Ukraine: I Don't Know Nuffink

Everyone has a lot to say about Ukraine and the Russian invasion. I have to say that I don't believe anything I read and I don't know what's really going on.

I just have questions:

Whatabout Color Revolutions? La Wik calls them innocent risings of the people. But Russia and China call them US-inspired meddling.

Is Ukraine a US puppet? I'd say a big "tell" is how President Biden was boasting back in the day about withholding $1 billion in aid. And how Hunter Biden has been involved in Ukraine energy companies like Burisma. Ukraine would give a dime to Hunter Biden if there weren't some sort of quid-pro-quo involved.

Is Russia winning, is Ukraine resisting? I feel that nothing I read about the war tells me anything. Wake me when it's over.

Whatabout NATO and the EU? Funny, we haven't heard much from NATO. But the EU seems to be getting involved. And the Germans seem to be waking up from a long slumber. And there seems to be popular support for helping Ukraine, in Europe and in North America: what's that all about?

Whatabout energy? I just don't get the disconnect between renewable energy and buying natural gas from Russia.

How powerful is Russia anyway? Here's the GDP table of estimates for 2022.

Country	GDP per capita nominal	GDP per capita PPP
United States	$74,725	$74,725
Germany	$51,860	$56,956
Poland	$19,056	$40,341
Lithuania	$22,412	$41,288
Russia	$11,654	$29,485
Ukraine	$4,958	$15,124

I mean. Russia and Ukraine are not exactly economic powerhouses. Even ex-Soviet satellites Poland and Lithuania are way ahead in the GDP game. So what's that all about?

Then there's China:

Country	GDP per capita nominal	GDP per capita PPP
Taiwan	$32,123	$56,959
China	$12,990	$20,667

Just for comparison. Interesting how Russia and China are both in the same GDP ballpark. And Taiwan is more or less in the Germany ballpark.

So what happens next?

Really, I have no idea, although I do expect our western leaders to exhibit a fair amount of stupidity.

But here's my idea. Suppose that the US backed out of NATO and ended the military occupation of Germany. Don't you think that Germany and Poland could do a pretty good job of keeping Russia at home?

And whatabout Nikole Hannah Jones:

What if I told you Europe is not a continent by defintion, but a geopolitical fiction to separate it from Asia and so the alarm about a European, or civilized, or First World nation being invaded is a dog whistle to tell us we should care because they are like us.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) February 27, 2022

You know. I think she has a point. We are outraged at Russia beating up the Ukrainians. But don't care so much when the US Imperial Forces beat up on rag heads and fuzzie-wuzzies.

I Know, How About a Great Reset on US Foreign Policy

One thing about ruling classes and the governments they work for: they ain't that smart.

And part of that comes from living in a court or working in a bureaucracy. Both kinds of institutions are go-along-to-get-along shops. Indeed, I've heard it said that the normal arc of a bureaucracy is to do less and less for more and more until the operation is nothing more than bureaucrats sitting around getting their paychecks and discussing their pensions.

So, if you are the president or the monarch it is very difficult to change policy. Because the bureaucrats and their jobs are all aligned with the same-old-same-old.

Such as NATO.

The whole point of NATO was to be an alliance of brothers that stood shoulder to shoulder against the Soviets. Because Stalin, because all the Commie eastern European puppet governments. Yay!

And then, just to prove we were right, the Soviets organized their puppet governments into a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Yay!

But then the Soviet Union -- an empire as a bureaucracy -- fell apart and the Eastern European puppet governments all became normal corrupt democracies like ours.

So, with the Soviet threat ended, our wise and worthy leaders...

They kept NATO going, and enrolled most of the Eastern European countries into NATO, and even invited Ukraine to be a part of NATO.

So, if you were the President of Russia, what would you think? Would you think that the eevil American empire had it in for you? Or would you just go about your business whistling a happy tune from Boris Godunov?

So here is my fearless forecast of the future, with help from one of my grandsons.

2021 - We lost Afghanistan

2022 - We lose Ukraine

2023 - We lose Taiwan

2024 - We lose Biden

Somewhere in there is losing COVID and losing on inflation. But that would make the message too complicated.

Yes, Democrats and Deep State and 17 intelligence agencies: how can you expect to win an election after you have lost three wars on your watch -- even if they are mostly phoney wars?

And then President Trump or DeSantis -- or whoever -- will have the mandate to completely cut the US Imperial Forces down to size. Then we

Cancel our membership in NATO.

Remove the occupation force in Germany.

Close 97.2 percent of US bases overseas.

It is essential to do this right away while the accusation of "He lost Afghanistan; He lost Ukraine, etc." made in the 2024 campaign is still echoing through the corridors of power, and before the deep state has a chance to organize and push back against the new president and his operatives.

Curtis Yarvin recommends that we give the retired bureaucrats full pensions. Because that's all they care about anyway. But I also think they should each get a medal.

Now, I don't really blame our Democratic friends for this total cock-up on the foreign policy front. All this is normal. It is what you expect from government. Governments keep doing same-old-same-old until the day that the whole thing falls apart. You got something you don't want to change? Turn it into a government program.

You want a society that responds flexibly and creatively to the inevitable storm and stress of life on this planet? Then keep government down to the absolute minimum.

Our globalist friends have been talking a big line in recent years about The Great Reset, by which they mean a whole raft of new government programs from climate change to Social Credit ID. The fact that they think that such a thing, pushed by the ruling class, is a good idea just tells you how little they know.

But I think it would be a good idea for the next president to steal the notion of the Great Reset, and call his revolution in foreign policy a Great Reset. 

Just to confuse things and throw dust in the eyes of the current ruling class.

Truckers are not Revolutionaries

My pal Curtis Yarvin is sneering at the Canadian truck parade as a failed revolution. And he has a point: if the truckers were trying to overthrow the Canadian government they were a pathetic zero. Successful revolutionaries look and act like The French Revolution's Saint Just and our own Lenin and Mao.

It is understandable that Yarvin would look at the truckers that way; his thing is "the next regime" and his ideal is a revolution where the present ruling class just walks out the door, accepting that its time is over.

But the truckers weren't trying to take over the government of Canada; they were just looking for some R-E-S-P-E-C-T. As the song goes. They were just saying, please stop messing with our lives and our jobs.

Hey, Canadian ruling class! How hard is that, to listen to the truckers and say, yes, you guys have a point? And then ignore them, as the ruling class generally does with jumped-up peasants? Or maybe concede some ridiculously small issue, patting the peasants on the back, and laughing to each other as the peasants  touch their forelocks before going back to the farm.

Anyway, now the whole thing is over, because all of a sudden on February 24, Prime Minister Trudeau announced the end of the emergency, just two days after the House of Commons voted in favor of a 30-day extension. Was the sudden change because the emergency was going to be defeated in the Canadian Senate? Or because Canadian banks were experiencing a run on accounts that could be frozen at any moment for any reason?

So I would say that the Canadian government made a ridiculous overreaction to the trucker protest. Hey, geniuses, you think that after two years of government ukases and mandates that the natives would be getting a bit restless? What? You never thought of that?

Remember back in the day when the Brit imperialists would report that "the natives are restless?" The point to understand is that the Brit imperial colonialists understood that they were governing a people that they didn't really understand. So when the natives got restless they understood "Houston we have a problem."

They did not spew out a paragraph of pejoratives, as Trudeau did, calling the truck protesters out for "antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia."

OK, let us understand, as economist Ludwig von Mises did when dealing with Austrian government officials in the 1910s to 1920s, that the vast majority of them are startlingly ignorant. As Joseph Schumpeter wrote in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, the trade of the politician is re-election. That he should do anything effective on the governing front is remarkable.

What Justin Trudeau is teaching us is that he really believes the political formula of today's educated class, that they are allies of the oppressed classes against white oppressors. And that the white oppressors are the enemy, and that the average white middle-class person is the enemy.

I suppose that it is a danger for any ruling class, that its functionaries actually come to believe the narrative and the lies that support it.

And the narrative of every ruling class is a farrago of lies, whether it is the feudal lords plundering their peasants, or the American revolutionaries that didn't want to pay for the French-Indian War, or the Progressives that gave us our administrative state and its entitlement programs and regulations, or the current woke elite that is desperately blaming the ordinary middle class for the failure of all the welfare-state programs from education to welfare, or the Trumpian nonsense about Making America Great Again.

What a wise ruling class understands is that over there in flyover land, the peasants see things differently than the rulers, and that this is normal. And a wise ruling class understands that everything it does takes monies away from A and gives it to B, and that A tends not to like that. This truth is inscribed in the First Amendment, which speaks about "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The First Amendment, in its wisdom, understands that there will always be this group or that group that gets all riled up and reckons that "we was robbed" and wants to do something about it.

