tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67429377894805458552024-03-24T00:10:33.111-07:00An American ManifestoYearnings for a better America by <a href="https://www.christopherchantrill.com">Christopher Chantrill</a>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.comBlogger5211125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-48587835550254667442022-07-07T13:19:00.001-07:002022-07-07T13:19:10.898-07:00Moving to Substack<p>My latest posts are now at: <a href="https://commonermanifesto.substack.com/">https://commonermanifesto.substack.com/</a></p><p>See you there!</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-23935964544100337792022-06-28T11:51:00.003-07:002022-06-28T11:51:58.162-07:00After Guns and Abortion Then What?<p data-pm-slice="1 1 []">It seems like forever that conservatives have obsessed about guns and unlimited abortion. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment really means what it says about guns and that abortion is not a federal human right hidden in a penumbra and an emanation, but an issue that state legislatures should address, there almost seems like an issue vacuum.</p><p>OK. Nature abhors a vacuum so let’s go to work.</p><p>I’d say first up is <strong>education</strong>. I’d say that the gubmint-bureaucrat-run education of the last nearly two centuries since Horace Mann and his “common school” is the best candidate for reform. And here is my Three Point Plan:</p><ol><li><p>Make government employee unions illegal, as a form of insurrection.</p></li><li><p>Universal vouchers, so parents can send their children to the school of their choice.</p></li><li><p>An end to teacher credentialization.</p></li></ol><p>That’s not so hard.</p><p>Next up is <strong>American Empire</strong>. It’s time to bring our troops home and buff up the Navy so it can descend upon pirates threatening container ships and tankers. In my view American Empire has been a disaster ever since President Wilson sent the doughboys from <em>On Moonlight Bay</em> to fight the Germans. Why not let the Euros fight it out on their own? And then to punish the Germans with a Mongol-era reparations peace plan with the Treaty of Versailles? Hello Hitler? My Three Point Plan is:</p><ol><li><p>End NATO and make the Europeans grow up and run their own defense.</p></li><li><p>Stop meddling in the Middle East, except to defend Israel.</p></li><li><p>Cut the “intelligence community” from 17 to 2.5 intelligence agencies.</p></li></ol><p>Finally, <strong>deregulate the regulatory state</strong>. I don’t know how to do this, but we really need to cut the educated class out of its current power to direct traffic from 1,001 regulatory agencies. We need to free America from the imperialism and the colonization of, by, and for the snobs of the educated class.</p><p>I would also really like to replace Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, Student Loans with a Great America Savings Plan. It would like a mega IRA that you can use for all the big things in life, from retirement to end-of-life health care to unemployment to kids’ education, and if you choose it then you opt out of Social Security, Medicare, etc., and do it yourself from your Great American Savings Account at Fidelity, Vanguard, whatever. The only problem is that if you cut federal spending in half then our liberal friends will find a way to spend the money on other free stuff. Milton Friedman once wrote that the government, every government, collects as much as the traffic will bear in taxes and spends as much as the traffic will bear on loot and plunder. I take that to mean that if we relieve the Feds of the cost of Social Security our liberal friends will find another way to buy votes with that money.</p><p>Of course, I propose to save the planet from climate change with Build Nukes Now. But that is obvious.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-6779657472494281802022-06-27T12:49:00.002-07:002022-06-27T12:49:21.528-07:00Abortion and the Three Peoples Theory<p data-pm-slice="1 1 []">Do you notice anything about the clips of pro-choice demonstrators peacefully protesting about <em>Roe v. Wade</em>? To me the protesters all look like white girls from selective colleges. You don’t see any ordinary American commoner women. And you don’t see any welfare moms from the ’hood.</p><p>The point about abortion politics in the USA is that the pro-choice side is driven by educated women in the educated elite. And the pro-life side is driven by ordinary middle-class commoner moms. </p><p>I have actually experienced this face to face as I ate breakfast at a hotel just down the street from the US Supreme Court where the <em>Dobbs</em> appeal was being considered. It was December 2021, and the hotel was full of abortion protesters, for and against.</p><p>At one point I heard two pro-life women mixing it up with a pro-choice woman. The pro-life women were quoting Bible verses and the pro-choice woman was talking about “my spirits.”</p><p>Which is exactly what I would expect. And you know what? They agreed to disagree; nobody called in their mostly peaceful protesters to get in the faces of the other women at breakfast.</p><p>Now, I believe that we have abortion politics today because of the situation of educated class women, that I call People of the Creative Self in my reductive Three Peoples Theory.</p><p>Modern feminism proposes that women should not be merely wives and mothers, but should have careers, as men do. That’s all very well, but that means that women can’t get married and have children until they have completed their education and begun their career. It means that, for 10-15 years after puberty, an educated woman really can’t have children.</p><p>And yet, in today’s society she is expected to have sexual relationships during college and early career.</p><p>If I were an educated woman, and I had internalized the feminist culture that I had been carefully taught, and I knew that I wanted a college education and a career before starting a family and that I should aim to become an “independent woman” as proposed by Simone de Beauvoir in <em>The Second Sex</em>, and that I was expected to “put out” — in the classic phrase of Blanche in <em>A Streetcare Named Desire</em> — I would want abortion as a backstop.</p><p>Without that, life would be too “stressful.”</p><p>But hey, ladies, what is so wrong with the common law tradition that criminalizes abortion at “quickening?”</p><p>Women who are People of the Responsible Self do not see the world the way that women in the educated class see it. For them, as ordinary commoners, maybe immersed in their Bible verses, life, the universe, everything, revolves around marriage, family, home, children. Paid work? Sure, but work is work. And it’s nice to earn money after the children are grown, and be around other women, and give back to the community.</p><p>For Responsible women marriage and children are at the center of life. So having sex with a man who isn’t committed to fathering your children is an abomination. Aborting a child you have conceived with the man you love? Unthinkable.</p><p>In other words, there is a great religious and cultural gulf between the project of life for a woman in the educated class and the project of life for a woman in the commoner class. What makes life meaningful for an educated class woman is her education and career. What makes life meaningful for a commoner woman is the family she created.</p><p>It is the beginning of wisdom in our ruling class to understand this, to accept it, and to allow America to be a place where both kinds of women can live their lives.</p><p>But whatabout the women who are People of the Subordinate Self? What is their relation to abortion?</p><p>Obviously, down the ages, poor women that had unwanted children usually abandoned them, either by exposure or by killing them. Many were left at churches: foundlings. Up to 40 percent of live births ended up as foundlings raised by the church at the local orphanage. And up to 90 percent of those died in the first year. See this piece at <a href="https://quillette.com/2022/06/24/the-tragedy-of-the-unwanted-child-what-ancient-cultures-did-before-abortion/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank"><em>Quillette</em></a><em>. </em>It’s pretty obvious: if a mother can’t afford to keep the baby and a relative won’t take the baby, then mothers tended to abandon the baby and hope that someone would take the baby and raise it. </p><p>Today, of course, poor women get an abortion. Is that a good thing? Probably not. In any case, because of the “present orientation” of lower class life, poor mothers are going to make decisions at the last possible moment. So, if they don’t have abortions and they can’t afford or don’t want to raise the child, then society has to “do something” if we don’t want such children abandoned or withering away in orphanages.</p><p>So what do we do? How about going back to the common law, where abortion after 16-20 weeks was criminal, and abortion before then was shameful?</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-76663318834863783172022-06-24T11:47:00.005-07:002022-06-24T11:47:51.987-07:00Roe v. Wade as Bookends<p> On the day that <em>Roe v. Wade</em>, the Supreme Court’s venture into discovering a constitutional right to abortion because penumbras and emanations, was <a href="https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/06/24/breaking-supreme-court-overturns-roe-v-wade-casey-with-dobbs-decision-n1595393" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">reversed</a>, let me begin by stating my postion on abortion.</p><p>I think that abortion sould be safe, legal, and shameful.</p><p>I think that, in general, if you got a baby started, father-to-be, then you got yourself a job for the next twenty years. Men should not be in the position of telling a woman to “get rid of it.”</p><p>I think that, in general, the criminal law is needed to keep rowdy men under control. Men sometimes need a punch in the solar-plexus to get straightened out. Or imprisoned for ten years or so until they get cured of their violent ways by <em>anno domini</em>.</p><p>But I think that, in general, the criminal law should not be ordering women around. If the word got around in female circles that abortion was shameful, if women were in the habit of agreeing with their friends: “I can’t believe she got an abortion,” then there would be a lot less abortions in this world.</p><p>It’s in the genes. Women believe what they have been carefully taught, what the other women believe, and that is just they way they are. Men, not so much.</p><p>So my objection to <em>Roe v. Wade</em> issues from my belief that very few things of a religious, moral, or cultural nature should be issuing from on high from an all-wise Supreme Court. And I believe that the law should not be an educated-class <em>diktat</em>. I believe that lawmaking should be a process very like what Jürgen Habarmas proposes. It should not be promulgated from on high, but worked out in the <em>Lebenswelt</em>, the “lifeworld” of people in a community working out agreement of community standards in the to-and-fro of conversation and communication.</p><p>And I believe in the notion of the states as “laboratories of democracy.” Guess what, it was a liberal justice of the Supreme Court that <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/496524-states-are-the-laboratories-of-democracy/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">coined</a> the phrase.</p><blockquote><p>Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Louis Brandeis was the first to popularize the phrase that states “are the laboratories of democracy.” Justice Brandeis in his dissent in the 1932 case of <em>New State Ice Co v. Liebmann</em> stated that: “a state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”</p></blockquote><p>Now that <em>Roe v. Wade</em> has been overturned by the US Supreme Court, individual states can set their own laws with respect to abortion. Some liberal states will maintain the current effective law of abortion until live birth. Most, I expect, will develop laws that severely limit abortion after 12 or 15 weeks — just like they do in Europe. Some states may ban elective abortion completely. Maybe that is not such a good idea, because “back-alley abortions.” Still, I am sure that rich abortion enthusiasts are even now planning how to get the word out to any pregnant women on how to get an abortion.</p><p>But, I still think that abortion sould be safe, legal and shameful. I leave the Karens of the world to deal with the women without shame.</p><p>But now, let us deal with the Larger Question, the culture among our educated classes that <em>they</em> are called upon to decide all moral and cultural questions, and to enforce their decisions with politics and government. And you shut up, peasant.</p><p>The extreme case of this is, of course, Communism and its half-sister Socialism, and its bastard brother, the administrative state, in which the educated ruling class decides everything from on high, and there is no recourse, no appeal, no evaluation of the benefit of any <em>diktat</em> from on high. Not until the society collapses in ruin, as China at the end of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. And notice that China did not abandon economic communism until after the death of Mao ZeDong.</p><p>Thomas Sowell roundly demolishes top-down culture and politics in <em>The Vision of the Anointed</em>.</p><p>But the Science!</p><p>Did you know that the Science these days is coming to the idea that there is a mysterious “something” — well, let’s call it a Dark Force, to go with the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy — that scientists think may be driving the universe to create new things, whether new species, adaptations, cultural changes, whatever. In other words, when Charles Darwin talked about “evolution” he didn’t know the half of it. I am reading a book right now, <em>The Self-creating Universe: the making of a World View</em> by J.J. Clarke that calls this mysterious Dark Force “emergence.” And then honestly says that this “emergentism” describes the way the universe works, but does not explain it.</p><p>Let’s rehearse how this should work with abortion.</p><p>Up until, say 1900, aborting a fetus was extremely dangerous, because infection, and not surprisingly, human society took a very dim view of abortion. But, in the United States “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">medicinal abortion</a>” did not become illegal until 1821 in Connecticut. (Which means what? That the women in the village decided?) So first, the rulers decided that abortion should be illegal. And then in 1973 they decided it should be legal. I wonder why.