What the Fed?

In the week ending December 21 the stock market fell out of bed, losing some 10 percent of value. But Chairman Powell of the Federal Reserve is still talking about higher interest rates.

Is he crazy? We have already seen a months long decline in housing prices, showing that at least where mortgages are concerned, the credit markets are showing a balance of buyers and sellers. And some investment banks are forecasting a slowdown in growth by the middle of next year.

Inflation in consumer prices is pretty moderate.

Yet the Fed still seems determined to fight inflation.

They say that the Federal Reserve operates only in one of two modes. It is either trying to fight inflation or fight recession. There is a third mode where it is acting as lender of last resort in a panic.

Usually, of course, the Fed is behind the curve. It keeps interest rates too low for too long after a recession, and then, playing catch-up, raises them too high and pitches the economy into a recession.

And then every generation or so in a credit crisis the Fed fails to act properly as lender of last resort and we get a 1929 Great Depression or a 2008 Great Recession where the credit system nearly collapses.

Now I suppose that right now the Swamp would like to kill Donald Trump's presidency and teach us deplorables to bend the knee to our overlords. After all, the president is in the middle of a fight with China on trade, is "shutting down the government" over "The Wall," is facing a Democratic House, the fury of Special Prosecutor Mueller, and I know not what.

So maybe the Fed is trying to teach President Trump a lesson, although I don't think you will find that power in the Constitution or in statute law.

Maybe there is something else that the stock market is telling us.

But come on Fed. When the market tanks by 10 percent in a week it is a sign that maybe, just maybe, you should switch from fighting inflation to fighting recession, if only for a month or two.

Or are you guys as dumb as a post?

So Trump is Rude

As we all know President Trump is notorious for his insults. And this is a very bad thing, as every liberal woman can tell you.

Really, I can't believe that America should stoop so low to elect a president like that!

Hey liberal girls! I can't believe that the Democratic Party would nominate a woman who would tell a gay group that half the country was racist, sexist, homophobes. In a word, deplorables! Really, what kind of a vile bigot would even think of half the country as beyond the pale of polite society?

And that is just the beginning. There are liberal politicians and activists thick on the ground that think nothing of ganging up on some conservative broadcaster to frighten off his advertisers. There are liberal activists all over that peacefully protest to prevent ordinary bland conservatives from addressing student groups at the university. And a nobody called Willis Eschenbach just got suspended from Twitter for uttering a few facts about Islam.

And you can forget about combining "conservative" and "professor" at the university.

And you girls think that Trump is the problem?

The point that needs making is that nobody is losing their job over Trump's insults. But they are when they utter a heretical comment against liberal orthodoxy. Nobody is being shunned and shamed by Trump's insults. But they are when some liberal activist decides to launch an accusation of racism or sexism. And so on.

Again. The reason that Donald Trump was nominated and elected President of the United States has a lot to do with his willingness to insult the powerful that claim the right to insult and name and shame and financially ruin anyone on the right. People like me, a proud racist sexist homophobe, and any other -phobe pejorative you have in mind, are nursing a deep sense of injustice about the power of liberal activists to exclude and marginalize people that don't repeat unthinkingly the latest liberal talking point.

Especially since we think that every word from the left is a lie, including "and" and "the," and has been ever since Marx's prophecy about the immiseration of the working class turned out to be false -- at least until the left turned against the working class about 1970.

And we are going to keep electing people to throw the liberal Billingsgate right back in their smug educated faces until someone cries Uncle.

Just saying.

Tech in Bed with Left in Bed with Media

What do we do about Big Tech? Just today there are three stories, one about The New York Times getting Facebook data, and another about Amazon getting Facebook data and another about "Google knows where you sleep."

And who can forget Google helping the Obama and Clinton campaigns with big data?

You can see why Big Tech is in bed with the left. Nobody in government is bothering them about monopoly and trust-busting; the system is working. Imagine if the Big Tech titans were being vilified like the Robber Barons of the late 19th century!

Yes, why aren't the Big Tech titans in anti-trust trouble? In a way, their monopoly power is more problematic, because of "first mover advantage," where the first entrant in an industry gets the whole market to themselves.

Well, the reason is that, ever since the Microsoft anti-trust case, Big Tech has advanced a safely "woke" political profile. I don't think it necessarily reflects the genius of the tech titans. I think it is partly that most people in tech are reliably conventional in their politics, meaning that they never made waves in their youth and sensibly subordinated  themselves  to the left-liberal education establishment. Why change now? And there is the fact that challenging the liberal hegemony gets you into big trouble with the lefty activists.

But what do we do about it? Truth is: not a lot, not in the short term.

But in the long term, I believe, we will see a great secular and cultural movement against the left and its various Toadies. Because injustice.

That's the point of my maxim: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. People with political power abuse it, and the victims of their abuse get angry. Then they turn on their abusers.

