Trump Russia: Is It 9/15/1864 or 8/1/1944?

Know the significance of those dates?

September 15, 1864 is the start date of Gen. Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea. It was the military action that told every loyal son of the South that the game was up, that the hated Yankees could drive through their homeland, loot and plunder, and there was nothing they could do about it.

August 1, 1944 is the date of the creation of Gen. Patton's Third Army that spearheaded the march to the Rhine. La Wik:

The Third Army simultaneously attacked west into Brittany, south, east toward the Seine, and north, assisting in trapping several hundred thousand German soldiers in the Falaise Pocket between Falaise and Argentan.

Now I am reading about the Trump march to re-election in November 2020. The battlespace preparation is over, according to Brian Cates. Because now that Rod Rosenstein has resigned from the Department of Justice both he and Jeff Sessions are available to serve as witnesses to the CIA/DOJ/FBI spying operation on the Trump campaign and administration.

See, for the last two years we rubes have been thinking that Rod Rosenstein was a snake in the grass that was part of the cabal to take Trump down. But suppose we were wrong? Suppose Rosenstein is our guy and has been metaphorically wired for the last two years to listen in on the plots and plans of the Obama administration appointees that were spying on the Trump campaign?

For the past two years, Rosenstein, far from being the snake in the garden, has actually been helping Trump prepare the battlefield for what’s going to unfold over the next few months. Two years of careful, stealth planning will begin to pay off.

So it could be that Gen. Trump is about to kick off his March Through the Swamp that will expose the deep staters and their willing accomplices in the media and their conspiracy to spy on and ctl-alt-del Trump and all who sail in her. It will show the deep staters that they are mere cannon fodder and they better make their peace with the new regime now while there is still time.

Or not.

Of course, for racist sexist homophobes like me, this is almost too good to be true. Really? Is the Barr John Durham John Huber team really going to drive its coach and horses through the deep state that conspired to spy on the Trump campaign? Will deep staters go on trial? And go to jail, do not pass Go? And is Rod Rosenstein "one of ours?"

It is a reminder that the Watergate investigation was not the heroic journalism of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. They were just publishing leaks they got from W. Mark Felt, acting associate director of the FBI. And, of course, Felt was the Deep State in person, anxious to deep six a president that was threatening to disempower the worthy and valiant Deep State.

The Deep State won that one. And how.

Brian Cates' line is that

As Rosenstein makes his long-anticipated departure as deputy attorney general, the final pieces are moving into position on the battlefield that President Donald Trump has been carefully preparing for more than two years.

Is he right? Only time will tell. 

Tlaib: Playing the Blame Game

In a way, I think that our Democratic friends deserve the Terrible Twins, Congs. Omar and Tlaib (D-Ummah). As thoroughly modern Muslims they are anti-Jewish, and especially anti-Israel.

And I get it. It is humiliating and monstrous that the Jews returned to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the Levant in the 20th century, in consequence of the Zionist movement, and have shouldered the Muslims aside.

I'd be mad as hell too if I were a Muslim from "Palestine."

But hey, you win some and you lose some. My dad was born in Russia and left in 1918 as a refugee (I actually never thought of him as a refugee until about a week ago, but hey...). And my parents had to leave India, the country of my birth, on account of the British Raj winding up business and handing the subcontinent over to the inhabitants thereof -- or at least the folks surviving after the various invasions and Mughal empires and British Rajs over the centuries.

Truth is: history is hell, and rape and pillage and slaughter of the innocents, and the Levant has seen more than its fair share of that down the millennia.

We all know about the monstrous Trail of Tears, native Americans forced from their homelands into the West. And the massacres of the Armenians and the Kurds. And the Ukraine famine. And the Great Purge. And the Holocaust. And the Great Leap Forward.

