GameStop and Bailouts

The ruling class is shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on at Robinhood, the stockmarket app that helped rocket failing retailer GameStop into the stratosphere and apparently ruined hedge fund Melvin Capital that had shorted GameStop.

Of course, for us deplorables this is all great fun, and "far-right" writer Vox Day, wants to go all the way and suggests

One thing is clear from all of this. The America public is not going to support another bank bailout once the next financial crisis begins. They'd rather see Wall Street burn, and rightly so.

Er, no. The trouble is that when Wall Street burns, we the people get nuked. Big time. As in the Great Depression, when the Fed failed to bail out the banks. As in the Great Recession of 2008-09, when Little Ben Bernanke failed to bail out Lehman Brothers.

Yes, I'd like to see the malefactors of great wealth taught a lesson they will never forget. But I don't want to be caught in the blast zone.

And as far as I can determine, it is just not possible to design the credit system so there is no chance of a meltdown.

Most credit, as far as I can see, is the anticipation of income in normal trade. Thus, a merchant borrows money against the sale of his merchandise at a future date. The question is: how much borrowing is safe? One hundred percent of the anticipated sale price? Fifty percent?

The problem is that, 99 times out of 100, borrowing 100% of the anticipated sales price is perfectly safe. Until the day that your ship gets wrecked, or the market price of the merchandise takes a tumble before you sell it.

Then, if the merchant doesn't have other resources, he is bankrupt and his creditors may go bankrupt and their creditors go bankrupt, and so on.

It is all explained in Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street. Everything is copacetic in the credit system so long as borrowers make their payments and that loans can be liquidated by selling the collateral. But if the borrower can't pay, or the sale of the collateral isn't enough to liquefy the defaulting loan, then you got trouble right here in River City.

Bagehot's Big Idea in Lombard Street is that the central bank should be the "lender of last resort." So when a financial institution goes broke the central bank steps in and buys it. Thus the illiquid debt of the defaulting institution is diluted in the capital of the central bank. But Bagehot recognizes a further risk. What if the central bank can't absorb the defaulting debt of the defaulter? Well, the answer is that the central bank is backed up by the state, and its ability to issue debt.

But what if the state doesn't have the capital or the "confidence" of the market? Like, say Venezuela? 

Exactly. That is why it is best to make sure that the credit system does not allow hedge funds and other reckless investors to put the whole system at risk. That is why an ordinary stock investor is only allowed to borrow 50 percent of a stock's value "on margin." That is why, back in the day, before the gubmint got into the act with Fannie Mae, Americans could only borrow 50 percent of the value of a home.

Yes but what if the Wall Street smarties have come up with another way of "laundering" low-quality debt like they did back in the 2000s with their derivatives and credit default swaps. It looked like a good idea until it wasn't.

That is probably the Big Problem. Wall Street smarties are always thinking up new ways of sailing too close to the wind. And usually, their folly is only discovered after it is too late, and the system is already in meltdown. This is what happened with default swaps and derivatives in the 2008 meltdown. It turned out that the financial legerdemain did not in fact make all those high-risk mortgage bonds into low-risk bonds. Oh dear.

That is why we are always going to need that "lender of last resort."

Here's the thing though, as you can see from my report on the 2008 bailouts. The biggest item was not the bailouts, of monies lent to weakened banks and financial mastodons. The biggest item was $16.9 trillion in guarantees for money market mutual funds.

Yeah. And the cool thing about the guarantees was that the Federal government didn't have to shell out a penny in debt or outlays. All that was needed to keep the money market mutual fund business going was the guarantee that the Feds would keep it lubricated. How cool is that?

Very cool, until our ruling class figures out how to take advantage of it.

Yarvin: Trump Never Had a Chance; Plus He's Incompetent

Now that Trump is returned to Florida, Curtis Yarvin reminds us that Trump's job as president was to be a King. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the skills and attributes to be a king.

Trump has never shown any particular gift for management or delegation, and he has the attention span of a rabid chipmunk. 

Nor did any of his people know how to be a king and actually run the government.

But then, Yarvin continues, what authority does the president have anyway? Practically none, especially if he is going up against the System and its bureaucracy.

With regard to the System he references a 900-person Zoom call of all the lefties where they coordinated the street action -- or lack of street action -- after the election. Wow. I get that the lefties all somehow coordinate like a flock of birds.

With regard to the bureaucracy he notes the case of Trump and a Pennsylvania lawmaker getting together, in a "Plot" with a mid-level Justice Department appointee to maybe get a bit of investigating on the Big Steal. But the other bureaucrats shut it down.

So, in fact, the left's Activist Central decides what goes down, or does not go down in the streets, and the permanent bureaucracy decides what goes down in the actual government. Presidents need not apply.

Who knew?

So, the benefit of Trump is that he did get to do some pro-Commoner stuff for four years, and in the aftermath the lefty Activism Central were part of the System, and the bureaucrats showed their teeth.

If we didn't know how the System worked before, we do now.

Bottom line is, of course, that the current System of the ruling class ain't going down until it runs out of money and thus can't keep all its bureaucrats and its activists on-side.

So of course the Biden administration is executive-ordering the agenda of the lefty Activism Culture. In particular because, since President Biden is in mental decline he really lacks the horsepower to moderate his lefty crazies.

And of course the bureaucracy is not going to apply the law to its own and to the lefty activists that break the law.

Says Yarvin about Trump's real achievement.

[The left] has succeeded brilliantly in pretending to be the underdog. Thanks to Trump, and to its response to Trump, this charade seems no longer viable.

So now the left will have to be upfront about power: that it has the power, that it believes in power, and that you'd better behave because power.

It's a start. 

Biden's Two Front War: Climate Change and Systemic Racism

Everybody knows that fighting a two-front war is a Very Bad Thing. It was Germany's fate in both World War I and World War II. And it didn't go well.

Now, the Biden administration is proposing to fight both climate change and systemic racism. All at once.

Now, according to my theory, governments exist to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. So your average foreign war is all about protecting the people from the furriners. And your average civil war, or political campaign or witch-hunt, is about the domestic enemies and traitors and witches.

Of course most wars and most politics are ginned-up rubbish, because if you don't have a war you don't have a reason for all that taxing and spending and borrowing.

But still: only one war at a time, Senator.

For instance, after 9/11 we had unity in the United States for about a year because all Americans were united to Do Something about crazed Islamic terrorists. But after a while normal politics resumed and our Democratic friends went back to posting ReDefeat Bush bumper-stickers on their Subarus.

Good old FDR had a grand old time uniting Democrats against the dastardly Republicans from 1933 till 1939. Although, in fact, the scapegoat President Hoover was a pretty progressive Republican in favor of government solutions for most everything, just like FDR.

But then, when FDR wanted to get into World War II, suddenly we were all Americans, united to defeat the Japs and the Huns. Democrats, Republicans? We were all Americans.

Now, I am wondering if President Biden should be making a decision about which war he wants to fight. Does he want to save us from the nightmare of climate change and unite all Americans to fight that existential threat? Oh, how glorious that day will be when climate change has been arrested and our human community saved! Or does he want to hunt down and cancel all the racist-sexist-homophobes wherever they may be found? Oh, the wonders of an America purged of all the white oppressors by the noble allies!

Because if President Biden wants to fight both existential perils, then maybe he is Literally Hitler. Too dumb to avoid getting himself into a two-front war.

Of course, I realize the difficulty of the president's position. He is the leader of the party that includes a whole barrel full of different activist interests. Every educated woke person must be into activism, and the key is to find a new activist field for your very own. But when all these activisms all come to power... Well, it is the job of a wise leader to make wise decisions about which activist agenda to concentrate on.

(Yes, I know. If he were really wise he would tell all the activists to take their activisms and put 'em where the sun don't shine.)

Of course, it is a bit of a problem when the president is already well advanced into senile dementia, and is merely the creature of his activist staff. It becomes hard to make sensible, strategic, decisions that are good for the Democratic Party and good for the United States of America.

Actually, of course, I believe that the president is making a mammoth strategic error by not concentrating all his power on the post-COVID economic recovery. Never mind all the activist rubbish about climate change and systemic racism.

Now I am a retired guy and my IRAs are doin' fine thank you very much what with all the money printing and such.

But, just between you and me and don't tell your wokie neighbor who won't get it, I think that tens of millions of Americans have had their lives blitzed into oblivion by the COVID economic shutdowns. And it is going to take years to dig them out the the hole we have pitched them into.

Correction: In my belief many of the tens of millions of Americans will never recover from the hell that they were pitched into. Shades of the Great Depression and the Skid Rows that resulted. And, I believe, this fact will very likely transform American politics.

Yep. I reckon that President Biden is making a strategic error, and his court historians will have their work cut out for them if they expect to give him an honorable place in the history books.

Whatabout the Next Crash?

