedule. Food prices show the biggest rise as the phrase “fertilizer shortage” enters the conversation. As the Fed begins to raise rates for the first time in a generation, equities decline 20% in what the media will tell us is a natural correction. Bitcoin will lose 50% of its value as governments tighten the rules on digital assets and their platforms.

The combination of Covid chaos and economic troubles will result in the first signs of right-wing unrest since the 2020 election. Fueled by anticipation of another stolen election, populist groups will organize public rallies in DC. The FBI, of course, will play their role but thanks to awareness of their shenanigans, these rallies will be full of people with cameras looking for FBI infiltrators. Finding the infiltrator will be the most popular internet game in 2022.

Everyone at Reason magazine will come out as trans and no one will notice.

Conservative Inc. begins to show some serious problems as the decline of their donor base begins to accelerate. Some of it is driven by the actuarial tables but most of it is the increasing realization that conservatism is just a money pit. This will correspond with an uptick in support for populist and dissident operations. Grifters like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk to become more populist in their rhetoric. Even Trump will start attacking the conservative establishment again.

On the media front, we see a wholesale reorganization of cable news. CNN shifts to a pure news model, dropping their entertainment shows. MSNBC, responding the Tucker Carlson-ization of Fox, begins adding left-wing populist content, retiring many of their current personalities in favor of left-wing YouTube personalities. The collapse of conservative talk radio will accelerate as that audience ages off and people simply stop listening to terrestrial radio in general.

Happy New Year!

Year In Review

Posted on December 30, 2021 by thezman

There are three reasons to write a predictions post. One is it is familiar stuff that everyone does this time of year. It is easy content. The other is you can have some fun with the predictions. Saying that the coming year will bring the death of your enemies is both fun for the writer and the reader. You can be serious about it and try to figure out what the next year brings. Of course, a blend of all three is like a trip to the old fashioned all-you-can-eat buffet. Good living.

The first prediction I made last year turned out to be a miss. The murdering in Lagos did not follow the familiar pattern. Odd number years are usually good years for killing, as the locals struggle with factoring. This year the pattern did not hold as the city is not going to break a record. Barring a very productive couple of nights, Baltimore will clock in with about the same number of murders as last year, despite a record number of shootings and a decline in the number of cops.

That said, there are rumors that the city is faking the statistics, so time will tell if the current figures hold. Baltimore has faked its crime stats in the past. There was a time when they stopped recording rapes entirely, so it is not out of the question for them to classify murders as accidental deaths. In most cases, no one really cares about the victims, so they could get away with it for a while. Regardless, this predication has to go in the loss column for now.

On the other hand, I was stunningly precise with my Covid predictions. “The Covidians will not back down. There will be reports of “vaccinated people” getting Covid and that will be enough to keep the panic rolling. Covid has now replaced climate change as the left-wing religion of fear.” For that call alone they will be making documentaries about my predictive powers in the future. I know my left-wing crazies as well as anyone can truly know the mind of the insane.

I kinda-sorta got the economic forecast right. The lack of specificity gave me some wiggle room, which is the hallmark of a good prediction. I did not mention inflation, but I got the general trend right. I also was right about the media trying to run cover for the economy as has been the case recently. The fact is the economy is so weird right now it is hard to judge it. Millions not working, despite millions of open jobs contradicts what we have been told about economics for a century.

The big miss in last year’s prediction was on Biden. I did not think they would let that idiot stay in office beyond Labor Day. Every seer has their weak spots and mine is in underestimating the stupidity of the people in charge. I figured they would pillow Biden before anyone realized that Harris was an obnoxious moron. Instead, they seem to be stuck with both of them. That and Biden has avoided the Grim Reaper, despite his condition and multiple Covid outbreaks in Washington.

I think I got it right on Trump. If not for the Left trying to keep him in the news, most people would have forgotten about him by now. The Trump phenomenon was like that one amazing summer you had in your youth. You have fond memories of that time, but there is no going back. That chapter is closed. We have serious issues facing us now and his frivolous brand of self-promotion seems out of place. Flight 93 crashed and no one really wants to revisit the crash site.

I was wrong and right about the Republicans trying to help the Democrats loot what is left of the middle-class. They helped get some things passed, but they held the line on some others, like the Build Back Better stuff. They did not push for an amnesty, but they have not said much about Biden’s open border lunacy either. The Republicans would love to vote for amnesty, but the Democrats refuse to give them the opportunity, so the Republicans are being saved from their own idiocy.

I will say I was right about the shifting posture of this side of the divide. Over the last year the number of people who think we have a systemic problem along with a hopelessly corrupt ruling class has grown rapidly. Lots of people now call themselves dissidents, without really knowing what it means, but they have come to loath the people in charge with the zeal of a communist. It is less and less about policy and more and more about the structure of society.

This is why you see more high profile people aping dissident rhetoric. They feel the ground shifting and they are looking for a safe place. This is something else I got right in last year’s predictions. Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro sound like paleo-conservatives all of a sudden, because that is where the audience is now. These grifters will always be with us and they are a good barometer. They are being told by their handlers to embrace populist themes because that is the market now.

