The Poverty of Power

I was talking to a woman about #MeToo and stuff a day or so ago, and it made me think.

What leads a chap like Harvey Weinstein to reduce sex with actresses to a quick dinner of champagne and caviar followed by a visit to his office and a quick jerk-off? In my sexual fantasies, sex with actresses would amount to a lot more than that.

The answer, I suppose is that Harvey's modus operandi reveals sex as a power obsession reduced to its essentials, when the beauty, the mystery of sex loses all her loveliness. In real life, sex is dressed up with love, and commitment, and a relationship, and children, God, and the whole cycle of life. But if you just want to get it on with the latest applicant for stardom, how much trouble is it worth? Do you do the dance of seduction? Do you wine and dine, and send gifts, and even write a poem or two? Do you visit the jeweler? Do you set your sex object up as your mistress? Do you abandon your wife? Your children? Well, Harvey baby has told us. It is worth champagne and caviar. It is worth an hour up in the office. But it is not worth taking the time for a seduction. So you get it off as though you were watching on-line porn.

Really, for a Harvey, all the extra stuff is not worth it; it has to be slam-bam, thank you ma'am. But you can't expect a nice middle-class girl to come up to the office and get it on in 30 minutes flat. Pretty middle-class girls just aren't trained up like that. They expect to be courted: that is why the hook-up culture requires its practitioners to load up on vodka before heading out for the evening. Middle-class girls need to blank out before hooking up.

Of course, next morning, or next month, they get angry. But that is another story.

So if Harvey is dealing with a nice middle-class girl that wants to be a star, then at least he gets to demonstrate his power by jerking off in front of her. And she probably has the sense to keep quiet. Until the day that #MeToo goes nuclear.

If power can ruin sex, what about the rest of the human experience? This is my point. If it is a bad thing for a Harvey Weinstein to wield sexual power over actresses, and everyone agrees that it is a shocking thing for employers to wield power over workers, then what about political power of politicians and activists over Americans?

The point about power and sex is that we can agree that the injection of power into sexual relationships is a bad thing that diminishes sex and diminishes people -- including both the powerful man like Harvey Weinstein and his various victims. And the point of power and employment is that it is not good for the employer to have all the power and his employee little or no power. Indeed, one of the developments of employment in the 20th century is that it is beneficial to the employer and to the bottom line not to bully his employees but to give them as much responsibility as possible.

So what about politics? Aye, there's the rub, for the woods are full of people convinced that the world waits upon the genius of their political power. But the truth is that political power, like any power, diminishes and dominates. It diminishes the potential of human cooperation; it makes people -- both the powerful and the powerless -- less than they could be, than they ought to be.

Look, this should be a slam dunk. The political regimes of the 20th century that most believed in the saving grace of political power were those of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. So, can we agree that extreme political power, that reduces the people to the status of slaves, is a bad thing?

What about the power of the administrative state and its entitlement programs? Can we not say that there must be a better way than comprehensive and mandatory programs of pensions, health care, and education, programs that dictate how people should save for retirement, how they should educate their children, must be less than optimal? And then there is the power to "deplatform" and prevent ideas from being discussed in the public square. There is the power to name and shame on social media. There is the power to brand people as racist, sexist homophobes.

Is it not true that the use of political power diminishes both the powerful that have the means to swing political power and the people without political power that are subordinated to the power of the powerful? Yet it seems that people are only opposed to political power when someone else is doing it to them.

I think that the next great step in human evolution is to reduce the power of politics and amp up the volume on cooperative relations between humans based on interpersonal trust and faith.

It may be, of course, that the development of blockchain may permit people that trust each other to interact by bypassing untrustworthy and unfaithful people. And especially the untrustworthy and unfaithful people that attempt to get their way with power. I wonder how that would turn out, for it would put additional power into the hands of the trustworthy and the faithful.

Or as Jordan B. Peterson says, the way to get on in the world is making yourself competent. Competent people are useful and beneficial, and people want to interact with them. It is a form of power, but a power that can be used  to help people.

Competence, trust, faith. Surely these can overcome the poverty of power.

It's the Power: Why Ruling Class Liberals Won't Let Us Alone

There used to be a joke about the British middle class requesting "no sex please, we're British."  I suppose the joke was that the married-with-children middle class that we associate with "the Fifties" was not looking to be titillated with sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It  has other things on its mind.