And yes, all assemblies, and demonstrations, and protests are really a show of strength, to communicate to the government that here is a bunch of people that are mad as hell and are not going to take it any more, to threaten, by their very presence and numbers, that they could turn the show of force into actual violence. But all such shows of force are better than an actual deployment of force.

And by the way, elections are another show of force, for when you win an election by getting the most votes, you are basically saying that we have the biggest army.

So I think that the Trudeau policy of actually representing the truckers as regime opponents is a strategic mistake. Just as I believe that the whole January 6 narrative of the Democrats is a strategic mistake.

Instead, I would recommend a National Committee to Review Cross-Border Trucking Regulations for our Canadian friends. And a National Commission to Investigate 2020 Election Irregularities for our Democratic friends.

I mean, there's nothing to worry about, right? The trucking regulations are as right as right could be, and a National Committee would soon confirm that. The 2020 presidential election was completely on the up-and-up, and an in-depth Commission would merely confirm it.

Exactly. So why are Canada's Liberals and US Democrats so touchy about all this? Surely, there is no possibility that where there is smoke there is fire?

I tell you, as I write this piece, I am thinking to myself: what is the problem with our ruling classes? How come they are so touchy? How come they are deploying pejoratives left, right and center?

Could it be that there is something rotten in the State of Denmark?

We are Heading for an Energy Armageddon

It's all very well to cut off Russia from the world economy, because Ukraine. And teach that Nord Stream gas pipeline a lesson. And Putin! Who does he think he is?

But have you globalist chappies thought about what that does to your Build Back Better agenda?

It means Germany freezes to death. Because the Germans decided to go all-in on their Energiewende. Which is German for close the nukes and build lots of windmills and solar power. Oh and dirty brown coal electric plants.

If there ain't any natural gas to fill in on the days without wind and/or without sun, then Germany goes dark.

And here in the United States the price of gas is something that ordinary deplorables really care about. Add Hispanics and blacks to that.

It means that you greenie chaps look like a bunch of complete idiots to ordinary people.

Yes, I know. But Putin!

Of course, high gas -- gasoline and natural gas -- prices doesn't really bother the Laptop Class. We can afford it, they say. And we should, because climate change. Science is Real™ and all that.

Let me say, up front, that I don't like this. I don't like the Germans freezing. And I don't like poor Americans getting hammered by high gasoline prices and accelerating prices for rent and food.

But, I realize that no ruling class gets shown the door unless it has really screwed up, big time. It makes sense, for ordinary people just go about their lives; they aren't engaged with the vital issues that consume the ruling class and their lackeys, the Laptop Class. For, ever since the dawn of time, ruling class courtiers have been consumed with the status games at court. It might be the cut of their silken court knee breeches. Or getting that vital sinecure at the Circumlocution Office. Or saving the world from climate change and systemic racism.

But ordinary people don't pay much attention to the ruling-class status games. Not until they can't pay their bills. Then, and only then, they cry to their leaders: "make it stop."

Of course, by that time it's too late.

But really, it all makes sense. The ordinary middle class will go about its business, until the pain starts to hurt. And the lower class will go on cashing their government checks until the checks don't cover their day-to-day costs.

Hey ruling class! This is not that hard! Do whatever you want, but don't frighten the horses in the street. And don't crash the economy with your fashionable ideas.

But, I guess it's too late for that. We are going to have soaring energy prices. We are going to have a couple years of 10 percent inflation. We are going to have some sort of a crash. And it's all on Joe Biden's watch.

Now some enthusiasts think it's all going to add up to 100 seats in the midterms and 100 years of Republican dominance. I doubt it. But there is a good chance that our ruling class is going to get a good punch in the solar plexus this fall. And that ain't bad.

But what I am thinking about is how to come up with the memes, the slogans and the maxims that will speak directly to ordinary white deplorable Americans, rising Hispanics, trans-canceled feminists, and aspiring black rappers. Something that will convince them, for a year or two, that Democrats don't care about people like them.

The memes would need to be about jobs, prices, rent, energy, stuff like:

A president that raises gas prices 50 percent doesn't care about people like you.

And so on.

How Humans Deal with the Unknown

My pal Fritzi Nietzsche famously wrote "God is dead." La Wik comments that

Nietzsche used the phrase to express his idea that the Enlightenment had eliminated the possibility of the existence of God.

Then La Wik starts to waffle. 

However, proponents of the strongest form of the Death of God theology have used the phrase in a literal sense, meaning that the Christian God, who had existed at one point, has ceased to exist.

But I think that they are all missing the point.

I say that all humans have to deal with the things we do not know. And I say that the problem has got worse with the explosion of knowledge in the last 500 years.

Take the whole question of life. How did life get created? Every civilization has a story about that, and it usually involves God -- or one of the gods -- creating the first living thing.

And today? We are still unable to account for the creation of the first animate object. I am reading a review of current thinking on the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" by a Brit philosopher J.J. Clarke. His book is The Self-creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview.

The book is really about how to talk about things that we really don't understand. Like Evolution. Used to be that we attributed it all to God. But then came Darwin and evolution. Animals and plant "evolved" to form new species and characteristics. But how? Well, because of the natural selection of small, inherited variations. Then came the gene theory, of gene variants that changed from parent to child. Now, I believe scientists are talking about "microevolution.̈"

But how? Clarke side-steps that question with the notion of "emergence." Changes in plants and animals and communities and the market "emerge."

Do you see how clever this is? It avoids dealing with the actual mechanism of change, whatever it is, and just proposes that the way the world works is that change "emerges."

Another clever sidestep in the notion of "agency." We avoid the sticky issues of "freedom of choice" and "rational decisionmaking" versus "instinct" and unconscious decision making by noting that all living things exhibit "agency." They seem to exhibit a decision-making ability. Really, it comes down to observing that even simple organisms seem to exhibit purposeful behavior, such as in the pursuit of food. Where does it come from? Never mind. Call it "agency."

In other words, humans -- and other living things -- need to make decisions all the time without fully understanding what they are dealing with and how it works. So we come up with all kinds of cunning notions about the world that fall short of really understanding what is going on.

So I tend to chuckle about our current Creation Myth, the Big Bang. It's a very satisfying myth, and engages all our knowledge about the the way the world and the universe works. So far. But that was true in the Genesis account of Creation.

Now, I might say, why bother with a new Creation Myth? Why not just say this? Here we are. We don't know how we got here; we don't know where we are going. We don't know if our modern technology is a boon or if it is destroying the planet. We don't know what came before life, and we don't know what happens after life.

But we don't. Doesn't matter if we are hunter-gatherers or lefty activists. There is always a Creation Myth. There is always a God and a Satan. There is always Heaven and Hell. There is always a Beginning and an End.

And the person that doesn't believe in God? Don't worry: they have a god. They just call it something different.

And we humans are always inventing of new ways to think -- and opine confidently -- about things that we don't quite understand.

It really is amazing.

Two Views of Our Ruling Class and Its Power

If you are like me you are always looking for reports of cracks and infirmities in our ruling class. To keep hope alive!

But the question is: is the ruling class on its last legs, or cunningly playing us all for mugs?

Or, to put it directly, has Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just administered the coup de grace to the Canadian truckers? Or has he displayed a fatal weakness and overreaction that will bring the rule of the Canadian educated crashing down in the weeks and months ahead?

The Zman has a piece out at Taki's that presents the rulers -- and particularly the media -- as all part of a seamless coordinated monster. He mentions Joe Sobran writing twenty years ago about The Hive. Exactly:

The managerial class is now an organism. It now has collective awareness in the class-consciousness sense, but none of the subsystems are aware of themselves as integrated parts of this organism.

Thus its propaganda, its policy, its reaction to events, everything about it is as natural as a coordinated hive of bees. The ruling class doesn't need to tell its functionaries what to do or what to say. They already know, instinctively.

On the other hand, Victor Davis Hanson views the elite bubble as a weakness.

Our elites like Trudeau and Newsom seem angry they are unfairly underappreciated by their clueless beneficiaries. The latter supposedly never appreciate the needed remedies for climate change, the thought cleansing required to eliminate systemic racism, and the mind reprogramming demanded for true diversity, equity, and inclusion thinking. 

Or is it like this?

On stage, a petulant cast of clueless Justin Trudeaus and bumbling Joe Bidens simply cannot fathom why few anymore are listening to them.

My view is that both Zman and Hanson are right. Our rulers do indeed act like a Hive, instinctively knowing what to say and do to guard and protect their power.

Until.

I've been reading a biography of Andrew Mellon, banker and industrialist and Secretary of the Treasury in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. And Mellon didn't know what to do as thousands of banks were going under in 1930, 1931, and 1932. Of course his liberal biographer, David Cannadine, Hive member, contrasts the cluelessness of Mellon with the all-knowing all-successful Roosevelt. 

And that's the point. When the economy in going good, ordinary people just go about their business while the ruling class builds castles in the air "tackling" climate change and "fighting" systemic racism.