Now that we are First and Ten with the Biden administration and we learn that President Biden is at 50 percent mental capacity, let's talk about the real question.

What happens at the end of the current deficits and money printing?

There's a piece at American Spectator about this. Donald Devine quotes a bunch of experts that say there is nothing to worry about. Not yet. Then he makes his prediction:

My prediction is that Biden’s control of executive and legislative branches will produce a short economic boom in 2021, followed by a big bust in 2022 that takes down the whole progressive edifice with it.

One of the problems he sees is the modern "repo" market.

“In repo, broker-dealers, hedge funds and banks construct short-term transactions. You put up collateral — Treasury bills or sometimes less-pristine instruments — with an agreement to buy them back the next day or week for slightly more, and invest the proceeds in the interim.”

The question is: what happens when things turn South?

But eventually, iffy collateral sneaks into the system. That’s also fine, until markets hit an inevitable rough patch, like, say, March 2020. No one will take the junky stuff anymore, and everyone scrambles for good collateral. So there’s a mad dash, a brawl really, to buy Treasuries — like musical chairs with six to eight buyers eagerly eyeing one chair.

If this sounds too complicated, let me give you Walter Bagehot and his 1873 book Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. 

As I understand Bagehot -- he was the founding editor of the London Economist -- the credit system needs the following to work:

All loans must be properly collateralized so that the borrowed money can be recovered if the borrower defaults.

All borrowers must be able to service their loans.

If either of these things breaks down, then you got trouble, right here in River City. If both things break down you got nuclear Armageddon.

For instance, in the runup to the Crash of 2008 we had the US government encouraging low down-payment mortgage loans. See the problem? If there is a downturn in home prices then some of those low-down payment loans can't be liquidated if the borrower defaults.

Then, in addition, the US government was encouraging, even mandating, that lenders lend to borrowers -- such as minority borrowers -- with low credit ratings, i.e., borrowers with a higher than normal risk of not making the payments.

So when the Fed tightened up on credit in 2006 many borrowers with adjustable-rate loans couldn't make their payments and because their homes came on the market the price of homes went down and banks could not recover the principal when liquidating defaulted loans.

And so you get a credit crisis where traders in the system don't want to trade in securities with "iffy collateral."

Then you get a credit meltdown which, according to Bagehot, can only be stopped by a central bank, a "lender of last resort" buying up distressed loans. It can do this because the assumption is that the central bank has, as capital, the whole wealth of the nation to back it up. You can see how the central bank acting as "lender of last resort" solves the crisis. It buys up dodgy debt, and pays for it with newly printed money that people trust more than the dodgy debt. So the panic subsides.

Usually, however, the guy in charge of the central bank, being a mere ruling-class courtier, partially flubs the "lender of last resort" bit. So, in the Great Depression of 1929-33 the Federal Reserve did not bail out the Bank of United States when it failed in 1931, probably because it was a Jewish bank. In the Crash of 2008, Little Ben Bernanke decided in September that he did not have the authority to bail out Lehman Brothers. 

The incompetence of the courtiers means that the credit crisis goes on longer and is deeper than necessary and ordinary people get wiped out.

The question you may ask is whether in the next credit crisis the market will believe that the central bank can in fact act as lender of last resort, or whether the problem is so big that it is beyond the ability of the Fed or the IMF to turn bad debt into good debt.

Here's an interesting factoid. In the 2008 crash the US government had an actual $700 billion TARP bailout program to bail out the banks where is borrowed and spent actual money. But it "guaranteed" about $16 trillion in money market mutual funds.

I wonder if the whole bailout could have been done with a "guarantee." It would have been a whole lot cheaper.

But there is something else to worry about. It is "MMT," or Modern Monetary Theory. It is Keynesianism on steroids and supported by lefties like Bernie Sanders and AOC and says that pedal-to-the-metal with debt and spending is OK for government. At least for now.

The real question is: what do you do when the balloon goes up? Gold? Bitcoin? And whatabout any asset that is held in a financial institution that you access over the Internet? How hard would it be in a great crisis for the government to seize 23.2 percent of all assets at Fidelity and Vanguard? When everything is just a record in a database.

The Future of Government: New and Exciting Enemies!

I've been cudgeling my brain over the past few weeks about the Biden administration's two big agenda items: Climate Change and Systemic Racism. What is really going on here?

And I now realize that it is quite simple.

Government has only two jobs: to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. But today there really are no foreign enemies. And, really, there are no internal enemies. Not like in the old days of bandits and robbers.

So what is government to do? It doesn't have anything to do any more. It should go out of business.

But that would never do, so it has to make it up. It has to make up external enemies and internal enemies, and wind us up into a frenzy of fear and loathing.

That is what climate change is all about: a monstrous external threat. OMG! Not even a foreign enemy: a global enemy. And not even a human enemy but the very planetary climate itself: Gaia, if you like. Really, it is genius. Why, our ruling class does not even have to march into harm's way. It merely has to hand out highly paid jobs to its educated gentry supporters all across the land, and hand out subsidies to its gentry voters for electric cars and solar panels on the roof. And of course all the gentry supporters are down with that. They believe! Oh Gaia, do they believe!

That is what systemic racism is all about: a monstrous internal threat. Imagine: right here in River City there are dark hordes of white supremacists and white oppressors, just waiting for the chance to descend upon traditionally marginalized peoples with their assault rifles and their patriarchy. But government is up to the challenge! It will conduct critical race theory training sessions throughout the land! It will teach the systemic racists a lesson they will never forget. Gentry supporters will have jobs, maybe millions of jobs to be teaching the deplorables and the white supremacists and the systemic racists a lesson. And, when they feel like a rest, they can erect another Black Lives Matter sign in the front yard.

When you think about it, you have to admit: it's brilliant. Strictly speaking we don't really need much government, because in the modern era things are so safe that we don't need no stinkin' government plodding around saving us from enemies foreign and domestic.

But now we have enemies that make the old enemies of the world look like pikers. The global threat of climate change makes all the old enemies, the Nazis, the Commies, the Islamic terrorists, look like nothing. It's not just those human enemies but something far bigger, far more threatening: the end of life on this Earth. Unless we act now.

The threat of systemic racism is just as bad. There is no telling what those shadowy white supremacists and conspiracy theorists might get up to next week. So we must declare war on them, re-educate them, purge them from the public square.

But what do we do about it? Honestly, I don't know. The whole setup is so brilliant, and so tempting for our educated ruling class that I don't think they will give up on it short of utter political annihilation.

In other words, we Commoners have to teach our educated betters that, if they don't climb down from their war on climate and their war on bitter clingers, we will strip them of all their powers and credentials and honors and pensions and make them go out and get a job, like the rest of humanity.

And we may -- just for the fun of it, not from malice -- put them on one-day suspensions from Twitter just to remind them that what goes around comes around.

Where is the New Miguel Cervantes When You Need Him

You all know Miguel de Cervantes. He was the cheeky chappie that wrote Don Quixote in 1605, making fun of the whole medieval romance genre.

I agree. That was really meanie-jelly-beanie. You literary snobs are always trying to deep-six the latest genre. I mean, sci-fi, fantasy: who needs it, darling. How about a bit of plotless James Joyce for breakfast?

Anyway, Cervantes was pretty harmless. Despite his fun and games we are still having great fun reading about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Not to mention Frodo and Co. And, apart from Parsifal (as in Sir Percival) Richard Wagner spent his whole career unearthing Nordic and Teutonic myths. Although, according to the late Roger Scruton, Wagner recast the pagan myths in a post-Christian mold designed by German philosopher Feuerbach and then changed his mind and used the mold designed by Schopenhauer. Fun!

But, dear God. We need our modern Cervantes now. To write the uplifting story of Don Qui-wokey, and his heroic battle against the windmills, er, the pipelines, of Keystone XL.

See that's the way I experience the left's Activism Culture. It is like a medieval romance. Back then, the medieval romance enabled dumb scions of the barony to imagine themselves as noble knights saving helpless maidens from dragons and evil castellans, and searching for the Holy Grail. Now we have the mindless romances celebrating the delta-minus rich-kid morons bravely trying to stop capitalism in its tracks with Heroic Acts of Activism against the Polluters! Peaceful Protests against the Fossil Fuel Companies! Marches Against White Supremacy! And OMG, fracking is polluting the water supply! Not.

I fear, alas, that we are some years, maybe decades, before the American people will help us racist-sexist-homophobes send the systemic racist climate Don Qui-wokeys to where the sun don't shine. Because apart from us bitter-clinger deplorables, the rest of America is either embarrassed by populist nationalism, or enjoying their bennies as Little Darlings of the ruling class. Oh, and don't forget the Wokey Allies.