</p><p>I think that with the development of safe “medicinal abortion” we all need to sit down together and come to agreement on what we think is right and proper. And I thijnk that, in general, it should be women running the show.</p><p>And then the larger question of the educated rulers deciding everything “from on high” needs to be addressed, on everything from climate change to systemic racism.</p><p>Because if you believe that “equality never hurt anyone” dear rulers, it means that everyone should have a voice when moral, cultural, or economic decisions are made — even racist-sexist homophobe armed insurrectionist deplorables.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-81544337744312603762022-06-22T16:04:00.002-07:002022-06-22T16:04:21.854-07:00The Fatal Conceit of Every RulerPolitics, according to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, is about the enemy. Any human community that experiences an enemy must rally together under a war leader to defeat the enemy. And a community at war must subordinate itself to its leader and fight as one to defeat the foe.<br /><br />But when the enemy is defeated, what then? Then the leader comes up with all kinds of reasons why a top-down hierarchical system is still needed to save the community from chaos. And that is why just about every society we know about features a hierachical system with the war leader at the top, his lieutenants as his faithful followers, and the ordinary peasants at the bottom.<br /><br />In fact, that is not the way that the world, or human society, works. We have realized, especially over the last 200 years, that human society is much more complicated than mere hierarchy, and that the horizontal interactions between humans are more important, both economically in trade and gift-giving, and socially, in the “lifeworld” where, according to Jürgen Habermas, it is not the single consciousness of the ruler that defines the world but all of us together, and we test and share our experience of the world in conversation with each other using the language we share.<br /><br />And, from our market and social transactions and conversations, we leave behind a precipitate of agreement that becomes our culture and our understanding of the way things are.<br /><br />Rulers are different. In his Vision of the Anointed Thomas Sowell writes about how our modern rulers believe and act as if they have a special relationship to the truth. They know, whereas ordinary commoners don’t. In Chapter 2: The Pattern, he relates how our current rulers have advanced policy in “The War on Poverty,” “Sex Education,” and “Criminal Justice.” In each case, the rulers declared a “Crisis,” declared a proposed “Solution,” ignored or explained away the negative “Results,” and came up with a “Response” that interpreted the failed “Results” as a need to redouble our efforts.<br /><br />I experience “The Pattern” as the fundamental limitation of the political that I learned from Carl Schmitt. In politics, everything is about the enemy and defeating him. Obviously therefore, any setback, as in war, is interpreted as a need to redouble our efforts; otherwise we will be defeated and be driven before the enemy and hear the lamentation of our women. As I say, if a political leader admits he is wrong then it is time to resign. But no political leader is willing to do that!<br /><br />We see this in the current situation of the Biden administration in June 2022. Basically, the Bidenoids made a grand strategic error in 2021 by going full bore on a trillion dollar handout and closing down oil exploration. But can President Biden address the nation and say “sorry, my bad?” Absolutely not. So he resorts to absurd complaints about Putin and oil companies not using their full refinery capacity, and ridiculous ideas about suspending the federal gasoline tax for 90 days.<br /><br />But what if we are not in a war, or a “crisis?” Then, I would argue, we don’t need politics, but the normal human interaction and conversation that leads to agreement. Of course, down the ages, aside from court politics, people lower down the totem pole did exactly that. But in our modern era our rulers have developed the conceit that they can direct traffic from the court all the way down to the ordinary Joe and Jill at work and at home. I say that the results are in: top-down politics doesn’t work.<br /><br />Another view is that of J.J. Clarke in The Self-creating Universe. His idea is that new things emerge out of the interaction between entities, from sub-atomic to living things to humans.<br /><br />If this is true then all the conceit of our betters, from the welfare state to economic regulation to The Great Reset to ESG to the Green New Deal are bound to fail. That’s because they are not emergent, a coming together of different proposals and adaptations, but a top-down imposition of a single notion on everyone by some special person on top.<br /><br />I suspect that this top-down culture is not just a folly our our present educated class but a failing of all political regimes, that issues out of the necessity of any war leader to coordinate his forces upon a single purpose, to defeat the enemy.<br /><br />However, even in war, the Germans discovered in World War I, you need to push responsibility downwards as far as it can go, because the general in charge cannot comprehend everything that has to be done to attack and destroy the enemy. He can only propose the general outline of what has to be done, and that general outline is worked out and interpreted into more detailed orders as the instructions get retailed from army to division to regiment to company to platoon.<br /><br />In life there is interaction, and give and take, and buying and selling, and giving and receiving, and conversation and disagreement and agreement. In politics there is only conflict, the war against the enemy.<br /><br />I say that the next Big Thing in history is the emergence of rulers that know, as Susan Sowerby taught in The Secret Garden, that they don’t own the whole orange, and wouldn’t know what to do with it if they did.Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-83646588403504638952022-06-21T14:01:00.002-07:002022-06-21T14:01:28.786-07:00The Age of the Commoner<p data-pm-slice="0 0 []">Back in the day, King Henry VII of England had a problem. The Wars of the Roses had killed off most of the male feudal aristocracy. So how to repopulated the ruling class?</p><p>Perfectly simple, <a href="https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/11/the-world-nationalism-made/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">according</a> to Liah Greenfeld, author of <em>Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity.</em> Henry promoted a bunch of commoners into the aristocracy. And thus was born the notion of the “nation,” a combination of <em>people</em> and <em>nation</em>. Because previously, “nation” meant the elite.</p><blockquote><p>Redefined as the English nation, the English people was elevated to the dignity of the elite… A nation was a sovereign community of fundamentally equal members and inclusive identity, which cut across class and status.</p></blockquote><p>And thus began an age in which, again and again, people of ordinary origin soared into the social stratosphere, not because of who they were, but what they achieved. What about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wolsey" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Cardinal Wolsey</a>, Lord Chancellor of England under King Henry VIII? Word is that he was the son of a butcher. Henry’s other Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell was the son of “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cromwell" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">a yeoman, fuller and cloth merchant</a>.” His descendant was Oliver Cromwell.</p><p>What about Sir Francis Drake, scourge of the Spanish Main? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Drake" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">La Wik</a> suggests he was the illegitimate son of a well-connected farmer that got farmed out to a neighbor who ran a ship in the coasting trade.</p><p>Then we have the United States of America. The commanding general of the Revolutionary War was George Washington, a landowner by marriage and a slave owner. But his <em>eminense-grise</em> was “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar” from the island of St. Croix: Alexander Hamilton. It was the twenty-something Hamilton that kept Washington’s army going as his chief of staff. And then, as the first Secretary of the Treasury under Washington this brilliant commoner set up the National Debt of the new nation and organized its accounts so that today we have a continous recording of US spending and revenue going back to 1792.</p><p>And who can forget Benjamin Franklin, escaped apprentice, who built a fortune from printing and publishing in Philadelphia. He created the American culture of thrift, hard work, and community spirit in his <em>Poor Richard’s Almanack</em>. In his seventies he was the agent of the rebels at the court of King Louis in Paris and talked the French into supporting the American Revolution.</p><p>Andrew Jackson was the son of Scotch-Irish pioneers; his father died in a logging accident just before Andrew’s birth. He was captured by the British in the Revolutionary War and orphaned at age 14. He studied for the law and was admitted to the bar at age 20. At 35 he was appointed head of the Tennessee militia, and ten years later achieved immortality at the Battle of New Orleans. In 1828 this commoner became President of the United States.</p><p>Abraham Lincoln was the son of an unsuccessful farmer in Kentucky. With intermittent schooling, Lincoln worked on his father’s farm until age 22 when he moved to New Salem, Illinois. After serving in the Blackhawk War he opened a store with a friend. Then he became a postmaster and finally determined to study to become a lawyer and entered into politics, serving in the Illinois legislature and then the US House of Representatives. In the 1850s Lincoln was active in anti-slavery politics and the new Republican Party. He was elected president in 1860.</p><p>Warren Harding was the son of a farmer and schoolteacher who later became a doctor. His mother was a midwife. In 1870 his father bought a local newspaper, and Harding learned the business. He went to college at age 14, and purchased the <em>Marion Star</em> after graduation at age 18 and managed eventually to make the <em>Star</em> into a success. Starting in 1900 he was successively elected state senator, lieutenant governor, and in 1914 US Senator. He was elected president in 1920.</p><p>Richard Nixon’s father ran a lemon ranch, and then a grocery store and a gas station. He worked his way through Whittier College at the family store. He studied law at Duke, and was called to the bar in California. After WWII service in the US Navy, Nixon ran for Congress in 1946 and the US Senate in 1950, winning against liberal Democrats. In 1952 he was elected Vice President, and in 1968 President.</p><p>Ronald Reagan was the son of a salesman. After high school and college he worked as a radio and sports announcer. In 1937 he took a screen test and became a B-movie actor. In 1947 he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild and testified before Congress about Communists in Hollywood. In the 1950s he became the host of <em>General Electric Theater</em> on CBS and famously toured GE plants making speeches. In 1966 he was elected Governor of California and in 1980 President of the United States.</p><p>Then there is Andrew Carnegie, son of a handloom weaver who got steel production going; John D. Rockefeller, store clerk who created Standard Oil to provide safe kerosene for oil lamps. The Wright brothers were sons of a bishop in the evangelical United Brethren and neither went to college. Henry Ford was born on a farm and never attended high school, but did learn how to operate the Westinghouse portable steam engine. Steve Jobs was the adopted son of a coastguard mechanic. He developed a “blue box” with Steve Wozniak to make illegal free long-distance phone calls. He dropped out of college after one semester and then got a job at Atari.</p><p>Our modern world has been created and enriched by Nobodies and Anybodies: people without much breeding and without much education and without much polish. I wonder why.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-67709657006487096982022-06-20T12:48:00.002-07:002022-06-20T12:48:36.799-07:00Understanding Our Ruling Class<p>Ever since the French Revolution “we” have believed in a politics of Left and Right. Because the supporters of the French king in the National Assembly in 1789 sat to the right of the president and the opponents to his left.</p><p>Thus the Right came to be identified with the old order, with privilege, with feudal hierarchy, and the Left with reform, with ideas, and with the common man.</p><p>It is the saving faith of the Left that it stands for the worker, the oppressed, the victim, against the powers of privilege, of oppression, and stasis.</p><p>I I have been reading today a couple of pieces by the Zman proposing that the Old Order is ending, that the West is <a href="https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=27650" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">out of time</a>.</p><blockquote><p>The people will remain but what defines them, that old Western tradition, including its messianic claims, will fade away, slowly replaced by something not yet born. </p></blockquote><p>On the other hand, he <a href="https://www.takimag.com/article/peter-the-greats-bookend/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">writes</a> at <em>Taki’s</em>, the West’s utter folly in Ukraine marks the end of Russia trying to be a part of Europe from the East and the end of the Global American Empire trying to be a part of Europe from the West.</p><p>A question that I have is: what on Earth does <a href="https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/19/the-criminal-order-beneath-the-chaos-of-san-franciscos-tenderloin/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">our ruling class</a> think it is doing? Here’s a piece by Leighton Akira Woodhouse about the homeless scene in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, in which the homeless demand for drugs leads to shoplifting and the whole thing run by an industry feeding money for drugs to the Mexican drug cartels.</p><blockquote><p>Taken together, the dealers, boosters, and fences comprise a vast illicit industry that generates the cash that pays a Mexican drug cartel to import narcotics into San Francisco’s streets. Those drugs kill two people a day directly. </p></blockquote><p>Then there are the “victims, from targets of muggings, burglaries, and home invasions to working class, elderly San Franciscans.” Their pharmacies and grocery stores get shut down, etc.