Christmas Day in India

While our lefty friends are busy doing the immensely satisfying activism of deplatorming Christmas, we are here in India, on the way by a circuitous route to the Taj Mahal in Agra.

Well, actually today we are driving from Gwalior to Agra, and the Taj is scheduled for dawn tomorrow. Did you know, by the way, that the fort in Gwalior features the fine Man Mandir Palace built by the Raj in which to enjoy his eight wives, and on the wall is a row of yellow rubber duckies. Why ducks? Well, the peacock, or swan, or goose is the vehicle of Brahma, the creator god. I guess that the swan is a high-rent duck, or something.

But back to Christmas.

On arrival at our hotel, the Deo Bagh in Gwalior, on Christmas Eve, we were greeted by a Santa with a cotton wool scotch-taped beard, who gave us each a piece of candy. Then we had dinner outside in the Bagh (garden) near a plastic fake Christmas tree that culminated in Santa cutting a Christmas cake. Of course it was cold outside, so the hotel arranged a blazing fire in the middle of the dining area.

(This is India's Big Problem right now, if you ask me. When anyone feels baby it's cold outside they immediately light a wood fire, right there in the street. That is why Google rates nearly all Indian city air quality as "hazardous" every day.)

At the Gwalior Fort on Christmas Day we were greeted at one point by a group of giggling school-aged girls who wished us "Merry Christmas." Later, at the Jai Vilas Palace of the Scindes designed and built and furnished in European style with delicious Indian touches, we took selfies at an installation that included an impossibly thin Santa, a fake Christmas tree, a sleigh, and two cotton-wool reindeer. And a bowl of candy for the kids. They were playing "Jingle Bells" non-stop. We had to explain to our guide the cultural significance of the sleigh and the reindeer.

The Jai Vilas Palace featured two banqueting halls, one for dining sitting on the floor, Indian style, and one for dining at a long table, European style. Actually, in the European section there were three tables, one for veg., one non-veg., and one for drinking. The drinky table featured a model railway with a train carrying the decanters. To stop the train you grabbed a decanter and lifted it off the train. I am not kidding.

And while in the bus we saw some Santa hats for sale at a street-side store. I realized that I had forgotten to pack my Santa hat.

In the afternoon, back at the hotel, we watched an Indian father play cricket with his sons in the Bagh.

Well, now it's Boxing Day, and I don't think the Indians observe, or even notice it. It's a British holiday, and the Indians are in two minds about the Brits.

Democrats Think They Can Break the Rules

Democrats didn't start cheating with the post 2016 effort to remove President Trump.

Oh no; they started long before that. Let us count the ways. Let us start in 1960.

Democrats stole the close presidential election of 1960. Mayor Daley of Chicago delayed reporting the vote totals of his city until downstate Illinois had reported so he knew how many votes to manufacture. Then there was Lyndon Johnson in Texas. He made sure that the Democrats won there. The losing presidential candidate Richard Nixon gracefully conceded.

Democrats ran President Nixon out of office in 1974 on trumped up charges of campaign spying. As if nobody else does it. Republicans were shamed into abandoning the president after he was impeached in the House and a delegation of Republican senators went down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and told him he had to go.

In the second term of President Reagan, after the Republicans lost the Senate, Democrats began investigating the Iran-Contra affair in which White House staffers had diverted monies from Iran to fund Nicaraguan rebels against the lefty Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega. It went nowhere because President Reagan -- who we were taught to believe was an amiable since -- played the amiable dunce and didn't give the Democrats a smoking gun with which they could impeach him. Also, the Democrats inadvertently made a national hero out of Col. Oliver North.

In 2000 George W. Bush narrowly won the presidential election in spite of a Democratic October Surprise featuring Bush's days as a drunk. After two terms of Clinton, it was time, you might think, for a change. But Democrats tried to steal the election with a recount in Florida featuring the now-famous hanging chads. After the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of Bush the left-wing activist community covered liberal cars with "Selected not Elected" bumper stickers. Not good.

Late in the Bush administration Democrats made a federal case out of Vice-President Cheney's aide Scooter Libby outing an intelligence agent and ruined him and sent him to jail. Only he didn't.

Finally we get to the 2016 election that Donald Trump won fair and square despite the October Surprise Access Hollywood tape that Democrats had procured to gross out nice suburban women.

We all know what transpired. Hillary Clinton decided not no concede on election night: I presume she was drunk. Then we got the Russians Are Coming narrative. Remember when Democrats used to accuse Republicans of looking for Russians under the bed? Now Democrats have turned their frustration at losing the election into a campaign to kick a duly-elected president out of office.

Now I think that Rule One of elective politics is alternation in office, and allowing the other side to take office.

Rule Two is not to use the power of government to harass the opposition party.

Democrats have been routinely violating these rules at least since 1960, and if they don't stop it is going to lead to blood.

I honestly think that most Democrats really have no clue how dangerous their abuse of power is becoming. They just believe in ruling-class conventional wisdom and what they read in ruling-class media and what they are hearing from their educated-class friends. They do not understand that the two rules are the way in which a wise ruling class avoids rebellion.

Because the point of my two rules is simple. Anyone on the receiving end of a ruling class that does not concede elections and uses police powers to harass the opposition will start to experience its rulers as cruel and unjust and pretty soon the ruling class will find itself facing a head of rebellion.

That is why it is in the interest of Democrats to follow the rules: Rule One to let the other guys alternate in office; Rule Two to refrain from abusing police power.

But I don't think that late-dynasty Democrats understand that. They are too full of their identity politics conventional wisdom to understand how they are playing with fire.

So it is up to us to teach them not to cheat.

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.