Only thing is that if I were to tell the story I would forget Soy Qui-wokey and make the story into a remake of the Parsifal legend, with Soy Parsifal -- the pure fool -- starting out as the child of an activist lesbian couple. The young lad naturally yearns, as xe plays mostly-peaceful-protest games with xis non-gendered pals, to get to activism school and take xis place in the glorious community of social justice activists bending the arc of history towards justice. Oh the glorious day when xe begins his first internship at the Climate Justice Matters NGO funded by tech billionaire George Porous! Oh, the joy of the day when xe has finishing xis "trained Marxist" training, and knelt before xer Marxist trainer and got xis Soyship in the Global Active-hood of Pajama-Persons and can lead xer first real Mostly Peaceful Protest.

One day, years later, he is driving his electric car in the forest on the way to a protest against an oil pipeline, reciting the chants he will lead, when he accidentally runs over a swan crossing the road. The local yokel Gurnie O'Mans curses him out for a fool. Having stopped his electric car -- whose battery is getting dangerously low -- he observes a number of bedraggled men by the side of the road. Who are these bums, he asks Gurnie? These men, Soy Parsifal, were once frackers, but they lost their jobs ten years ago in the first days of the Biden administration, and because of the shame of being fossil fuel workers, have been canceled and cannot get jobs in the soy economy.

Well, that's a start. We'd have to have a Kundry, Soy Parsifal's liberal activist mother who is now a sour and angry cat lady. Whatabout the Fisher King, Am-trump-as, wounded by the impeachment spear flung by the wicked witch Soya Nancy? A chorus of feminist flower maidens? And whatabout the evil magician Klingsor? What is he up to?

Of course, before the activist Soy Parsifal can heal the wounded Am-trump-as he must learn the error of his ways, and discover how activism is a path of cruelty, a Trail of Bloody Tears, that has killed more people in history than all the Genghis Khans and Hitlers -- put together. He must renounce activism forever, and bring his angry cat lady mom Kundry back into the light. That would be a story!

Then, and then only can Soy Parsifal eat his first meal of meat, and renounce his Soyish ways, and come to the castle of King Am-trump-as, and heal the king's wound, and light the light in the eyes of the MAGA faithful once more, and Make America Great Again. Once more.

"Ain't I a stinker!" ©1950 Bugs Bunny.

The Decline and Fall of the Progressive Empire

Today I am starting a new topic, the decline and fall of the present ruling class. But let's steal the words of Edward Gibbon, he of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Why did the Roman Empire decline and fall? According to academic Michael Mann in The Sources of Social Power, it began to decline when its modus operandi no longer worked. Up until the second century AD the Roman Empire fed on conquest and slavery. Its army would conquer a new province and the empire would feast on the plunder and the slaves. But then the Empire got too big, and the frontiers too far away from the center. And so the potential for conquest and plunder started to dry up.

But whatabout the empire in which we live? And what do we call it, anyway? Liberal Empire? Lefty Empire? White Supremacist Empire? Capitalist Empire? Empire of the Educated?  I think I will stick with Progressive Empire for the time being.

The reason I prophesy the decline and fall of the present regime is that its anthems, its agendas, are getting rather threadbare.

There seem to be two justifications for political power. The first is the promise of physical protection. This obviously goes back to the apes, that the males protect the band and its food-growing territory from invaders. I consider this a male thing. The second is the promise of protection from evildoers within society, the backstabbers and gossipers that are the bane of every woman's life. I consider this a female thing.

In the last century, the century of the educated ruling class, our rulers have heroically defended us -- or rather we have defended our rulers -- from the menace of Kaisers, of Hitlers, or Commies, of oil sheiks. Golly, where would we have been without them! But now our leaders are promising, at enormous expense, to protect us from climate change.

You know what I think? I think our rulers are running out of reasons to protect us. This climate change thingy depends on the predictive computer models of gubmint scientists -- which are completely different from the divinations of the temple priests and soothsayers of old, completely different. In other words, climate change looks and feels like a scam.

In the last century, the century of the educated ruling class, our rulers have heroically defended us -- or rather we have defended our rulers -- from the internal menace of monopolists, exploiters of labor, Southern racists, and now patriarchs, white supremacists and the menace of systemic racism.

You know what I think? I think our rulers are running out of moral menaces with which to terrify us. The proof is in the moral narrative of "allyism," that America is composed of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." What "white oppressors?" Educated white liberals in the schools, universities, and journalism? Heavens no, those are all allies. Evil corporate moguls? Heavens no, those all pay their indulgences to Black Lives Matter. Would they be Trump Car Paraders and crazed Qanon cultists wearing viking costumes in the US Capitol? Yep, that must be it.

But why? Why is our ruling class singing such ridiculous anthems to their rule? What is really going on? Is it a conspiracy?

I think it is because the basis of human social cooperation has been transformed.

I think the old system, of male defense of the border, and female defense of the hearth, made complete sense back in the days of the chimps: that's what Nicholas Wade says in Before the Dawn. And more or less sense in the days of the hunter-gatherers, and even down through the agricultural age. You needed brave warriors to defend the food-growing land, and you needed moral arbiters to sort out troublesome youths and quarreling women.

But not any more.

Loot and plunder of the neighbor's lands? But wealth today is in intangible capital, ideas and techniques.  Loot and plunder does not pay, except in the internal taxation and regulation systems by which today's rulers fleece their own sheep, not the neighbor's sheep.

Calling sinners to repentance? But today's market economy rewards trust and names and shames cheaters and defaulters in a hundred different ways. Oh yeah, we need a few cops to crack heads here and there; but the vast majority of people go with the program, because there is a huge benefit in doing so, and a huge penalty for being identified as untrustworthy.

Obviously this new situation is so brand new as to be breathtaking. It has really taken hold only in the last 200-300 years, whereas the agricultural age extended for, say, max, 50,000 years, and the hunter-gatherer age a million or so, and the chimps for tens of millions of years.

We cannot expect our rulers, our neighbors, and ourselves to have suddenly adapted to the new setup. We are programmed for another age.

Instead, we should expect everyone -- from noble lords to cathedral priests to young punks to the nice ladies next door -- to keep punching the old buttons, and being completely flummoxed when the old actions don't have the desired effect.

But, "scientists say," the future belongs to those that adapt. And the number of people adapting, "experts agree," will be a minority. This will mean, "ethicists believe," a profound change in human society.

Because, as I say, every story is a survivor story.

Good Luck, Joe. You'll Need It

So you, Mr President and your Democratic friends have got rid of the awful Trump. So what comes next?

I'd say that the most important thing for your administration to do is to avoid the mistakes of the early Obama administration. There were two big ones.

First, there was the decision to make the "stimulus" all about loot and plunder for Democratic Party constituencies like public-school teachers instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Second, there was the push for Obamacare, all about making health care a totally centralized administrative system, instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Incidentally the financial crisis was caused by the bursting of a housing bubble caused by gubmint subsidy of home mortgages that encouraged Americans to buy houses on low down payments and 30-year fixed mortgages. This housing subsidy is the big reason why housing prices, to this day, are sky-high and very difficult for ordinary young middle-class Americans trying to buy a house for the first time.

I noticed that President Trump, in his farewell address, catalogued all the wonderful things he had done for ordinary Americans. But you, President Biden, have emphasized, after restarting the economy, climate change and systemic racism. And the stimulus bill you have proposed so far sounds just like another loot and plunder operation for the Democratic Party supporters.

Frankly, I believe that climate change and systemic racism are both catnip for the educated Gentry, and provide nothing for the vast majority of Americans.

I don't have much to say about climate change, although I think it is an instance of the Left's Conceit that it knows what is good for the rest of us. 

The decarbonizing plan is an utter folly that will visit enormous hardship on ordinary Americans. Cheap energy is, and will continue to be, the basis of a healthy economy that extends prosperity to all walks of life. I maintain, according to the notion of Daniel Botkin in Discordant Harmonies, that there is only a climate problem if the climate changes too fast for plant and animal species to migrate with the climate. An example of dangerous climate change is cold weather on the farms of folks in the far North and the harvest fails and they all die -- as in Scotland in the 1690s at the depths of the Little Ice Age.

It's telling that the Scottish famine in 1690 was a tragedy while the Irish potato famine 150 years later was a scandal. The difference is that by 1840 we Westerners had the means to get food to a famine area. Today we have probably an order of magnitude more "means" to adapt to climate change.

Then there is systemic racism. One fine day, a brave politician is going to call an end to what I call the School of Hate. But I doubt if it will be you, Mr. President.

I get the liberal obsession with race. The civil rights movement was, for liberals, an ecstatic moment, a supernova of surpassing brightness that lighted up the moral universe. But once you have made discrimination by race illegal then, as my grandfather would have said, it's all over bar shouting. By placing the chains of race guilt upon ordinary white Americans for the last half century you have committed a moral crime that, to me, is morally equivalent to the Jim Crow laws that you fought to eliminate. But this moral crime is, to me, just one of the Left's Crimes.

It seems that our problems are insoluble. But, as Ike said, if you have a problem you can't solve, make it bigger.

