Lower Class Lives on Gubmint Checks

I suppose that I knew this all along, but it's still shocking. According Richard Shinder, commenting on a piece by Phil Gramm and John Early in the Wall Street Journal, the point isn't that inequality isn't as bad as our liberal friends like to lecture us. Hey, if you don't take gubmint payments into account, of course inequality looks bad. But he takes Gramm and Early to task for this:

Left largely unremarked upon in their essay are the costs and consequences of both current and prospective redistributive policies, other than observing a collapsing labor-force participation rate among lower-income households and that the percentage of income attributable to government payments among the bottom quintile of U.S. households now exceeds 90 percent.

Yikes.

Of course, that chimes in with Charles Murray in Coming Apart. In the bottom 35 percent of Americans, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. 

As I was returning home from coffee this morning I passed by a house still with its Biden/Harris yard-sign displayed. Only this sign had stuff like Truth Peace Kindness on it.

I thought to myself: you liberal gentry living in swank houses one block from Green Lake in Seattle have No Idea.

The fact that the bottom 20 percent of Americans get 90 percent of their income from gubmint is Your Fault, liberals. Oh, it's happened for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of the gubmint programs that you have passed over the years. Because You Cared.

The situation, I suggest, is the same as the end of the feudal age when, according to Marx,

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” ...

And the reason, I found out, was because the nationalization of armies by the absolute monarchs meant that the feudal lords didn't need to keep extra hands around in case they needed to go to war on the lord next door.

Look, nothing to see here. All ruling classes use their feudal retainers to support their power plays. If the lower quintile is useful as a vote bank, or useful as street fighters or as the army's cannon fodder, then the ruling class will support the lower class. If the world changes, well then those chappies are going to be "eating the paint off the walls" as they said in Russia right after the end of the Soviet Union.

That's why I say: don't be a Little Darling of the ruling class. Right now they say they looove you. And so they do. But next week? Reasons of state will govern, and if reasons of state say that the old white working class ain't what it used to be, then it's Coi-t'ns (That's "curtains" in standard English) to the white working class. As Bugs Bunny used to say.

Right now, I read, the Biden administration is pushing its big $2 trillion infrastructure bill to Congress -- to "rebuild infrastructure and reshape the economy." Except that half of it seems to be simple redistributive payments, that's not actually going to build anything. Well, of course, because the Democrats are an over-under coalition, with Jobs for Gentry and Checks for the "oppressed peoples." And "reshape the economy?" Oy, I don't like the sound of that. I'll bet it really means "wreck the economy." As in Oops...

That is the game that the left has been playing for the last century, to use the poor as a political weapon, and buy their loyalty with loot and plunder from taxing the productive sector.

And lots of nice liberal ladies are persuaded that this loot and plunder operation is the very essence of justice and peace and kindness. And they will continue to believe what they have been carefully taught right up until the moment that the poor are reduced to eating the paint off the walls.

I tell you what I think Our Great Challenge for the next 20 years will be.

No, it will not be Climate Change. It will not be Systemic Racism. It will simply be getting the bottom 20 percent back into the workaday economy, back to work, back to marriage and children and trying to rise out of the lower class into the competent middle class.

And that ain't simple.

How Does a Politician Do "Commoner Politics?"

One thing that has struck me since January 20, 2021, is that the Biden agenda has nothing for the Common Man -- or Woman.

Fighting climate change? Jobs for Gentry. Screw the middle class. Nothing for the lower class,

Fighting systemic racism? Jobs for Gentry. Screw the white middle class. Reparations for the lower class, but don't hold your breath.

Unlimited immigration? Nannies for the upper class; cheap labor for Big Business. Lower wages for the middle class, and no jobs at all for the lower class.

OK, great. The Democrats don't give a damn about Commoners, the folks that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules.

That's because progressive politics, ever since Marx, is all about using the Subordinates as the clients -- Little Darlings -- of the Gentry educated class.

And since politics is division, and requires an enemy -- well, the Commoner middle class is it. It's a bit weird, because to make it work you have to sell the idea that the ordinary middle class is a powerful force of white supremacists and systemic patriarchs that are "white oppressing" the world.

If only! As I like to say, the fact is that the ordinary middle class is not that interested in power. 

So what do we do about it?

To misquote Marx, " It is high time that Communists Commoners should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism White Oppressors with a manifesto of the party any future Commoner party itself.

 Now, I think that Donald Trump made a decent start on this. But, if anything, the guy was too positive. When you are talking about Making America Great, that identification with the nation state is good, and we need more of it.

But hey, politics is division, it is about putting your opponents on the back foot. Naming and Shaming. And all that.

So I think that it is time to take the offensive on the Green New Deal. If I were a politician I would be talking about how there is nothing for ordinary people in it. The Green New Deal is all about jobs and power and prestige for the educated ruling class, the folks that will be making all the decisions and the regulations. It will be cool for the special interests and the renewable energy contractors that make tons of money out of the renewable energy projects, the high-speed rail projects, the greening of the nation's housing stock. But for ordinary people it will mean nothing but higher energy prices, more oppressive regulation, and probably a future of poverty.

Really, the Green New Deal is like World War II. We spent a ton of money; we drafted all the young men; we created a lot of work for chaps like Henry Kaiser to build Liberty ships, all very important, assuming that the Nazis were the worst thing in the world. But the average person just had to suck it in and go with the program, or else.

Let's agree with the need for World War II. Anyway, it ended after four short years. But the Green New Deal is going to go on for decades. The question is: how long are you willing to wait for a resumption of normal life?

Actually, the experts have pronounced on this, in particular with Edward C. Banfield's The Unheavenly City, which did not go down well with liberals. His idea was that the poor are "present oriented." Their only concern is with the next meal or the next rent check. The higher up in class you go, the more "future oriented" you become.

So, for the middle class,

[he or she] plans to get ahead and does what is necessary to improve his lot in life and to ensure his children achieve more than he did.

But the upper class lives in a different world.

The upper class individual occupies the farthest end of the future-oriented spectrum; he conducts himself and his affairs with an eye toward his heirs and family name. 

So you can see that the Green New Deal is purely an upper-class endeavor. It is all about saving the world for our grandchildren.

Jolly nice, but meanwhile the lower class has to find that rent check, and the middle class has to save the down payment on that dream house in the suburbs. 

Notice that Donald Trump's line of Making America Great Again fits exactly into the world of the ordinary middle class. The middle class chappie or chappette wants a world in which it is possible "to improve his lot in life" and create a better life for her children.

Now I think the beautiful thing is the your average New York Times reader and NPR listener has No Idea about this.

Our liberal friends all agree that we have to save the planet. Why not? Especially as liberals will be the ones to get all the Green New Deal administrative and policy jobs.

Our liberal friends all agree that limiting immigration is the cruelest thing in the world. Of course they do. It's not their jobs that will be affected. Not until they lose their administrative position, because systemic racism, and it's time to Learn to Code and compete in the job market with a million South Asians.

Our liberal friends all agree that "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" and "whiteness" are the worst things in the world. Actually, this is where they really ought to get a clue. Don't they realize that the only privilege in America is "liberal privilege," and that if we start on a full-scale War on Whiteness then white liberal jobs in government and academia will be, if not the first, then the second to go? No, they don't. But they will, sooner than they think.

Like I said. All this stuff is low-hanging fruit. Donald Trump picked the lowest-hanging fruit, but there is lots more fruit in easy reach for any damn politician with a half a brain.

So get going, guys and gals!

What Do You Do About Christopher Lasch

In a piece at American Greatness Roger Kimball ponders the case of Christopher Lasch, a writer/intellectual that started out as a full-on lefty but ended up not quite so left.

I myself have a copy of Lasch's Revolt of the Elites, but I can't remember what it was all about.

But Lasch hated capitalism. Back in the Sixties

he informed us that we now faced “an unprecedented crisis” wrought by capitalism, “giant corporations,” and other familiar villains... He concluded that “It is clearer than ever that radicalism”—which he went on to identify with socialism—“is the only long-term hope for America.”

But in his last book,  The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, 

Lasch mounted an attack on the “ideology” of progress, which he saw as a natural coefficient of the free market (a phrase I shall henceforth prefer to “capitalism” since “capitalism” is a negative epithet baked in the oven of Marxist imprecation).  

“How does it happen,” he asked in his preface, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”  

I can help wondering, after reading all this, that "what is his problem?"

The first problem is to stigmatize the culture of the market -- free or otherwise -- as "capitalism." That tends to characterize capitalism as a cultural or political movement, which it is not. If there is an "-ism" to capitalism it is the realization, after the fact, that something just changed. That was what classical economics was all about, a first effort of trying to figure out what was going on in the economic sphere.

The second problem, in my opinion, is to imagine -- as intellectuals tend to do -- that anyone can grab control of the process of capitalism, politically or culturally. Really, we don't have a clue what is going on.

When you develop an ideology of "progress" or develop an opposition to "progress" you are taking a huge leap into the unknown. You are imagining that you can even come to fully understand the ways of human life and culture.