Hey, did you know that in France after the Liberation in 1944 there were probably more people massacred than in the monstrous Reign of Terror? Or that about 2 million German soldiers mysteriously never showed up after World War II. Or that maybe as many as 10 million Germans died of starvation in the Allied occupied areas after 1945? I didn't either, and it may all be revisionist conspiracy theory. You tell me.

The point is that the winners write history and the losers are lucky to be alive.

Which suggests that if the Left ever really takes over the US their current hegemonic narrative, the removals of statues and paintings, will be a walk in the park compared to what comes next.

But back to Tlaib and Omar, in the context of my belief that all identity politics, from globalism to nationalism to racism to Muslimism is "fake tribalism."

There are no tribes. Never were. It is all made up by political leaders and priests and government teachers and Mean Girls and criminal-gang homeboys to enlist the people into the rank-and-file of their power plans.

And in the modern era, we could say that fake tribalism started with the national idea. Totally fake. Before the nation state people were organized into smaller political and cultural units and knew that was the way of the world. Or, with Mohammed, they got organized into the Ummah, the worldwide community of believers. Except that the Muslim world is divided into Shia and Sunni, each of which is descended from the Prophet and the sole representative of Islam on Earth.

Now, our liberal masters want to de-emphasize the national idea in the US, because they experience themselves as the global educated elite that is going to create a global society that will end war and racism and sexism and homophobia and climate change.

But isn't it interesting that they way they are doing this is to sow discord and division in the US, between race and race, gender and gender, religion and religion? Well of course they are. Politics is division and to divide you have to order people into different fake tribes than the fake tribes of the old days. So if you want to break up the idea of America and Americans, you must set American against American and get people to identify with something other than America. Since most ordinary people aren't ready to identify as global humans, and our lefty friends have condemned the American nation out of hand, that means that some lesser group identity must be created to replace the American national identity: fake identity politics tribes to replace the old fake American tribe.

Really, this is not rocket science.

And you can understand the liberal rage at President Trump. He is out there reviving the old fake American national identity: Make America Great Again. How dare he! Why even Nietzsche, the "Nazis' favorite intellectual," knew that nationalism was a bad thing.

And your Congs. Tlaib and Omar are pushing the Muslim identity. There's a risk there, in that it might encourage millions of Americans who never thought about it to identify more strongly as Americans.

And it might even scotch Slow Joe Biden's cunning plan to paint Trump as a racist. Compared to what? Congs. Tlaib and Omar? How does that work exactly, Joe old chap?

Hey, Joe! Keep your arms off my wife, you creep!

Voltaire's Bastards: Blaming It All on the Staff

I'm still not quite sure what to make of John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards. A good way to illustrate this is his chapters on the military staff culture: "Learning How to Organize Death" and "Persistent Continuity at the Heart of Power." What began as an attempt to infuse a bit of reason and knowledge into military affairs, "marshaling reason to organize armies in order to remove mediocrity and allow the competent soldiers to command," has ended in the "transformation of reason into a bureaucratic sea."

And as we know, anything organized as a bureaucracy eventually becomes all about the interest of the bureaucracy and not the noble purpose for which it was founded. The original purpose of the administrative system is transformed, in the end, the continued existence of the bureaucracy.

The problem with the rationally organized army, Saul realizes, is that it creates just the instrument needed for a Napoleon to lay waste to the whole of Europe. So maybe it is better to have an army as "a bureaucratic sea designed to drown Heroes" rather than a shining sword ready to be wielded by a genius Hero.

So let me try to lay out Saul's argument. First, there were the young officers "disgusted by having to fight in unprofessional armies under the orders of unqualified aristocrats." So, under Guibert and others, they organized the profession of arms on a rational basis. But that led to Napoleon co-opting the shining new tool and destroying everything, and so there emerged the staff bureaucracy that was suspicious of genius -- from Marlborough to Guderian to Patton -- and substituted war by the book that did not need genius to succeed. Problem is war by the book led to gigantic bloodbaths, of which World Wars I and II are Exhibits A and B.