</p><p>And yet our rulers do nothing about the whole operation, from homeless to drugs to petty crime to criminal gangs. Their philosophy is that criminals are victims, that police are thugs, that accused criminals should be released with no bail and society doesn’t care about oppressed peoples.</p><p>I am in the middle of Thomas Sowell’s <em>The Vision of the Anointed</em> in which he notes that the rulers’ approach to problems doesn’t change and doesn’t respond to results on the ground.</p><blockquote><p><strong>War on Poverty.</strong> The idea back in the early Sixties was “to help our less fortunate citizens help themselves” and to effect a “decline in dependecy.” The record is that the War on Poverty has increased dependency, but our rulers have not changed their approach to poverty.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p><strong>Sex Education.</strong> The idea back in the early Sixties was that sex education in the schools would help reduced venereal disease and pregnancies before marriage. In the event, STDs increased, pregancy outside marriage increased and marriage decreased. But our rulers have amped up the sex education to include celebration of LGBT.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p><strong>Criminal Justice.</strong> In the Sixties the idea was promulgated from on high that the criminal justice system was primitive, vindictive, and a “deeply childish fear” without punishment crime “would run amok.” Why not turn jails into rehabilitation centers? In the event, crime, including murder, has increased, but fifty years later our rulers still think we are being too punitive, as in Soros prosecutors.</p></blockquote><p>The point is that, despite the results of these policies being failures, our ruling class has not changed its approach to these issues over the past 50 years. If anything it has increased its commitment.</p><p>Now Sowell has a Five Point analysis of the ruling class’s approach to the world.</p><ol><li><p>Social problems exist because people other than the rulers “lack the virtue or wisdom of the anointed.”</p></li><li><p>Social beliefs are “socially constructed” rather than an adaption to reality, so that problems should be solved by ruler rationality rather than “evolved traditions” or social adaptation.</p></li><li><p>When things go wrong it is intentional rather than “systemic.” Someone is to blame.</p></li><li><p>Great social dangers can only be averted by “imposition” of ruling class vision.</p></li><li><p>Opposition to the rulers issues not from a valid difference of opinion but from intellectual or moral faults in the lower orders.</p></li></ol><p>What, you may ask, is wrong with these people? I think the answer is that, in politics, you can never be wrong. The whole point of politics is to lead the people to war against an enemy that threatens to annihilate us. If our gloroius leader fails to lead us to victory, he is outta here. So, he can never say: gee, fellas, I guess I screwed up that one.</p><p>The lesson, then, is that anything short of a war to the death against annihilation should not be a political issue, but assigned to other social institutions, from economic to social to religious.</p><p>But for our ruling class it’s too late for that.</p><p>So what do we do? I say that we work on a new narrative to replace the old narrative of our present ruling class, that the Zman says is “something not yet born.” </p><p>Only I think that its outline is pretty clear. The new narrative will say that the wisdom of the ages is in the semi-conscious evolution of the culture of the middling sort of person, that lives engaged in the sinews and the day-to-day social and economic relationships of society. As opposed to the vision from on high of our present educated evolved ruling class.</p><p>And I say that the day will come when the whole superstructure of our present ruling class, represented by the analysis of Thomas Sowell above, will come crashing down. Rather like the whole structure of late-feudal/absolute monarchy came crashing down in France in 1789.</p><p>Why did it come crashing down in 1789, and lost the Mandate of Heaven in that year of all years? Good question. But come crashing down it did.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-53232850176959749602022-06-17T12:38:00.005-07:002022-06-19T11:36:24.893-07:00Change: Billionaires Want to Change the World<p>Friedrich Hayek's last book was title <i>The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. </i>In it he labels as the "fatal conceit" the idea that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes."</p><p>Now comes Karen Hunt at <i>American Greatness</i> in "<a href="https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/16/know-your-enemy/">Know your Enemy</a>" like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Jef Besos and others that think with a bit of technology they can change the world.</p><blockquote><p>These elite firmly believe they are so smart, so wise, so all-important that they have the right—indeed the obligation for the good of the planet—to exploit everything and everyone, right down to the last pound of flesh and even our most private thoughts.</p></blockquote><p>Funnily enough, they already did! Inadvertently, with their PC operating systems and their iPhones and their online buying. They changed the world by accident, and then, a billion or so dollars later decide they want to change it by design.</p><p>In <i>A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles</i> Thomas Sowell takes another tack. He says that our modern elites have two different visions. Some of them have a "constrained vision" that believes we don't know the half of it. The others have an "unconstrained vision" that believes we can remake the world using our logic and reason and science. Thus the Age of Reason.</p><p>In Sowell's narrative the father of the modern unconstrained vision was William Godwin with is 1793 book <i>Enquiry Concerning Political Justice</i>. For Godwin it was a crime not to use all our logic and reason to make the world a juster place. We could say that the father of the constrained vision was Adam Smith in his <i>Theory of Moral Sentiments. </i>In this vision there is a lot more respect given to the unseen wisdom of habits and cultures and ways of life that develop unbidden in society.</p><p>The interesting thing to me is that today it is the conservative man in the street that talks about logic and reasonn and the lefty that talks about "lived experience." And yet the lefty is still trying to upend society with his "fundamental change" and the conservative that is still saying: Whoa Neddy.</p><p>And yet, the lefty still wants to redesign society. Because justice.</p><p>I suppose we should just be grateful for the Law of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences">Unintended Consequences</a>. La Wik has a history starting with John Locke -- who discussed the unintended consequences of interest rate regulation -- through Adam Smith, Engels, and Robert K. Merton. Today it is, of course, the commonsense of every conservative that every new liberal program is wrecked by unanticipated consequences of gubmint mucking around where it don't belong.</p><p>We see the weakness of the lefty approach to life right now in the utter disaster of the Biden administration that thought it was going to shut down oil exploration and fossil fuel electric generation and push electric cars and have a war in Ukraine and shovel money at its supporters and fight racism and transphobia and not think for a moment that everything would blow up in its face.</p><p>I wonder if the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of the world appreciate that they got their billions because they had an idea that worked, and that other people got a say. Because we wouldn't have Apple and Microsoft bestride the world if the world hadn't decided, one purchase at a time, to buy into their brilliant ideas. Nobody forced people to buy iPhones and Microsoft Windows back in the day.</p><p>I like to say that the difference here is the change created by Anybodies, where one in a million has an idea that changes the world, and the change created by Somebodies, where the ruling class and its stooges tells the world to change, or else.</p><p>The point is illustrated by the business startup culture. Lots of people come up with ideas that they are convinced will change the world and they try to put them into practice. But very few of them actually end up amazing the world.</p><p>There is no reason why the same should not apply to political and cultural ideas. Lots of people have great ideas for changing the world. But how do we decide which of them are any good?</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-12675000292871324752022-06-16T13:01:00.001-07:002022-06-16T13:01:35.856-07:00When the Recession's on the Democrats' Watch<p>Dp you realize how rare it is for a recession to occur on the Democrats' watch?</p><p></p><blockquote><p>2008: Great Recession was on President Bush's Watch. Cause: blowup of Dem cheap mortgage policy.</p><p>2000: Tech Bubble broke in 2000 but wasn't felt until 2001, on President Bush's watch. Cause: probably excess enthusiasm from tax rate cuts plus the easing of credit in the 1998 Russian bond default.</p><p>1990: Recession took place on President Bush I's watch. "Worst economy in last 50 years," said Candidate Clinton.</p><p>1980: Stagflation on President Carter's watch but recession on President Reagan's watch. Somebody had to curb 10-20 percent inflation.</p><p>1969: Recession on Nixon's watch. Hangover from LBJ's double wars: on poverty and Vietnam.</p><p></p></blockquote><p>But I think we are staring at a recession that will be 100 percent on Biden's watch. And do you know what I think? I think that nobody in the Democratic Party has a clue about what to do. Because the Democratic Party agenda is always a new round of spending that they advertise as a boost the economy, but which really boosts Democratic constituencies and voters.</p><p>There has never been a time in my adult life where Democrats have authoried a policy that would curb the loot and plunder getting shoveled out to their supporters.</p><p>But the current economic nightmare has many authors:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>President Trump jawboning the Fed not to raise interest rates in the fall of 2019.</li><li>The administrative state's lockdown policy response to COVID.</li><li>The Fed's print-money response to COVID.</li><li>The reluctance of the administrative state to end lockdowns and travel restrictions.</li><li>The Biden administration's belief that Obama didn't stimulate enough in 2009.</li><li>The Green New Deal policy of shutting down fossil fuel exploration and use.</li><li>The Fed's delay in returning to a post-COVID monetary policy.</li></ol><p>Yeah. All in all, I'd say that the combination of all these economic errors is not going to be any fun.</p><p>But here's my point, going back to the list of recessions in my adult lifetime. In none of these recessions were the Democrats in charge while the thing was developing. In almost all cases, Republicans were the ones having to take the unpopular policy decisions needed to fight inflation or curb an excessive boom.</p><p>Obviously, President Biden is the last person you would choose to be president in such a time. Heres's a guy that sat around in the Senate for 50 years and never did anything serious in his life. Plus, his administration is staffed by a bunch of DEI appointments chosen for their race or gender or sexual orientation rather than for their competence in rallying an army on a stricken field.</p><p>It's easy to say that it serves them right. But, of course, it isn't the ruling class that suffers during inflation and recession. It's ordinary people, especially the lower class people I call Subordinates.</p><p>And it's easy to tell ordinary people that it serves them right for voting for Democrats. But our society basically teaches everyone that Democrats are the people that care about people like them; that's what Curtis Yarvin's <a href="https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral?s=r">Cathedral</a> is all about. You have to be an ornery old cuss to break with The Narrative handed down from on high at the altar of the Cathedral.</p><p>But someone is going to have to come up with the ideas and the policies and the intestinal fortitude to lead us out of this mess with the least suffering for the American people. And I don't see that leader coming out of the Democratic Party.</p><p>Put it this way. If someone asked you to name the go-to guy in the Democratic Party that everyone regards as a safe hand on the economic tiller, what name would you come up with?</p><p>I rest my case.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-90868088668912239672022-06-15T12:56:00.002-07:002022-06-15T12:56:32.458-07:00Panic at Activist Organizations<p>Now, as never before, because Trump etc., progressive activist organizations need to be effective so they can fight injustice. And yet, progressives worry, today's activist organizations are becoming totally ineffective. <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/">Said a progressive organization head</a>:</p><blockquote><p>[there are] millions of people depending on these [progressive] organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way.</p></blockquote><p>But, it's as if the right wing had deliberately succeeded in sabotaging them.</p><blockquote><p>Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.</p></blockquote><p>This is in an article by Ryan Grim at <i>The Intercept</i> about how progressive advocacy groups are so embroiled in making the organization itself a just place -- and free from racism, etc. -- that they have abandoned their sacred duty of making the world a better place. He starts with meetings at the Gutmacher Institute, the pro-abortion research organization in the wake of George Floyd.</p><blockquote><p>Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy... talked about the role systemic racism plays in society and the ways that Guttmacher’s work could counter it. Staff suggestions, though, turned inward... Staffers suggested additional racial equity trainings.. With no Black staff in the D.C. unit, it was suggested that “Guttmacher do something tangible for Black employees in other divisions.” </p></blockquote><p>In other words, the cancel, safetyist, self-care culture is not just ruining the effectiveness of our schools and colleges and woke corporations, but the very social justice organizations that are trying to create a better world. It has resulted in "wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years" in organizations like "The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement." Oh no!