You can see the wisdom of that attitude, 50 years after "the Sixties." What was the point of the sexual revolution, now that women are demanding safe spaces from any man and his patriarchal sexual harassment, now that drugs are now coming to mean the white working class dying of despair in the opioid crisis, and peculiarly sexless girl singers bump and grind their wailing songs in an advertisement of availability that is absolutely forbidden by #MeToo.

What the average middle-class American would like today would be "no politics please, we're normals." The promise of middle-class life, after all, is to live free of subordination to some scion of a ruling-class landowner, to be responsible and independent of his power, making your own way  in the city.

But the last two centuries has seen the rise of a new ruling class and a new politics, and a new subordination. Whereas the old ruling class just ruled over a subordinate peasantry that it both protected and exploited, the new ruling class reinvented politics by separating the protection and the exploitation. It would protect its selected classes of victims, "little darlings" that it determined to champion. It would exploit the middle-class bourgeoisie and use revenues from middle-class enterprise to buy the votes of its protected "little darlings."

Thus the middle class is subordinated to the new educated ruling class by constant ideological warfare that makes the middle class into, first, exploiters of workers, and now racist sexist homophobes whose bigotry must be named and shamed into oblivion.

The "little darlings," first the workers, and now women, minorities and the sexual experimenters of the  ruling class, are subordinated as the protected class championed and patronized by the educated ruling class.

If you are a middle-class normal you just want to live your life with a minimum of politics. You feel mildly prejudiced against racial minorities and aggressive feminists and sexual experimenters from a natural and healthy desire to trust only those likely to be trustworthy. 

On this strategy minorities and women would be co-opted bit by bit into the middle class and everyone would live happily ever after. But his obviously runs counter to the political agenda of the educated ruling class for whom living happily ever after is nothing to do with the case, because for the new ruling class the meaning of life, the universe, and everything depends on using ruling class political power to dominate society as every ruling class aims to do.

If you are in politics you need  to "raise awareness;" you need to mobilize your supporters. And you need to cast your political opponents as monsters and bigots. You cannot allow things to settle down and for everyone to just get along.

That is why, 50 years after the Civil Rights Acts, we are obsessed with racism. That is why, with women earning just about the same as men, we are obsessed with sexual harassment in the workplace. That is why, with gay marriage a fact, we must hunt down people that don't bang their heads on the ground in celebration of LGBT. Thus the Trump election "should be analyzed less in terms of what he offered as a candidate and more as a reflection of the public's surly mutinous mood."

Well, yes, per Suzanne Fields. The public would be "surly and mutinous" when the educated ruling class insists on poking and tormenting it with its "monomaniacal intensity of causes" that are all about  the political power of  the ruling class and nothing about the needs of the average middle-class normal.

So that's the state of play today. The  ruling class is obsessed with its political causes, and the middle class is surly and mutinous.

But only because the ruling class wants it that way.

Things May Not Work Out for the Dem Extremists

I know that we are all supposed to be terrified of the totalitarian left, in which nobody in America can say or do a thing out of line, or the liberal enforcers will getcha.

And I know we are supposed to be terrified of the liberal cunning plan to replace the current white majority with an immigrant horde that will vote Democrats into power forever.

I know that it’s all dreadful and terrifying, but I just think that the Democrats will find that their cunning plan will end up just like one of Baldrick’s cunning plans: too clever by half.

I suspect that the first problem with the liberals’ cunning plan is that it assumes that liberals are the ringmasters and all the American people are just trained circus animals completely under the ringmaster’s control. I doubt that the trained circus animals are quite as tame and conformable as the liberals think.

The second  problem I see with the liberals’ cunning plan is that I suspect that there isn’t enough money to keep their clients satisfied. The trouble with their politics-with-everything philosophy is that a  hierarchical patronage system needs a constantly increasing flow of money to reward the supporters. Last year’s handout is just taken for granted: what have you done for me lately? That is why liberals are now reduced to promising Medicare-For-All and free college tuition. These are staggeringly expensive programs and there is no money to pay for that kind of thing without incredibly increased taxes, and if liberals attempt to implement them they will probably experience the wave election of 2010 all over again.