I think that our Big Problem is that our educated ruling class operates according to a political formula that violates what I call the Four Laws of modern governance. I wonder if you have heard about them, Mr. President. I would recommend putting them on your desk, as President Truman had "The Buck Stops Here" on his desk. Here they are:

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). 

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). 

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

Really, everything that our educated ruling class has attempted since the turn of the 20th century attempts to violate these laws. But breaking these laws is catnip for the ruling clique and the larger ruling class, because they all provide for the satisfactions of ruling class members: ambition, honor, and vanity. 

Now I think that the present violations of the Four Laws have gone "about as furr as it can go." Any more ordure piled on top of the mountain of legislation and regulation of the past century is going to seriously break the United States. But your party, Mr. President, wants to double down with Medicare for All, which violates all four laws, and your Green New Deal which will probably be mostly a regulatory scam and only violate the last three laws.

But that is just nuts and bolts.

To make the problem even bigger, I think it stems from the insularity of our ruling elite, that cannot imagine the notion of people not like the educated elite, and that these other people would choose to live a different life than the educated, and worship different gods. If you read about my Three Peoples notion, Mr. President, you will see how understanding the people of today as belonging to different worlds -- the world of the Creative, the Responsible, and the Subordinate -- immediately raises the question of how to make it possible for these very different kinds of people to live in the same society. Notably, the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" doctrine of Allyism lacks such a world view. It only sees the world in the black and white of allies fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Now I think that Allyism basically reduces to this: that the woke elite gets to buy the votes of the oppressed peoples with loot and plunder seized from the white oppressors. In other words it is a Viking world view masquerading as noble benevolence. It is the Big Problem with the left's Activism Culture. That is perhaps why my basic critique of your side, Mr. President, is called the Great Reaction, a lurch to the primitive:

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; totalitarianism is a return to the scapegoat; social justice is good old loot and plunder.

My prediction, Mr. President, is that by the third year of your presidency we will be seeing serious economic problems, and that your supporters will be looking around desperately for a reason, some fault of the big corporations or the lack of a proper minimum wage or the rampaging evil of systemic racism. And you will find yourself called upon to take drastic economic and political action that will only make things worse. For that is the way of the world, that the rulers and their supporters are the last to know there is a problem.

My diagnosis of our national problem is that it issues from a wrong turn by our educated elite. You and your supporters, Mr. President, interpret your culture of creativity in terms of creating a new society. Run by people like you.

But I say that the correct agenda of a culture of creativity is creating a new Me, and leaving society alone. You create a new Me in the Hero's journey into the unconscious, and if you survive the journey, you will come back much sadder and wiser. Only then will you be qualified to help other people. And you will probably die on the border between Order and Chaos as a Sacrificial Hero. I have written about this, Mr. President, in my writing on "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left."

The presidency of Donald Trump was a wake-up call to our present ruling class, that they are "not fit for purpose" as the Brits say. Unfortunately, it is clear that our ruling class has not gotten the message. Indeed, the only message it has had in the last four years was to deep six President Trump.

You will notice, Mr. President, that in the urge of your supporters to deep-six Donald Trump there is nothing that exhibits any concern for the American people, apart from the educated gentry of the ruling class and its clients the "oppressed peoples." This means that the American people are condemned to suffer in the next few years from the blindness and the myopia of your supporters.

It will not be a happy time.

Trump's Biggest Failure: The Race Issue

There are all kinds of articles around today mourning President Trump's out-of-control insults. There's Bush appointee J.T. Young warning us not to throw out the baby -- the populism that Trump fed and watered -- with the bath water -- Trump and his insults.

The Left’s legitimate fear is that conservative populism could be an even more potentially potent political force than the potent one Trump wielded. Instead of Trump suppressing its growth in suburbs and among women, another candidate — such as a woman like former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley — could draw in millions more.

Well, OK. So the suburbs and the women don't feel threatened by the left yet. They still think themselves above the bitter clingers and the deplorables of the white working class, darling. So Ben Franklin's adage still applies, that experience keeps a dear school but they will learn in no other.

Or Breitbart's Joe Pollak on Trump's "will to win:"

His boldness made him an extraordinarily successful president — until his disastrous January 6 challenge, which has left the Republican Party divided and dispirited.

Well yeah. Because the Washington DC GOP has lived for decades in fear of being named and shamed and shunned. And January 6 proved that they still live in fear.

Look, I've been reading a bit about male insults and vaunting in Bernard Cornwell's novels on England's Alfred the Great. His hero, Uhtred, is half way between the nice literate Christian peacemaking of Alfred and the pagan insult and revenge culture of the Danes. But when it is time for battle, then the nicey-nicey goes out the window. It is all insults and vaunting and fighting. And the best man wins.

If you are going to have a guy fighting for you, then he is going to be showing that he is unafraid of the enemy. His insulting, his vaunting, are the way he tells his supporters that he has got their backs, and they can follow him, because he has the victory glint in his eyes.

But one thing Trump never did. He never took on the Race Issue, the number one rule in America today that you are a white racist if "we" say you are. And there is no defense, no recourse.

And in the years that Trump did nothing about the Race Issue, the left came up with a new race canard, the doctrine of "systemic racism" which means that whites are guilty forever.

The next leader of the conservative populist movement has to take the Race Issue, head on, and say to any race accusation: It Takes One to Know One.

Then he should have a stable of follow-on comments, such as: "the American people that fought a war to free the slaves? Those are your racists?" Or, "the American people that elected a Congress that passed the civil rights acts? Those are your racists?" And so on.

This is not that hard. So long as our liberal friends have the cowskin Race Whip in the back pocket we conservative populists are going to be slaves on the liberal estate, touching our forelocks to the liberal overseer and begging Massa not to bring out the whip for a flogging.

Obviously, that man is not Nikki Haley. It will be the politician that first rises out of the current funk and has the courage to tell his populist supporters that the January 6 Capitol riot and its aftermath of fences and riot troops shows that the ruling class is afraid of them, that it fears their strength, and rightly so. And so, On to Richmond!

And yes. No harm in a little Whataboutism. Whatabout BLM/AntiFa? When is our government going to protect us from them with fences and National Guardsmen? Like they jumped to protect themselves in Washington in a New York minute.

This is not that hard. Our liberal overseers will continue to insult us and abuse us and belittle us, and play their race cards and gender cards and now transgender cards. They will continue this until their abuse starts to cost them. And then it will be too late.

"Secret Garden" and Multiculti

For some reason yesterday I needed to re-read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. But I couldn't find a copy in the house. So I looked online for the movies. There are many, including the 1993 version with Maggie Smith as the housekeeper Mrs. Medlock. There is a 2020 version with the Yorkshire lad Dickon played by a POC. And there is a "steampunk" 2017 version that turns the whole thing into a post environmental apocalypse.

But the original novel was about the tricky issue of the children of Brits in India. The girl heroine, Mary Lennox, is the child of Brits that died of cholera. Mary knew nothing of her parents, being raised by "native" servants. Mary ends up at her hunchback uncle's place, Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors.

Misselthwaite is a morgue, because the uncle, Mr. Craven (!), is still in a depression over the death of his wife, and ignores his bedridden son. Because. 

The story is about Mary's personal transformation from a spoiled, angry brat into a savior that saves not only herself, but her uncle and his bedridden son, with the help of the servant Martha and her younger brother Dickon, who is a dab hand at pet animals and anything to do with plants. It is, you may say, completely over the top.

In the 2017 steampunk version I watched, -- not mentioned on La Wik until I fix it -- the uncle owns a big factory that has completely run down after an environmental collapse and the death of the scientist mother, and the bedridden son turns out to be AI, invented by the dead scientist mom. It is a hot mess, but a rather charming hot mess.

The 2020 version features a young man of color as the Yorkshire lad, Dickon. And that got me to thinking.

The whole point of The Secret Garden, in my mind, is the cruel treatment of children by the upper class, whether it is powerful folks in the Empire dumping the kids on the servants, while they pursue their lives of power or self-pity.

Then there is the case of Rudyard Kipling, born in India, who was dropped off at a boarding house in Southsea, Sussex, with his sister Trix just before the parents returned India. Rudyard was five, and Trix was three. Kipling called this the "House of Desolation" writes Jad Adams in Kipling:

The children speculated miserably on why they had been abandoned, unable to understand what had led their parents to leave them to such horrors.

I wonder what Kipling meant in The Jungle Book about an abandoned child brought up by wolves.

So, you can see that children's books -- modern fairy tales, I suppose -- are often about the horrible neglect and cruelty often meted out to children, especially the children of the ruling class.

In The Secret Garden the secret ingredient to redeem Mary's humanity is Dickon, the child of nature. In The Jungle Book the redeemers are wolves!

Hey, isn't raciss to cast Dickon, the child of nature, as a child of color in the 2020 movie? Shouldn't the POC have been Mr. Craven the uncle? Oh no, because the POC can't be the villain.