But when inflation hits ten percent, and gasoline is up 50 percent and the people are harassed by a blizzard of COVID regulations and ukases from the laptop class, that's when ordinary people rise up and dump the old rulers for new ones.

Not because they know what the rulers did wrong. Or because they know what needs to be done. But because the only thing The People can do when everything seems to be going wrong is to dump the rulers and try new ones. 

That's what they did in 1932, when clueless Mellon didn't know what to do. Looking over the blizzard of projects that Roosevelt's brain trust came up with, I'd say that only two were worth a dime. First, was an Emergency Banking Act that printed a bunch of money so that banks could meet heavy withdrawals, and banks wouldn't fail any more. And the second was going off the Gold Standard. All the rest, the NRAs, the CCCs, the TVAs? Baloney and nonsense on stilts and Jobs for Gentry.

The point is: will the same ruling-class rejection happen in 2022 and 2024? The answer is simple. We Don't Know.

And if we kick out the current ruling class from executive power, will it make a difference? We Don't Know.

But we do know this. The century-old ruling-class doctrine of wise top-down regulation and organization goes right against the Science™. Because the science today says that the universe works not by mechanical organization but by creative emergence, lots of people trying new ideas and the good ones surviving and making a fortune for their inventors.

As in: Elon Musk thinks that his reusable Starship spaceship and booster system can replace current jet passenger transportation, and do it cheaper. Is he right? We Don't Know. But stay tuned...

Changing the Tribal Rules

Here's a piece from Carl M. Cannon on the "Five Tribes" of America.

Back in 2018 the Five Tribes were:

Make America Great Again	12%
Mainline GOP	14%
The Detached	24%
Independent Blues	24%
The Resistance	26%

That was then. Now in 2022 the numbers are a bit different.

MAGA	14%
Mainline GOP	27%
Institutionalist Democrats	20%
Woke Democrats	19%
Multicultural Moderates	20%

Hmm. It seems to me that the second set of percentages are intended to obscure what is happening.

Is The Detached now supposed to be the Multicultural Moderates? 

Is The Resistance now the Woke Democrats?

Or what?

Or should we add the MAGAs and Mainline GOP together and make 26 percent in 2018 and get 41 percent as GOP supporters in 2022?

And add Independent Blues  and The Resistance in 2018 to get 50 percent Dem supporters in 2018, and add Institutionalist to Woke Democrats and get 40 percent Dem supporters in 2022?

So we would get Three Tribes, like this for 2018:

GOP Supporters	26%
Not interested	24%
Dem Supporters	50%

And again, Three Tribes, like this for 2022:

GOP Supporters	41%
Not interested	20%
Dem Supporters	40%

In other words, are the establishment pollsters trying to obscure the collapse in support for Democrats and the surge in support for Republicans, or what?

Look. There is no politics without an enemy. If you are into politics, the First Question is: who is the Enemy?

Ever since Marx (and probably before) the rising ruling educated ruling class has operated a political formula where an enlightened ruling class uses its enlightenment to advocate for the helpless lower classes. The Enemy was the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Only today, two things have changed.

Back in the day, the Helpless Ones were the workers. Today the Helpless Ones are non-whites and non-heterosexuals. Back in the day the Enemy was the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Today the Enemy is the broad white middle class. That is all.

Only, of course, there is a little problem. There is a real danger that the broad white middle class is now starting to include the rising Hispanic middle class, and the Tiger Mom East Asian middle class.

Nobody thought about that back in the day. Not that anybody thought about anything. They just established their political formula and the Enemy as the broad white middle class without really thinking about which side Hispanics and East Asians would end up on.

And even then, the Hispanics and East Asians might have stayed as Democrat voters. I mean, it's the sensible and practical and no-decision thing to do if you want to stay out of trouble, truckers. But now we have the lockdowns and the mandates and the inflation, and they are falling hard on the broad white-and-every-other-color middle class.

And what is the ruling class doing? It is not saying: wow, bit of a cock-up on the political formula front. Maybe we should have an all-hands meeting of the ruling class to figure out what to do.

No, the ruling class is doubling down on its folly. It is declaring emergencies over a peaceful trucker protest. It is declaring an armed insurrection when the wrong sort have a mostly peaceful protest. 

And that won't end well, ruling class.

The Lesson of the COVID Mess

I think it is pretty clear, by now, that the masks and the shutdowns and the vaccine mandates that were pretty universally applied by the world's governments during the COVID era Did Not Work.

And there is a real possibility that the government actions and mandates Made Things Worse.

Of course, I am biased here. I believe that, in general, government action Makes Things Worse.

Why? Because governments are an expression of politics, and politics is all about uniting to defeat the Enemy. And then sharing out the loot among the supporters.

And that is all.

Five hundred years ago there was little doubt that every human community needed a brave king to defend it from marauders and looters. And the way for a human community to thrive was to conquer and plunder. Anyway, that's what all leaders did, and nobody seemed to have much of a problem with that, except for the people on the receiving end.

But then emerged the modern economy in which ordinary people grew their own food less and less and labored instead for wages that they used to pay for food.

And the natural conservatism of the peasant -- for whom an agricultural mistake could result in starvation -- began to be supplanted by the creative experimentation of the business entrepreneur.

In the last 200 years, with one entrepreneurial revolution after another, the average real income of people in the developed nations has gone up by 30 times. You could look it up.

Nobody predicted it; nobody planned it. In fact, if the powers that be had an inkling of what was coming they would have strangled the baby in its cradle.

But the culture of the lord in his castle dies hard. Today, we don't have many lords in castles, but we do have lots of administrators in offices.

This is weird, because the science™ says that the world works not by top-down planning but by "creative emergence." Somebody has an idea, it works, and lots of people copy the Somebody's idea, and the world changes.

Thus, it is not surprising that the administrators in their offices all responded to the COVID crisis with top-down plans and regulations and mandates. That is what administrators do.

And administrators do not respond to changing conditions the way that markets do, by making bets on the future. They regulate and command. And then, long after the fact, they change their policy in the dead of night hoping that nobody will notice.

Because they are government they cannot make a mistake, because there is only one thing for a political or administrator to do when he makes a mistake, and that is to resign. That is why, when they make a mistake, they deny it and blame saboteurs and wrecker.s

In fact, I would say that the mistakes of the COVID era issue mainly from the necessity that administrators and politicians cannot ever admit a mistake.

When political leaders and their administrators make a mistake there is really only one thing for the people to do. They must form a mob and embarrass their leaders into resigning and leaving the leadership for others, sadder and wiser after the event.

This, of course, is the sense of René Girard's Scapegoat mechanism. We all get together to blame someone for what went wrong, and then come together and live happily ever after.

But I think that the whole COVID experience is telling us that there must be a better way, a different way from top-down administration and ukase. A way that issues out of modern science and its present doctrine that the world works by way of creative emergence: people having bright ideas that work and everyone else going along. Not because someone forced them but because humans naturally want to do what works.

Could that happen after the COVID screwup? Maybe, but I wouldn't place a bet on it.

De-banking the Opposition

So, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has declared and state of emergency in which, maybe, the gubmint will have the power to seize the bank accounts and other financial instruments of armed insurrectionist trucker.s. Although the usual suspects don't mention that.

But then some wag posted a tweet that alleged that Gen. Washington, the armed North American insurrectionist of the 18th century, maintained an account at the Bank of England right throughout the Revolutionary War.

During the American War of Independence, General Washington had an account at the Bank of England. His monies were not seized. The belief at the time was the Govt could not seize private property absent due process and a judicial proceeding.

Tell #Canada

— Seth Barrett Tillman (@SethBTillman) February 16, 2022

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin, the conservative columnist of color, has been de-B-and-B'ed by Air BnB. 

Hey, you know what? My Argentinian friends tell me that back in the day, when Argentinians used to prefer to have US dollar-denominated accounts rather than Argentinian pesos, one day the government stepped in and converted their accounts from dollars to devalued  pesos, essentially taking away two-thirds of the value of their money. Yay Internet!

You know what I think. I think that it's time for Republicans to propose a new Civil Rights Law. It would go something like this:

No business or financial institution shall discriminate on the basis of armed insurrectionism, subject to penalties to be enacted by Congress.

This shouldn't be hard. I'd say that every institution that cancels an account should be forced -- subject to arrest and solitary confinement of the CEO -- to provide a link at which the former account holder can obtain a monthly payment of three-fourths of the outstanding credit balance at the time of cancellation. Until four months after the restoration of the account. Additional monies to be paid to the lawyer of the account-holder's choice. (Because Rule One: you have to deal in the lawyers.)

Justice for protesters! Right, lefties?

I mean. Back in the day, did the Weathermen have their accounts seized? Did the Communist Party of the United States have its accounts seized? Did black churches in the Jim Crow South have their bank accounts seized? Or what?

And there's this from Instapundit:

MORE TO COME: Doxxed Freedom Convoy Donor Forced to Close Her Restaurant After Threats. “Anyone who donated to the Freedom Convoy is now subject to partisan doxxing and potential threats or actual violence.”