And the problem is that the disorganized guerrilla band can very often tie the organized army up in knots. So should not armies be organized on the guerrilla model, learning how to appear out of nowhere to land a nasty blow right in the solar plexus and then disappear into the hills?

Maybe, or maybe not.

Maybe the ponderous bureaucratic staff-led army is just what we want, and especially just what the politicians want, because the genius Hero is likely to become a threat to their power, as Gen. McArthur to President Truman. So what if millions get killed in the wars? As long as the state goes on, what's the problem, except for the mothers of the slain?

But Saul proposes to unleash genius:

Surely it would be wiser today to hand our defence to those able to defend us in the belief that we are capable of controlling them. Better the risk of honest genius than the impossibility of controlling manipulative and unresponsive mediocrity.

I wonder. If we apply my reductive Three Peoples theory, I'd say that most people approach defense as People of the Subordinate Self, and are happy to serve as serfs and let the bosses take care of things, reserving the right to criticize them when things go wrong. The People of the Responsible Self would step up to "do their bit," as the Brits say, but really would be uncertain about letting self-professed geniuses loose on the world. And as for the People of the Creative Self, I suspect that they would be all in favor of themselves being empowered to lead the nation to glorious victory, but not at all certain about the other so-called geniuses.

The thing is, we know all about the geniuses that actually got to be successful geniuses, the Pattons, the Maos, the Castros. But the guys that thought they were geniuses, and led their irregular band of guerrillas to ruin? We never hear about them.

And then there is the little problem that the successful guerrillas -- the Maos and Castros -- like to convert themselves into the boss of a great big beautiful non-functional bureaucracy, of which it might be said that the cure was worse than the disease.

The point is that when creative people are on the loose -- as in Schumpeter's creative destruction -- they disrupt an awful lot of lives with their creative endeavors. And average people don't like that.

But is the creative change "good for them" despite the negative aspects? Sure. Unless you happen to be one of the buggy-whip makers.

"Intelligent Design" Just Means "We Don't Know"

Lefties and the like have liked Darwin's theory of evolution because it demolishes the notion of God creating the world, and the fishes and the animals. And Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

The lefty religion stands or falls on the verdict that pre-lefty religion is all superstition and bigotry. And that lefty prophets have come down from the mountain with tablets of justice and equality that will save the planet.

So Darwin must be true.

But now it is becoming pretty clear that random mutations to DNA cannot explain the emergence -- or creation -- of new species.

So there must have been "intelligent design." Some-thing or some-one or some fill-in-the-blank must have designed things. So says Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute in Seattle.

There's a good piece by David Gelernter in the Claremont Review of Books that goes into the whole question of "Giving Up Darwin."

Intelligent Design is a good way of describing the notion that the way that living organisms develop make it seem as if there were an intelligent designer in his organism shop assembling new ideas for organisms and sending them out into the universe care of Galactic UPS.

But I propose: why not just say that God Did It. And I have a deep and sophisticated philosophical reason for saying so.

In my view, the notion of God is an astonishing and deep and sophisticated philosophical way of dealing with the primary fact of human life.

We want to know the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" as recited ad nauseam in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, but we don't.

We don't know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. So we make it up, and the author of this universe kit is a chap we call God. This is because we humans like to gin up a reason for the things we do and thereby justify both our noble acts and our unspeakable crimes. And ordinary wiving and thriving.

Making God the author of some mystery in the universe works like a champ until our human knowledge expands enough to understand the mystery in question.

But there are always millions of unexplained mysteries left over. Let's say that God is in charge of all those mysteries.

For instance.

Back in the day we humans reckoned that the gods on Mt. Olympus ran everything, including the day-to-day battles of the siege of Troy described in The Iliad. If one group of gods thought the Greeks had been having things too much their own way they would insist that the other gods let the Trojans win the next one.

But by the time that The Odyssey got written, humans had a lot more personal agency, and were not above tricking the immortals so they could get their human way. The lovely Penelope was responsible for keeping those Suitors at bay, and young Telemachus knew that he had to do something about the Suitors. What was that all about?