</p><p>But my interest in the article was really the taken-for-granted idea that progressives today are fighting like never before against a tsunami of injustice.</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In the wake of George FLoyd progressives were united in "a reckoning with racial injustsice".</li><li>In mid 2021 the Biden administrations program of "transformational change" stalled as organizations broke down into "internal strife and internal bullshit" instead of fighting for "reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change."</li><li>"Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike... A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist."</li><li>"The ACLU alone collected almost $1 million within 24 hours of Trump’s election and tens of millions more over the next year."</li></ul><p>Know what I think? I think that when social justice organizations are as focused on the internal justice of an organization it means that the threat of injustice from those monster racist-sexist-homophobes of which you've heard tell is not that urgent.</p><p>That's the way humans are programmed. When there's an emergency, and our lives are threatened, we all come together and we subordinate ourselves selflessly to the self-appointed leaders.</p><p>But when the emergency recedes a bit, then we start to want to renegotiate our place in the hierarchy and demand that the boss is nicer to us. And whatabout that promotion he promised in return for a job well done!</p><p>Which goes to prove that the existential threat of injustice is not quite as bad as we've been told.</p><p></p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-19695172103733345212022-06-14T12:39:00.006-07:002022-06-14T12:39:49.150-07:00Don't Do Anything Stupid, Rulers<p>Last week President Biden <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/may/10/biden-blames-putin-and-ultra-maga-inflation-pledge/">blamed</a> Putin and Republicans for inflation.</p><blockquote><p>President Biden on Tuesday blamed Russia’s war in Ukraine, corporate greed, the pandemic and the policies of “ultra-MAGA Republicans” for causing record-high inflation...</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>“It’s not because of spending,” Mr. Biden said when asked whether he is to blame for inflation. “I think our policies help, not hurt.”</p></blockquote><p>OK. So how do you tell when a politician is lying? The answer is because his mouth is moving.</p><p>Plus, my little maxim: Why do politicians lie? Because we the voters insist upon it.</p><p>Now, I don't know if President Biden really thinks all those stupid things he is saying in his speeches. He is lying because if he didn't then the only thing to do would be to resign.</p><p>By the way, how are you Fact Checkers doing these days? Somehow I haven't heard much from you lately.</p><p>What I am starting to worry about is that, with everything going wrong, the Biden administration will do something stupid.</p><p><i>It looks like</i> the Ukrainians are losing the war in the Donbas. Which means that Biden and the Europeans could do something stupid, so they don't look bad, and start World War III. </p><p><i>It looks like</i> the stock market and the economy are totally screwed, with inflation and recession occuring at the same time, even as the Fed is determined to raise interest rates. Which means that Biden might do something stupid so that he looks like he is "doing something."</p><p><i>It looks like</i> we are having a meltdown on the crypto front, with Bitcoin down from $68,000 to $22,000, and I <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/14/crypto-industry-regulatory-backlash-lending-crisis-00039415">read</a> that "One of the biggest lenders within the crypto market, Celsius Network, is struggling as the booming sector turns sour." Hey, Chairman Powell of the Fed, and all the Euro ships at sea. You do know that you guys are the "lenders of last resort," right?</p><p><i>It looks like</i> the Democrats are going to get wiped out at the midterms in November. So what are they doing? Running J6 show trials and threatening to indict President Trump. That would really solve all our problems, right?</p><p><i>It looks like</i> there is a bit of a cock-up on the China front, with:</p><p></p><blockquote><a href="https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=51665">China's High-Speed Rail Network is a Trillion Dollar sinkhole</a></blockquote><blockquote><p>The <a href="https://www.asiamarkets.com/chinese-banks-run/?fbclid=IwAR1lnw6GyZ6_ZHUVWPNPL-5ZWr8rW6CisX5IWDN8Tb_P7hliCekLJgRJ-mE">run on regional Chinese banks</a>, plus people losing their down payments from Evergrande </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>The CCP "<a href="https://instapundit.com/525648/">order</a> a few weeks back for top party officials to keep all their money in China." But what about nephews and nieces?</p></blockquote><p>Suppose China had a real economic crisis, and invaded Taiwan to distract attention. Could the Biden administration avoid doing something stupid?</p><p><i>It looks like</i> "minorities and women hardest hit" in the <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/baby-formula-shortage-hits-low-income-women-moms-of-color-hardest-can-we-fix-things/ar-AAYofg8?ocid=BingNewsSearch">baby formula crisis</a>. Imagine if Biden & Co. decided to nationalize baby formula to solve the crisis.</p><p>But really, what could go wrong?</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-52245621943351069792022-06-13T11:45:00.002-07:002022-06-13T11:45:25.853-07:00Journo Tells Us Why Dems Screwed the Pooch on Inflation<p>At <i>The Atlantic</i> James Surowieki want us to know "<a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/how-did-they-get-inflation-so-wrong/ar-AAYiYZJ">How Did They Get Inflation So Wrong</a>." And I must say, the Dem-operative-with-a-byline really helped me understand why the Biden guys made such a staggering mistake with their various stimuli and BBBs and whatever in 2021.</p><p>The reason that the Dems overcharged their winter 2021 stimulus package is that they were still smarting from the failure of the Obama stimulus back in 2009.</p><blockquote><p>After the steep economic downturn over those two years, the U.S. economy grew at a very slow clip... And this happened even though... Democrats had passed a $787 billion stimulus plan, which at the time was the biggest such package ever enacted.</p></blockquote><p>So, the Dems were determined not to make the same mistake twice. No Sir!</p><blockquote><p>The lesson that policy makers drew from that experience was that if you wanted to get the economy moving and keep it moving, you needed to err on the side of going big.</p></blockquote><p>Ah yes: "policy makers." Going Big.</p><p>Hey Dems! Here's a word to the wise. "Policy makers" don't know from nothing! And you have learned the wrong lesson from 2009. Here is my analysis of what went wrong.</p><blockquote><p><i>First</i>, it may very well be that there was no way to have a quick recovery from the Great Recession of 2008. The 2008 crash was a once-in-a-generation (we hope) disruption of the credit system. Rather like 1929. My guess is that you don't recover from that with a quick $787 stimulus bill. It takes longer than that for the various economic actors to recover from the hit they took in the Crash.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p><i>Second</i>, I remember reading, in the conservative media, that the Obama stimulus failed to stimulate the economy because it was mostly handouts to Democrat special interests, notably the teachers. In other words, it wasn't designed to restart the economy but rather to hand out loot to Dem supporters. For instance, in FY2010 federal education spending jumped $50 billion from $90 billion to $140 billion. You think that education spending "stimulates the economy?" I gotta bridge... </p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p><i>Third</i>, don't forget the reason for the Crash of 2008. It was because of half a century of Dem-driven easy credit for home mortgages, principally by laundering mortgages through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and using the credit of the federal government to price mortgage interest rates. And then there were the Liar Loans, and low-down loans to blacks and Hispanics -- who got hammered by the Great Recession. The debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went from nothing in 1938 to about 50 percent of GDP at the peak in 2008. If you think of the regular federal debt at about 100 percent of GDP, this means that Fannie and Freddie represent another huge chunk of national debt. Only it's sorta off-the-books.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p><i>Fourth</i>, the Crash was made into a real crash because Little Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, didn't do his job as "lender of last resort." He let Lehman Brothers go broke, whining that he didn't think he had the authority to bail them out. Ben, oh Ben.</p></blockquote><p>My point is, Democratic office-holders, and aides and staffers, and "policy makers" and media scribes, you screwed up in 2021 because you failed to learn the real lessons of 2008. Not to mention the bigger lesson that you really don't want to be screwing around with the credit system because you don't understand it.</p><p>But that's OK. Chances are we'll have a Republican president and Congress in 2025 with a real mandate to fix things. Because you guys screwed up. Not because you are corrupt, although you certainly are that. But because you didn't go your homework.</p><p>And one of the ways a political person does their homework is by talking to the opposition. Funny thing about oppositions. They tend not to have a view of events that excuses the party in power from its mistakes and stupidites.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-89739309995960710142022-06-10T13:40:00.000-07:002022-06-10T13:40:07.406-07:00Hispanics Joining the Middle Class and GOP<p>Back in the day, you'll remember, the Democrats were going to own the future, <i>The Emerging Democratic Majority</i>, courtesy of Judis and Teixeira. It would be composed of the educated, women, the young, and minorities.</p><p>I have a different theory, my reductive <a href="https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/2020/04/three-peoples-theory-in-brief.html">Three Peoples</a> theory, that says that the upper class of creatives and the credentialed tends to vote its interest with the Democrats, the middle class of responsibles that go to work and obey the law tends to vote Republican because its interest is a growing and stable economy, and the lower class of subordinates tends to vote Democrat because that's who is offering loot to the lower class.</p><p>If you walk around my überliberal neighborhood in north Seattle, the heartland of Rep. Pramila Jayapal's congressional district where she won 83 percent of the vote in 2020, you notice that there are a ton of Hispanic roofers and construction workers and yard-maintenance workers slaving away all day, every day. No blacks to be seen. OK, a couple.</p><p>In my racist-sexist-homophobic way, I interpret this to mean that Hispanics are working their way up into the middle class. And blacks are not.</p><p>Therefore I would say that we should expect Hispanics to be moving in the the Republican Party in battalion strength. But blacks, not so much.</p><p>Hey, I was writing about this <a href="https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/2014/12/forging-new-gop-majority.html">eight years ago</a> when the Republicans won Congress back from the Dems in Obama's second midterm. And what I said was that the Democrats were turning the Democratic Party into the Black Party. And that would alienate Hispanics and Asians (except for high-caste South Asians like Chair of the Progressive Caucus Jayapal). And there was this:</p><blockquote><p>Hispanics think <a href="http://diverseeducation.com/article/6086/">blacks are lazy</a>. That's when they are not actually <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/25/local/la-me-0126-compton-20130126">expelling blacks</a> from their neighborhood.</p></blockquote><p>Not to mention, I wrote, that liberals would not do themselves a favor with anti-police rhetoric. Because the middle class expects the police to protect them from lower class thugs, from the days of Dickens' Bill Sikes to today's gangbangers shooting into a crowd when they've been dissed. </p><p>Now comes Andrew Abbott at AMAC writing about "<a href="https://amac.us/the-vanishing-permanent-democrat-majority/">The Vanishing Permanent Democratic Majority</a>" and the "precipitous decline" in Biden support.</p><blockquote><p>Nowhere is this clearer than with Hispanic Americans, who now disapprove of the job that Joe Biden is doing as President by a whopping 60%-26% margin.</p></blockquote><p>And even black support is down from 85 percent to 63 percent.</p><p>The reason for this, of course, is that liberals have persuaded themselves that the Republican Party is a "white" party.</p><blockquote><p>The belief among liberal elites is that the Republican Party exists explicitly to service and promote the policies and principles of “white America” and that, since the 1960s, the party has been rooted in white isolationism, nativism, and resentment of minorities. Thus, as the country becomes more diverse, the white Republican vote will gradually be destroyed via diversity, or so the theory goes.</p></blockquote><p>As opposed to my theory that the Repuiblican Party is now the party of the ordinary middle class. Actully, I"d say that the Republican Party is the party of ordinary people whereas the Democratic Party is the party of "special people," special because of education, credentials, or victimhood.</p><p>And most of those victim are "fake" victims, dontcha know, from LGBT to corporate snowflakes to Muslims. They are either members of the ruling class in good standing or the pets, the Little Darlings, of the ruling class.</p><p>And, of course, if you are an ordinary middle class person you might get "resentment of minorities" that get the special care and feeding of the ruling class. But that would be wrong.</p><p>And let me tell you: if you have been noticed by the ruling class and declared to be a victim, and richly rewarded for voting Democrat, You Are Not A Victim, cupcake.</p><p>And then Trump. Liberals knew that Trump could never get minotiry votes. But he did, and then in 2020</p><blockquote><p>Not only had Trump held onto his minority support, but he actually won a more significant share of black male and Hispanic voters than he did the first time. </p></blockquote><p>As I say, there is no mystery or conspiracy theory needed to explain this. The Republican Party is the party of the ordinary middle class. And it looks like Hispanics are rapidly ascending, by hard work and enterprise, into the middle class. Ergo, they are voting Republican.