Why did "capitalism" arise in the late medieval era? And why since 1800 have we experienced what Deirdre McCloskey calls a "Great Enrichment?" Why did feudalism die out? And why did lefty totalitarianism, with its attempt to command economy, politics and religion, all in one, emerge in the 19th century?

Really we don't have a clue. But we can all have a grand old time speculating about it.

Why, for instance, did slavery become a scandal in the 18th century? And why are almost all educated people working in semi-serfdom as salaried employees for Big Business, Big Government, Big Education, Big Activism?

Why are we seeing a cultural meltdown on race right now? Why are people panicking over a teensy weensy increase in global temperature?

Yup. It's a mystery. So more research is needed.

Actually, I do understand somewhat the rage against capitalism. It comes out in Marxist Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: a longer view. Her big thing is the "market imperative," that for people living under capitalism you have to conform to the dictates of the market -- i.e., its prices -- whether you like it or not.

But what Wood never really faces is: compared to what? Because the alternatives are all subordination to the "imperative" of some sort of landowner or ruler or priest. At least in the market economy there is a a certain freedom to use your talent to make a living, never mind who your parents are. And if you are a despised minority, well, maybe your income will be a bit lower than it should be. But then, you can always find a job by lowering your salary demands. Because the evil capitalist boss is always going to be tempted to make money on you rather than keep the proles down.

I suppose that is the biggest problem humans face: the problem of not being in control of your fate. There must be a better world where everything will turn out for the best.

Hope and Change, as a famous political philosopher once said.

The Filibuster is Racism, Etc.

What a surprise! Our liberal friends are now saying that the Senate filibuster -- which basically says that you can't pass anything in the Senate unless you have a supermajority -- is racist. Because Jim Crow.

Only, for President Biden, Jim Crow isn't enough. He's now amping up to "Jim Eagle." 'Cos eagles are bigger and scarier, I suppose.

I know, it is really annoying, when you have won with presidency with the help of half a billion from the Zuck and "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election." Or, as it says in the Time <title> tag: "The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election."

Really annoying when you only have a 50-50 Senate and lost 13 seats in the House to yield a 222-213 majority. Because you have vital and important legislative measures like imposing federal rules on all elections. And pitching the US into a multi-trillion dollar program to save the planet from climate change.

There oughta be a law!

OK, now let's go to a bit of science. The best science on legislative voting that I know is The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. They go through a book full of various legislative combinations and dual-chamber and single-chamber legislatures. And what they eventually come up with is that the only just voting system is "unanimous consent." In other words, forget majority voting. Forget supermajority deals like the filibuster. The only just form of voting is for all the legislators to agree.

Why? Because if you have unanimous consent then the proposers of the legislation have to buy off the folks opposing it.  (And why are the opposers opposing? Because the legislation is going to cost them money. Duh!) In other words, if you want to pass legislation to force the country in some direction or other you have to make the losers whole. Or at least compensate them enough to vote with you.

If you want to get into my extended analysis follow the link to "Fifty Years of 'The Calculus of Consent'" that I wrote in 2012. There are various disquisitions on "logrolling" and "side payments."

No doubt this is what inspired me to invent my maxim: "There is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

See, there are two dominant views of politics. Our liberal friends think of politics as "doing good" in the world -- at least when they do it. Guys like me think that politics is civil war by other means.

In other words, I believe that politics is the way we avoid civil war by listening to the grievances and the complaints of the folks out of power. Of course, the chaps on the other side are contemptible and not really worth listening to. But, the point is to do enough to stop them from  giving up on politics and forming a head of rebellion and starting to run up a butcher's bill.

To understand that, in my view, is the beginning of wisdom. You really don't want civil war.

That is the point of the Moynihan law that you don't want to pass major legislation short of a 70-30 vote in the Senate -- in other words, major legislation needs overwhelming support if it is to endure.

An obvious example of what not to do is Obamacare, that passed by a whisker, and remains contentious to this day.

The filibuster is a similar concept to Moynihan's law. It says that if you want to pass something in Congress you'd better get 60 percent in the Senate. Otherwise, to coin a phrase, you got trouble, right here in River City.

Of course, the filibuster is associated in the minds of all good people sporting Black Lives Matter signs in their yards with the Southern Democrats in the time of Jim Crow. It grew up in the aftermath of the Civil War after the South had been devastated by the "bummers" of Gen. Sherman's army in its March Through Georgia and other Southern states, and after the disputed presidential election of 1876 and its "back room" deal to award the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1876 the Democrats had won control of the Senate and Congress.

Yes, you are asking. How come the Democrats had come to win Congress back? Because of the Crash of 1973 and Long Depression consequent upon the US gubmint deflation to get the US back on the Gold Standard. Experts now agree that deflations are not a good idea.

Of course, I always find an excuse not to accept the conventional wisdom. And my take is that probably the filibuster kept the South in the Union for the century in which the South had to deal with the humiliation of losing the Civil War and being stripped of its wealth and its political domination.

In other words, the South was consigned in the century after 1865 to the humiliation of what we would now call "deplorable-dom." But at least they could stop the really bad stuff (for them) in Congress with the filibuster. And, I dare say, the filibuster helped the Republicans to cool the jets of their over-enthusiastic partisans who doubtless thought that the the rubble in the South should be made to bounce for the next thousand years.

Today we have a slightly different problem. We have a ruling class that has ruled for a hundred years and is presently outraged that the "natives are getting restless." How Dare They, to coin a phrase.

So our ruling class is coming up with various dodges to keep their slipping grip on the reins of power. H.R.1 to federalize election rules is one such dodge. Abolishing the filibuster is another.

But I tell my liberal friends that when you are reduced to "dodges" to stay in power then the clock is running on your glorious era of power. Maybe instead of beating up deplorables and canceling heretics it is time to starting thinking about the unthinkable: "where did we go wrong?"

Hey liberals, let me count the ways.

And there is another thing. If you are going to commit the United States to a multi-trillion dollar program to save the planet in a war on climate change you'd better have overwhelming support from the people -- as in supermajorities in the United States Senate. Because in a war two things will happen. First, with your taxation and inflation you will destroy the wealth of ordinary people and put it in the hands of "war profiteers." Second, you will sacrifice the lives of a goodly part of a whole generation of youth on the battlefield. You better have a good reason for that, Senator.

Otherwise, I suspect, the people will show you the exit.

Excess Deaths Going Negative

Over at Powerline John Hinderaker observes that the death rate in the US and UK seems to be going negative. In other words that the "excess deaths" among oldsters like me during the COVID crisis of the last year were merely bringing normal deaths among oldsters forward a few months.

And for this we wrecked the economy and shut up the kidz?

OK, let's go with Ike, and make the problem bigger.

Speaking as a 74-year-old with two kids and six grandchildren, I say that once you have got grandchildren well on their way to adulthood, then you -- that is, "me" -- are surplus population. One fine day, you are going to die. Not because of a disease, but because ageing is part of Nature's program. There is a reason why old people have dry skin and dicky hearts. It is because Nature is planning to kill you off. Nothing personal, you understand.

But we in the West have erected the most obscene gubmint programs to throw money at the elderly. Social Security: hey, if you didn't save your nickels and your kids don't give a damn about you, well, good luck, chum. Medicare: why are we spending a fortune on old people in their last six months of life? 

Really, it is remarkable that the kidz haven't risen up in rebellion against us blood-sucking oldsters.

And, no doubt, when the kidz do rise up in rebellion they will attack the wrong fortress. Idiots.

But I get it. The only warrant for government power is to fight existential peril. And then reward the supporters after the fight with loot and plunder. In the good old days it was to the victor the spoils.

But today it doesn't make any sense to loot. Why loot Amazon? Because after you have looted it the looters don't have Amazon to serve them any more. And the same goes for all capitalistic enterprises.

Sure, you can prune and tap the capitalistic enterprises like they were maple trees and you want to tap the maple syrup. But it doesn't pay to kill the tree.

But the whole point of politics is to find something to fight. And right now we can see the end-point of this age-old instinct. The Biden Boys want to fight climate change with a multi-trillion dollar war -- just like FDR in WWII! Loot and plunder for all the producers of green boondoggles. And they want to fight systemic racism. Loot and plunder for all the "oppressed peoples."

Only the Green New Deal will be a net loss for ordinary people and for "oppressed peoples." And "systemic racism" logically leads to a war of all against all.

Something's got to give. And it will. The only question is the size of the butcher's bill before something "gives."

Meanwhile, we are going to find out that in 2021 the death rate is a lot lower than 2020, as the old geezers like me that might have died this year in 2021 actually died back in 2020.

What we need is a new moral calculus that makes it a moral horror to throw money at old geezers like me. And instead guts gubmint programs by 50 percent so that the young'uns have a chance.

As in, getting an education -- or more to the point, training -- without becoming a debt slave. As in, buying a house that's priced something short of astronomical. As in, keeping your wages out of the hands of politicians so you can save to start a business, to buy a house, to save for a rainy day, to help your kids get a good start in life.

But I don't expect this to happen soon. Not until our present rulers are sent packing.

And even then...