Close to our own time, we had the mechanics of Newton, which seemed to suggest that everything in the world was determined by the relentless billiard ball determinism of Newton's equations. So where did free will or mere chance come in? Did God do it?

Well, we sorta solved that one with quantum mechanics which developed the math to show that, until some event happened, the so-called sub-atomic particles existed in a fuzz of probability. Things didn't know what they were going to do until they did.

OK, so let's say that the fuzz of probability is where God exists. And, of course, there is the curious fact that the universe doesn't crystallize out of probability in just any old way, but according to clearly defined rules that can be represented mathematically, once we can figure out the math.

Right now, the easiest way to understand the creation of species and major mutations is by the notion of "intelligent design" or, less politely, God. But I expect that in the near future the "scientists" will discover some mechanism or probability function that explains how species creation works.

But the day after this magnificent discovery we will realize that underneath it is yet another mystery.

I say: why not just call that unfathomable mystery God and get on it.

Is Google "Thinking Strategically?" I Doubt It

Yesterday I wrote about Google's suppression of the Claremont Institute as an example of foolishness. But Glenn Elmers at American Greatness sees a Google strategic vision at work.

A military mindset is at work behind Google’s action—which represents the censorship and propaganda agenda of the whole social media conglomerate...

Google’s claim that it had made a “mistake” is a transparent falsehood. They were testing the perimeter.

Well, maybe.

See, I don't think that Google really knows what it is doing. Actually, I don't believe that the identity politics Left really understands what it is doing.

I think that the Left is merely executing on the 150 year-old playbook invented by Marx. He ginned up the notion of smashing the bourgeoisie by riling up the working class. Today's left is merely executing on new plays to smash the bourgeoisie. Real original, guys and gals.

I explain that by reference to my reductive Three Peoples theory, where I propose that the whole game for the Left is to form an alliance between the People of the Creative Self with the People of the Subordinate Self against the People of the Responsible Self.

The People of the Subordinate Self are people that want someone else to solve their problems for them. And that is what the left proposes to do. For the workers: Yeah! It's the bosses' fault! For women: Yeah! It's the patriarchs' fault! For black: Yeah! It's the whites' fault! For gays: Yeah! It's the straights' fault!

And so on.

And it is all a lie, including "and" and "the." The workers? Hey, workers, you need your employer more that he needs you. Hey, women, you need a husband to keep the resources coming so you can care for your children. Hey, blacks, you need the modern economy that whites invented so you can take advantage of its blessings. Etc.

Now, it my view that we are now in the terminal stage of the left's 150-year war on the People of the Responsible Self. I think that the folks on the left are now dull routinists, trying to slot into the concepts that Marx invented and trying to give them one more college try.

So the young millennials operating the controls at Google's social media supervision control room? They are ignorant fools that are just doing what they have been carefully taught. And I think that goes all the way up the administrative chain to foolish women like YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.

Look: these tech billionaires have been doing tech. They have not been studying the classics, or the importance of Kant, or even the notion from lefty Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment that

Enlightenment behaves toward things as dictators toward men.

I wrote all about it in "The Twilight of the Educated Gods" a while back.

These people do not really know what they are doing; they are just reciting what they have been carefully taught.

At least, that's what I think.

No, I think that everyone, up and down the lefty supply chain is just doing what they have been carefully taught, and really don't know what they are doing.

It's just like the world stumble-bumming into World War I: They were idiots: from Kaiser Wilhelm to sir Edward Grey.

I believe that the Googles and the Facebooks and the Twitters are just taking the easy way out, for now. They know that they need to keep the lefty activists and peaceful protesters down to a dull roar, so they supinely go with the flow.

Indeed, since all they have ever been carefully taught is some diluted and easily-digested leftism, they might even think they are doing the Lord's work by purging social media of the "far right," or whatever the pejorative term of art is this week.