But, to make the problem bigger, how do we, of western culture, invite the outsiders, which really means Africans, into our culture, without being insulting or patronizing?

For instance, was it insulting to have the black slave Mammy in Gone with the Wind? If the movie were reshot, should Mammy be played by a white bitter-clinger?

Was it patronizing to have the physicist astronomer in Interstellar played by a black? Or is it insulting to American-born blacks that the actor was born Ghanaian?

The point is that literature and the arts -- and especially children's stories -- are about stereotypes, recognizable stereotypes that leap out of ordinary life into the story. It must be so. And for the Jungians among us, we translate "stereotypes" into "archetypes."

If you muddy up the archetypes with ruling-class dictates and quotas and such I do not think you will achieve what you think.

And above all, no group will find its place in modern society as the Little Darlings in the petting zoo of the ruling class. Everyone of us, and every group, has to find their own way and their own niche that plays to their particular cultural heritage and acquired skills.

And here's the danger for America's blacks. The recent importation of millions of East and South Asians means that the old moral narrative of evil whites vs. innocent blacks is going to be replaced by a new narrative, probably along the lines of cultured Asians vs. jumped-up Europeans and primitive Africans.

Or it might be a fight between South Asian Brahmins vs. East Asian Mandarins, with blacks the clients of the Brahmins and whites the clients of the Mandarins.

Either way, our literature and our movies need to be peopled by real archetypes, not blurred and fake ones imposed by an unjust ruling class.

Women in the Public Square: Pelosi and AOC

One of my ideas is that women do not understand and do not want to live in the public square. It comes from years of pondering Georg Simmel's dictum about the emergence of women into the public square.

Simmel understood that in the short term the public sphere for women would be defined by the rules “created by men and for men” but that eventually women would transform the public square to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”

But how do you square this with micro-aggressions and "safety culture?" You can't, unless you make the shameful jump to the notion that women do not get the public square that men have created, and do not like life in the public square.

The point about the public square is that it is a place where men can fight each other: not with swords but with words. And a beautiful thing it is: to transform the age-old culture of the fight to the verbal fight of the public square.

But women don't do this. When a woman has a beef with another woman she stops talking to her, probably forever. Women can do this because the vast majority of women are the absolute monarchs of their households. Anthony Trollope understands this in John Caldigate where he has all the women in complicated relations of not-talking-to-each-other.

I think this is the way to understand House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her animadversion to Donald Trump. She is just not willing to have any conversation with Donald Trump. Because? Probably because he insulted her a ways back. Insults: that's what men do to each other as they sort out their hierarchy. But women do not. 

So I regard the impeachments of Donald Trump as a kind of high school Mean Girls campaign. Except, of course, that the Mean Girls never think of themselves as mean, but as the most attractive and chaste and pure girls in school.

And AOC is a naive young woman that believes what she has been carefully taught, as I believe, almost all women do.

What neither of these women understand and what few women understand is what every man in the public square understands: It's All Bullshit!

Men can accept this because of a maxim of mine:

Women expect to be protected; men know they are expendable.

But, you see, if women are to expect to be protected they must go with the program, and that starts with believing and enacting society's main narrative.

So I believe that eventually women will depart the public square; they will realize they have much more power by acting from behind the scenes. The Duke of Wellington, you know, was frequently entertained by in the 1820s by Mrs. Arbuthnot.

How will it happen? Probably it will happen as upper-class women come to decide that careers are not what they are cracked up to be. And so it will come to be accepted, and then insisted, that women who really contribute to society do so as mothers to their children and advisors to their husbands. Oh, and they will be opposed to divorce. Did you know that the divorce rate for college-educated women is 25 percent?

And then middle-class women will copy the upper-class women, and the world will change.

German History in Three Chapters

Thanks to Curtis Yarvin I got to watch a US propaganda film from 1945, warning of the danger of US right-wing politics using the Evil Germans as an example. 

There are three chapters of "German History" in the film:

Chapter 1: Führer #1, Blood and Iron (picture of Bismarck)

Chapter 2: Führer #2, Deutschland Über Alles (picture of Wilhelm II)

Chapter 3: Führer #3, Today Germany... Tomorrow the World (picture of Adolf Hitler)

Then, after pictures of mass graves, a swastika getting blown up, and the wreck of Hitler's Alpine retreat, we switch to the US of 1945 and "The ghosts of Berchtesgarten still walk. Right here in America..." and pictures of American politicians and activists that we are supposed to hate. Only I don't know who they are picturing. Presumably one of them is Charles Lindbergh. And another is Huey Long. And presumably Father Coughlin. But I can't be sure.

Bless their hearts.

When you know a bit of history it is interesting to see what the propagandists miss out. For instance, the whole point of Bismark's three wars, on Denmark, Austria, and France, was to force the various German states to unite. Bismark's genius was to understand that the only way to do this was with three nice little wars.

And why bother to unite Germany? Well, perhaps because of what had happened to the German lands before the film's Year Zero of 1870.

We could discuss the occupation of the German lands by France in the Napoleonic Wars. Friedrich Meinecke's book is called "The Age of German Liberation: 1795-1815." A lot of what we call German nationalism was born in that age when the Germans got together to decide how to stop the French from walking all over them every century or so.

Because in 1618-1648 was the Thirty Years War in which Sweden, France, and the Spanish/Austrian Hapsburgs pretty well devastated Germany. Thanks fellahs!

So if I were to write a History of Germany in three chapters, I would say

Chapter 1: Never Again. Leading intellectual lights in German lands during the Napoleonic Wars devise educational reforms to educate Germans to stand up against the French. The University of Berlin is the first research university. It leads eventually to Bismarck, who cunningly unites Germany in three short sharp wars.

Chapter 2: Age of the Idiots. After the fall of Bismarck Germany is ruled by the lightweight Wilhelm II, who makes enemies of France, Britain and Russia, while Germans invent the automobile, make a revolution in physics, and a revolution in ammonia fertilizer with the Haber process. After getting caught in a two-front war Germany -- Idiot! -- was humiliated and dismembered by the Treaty of Versailles, and that made young Adolf Hitler mad. So when the stumbling bumbling US Federal Reserve failed to act as lender of last resort in the 1929 crash Hitler rose to power, and then got Germany into another two-front war. Idiot!

Chapter 3: European Hegemony. Dismembered and humiliated again after World War II, Germany got smart and entered into a partnership with France to dominate Europe with the nominally supra-national European Union. So today Germany dominates Europe but does it through intermediaries. Sorry about the butcher's bill in the Age of the Idiots.

That's the thing about history. The more you know, the more you can stitch together a narrative to do anything you want. You can make the Germans the monsters of all time, or you can make them the helpless victims that finally got their act together. 

Your choice.

AntiFa Doesn't Want Powell's to Sell Anti-AntiFa Book

 I like to say that our liberal friends have No Idea. They've been patting themselves on the back for generations about their commitment to free speech, and all the liberal ladies at the public library do their Banned Books thingy every year and think they are incredibly brave.

But now Powell's Books, the independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, is under fire from AntiFa for daring to sell Andy Ngo's book on AntiFa: Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.

Of course, Powells isn't actually going to sell Unmasked in its store. Heavens No! Darling!

At Powell’s, a lot of our inventory is hand-selected, and hand-promoted. And a lot of our inventory is not. With several million titles available online at any given moment, complete hand-curation is not possible. Unmasked by Andy Ngo came to us through an automatic data feed via one of our long-term and respected publishers, Hachette Book Group. We list the majority of their catalogue automatically, as do many other independent and larger retailers. We have a similar arrangement with other publishers.

This book will not be on our store shelves, and we will not promote it. That said, it will remain in our online catalogue. We carry books that we find anywhere from simply distasteful or badly written, to execrable, as well as those that we treasure. We believe it is the work of bookselling to do so.

Decades ago we received credible bomb threats for selling the work of Salman Rushdie, and yet we carried on. We cannot behave any differently today when we feel differently about the book or writer in question.

As reported by Oregon Live: "Powell’s responds to protests over right-wing agitator Andy Ngo’s book: ‘We carry a lot of books we find abhorrent’" See, AntiFa has been doing mostly peaceful protests inside Powell's Books lately and Powell's has been closing early.

Actually, I feel for Powell's. There they are, just north of downtown Portland in the Rose District in a store that occupies a whole block. Whaddya going to do when AntiFa calls and the Portland City Council is busy defunding the police and the mayor is Ted Wheeler? Send for the Proud Boys? 

This could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Because I doubt that a bookstore can afford to occupy a whole block in Portland's Rose District. Not any more.

And you think that all those hipster lefties in Portland are going to continue buying at a store that sells -- online! -- a vile right-wing agitator's screed about the mostly peaceful protesters of BLM and AntiFa?