Really, this can't be hard. Since the police aren't allowed to arrest "aspiring rappers" they have all the time in the world to go after lefty white oppressors who are doxxing their political opponents.

Why aren't the police pursuing these doxxers? Because they are the children of headline politicians? Because they are Activists of Color?  Or what?

I guess the only thing that will persuade our liberal friends about this is when liberal activists find themselves on the wrong end of it. Maybe the liberal fact-checker sites should be sanctioned for false fact-checks.

It all comes down to the eternal wisdom of Cpl. Jones in Dad's Army. Said he: "they don't like it up 'em." I have no idea what he meant by that, but I do know that our liberal friends are peculiar in their lack of strategic vision. They seem to be unable to understand that the weapons they deploy against their hated enemies could by turned against them.

Of course, I understand why this is so. When your ideas and your beliefs come direct to you from Gaia, they come to you direct from Gaia. And that is all you need to know.

Canadian Truckers and the Great Rebellion

I first crystallized on a narrative about the political suppression of ordinary Commoners back in November 2020. I wrote about how it all started when the Commoner-born Richard Nixon was cheated out of the White House with a stolen election in 1960.

My point is that the Commoners of America have been gradually coming to cultural and political consciousness in the last half century. Call it a Great Rebellion. And the educated ruling class keeps trying to sabotage this movement.

I don't want to suggest that the sabotage is scandalous. It is just natural that our present ruling class -- that practices an over - under political formula -- would find the middle-middle as a threat to its power, and the ruling class would be right. The rising tide of Commonerism is a threat to its power.

To me, Nixon, Reagan, and Trump were all elected by ordinary middle-class Commoners, the great middle-middle of America, to represent them and their ordinary needs as ordinary Americans.

And, I think it fair to say, our Gentry ruling class did its utmost to kick all three out of office, and succeeded with two of them. Hey, two out of three ain't bad.

Now with have the Canadian Truckers and their bouncy castles entering the fray.

Now, I don't want to say who is right and who is wrong in all this.

But I would suggest that the COVID activities of the ruling class have been felt most cruelly by the middle-middle, that is, by people that neither have laptop jobs that can be done by computer at home and with Zoom calls nor are people just getting a check, like retirees and the lower class that doesn't work much.

And, because nobody in the ruling class really knows anyone in the middle-middle, the rulers don't really have a feel for how all the scientific and beneficent COVID restrictions and regulations are hitting the middle-middle.

And thus, when the middle-middle objects, the Gentry ruling class is caught by surprise. Naturally, it experiences the resistance to its beneficent rules as an insult. And so the cry goes out: Does anyone know one of These People?

Of course, it is worse than that, because the over - under political formula of today's ruling class experiences the middle-middle as the enemy. That is the logic of its Allyship notion, that the rulers are Allies of the Oppressed Peoples fighting the White Oppressors.

What I am suggesting is that, because of the ruling-class political formula, any member of the ruling class would already be primed to regard people protesting its wise and thoughtful COVID regulations as the Enemy. 

Because that is how politics works. I notice when I walk in the neighborhood that all the dogs being taken for a walk are very interested in me. Except for one thing: if there is another dog around, the dogs in question are going to be much more interested in each other than in the humans.

But here is something that shocked me this morning. I was walking towards a dog and its owner, but in between us was a squirrel. And the dog paid no attention to the squirrel. Didn't that dog know that squirrels are the Enemy? Hey, maybe the dog was blind, because in my experience dogs have highly sensitive radar that picks up squirrels at one hundred paces.

So it is with politicians. Their radar is tuned to pick up Enemies, the enemies of their political formula.

And so, if you want to understand a politician, keep a sharp eye on him and see who or what pricks up his attention. Chances are that's the Enemy that he has sworn a blood oath to track down and demolish.

I don't know what will happen with the Great Rebellion of Commoners. Up to now our Gentry ruling class has done a pretty effective job of heading it off at the pass. But it does seem to me that its anti-Commoner campaign is getting a little more active of late.

And I wonder what Peter Turchin's "over-production of elites" will mean in the long run. I mean if the over-produced elite scions can't find a nice Stiltstocking job at the Circumlocution Office, maybe they will join the Resistance. 

Or maybe not. Because Darling, have you ever been inside the house of one of those Deplorables?

In Politics You Never Admit You Were Wrong

For years I've used Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution as a way of understanding politics, that when things go wrong, the activists amp it up and start canceling their opponents: Reign of Terror.

But I can see, back when I started writing about reigns of terror, that I didn't have the key insight that drives political activists to destroy the opposition.

The problem with politics is that you can never admit you were wrong. Or made a mistake. Or shoulder the blame.

Obviously, this is crazy. Human life, every human life, is one mistake after the next. Successful people, happy people, are the kind that realize that "Houston we have a problem" and work like mad to solve the problem.

If fixing mistakes is one of the key skills for a happy and successful life, why don't politicians admit their mistakes?

I think it is because politics is always about fighting an enemy. As in: Nazi Carl Schmitt, that the political is the friend - enemy distinction. As in: Curtis Yarvin, that there is no politics without an enemy. 

Think of it.

• If you've been leading the fight to an enemy for years, can you turn around and say: wow, this enemy is not as bad as we thought?
  
  
• Can you admit that your strategy for fighting the enemy was all wrong, and so now it's back to square one?
  
  
• Can you admit as President Roosevelt in December 1941 that you screwed up the intelligence and the Japanese were able to cruise a force half way across the Pacific to bomb Pearl Harbor?

Obviously not. 

If you admit any of these things, then there is only one thing to do, and that is to resign. So the only way to hang onto your political leadership is never to admit being wrong. And the political system accommodates this. After a couple of presidential terms, the voters typically decide it is Time for a Change. What they are really saying is: you promised Heaven on Earth, you failed to deliver, and so you are outta here.

This approach allows us to understand the present moment.

• If you have spent the last two years pushing mandatory masks and mandatory vaccinations and the science starts to show that you were wrong, then you have a bit of a problem.
  
  
• If you have been pushing entitlement programs for the last century and the entitlement programs are broke, then maybe your brilliant plan was not o brilliant.
  
  
• If you have been enacting welfare programs and the result is that lower-class men don't work much and lower-class women don't marry much, and the young men of these families are violent criminals and only aspire to rapping, then maybe you have a problem.
  
  
• If you passed civil rights laws half a century ago, and you elected the First Black President fifteen years ago, and blacks are still poor and criminal and violent, then maybe you have a problem.

Do you see the point? The last thing that any politicians does is admit he screwed up. The last thing that any ruling class does is admit that its programs and policies were and are a disaster. 

Because once you admit your mistake, there is only one thing to do, and that is to resign.

• Would any politician of your acquaintance admit a mistake and resign?
  
  
• Would our educated ruling class ever admit a mistake and resign?

There is a reason for this, and I use Nicholas Wade and his Before the Dawn to illustrate it. Male chimps defend the troop's territory from other male chimps. But when there are no more male chimps left, then the troop ceases to exist and the females are absorbed into another troop. Same thing with human hunter-gatherer bands.

So, for males, politics -- the pursuit of the enemy -- really is a matter of life and death, or at least status vs. oblivion.

But what do humans do when they are oppressed by rulers that are screwing everything up? There seem to be several alternatives.

1. Exhaustion. That's how most reigns of terror and great purges end.
2. Bouncy castles. Truckers get together and set up inflatable castles in the capital city.
3. Scapegoat. We all come together and select a scapegoat and make them responsible for everything. As in "time for a change" elections.
4. Revolution. The ruling class is ejected and replaced by a new one.

I sure would like it if our problems could be solved by something less than bloody revolution.

But here is a new concept: Any problem that is less than life-or-death shouldn't be the responsibility of politicians and politics. Because almost every human activity is likely to go wrong and require people to get together and fix it. It needs people with a "Houston we have a problem" attitude.

And politics is the one human activity where you can never admit you were wrong and then get together and fix it.

Making Sense of George Soros, Klaus Schwab

One of the questions in the back of my mind is about George Soros. What is this billionaire Jewish currency speculator think he is doing with all his support of lefty activism? 

Does it issue from the trauma of being a Jewish kid in Hungary in the last days of Hitler's Reich? Or is is simply the conventional wisdom of an educated post-WWII European that the nation state equals nationalism equals Hitler?

And whatabout Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos every year and pushing the Great Reset and Build Back Better? Michael Rectenwald has a long piece "What is the Great Reset?" in Hillsdale College's Imprimis.

Apparently the Great Reset is "a means of addressing the 'weaknesses of capitalism' that were purportedly exposed by the COVID pandemic.

Appararently Klaus Schwab has been pushing the idea of "stakeholder capitalism" since the 1970s. "Stakeholder capitalism" means that

the management of a modern enterprise must serve not only shareholders but all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity.