But in my view they are fools and knaves, as the sequel will prove.

What Does Google-the-Censor Think It Is Doing?

In the growing catalog of tech deplatormings of ordinary conservative discourse, the late great deplatforming of the Claremont Institute by Google is merely ordinary in its mindlessness.

Claremont has been advertising to its supporter base

the danger to the republic posed by multiculturalism, identity politics and politically correct speech restrictions. Google decided that our writings violated the company’s policy on “race and ethnicity in personalized advertising” and prevented us from advertising to our own readers about our 40th-anniversary gala dinner this Saturday.

Well, now, after an article in the Wall Street Journal, Google has reversed its ban.

Google’s Acting Director of Political and Stakeholder Outreach got in touch with the Claremont Institute to notify us that the labeling of The American Mind as a “racially oriented publication” was a mistake. 

What is going on here?

I will tell you, based on my own experience with millennials in tech.

They know nothing! Except what they have been carefully taught, to hate and to fear, by their lefty teachers in school and their lefty instructors in university. They have absolutely anodyne opinions that conform eerily to New York Times conventional wisdom.

Correction. I was talking to a millennial yesterday who had actually taken some philosophy courses. He sounded like he had his head on straight. Or maybe he was just being nice to an old geezer.

So when these foolish, uneducated millennials are given jobs to moderate internet speech they have no understanding of politics except what they were carefully taught by their lefty instructors.

So of course, the uneducated millennials are outraged by a chap like James Damore that produces an anodyne essay on women in tech. How dare he? Really, how can any man produce stuff that goes against the narrative that they have been carefully taught? A la lanterne! As the French said during the revolution.

And of course the uneducated millennials are outraged by an outfit like Claremont that exists to challenge the lefty conventional wisdom, and particularly the lefty conventional wisdom on sex and race.

Because the whole point of the "education" they received from their lefty instructors from K thru grad school is to make them into ideological foot-soldiers for the lefty march through the institutions.

Just saying. The whole point of classical studies in the university, what they used to call "Greats" in Oxford and Cambridge in Limeyland, was to educate the scions of the ruling class in politics and philosophy and the Greek and Roman classic texts so that they knew all the angles of governance before they entered the political arena. The ruling class of that era knew that to merely indoctrinate their young scions of privilege in ruling class ideology wouldn't do the trick -- wouldn't keep the ruling class in power. The next generation had to know the ground. Of course, come the day they would know how to advance the agenda of the ruling class. That goes without saying. But they also knew how the world worked.

Now I believe that the purely ideological training -- what you might call ideological boot camp -- that the left propagates in the university and in the tech censorship bureaus -- is a strategic mistake.

See, I think the reason for free speech and the tolerance for crazies on the other side of the political spectrum is that if you censor and deplatform the opposition you are merely creating a head of rebellion that will eventually come and bite you.

That is the meaning of my maxim: there is not such thing as justice, only injustice. To put it another way, justice is merely the situation after the removal of an injustice. Until the next injustice comes along.

But the young millennial good little boys and good little girls at the tech censorship bureaus know nothing about that. Because all they know is the moral and ethical rightness of erasing all "hate speech" and racist sexist homophobic horror from the world. To make it a safe-space. As they were carefully taught.

And apparently it takes the intervention of a quasi-adult "Acting Director of Political and Stakeholder Outreach" to stop the millennial crazies in the tech censorship bureaus from their mindless Inquisitions and auto-da-fés before they get the tech parent into serious trouble.

But it shouldn't take an article in the Wall Street Journal to get the tech censorship bureau to curb its enthusiasm for ideological totalitarianism.

Unfortunately, it is getting to be pretty obvious that we are not going to put an end to this foolishness, these cadres of mindless millennial ideological shock troops, without a train wreck.

And that's a shame because it means that tons of people are going to go over the side before we get to right the ship of state.