Then there is the problem with the liberal pet projects like climate change and diversity and inclusion and deplatforming anyone that steps outside today’s liberal party line. Climate change is a program by the elite, of the elite, and for the elite, and if you are an ordinary person you just can’t see the point. But if you are an ordinary person you can see that your gas prices are up, you electricity prices are up, and jobs are hard to come by. Because you are an ordinary person you don’t really have a voice in the public square, not until the the whole thing reaches a tipping point and the yellow vests hit the street because they just can’t take it any more. Diversity and inclusion really only benefit liberals and the liberals’ latest little darlings. And anyone that is not terrified by the reign of terror and virtue of today's liberal Jacobins is probably bidding for a place on the liberal Committee of Public Safety.

In his Anatomy of Revolution Crane Brinton proposes that the Reign of Terror period in a revolutionary cycle is necessarily short and sharp. That’s because people cannot be wound up to an ideological ferment for too long. Ideological mobilization can only be temporary; at some point people just become exhausted and want to return to normal. On his view, a revolution begins with moderates, but is then taken over by the crazies when the moderates fail to change the world as promised in the revolutionary prospectus. But the crazies’ Reign of Terror eventually runs out of gas and the Thermidor period returns to a kind of normalcy, although not of course to the status quo ante.

The reason we are in this semi reign of terror is that moderate liberalism has not delivered the promised world of peace and justice. The moderates are forced to up their ante to keep the crazies from taking over the liberal project completely. And, of course, it only makes sense to purge all conservatives out of the academy and social media. That is how a reign of terror works.

The problem of a reign of terror is that in its rage for justice it commits the most appalling and monstrous injustices on an innocent population. That is what my maxim that “there is no such thing as justice, only injustice” is all about. Look at how this works in the so-called  “justice system.” The law courts only respond after a damage has been done, after a person has been victimized by a criminal, after a person has been damaged by a tort. But the legal system can never really deliver justice. It can only try to compensate the victim after the damage has been done. It can never return the victim to the moment before the damage was done.

And that is why I think that things will not turn out the way the liberals think, or that we normals fear. Our liberal friends are playing with fire, and that fire will end up consuming them. Of course, the fire may consume us normals first, before it turns on the liberals and consumes them. Fires are like that.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going

Salena Zito defines the great divide in America as between the "placed" and the "placeless." By "placed" she means people that want to live and work and stay in their native city. By "placeless" she means the gifted and credentialed that can live and work and move to anywhere, and do.

Actually, I'd say that the great divide in America today is between the "favored" and the "unfavored." The "favored" are the educated elite and their "little darling" victims; the "unfavored" amounts to everyone else, the racist, sexist, homophobic normals.

This is not surprising. The whole point of politics is to reward your supporters with government revenue and favors, and screw everybody else. So the bigger government gets, and the more that outcomes are directed by government, the more you are going to get a "favored/unfavored" division in society.

But I want to challenge the idea of "place" as a good thing. The basic nature of humans is that we are nomads, happy to sojourn in a favored land for a while, but whose survival always depends on knowing when it is time to move on before it is too late.

This is personal for me because my father's family was caught in Russia in 1918 and got out alive, and my mother's family was stuck in Japan in 1940 and got out alive. Then my two parents were stuck in India at independence and got out to England in 1948. Now I live in Seattle; one daughter lives in Connecticut, and the other daughter in Britain.

So, on Zito's definition we are "placeless." Very well. But the point is that we got out in time. And so we continued to wive and thrive.

It is natural for ruling classes to sell the idea that the thing to do is to stay in one place and pay taxes. you see that attitude in Marx: "Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels." Yeah, Chuckie, baby!

In our time the left has encouraged the working class to believe that they could settle down in a place and get good jobs at good wages forever. So they did. And then the world moved on; the good jobs at good wages went away, and the "places" turned into ghost towns.

Was the white working class betrayed? Of course, but not by the corporations that hired and fired them, but by the lefties that sold the working class on the lie that they could work and prosper in one place forever.

The truth is that there is a name for people stuck in one place:  Slaves -- and their kissing cousins, the serfs -- are people that cannot leave their place, whether that place is a slave plantation or a communist utopia. Free men and women are free to get up and go, and they do, before it is too late.