Schwab and the WEF have promoted this idea ever since.

They can take credit for the stakeholder and public-private partnership rhetoric and policies embraced by governments, corporations, non-governmentals organizations, and international governance bodies worldwide.

Then there is a thing called the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Index, a kind of "social credit score" for corporations that has the effect of promoting lefty ideas like "commitments to already-vulnerable communities within their ecosystems."

BlackRock, Inc., the world's largest asset manager, is solidly behind the stakeholder model. 

And BlackRock is all-in on the climate-change movement.

In recent publications, Schwab and Thierry Malleret have pitted "stakeholder capitalism" against "neoliberalism," which they define as "a corpus of ideas and policies... favoring competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention, and economic growth over social welfare."

In other words, today's corporate elite is in bed with the administrative elite which is in bed with the political elite, and a grand time is had by all. 

It does all help make sense of the whole COVID experience. Because the whole elite is using the same hymnal, reading the same music and singing the same words.

So of course the social media giants are all-in on suppressing "misinformation" and "disinformation." 

Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg was nominated to be one of Klaus Sachwab's Young Global Leaders -- along with Google's Sergey Brin and others you may have heard of?

Really, it makes much more sense for corporate leaders to be "in alignment" with political and cultural leaders than opposed to them. It avoids being branded as "robber barons" and "malefactors of great wealth" and all the other pejoratives that have been hurled at businessmen down the last couple of centuries.

And it gives the corporate elite a stake in the over - under politics of the current era. If you support "stakeholder capitalism" it means you care about the oppressed. It makes you one of the good guys.

But the science™.

See, the science these days says that a benevolent top-down hierarchy is not the recipe for peace and prosperity. The science tells us that top-down politics and economics tends to set the economy and the culture in concrete. And it keeps on going on until the day that it doesn't. On that day, the dam breaks and all hell breaks loose.

See, the modern view is that life, the universe, and everything is "emergent." New ideas, new complexities emerge from the primordial soup, and if they work they take over the world. If they don't work then you never hear of them.

A notion like "stakeholder capitalism" that operates with the conceit that it knows how to organize "all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity" is wrong. We tried that back in the day with unionized manufacturing. All the workers at GM and Ford and General Electric were unionized and well-paid and pensioned. Until they weren't.

But that's OK. Because we now know that the white working class that benefited from the union-worker era were in fact racist-sexist-homophobes  and "bitter clingers" that had it coming.

So let's revisit the hit on "neoliberalism" that it favors "competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention, and economic growth over social welfare."

Very good. But who gets to define "solidarity," "government intervention" and "social welfare?" And who gets to use their political and economic power to implement these ideas? And what if their brilliant idea is wrong?

We see what typically happens with this model from the late COVID experience. We are told that our betters are "following the science." But we learn later that they are just winging it. And when the opinion polls turn decisively against their policies of masking and vaccination they change their tune. But the science?

There's no doubt that we humans can help people when the market turns against them and their comfortable lives are threatened by a new technology. But we cannot stop "creative destruction" in its tracks with "government intervention." Because chances are that "government intervention" will make things worse, because ten-to-one government intervention will help the powerful and be completely oblivious about the non-powerful.

For example, the governments in the United States have fallen over themselves to make unionized teachers safe and force children to wear masks in school. But they have been oblivious to the harm done in all kinds of ways to ordinary non-organized workers like truckers.

I suppose then that the way to understand George Soros and Klaus Schwab is to understand that, like most humans, they think that what is best for them is best for the rest of the world. And you better fall in line, peasants.

Oh, and Whoa, listen to Dr. Robert Malone with Tucker Carlson on WEF and Young Leaders starting at 46:30.

Wokeness Has Only Just Begun, Says Blogger

Thanks to the links at Powerline, I got to read this piece about Wokeness, by N.S. Lyons: "No, the Revolution isn't Over." Because:

1. Wokeness is a religion, a set of "metaphysical beliefs.
   
   
2. The "void of meaning hasn't been filled." There's nothing out there that can compete with Wokeness.
   
   
3. "Social atomization hasn't reversed." No communities, civic associations, "little platoons" to fill the gap.
   
   
4. "Atomization is probably the inevitable byproduct of liberal modernity." And Wokeness is a kind of desperate attempt to recover meaning.
   
   
5. The Information Revolution isn't done yet. Makes it easier to form mobs.
   
   
6. There is no authority that can "establish any kind of common metaphysical framework, common moral narrative, common vision of a properly ordered life, common norms, or even a common reality that most of society will respect, trust, follow, and collectively defend."
   
   
7. Political parties can't help because "All they can actually do is ride the chaos of the Zeitgeist,"
   
   
8. Majorities don't matter because, per Taleb, the most intolerant minority rules.
   
   
9. "Personnel is policy" and don't expect the teachers and the HRs to back off their wokey agenda.
   
   
10. Wokies occupy all the institutional high ground.
    
    
11. "Long marches are long" and we haven't even started a counter-march.
    
    
12. "Culture wars are generational wars, and the young are woke as hell." Well, yeah. Because they have been carefully taught.
    
    
13. "The youth are still coddled and mentally broken"
    
    
14. "Elite overproduction is still in overdrive"
    
    
15. "'Wokeness is still required by law." And that goes all the way back to the Civil Rights Laws.
    
    
16. "Money is still power... This Wealth-Foundation-NGO-Government Complex thus works in unison to pour huge amounts of money-power into causes that are essentially by definition progressive ones (being to affect rapid change)."
    
    
17. "The opposition is still only political." There is no "resistance on the cultural, educational, economic, technological, and media fronts," not yet.
    
    
18. "Partisanship is still getting worse" and a Trump election in 2024 might unleash an "outbreak of the Second Woke Crusade to extirpate all the Racist Forces of Evil from the nation once and for all."
    
    
19. "None of the levers of power have changed or will change hands." I.e. "The intelligence agencies; the domestic security services; the military officer corps; the diplomatic service; the regulatory administrative state; the Ministry of Information [sic]; and so on."
    
    
20. This is just like Mao's Cultural Revolution. The leaders using the woke young to beat up on their rivals. But, like the Cultural Revolution it may not end well for the rulers.

Yeah. Don't get too optimistic, especially if the GOP wins the midterms.

But Who Will Be the Ruling Class?

In the last week or so I have been blogging on the crisis of our time. And the basic problem is that we are in the Autumn of the Educated Ruling Class, because the program of the educated ruling class has failed. It failed for the working class, it has failed for blacks.

And, of course, it has ended up being unjust to the ordinary Commoner middle class, because its over - under political formula, that was intended originally to feature the fat-cat bourgeoisie as enemy, has ended up with the ordinary Commoner middle class as the enemy, because racist-sexist-homophobe.

I have been noting how we have had a succession of presidents - Nixon, Reagan, Trump -- who have really campaigned and governed as the leader of the Commoner middle class.

I have noted how, despite all this, the Republicans have no clue what they are doing. And it is true, as the Zman writes, that conservatism really doesn't have a clue.

The question is: who would be the ruling class in the Next Regime, assuming that the Next Regime is a regime that features what I call an expanding-middle political formula, that regards the ordinary Commoner middle class as "friends" and anyone that wants to beat up on the ordinary Commoner middle class as the "enemy." But, anyone that wants to ally with the ordinary middle class is welcome as a friend.

And I don't mean here the top-dog part of the ruling class, but the second-tier, that today is the entire educated and credentialed class that benefits from the administrative state: the bureaucrats in the government, the lower-order politicians, the teachers, professors, journalists: everyone that Curtis Yarvin calls The Cathedral. Down to the nice liberal ladies that have #WeBelieve yardsigns out front.

And the answer is: I don't know.

But there is an even bigger problem. It arises from a notion from economist Milton Friedman. He wrote that government is always running against the limits. It always spends as much as it can, and it taxes as much as it can. And, I would say, it borrows as much as it can.

The question is: can modern government be cut back so that it is spending not 35-40 percent of GDP but, say, 15 percent of GDP? I don't know, but I suspect that it can't be done, partly because politics is always about loot and plunder for the supporters, and also because "women expect to be protected."

All I can say is that I am going to think about this. I am sure that someone has already figured this out, and that the answer is obvious. But I haven't figured it out.

Who will be the rank-and-file of the new ruling class that governs in the interest of the ordinary Commoner middle class? I don't know.

After the Canadian Truckers

I imagine that the Canadian government will manage to dislodge and humiliate the Canadian truckers and use their media narrative power to marginalize the ordinary middle-class populists that have arisen to support them.

Pretty well what has happened here with the January 6 mostly peaceful protesters.

The fact is that political change is almost never peaceful. That's because the ruling class has too much going with the present correlation of forces to act sensibly when the rules change.

Prime Minister Trudeau exactly tells us the problem with his tweet:

Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days. Together, let’s keep working to make Canada more inclusive.