And I think I may be finding a helpful angle on it from John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards. He proposes an opposition between reason and Heroes. I think he means that the suppression of of human agency in the notion of reason, a flatland of calculation and logic, brings forth the egoistic Hero -- the Napoleon, the Marx, the Marcuse, the activist -- as its Hegelian antithesis.

And that is a bad thing, because in the land of myth that has been revived in the last 100 years by Jung and others, the Hero is supposed to be a sacrificial hero, who goes down into the underworld of the unconscious to learn about the borderland between Order and Chaos and only returns to the everyday world when he has become sadder and wiser.

It is clear to me that our peaceful protesters and activists are Egos that have not experienced the necessary descent into the underworld. And therefore they are monsters that threaten to destroy everything good and true.

Because they are dumb and stupid.

Poor China. It Is Stuck Playing Yesterday's Game

Hey, even the New York Times is publishing a piece that says President-for-life Xi of China has missed the point. "Xi Jinping Wanted Global Dominance. He Overshot."

Back in the day, even under Mao, China wanted a good relationship with the US. But Xi thought he could play superpower.

Mr. Xi has been aggressively hard-line. Under him, anti-American rhetoric has spread in official media. The Chinese government has been explicit about wanting to challenge the United States’s military presence in Asia. It has made aggressive moves toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea.

Then Xi has tried to "co-opt members of China’s vast diaspora, hoping to develop a network that will facilitate political infiltration into other countries and high-tech transfers out of them."

And now it looks like China will have to agree to a trade pact with the US that represents a loss of face to President Xi.

Then there is the attempt by Russia, China and some bit players to keep President Maduro in power in Venezuela. And your point is? To show the US that you can play the game?

Look, I get it. All these second division players have watched the US global hegemony over the past century and dearly want to play that game too. They want a navy like ours. They want to tell tin-pot dictators whether to come or go. They want to sit by the energy spigot and make a mint out of energy production.

'Cos that's what great powers do! Yay!

One little thing, fellahs. The whole idea of the US imperium was to push back at totalitarian players like Hitler and Stalin, and the tin-pot versions like Castro and Chávez, who didn't believe in a world of commercial reciprocity, but in political and imperial dominance and hegemony. Because equality.

But that was the old world, and that is the world that the left has been trying to revive for the last century in its Great Reaction: socialism as neo-slavery, welfare state as neo-feudalism, and identity politics as neo-tribalism.

Thing is: the military domination of land doesn't matter any more, not much. What matters are the monster 200,000 ton container ships plying their trade across the oceans of the world. Great nations are no longer interested in conquering and plundering their neighbors for riches and for slaves. Why? Because there is no money in it!

What good did it do for the Stalinists to conquer eastern Europe? It just made the eastern Europeans as poor as the Russians. What is the point of China colonizing Third World countries with unpayable Belt and Road debt? Because the West did it 150 years ago? And Robert McNamara did it with the World Bank 50 years ago?

And what good will it do to keep Maduro in power in Venezuela so the Venezuelans can starve a little more.

What is needed is for the great nations of the world to do what the men of the West did in the 19th century: trade the warrior's sword for the sportsman's trophy.

That's the remarkable thing about our age. Just when men stopped being combination peasants/medieval soldiers along came football and tennis and cricket. And basketball and baseball. So now men could compete for the honor of the city, and teach the guys in that other city with the lousy team a lesson.

And very delightful and harmless it is. Same goes for careers. What better use is there for male aggressiveness than to challenge your fellow corporate road warriors into a fight to the death -- for market share?

What is needed is for the natural competition between nations to be channeled into equally harmless pursuits. But what?

Well I have an idea. Remember the race to the moon? Yeah. That was a harmless way of channeling the Cold War into harmless pursuits.

I propose a global competition, A Race to Mars.

Which nation will be first to put a man on Mars? It goes without saying that the first nation to put a man on Mars has hair on its chest. Its people are clearly the wave of the future.

And all the rest are cry-babies.