It is nice to think that you can live in one place for generations in one place, but it is not really the way of the world. Something always changes, whether it is the weather, the king, the Mongols, the Nazis, ISIS, or the Communists. And you better be ready to get up and get out before it is too late.

That, after all, is the reality we are experiencing today. All over the world people in the less-favored locations are getting up and getting out of the "shithole countries" that they are living in. They want to get to non-shithole countries so they can wive and thrive. And because air transportation is so cheap, they actually can get up and leave.

Hey, maybe some lefties will even help them move if they agree to become poster children on the TV news for some lefty activist NGO. And that is the trouble with migrants; they seem to be easy marks for the left.

But the lesson of history is: don't be a mark. It doesn't matter what the priests tell you, or the politicians, or the real-estate salesmen. If things don't look good in the months and years ahead you'd better do something about it. If you want your genes to survive.

It's really cool that Donald Trump has arisen to Make America Great Again and give the white working class a chance to get out of the rut they were in. But nobody should think that Trump is going to save their bacon forever. The world moves on; it always has and it always will.

And you better be on board when the last train leaves the station.

Why I Think Jordan Peterson is Important

In response to my review of Vox Day's Jordanetics, Vox Day kindly averred as how Immanuel Kant was "wrong, completely wrong, and utterly wrong... And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad."

But here is a Rex Murphy piece in the Canadian National Post on Jordan B. Peterson, about how the left too has a problem with Jordanetics, about how the whole Peterson phenomenon started with a bunch of U of Toronto students that tried to get the prof fired for crimes against leftism.

[They were outraged by] Peterson’s “gross misconduct,” his “efforts at agitation … inflammatory denunciations … evident connections to white supremacists … disruptive behaviour.”

In response, Peterson

more or less told the pack of puerile leftlings chasing him with pitchforks and torches that their grandmothers wore severely unstylish army boots.

OK, so why do both left and right disapprove of Jordan B. Peterson?

The answer, as you would expect, is completely comprehended by my reductive Three Peoples theory. That's the one with the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class, and the People of the Creative Self, everyone from artists and writers to start-up businessmen and political activists and revolutionaries.

See, the point is that lefties see the world as creative revolutionary activists like them making the world safe for their "little darlings," the People of the Subordinate Self -- the workers, peasants, and historically marginalized people like blacks, women, gays -- from the depredations of the evil bourgeois middle class and the worst thing in the world, Christianity. But Peterson defends the right of the ordinary middle class to pursue its destiny of responsibility and even regards religion as a Good Thing.

Now, chaps like Vox Day believe that the middle class of the nation state, the People of the Responsible Self, and reason and logic are the good guys. The lefties of the People of the Creative Self are the bad guys, and the workers and peasants of the People of the Subordinate Self, are the foolish dupes of the lefties.

My Three Peoples theory takes the reductive position that all three of the Three Peoples are perfectly natural and physical. There are tons of people in the world that just want to be safe and leave all the heavy lifting to their lord or their political patron. So be it. There are lots of people that want to get a job, get married, have children, and retire in good time with a nice little nest egg. More power to them. Then there are creative geniuses on the border between the known and the unknown that bring new inventions and economic revolutions. They are amazing.

So you can see that my theory of the world is a sophisticated and balanced view of the world that understands that there are all kinds of people in the world and they have a perfect right to be who they are. In any case, we can't be sure about who has the inside track on Truth, Justice, and the American Way. That really is the point that Kant is making with his notion that we can't know things in themselves, but only start guessing from what we pick up with our senses. My Three Peoples theory also tracks with Jung, because Jung proposes that all religions are attempts by historical peoples to make sense of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and that the same themes keep coming up in every religion. With the left, we are saying that all religions are superstition and bigotry. But with Jung we are saying that all religions are an honest attempt to get to the heart of things.

So of course Vox Day would be anti-Kant and anti-Jung.

Now, I'm not sure what Jordan Peterson has to say about the People of the Subordinate Self, but he clearly in his 12 Rules says that the first thing to do is get out of the basement, stand up straight with shoulders back and discipline yourself to become a responsible person. In Maps of Meaning, his first book, he proposes that the highest and best thing is to be a sacrificial hero trying to make sense of the border between order and chaos. That is a celebration of the creative self.