Meanwhile the funeral directors are not going to have a very good year. Sorry chaps.

The Day the Universe Changes. On Race.

I see that, in my "pejoratives" topic, that the first time I hoped, foolishly, for an end to the race grift was back in 2010: "The Year of the Race Card."

I wrote that the only way Democrats get elected is by scaring Blacks and Jews to death.

Back in 2019 I asked "Which is Worse: Trump's Insults of the Racist Canard?" Yeah, I know. I'm thinkin', I'm thinkin'.

Then, back in June 2020 I published my alliterative "Codex of Preferred Progressive Pejoratives," helpfully pointing out the target of each progressive pejorative and the toxicity level of each pejorative.

Did you know that the dictionary definition of "pejorative" -- from my Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary that I bought used many moons ago -- is "tending to make worse?" It comes from the Latin, pejorare, darling: "to make worse."

And boy, oh boy, do our liberal friends make things worse with their race politics.

I am preparing for the Day the Universe Changes. It will be the kind of day when some liberal plays the race card on TV and their interlocutor will reply. "Oh great, the race card. Got any other cards up your sleeve?"

And when they say, channeling Greta, "How dare you!" the racist monster replies: "Read your Hegel, darling. He says that there is no difference between racism and anti-racism. The thing is equal to its opposite."

Back at the end of 2019 I wrote a set of pieces, starting with "Of Course I'm a Racist. How About You." I descanted upon the theme that everybody likes their kind best.

Doesn't everyone prefer their own kind best? For instance, your liberal anti-racist may sneer and be ashamed of his rich-kid whiteness. But that's because his whiteness is not his identity. For a lefty xir leftiness is xir identity. Call him a lefty and he feels the compliment.

And, the key thing, from my intensive research into "fake tribalism," is that people form into tribes when rallied by their leaders to confront an existential threat to their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. To coin a phrase.

A while back I tried to come up with a few clever retorts against the Racist Canard.

How's your Two Minute Hate going today, precious?

Look, diversity/ inclusion is racism, straight up. 

Where's the toxic masculinity if colleges are 60 percent female? 

What white supremacy? There is nothing more shameful and low-rent today that being a white male in a MAGA hat.

But in the end, I recommended the simple retort: "Of course, and how about you?"

Of course, the thing is that on The Day the Universe Changes on race, we won't do the liberal thing and lock every last progressive that played the race card up in Cancel Hell.

We won't because we don't believe in witch hunts and cancel cultures and naming and shaming and all the rest of the lefty rubbish.

Because, in the famous phrase of our First Black President, Barack Obama, That's Not Who We Are.

Oh You Brits: How Could You!

In this Cancel Culture age it is rare to see a good old-fashioned insult piece. But UnHerd.com is up to the challenge with "Why we French love to hate the English" by Frenchie Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. 

Now, for the first time in my life, I understand why the French talk about "perfidious Albion." Read this catalog of English crimes:

It starts with use of unregulated longbows at Agincourt.

I agree! There oughta be a law! Then there is

burning Joan of Arc at the stake.

OK, so that was nasty. We moderns would never do that to Greta Thunberg. But here is something I didn't know:

Pitt’s flooding fake assignats to devalue French paper money during the Revolution (typical of the perfidiousness of Albion in all things financial[).]

I had thought all the French financial messes down the ages were all home grown. And this:

“Les Anglais conspired to break the Peace of Amiens in 1803, led the entire continent into war, and managed to pin it all on Napoleon!” one friend raged.

Wow! I had no idea!

Had enough?

And on to St. Helena, to Kitchener’s stand-off against Marchand at Fashoda in the Sudan in 1898, and of course to the sinking of a good chunk of the French Navy at Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 by the Royal Navy, rather than risking it fighting on for Vichy.

Well. Now I understand the French. They gotta right to be outraged.

And that is nothing compared to the insult to Queen Isabella, daughter of the king of France, wife of England's Edward II. Insulted by Edward's gay relationships she was forced to go home to Daddy in Paris, shack up with Roger Mortimer, and return to Britland at the head of an army and depose her husband.

Hey, you Rosbifs, don't even think about shaming our fine French princesses!

Only now, of course, the French don't have any princesses any more. What a shame!

Seriously though, I think that the good old male tradition of the insult, best practiced after a few at the local pub or tavern, is a vital part of human evolution. To be able to give and take a good honest insult is part of what it takes to be a man.

It is gratifying to see a rough, tough Frenchwoman showing that she can give it out like the best. My view is that if women really want to participate in the Public Square they need to understand and master the art of the insult -- instead of being perpetually insulted in the popular refrain of "I can't believe she said that."

And don't get me started on "safetyism."

Against Kimball: Science Advances by Breaking the Rules

Everybody says that they are in favor of logic and reason: St. Thomas Aquinas; the rational Enlightenment; conservatives. Even radical lefties say that modern capitalism and liberalism is all a lie because the truth is that capitalism and liberalism are all about oppression.

Now comes Roger Kimball with a piece in American Greatness on "Science!" He starts with statement that the two great scientific fraudsters, "the egregious Michael “hockey stick” Mann and St. Anthony “mask theater” Fauci, have recently received gratifying comeuppances." About which we can all agree. But then he starts attacking all my favorite guys:

[Paul] Feyerabend maintained that science is no more cognitively privileged than (for example) astrology, voodoo, or necromancy. The “only one principle that can be defended,” he wrote in Against Method, “. . . is anything goes.”

[Thomas Kuhn.] According to Kuhn, [in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,] scientific truth is “paradigm relative.” For example, what was considered true under the Ptolemaic view of the solar system differs from what we, having read Copernicus, believe. 

[Karl] Popper’s 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery made the curious argument that the distinguishing mark of a scientific theory was not (as everyone used to think) that it was verifiable by empirical evidence. On the contrary, Popper argued that a theory was scientific to the extent that it was “falsifiable.” 

Well, I think all three are right and Roger Kimball is wrong.

Feyerabend: The point here is that the record of the last century or so is that a new theory always busts up the assumptions of the reigning methodology. Maybe just a little, maybe a whole lot. Newton was based on absolute space and time; Einstein said that space and time are relative.

Kuhn: His argument is that the reigning princes of science will always defend the old ways. Only when the old generation dies off can a new "paradigm" get a foothold.  Of course this applies to everything. The current 80-year-old princes of the Democratic Party are about to retire and the Dems will only then complete their paradigm shift to lefty wokism.

Popper: The point of "falsification" is that if your theory explains everything it isn't useful. Climate change is an example. Everything that happens, from extreme weather to hurricane frequency, is said to demand that we stop using fossil fuels. Genuine science makes predictions upon which the theory stands or falls. The famous example of the 1919 confirmations of General Relativity is an example, including the "Perihelion precession of Mercury" -- which could not happen according to Newtonian theory -- and the "Deflection of light by the Sun" of a star that was close to the Sun during a solar eclipse. If these experiments "falsified" Einstein's equations instead of confirming them, it would have been "back to the drawing board."

The point that these three scientists are making is that every scientific theory is a stitch-up, good enough for government work. But once you start trying to apply it to more and more situations, then you are likely to find that, at some point, it doesn't work. The most obvious case is Newton's mechanics. It works at Earth scale. But when you get out into the universe, then it doesn't predict close enough.

And when scientists have to explain their anomalous results with things like "dark matter" and "dark energy" that is a "tell" that "Houston we have a problem." Nothing shameful about that: happens all the time. Here is an article that proposes that the "dark matter" explanation arose because scientists used Newtonian gravitation instead of relativity to model the behavior of galaxies. (Waat? Really?)

Now, my belief is that to understand what is going on here you need to understand the German Turn in philosophy and knowledge -- and Feyerabend and Popper were both born Austrians. Kuhn? He was Jewish American with a German name.

I have a lot to say about the German Turn, but it starts with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a Prussian. He wrote that we cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances. When we humans experience light hitting our eyes we process and interpret that light in our brains, and out of that processing we create an image of the world we are seeing.

For instance, I am sitting at a table. Hey, what more do I need to say? Well, if I wanted to construct a table, then I need to know more about the construction of tables, about materials, about tools, and so on. And if I were to use metals in my construction I would have to learn about the mining and smelting of metals. Behind what George Lakoff calls a "basic level" object hides an infinity of possibilities.

My argument is that Kant's theory of things-in-themselves and appearances set off the German Turn that leads directly, do not pass go, to relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are ridiculous at a "basic level."

So, whatever you believe, I suggest that you take the notions of Feyerabend and Kuhn and Popper, and ponder them in your heart.

Now, we conservatives and nationalists tend to ridicule the left and its "critical theory." Writes Andy Ngo in Unmasked, "Have you heard it argued that there is no such thing as objective reality and truth?" But the critique of objective reality and truth doesn't just come from Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. Kant's masterwork was titled "A Critique of Pure Reason."

My point is that if we want to own the future and banish lefty rubbish from the face of the Earth "we" need to understand "critical theory" from Kant to Kuhn and then go beyond it. That's Sun Tzu: To beat your enemy you must first understand him.