</p><p> And, I suspect, Hispanics and to a lesser extent, blacks, are being royally screwed by the Biden inflation.</p><p>But don't tell Rep. Jayapal.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-30467242652217860982022-06-09T13:51:00.001-07:002022-06-09T13:51:07.024-07:00Philosophizing about he Next Regime<p>Everyone who isn't a deep-state liberal is thinking about how we ditch the present regime, which goes by the name of liberal democracy but is anything but.</p><p>Many of the alternative philosophies are efforts to imagine a new philosophy without thinking about the practical process of getting there. Zman <a href="https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=27564">criticizes</a> libertarianism and also the revival of the Catholic idea of "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integralism">integralism</a>" for this. As he says:</p><blockquote><p>Integralism is the principle that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society. </p></blockquote><p>But what if the majority of people aren't Catholics? Then you don't have a chance of basing society on a Catholic basis. Then Zman goes on to critique the history of the Right in the 20th century, even the deification of the Founders and their Constitution. The Consitution was a political compromise by practical politicians, he writes, not a sacred truth.</p><p>But the Constitution was very much a thing of its time, representing the rising bourgeoisie against the old regime of feudal monarchy.</p><p>In fact, I would say that the politics of the last 500 years has always involved a rising class wanting to take its rightful place in the public square and its power.</p><p>Let us consider Henry VII in England as simply a feudal faction beating up on the old regime and taking power.</p><p>What did the Tudors achieve? Well, they spawned the Elizabethen era that we regard, even now, with a golden glow.</p><p>But a century and a half later the English Civil War definitely involved the rising middle class, its Puritan ideology, and its refusal to pay "ship money" for the king's foreign advantures.</p><p>What did the Puritans achieve? Well they got the Dutch to invade and they taught the Brits how to finance a Second Hundred Years War against the French and make a mighty British Empire.</p><p>And the French Revolution definitely involved a rising class of thinkers and middle class inspired by another ideological movement, the Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu.</p><p>What did the French Revolution achieve? Well, it led to the end of France as the top dog in Europe. Sorry about that.</p><p>And the 20th century's socialism and administrative state definitely involves a rising class of would-be educated supervisors of society and the economy and the culture inspired by Marx and Fabianism and the idea that evolved, educated people should supervise the chaotic injustice of industrial capitalism. And teach the Robber Barons, the malefactors of great wealth and the economic royalists a lesson.</p><p>What did the evolved educated class achieve? I'd say two world wars, monstrous regimes in Russia and China, and a program of domestic lootinug unparalleted in human history. What else to you call a state spending 35-50 percent of GDP this year and every year on government loot and plunder?</p><p>You would think, wouldn't you, that there would be people starting to get restless unde the boot of the evolved, educated class, and you would be right.</p><p>I'd say that this is a rising movement of the ordinary middle class. We only really understand this movement through the pejoratives of the current ruling class, as "populists" and "racists" and "white oppressors" and "gun nuts." But what they are is ordinary middle class people with ordinary middle-class lives and they want a society and social norms that value ordinary middle-class people and their ordinary lives of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.</p><p>And I say that we have seen three presidencies in the US already that have represented these people: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. That is why all the right people have all agreed that Nixon was a monster, Reagan was an amiable dunce, and Trump was a Russian stooge. All agreed?</p><p>I say that the current woke-ism is actually a sign that the evolved, educated ruling class is in trouble. A ruling class that's firmly in the saddle doesn't have to resort to censorship and canceling and purging of heretics from the Cathedral of education and media. You only get reigns of terror and virtue and J6 Committee show trials when things are going wrong for the rulers. And they "cain't stand 'im" as a famous American philsopher once said.</p><p>But whatabout the Zman's concern for a ruling philosophy or political formula that the new regime will base its power upon?</p><p>Honestly, I don't know. But you know what I do think? I think that once the new regime is in place then all kinds of unconnected facts and people and ideas will come together in a new narrative. And it will all be obvious. And everyone will say that they saw it coming all along.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-56919809043851435372022-06-08T13:40:00.004-07:002022-06-08T13:40:21.780-07:00What Happens When We Don't Respect the Rulers<p>I am reading a gigantic history of the French Revolution, <i>Citizens</i> by Simon Schama, and right now I am in the middle of the events of 1789, just before the fall of the Bastille, where the Third Estate -- i.e. the middle class -- is testing its muscles against the other Estates of the Estates-General called by King Louis XVI to Do Something about gubmint revenue.</p><p>But I must admit I don't really get <i>why</i> the authority of the King has cratered, why the King can't just say Shut Up Peasants and make it stick like King Justin de Trudeau of Canada.</p><p>I suppose the reason is that, back in the 1780s everyone, from the princes of the realm down to the average lawyers, had read and learned and inwardly digested the essence of the Enlightenment -- chaps like Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Denis Diderot -- and therefore the medieval forms and processes of the French monarchy didn't have the authority to rule. Of course, maybe if they had a war to fight...</p><p>Now I am also reading a piece by Jeffrey A. Tucker at <i>Epoch Times</i> where he is going through the Come to Jesus moments of the last couple of years: "<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-pandemic-response-changed-my-thinking_4518635.html">How the Pandemic Response Changed My Thinking</a>" in several ways, as in</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><b>The Role of Information</b> It's not enough to have information out there, as in the internet. People can still grab the wrong idea and screw things up, from politicians to experts to the people.</li><li><b>Trust in Big Tech</b> Back in the day it seemed like Big Tech "had a libertarian ethos." Not any more, as Big Tech amplifies the regime narrative and "censorship and cancellation became the norm."</li><li><b>Administrative State Revealed</b> The Administrative State Rules! "At times, it seemed like the legislatures and even the courts were utterly powerless or too cowardly to do anything."</li><li><b>The Issue of Inequality</b> We have a "coercive social system that favored the professional class over the working class." Imagine having lockdowns during COVID if ordinary workers had a voice.Yeah, it's not the capitalists vs. the workers, but the credentialed vs. the workers.</li><li><b>The Mob</b> Think mask-shaming, etc. It teaches us that tyranny is "about a whole-of-society takeover by a manufactured mania."</li></ol><p>But, thinking back to the French Revolution, there obviously have to be several fractures in the body politic for "change" to occur.</p><p>Notice how our liberal friends use the rhetoric of revolution in their notion of "change" to refer to ordinary accumulation of power by the current ruling educated elite. We are not talking about that kind of "change," dear liberal friends. We are talking about anything that promotes helpless horror in the educated ruling class.</p><p>For instance, if this year we not only have Gov. DeSantis whacking Dis-en-ey for its wokiness by removing its special tax situation for Dis-en-ey World. I'm sure our liberal friends are in shock</p><p>And suppose the January 6 Committee hearings turn into a bust, and raise the wrong kind of questions, like just who were those people that seemed to encourage the crowd at the Capitol to enter the building but mysteriously have not spent the last year in the DC Gulag in solitary confinement? Could they have been FEDS? And just how many weapons were the "armed insurrectionists" wielding? As opposed to the chappie with a gun arrested early this morning close to the home of Justice Kavanaugh.</p><p>And suppose that Republicans win really, really big in November. Right now it seems that the conventional wisdom is that they will gain about 30 seats to yield a 40 seat majority. But suppose they win 60 seats. Or, Gaia forbid, <a href="https://www.christopherchantrill.com/midterm_summary.php?year=1900_2020&chart=midh&rank=Y">80 seats like in 1938</a>?</p><p>And suppose the inflation drags on and there's <i>another</i> housing crash. And a recession. On your watch, Joey.</p><p>And suppose American women all get to feeling that the government doesn't protect them?</p><p>And what if Elon Musk decides not to buy Twitter <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/08/elon-musk-twitter-bot-data/">because bots</a>?</p><p>Thing is: I really don't want everything to come unglued. Millions of people will suffer. And yet, usually there is no other way. Because there is no other way for the rulers to lose the Mandate of Heaven.</p><p>You'd think that wise rulers would know they were screwing up and have the decency to hand over the reins of power to someone else. But somehow they never do until it is too late. I wonder why.</p><p><br /></p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-83002285932028861052022-06-07T11:41:00.001-07:002022-06-07T11:41:59.392-07:00Prediction: The J6 Committee Hearings Won't Move the Needle<p>Let us concede that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Watergate_Committee">Watergate hearings of 1973</a> were a tactical masterstroke. They got rid of the monster populist Richard Nixon and all who sailed with him.</p><p>And then Democrats won the 1976 election, which would be a normal change election after two presidential terms with the other party in the White House.</p><p>Then the Democrats lost it in 1980 because stagflation (and actually probably because, a day late and a dollar short, the Fed was finally starting to fight inflation).</p><p>Stagflation. Gosh, that sounds familiar. I wonder why.</p><p>So tactically, the Dems won one in 1973. Strategically, it was a wash. And I would like to suggest that, maybe, if there hadn't been a Watergate hearings then Ronald Reagan would not have won in 1980. Just sayin'.</p><p>So, what exactly is the J6 Committee hearing all about? To blacken the Republican Party? To "get Trump?" To flush out all the lizards of the Trump administration? To stop the Proud Boys in their tracks? To win the next presidential election?</p><p>See, it would be one thing if Trump were still in office, and presiding over double-digit inflation, and, in the opinion of all right-thinking people, had completely messed up the COVID response. But you chaps got rid of him, by fair means or <i>2000 Mules</i> foul, back in November 2020. So your Dem partisans got the red meat they wanted already. And GOP partisans are all energized by the Big Lie -- you know, the one about the 2020 election begin completely above board, nothing to see here and if you object you are an armed insurrectionist.</p><p>Oh, and this just in from <i>The New York Times</i>. "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/business/media/fox-jan-6-hearings.html">Fox News Doesn't Plan to Carry Jan. 6 Hearings Live</a>." Waat? How Dare They!</p><p>And that's another thing to consider, Dem partisans. Back in 1973, all good people were shocked, shocked by the Watergate break in and coverup. And there was only one narrative available, on CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS. Today, GOP voters don't believe a word they hear from MSNBC and CNN and <i>The New York Times</i>. And with the advent of cable and streaming, people just aren't watching the three networks any more. Not like they used to. They have important streaming series to binge on.</p><p>Thse other thing, which I am sure you strategic geniuses have all thought about, is that if you "get Trump" with the J6 Committee then you have cleared the path for Ron DeSantis in 2024. Are you really sure you want that, in preference to having DeSantis and Trump duke it out? Frankly, I'd say that you don't want DeSantis to be the GOP nominee in 2024. That guy seem to have a tactical and strategic sense that even Bismarck would respect.</p><p>And there is this. When gas prices have doubled in a year, I dare say that the average "punter" -- as the Brits say -- isn't that excercised about armed insurrectionists burning down the Capitol. He's worried about the cost of filling up his F-150 truck.</p><p>And I'd say that beating up the oppostion is not good politics. Not in the long term.</p><p>See.you in November, old chap.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-49874977546487809272022-06-06T17:19:00.003-07:002022-06-06T17:19:49.057-07:00When They Start to Cheat<p>When do people start to cheat, financially? Typically, not till they are going broke. When do they start cheating politically? When their perfect plan isn't working any more.</p><p>So when our Democratic friends spend half a billion dollars getting ballots to the ballot drop-off box, and when Michael Sussmann walks free but Peter Navarro gets put in chains. And when Democratic voters think that the Republican Party is no longer a party but a rebellion. And when the Census Bureau suddenly discovers <a href="https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/06/06/there-was-huge-mistake-in-the-2020-census-guess-which-party-it-favored-n1603315">a big mistake</a> in the 2020 Census that just happens to benefit one party in several states...</p><p>Well, it all adds up, and it adds up to Democrats realizing that they are in a heap of trouble, going broke, politically. Of course, we are talking about politics here, and "there is no politics without an enemy." So, the trouble is not that Democrats have gone bat-sh*t crazy on climate and race and crime and spending, and realize: wow, we really screwed up. No, it's the other guys that did it: the climate deniers, the racist-sexist-homophobes, the gun lobby, and billionaires that don't pay taxes.