So of course I think that Jordan Peterson is a good guy. He is saying what I am saying, only better.

See, my world view is that for most of history, and certainly since the dawn of the state-based agricultural age nearly everyone was a subordinate peasant or a slave. It was the genius of Christianity and the other Axial Age religions to develop the idea that humans were responsible to God for their lives, not subordinate to their lords, and ought to do something about it. But now, in my view, we have entered into a creative age, where people think that the highest and best thing is to be creative. The last 200 years of the capitalist explosion is nothing if it is not a creative explosion.

This means that the old religion of responsibility, Christianity, no longer can win the hearts and minds of people that yearn to be creative. They all want to be artists and writers, and activists and start-up entrepreneurs, not mere deplorable responsibles. Now modern leftism, in my view, is the idea that only political creativity is meaningful, and that responsibility is for the birds. So their religion excludes responsibility as a good.

But I think that the religion of the future must combine a faith in responsibility with a faith in creativity, rather than choose one or the other, and I think that Jordan Peterson's ideas are a sensible step in that direction.

 On my view you can easily see that it makes perfect sense that Vox Day, with his faith in responsibility, and lefties, with their faith in political creativity, would think that Peterson is a dangerous crank that ought to be vilified and suppressed.

My only complaint is that the woods are not full of Jordan Petersons celebrating a combination of responsibility and creativity.

But we can't have everything. Not right away.

Yes, There is Objective Truth, But We Don't Know It

Vox Day has a thoughtful riposte to my review of his Jordanetics. He says that Kant was wrong:

And the only thing you need to know about Kant is that he was wrong, completely and utterly wrong. His entire life's work was an unnecessary attempt to square a philosophical circle. The objective truth exists regardless of our ability to correctly perceive it at any given point in time.

Well, yes. The objective truth, or Kant's ẗhing-in-itself, presumably does exist independently of our ability to perceive it. But Kant's point is that, whatever really exists, we don't know what it is, and cannot directly know it, the things-in-themselves, because we only experience appearances. The immense cunning of Kant's idea (whether it is right or wrong) is that we should never assume that we have arrived at a complete understanding of anything. All we ever know is that we have a pretty good grasp of things, thus far. Hence Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

And the fundamental fact of our time is the notion from Werner Heisenberg that the 20th century physics revolution means that the really real, deep down at the micro level, cannot be described by every-day notions by which we talk about the every day world as we experience it moment to moment. So we have to fake it with the likely stories of atoms and quarks and stuff by which we try to understand the math through metaphor.

Nor does Vox Day put any faith in Jung:

And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad. That's not you make sense of the world. That's not how you make sense of anything.

In my view, all Jung is doing is starting with the notion that all religions and all accounts of the really real are the accounts of blind men encountering an elephant. It's a trunk. It's a big flappy ear, etc. But what is it, really? Well Jung -- and Peterson -- say that all religions are attempts to understand the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, given the state of human knowledge at the time. Therefore they are reprising the same old themes, but shining a new light as human knowledge and expertise expands.

I was talking to a math-whiz acquaintance a few months ago, and opined that in due course the physicists would come up with a theory of reality that goes deeper than quantum mechanics and its present account of energy and mass. He agreed. So what is objectively real? What we know today, or what we will know tomorrow?

And that is, for me, the meaning of Kant. He is just saying: don't think that you've got the final word on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Just remember that all we know are sense impressions and the story we have made up to make sense of them. Assume that the thing-in-itself is still a mystery.

Whether the real is real, or just an phantasm, no human can go far wrong by accepting that he still has a lot to learn.

For me there's a bigger thing going in with Kant and Jung and Peterson. And it is this. "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," through thinkers like Kant and Jung, and even Peterson, are starting to develop a theory of the meaning of life, the universe and everything that can show up the left as the shallow, reactionary, and cramped movement it is, that makes a god out of politics and power, instead of going beyond politics and the lust for power, given that the market economy has provided a means where humans can negotiate practically everything through trust and exchange rather than battle to the death over the exclusive right to a food-growing patch of land, which has been the fate of mankind since the dawn.