And this begins with admitting that there is no such thing as "objective reality." All realities are constructed, in our minds.

The Border: Where Do the Mexican Drug Gangs Fit In?

Well, so today it's reported that the Biden administration is asking the Mexican government for help at the border. In return for COVID vaccines. Hey, politics!

Here's what I wonder. Where do the famous Mexican drug gangs and their "coyotes" come in?

And where does the money go?

We know, for instance, that border jumpers usually get assistance from a "coyote."

We know, for instance, that Central American immigrants send a lot of money back home, using modern high technology, and I believe that New York Times owner Carlos Slim gets a cut because of his Mexican near-monopoly cellphone company.

"Remittances," they call it. And last year was a record. Yes, but I wonder who that money goes to? I'll betcha the money doesn't all go to the family back home. I bet it is also paying back "coyote" fees and various add-ons. In fact, I'll bet you a nickel that illegal immigrants never stop paying the "coyotes" until they get a green card.

I mean. suppose you are in the organized crime game. What better suckers than people who are illegal and need to stay clear of the police? I bet that these folks get threatened into helping the drug trade.

And I wonder how many illegal immigrants are basically slaves working for the drug lords and getting all their wages docked to pay their "coyote."

Look, any time that people are evading a law -- remember Prohibition? -- you get organized crime getting in on the action, because the rules are a bit tougher when something's illegal. You gotta pay off the cops and the crooked pols. The Godfather, etc.

Hey, I wonder whether our glorious US politicians get in on the action. Oops, not whether, but where?

It's funny that I/we don't know anything about this. All the media interest is in "kids in cages" and other diversions.

And I wonder where the US activist community comes in. When people are wearing "Biden Please Let Me In" t-shirts, I assume that the activist community has got into the act. As when people are marching on foot across Mexico. Army generals and historians and people like me know that people don't march across country without needing food and lodging. You can "requisition" the food, if you have the guns.

Anyway, what with the Biden open borders batters playing on a bit of a sticky wicket right now, I just want to know a bit more about the bowlers, and the umpires, and the wicket keeper. And the intrepid journalists doing the play-by-play.

I just have this feeling that we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Is There Really Anything We Can Do?

In his Gray Mirror blog Curtis Yarvin agues against dissident political action against the regime. He argues that when it is time for regime change it will just happen as natural as you please. One day the old regime will be in power. Next day the new regime will start up.

I suppose he is saying that "take the streets" is a lefty conceit, having to do with their fantasy that they represent the oppressed peoples, whose only way of advertising their suffering is by fighting and dying in the streets.

Very nice, but what he is saying is that the old regime has to utterly discredit itself before it gives up the game.

For instance, I was talking with an elderly educated-class woman waiting for a ferry, watching first the electric bikes driving off the ferry, then the manual bikes, and then motor bikes. I suggested that this order of egress represented some kind of social ordering. She allowed as how she thinks that electric cars are a good idea.

And today Lady Marjorie tells me that Seattle City Council is putting off its plan to institute car congestion charges in downtown Seattle. But, says the Seattle Times,

In the next two years, Seattle will create incentives for public and private companies to electrify their vehicles, encourage more walking, biking and transit ridership and may propose fees on driving in certain parts of the city to decrease congestion.

In other words, the regime is pedal-to-the-metal on its "urbanization" agenda. So, do you write your councilman? Do you hit the streets? Do you argue with your liberal neighbors to change their minds?

Not really, because to our liberal friends everything they are doing is good and progressive and educated and evolved.

As the scientists say, living things just go about their business until, all of a sudden, something frightens them and they stop in their tracks. And recalibrate.

And we have just been taught what happens when the plebs peacefully protest at the Capitol. The ruling class and their bribed apologists all scream about "armed insurrection" and bring out the national guard. Which a bunch of retired Pentagon generals argued against during the Summer of Floyd.

Put it this way. Do we have a chance of changing America before the average nice liberal lady has given up on at least half of the ten woke ideas I tabulated yesterday?

Spiked-online reported on ex-Downing Street aide Dominic Cummings on the disjunction of science and bureaucracy in the British government.

Yesterday he eviscerated the British state’s contempt for science and technology, and the vast bureaucracy that has attached itself to science and technology policy. 

Apparently Cummings helped set up the Brits' vaccination policy which worked, while the EU policy did not.

But can any of us trust government and science? Ever? Surely the lesson of the COVID Year is that government loves to use science as an excuse to impose complicated bureaucratic rules and counter-rules.

The Zman shows the problem with government and science.

Over the last year the main thread of the [COVID] story has been the political class trying to contend with the unintended consequences of their actions. The reason their story keeps changing is their inputs never have the desired outputs. They have to keep going back and rewriting the story of their actions to fit the present reality. It turns out that throwing wrenches into the gears of human society was not the smartest play on their part.

 Then there is the $1.9 trillion stimulus. Does the government have a clue what it is doing? I doubt it. The pols and the deep state are just doing what comes naturally: spending and borrowing.

The people who initiated these changes in American society are not working from a grand plan or a set of ideological goals. There is no point to what they are doing. Instead, our managerial revolutionaries are swept up in forces they do not understand. It is a strange, recursive and reactionary revolution from the top. 

The point of the ten woke ideas is that to justify your ruling-class power you have to have an existential peril to fight against. And if nothing seems to change despite your brilliant agenda, then you pile on and redouble your efforts. The point about the COVID masks and shutdowns is that the pols have to show they are Doing Something to protect us.

The really interesting question about Life, the Universe, and Everything is what do you do when things go wrong.

Well, we know. It's all brought out in When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. First you redouble your efforts. Then you keep going despite your doubts. Then people start to desert, and leave the movement. Then it collapses.

And whatever happens, it ain't pretty. 

Just like Curtis Yarvin says. One fine day the old regime leaves office and the new one takes its place.

The Ten Woke Ideas from FiveThirtyEight

 The chappies at FiveThirtyEight founded by Nate Silver have produced a piece on the ten issues that make up the Woke Agenda.

I thought I should put up a table of the ideas, with the validity of each idea and a counter argument.

	Idea	Validity	Counter
1.	America "not an exceptional nation." "U.S. has disempowered its Native and Black populations and women throughout its history," and has "never been a true or full democracy."	Baloney. Every nation is an exceptional nation. Every political entity favors the agenda of the ruling class and its supporters.	Yes, but the US has made extraordinary efforts to balance the agenda of all kinds of different people. US ruling class used to favor whites in the past, now it's anyone-but-whites.
2.	White people, particularly white men, are especially advantaged in American society (“white privilege”).	Actually, it was more Virginia plantation owners, followed by New England Protestants, followed by WASPs, followed by today's educated elitists.	Are white men -- ordinary middle-class white men without advanced degrees -- privileged in today's America? I don't think to.
3.	"People of color in America suffer from not only individualized and overt acts of racism" e.g., racial slur,  "but a broader 'systemic' and 'institutional' racism."	True up until 1964 Civil Right Act. But not enough. Otherwise why do you need Jim Crow laws to enforce racism and segregation?	It is one thing to use the government to prosecute acts of discrimination. Another thing to discriminate by affirmative action and diversity.
4.	Capitalism as currently practiced in America is deeply flawed, giving way too much money and power to the wealthy.	True. Humans are flawed, and capitalism is human! But capitalism doesn't "give money." it rewards good ideas until replaced by newer ideas.	Don't you mean Government "gives way too much money" to the wealthy, the middle-class elderly, to the politically active?
5.	Women suffer from systemic sexism.	Women only entered the public square in 1900ish. Prior to that, of course, upper-class women ran the world from their salons.	Women "expect to be protected" and will complain until protected. Only upper-class educated women with #WeBelieve signs need apply.
6.	People should be able to identify as whatever gender they prefer or not to identify by gender at all.	Yeah. Why not? But do we force the rest of the world to pay for gender reassignment surgery?	One little problem. If people don't have kids there won't be any genders in a generation. Just dust and ashes.
7.	The existence of a disparity — for example, Black, Latino or women being underrepresented in a given profession or industry — is evidence of discrimination, even if no overt acts of discrimination are visible.	No it ain't. People are different.	This accusation is just an application for a license to discriminate. In my America an absence of disparity would be prima facie evidence of government discrimination. Let the lawyers loose!
8.	Black Americans deserve reparations to make up for slavery and post-slavery racial discrimination.	Reparations is vengeance. The whole point of the legal system is to reduce vengeance to a dull roar.	And just who is to pay this? The Irish that suffered under the Brits for centuries? The Jews from the Russian pogroms or Nazi Holocaust? And to whom? The children of Barack Obama, scion of a tribal chieftain in East Africa and raised by whites?
9.	Law enforcement agencies, from local police departments to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are designed to defend America’s status quo as much as any public safety mission.	Yes. law enforcement is designed to protect people (especially women) from "domestic enemies," e.g., violent lower-class males in cities. That's why the Brits invented modern policing.	Hey, no skin off my nose. The police are there to keep violence in low-income communities down to a dull roar. And given the absence of fathers in low-income communities, what do you expect wokies?
10.	Trump’s political rise was not an aberration or a surprise. Politicians in both parties, particularly Republicans, have long used racialized language to demean people of color — Trump was just more direct and crude about it.	This is a straight-up lie. Trump is a "nationalist," meaning that he values Americans as Americans. And in 2020 increased percentages of Hispanics and Blacks voted for him. I wonder why.	If I were Trump I would sue for slander. The key and obvious thing about Trump was that he encouraged all people living in America to think of themselves as Americans and not as ethnic, or racial or gender minorities.