That is what Donald Trump is all about, and Brexit and les gilets jaunes and all the rising populist movements. The leftist and globalist ruling class is committing injustice against ordinary people every day, but the rulers have no clue. Why would they? They have forbidden anyone from uttering a discouraging word, on pain of social media ban and deplatorming.

If I were Big Tech I would already be trimming my sails. But I suspect that our tech titans will need a bit of encouragement before they see the light. They are human all too human, after all.

Let Us Imagine a New Culture

Writing in National Review, Victor Davis Hanson takes on the demolition of the liberal arts in the university after the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point announced it was shuttering various majors in history and modern languages and art. Not really a demolition, more a suicide, he writes.

I think that I would rather think of the leftification of the university as an opportunity. After all, the lefties have demolished the majestic western canon, for sure, but nobody wants to study the vile totalitarian cult that they have erected on its ruins, where everything is reduced to a binary narrative of victims and oppressors. And so they have flubbed their opportunity to create a real flourishing culture to replace what they have demolished.

Now I think that the western canon has been in trouble for a while anyway, because it has failed to produce a saving religion for creative people. I think we need new religion, culture, philosophy here in the west, and I think that this refounding should be based on my reductive notion of the Three Peoples. The totalitarian culture of the left has foolishly and cruelly politicized and dogmatized politics into victims and oppressors, religion into ideological activism, and culture into a cramped space that makes the culture wars of the Puritans look like a walk in the park.

So, as marine General Chesty Puller said when surrounded, we got the lefties just where we want them.

If young people are abandoning liberal arts majors, so much the better.

But what will replace the liberal University? Well I think the answer is cults. I was reading alt-right Vox Day getting outraged about the cultish nature of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. He is missing the point. Anything outside the ruling class and its seminaries can't really partake of the teacher/student binary. So the way that culture and religion work is by enthusiasm: prophets and their disciples.

Now I would say that enthusiastic Christianity is the right and proper enthusiasm for People of the Subordinate Self. I think that something like Jordan Peterson's enthusiastic responsibility is the right enthusiasm for People of the Responsible Self.

That leaves the People of the Creative Self. What should their enthusiasm be? Well, I think that Jung and Peterson have a lot to say there too. They argue that there is such a person as the sacrificial hero that acts on the border between Order and Chaos, bringing a boon to society. The key thing, I think, is the absence of power. Whatever the creative person does, it should be beyond power.

Today, our educated creative ruling class thinks that power, political power selflessly wielded by educated activists, is the answer. They are wrong, and until they learn to lose their faith in political power they will spread nothing but misery.

But we are creative too, and it up to us to teach the lefty creatives how to do it.

A Truth Table on Discrimination

A few days ago I read someone that illuminated the current situation on discrimination in the United States. Here, the government discriminates on the basis of race, sex, and sexual preference, but the people are forbidden to do so.

Now, obviously there are four possibilities here, between the government discriminating or not discriminating, and the people being allowed to discriminate or not discriminate.

There is the Jim Crow position, where the government discriminates on the basis of race, and the people are required  to discriminate on the basis of race or the KKK would want to know the reason why. (Yes,  that was the primary role of the KKK: not so much to lynch blacks but to intimidate whites into observing  the letter and the spirit of Jim Crow).

Then there is the Freedom position, where the government is forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race and sex, but the people are allowed to discriminate. Imagine living in a world like that!

Then there is the Original Civil Rights position, where government is forbidden to discriminate and individuals are also forbidden to discriminate. This is what got Barry Goldwater into hot water. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he objected to the requirement that private parties were forbidden to discriminate. After all, the whole point of being a free person is having the freedom to use your own judgment where other people are concerned. The Civil Rights Act lasted for about a couple of years until the beginning of Affirmative Action, under which government  was required to discriminate and businesses were encouraged to discriminate if they knew what was good for them -- or forget about government contracts and grants.

Then there is the official Current Position, in which government blatantly discriminates and encourages corporations to discriminate, but individuals may not discriminate. Of course the whole thing is covered with 1984-style lies, where discriminating in favor of liberal "little darlings" is called non-discrimination, and private individuals exercising their God-given rights of freedom are called racist, sexist bigots.

Finally, there is the Real Position, in which the government blatantly discriminates on the basis of whatever is the racist, sexist, -phobic issue du jour, and calls it bending the arc of history towards justice, and demands that all individuals discriminate on the basis of the current issue du jour or face deplatforming and social media banning. Really, this is the same at the Jim Crow Position, only then the mandatory discrimination was by whites against blacks, and now the mandatory discrimination is against white normals by everyone else, led by educated ruling class white liberals.

Do you know what I think? I think that there is a splendid opportunity out there for people to poke the ruling class and their bribed apologists, and tell them, again and again. that they are unjust bullies and bigots that are no better than the Jim Crow segregationists of happy memory. Maybe worse, because back in the day, George Orwell had not yet written 1984.

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.