As I blogged last week, this tweet (and most of the other tweets from Trudeau) are trumpeting the political formula of today's ruling class, that I have called today the "pejorative ruling class," meaning the ruling class that Makes Things Worse.

I say that we are living in the Autumn of the Pejorative Ruling Class, meaning that the political formula that has worked so well over the last century, of the educated/credentialed/academic ruling class allied with the lower class to beat up on the stuck-up bourgeoisie, is in its last stages.

It is failing for a number of reasons.

1. It does not really help the "oppressed classes," primarily because it does not do anything for the lower classes except feed them with free money.
   
   
2. It has tripled the size of government over the last century. This means that, in the US, at least 40 percent of GDP is seized by the government and handed out as loot and plunder. If you think that this benefits society as a whole, I gotta bridge...
   
   
3. It has created a huge credentialed elite that has been educated for bureaucratic and administrative supervision -- in numbers rather in excess of the actual demand for such workers.

As I wrote last week, the over-under political formula made a kind of ugly political sense a century ago, because the working class was big and the bourgeoisie was small; so the numbers favored the rule of the educated class.

But now the middle class is easily the biggest class, so it doesn't really make political sense to marginalize it as "bitter clingers," "deplorables," and racist-sexist-homophobes.

But, flipping through Prime Minister Trudeau Twitter feed, it is clear that pandering to the oppressed classes, of whatever color and gender, is what he does.

And that is what President Biden does.

On the right, we tend to call all this "far-left" and wokey and the rest of it. But I think that it is more accurate to say that these people are just ordinary educated people doing what they have been taught. They don't know any better.

And if you have been taught a political formula where you, the ruling class, are called by Gaia and Justice to fight the horrid evil white oppressors to stop the endless marginalization of the eternal oppressed peoples, then what Trudeau and Biden do makes complete sense. It creates meaningful lives for the Laptop class and it provides loot and plunder for their lower class supporters.

But it is incredibly annoying to ordinary middle class people that just want to live their lives by the rules, own a nice house in the suburbs and raise a family.

It is also incredibly confusing to the middle class to be regaled endlessly about racism and sexism and privilege. Because ordinary middle class people just get on with life, playing the cards that life has dealt them, and not feeling that they have been particularly privileged or advantaged by their lives or their parents' lives.

And, by the way, the ordinary white middle class is taught every day that any day now, the rules may change and they won't get the promotion or job they wanted because the DEI administrators are going to hire or promote someone not on experience or merit or results, but on race and gender.

I wonder what the ordinary middle class thinks about that. We really don't know because the ordinary middle class knows that the way to get into trouble in a New York minute is to complain about quotas / affirmative action / diversity / equity. So they button their lips. Unless they happen to be on the street in the middle of a Canadian trucker peaceful protest.

OK. Our present ruling class is clueless. At one point the mayor of Ottawa criticized the truckers and their supporters for turning the whole thing into a backyard barbecue.

I mean. Peaceful protest is deadly serious. Because justice. Because centuries of oppression. How Dare the truckers and their supporters have fun!

I think the important thing to know is that our rulers really don't know what to do. They know they are in trouble, but none of the usual Five Point Plans are going to make a blind bit of difference.

And in back of that is that there is really nothing for politics to do any more.

Because politics requires an enemy that we can go and fight and destroy, to make us safe. But really there is no enemy. Not any more. So that means there is nothing for politics to do.

So the ruling class makes it up. Oppressed classes and climate disaster. Unless we act now.

Women's Tears and the Public Square

As you know I believe with sociologist George Simmel that the public square was invented by men for men, and that, with women coming into the public square they are changing it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

Now comes Richard Hanania with a piece "Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas." He is saying that when men argue in the public square they can stand there are argue away forever -- although argument tends to end up as fisticuffs.

But if a man is arguing with a woman and she dissolves in tears, then she wins.

A man can’t just yell in another man’s face for 5 or 10 minutes about how he’s hurting his feelings. If a man does behave this way, bystanders are more likely to feel disgusted than join in or play the role of white knight. The man at the receiving end of the abuse is at some point going to have to escalate towards violence, or back down and say something about how this is beneath him. Depending on the situation, observers may assume violence is a distinct possibility, and get between the two sides.

None of these options are available when getting yelled at by a woman. You certainly can’t make an implicit threat of violence. Raising your voice will turn everyone against you, and even walking away can look heartless.

Hanania proposes three available rules for male vs. female argument:

1. Expect everyone who participates in the marketplace of ideas to abide by male standards, meaning you accept some level of abrasiveness and hurt feelings as the price of entry.
   
   
2. Expect everyone to abide by female standards, meaning we care less about truth and prioritize the emotional and mental well-being of participants in debates.
   
   
3. We accept gender double standards, and tolerate more aggression towards men than we do towards women. We also tolerate more hyper-emotionalism from women than men.

But, of course, this means that women have the upper hand, because they can always switch to hyper-emotionalism when they are losing an argument.

Actually, I think that any capitulation to female rules is unworkable: you cannot have an effective public square on that basis.

Moreover, I don't know if you've noticed, but the option to be "exhausted" or to use hyper-emotionalism is only OK for lefty women. If you are a regime-approved activist, go ahead. But don't try that if you are a conservative, or a female supporter of a Canadian trucker. I don't think that Sarah Palin was ever allowed to be "exhausted." And I doubt if Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) gets to be all emotional with Chuck Schumer.

Actually women's rules cannot work in the public square, and the reason is obvious from my notion that men have a Culture of Insult -- which is the male one-on-one confrontation minus the actual resort to violence -- and women have a Culture of Complaint.

I have said that the way the women's Culture of Complaint works is for two women to be have coffee together and complaining about a third person.

But I realize that is incomplete. There is another instantiation of the women's Culture of Complaint. A woman may directly complain to her husband or to a man. And she does this because she knows that the man cannot win in that situation. If she gets angry, he cannot resort to violence, as he might with another man. If she gets emotional, he cannot resort to disdain.

The reason that the Culture of Complaint works for woman on woman is that the woman has the option that "she will never talk to that woman again." Whether it's the neighbor across the street or another officer on the US Navy ship. Remember the case of the US Navy destroyer colliding with a container ship back in 2017? The "officer of the deck" (OOD) and the "Tactical Action Officer" in charge of "monitoring the combat radar" were both women.

The OOD was named Sarah, and the Tactical Action Officer was named Natalie, and they weren’t speaking to each other!!!

Obviously a Navy cannot function when the women aren't talking to each other. But a neighborhood can.

The way that public institutions work -- have to work -- is that every day the people working there have to suck it in and work with the other people. Even if the other people suck. Especially if they suck.

For men, they have to stop short of violence. For women they have to stop short of "exhaustion" and "never talking to that person again."

Otherwise you don't have a public institution. You have a barroom brawl and you have Navy destroyers crashing into container ships. And that is not good.

 

Lefties Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Well. President Biden goes to New York City and says the whole problem with violent crime is gun shops in other states.

The Justice Department is sending additional prosecutorial resources to help shut down what’s referred to, as you all know, the iron pipeline that funnels guns from shops in states like Georgia, crime scenes in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and so many other places[.]

'Cos you cain't buy a gun in New York City. No Sir. And people wouldn't be getting shot if only the "ghost guns" weren't sneaking into NYC by the back door.

Or, here's a lefty book that says that Ronald Reagan was a racist. No, no, no, writes Paul Kengor, a Reagan biographer: one of Reagan's best friends was black. No doubt, but Reagan was still a racist dog-whistler, don'tcha know.

Actually, the lefty has a point. The whole point of lefty race politics since the Civil Rights era is that ordinary middle-class whites have to pay. And if they object, they are racists. And if a politician arises that rallies the middle-class/working-class whites, he's a racist dog-whistler. That goes for Nixon, Reagan, Trump. And my liberal neighbors already hate Ron DeSantis.

On the other hand, here's the FBIs raiding an operation, Feeding Our Future, that appears to have been scamming the federal school lunch program in Minnesota to the tune of $244 million. Apparently, the head of Feeding our Future regards the whole thing as an attack on the Somali community.

Look. The way to understand all this is that the whole lefty program is on fire. It doesn't work. It never worked. That's because top-down government is good for only one thing: military conquest. And the point of the top-down thing in the military is to force the young men to sacrifice their lives without rebelling against the generals and nobles and kings that issue the orders.

If you are not conquering something and driving the men before you and listening to the lamentation of the women, then politics ain't working for you.

Because politics come down to fighting an enemy -- it could be Commies, Fascists, greedy bankers, far-right racists, dog-whistlers -- and then handing out loot to the supporters. And that is all. Everything else is window dressing.

Thus, people in receipt of loot and plunder are just sitting there, cashing checks and buying luxury items. Like the folks at Feeding Our Future. What they are not doing is contributing to the economy.