This sort of thing is going to increase until it gets batted down. The whole point is that the ruling class, our educated elite, obtains power from the Woke Effect. Because it gives them the right to use political power to help their supporters and to punish their enemies. 

That's the point. If there is no discrimination, no systemic this-or-that, then there is no need for allies to save the oppressed people from the white oppressors. QED. Period. Full Stop. 

That is all.

Sen. Ron Johnson Pushes Back on "Racist." Sorta

Here's what Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said the other day about not being afraid of the pro-Trump rioters in the January 6 Capitol riot:

Now, had the tables been turned, and Joe — this is going to get me in trouble — had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa, I might have been a little concerned.

But notice how AP introduces his remarks:

Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin denied Monday that he made racist comments last week when he said he wasn’t concerned about pro-Donald Trump insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol in January but would have been worried if they were Black Lives Matters protesters.

Notice the "tell?" They left out "antifa." Well well well: nobody here but us journalists at the AP.

Now I think that "denying" that you made racist comments is not enough. I think you need to strike back, and say something like:

"I've been playing political poker, man and boy, for 25 years. And my experience is that the guy that plays the race card is the real racist."

Then you go on and waffle some more.

"Go ahead. Call me a racist. I don't care. But what I want to know is when my Democratic friends and my friends in the Democrat media are going to stop playing the race card so we can get down to solving America's real problems instead of the ghosts of problems past." 

Here's what I think. I think that the politician that figures out how to trump the race card, or how to hit the racist screwball out of the ball-park has got a glorious future ahead of him.

But first he has to have the courage to risk it. Rather like President Trump, who got nominated in 2016 by showing that he had to courage to go up against the Blob.

Yet even Trump didn't have the courage to trump the race card.

But let me tell you, the guy that figures out how to do it, and emerges unscathed from the usual media feeding frenzy whenever there is race-card blood in the water, that guy is going to go places.

Quote Eric Hoffer: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." 

And so it goes until the DA indicts the race racketeers for racketeering. But it takes a while, because usually when there is a racket it only thrive because it gets protection from the local politicians.

President Biden: Who's in Charge?

At The American Spectator Jack Cashill wonders about who's in charge in the Biden administration. It isn't former President Obama, he writes.

Although clearly immersed in leftism since childhood, even Marxism, he never left the shallow end of the pool. As president, he proved so adept at breaking promises because he did not care deeply enough to ensure those promises were realized. What mattered more was that he be seen striking the right pose, finding the right groove, spinning the right narrative.

Mind you, maybe that is all Obama needs to do to keep us spinning into the abyss.

But Conrad Black, who always hints that he knows a thing or two, writes at American Greatness that

At the midway point of the proverbial first 100 days, there is no indication at all that Biden will resist the pressures from the Left in his party.

As, for example,

The administration appears to be unable to demarcate spheres of influence between the ecological zealots who shut down pipelines.. from the agitations of the Democrats’ traditional supporters in organized labor[.]

Still, he avers,

It is disappointing that the wave of national revulsion that must be rising up from the depths of American public opinion has not broken over the heads of the cancelers, statue-defacers, bigots, defamers of American history, and secular iconoclasts.

This all confirms my suspicion -- based on no evidence at all -- that nobody is in charge in the Biden administration. But, so far, it doesn't need leadership.

For instance, the election steal, thoughtfully documented by Time magazine as the shadow campaign that "saved" the election, didn't need "leadership." Everyone knew what to do and did it.

Of course, there are developing crises, such as the mess at the border, and the economic mess coming down the pike from two years of money printing and giga-deficits and loot and plunder, and the rage of folks whose lives have been trashed by the COVID supremacy.

But none of these developing storms have intensified into an actual political hurricane that blows right across the ruling-class suck-up media narrative. None of these future crises need a brave decision by a strong leader. Not yet.

But that's the point. Everyone in the ruling-class world is doing their little activist thing, having a grand old time, and they will all keep having a grand old time until they hit the wall.

What the wall will be, and what will happen when the hit happens? I have no idea.

But when the proverbial ordure hits the fan that's when the problem of Joe Biden's incapacity becomes a problem for the ruling class.

And an opportunity for the rest of us.

Yeah, that's the point. The fact that there is no leadership at the top of the ruling class is a Good Thing for the rest of us. Because nobody is getting practice at making tough decisions.

So when it's time to make some tough decisions, there won't be anyone in the hot seat ready and seasoned and practiced in the art of tough decision-making.

So the chances are that the ruling class will botch the big decision that it will need to save its bacon.

The Small Minority Gig and the Ruling Class

In his NY Post piece on "To beat woke tyrants the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are," Instapundit Glenn Reynolds invokes the Chapter 2 in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game: "The Most Intolerant Wins." He starts by noting that almost all prepared drinks have a "U" symbol on them that establishes the drink as Kosher. Even though full kosher eaters are less than one percent of the US population. Taleb writes that

It suffices for an intransigent minority -- a certain type of intransigent minority -- with significant skin in the game (or, better, soul in the game) to reach a minutely small level, say 3 or 4 percent of the total population, for the entire population to submit to their preferences.

Not quite. It requires an intransigent minority supported by the ruling class to force the entire population to submit to them. If the ruling class doesn't care about them, or actively wants to use the small minority as a punching bag, well, keep your heads down fellahs. 

Because unless the ruling class encourages a narrative, and publicizes it, and teaches it in the media and the schools, it didn't happen. Case in point, The American Spectator's Dov Fischer, who is a Jewish lawyer and an orthodox rabbi. Says he in "Let's Play Holocaust:"

I grew up in the 1950s and much of the 1960s relatively unaware of the Holocaust.

See, the Holocaust didn't become much of a thing until the Seventies. And before World War II our national savior FDR wasn't in too much of a hurry to let the Jews of Germany into the United States.

You can see that this is the key to our ruling class's brilliantly successful campaign of championing small minorities against the rest of America to maintain its domination and hegemony. First it was blacks, because slavery and Jim Crow. Then it was women, because the patriarchy. Then it was gays, because of centuries of homosexual persecution. Then transsexuals -- sorry, transgenders -- because.

If it weren't for the ruling class championing these chappies, they would all keep a low profile and make sure to keep below the radar.

As you probably know, because of your eevil habit of consuming far-right media, a trickster has turned this game on its head by championing the idea of "Super Straights" as a helpless minority that demand their rights not to date transgenders.

But naturally, our ruling class has swung into action to censor this dangerous and "far-right" and transphobic movement.

See what I mean? If you are a small minority, be you ever so intransigent, and the ruling class don't like you, better head for the hills.

Because while the ruling class can use small minorities to solidify its power -- as our ruling class does today -- it can also turn on a dime and crush small minorities as the very agent of the Devil. That's what Literally Hitler did.

I maintain that all minorities maintain themselves using a Culture of Innocence. We, whoever "we" are, are innocent. Everything that goes wrong with us is the fault of the big guys, so we'd better all stick together. That is the point of the Culture of Innocence. It is the means for our community to stick together united against the world.

But the Culture of Innocence is almost always a lie. I had a serious confrontation with the lie of America's innocence lately, reading Flyboys by James Bradley, about the naval fliers in World War II. The Japs were inhuman killers, right? Well, the US treated Filipinos in the Spanish-American War rather similar to the way that the Japanese treated the Chinese in the 1930s. And the first thing the US did in WWII was the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, which outraged the Japanese as an attack on civilians. Then, towards the end of the war was the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, culminating in the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And never mind about carpet-bombing German cities. Hey, but we were the Good Guys, remember?

Yes, and so it is with our Woke Ruling Class today. All the Wokies are doing is fighting the "white oppressors," as the noble "allies" of the "oppressed peoples."

Akshully, this game of innocence occurs wherever politics is found. If you want to get the people off their behinds to fight a war for you, whether hot or cold or woke, you need to scare the people out of their wits with talk of a frightful danger, real or imagined. They, the enemy, are the worst thing since Frankenstein invented fossil fuel, and we, the helpless innocents, are the most oppressed and ill-treated since the invention of the patriarchy.

But, of course, one fine day, the world changes, and today's ruling class becomes yesterday's ruling class, and a new company of innocents takes the stage.

The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.

Who is Getting Screwed in Post COVID?

As I was taking leave of my Greek friend yesterday I asserted that we are going to see angry people in the months and years ahead.

But what people? Honestly, I have no idea. But, based on my infallible knowledge and instinct, I predict that there are tens of millions of Americans that got totally shafted by the year of COVID.

But, at this stage, we have little idea who they are and exactly how they got shafted.