I think that ideas like my reductive Three Peoples theory and the notion of the sacrificial hero in Jung provide a means of developing a higher and better concept of human meaning than the cruel leftist faith in politics and force, and a better way of showing up its barren world view as an utterly futile and foolish fantasy.

And I think that Jordan B. Peterson's revival of meaning for the life of the responsible person in 12 Rules is a first step.

The Trouble is that the Yellow Vests are Already Toast

So now all the experts are predicting that the current regime in France is toast, because the French regime, like the France of 1789, is running out of money.

Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. The whole point of government, as I keep saying, is to occupy territory, tax the inhabitants, and reward its supporters. The problem is that you have to keep upping the ante, because your supporters Want More Money, and eventually you run out of other peoples' money to keep rewarding your supporters.

But that is not the point. The point is whether we, the people, are going to play the government's game.

The reason that the yellow vests, the gilets jaunes, are angry is because they bought into the regime's promises, long ago: vote for them and get benefits. That's great, except that when you do that you turn yourself into a peasant, dependent on your master's favor. You sit there, on your peasant allotment, or in your union job, getting your handout, until the day that the handouts stop.

Like I said. The trouble about being a Little Darling is that one day your sugar daddy ups and leaves. Then what?

That is what happened to the peasants. They were useful to their lords until the day came that the lords didn't need them for their personal armies. Or until the lords got into agricultural "improvement" and didn't need so many agricultural laborers as in olden times.

That is what happened to the white working class. Vote for us, said the socialists, and we will protect you from the bosses.  We will provide you with pensions, health care, good jobs at good wages. Until "we" didn't. Because? Well because the unionized corporations started having to compete with up-and-coming countries like China using workers that were just off the farm and would work for a fraction of the wage of good all-American union workers. And the progressive politicians lost interest in the white working class and started bidding for the votes of women and minorities, and then legal and illegal immigrants.

That is what is happening to the gilets jaunes. France has all kinds of regulatory wonders, from the 35-hour week to mandatory benefits to near lifetime employment guarantees. But now the political class with their haute école degrees believe in helping helpless migrants, and saving the planet from Maurice Strong's notion of climate change.

So here is my analysis from my reductive, but brilliant, Three Peoples theory. Choose your poison: choose what you want to submit to. There are three options, one for each of the Three Peoples.

You can submit to your loving lord, if you are from the People of the Subordinate Self. That means you are fine until the day that your loving lord -- or your loving politician -- no longer needs your support. Then you are toast.

You can submit to the market, if you are from the People of the Responsible Self. That means you will always have a job, because if your current gig ends when the market has moved on and your skills aren't in demand any more you just shrug your shoulders and get trained for something else, or convert your skills into something else. Because you just accept that the market's verdict is final. If you don't accept the market's verdict you are nothing but an underling.

You can submit to the gods of creation, if you are from the People of the Creative Self. That means you need to accept that, most likely, you won't make it, because in the world of creativity many are called but few are chosen. If you accept this truth you are a mensch, and accept that if you can't make it as a creative then you just have to suck it in and submit to the market. If you don't you are a menace, because you will probably try to get into politics or activism, trying to be creative in politics, where the name of the game is to get people to vote for you in return for benefits.

So if the yellow vests think they can solve their problems by defacing a few glorious French monuments, or electing a populist leader, like the US, Hungary, Italy, and now Brazil, they are wrong.

Trump ain't gonna solve the problems of the white working class in the US. Only the individual folks in the white working class can do that by training for and searching for and finding good jobs at good wages. Right now that would be the fracking industry, but that means heading off to North Dakota or Texas. Otherwise they are toast.

Victor Orbán ain't gonna save the native Hungarians from the Muslim migrants. Only they can do that by adapting their skills to the market, and heading off to Germany or Britain if that is what it takes. Otherwise they are toast.

Salvini ain't gonna save the Italians from ruin. Only they can do that. Otherwise the Italians are toast.

Bolsonaro ain't gonna save the Brazilians. Only they can do that. Otherwise the Brazilians are toast.

And what doesn't work is voting for entitlement programs. Because entitlement programs are programs that take money away from some people and give money to other people. By force. And sooner or later your employer or the government runs out of other peoples' money to pay your benefits.

This is not rocket science, folks. You submit to the verdict of the market or you or your children end up as toast. No matter what some damn politician has to say.