</p><p>And it is fascinating for me to read about various Democratic individuals and groups that have literally No Idea how they got into such a mess.</p><p>You could say that it just shows the problem with totalitarianism. When you combine religion and politics it means that every political act is sanctioned by God (or your secular equivalent). So of course none of our political actions are wrong or evil or stupid. Because we are talking about God's or History's Truth here.</p><p>Anyway, the whole point of the Separation of Powers, and the separation of religion from politics, and the idea of an independent judiciary, and the idea that you really don't want a big government that spends 35 percent of GDP, and all the rest, is that: what if the government, the priesthood, the political judges, the economic czars get it wrong? How do you fix it?</p><p>That's the place America is at today. Our ruler are absolutely determined and convinced that the Big Problems are climate change, that requires a complete revolution in energy use, and Systemic Racism, that requires the complete politicizing of education and employment.</p><p>But what if they are wrong? What if transforming the energy economy is just as disastrous as Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward, in which, it is estimated, 30 million Chinese died of starvation? When would we know enough to put a stop to it? How would we stop the political freight train in time?</p><p>What if fighting System Racism sets up a race war as the people on the losing end decide they are not going to take it any more?</p><p>I just get the feeling that none of the headline people -- or their aides and staffers -- have any idea other than defeating the enemy. That's what people in politics do. That is all they do. That's the only thing they know how to do.</p><p>If there's a glorious victory, then history is written by the victors, and it is all about how Washington or Lincoln or FDR or Obama saved the world. If there's a humiliating defeat, then the erstwhile leaders and their lieutenants of the <i>ancien régime </i>are the most evil monsters that ever were. And the history is written, again, by the victors, whoever they are. But whoever they are, they just saved the planet.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-25751449485564441712022-06-03T13:56:00.000-07:002022-06-03T13:56:06.015-07:00What the Heck is Politics About Anyway?<p>Here's a piece about Blair and Clinton and how <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/02/bill-clinton-tony-blair-warning-for-progressives-00036616">brilliant they were back in the day</a>, by John F. Harris at <i>Politico</i>. He remembers covering a joint press conference of the two at Downing Street in the Nineties.</p><blockquote><p>I was a White House reporter at the time, and the news conference remains one of my vivid memories in six years covering Clinton’s presidency. </p></blockquote><p>Hmm. I wonder why that would be? Anyway, here's what he thinks of Blair and Clinton and their "Third Way."</p><blockquote><p>The problem with traditional liberalism was that it was stuck in a rut — more responsive to its interest groups than the broader public interest, insufficiently attuned to the imperative of economic growth. The problem with the post-Reagan, post-Thatcher right was that it had turned brutish and backward-looking — enmeshed in racial and sexual prejudice, indifferent to the challenge of expanding opportunity to people who didn’t already count as society’s winners.</p></blockquote><p>And today, 30 years after those heady days -- for John F. Harris, at least -- things are dark.</p><blockquote><p>Blair and Clinton were describing the world as a fundamentally hopeful place. Now we have had nearly a generation of real-world experience with that century — marked by war, climate change, virulent nationalism, tribalistic identity politics and a malevolent media ecosystem trafficking in misinformation, commercialized contempt and nihilism.</p></blockquote><p>I was reading a piece a couple days ago with a similar cast, about the glories of the politics of defending Social Security and securing rights for workers. </p><p>OK, so let's do a counternarrative. Suppose the whole Blair Clinton "Third Way" was a lie, a clumsy attempt to rescue the big-government welfare state from oblivion. How would we know? For instance, what has the Democratic Party or the British Labour Party done recently about, say, the white working class allegedly "dying of despair?" They certainly don't count as "society's winners." But what has the progressive world done for them lately, except stigmatize them as white oppressors and supremacists and racists?</p><p>Suppose the generation of "war, climate change, virulent nationalism" etc. is a consequence of the collapse of the lie of Blair and Clinton? War? Well, was beating up the Muslims in the Middle East such a good idea? Back in the day, progessives and "Third Way" chappies were down with that. Climate change? Er, could you show me just how climate has changed, significantly, truthfully, so that it required a gigantic government program to save the world? Virulent nationalism? Do you think it might have something to do with Enoch Powell's judgement that the European Union could not work because it has no <i>demos</i>, no European people? Thus the peoples of Europe rally around, and identify with, the nation states to which they feel they belong. The problem is not the peoples of Europe; the problem is chaps like John F. Harris that sneer at nation states and thus naturally sneer at nationalism and patriotism as "virulent."</p><p>Suppose the glorious fight for Social Security and the rights of workers has resulted in the "<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-are-blue-collar-americans-dying-of-despair/2021/11/28/4a469f10-5054-11ec-83d2-d9dab0e23b7e_story.html">dying of despair</a>" of which we've heard tell? Because pensions are thing that ought to be outside politics, and workers' rights mean nothing if there isn't an economy to produce products and services that can provide the economic basis of worker prosperity.</p><p>Let's take another tack. How would the world be different if the progressive movement and rights for workers and Bismarckian pensions had never happened?</p><p>Or let's put it this way. Suppose that the government enacted rights for agricultural workers in 1400? Do you think it would have made a blind bit of difference over the next 400 years as peasants starved with the end of the agricultural era up until starving peasants started moving into the the cities <i>because that's were the jobs were</i>?</p><p>Suppose, after passing the Social Security Act in 1935 the US had got into World War II <i>and lost the war</i>. Do you think that there would have been any Social Security checks for old geezers like me? Suppose the Ukrainians lose their war against Putin's Russia? Do you think that workers' rights and the "Third Way" will make a blind bit of difference to the vengeance of Putin on Ukraine and the Ukrainians?</p><p>The reason that the Labour Party spawned Tony Blair and the Democratic Party spawned Bill Clinton was that the voters hated the lefty politics that came before them. So Blair and Clinton muddied the waters and said they were new and improved, a Third Way between left and right, New Democrats that had learned their lessons from the Reagan years.</p><p>But, of course, after Blair and after Clinton the two parties returned to their roots. And their roots are that politics is the way to save the world. And anyone that opposes their brilliant ideas to save the world are their enemies and must be destroyed.</p><p>Yes, politics requires an enemy. If you are going to save the workers then you promise to fight against the employers. If you are going to save women then you promise to fight the patriarchs. If you are going to save the blacks then you promise to fight the white racists. If you are going to save the gays then you promise to fight the homophobes. And that is all.</p><p>But does all this fighting actually help the helpless victims on behalf of whom the fight is joined?</p><p>Probably not. But don't mention that to John F. Harris or any of your wokey friends.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-44465733358247381252022-06-02T09:03:00.000-07:002022-06-02T09:03:40.477-07:00Economics 075 for Uncle Joey<p>President Joe Biden is pretty good at preposterous stories about his storied past. With the latest being that he <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/joe-biden-says-he-applied-to-naval-academy-dates-dont-add-up/">almost went</a> to the Naval Academy.</p><p>One thing I haven't yet heard from him was how he schooled Milton Friedman back in college when little Joey took Economics 101.</p><p>Today I am <a href="https://townhall.com/columnists/veroniquederugy/2022/06/02/when-will-magical-economic-thinking-from-biden-and-co-end-n2608110">reading</a> Veronique de Rugy on Biden & Co's "magical economics." It's a good line, because if you have half a brain you have to think: what was the BIden team thinking? Maybe they needed a dose of Economics 075 from yours truly. I call this Economics 075 to accord with the number of years I have been on Earth and how that experience has taught me a lesson or two.</p><p>Lesson One: Money, money, money. If you look at the time series of <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS">M2 money</a> at St. Louis Fed's FRED database, you will see that M2 has gone from $15.5 trillion at the end of 2019 to $22 trillion on May 2, 2022. That is up 42 percent in less that 2 1/2 years. Can you spell inflation, Joey?</p><p>Lesson Two: Spend till you Bend. Federal spending in FY 2019 was $4.4 trillion. In FY 2022 it is budgeted at $5.8 trillion. That is up <a href="https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_2016_2026USb_F0f">32 percent in three years</a>. You really think that increasing spending makes America more prosperous, instead of just shoveling money at Democratic voters? I gotta bridge, Joey.</p><p>Lesson Three: "Incredible Transition." President Joe Biden has represented the sharply higher fossil-fuel energy prices as part of an "incredible transition" to clean energy. Personally, based on my <a href="https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/search/label/four%20laws">Four Laws</a>, I believe that such a government-driven transformation of energy production and use is bound to end in disaster. Because, as Stalin and Mao and other lefties have demonstrated in double-blind experiments, Socialism Does Not Work. And nor does any top-down economic policy. The market economy, the social cooperation between producers and consumers, is a discovery process that changes direction every single hour of every single day. Top down ukases never work. They are useful only in wars, which always result in a staggering net loss of human welfare.</p><p>I believe that the social experiment of the last century, an experiment in the top-down supervision of humans by educated visionaries and expert administrators, is proving to be a great folly that has visited, in its worst aspects in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, unimaginable horrors and miseries. And in the case of the western democracies it has birthed a society of jolly good fun for educated folk but not so much fun for the ordinary middle class, and a definite downer for the lower class, where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.</p><p>I think that the administration of Uncle Joey shows that the educated ruling class really has No Idea what a mess it has created, and that the worst is yet to come. It has No Idea that almost everything it proposes is most likely to Make Things Worse for ordinary people and crater the lives of the lower orders.</p><p>So my Three Point Plan for America and the world is:</p><p><i>First</i>: get back to a money tied to gold or some other entity that can't be manipulated by government. Except during and after a war. Because post-war deflation is Not Good.</p><p><i>Second</i>: reduce government spending to a maximum of 20 percent of GDP, with most "entitlement programs" replaced by genuine savings programs by and for individuals.</p><p><i>Third</i>: Stop pretending that the ruling class has a clue about anything from climate to racism. Return to a society where law is not something manipulated by the Supreme Court and religion is not ruling-class woke ideology.</p><p>Is this Economics and this modest Three Point Progam too much to ask of our august rulers?</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-26897070592172352622022-06-01T09:23:00.004-07:002022-06-01T09:23:56.605-07:00The Great Liberal Forgetting about Law<p>The whole point of law and the legal system, on my understanding, is that is replaces the old system, which was the Hatfield-McCoy system of revenge.</p><p>In the old system it was my kindred against your kindred, an eye for an eye. Revenge for a perceived hurt. And retribution.</p><p>Then there was the good old Saxon tradition of <i>Wergild</i>. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weregild">La Wik</a>.</p><blockquote><p>[Wergild] was a precept in some archaic legal codes whereby a monetary value was established for a person's life, to be paid as a fine or as compensatory damages to the person's family if that person was killed or injured by another.</p></blockquote><p>I suppose you could call the <i>Wergild</i> system "reparations." Has a familiar ring to it.</p><p>In other words, at some point the principle of revenge and retribution was formalized into an informal legal code. Progress, if you see what I mean.</p><p>The whole point of the legal system is to remove the temptation to go to war over a perceived wrong, because all parties can trust the legal system to be unbiased.</p><p>Now let's talk about US politics.</p><p>Back in the day, we were all taught to believe that the Nixon Watergate saga was the worst thing since the assassination of <i>Julius Caesar</i> by Brutus & Co.: "Speak, hands for me." And I admit, I drank the KoolAid back then.</p><p>But as Geoff Shephard writes at <i>The American Spectator</i>, it's <a href="https://spectator.org/sussmann-bias-d-c-juries/">a funny thing</a> but all the Nixon conspirators that were tried in DC were convicted, while the chaps tried elsewhere were not.</p><blockquote><p>Republicans don’t stand a chance of acquittal in a politicized case brought to court in D.C. This was clearly demonstrated almost 50 years ago in the Watergate prosecutions, where — with two notable exceptions — every case tried in D.C. resulted in a conviction and every case tried outside in an acquittal.