But I bet you that by the time of the presidential nominating conventions of 2024 we will know exactly who they are.

Will it be the homeless? I don't mean the regular homeless but the people that got pitched out of their lives by the COVID shutdowns and didn't have the moxie to know how to find a new gig. Because welfare state.

Will it be the lower-middle class, people that don't quite make the cut to qualify as genuine victims, but who have suffered mightily over the past year?

Will it be the folks that stopped paying rent or their mortgage, because they could, and are now in a deep hole and they can't dig out?

Will it be the folk that got involved in the BLM-Anitfa riots last year and have now obtained finely-honed trouble-making skills?

Will it be middle-class women who "can't believe" how the police don't arrest and the courts don't prosecute thieves and thugs?

Will it be ordinary people outraged by the loot and plunder of the $1.9 trillion "stimulus" because they didn't get a share of the loot?

Will it be people that I just have no clue about?

My point is that the ruling class is clearly in a bit of a panic. That's what the reaction to Trump was all about: It Can't Happen Here. To coin a phrase. That's what the staggering overreaction to the January 6 riots was all about. Whereas the BLM-Antifa riots went on for six months to a "nothing to see here" chorus from the ruing-class media.

When people get into a panic, it means that they have encountered something unexpected, something that does not compute according to their world view, something that threatens their existence. Jordan B. Peterson deals with this rather nicely in his Beyond Order. Suppose you get a letter from the IRS.

If you receive an official piece of mail from [the tax] agency, your blood pressure will increase (or drop precipitously), your heart will pound, your palms will sweat, and a feeling of intense fear, even doom, may sweep over you. That is the instinctive response, associated with preparation for action, that accompanies exposure to danger.

Are you going to face the monster, or "suffer like a scared animal confronted by the predator's vicious eyes in the pitch of night"? Are you going to accept that your understanding of the world was flawed, and that you need to revise your world view?

Or are you, dear ruling class going back to same-old same-old and just do more of what comes naturally?

All I know is that I am going to be scanning the horizon to see how the American people deal with the aftermath of the COVID disaster.

And I think that our Democratic friends, in taking care of their supporters and thumbing their noses at the rest of America, have just made a huge strategic mistake.

But it could be that the opposite is true.

Changing America on a 51-49 Vote

Back in the day, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, onetime White House aide and later a Democratic Senator from New York, had some advice on big legislative bills like Obamacare in Congress, according to Politico in 2013: 

Twenty years ago, when he was trying to persuade Bill and Hillary Clinton that universal health care was a politically unrealistic goal, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan repeated one insistent warning: Sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely. “They pass 70-to-30,’’ he said, “or they fail.”

What did he mean by that?

He meant that if you want to do big changes, you can't just ram it down the throat of the opposition. You have to find some sort of common ground. Otherwise you stir up a head of rebellion.

Read The Calculus of Consent by Buchanan and Tullock. Here's one of my takes on it. They say, by the way, that the only way to have just government is to require unanimous consent for every legislative bill. Why? Because that forces the majority to pay for the losses to be paid by the minority. Science™.

The need for a 79-30 vote probably explains why the Republicans were so hesitant to repeal Obamacare. It was because they knew that ramming it down the throats of the Democrats would just make them mad. Of course, partisan conservatives like me hated their timidity.

But now the Democrats just passed a $1.9 trillion blue-state bailout bill with no Republican votes in the House.

The bill passed the House by a 220-211 margin without a Republican vote, as the GOP argues the job market has recovered enough to warrant little or no new stimulus spending. One Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, opposed it. 

Also, Democrats with their H.R.1 bill are proposing to completely revamp election law in the United States. Again with no Republican support. And they want to ram down statehood for the District of Columbia.

And they are threatening to expand the Supreme Court.

Look, there is no mystery about this. Ever since Trump, Democrats have been looking at the political situation and they can't believe it. They can't believe that ordinary middle-class Americans are turning against them. 

So they are getting desperate. So they are queering the pitch of the electoral system. So they are pulling stunts like the BLM-Antifa summer. So they changed the rules for last November's election to make it easier for their operatives to find votes. So they overreacted to the January 6 riot. So they damned the whole of American history with their 1619 Project.

Hey, Nancy! What are you afraid of, honey?

And so we must go back to Politics 101.

What is the point behind Moynihan's remark about 70-30 votes for sweeping, historic measures?

I will tell you. The reason for elections and legislatures and reform bills is not to bend the arc of history towards justice or fight "systemic racism."

Not at all. The whole point of politics is to discourage the losers from deciding to opt for civil war.

See, when you pass a bill for $1.9 trillion with no Republican votes in a 50-50 Senate, and you pass the bill 220-211 in the House with no Republican votes, you are saying to the opposition: "Eff you!" You are basically saying to the minority: You are nothing! We can do anything we want and you will shut up if you know what is good for you.

Same thing with the big-tech censoring of right-wing voices on social media.

All one can say about such behavior by the majority party is this. It will not end well.

The whole point of the First Amendment and free speech and the right to "petition the government for a redress of grievances" is so that people with a chip on their shoulders will petition government rather than say, with Shakespeare's Cassius, "speak, hands for me" as he plunges his dagger into Julius Caesar.

Do the Nancy Pelosis and the Chuck Schumers not know this?

What do they think they are dong? Teaching the "systemic racists" a lesson? Teaching the Republican voters to never vote for a Trump again? Teaching their Republican colleagues in Congress that they are nothing?

Or are Nancy and Chuck running scared before the advancing horde of AOCs and the growing "coalition of the fringes?"

All I can say is that I must be missing something. Because for me, as a student of philosophy and politics and economics, this does not compute.

Google's Little Race Problem

Google is in the wokey headlights just now because it doesn't think that the graduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) meet its exacting standards. Paul Mirengoff has the whole procedure.

See, Google has ranked colleges as follows: "elite," followed by "tier 1" and "tier 2." But HBCUs don't make the cut for "tier 2." So they are ranked as "long tail."

Racist! Google is racist!

Now I have a classification system for liberal bad behavior: Left's Conceits, Left's Crimes, Left's Errors. Well, why not? And I think that this siti-yation -- as they say in Treasure Island -- contains all three. And I'm not sure that this doesn't always apply.

Left's Errors aspect: Back in the Sixties, a second after the Civil Rights Act was passed, liberals decided that merely criminalizing racial discrimination wasn't enough. That was their first mistake. Why? Simply because it is one thing to judge that, say, having a whites-only fountain is discrimination; it is another to say that, because a particular corporation does not have a racial makeup that matches the racial proportions in the community, this represents discrimination.

Left's Conceits aspect: The second problem is to imagine that we evolved and educated liberals could, with politics and government, right the wrongs of yesteryear with top-down liberal-led programs of racial discrimination that we call quotas, or affirmative action, or diversity, or allyism, or fighting "systemic racism." It is a conceit, often found around ruling classes, that any political program it advances will achieve the results expected. Unfortunately there is Science™ that shows that this is not so. It is called the Law of Unintended Consequences. Even La Wik recognizes the Law of Unintended Consequences as a Thing.

Left's Crimes aspect: As the Paul Mirengoff article articulates, the whole quota/affirmative action thing has seriously hurt Blacks. it goes like this:

1. "Elite" universities tend to recruit black students with qualifications somewhat below the white and Asian students -- good but not great credentials -- in order to meet their racist diversity goals.
2. "Tier 1" and "tier 2" universities are forced to accept "mediocre black students" to meet their racist diversity goals.
3. "Long tail" universities like "HBCUs are left to select from a pool of applicants with credentials insufficient to warrant admission to good non-HBCUs even with the benefit of racial preferences.

"Expert agree" that the mismatching of black applicants to university results in lower overall achievements for blacks. Google finds that “HBCU computer science students struggle with the most basic of coding, algorithms and data structures.”

I think that the "mismatching" problem is a crime. But that's just me.

Of course, this also comes under my Little Darlings problem. When you accept the overlordship of the ruling class, and become its Little Darlings, as "the workers" once did, and then women and minorities and now LGBT+, you will thrive under the sponsorship of the ruling class until the day that you are no longer politically useful. Then, like the soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Army that invaded Russia, you will be left by the roadside, probably to die of hunger and disease, certainly of despair.

And it is notable, I would say, that the abandoned Little Darlings don't really ever cotton to the reason for their despair.

Do the white working class today blame the 19th century reformers for their plight? Or FDR for eight years of top-down failure in the Great Depression? Or the compulsory unionism that made US steelworkers and autoworkers uncompetitive with the world market in the 1970s?

Anyway, it hardly matters. The damage is already done. As I say, the only question in the aftermath of lefty conceits, crimes, and errors is the size of the butcher's bill.

Will it be a butcher's bill on the scale of a Stalin or a Mao, or simply the abandoned folks "dying of despair" in rural America?

We can only hope.

Peterson's "Beyond Order"

I only realized that Jordan B. Peterson's follow-up to 12 Rules was to be published March 2 on the day before publication date. So I ordered my copy of Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life right away. For some reason the book is not yet banned on Amazon.