It's all very sad. I've loved to visit Powell's for over 40 years, since I started driving down to Ashland's Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1978. We met my parents in Ashland for a week and went to three plays. So that when my daughters grew up the elder one started taking her kids to Ashland every year. On the way down, and on the way back: the guilty pleasure of a visit to Powell's.

I'm afraid to tell you that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is not what it was. It was created by a high-school teacher in the 1930s, but now it is overrun with Wokeyness. There have to be opposite gender characters in pretty well every performance, and sometimes even in the main characters. For instance, we were to a Henry IV Part One with the Harry Percy played by a woman in tight camo with a big butt. Then there was the Julius Caesar with Caesar as a woman CEO.

When you do stuff like that you are advertising to the world that you have Literally No Clue.

But back to Powell's. The point about Powell's is that, when you check out a particular section, you find books you didn't know existed. That is perfectly wonderful. And in its psychology section there is a whole display bookcase exclusively devoted to Freud and Jung -- with Jung taking up 2/3 of the shelf space.

Only question is: how much longer?

I'd rather not think about that.

Zuck and @jack Have No Power, Because...

So now Curtis Yarvin has exploded another test nuclear device. "Big tech has no power at all," says he.

What does he mean? He means that, for Zuckerberg and the rest of the tech lords, the easy way out is to defer to the "press" and cancel anyone the press wants canceled. 

Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh.

Perfectly true. Only, I would add, the Breitbart Downstream Principle applies:

The press is downstream from activism is downstream from the Cathedral is downstream from the political formula.

For "activism" you can substitute "wokies" if you prefer.

The maxim above is merely a restatement of the Breibart Extended Downstream Principle I have inscribed among my Maxims:

Politics is downstream from culture (Breitbart) is downstream from religion (Wright) is downstream from “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” (Chantrill). 

For those of you that aren't yet in the know, the Cathedral is the combination of all the people who are good and right and that have the right values.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

To clarify things further, Yarvin argues that: 

There are three forms of regime: monarchy (rule of one), oligarchy (rule of a minority), and democracy (rule of a majority). The System is an oligarchy.

There are four forms of oligarchy: hereditary oligarchy (rule of nobles), military oligarchy (rule of soldiers), commercial oligarchy (rule of the wealthy), and clerical oligarchy (rule of thinkers). The System is a clerical oligarchy.

The Political Formula is the ruling class's moral and legal basis for its power. I described the political formula of our ruling class today at American Thinker.

The U.S. formula used to be that government existed to protect “the little guy.” The formula was celebrated in anthems like It’s a Wonderful Life, with the little guy homeowners of Bailey Park protected by St. George Bailey from the rapacious dragon Mr. Potter.

In our day government exists to fight systemic racism, and it is celebrated in anthems like the woke “oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors” narrative. If it weren’t for the “allies,” little kiddies are carefully taught from K thru Activism School, the world would collapse into a “literally Hitler” oppression of the oppressed peoples by the white oppressors. Sign here to become an “ally.”

Am I right, or am I right?

And what is poor old Zuck going to do standing up against the priests of the Cathedral and against the sacred principles decreed in the regime's political formula? He's gonna stand up against all that is good and true and anti-racist? He ain't, and neither is @jack at Twitter. 

So what do we do about it? Well, the answer is right there in my Downstream maxim. We gotta come up with a new "meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Which, of course, I have done in my "Vision of the Good Life."

So, what are we waiting for?

Direct Censorship, Reign of Terror

So, we've officially entered the Woke Reign of Terror, where you are not allowed to disagree with the regime. Curtis Yarvin:

As a student of history, I know what burden the System has taken on by this step. Such an escalation is a ratchet. Once you enter the mindset of the Eastern bloc and declare the revolution as a permanent axiom, which makes anyone who opposes or even doubts the revolution into a potentially violent criminal, there is no way back.

This "mode of direct censorship... works." But there is a problem. It takes a lot of energy. You gotta have your two minutes hate every day. Of course, you have to amp it up, as the French did, and the Bolsheviks did. The Jacobins guillotined their tens of thousands, the Bolsheviks executed and starved their tens of millions. And then the whole thing dies of exhaustion. I suppose that our Wok-eviks will just deplatform the top conservatives and Qanon guys and get thousands named and shamed and fired. And then one day it will die. Because, as Crane Brinton says in Anatomy of Revolution, people cannot live forever in the fever of revolution. And then comes the Thermidorean Reaction.

Because, you see, any regime that has to break the glass and go for direct censorship has admitted that their revolution has already failed. If things were really copacetic, and heaven on Earth were just around the corner, the regime wouldn't need censorship. The facts would speak for themselves with just a little nudge from regime supporters.

The whole thing also reminds us -- as if we need telling -- that the regime is actually scared of the Trump voters and the Commoners in general. Which means that, deep down, they know instinctively that they have visited monstrous injustice on the ordinary Commoners of America.

For the truth is that the Commoners, like the bourgeoisie, are not that interested in power. They just want to get on with their lives. Only, as Trotsky said, "you may not be interested in power, but power is interested in you." 

Now I would say that this is new. Back in the agricultural age there were more like just two classes: the landlords and the peasants; landlords had the power and peasants sucked up to power. The idea of people just going about their business, trusting trustworthy people, is new and revolutionary and utterly confusing to the people interested in power.

The question for our time is whether the Commoners that are not that interested in power can ever get a ruling class that respects them and lets them get on with their lives.

We know at least that the current ruling class down not respect us, and is damned if it will let us just live our lives in peace.

Democrats Shocked: Blair Kid to Intern with GOP

When Tony Blair’s kid Euan decided to try for an internship with Congress, where do you think he applied?
Like any ambitious kid, he applied to the “powerful” House Rules Committee. But why oh why
did the chip off the old New Labour block sign up with the eevil Republican majority committee staff?
Apparently the news has “stunned Democrats in Washington.”

But don’’t worry Dems.
Young Euan
is planning a stint on your side of the aisle in due course, before
he goes on to get an MBA at Harvard. Pop quiz. Who was the first US president to get an MBA from Harvard?

Why are Liberal Journalists like Muslims?

You’d expect that political philosopher
Mark Steyn
would have the answer and you would be right.

[Both] the U.S. media and
those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar,
two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of
the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs.

He is talking about the Koran flushing incident, of course. Did you know that it was a Pakistani
cricketer, the best bowler in the world, that started the flushing frenzy in Pakistan? Mark has more, much more.

The Democrats' Daunting Task

It's been great fun for the Democrats to spend the last four years damning President Trump and everything he stands for, but now they've caught the car they were chasing. And here's the problem. Well, here are a bunch of problems.

We need to boost the economy from the COVID depression. But we already spent all the money. Tax increases? Hmm. Back in 2009, after the Great Recession, President Obama passed a "stimulus" that mainly handed loot to Democratic constituencies. So I expect very slow growth for the next few years. Voters won't like that.

We need to reform the welfare state -- 30 years ago! I mean pensions, health care. Oh and welfare. I suspect Democrats have No Idea of the social cost of the administrative welfare state; all the conservative critiques have been brushed aside.

We need to put climate change on hold. Leave aside whether climate change really is a problem: all the plans to phase out fossil fuels will cause untold damage to the economy. Think Five Year Plan.

We need to stop the "systemic racism" canard. I get it: Democrats need to rile up their minority supporters to get them to the polls. And I get that politics is division. But in the end division ends in civil war.

We need to make the economy and the culture more "commoner friendly." That means making it easy for people to start businesses, with less regulations, and to revalue the commoner life of wiving, thriving, and childing over elite feminism and LGBT.

 Then there's education. The COVID time has taught us the eternal lesson of government bureaucracy: in the end the bureaucrats do nothing except pick up their pay and pensions. I say that politics must not define how people educate their children. We need a lot more informal education, from home schools to apprenticeships and internships, and a lot less supercalifragilistic-tenured-for-life-ism. What should education do? I don't know; I just think that most education reformers, from Horace Mann on down to James Conant, are fools and knaves.

Democrats think it is first-and-ten, with the opposing team ordered off the field for penalties. As John Hinderaker notes, Democrats think that both Trump and his policies are discredited:

Tax cuts? Discredited! An America-First foreign policy? Discredited! Enforcing the immigration laws, which is the president’s constitutional duty? Discredited! Stopping the China sellout? Discredited! Standing up to Russia? Discredited! Supporting the Israelis? Discredited! Cutting back on unproductive federal regulations? Discredited! Encouraging U.S. energy production and independence? Discredited! Objecting to political correctness and cancel culture? Discredited! Standing up for America as a positive force in world history? Discredited!

All the "discredited" policies are meat-and-drink to the globalist educated gentry: it's in the air they breathe. My judgement is that all those policies lead to trouble, and if the Democrats return to them they will create misery and mayhem -- for the American people and for themselves at the ballot box. 