</p></blockquote><p>Now we have the words of the forewoman at the Sussmann trial, where lawyer Sussmann was accused of lying to the FBI about who was employing him.</p><p>After the verdict, the <a href="https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/05/31/sussmann-juror-is-talking-and-its-an-eye-opener-n572978">jury forewoman</a>, who declined to give her name, spoke to the media. She said charges should never have been filed against Mr. Sussmann in the first place.</p><blockquote><p>“I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” she said of the case. “There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.” </p></blockquote><p> Bless Her Heart, as the ladies say down South.</p><p>But, as the DC juries on the J6 defendants have decided, mostly, you can't be too careful with "armed insurrectionists" getting waved into the Capitol by thoughtful police officers. There are, apparently, no bigger things than the horror of invading the sacred precincts of Congress to do a bit of site-seeing.</p><p>And by the way, just what were various FBI assets up to on January 6 in and around the Capitol? Inquiring minds would like to know.</p><p>The problem here is that our liberal friends, encouraged by their liberal law professors and their noble liberal activists -- not to mention a Supreme Court that believes that the law should follow the liberal world view -- have No Idea what the law is all about.</p><p>The point about law is that it is there to adjudicate disputes in a dispassionate fashion so that passionate partisans can't impose their partisan will on the rest of the nation. Because they are right and the enemy <i>du jour</i> is wrong.</p><p>The whole question of using the legal system to help your friends and beat up your enemies obviously came into sharp focus with the five year effort to Get Trump.</p><p>Not because Democratic partisans are fools and knaves, although they are. But because when the other guys reckon they can't get a fair deal in the legal system then they will eventually try to overturn the system.</p><p>And you really don't want that, dear liberal friends, because, in the wise words of an apochryphal <i>Washington Post</i> headline:<i> </i>"End of the World: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit."</p><p>You do care about women and minorities, right?</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-68243296665594402682022-05-31T09:07:00.003-07:002022-05-31T09:09:44.723-07:00Shootings, Gun Control, Escaping Arrest<p>Is it the best of times, or the worst of times? Are mass shootings a verdict on <a href="https://www.takimag.com/article/new-shooter-new-shooter-new-shooter/">everything</a> from our gun culture to broken families to untreated mental illness? Or on the failure of the liberal welfare/administrative state? Would making guns illegal save lives? Are state patrol officers finding that a lot of drivers <a href="https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-floyd-effect-part-62-more-bad-drivers-flooring-it-when-cops-try-to-pull-them-over/">won't pull over</a> for a traffic stop?</p><p>Are mass shootings a sign of the times, or are they notable because in our modern era, there just isn't as much homicide as in the good old days? Do we expect the government to make us safe, irregardless, whereas in the old days people died. For all kinds of reasons, at any age?</p><p>When liberals react to the latest shooting -- but not to the average <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2022/05/31/46-shot-during-memorial-weekend-in-mayor-lori-lightfoots-chicago/">weekend</a> in Chicago -- are they trying to Do Something? Are they attacking The Enemy, white males? Or are they trying to show women that they, the liberals, are doing everything they can to protect them?</p><p>And how about this, <a href="https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-floyd-effect-part-62-more-bad-drivers-flooring-it-when-cops-try-to-pull-them-over/">from Steve Sailer</a>:</p><blockquote><p>Since January of this year, more than 900 drivers have failed to stop for a Washington State Patrol trooper trying to pull them over.</p></blockquote><p>But this has nothing to do with recent legislation from the Democratic Washington State Legislature.</p><blockquote><p>Strachan and others in law enforcement connect the increase in failures-to-yield to passage last year of House Bill 1054, a sweeping police tactics law that, among other things, barred high-speed pursuits except in very limited circumstances. The law was part of a package of police reforms majority Democrats passed in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and other high-profile police killings — reforms aimed at addressing racial disproportionality in policing.</p></blockquote><p>You know. I think that 97.2 percent of all politics is just virtue-signaling and posturing and conceit from the ruling class.</p><p>After all, courtiers don't wear silk breeches and silk stockings any more. How then are they going to stand out from the crowd and demonstrate their lofty specialness?</p><p>And then there is the larger point, that politics is all about the enemy, so if you are a politician you are nothing unless you are valiantly fighting the enemy. Any enemy.</p><p>The enemy can be a foreign enemy, the dastardly Putin. Or it can be a local enemy, the dastardly "gun lobby." Or it can be an existential enemy: climate change.</p><p>But "there is no politics without an enemy."</p><p>I have this crazy notion that we are in the Autumn of the Political Age, because we don't really have Huns and Mongols and Nazis to fight. We don't really have gangs and criminals to fight, except in lower class Democratic cities. And, really, there is nothing we can do about existential perils like climate change.</p><p>But a politician needs an enemy, like a drunk needs a pick-me-up.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-88558066890783153982022-05-30T13:15:00.001-07:002022-05-30T13:16:18.923-07:00How the Next Regime Dishes the Lefties<p>In the last weeks there have been a lot of "far-right" thinkers pondering about the failure of conservatism. Here's the Zman <a href="https://www.takimag.com/article/watching-the-bums-fight/">today</a> up at <i>Taki's</i>. Conservatism is dead. So let's conduct an autopsy.</p><blockquote><p>One reason we conduct autopsies is to better understand what to avoid in the future. The same is true of these debates going on within what is left of conservatism. This <a href="https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/21/remain-calm-all-is-well-how-not-to-save-the-republic/">dustup</a> between William Voegeli and Glenn Ellmers is a good example.</p></blockquote><p>I did a <a href="https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/lets_talk_red_meat_instead_of_word_salad.html">piece</a> criticizing Voegeli and Ellmers at <i>Amerian Thinker.</i></p><p>One reason conservatism failed, I think, is that it was merely defending itself. But you have to go on offense, for "offense is the best defense."</p><p>Or, any politics must have an enemy. And what do you do with an enemy? You go out and defeat it.</p><p>This has been the strength of the left since Marx. There's always an enemy. First it was the capitalists and or the bourgeoisie. Then it was Southern racists. Now it is the ordinary white middle class, the white oppressors of which you've heard tell.</p><p>So I say that the new politics needs to be an expanding middle. The ordinary middle class are the good guys; the pointy-headed intellectuals and the "experts agree" and the wokey activists are the bad guys. In any politics we must decide who are our friends are and who is the enemy.</p><p>In the next regime, our friends are any people that come join us in celebrating the ordinary arc of human life, people who want to wive and thrive, get married have children, work a decent job, and leave a little for the next generation. We say to the lower class: you could be our friends, and we will look after you.</p><p>Our enemy is <a href="https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/2014/02/trouble-in-cathedral.html">the Cathedral</a>, the educated class that has spent the last 50 years making war on the middle class. They must be beaten, despoiled, and humiliated. And don't forget the lamentation of their women.</p><p>How do we beat them? I'd say it starts with demolishing the current education system. First, we replace the government K-12 system with vouchers, so parents send their kids to the school of their choice. Then we attack occupational licensing and credentialism. Then we demolish the universities. Universities used to be the place where the ruling class trained the priests for the state church. Today universities are the place where the ruling class teaches the kiddies to hate their country, hate their history, and hate the middle class.</p><p>Let's do the numbers on education. RIght now, <a href="https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2022USbn_23bs2n">total government spending on education is $1.3 trillion</a>. Let's say that the population under 25 is 28 percent of 330 million. If we divvy up the $1.3 trillion that adds up to $14,000 in vouchers per kiddie. Wow, that's real money, especially if the moms in the neighborhood get together to create a group homeschool.</p><p>But whatabout the teachers, the professors, the administrators, the DEI specialists? What will happen to them? No problem. They will still have jobs. Providing they teach the kiddies what the parents want them to teach, because vouchers. Of course those educationists that are rabid lefties and LBGT groomers, well, they will have to change the cut of their jib. Maybe they could get <a href="https://digg.com/video/mcdonalds-pov-view-lunch-rush">jobs at McDonalds</a>.</p><p>But whatabout science and research? Perfectly simple. We reward billionaires that fund research with medals and tax rebates.</p><p>But maybe we can save a bunch on education by implementing my plan of apprenticeships for everyone that isn't going to be a physicist or a philosopher. The whole point of apprenticeships is for young'uns to get paid for doing something useful while they are learning to be useful.</p><p>And whaddya know, there's an outfit called <a href="https://discoverpraxis.com/">Praxis</a> that's pushing apprenticeship as an alternative to college.</p><p>Whatabout dishing the credentialists, from lawyers to physicians? I would say that any organization that issues credentials has to accept unlimited liability for the errors of its credentialees. So law schools and state bar associations and medical schools and medical associations will be liable for the mistakes of the folks that they have declared to be ready for prime time.</p><p>Yep, I suspect that these special interests are not too interested in anything more scary than keeping the low-renters out of their sacred precincts.</p><p>Yes, but how do we know whether our doctor or lawyer -- or auto mechanic -- is competent? Hey, I know. How about a combination of liability insurance and a ratings system -- like eBay and Etsy and Amazon and TripAdvisor? You think?</p><p>Then there is climate change. With President Biden talking about high gas prices as an "<a href="https://nypost.com/2022/05/23/biden-praises-gas-prices-as-part-of-incredible-transition/">incredible transition</a>" and Democratic politicians all over the place putting bans on natural gas hookups for new construction, I'd say we are getting to a place where we can say that climatistas are the enemy of the ordinary middle class: enemies of affordable energy, enemies of personal transportation, enemies of a safe place to raise your children, enemies of comfort: indeed enemies of the ordinary middle class.</p><p>We say to the educated class: Go Away, or you will regret it.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-83999089397153426352022-05-27T13:18:00.001-07:002022-05-27T13:18:18.068-07:00Don't Forget, There Must Be an Enemy<p>It's always annoying when, after a shooting, our liberal friends all line up to blame guns, gun owners, the "gun lobby," and racists and whatever else moves.</p><p>Then there are the conspiracy theorists on our side who impute all kinds of sinister motives to our rulers. For instance, it turns out that <a href="https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/05/27/authorities-investigating-retired-federal-agent-having-contact-with-buffalo-shooter-before-attack/">FEDS were interacting</a> with the Buffalo shooter.</p><p>It's easy to imput malevolence in our liberal friends, but I don't think so. I think they are just stupid, and when you are stupid you naturally try to cover up your mistakes and blame the other guy -- who is, after all, the enemy.</p><p>The fact is that when something bad is happening, we expect our governments to protect us from the danger. That applies whether the something bad is a crazed shooter, a crazed Putin, a nasty outbreak of inflation, a failed harvest, or a shortage of infant formula.</p><p>Most of the time, our government can't help us.</p><p>Where do crazed shooters come from? Do they come from the availability of guns? From the absence of fathers in many homes? From various mood-altering drugs, legal and illegal? Do they come from the media's endless publicity of disasters, showing angry youngsters how to make a name from themselves? Do they come from the collapse of the authority of parents and neighbors over the past century? Is it a consequence of the overabundance of female teachers in the government schools?</p><p>And is the government's response ever serious, or just a need to be seen to Do Something?</p><p>If you accept my notion, from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and from Curtis Yarvin that politics is all about the enemy, then you can see that government is always in a position where it must be seen to be Doing Something about the enemy <i>du jour</i>. Because if the government is going out and defeating the enemy, what's the point?</p><p>And if the government failed to defeat the enemy, then what's the use of government?</p><p>No. You are not allowed to think such thoughts!</p><p>I read Michael Barone today inverting the notion of Veblen's <i>Theory of the Leisure Class</i>. Today, he said, we have a situation where politics is the <a href="https://www.nysun.com/article/republican-primary-voters-repudiate-trump-as-gop-enthusiasm-bodes-well-for-midterms">leisure of the theory class</a>, that anyone who is anyone gets their status from some political appointment. And, I would say, any position in the vast universe of government and its satellite organizations is a lot easier to obtain than success in business. In fact, the theory class is almost all courtiers. That's why they are right on with all the hot issues from climate change to systemic racism. Courtiers are nothing if not followers of fashion. And not just in silk stockings.