If they are not quite in the top tier, they are getting gubmint checks and doing some king of illegal grift on the side. I remember a comment in the Wall Street Journal after the welfare reform in the 1990s. Oh, said this black lady. We always worked, but under the old welfare rules we got the checks and worked off the books. Then there was the guy with a construction business that hired people off the books. When he went broke the state got involved, because it wanted its back taxes.

One of the off-the-books employees was claiming unemployment as he worked of the books, and another was claiming disability as he worked off the books.

No kidding. Why, that's racism straight up!

OK. Let's review all this.

President Biden and guns. Hey, Mr. President. If everyone is getting a check on the one hand, and doing some sort of a scam on the other, then the general illegality is going to mean that they aren't going to want the cops around too much. And that means that they will be doing their own law enforcement, gang to gang, gun to gun. And if the guns aren't avaiable at the gun shop on the corner then any aspiring rapper that won't stand for any dissing is going to get a gun from somewhere else.

Guess what. If the black community has developed a culture of gubmint checks and off-the-books side hustles, then they ain't gonna be getting ahead in the ordinary economy where you get a job and pay taxes and expect law enforcement to take care of the crooks. 

And all this is a consequence of liberal policy. Because when you enroll the lower class in all kinds of free money programs, then you create people whose whole lives are organized around how to qualify for the free money and how to scam the free-money programs with side hustles.

I'm here to say that I don't think it is a very good idea. Is that racist of me, dear liberal friends? Too bad. It's still your fault.

And when, after 70 years, Social Security is running out of money, that's liberals' fault.

When after 50 years, 70 percent of black kids are born out of wedlock, because, among other things, you can't get welfare if you are married, that's liberals' fault.

When the black-on-black murder rate is ten times the white murder rate, that's not because of guns from out of town. It is because lower-class gangs live by violence, and they always have. In Britland, which has strict gun control, there are still plenty of Muslim gangbangers that get access to guns. Supply and demand, don'tcha know.

But liberals will never admit they were wrong. People in politics never admit they were wrong. The only thing you do with people in politics is you show them the door. Time for a Change. Old chap.

Great Rebellion Reaches Canada

 So now the Great Rebellion has hit Canada, with the truckers staging a peaceful protest in the capital of Canada, Ottawa, on Parliament Hill.

Naturally, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has accused the peaceful protesters of being the worst people in the world:

Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days. Together, let’s keep working to make Canada more inclusive.

Really, Mr Prime Minister? Really?

Translation: We, the allies -- educated, the evolved, the elite -- are fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors. 

By the way, the Allies narrative has three lies. 

First of all, who gets to say they are Allies? The educated ruling class, like any ruling class, is in politics for the power. The allies, if they are allies, are the lower class whose support the rulers buy with programs and entitlements. 

Second, the oppressed peoples are not really oppressed. They are the Little Darlings of the ruling class and, far from being oppressed, enjoy perquisites and privileges, as the mistresses of powerful men have enjoyed down the ages. 

Third,  the white oppressors are ordinary middle-class whites, with no particular skills, no particular privileges, and no particular interest in politics.

But you can see the point of the Allies narrative, particularly as expressed by Prime Minister Trudeau in his tweet. It communicates the political formula of today's ruling class. We enlightened rulers are the only thing between survival and utter annihilation for Jews, Muslims, blacks, and LGBTs. Hey, whatabout women, Justin, old pal? Ain't there no sexism in the world any more?

Put it this way: without the lie that the present educated ruling class does it all for the benefit of the oppressed, what would be the point of them? Other than the ruling class looks after its own? But hey, every ruling class does that.

In my view, the reason for the Canadian Trucker Rebellion -- and the Tea Party, and the Trump Train,  the Brexit Brits, and the French gilets jaunes -- is that the current ruling class of educated professionals rules without thinking about the impact its programs and policies will have upon ordinary middle-class people.

So, we have seen the notion during the current COVID experience that, for the Laptop class who can work anywhere as long as they have access to the internet, the maskings and lockdowns are a minor annoyance. But for people who have to attend to work at a workplace or in a public place, or interact with the administrative state, things are a lot different. As in really painful.

There is another point, and that is that the ruling class rules on the assumption that it knows what is best for the lower class, because Allies. Not that the rulers ever asked the lower classes, except to ask them if they wanted loot. And I say that the politics and programs instituted over the last century and more by the ruling class for the benefit of the lower class has Made Things Worse for the lower class.

Yes, of course the ruling class knows what is best for the ruling class and takes care to fluff its pillows of an evening.

And the ruling class can ignore the needs and the aspirations of the ordinary middle class, if that is its fancy. And it can demonize the middle class as the enemy. There is no politics without an enemy.

And the ruling class can indulge its fancy that it knows what is best for the lower class.

But what if the middle class just can't take being ignored and demonized any more?

And what if the old white working class is dying of despair?

And what if the lower class lives in unendurable chaos because of the conceited programs and entitlements designed and administered by the educated ruling class that in real life actually Make Things Worse for the lower class?

What if the ruling class runs the national debt up to 150 percent of GDP and there is no longer enough money to run all the entitlement programs and also to pay the high interest rates needed to fight inflation?

I'd say that the result of all that is what they used to call Trouble in the Balkans.

Enough of Enemies; Enough of Loot and Plunder!

The fact is that one of the instinctive roles of male humans is to defend the territory. Because the territory has food on it. Defending the territory and its food is a matter of life and death.

But, since the Industrial Revolution food is something humans buy with money. Therefore, access to or control of food-bearing territory is not a matter of life and death.

If we apply Nazi Carl Schmitt's dictum that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy, we can see that it used to make complete sense. Friend is someone that shares the food-bearing territory and fights to defend it; enemy is someone threatening to take away our food-bearing territory.

So when, e.g., Frederick the Great of Brandenburg invaded Silesia in 1740 it was not about defending Brandenburg's food-growing territory but it was about increasing the area of food-growing territory over which Fred could rule and tax. It worked out well for Our Fred, and he was a decent flute player that liked to play music of an evening. Of course, it could be that he sent the wrong message to the future rulers of Germany.

Then came the Industrial Revolution.

Then came Stalin. He starved the peasants of the Ukraine so he could buy industrial equipment from the West. Way to go, Joe.

Then came Adolf Hitler. He believed that Germany needed Lebensraum to grow food for its people. In the East. But Germany was an industrial nation that could buy its food as long as it wasn't in a world war.

Not a good idea, Adolf.

Now, of course, ever since World War II, our global elite has decided that nations and national leaders are literally Hitler, and it is their sacred duty to stop Literally Hitlers anywhere they rear their mustachioed heads.

But, our global leaders are still acting like male humans defending their territory. All across the world leaders during the late COVID emergency have been acting like male humans defending territory, issuing orders to the troops -- er, ordinary citizens -- to keep in line, to wear their uniform masks, get their vaccinations. Or else go to the brig. Just like the GIs in World War II.

And after the War on COVID our leaders are proposing to bravely lead us to Build Back Better with a whole raft of programs to dish benefits out to the people. And mobilize for the Next World War, the Green New Deal that will decarbonize the world before it's too late.

Needless to say, those that get on board with the new World War Green will be handsomely rewarded. Others will pay for their armed insurrection.

The thing that keeps bothering me is that, whether we are talking about hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon rain forest or the cult followers of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, proprietor, we are talking about the same thing.

First there is the enemy to be defeated before it's too late. And then there are the glorious perks to all the faithful friends and followers.

In other words, whenever politics is involved it is always about the enemy, and then always about rewarding the followers. Just like in the Amazon rain forest. Just like with feudal lords and their retainers. Just like the Soviet leaders and their nomenklatura. Just like western leaders and their loyal deep state.

But, you only need to mobilize against the enemy when your life depends on the continued possession of food-growing territory. If you are growing food to sell, if you are making stuff to sell, if you are doing anything in the modern economy, you don't need to defend your food-growing territory. What is more, it doesn't make any sense to invade a country and plunder its resources and sell its inhabitants into slavery. They will benefit you much more doing what they are already doing and selling it to you. That's because 80 percent of wealth in the modern economy is "intangible capital" which is a fancy way of saying the knowledge and skills of humans.

Do you understand what I am saying? I am saying that the modern state with its compulsions, its endless partisan squabbling, its gigantic loot and plunder operation -- that in the developed world means something from one third to one half of gross domestic product -- is an echo from the past, the past of primitive humans that lived and died on food-growing territory that they defended with their lives. That's why I call it the Great Reaction.

Loot and plunder? The last major loot and plunder operation that I know of was the looting and plundering of eastern Germany by the Soviet Union after World War II. How did that work out, Joe Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev?

See my point? If you are in the enemy plus loot and plunder game you ain't doing yourself a favor. Although of course, you do get to drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentation of their women. If that's how you get your jollies.

The next Big Thing for humans is to get beyond the primitive culture of enemies and loot and plunder for the friends.

But I don't know how we get there.