Hey, you good little girls at Penguin: how come I didn't know about the publication date? Are you still too triggered that, well, everybody knows that Peterson is a... well... something Eeeuww? 

But now I am half way through Beyond Order, and I'll tell you what surprises me. There's a lot of Nietzsche and Jung in it. And Dostoevsky. And then he tells the Mesopotamian myth of Tiamat and Apsu and Marduk. And when he is done with that it is on to the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, and Horus. And how Harry Potter fits exactly into the myth story arc. 

I would have thought all that would be a bridge too far for a best-selling self-help author. Anyway, the book is #8 on Amazon right now on March 8, 2021.

If the theme of 12 Rules was to get started in life, to get out of that proverbial parents' basement, the theme of Beyond Order is really more for mid-life adults that are afraid to take the next step out of a dead-end career. Or don't know what to do about the wokey co-workers at corporate HR. And Peterson recommends a blend of creativity, courage, and responsibility, and stick-to-it-iveness.

Of course, if you read Helen Lewis's review of Beyond Order in The Atlantic you won't be any the wiser about who Peterson is and what he is trying to do. Lewis is a Brit feminist lefty, that went to a private Catholic high school and then Oxford, darling, and you can understand that she would have No Clue about what Peterson is about, and what his ideas mean to his readers. To give you a hint, here is Lewis on Maps of Meaning, Peterson's 1990s book.

Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, built on the work of academics like Joseph Campbell, the literature and religion scholar who argued that all mythic narratives are variations of a single archetypal quest. (Campbell’s “monomyth” inspired the arc of Star Wars.) On this “hero’s journey,” a young man sets out from his humdrum life, confronts monsters, resists temptation, stares into the abyss, and claims a great victory. Returning home with what Campbell calls “the power to bestow boons on his fellow men,” the hero can also claim the freedom to live at peace with himself.

Know what I think? I think that Lewis hasn't read Maps of Meaning. But, of course, it is trite to call Peterson's work a rehash of Campbell, just as it is right out of the lefty catechism to refer, as Lewis did in her famous GQ interview with Peterson, to Nietzsche as the "Nazis' favorite intellectual." Earth to Lewis: Nietzsche was a pro-European and an anti-nationalist.

The message in Beyond Order is that if you are stuck in a rut, it isn't going to do any good to hide from your problems. And it isn't going to do any good to burst out into the stratosphere, and it isn't going to do any good to pick up on one of the modern isms. Lewis:

Peterson writes an entire chapter against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There’s an academic movement devoted to skepticism of grand historical narratives. It’s called … postmodernism. 

Ahem. Do not all the most advanced minds agree, Helen Lewis, that postmodernism is the grand narrative that all other grand narratives are, to use a Brit word, bollocks, and apologies for power. But postmodernism is pure as the driven snow.

Odd, isn't it, that postmodernism is a favorite with lefties for whom political power is not just the best thing but the only thing.

Here's an interesting moment from Beyond Order. Peterson talks about the 160 city speaking tour for 12 Rules. He mentions the need to keep the audience's attention, and how he learned to focus on one or two people in the audience.

What you want to see from the person you are facing is silence. What you want to hear from the crowd is dead silence. You want to hear nothing.

Because when people stop paying attention they shift their weight; they whisper to their neighbor; they think about tomorrow.

I became increasingly aware that the mention of one topic in particular brought every audience... to a dead-quiet halt: responsibility[.]

Well I never. Odd, isn't it that the one thing that our lefty friends are against is the notion of individual responsibility. Responsibility for lefties is all about the responsibility of the patriarchy or white supremacy for the misery of the oppressed peoples.

But responsibility for lefties is never about each individual, be xhe never so humble, seizing the nettle of life, overcoming adversity and fear, and just getting on with it.

Given how the ordinary People of the Responsible Self respond to Peterson's work, I would say that folks like Helen Lewis should spend a little more time trying to figure out why, and a little less time back-handing Jordan Peterson.

For me, the reason for Peterson's success is obvious. Peterson is laying out the road to creativity from rote responsibility. And it is a road that a lot of people in the world are ready to hear.

At the Intersection of Math and Politics

There's terrifying piece at Quillette about the intersection of math and leftism by Greg Ashman: "Decolonising Math is Rooted in a Decades-old Conflict." It is, if you like, the argument between people that want to teach kids to understand math, and "those who assert the importance of explicit teaching, practice, and memorization." And never mind what it means.

Now, of course, the "understanding" crowd are saying that forcing kids to memorize and practice is, as my cousin says, "colonizing the curriculum," and marginalizing the human way of learning, especially the non-western approach to knowledge.

The point is that, if things like learning to talk can be achieved without explicit teaching and rote memorization, why not math? Ashman:

Humans have been speaking to each other for a long time and long enough for evolution to act on the process of children learning their mother tongue. In contrast, writing and symbolic math are only a few thousand years old at best and for much of that time have been the preserve of only a tiny proportion of the human population. There simply has not been sufficient time for us to evolve natural ways to learn to read or do math through immersion.

In other words, little babies are programmed to learn to speak; they are not yet programmed to learn math. 

The article made me think about things we learn where explicit teaching and practice are required and just accepted. Let me count the ways:

1. Learning a musical instrument. You have to practice to make perfect. Unless you are Mozart.
2. Learning to dance. It takes about two years to learn Argentine Tango so you can just lead it unconsciously. And you practice it till it becomes second nature. Then you can wow all the girls.
3. Learning to fly. Pilots are taught to practice emergencies, because you do not have time to think when something goes wrong.
4. Boot camp. Soldiers need all kinds of skills to be second nature. To stay alive.
5. Acting in a play. You need to learn your cues, your lines, your blocking, and it needs to become second nature.
6. Mental arithmetic. It helps to know that "1 minus 4 is 7 carry one" -- instinctively, never mind why. Much faster than counting on your fingers.

Need I go on?

Maybe this explains "white privilege." Whites -- i.e. everyone except Africans -- have been doing writing and math rather longer than Blacks from West Africa. And it shows. No fair!

Note, by the way, that Brahmins from India and the Chinese seem to have no problem in the math department. In fact, I'd say that the Chinese people are probably better at math than your average pimply white soyboy. And I explain that by a couple thousand years of Mandarin examinations.

Or, as a guy from Taiwan explained to me, on the subject of teaching literacy in the East Asian character system: the way they teach literacy is that each student has to learn 20 characters a day. Or they get beaten.

What I wonder is what will happen, One Fine Day, when the clients of the liberals wake up to the fact that lefty politics is all about lefty educated gentry feeling good about themselves. Lefty politics has almost nothing to do with helping minorities and "oppressed peoples."

Do you think they will descend into a rage that outdoes the Viking "beserker" rage? Or just say: "much as I hate to say it, my liberal patrons just aren't as caring and compassionate as they like to think."

What? Me Worry? Advice to My Liberal Neighbors

In his seminal Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Joseph Schumpeter marvels that democratic governments ever get anything right. Says he in Chapter XXIII:

[D]emocracy does not mean and cannot mean that people actually rule... Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule over them... [D]emocracy is the rule of the politician.

Thus:

[T]he democratic method produces legislation and administration as by-products of the struggle for political office.

That H.R.1, the first legislation proposed by the current Congress, is all about rejiggering the rules for elections to favor the majority party, the Democrats, is thus not a bug but a feature. 

It is thus perfectly normal that the current $1.9 trillion stimulus package in Congress all about rewarding Democratic constituencies and very little about getting the economy back on course.

There are, by the way, some storm signals flying:

The American Spectator: "Inflation will destroy the middle class." The stimulus bill will stoke inflation and "a prolonged inflation will destroy the already weakened middle class and worsen the widening wealth gap in America." Is there any indication that the people in the Biden administration or that Nancy and Chuck have the least bit of interest in this?

National Review: "The Mother of all Stock Market Bubbles." The ratio of stock market valuation to GDP is right now 25 percent above the previous high at the peak of the NASDAQ bubble of 2000.

Powerline: "Storm Clouds for Biden." The Washington Post's business and economics columnist, Steven Perlstein, is retiring, and his last column basically tells the Dem faithful that their economic agenda will end in ruin.

And the politicians aren't paying attention because their trade is not fixing the economy but getting elected. And after you get elected you reward your supporters. And you think about ways to make it easier for you to get elected in the future.

Yes, but how do I protect myself? First, don't think you can completely protect yourself. But obviously you don't want to have too many dollars. You don't want to get sold out with an underwater mortgage.

And don't sell out at the bottom!

Meanwhile, a message to my liberal friends with the BLM and the #WeBelieve signs.

If you beat up on the police, what you get is fascism.

If you let your anti-fascist mostly peaceful protesters run wild, what you get is fascism.

If you permit runaway inflation, what you get is fascism.

If you beat up on the commoner middle class, what you get is fascism.

If your administration just caters to gentry-liberal virtue signalling, what you get is fascism.

This is actually not that hard. The tribe of the commoner is the nation. When the commoner is afraid, he rallies to the nation.