Problem is that the elite, the educated gentry, don't pay for their mistakes: their errors, their crimes, their conceits. It's the ordinary schmuck that pays. That will never change, but it sure would be nice if ruling classes thought a bit about who-whom -- and not the way Lenin thought about it.

But why should I care? Even though I identify as a Commoner, I am really educated Gentry. And I'm sure the Democrats will take care of people like me.

Great Rebellion: It's All Wind... Or Is It?

Normally, when the peasants storm the palace, or the MAGAs storm the Capitol, the ruling class responds with repression, and I expect that our ruling class will do the same. Because the first rule of power is to use it.

Don't the peasants know that their only role in Capitol politics is to perform for The Hunger Games?

Curtis Yarvin is up before dawn to call the whole thing "pure wind," as in George Orwell:

Political language—and with variations, this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Of course, I utterly deplore violence, including "mostly peaceful protests," but I have to say I enjoy the photo of the guy in Nancy Pelosi's office. It's telling, isn't it, that the two pieces that Google sent to my smartphone were the photo guy and a Slate piece saying that "Ted Cruz and his Pals" are to blame.

I must say that I appreciate the "tells." 

• That pretty well all the Republicans in Congress said, OK, that's it: we are done with Trump. 
• That Facebook has banned Trump until the end of his term. 
• That the MSM was outraged by the desecration of the nation's monument. Er, did you know that the Capitol was built, in part, with slave labor? (And did you know that the website of the Architect of the Capitol is "aoc.gov?" I kid you not.) 
• That everyone in the White House is resigning after the "attempted coup."

Reading between the lines it seems perfectly obvious to me that Trump is done. The ruling class is expelling the foreign object, and by January 20, it will all be over.

Except, I believe, the Great Rebellion is just getting started. It's odd, isn't it, that I should have wanted to start a new meme just two days ago, and that I would have decided on "Great Rebellion." And that the first thing I found was that Joel Kotkin had coined the meme four years ago. Yes, and the five "causes" of the Great Rebellion were "class conflict", "race and ethnicity", "geographic disparities", "nationalism and cultural identity", and "governance and localism."

And why? Because our ruling class has built its moral justification on the notion that it protects the lower classes against the "white oppressors," that it is the noble defender of the "traditionally marginalized" races and ethnicities, that its urbanist enclaves are the "Capitol" and the suburbs are the "Districts," that nationalism is bad but globalism and identity politics are good, that credentialed administrative governance is good but local yokels are bigoted hayseeds. 

And it's all "wind."

Because it is a lie is that the ordinary commoner middle class is a cabal of "white oppressors," that the ruling class has helped the traditionally marginalized rather than deracinate them into "human rubble," that urbanist enclaves work for anyone but the rich and the connected, that nationalism is evil, rather than the best "fake tribalism" going, and that centralized administrative government cannot work because experts.

I agree with Yarvin that storming the Capitol is an empty gesture, because of course the Capitol is not the real fortress of the ruling class. And I do not believe that a violent revolution is likely or that it would work. I say that the Age of Revolution is over, meaning that changing one ruling class for another solves nothing. And I also believe that the Age of Politics is over, meaning that we are not going to make things better with plundering the economy and divvying up the loot.

The Biden agenda is a "tell" on this. Climate Change and "systemic racism" are both ruling-class grifts, that give power and authority and perks to the ruling clique and the larger educated gentry. But what's in it for the ordinary American? Nothing. Indeed, less than nothing.

Honestly, I don't know where this is going, and what will come together after the whole thing is over and there is nothing left to do but compute the butcher's bill.

I just think there is an instinctive and unconscious Great Rebellion brewing. And our ruling class has literally No Idea what is coming next. Nor do you; nor do I.

Great Rebellion: Dems Have Actually Reversed Conservative Reforms

I was moving my old blog posts from 2005 - 2008 onto Google over the last few days, and one thing I noticed: since whenever, we conservatives had all kinds of good ideas for reforming the welfare state, from welfare to choice in education to making Social Security into a real savings program. 

Yeah. Good luck with all that. I saw an earnest piece by a young fellow from the Reason Foundation, Satya Marar, advocating for school choice. Yeah. Where has that gone in the last 15 years? Hey, today, union teachers don't think they have to teach -- while partying in the Caribbean -- because COVID.

Which is the point of all government bureaucracies, reducing the workload until all the bureaucrats are doing is having meetings to decide when the next meeting will be.

You would think that black voters in the non-functional inner-cities would be fit to be tied about the lousy schools. You would think. But actually, black voters look at the schools as a jobs program.

Remember how Obama reversed the conservative welfare reform of the Nineties? Thanks, Barack.

You would think that black voters would be fit to be tied about how welfare has devastated their communities over the last 50 years. You would think. But with the end of marriage, what's a single mom gonna do?

And now the Soros prosecutors and Defund the Police movements are reversing the "broken windows" policing that pulled New York City murders down from about 2,000 a year to 600 a year.

You would think that black voters in the inner cities would be fit to be tied about lawlessness and murders, since they are predominantly black-on-black. You would think. But they don't dare, because "snitches get stitches."

Actually, I classify liberal programs into three categories:

Left's Crimes. I'd say race politics is the top of the list. Defund the Police.

Left's Errors. I'd say Social Security. Imagine if ordinary Americans saved their own money for retirement.

Left's Conceits. That's recycling, electric cars, bike paths, organic food. 

So here's the Biden plan. We are going to keep all the entitlement programs, which can't be afforded. And then we are going to pile extra spending on climate change, including no doubt mandatory electric cars and sky-high fuel prices.

Oh, and after 50 years of quotas, Affirmative Action, and "diversity" now we are going to indict the entire white working class as "white oppressors" and go full steam ahead on "systemic racism."

You would think that our liberal friends, with their passion for equality -- and "equality hurts no-one" according to a yard-sign at the top of liberal Phinney Ridge here in Seattle -- would hate and despise all gubmint programs that treat people unequally, especially since race is a social construction.

What with the Democrats winning the two Georgia Senate seats in the runoff, I think it is fair to say that whatever we racists-sexists-homophobes have been doing over the last 50 years, it hasn't been working.

Well, whatever the road back to equality and respect -- because if there is one thing that is absolutely clear, it is that Democrats don't think they need to respect Republicans and white working-class whites -- it has to start with the average deplorable refusing to cower before the race card.

I don't know how to do that, but I am sure that there are thousands of political geniuses that do.

And it all has to start with the idea that, to coin a phrase, we are mad as hell and we are not going to take it any more.

In other words, a Great Rebellion.

The "Great Rebellion" of the Ordinary Commoners

Joel Kotkin called it four and a half years ago in The Daily Beast: "Why The World Is Rebelling Against 'Experts'." Said he, in July 2016:

The Great Rebellion is on and where it leads nobody knows.

Its expressions range from Brexit to the Trump phenomena and includes neo-nationalist and unconventional insurgent movement around the world. It shares no single leader, party or ideology. Its very incoherence, combined with the blindness of its elite opposition, has made it hard for the established parties across what’s left of the democratic world to contain it.

Kotkin identified five different causes feeding the Great Rebellion:

Class Conflict: as in, upper class for Remain, everyone else for Brexit.

Race and Ethnicity: as in, "Ethnic minorities and immigrants have now become core constituents of progressive parties in many countries."

Geographic Disparities: as in "a chasm between the metropolitan core and the rest of the country."

Nationalism and Cultural Identity: as in, "historic values are also being undermined, as universities and even grade schools seek to replace cherished values with post-modernist, politically correct formulations." 

Governance and Localism: as in, the upper class "increasingly see themselves as rightful rulers, the benighted masses be damned."

 Does he nail it, or does he nail it?

In the US, it seems to me, the Great Rebellion started with the stolen election of 1960, when the commoner-born Richard Nixon was defeated by the shenanigans of Richard Daley in Chicago and Lyndon Johnson in Texas.

It continued with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and the identification of the "Silent Majority" by Vice President Agnew and the campaign against the "nattering nabobs of negativism." But Nixon was put down in 1974 for lèse majesté -- against the special people.

Then we had the election of the commoner-born Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan was so successful that the establishment George Bush inherited his crown, and the liberal Bill Clinton had to run as a New Democrat in 1992. And when Clinton governed as an Old Democrat he lost Congress to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years.

But Bill Clinton only won because Ross Perot, running as a populist, divided the Republican presidential vote.

Things were quiet for a while, especially when George W. Bush rallied Americans to the "nation" after 9/11. So the Great Rebellion was quiet until the radical-liberal Barack Obama was elected. His election catalyzed the Tea Party that flourished in 2009-10 and gave the Republicans the House in 2010. But Obama saw the Tea Party as a threat to reelection and so Little Lois Lerner at the IRS worked diligently to prevent Tea Party entities from registering as non-profit organizations. 

Starting in 2015 we have the Trump phenomenon, first taken as a joke by the ruling class, and then as an insult. So the ruling class has spent the last four years discrediting and obstructing President Trump and his championing of the nation and the commoner.