</p><p>Maybe we are starting to see the fundamental weakness of the welfare and administrative state. It's one thing when the government is just in charge of repeling boarders, keeping out the Huns and the Mongols. That's a pretty simple concept. But when you have expanded your mandate to include everything from pensions to health care and tasking the police with defending elementary schools then you have a bunch more things that could go wrong. And because we are talking about government things do go wrong. A lot.</p><p>But if something goes wrong it must be the politician's fault, right?</p><p>You can see why politicians have to be expert at blaming other people for their mistakes. They must do that or resign. And who wants to resign, Nancy Pelosi, age 80? </p><p>The best people to blame are the supporters of the Outer Party. I mean: if they were decent people they would be members of the Inner Party and down with the ruling-class agenda, right?</p><p>I take another position. I say that anything the government does is bound to be a mess and a failure. That's illustrated by the Four Laws:</p><blockquote><p>Socialism cannot work because prices.<br />Administration cannot work because bandwidth.<br />Regulation cannot work because "regulatory capture."<br />Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.</p></blockquote><p>What does this mean? It means that top-down government only works for sending young men to their deaths in battle. Everything else is too complicated for a top-down hierarchy to succeed.</p><p>And then there are the Germans. They discovered in WWI that top-down didn't work in the military either. Authority had to be pushed as far down as possible. You didn't just march across No Mans Land with bagpipes playing. You snuck across, from shell-hole to shell-hole, trying to be inconspicuous, and you had to rely on some corporal to make it work.</p><p>That's my line on government failure. What did you expect, cupcake?</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-4363840628069524242022-05-26T14:30:00.000-07:002022-05-26T14:30:48.831-07:00The Fatal Conceit of the Schwabs and Soroses etc.<p>Yesterday I blogged about <a href="https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-world-according-to-george-soros.html">dear old George Soros</a>, speculator and funder extraordinaire, and his <a href="https://www.georgesoros.com/2022/05/24/remarks-delivered-at-the-2022-world-economic-forum-in-davos/">speech</a> to Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum at the meeting of the private jets in Davos, Switzerland.</p><p>Klaus Schwab <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/davos-2022-klaus-schwab-trust-based-and-action-oriented-cooperation/">opened the conference</a> patting the fly-private worthies on the back for their wisdom and excellence.</p><blockquote><p>Our multiple collaborative initiatives will drive progress by strengthening global and regional cooperation; by preserving nature and fighting against climate change; by developing new economic and social policies; by accelerating responsible ESG industry transformation, and by using the disruptive technologies such as AI, blockchain, and quantum computing, for the benefit of society.</p></blockquote><p>The thing about this is that it is word salad, that nicely coordinates with what the rest of the educated global elite is thinking and wants to do. It imagines itself as a benign supervisor of the world, soothing its passions and directing it on the right path.</p><p>But Schwab is probably wrong. His ideas will probably die a painful death.</p><p>For instance, my guess is that "fighting climate change" is going to turn out as a gigantic mistake that may turf the current ruling class out of power. I am reading a detailed history of the French Revolution -- Simon Schama's <i>Citizens</i> -- and it mentions the critical importance of spiraling bread prices in early 1789. Ordinary people wanted the King to Do Something about it. Hello spiraling gas prices which President Biden calls an "<a href="https://nypost.com/2022/05/23/biden-praises-gas-prices-as-part-of-incredible-transition/">incredible transition</a>" to a post fossil fuel future.</p><p>And I think that "developing new economic and social policies" will probably be policies that seem nice and cosy to the global elite, but not to the ordinary punter.</p><p>For comparison, in 1787 the Frenchies had an Assembly of Notables to decide what to do about the finances of the French government. All very sensible, but then came July 13, 1788 and a monstrous hailstrom that took out the grain crops in France. Then followed a winter, the worst since 1709. The four-pound loaf went from 8 sous in summer 1787 to 15 sous in February 1789. You already know what happened next.</p><p>And I think that "responsible ESG industry transformation" will turn out to be a dead letter as the economy reels from the current inflation and gets completely transformed into something that nobody expected, least of all the fly-private barons of Davos.</p><p>It is, as Hayek wrote in his final book, a <i>Fatal Conceit</i> to think that you and yours can design and construct the political and economic order. Let alone the moral order! The world is the result of billions of experiments -- vegetable, fungus, animal, and even human -- that worked. It's odd that the official narrative accepts this with regard to Nature, but not with regard to human society. Let's take Hayek's words at the beginning of <i>The Fatal Conceit</i>.</p><blockquote><p>To understand our civilization, one must appreciate that [it] resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely <i>moral</i> practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection... of those groups that happened to follow them.</p></blockquote><p>Our world is full of Fatal Conceits, of which the late lockdowns, the recent baby formula crisis, and the airline pilot shortage, and spiraling inflation are merely the ones we can see with our own eyes.</p><p>Another way of looking at it is to say that any number of things may go wrong for us humans. Obviously we can't prepare for all of them. And we can't decide which of them really will go wrong, and which we ought to prepare for. Because ten-to-one, the actual thing that goes wrong will be the thing we didn't think of. And all the preparations for the emergencies that didn't happen will probably have taken resources away from the effort to deal with the thing that actually did go wrong.</p><p>Another way of saying this is that humans have survived and flourished by adapting to changing conditions. When something goes wrong, we all pitch it to fix it. If we succeed, then we survive to live another day. If we don't succeed... Well, every story is a survivor story. The prisoners that died in the Kolyma goldfields, in the Holodomor, in the Great Leap Forward, in the dearth of 1789 in France: they are gone, and very few of their stories will be told.</p><p>For instance, my Dad left Russia in 1918 at the age of 16, just as the Bolshevik revolution was turning nasty. I wonder what happened to his school friends at the German speaking school he attended in St. Petersburg. My Dad's Russian mother escaped to England, and so did her sister. But what about their relatives?</p><p>There is a reason why most novels have a happy ending.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6742937789480545855.post-31758387510806913572022-05-25T14:18:00.007-07:002022-05-26T12:24:07.535-07:00The World According to George Soros<p>One of the questions I have about the modern world is about George Soros. He says he believes in the "open society" described by Karl Popper in <i>The Open Society and its Enemies</i>. And Soros was actually a student of Popper back in the late 1940s while a student at the London School of Economics.</p><p>My problem is that I don't see how a genuine follower of Karl Popper would be funding lefty activists and "Soros DAs." For instance, according to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemies">La Wik</a>:</p><blockquote><p>Popper indicts Plato, Hegel, and Marx as totalitarian for relying on historicism to underpin their political philosophies.</p></blockquote><p>So why then does Soros finance so many lefty activists, followers of Marx? I don't get it.</p><p>Anyway, George Soros gave a speech on May 24 at the gathering of the private jets at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland and he has thoughtfully provided the text at <a href="https://www.georgesoros.com/2022/05/24/remarks-delivered-at-the-2022-world-economic-forum-in-davos/">georgesoros.com</a>. Do his remarks help me understand him? Maybe. He begins thus:</p><blockquote><p>Russia invaded Ukraine. This has shaken Europe to its core. The European Union was established to prevent such a thing from happening.</p></blockquote><p>Really? The EU was intended to stop Russian aggression? I thought that was NATO's job. He continues.</p><blockquote><p>The world has been increasingly engaged in a struggle between two systems of governance that are diametrically opposed to each other: open society and closed society. Let me define the difference as simply as I can. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state.</p></blockquote><p>Jolly good show, old chap. Then he continues:</p><blockquote><p>Other issues that concern all of humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to that struggle. </p></blockquote><p>Oh really. Notice what he is saying? He just said that the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual, but then tells us that "fighting pandemics and climate change... maintaining global institutions" are almost as important.</p><p>Now I would say that if protecting the freedom of the individual is the role of the state then all the fun stuff like fighting pandemics and climate change is a buncha baloney. Because if you are in a fight against a pandemic or against climate change it means that the freedom of the individual takes a back seat to the prosecution of the war. And of course, if we good chaps of the open society are necessarily committed to fighting the closed society -- Russia and China, according to Soros -- then the freedom of the individual takes a back seat to that armed struggle as well.</p><p>Soros was there in the 1980s with his Open Society Foundation to help end communism, and the 1990s was a heady time. But then came 9/11.</p><blockquote><p>After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the tide began to turn against open societies. Repressive regimes are now in the ascendant and open societies are under siege. Today China and Russia present the greatest threat to open society. </p></blockquote><p>But why? Digital technology and AI. "AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies." You mean like social media censoring anything that challenges the ruling class "narrative" as disinformation and misinformation and the abortive Disinformation Governance Board right here in the good old USA?</p><p>And yet, AI is not turning out so well in China, as President XI has locked down the whole country to fight the COVID Omicron variant. Why did he do that? Soros says:</p><blockquote><p>Xi harbors a guilty secret. He never told the Chinese people that they had been inoculated with a vaccine that was designed for the original Wuhan variant and offers very little protection against new variants. </p></blockquote><p> Really? But guess what. The whole Ukraine thing is giving Europeean leaders an idea. They see an opportunity to bind their nations into a federated Europe.</p><blockquote><p>They wanted to use the invasion of Ukraine to promote greater European integration, so that what Putin is doing can never happen again. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Enrico Letta, leader of Partito Democratico, proposed a plan for a partially federated Europe. The federal portion would cover key policy areas. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>In the federal core, no member state would have veto power. In the wider confederation member states could join “coalitions of the willing” or simply retain their veto power. Mario Draghi endorsed Letta’s plan.</p></blockquote><p>Really? Well, bless my buttons. And imagine how the freedom of the individual will fare in this new federated European state. I wonder if there will be elections for the <i>capo di tutti capi</i> in this new federated state.</p><p>But it gets worse. Guess what is suffering as a result of the Ukraine war?</p><blockquote><p>While the war rages, the fight against climate change has to take second place. Yet the experts tell us that we have already fallen far behind, and climate change is on the verge of becoming irreversible. That could be the end of our civilization. </p></blockquote><p>"Experts," you say? </p><p>Well, this has been very helpful for me, in my quest to understand the mind of George Soros. It seems to me that he experiences himself as the monarch of the Open Society. And that this Open Society is, or ought to be, a federated Europe.</p><p>This ties with another feeling I have about George Soros, as a Hungarian Jew that grew up in the hell of Nazism and World War II. It is the "never again" idea that we must never allow nation states to have the power they had in the heyday of fascism and Nazism. Thus the EU, thus globalism. Because never again Hitler.</p><p>But I am a student of Karl Popper, who went on to develop his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds">Three Worlds</a> theory of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.</p><blockquote><p>World 1: the realm of states and processes as typically studied by the natural sciences. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>World 2: the realm of mental states and processes.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>World 3: the realm of the 'products of thought' when considered as objects in their own right.</p></blockquote><p>For Popper the "products of thought" are both scientific theories and actual products of scientific theory and technology like jet airplanes and nuclear plants. And, I suppose, the poltiical theories about open societies and closed societies and their actual implementation in actual states.</p><p>I have a real problem figuring out how the real Popper aligns with the Soros idea of Popper. But who am I to say?</p><p>But, all in all, it looks like Soros is just an ordinary globalist that has signed onto all the "world's gonna end unless we..." stuff. And, when you think of it, any top-down narrative these days needs the lefty activists to enforce the will of the overlords. So therefore Soros DAs to keep the peasants from stepping outside their lane.</p>Christopher Chantrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04115398168797134843noreply@blogger.com0