So, if you are a member of the Cathedral with all the perks and the power that go with it, the one thing you want to take care of is to keep the commoner sheep safely grazing. Don't sicc wokey wolves on them; and don't wipe out their modest jobs and their modest savings and their kids' education.

Do that and you will rule forever. The alternative is Literally Hitler.

When a Protest is "Mostly Peaceful" Then Maybe Crowd Control is Needed

When I had a chat with my Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss a couple of weeks ago I was a little surprised by his invocation of the 1990 WTO riots in connection with police brutality in Seattle, especially considering that he would have been 13 at the time. I know know what it was all about, now that I have got into the CHAZ chapter in Andy Ngo's Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Here's the quote:

Despite the ultraviolence of the Seattle riots, police were prohibited from using the best tool they had for crowd control: CS gas [tear gas].

That's because "Police Chief Carmen Best relented to political pressure from the Mayor's Office to ban the SPD from using [tear gas] despite its effectiveness."

I'd say that anyone with half a brain would recognize that the failure to deal firmly with Antifa has been a strategic mistake. But by concocting a story about Seattle Police Department brutality going back to 1990 my pal Dan Strauss gives himself permission to be a squish where crowd control is concerned.

Which leads to the whatabout issue with regards to Antifa vs. the January 6 riot. Which is the real problem? Antifa? The white supremacists? Or both? Or neither?

It's a "tell" isn't it, that the whole ruling class from Nancy Pelosi on down was genuinely shocked by the Capitol Hill riot on January 6: Build a Wall! Call out the National Guard! Notice that nobody really got hurt except rioter Ashli Babbitt. There was no bomb, like in the Capitol on March 6, 1970. Just a mob running through the Capitol building, taking selfies in the House chamber.

And yet, we learn, the Our Nance may have refused the offer of 10,000 troops from President Trump.

I have two questions. One is to understand what is really going on in the heads of chaps like Dan Strauss and Democrats in general with respect to lefty riots. Are they just lying, and going with the line that nothing to see here, just peaceful protests, because they want to destroy the GOP commoner voters? Somehow I can't believe that. I think that the problem is probably weakness, the "no enemies on the left" culture. The problem for a progressive politician is that he needs to be sympathetic to the protest/activist culture, because justice. If he is not as strong as the next lefty on the sacred right to "peaceful protest" then I suspect he can't have a career in Democratic politics.

Maybe it's just as simple as the existence of "oppressed peoples." First, there is systemic racism. Therefore we must protest against injustice. Therefore we can't be surprised if concerned activists sometimes cross a line; their hearts are in the right place.

And, clearly, both sides of the political conflict are fairly relaxed when their own side is in the streets, but terrified of the activists of the other side.

The other thing is the basic problem for all nationalistic Commoner Americans. When are our leaders going to figure out how to blow up the race card, and blow up the victim card, and blow up the "mostly peaceful protest" card?

I had a flash of intuition today reading two articles in Quilette about "suffering." You know, the suffering of a rough night on social media, and the paradox of increased "stress" in a time of physical plenty. The takeaway is that a good person cannot be indifferent to suffering; therefore we should do something about it.

The issue of suffering is also a big issue in Roger Scruton's Wagner's Parsifal: The Music of Redemption, i.e., redemption from suffering. There are all kinds of people suffering in Parsifal. But what do we do about it, Dick?

Obviously, while we are all called to ease suffering, there is a temptation for sufferers to take advantage of, or demand the compassion of others.

But that, of course, is exactly what our lefty friends tend to do. They demand that we redeem the sufferers, or we are racist-sexist-homophobes: What, they say? You don't care about other peoples' suffering?

Of course, we racist-sexist-homophobes might be tempted to say: after you, Alphonse. Let me see you do your Good Samaritan bit before you force me to contribute. And anyway, what is left of the redemptive aspect of relieving suffering when it is forced? No more Good Samaritan: just another taxpayer.

One of the points that Scruton brings out in his analysis of Parsifal is the cruelty of Titurel, forcing Amfortas to perform the Eucharist even though Amfortas suffers increased pain from his wound. Whaddya mean, forcing someone to redeem someone else's suffering at the cost of enormous pain? Who are you to insist, Titurel, old chap? Maybe that is what our liberal friends do, forcing America to succor their victim du jour no matter the cost to the ordinary Commoner forced to do the liberal's will.

Oh well. More research is needed.

Lefties, LGBTs, Liberals and Their Conceit

Radio host Dennis Prager has a list of questions to help you determine whether your Democratic friend is a liberal or a lefty. E.g.,

8. Is it racist to claim that Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the greatest music ever composed?

9. Is the national anthem racist?

The idea is that: if they unfriend you for asking the question they are a lefty; if they don't they are a liberal.

But I think that rather misunderstands the problem, as though political identity comes with various stands on the issues. It does, after a fashion. But first is the "fake tribe" you belong to, and whose flag you fly.

For instance, on my walk at the top of this hill at Palatine and 60th this morning I passed a gray-haired woman -- probably 70ish -- hauling her garbage can back to her yard. Her house proudly boasts a hand-made Black Lives Matter sign and is in the process of getting solar panels installed on the roof.

Now, is that woman -- who lives on the street with the best views -- a lefty? I doubt it. She is just virtue-signaling that she belongs to the Good People. I expect she has never had an original thought in her life. She just instinctively adheres to the notions and the ideas of her community, and that community is the community of gentry liberals. Right now, all across the land, good gentry liberals appalled by Trump and white supremacy have BLM and #WeBelieve and "Hate Has No Home Here" signs in their yards. 

I'm sure that if I had stopped her and asked why she had a racist sign in her yard she would be mortally offended. It would never have occurred to her that a Black Lives Matter sign means anything other than she is opposed to Racist Police Violence. If I had told here that the leaders of Black Lives Matter proudly identified themselves as "trained Marxists," she would be saying to her gentry friends later today "I can't believe he said that." Because it does not compute for her: it is crazy-cakes.

It is part of the educated gentry's conceit that they are the better people.

Meanwhile Ellie Gardey at The American Spectator writes that "Thirty Percent of Young Liberals Now Identify as LGBT." She offers two theories about this. One theory -- courtesy of the LGBT activists -- is that it represents the natural sexual identity of humans.

The opposite theory would be that LGBT identity is socially conditioned, and that over 30 percent of young liberals adopt gay or transgender identities at least in part because those identities are celebrated within young progressive communities. Young liberals today treat LGBT identity as a protected class, grant greater social status to those who are gay and transgender, and even devote an entire month of the year to parades and celebrations promoting LGBT identity. In such an environment, young people could be encouraged to form a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender identity.

Yeah. I mean, if young people are carefully taught that to be gay is to be special, why wouldn't they go for it?

Well, you know how I would understand this. First, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, I would say that it makes sense that People of the Creative Self, who believe that the best life is a creative life, would certainly be open to creativity in sexuality, rather than the boring old marriage and children of the People of the Responsible Self.

I would also add the following possibility:

I believe that girls and women are instinctively (but not consciously) repelled by the humiliation that women have suffered from the sexual revolution. In my limited experience with women down the years, they like to be gently courted. And when they submit to your advances they imagine a relationship from now till eternity. That's a far cry from the campus "hookup" culture which assumes that everyone is ready for, or at least half-a-bottle of vodka away from, a one-night stand. Remember "Mattress Girl?" Her problem was that she didn't like being dumped by her German boy-friend. Indeed the "sexual harassment" thing is that women don't like being treated as a merely "sexual" object. Not by fellow college students, and not by Andrew Cuomo.

Remember LUG (Lesbian until graduation)? Makes complete sense to me. Why get tricked into the male game of notching conquests on the bed-post? Just check out of the dangerous -- and male -- game of sexual league tables until graduation. Hey, you "safetyists" ought to be able to see the sense in that!

See I argue backwards from my current position as a 74-year-old, that the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is grandchildren. Why? Because the alternative is oblivion, and who needs that? So, to get to grandchildren, you need children. And to get to children you need heterosexual sex. And unless you want seriously angry children you need those children to be conceived in marriage. As a Colorado philosopher once said:

Children want a mother and a father; their mother and their father.

In my view, the whole LGBT thing is one of the "left's conceits."

And there is another aspect of this, one that tends to get elided in the normal course of things. It is this. The creative life -- in sex, in career -- is not for everyone. Indeed, I would say it is only for seriously crazy people. That's because, in the creativity stakes, many are called but few are chosen. How many people get to have a successful business startup? How many people get to be a famous writer or artist?  That is why Jungians like Jordan B. Peterson talk about the Sacrificial Hero dying on the border between Order and Chaos. Creativity ain't for everyone. Even the successful creative person probably dies in the creative moment. Because you know what the other name is for a creative person? Exactly: Heretic; someone turning the existing orthodoxy -- that's Greek for correct opinion -- upside down. And most people hate the guy that turns everything upside down.

Someday soon, I believe, this whole lefty, LGBT, liberal thing is going to collapse like a burst balloon. And the reason will be that women will revolt against it. I don't know how or when. I think it is already starting, with the movement against "sexual harassment" and the rise of "safetyism." Women expect to be protected, and if you don't protect them they will find someone who will.