ABC of Politics in Brief

Enemy

The political was defined once for all by Nazi Carl Schmitt: 

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.

And the point about an enemy is that conflict is possible, and conflict can lead to killing.

Schmitt's notion has been simplified by Curtis Yarvin, who has written: "there is no politics without an enemy."

Tribes

Ancient humans weren't really tribal; they lived in a world of kindred: every person known to them was related to them by blood.

But when humans began to live in communities large enough that they didn't know everyone they have become tribal. They invented a bond between them that replaced the old bonds of blood relationship.

Thus, I maintain, all tribes are "fake tribes." They constitute an imagined relationship, a kinship of being the same kind of people, rather than the people of one blood.

Tribes are typically formed by the brothers-in-arms who have fought a successful war. Their leader is the new lord, and the brothers-in-arms are the members of the new tribe. The ubiquitous tribe of our time is the nation state. The nation is the tribe of the middle class.

Layers

Every human society is hierarchical, and we know why. It is because hierarchy is nature's way of minimizing conflict. Over the years, humans have come to think of society as a Three Layered hierarchy. Viking society was composed of Earls, Peasants and Thralls (slaves). Roman society? Patricians, Plebeians, and Slaves. Today's society, according to Curtis Yarvin, is composed of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. The alternative is just to think of "us" and "them." But that means conflict.

Honor

Among men, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, honor is the reputation for courage. Among women, honor is the reputation for chastity. Obviously, in politics, the reputation for courage is paramount, for the political leader is nothing if he is not leading his friends against the enemy.

Female honor, chastity, or always doing the right thing, is problematic in politics, and that is probably why women are problematic in politics. Women expect to be protected, but the point of the political leader is to lead his tribe into danger.

Activism

Every young educated person wants to be an "activist," fighting for the oppressed against the oppressors. But this is a fantasy, similar to the medieval romance of the late medieval age, that celebrated knights riding their chargers to rescue damsels in distress and search for the Holy Grail. Knightly orders were invented during the Crusades to go to the Holy Land and protect the pilgrims from maurauders. In our day the "activist" is acting the rule of revolutionary of the good old days of the Enlightenement when educated intellectuals were inveighing against the monstrosities of the absolute monarchs.

Blame

No politician ever takes the blame. He cannot, for he is the brave leader of his people leading them to victory against the enemy. And to fail in that is to be defeated in a humiliating battle against the enemy and condemning his people to oblivion.

ABC of Politics: Enemy

What do we mean by politics and the political? What do activists mean when they determine to Struggle for Justice? Or revolutionaries when they plot an armed insurrection to overturn the old regime? Or Black Lives Matter when they declare that equality never hurt anyone? Or Trumpists when they resolve to Make America Great Again?

A few months ago I read Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. I was hesitant, at first, because Carl Schmitt is famous as a "prominent member of the Nazi Party" and there is a reluctance in polite and educated circles to risk any pollution with Nazi associations. 

But the day came when I overcame my inhibitions and ordered Nazi Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. I have to say that the book changed my life, because it changed forever my understanding of politics and government. 

After starting The Concept of the Political noting that nobody seems to have seriously defined the political before him, Schmitt comes out and says, in Chapter II:

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.

The point about an enemy as compared to other humans, Schmitt points out, is that "conflict" is possible with an enemy. And not just conflict, as he writes in Chapter III:

The terms friend, enemy, and conflict… refer specifically to the real possibility of physical killing.

The guy that pointed me towards Schmitt is Curtis Yarvin, who states that 

[P]olitics is human collective action—against humans. There is no politics without an enemy.

This puts the notion of "limited government" in a new light. For it suggests that politics and government should be limited to questions where the friend and enemy distinction is inescapable. It suggests that government should only be involved in issues where the "other" really is an enemy, a existential threat to our way of life, where we accept that conflict, killing, or a fight to the death, is likely to be needed. 

Schmitt's definition of the political raises an awkward question, that the problem with any politics is that it is liable to descend from a frank and open discussion of the issues into a partisan food-fight where the parties come to experience each other as enemies. Perhaps we need a "no first use" approach to politics similar to the enlightened approach to nuclear warfare: politics is only appropriate if "we" have been attacked by an enemy.

Or, to put it another way, in connection with an "issue" involving politics or government over which the members of a society are divided, is it possible to avoid coming to consider people who vote against our program or vote against our candidate as enemies, and treat them as such?

When do we ever consider, in respect of some political issue or government program, whether we really want to treat opponents of our magnificent ideas as enemies?

For instance, if the education of children is decided by politics, then immediately the question arises about what to do with people that resist the government's policy on education. Recently we have seen, in the United States, exactly what happens. Government leaders in the federal government have decided that parents opposed to its policy may be subject to police surveillance and accused of "violent extremism." 

In other words, the leaders of the United States federal government experience parents opposed to their policy as enemies. This is not remarkable, for it is a short step for anyone in politics to go from considering political opponents as mere nuisances and to experiencing them as enemies.

That's because once a topic becomes political, it enters the friend vs. enemy distinction and starts down the road to conflict and the "real possibility of physical killing."

So what does the political, and the distinction between friend and enemy, come from?

Absent any better ideas it starts, I would argue, with the territorial culture of the chimpanzee. According to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the main job of chimpanzee males is to patrol the border to defend the food-yielding territory in which the females bear and raise young chimps. More territory equals more food equals more baby chimps; less territory equals less food equals less baby chimps. Every male chimp beyond the border is an enemy.

The same is clearly true with humans in the hunter-gatherer and agricultural eras. Anyone that threatens our land is a threat to our life, and an enemy.

But that has all changed with the industrial era. Food is not something you grow any more, it is something you buy. It does not matter where the food is grown or who grows it. Who is the enemy now? Is there really an enemy any more?

Let us rehearse the history of the enemy. In the hunter-gatherer era all men were warriors and defended their territory from the enemy. But in the agricultural era most men became farmers, and only a few men defended the border from the enemy; we call them "marcher lords." Marcher lords had a grand old time fighting each other down to the Hundred Years War and finally in the Wars of the Roses so that Shakespeare could make them into colorful characters to strut and fret upon the Elizabethan stage: other marcher lords as enemies.

In the 17th century began the age of religious wars: Roundheads versus Cavaliers, The Thirty Years War. And the Protestant Dutch invaded England in 1688 to create a counter-force against Catholic France. Rival religions as enemies.

In the 18th century we had class wars with the rising bourgeoisie feeling its oats in the American and French Revolutions. The enemy is not a rival lord but the class of lords in general.

In the 20th century humans graduated to world wars, which were about what? Defending food-growing territory? Teaching emperors with gold-braid uniforms and knightly stars a lesson? Creating Lebensraum? Teaching Nazi racists a lesson? Teaching communists a lesson? Enemies have become ideological, people with a different idea of the good and the just.

I would argue that, ever since the dawn of agriculture, the enemy-at-the-border concept has been less and less relevant. It was certainly irrelevant when Rousseau wrote in A Discourse on Inequality that

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying "This is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

Do you see all the "tells" in this sentence? First of all, it uses the code-word "enclosed," as in enclosures of common land that was a political issue right up until agricultural land ownership didn't matter any more. Then, Rousseau assumes that the people in society can resolve questions of ownership without resort to conflict. So, we are way beyond chimps and hunter-gatherers. The idea of property and property issues settled by legal procedure is already in place and taken for granted. This "first man" is not a founder at all, he already lives in a "civil society." The other people are not "simple enough to believe him," but already live in a society where ownership is a matter of common sense and routine. What's your problem with ownership, Jean-Jacques, a bourgeois born and raised in the city of Geneva?

But politics demands an enemy. Do we need an enemy?

Let us follow the enemy experience down the ages.

Let us propose that the chimp or hunter-gatherer band threatening our food-yielding land is a genuine enemy.

Let us concede that Danes longshipping up the rivers of Saxon England and raping and pillaging English villages are genuine enemies.

Let us say that all feudal feuding up until the dawn of the industrial era is understandable; the other noble and his feudal host is an enemy.

But are rival religions really enemies?

And was the German industrial state a genuine enemy of the French industrial state in 1914? What exactly would be the point?

But there is no politics without an enemy.

What about internal politics?

Is the capitalist the enemy of the worker he employed in the two centuries that real per-capita income has increased by 30 times?

Is the male patriarch really the enemy of all women?

Is the white oppressor really the enemy of the oppressed peoples migrating across the world to partake of white oppressor culture and jobs?

And is the white supremacist really the enemy of the black aspiring rapper?

But there is no politics without an enemy.

I think we humans need to face up to the fact that politics, the cult of the enemy, is vieux jeu, because in the world-wide market economy there are no enemies, because we are no longer chimpanzees competing for food, or marcher lords competing for fiefs, or religions and ideologies competing for state power, and land is not life any more. Life today is not growing and defending the food supply; it is doing and making things that other people will buy.

But there is no politics without an enemy.