For now, the ruling class has beaten back the populist-nationalist rebellion. To Be Continued.

Joel Kotkin also had a piece on "The Middle-Class Rebellion" in late 2019. He identifies "energy and housing prices, which threaten to “proletarianize” the living standards of the not long ago decently comfortable."

In the United States, among children born in 1940, about 90 percent grew up to experience higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project; that dropped to only 50 percent among those born in the 1980s.

Housing prices are notably excessive in Hong Kong, and urbanist locations like "Sydney, Vancouver, London, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles." The upper-class urbanist movement thinks, erroneously, that higher urban density will lower carbon emissions. It makes it hard for ordinary commoners to buy houses on the urban periphery.

And then the ordinary commoners get hit by the climate change grift.

The high energy costs derive from zealous climate change politics claiming that any energy source outside solar and wind are inherently dangerous to the health of the planet... This dogmatism underlies efforts by government planners to raise the price of fuel in order to reduce consumption and force people onto transit.

Kotkin reckons that middle-income unrest -- the Great Rebellion -- "will continue worsen as long as policy makers, and the private sector, ignore the basic needs and aspirations of the majority population."

When you look at the Five Causes up above, and the effect on ordinary people, of sky-high housing and energy prices, you would think that some enterprising politician would be able to build a movement, a Great Rebellion against an unjust ruling class that believes the "benighted masses be damned."

Stay tuned.

You Noticed: Our Rulers are Going Stark Staring Mad

You might ask: why don't the wokerati just leave us alone? Why do they have to be in our faces about our racism-sexism-homophobia? Why get in the faces of the police? Why allow the homeless to trash the place? Why release violent suspects onto the street? Victor Davis Hanson goes on and on about the ridiculous behavior of our ruling class.

Is there really a legal system any more, at least as we once knew it, in our major cities—New York, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles? Violent crime has soared. Murders are up 30-50 percent in many of those places... 

In 2020, whether an arsonist, looter, or rioter was arrested, indicted, and jailed depended on the ideology of the perpetrator and the political context of the crime. Old ideas like “broken windows” preventative enforcement went down the memory hole. Did Rudolph Giuliani’s crime-reduction miracle in New York City ever really exist? Is it legal for a district attorney simply to announce that he will no longer enforce the legal code?

A clue comes from Curtis Yarvin's latest, "Socialism and capitalism are both fake."

We can say: “socialism,” in the 20th century, is an aristocratic movement which intends to promote the interests of the working class.

Of course, the followers of the movement, people motivated by fashion -- I suppose the folks with their virtue-signaling yard-signs -- don't really count. It's the real aristocrats that count.

Yet for those betters, the true aristocrats, the motivation of the ideology is at least as much ambition as empathy.  

Socialism has never really been a working-class movement to help the workers. It was always been an aristocratic movement, an intellectual cult and, as very often happens, a clerical nobility.

But things aren't really going too well for the clerical nobility. There is still sin in the world: blacks are still doing badly in school, and still the leaders in violent crime. And the white working class are now the leaders in dying of despair.

How could this happen, with all the good sort of people trying to make things better. Strictly speaking, we could all agree, if things are going wrong then dollars to donuts, it is probably the fault of the ruling class, the clerical nobility.

But, of course, nobles never blame themselves when things go wrong. It is always the "other." That's the beauty of the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. We allies are putting the pedal to the metal to help the oppressed peoples. If something is going wrong, it must be the fault of the white oppressors. QED.

It could not be, could not be, that the programs and policies -- even the very idea that government can make a society better -- are wrong, and instead of making things better are making things worse.

As I have written many times, from When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al, a religious group does not just give up when its prophecy fails, when the promised socialist heaven on Earth does not appear. It redoubles its efforts, for a while.

Now I say that the whole idea of a just society is a pipe-dream. The best we can hope for is a society where injustice is kept down to a dull roar. I say that the whole idea of the top-down administrative state is a conceit of the ruling class, and bound to increase injustice. I say that the whole idea of government education is a disaster, because it ends up being an indoctrination in ruling-class ideology, whereas I think education should be a "diverse" environment where parents can try out their kooky ideas on their children -- which, I suspect, would turn out to be a lot less kooky that the ideas of the ruling class. I say that the whole edifice of entitlements is a disaster because it sequesters the savings of the people as handouts that can never be reduced.

And I say that the Age of Politics is over. We've got to find new ways to indulge in our masculine lust for loot and plunder, and our feminine lust for virtue-signaling. These lusts are All Too Human, and will not go away. The question is how to divert them into social beneficial channels, like converting warriors into sports heroes. Yes. How do we convert virtue signaling into socially beneficial channels?

Meanwhile we are condemned to live in a world where our ruling class is going stark staring mad.

Still, they haven't started a world war recently.

America's One and Only Problem: Our Ruling Class

Today, New Years Day, is the day that writers write hopefully about the future. Or we worry about the gathering storm.

I'm a pretty simple-minded fellow, and I believe that the future is golden, but for one thing: the inability of our betters to think out of the box -- their box.

Our ruling class cannot think beyond its own moral benefit, its own advantage, its own "ambition, honor, and vanity," to quote Curtis Yarvin. We see this play out in the three major "issues" front and center at the moment.

The first issue is the COVID pandemic. Our ruling class instinctively assumes that the way to tackle the COVID crisis is the supervision of politicians advised by experts.

Well, we have seen that the experts don't know much, and the politicians less. They are quick to impose actions to "lock down" the populace, without really a clue about what such actions will do to the people.

Politics and government are peculiarly unsuitable for dealing with an uncertain problem because politicians and experts are very reluctant to admit they are wrong. A politician is the leader of his people, and must seem almost godlike; he must seem to enjoy the Mandate of Heaven. If things go wrong then it must be because he has lost the Mandate of Heaven, and no politician wants that. Experts are similar: they live and die by their credentials. But the truth is that life is uncertain; we advance by correcting our mistakes.

We see this play out in the difference between NASA and Elon Musk's SpaceX. NASA hates to have accidents and mistakes; Elon Musk is unafraid and just learns from each mistake.

The second issue is Climate Change. Our ruling class has bought into the Climate Change Prophecy, hook, line and sinker, and you can see why. The Climate Change Prophecy is a classic end-of-the-world play, and appeals to politicians because it is an existential peril, and as I say, "the only warrant for government power is existential peril." But is the warming all it is cracked up to be? Maybe not, but suppose it is true! Better safe than sorry! Only, the great skill of humans -- and of Nature in general -- is adaptation. If the climate really does change, then we humans are in a position to adapt, and how! Anyway, the most likely effect of climate change will be the movement of climatic regions towards the poles. Thus, for example, the wheat-growing regions of North America will move northwards into Canada. Will the oceans rise? Maybe, but we humans are, I think, up to the challenge of either moving our cities inland or protecting them with dykes, like the Dutch.

The third issue is Systemic Racism. Ruling classes have always been eager to be the military saviors of their people, to save us from the invaders. But running a close second has always been the temptation to be moral saviors as well, to save people from a fate worse than death. The temptation has grown particularly in the last few centuries as rulers have stopped being warriors and become administrators. Even military leaders now are more administrator than warrior. Since a leader must distinguish himself somehow, it makes sense to celebrate the moral virtues if the opportunity to vaunt martial virtues diminishes over time.

In my view, the folks most tempted by moral leadership are rich kids, the scions of wealthy or powerful families that lack, perhaps, the warrior personality. Thus we had the rich kid William Wilberforce that wanted us to repent of our slavery sins, rich kid Marx that wanted us to repent of our class sins. And now we have veritable armies of children from notable families eager to moralize over us on the "activism" front and demand that we repent of our racism sins.

The thing is that anyone can gussie up a moral narrative. The Systemic Racism narrative proposes a Three Layer moral universe of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." Lucky is he or she that gets to be an "ally!" I prefer a slightly different narrative, using "human rubble, liberal oppressors, and ordinary commoners," because I think our Big Problem is liberals and their gubmint programs that have reduced the lower classes to demoralized victims dying of despair.

But the bigger issue, I think, is the recognition that there are at least three kinds of people that live in modern society, and they have the right to live their lives each according to his lights; it is the world view of my reductive Three Peoples theory. There are the Subordinates that just want someone to take care of them; there are Responsibles that want to be left alone to work, marry and have children without having some liberal interfering all the time, and there are Creatives, the educated Gentry, that live for "ambition, honor, and vanity" in making a better world. Our problem is to figure out how these three rather different kinds of people can all live their lives according to their lights.

I say that our religions, our culture, and our politics should start from the knowledge that different people want and need different things, and the beginning of wisdom is to understand that.

But when your are a ruling class it is easy to assume that it's your way or the highway. That works fine, of course, unless some folks find that the ruling class way is not their way.