All-in-all it was a strong performance from the hardest working man in dissident politics, but not a flawless performance. Like everyone, I am disappointed that Biden did not drop dead, but that gives us something to look forward to in 2022. Like last year, I think we may look back at this year and see it as a good time. The immediate future looks grim, more so than this time last year. Accepting it is not pessimism, but simply being realistic, which is another word for prudent.

The Runaway Train

Posted on December 29, 2021 by thezman

A popular topic on this side of the great divide is how much of what we see from the ruling class is directed and how much is emergent. Put another way, how much of it is the result of conscious coordination from some central source and how much is just the mentality of the swarm. Those who like conspiracy theories and simple answers prefer the coordination model, while those with experience in complex human systems prefer the emergent behavior approach.

Of course, both can be true. Elites in the anglosphere have been enamored by what is called nudge theory for a while now. the 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness was a big hit with the managerial class, as it suggested a feminine way to compel social behavior. Instead of ordering people around, elites would use their power over the institutions to “nudge” people in the preferred direction with positive incentives, rather than force.

As is so often the case, Nudge Theory is really an old idea tarted up with managerial class jargon that comes from the graduate schools. The tax code in America has been used this way long before the nudge idea. The mortgage interest deduction is a nudge toward home ownership, rather than renting. Business gets tax breaks for capital purchases when the economy is flagging. The government food pyramid is a way to nudge people toward one form of consumption over another.

The food pyramid is a good example of how conspiracy and emergent behavior work together in a mass society. The people behind the food pyramid are the giant agricultural concerns that control the food supply. A high carbohydrate diet is more profitable than a healthy diet, so they bribe government officials and academic researchers to promote the high carb diet. At the same time, people actually believe in the “low fat” diets now so no nudging is required.

We are seeing this with the Covid drama. The inner party has finally realized they have a serious problem on their hands with Covid theater. People have figured out that they can get two weeks out of work by claiming to have Covid, so the great winter sick-out is starting to harm the economy. Of course, the contradictions and lies about Covid are undermining their ability to tell future lies. Biden’s last speech on Covid came with a message to the media to cool it on Covid.

The White House is pushing a message to the media, which they expect the media to blast through their megaphones. You are starting to see planted stories about how Omicron is harmless and a good sign. On the other hand, the hive mind of the media has been tuned to spread fear about Covid. The front page of party organs like the New York Times are organized around Covid theater. The result is a weird whipsaw effect where the message swings wildly back and forth.

Covid theater is useful in exploring the hive mind aspects of this age. All of a sudden, tens of millions of normal people are made aware of the fact that many of their associates are not just liberal, but possibly insane. The people wearing ceremonial face gear are exempting themselves from the normal tribe and declaring their allegiance to the crazy tribe. One sort of emergent behavior, triggered by the Covid conspirators, is causing new emergent behavior among the healthy.

Those big tanker trucks you see on the road are a good model to think about when considering this stuff. Inside those tanks is either compartments or what would look like a baffles if you peeled back the skin. The point of the internal structures is to give the tank rigidity but also prevent the fluid inside from sloshing around. A ton of water sloshing forward when braking would create a tremendous amount of force. The tankers are designed to keep the contents stable in transport.

That is a good way to think of society. The hive mind, the emergent behavior is like the fluid inside one of those tankers. When the ruling class jams on the brakes or takes a sudden turn, general opinion can swing wildling in one direction. The initial Covid panic is a good example. The baffling is supposed to be local institutions, community and the traditions of society. They are supposed to put a brake on the wild swings of opinion caused by the sudden lurching of the ruling class.

This is the proper image for modern America. It is a tanker truck racing down the road half full of fluid. During the Trump years it swung from one side of the road to the other, in part due to the driver and due to the sloshing about inside the tank. The Biden turn at the wheel was supposed to stabilize things, but every reaction on their part to stabilize things has caused a new action inside the tank. Trump enjoyed the ride, while Biden is hanging on like prisoner to the machine he is driving.

The point is, much of what looks like conspiracy is just wild reactions to events that the elites set off by a legitimate effort to nudge society in a preferred direction. Just as war plans do not survive contact with the enemy, elite conspiracies do not hold up very long after contact with mass society. Covid is revealing just how little control our ruling elites have over their creations. They unleashed a panic that has become a bizarre subculture they no longer can control.

This does not settle the question at the start, but it does suggest the question is not all that important. Unless you are inclined to believe that the people “really in charge” are super-geniuses able to play four-dimensional chess, yet not realize you are onto them, it is hard to see the hand of design in the current madness. On the other hand, emergent behavior does not explain the players who are fortuitously positioned to profit from the madness unleashed by our rulers.

Perhaps the way to think about is as a process that evolves and two of the forces driving the evolution are conspiracy and emergent behavior. The former is locked in on short term gain without considering the long term consequences. The later forces are just the normal social forces weaponized by the collapse of that internal baffling that comes from strong local community and traditions. The empire is a runaway train and all of us, the engineers included, are just along for the ride.

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