Controlocracy: Xi's Big Mistake

Here's a line on China's President-for-life Xi Jinping.

Norwegian political scientist Stein Ringen describes contemporary China as a “controlocracy,” arguing that its system of government has been transformed into a new regime radically harder and more ideological than what came before.

Yes. It's easy for higher-ups in all kinds of endeavors to imagine that the only way to make the system work is for strong leadership at the top.

But, as Xiao Qiang continues:

China’s “controlocracy” now bears primary responsibility for the coronavirus epidemic that is sweeping across that country and the world.

Do you get it, President Xi and Bernie Bros and all the ships at sea?

Strong leadership and central control and top-down systems and administrative hierarchies are not how the world works.

My own Four Laws are a modest contribution to that truth.

That socialism, i.e., top-down controlocracy, cannot work because it cannot compute prices. What does that mean? It means that in order for the world to work, we need input -- prices -- from all the folks up and down the food chain.

That administrative bureaucracy cannot work because it does not have the bandwidth to keep track of everything. Which is the same thing as the first law.

That regulation cannot work because of "regulatory capture" of the administrators by the folks being regulated. Which is a corollary of the first two laws, that, since the regulators don't really know what they are doing they have to rely on the folks in the industry they are supposed to be regulating in order to decide what to do.

That government programs cannot work because you can never reform them. Which is to say the same again, that a government program stops the normal give and take of every human social endeavor, and thus puts it on track for ruin.

"Controlocracy" is the utterly foolish and adolescent idea that you, Mr. Playground Bully, are the smart guy in the room and that if only everyone would just stop their selfish greed and get with the program, Jenkins, then things would start to work again.

But the corona virus epidemic shows the fundamental flaw in the "controlocracy" notion. The whole idea in a "controlocracy" is to impede feedback, because the whole point of the "controlocracy" is that we already know all we need to know. So shut up, peons, and do your job. But, as Wretchard just tweeted:

A Chinese doctor was raising the alarm in December 2019. Then they shut him down. In a world where emergent events will come with increasing frequency we can't afford to have an uncensored, text-only communications circuit.

And that's the point. All events in the world are "emergent" events. They are not the billiard balls of a mechanical system. Everything going on in your body right now is an emergent event, triggered by who-knows-what kind of an emergent-event cascade.

Right now in Seattle it is late winter, and all over the place plants are budding and crocuses are croci-ing and cherry blossoms are getting ready to cherry-blossom. Why? Because God issued the orders on December 27, 2019 at 1:00am Heaven Time? Or is it something much deeper, much more mysterious than that?

We know a heck of a lot about things out there, but the more we know the more we know we don't know.

For instance, the "controlocracy" bug that has infected control freaks all over the world issues from our human conceit about our "consciousness" which reached its apogree during the heyday of "reason and logic" that we now call the Age of Reason.

But ever since reason's apogee we humans have been saying, yes, but. Yes, but, obviously we don't just run on reason, but instinct. And what does that mean? Or, as the German Turn revolved from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Freud to Jung, we got to the point where we recognized that our conscious mind was just a bobble on top of our unconscious mind. And that mind, or brain, was just a bobble on top of the emergent events going on in the rest of the body where things are going on as if according to some divine plan. Only, what is that divine plan, or is it much more complicated than that?

I think that the best way to understand things is to recognize that, in human affairs, it certainly makes sense to appoint a strong man when the borders are threatened by invaders. Of course, even then, as the Germans determined in World War I, you still need enterprising soldiers down the chain of command to appraise the situation and act responsibly. In other words, the General at the top doesn't have the bandwidth to supervise the details down the hierarchy to the chap on the front line. See Four Laws, above.

But absent that emergency? You'll notice that almost all political appeals want to make you think that there is an emergency that requires top-down supervision from the Savior of the Nation, as if someone were attacking on the border.

Only, the message we get from almost everything in Nature is that everything and everybody, down to the individual cell level and below, should just be getting on with their business as best they can. Call in the US Cavalry -- or the Cajun Navy -- if you are really in a jam. But normally, just get on with things, and call in help from the guy right next to you.

Now, of course, I have a deep dark suspicion that the way things really work is women having lunch together. I was at the Vancouver Art Galley on Monday, and what do you think was going in the second floor café? Exactly. A room full of women, two to a table, discussing things across the table and staring meaningfully into each other's eyes. I dare say the fate of Vancouver was being decided right there, right after the pairs of women separated so that each one could then speak confidentially to another friend and that friend speak confidentially to her friend, and so on, until the whole of the Vancouver Community of Women had been brought up to speed on the developing -- and emerging -- consensus.

But what will not solve things is a new "controlocracy."

Good lord. After the experience of the 20th century and its disastrous "controlocracies" near and far, high and low, how can there be anyone left that does not now recognize the need for emergence, not control?

When Will the Dems Cry Uncle? Not Yet.

Did you notice the interesting thing about last week? President Trump said as how he and President Xi were working together beautifully to deal with the corona virus issue.

But with Democrats it is war.

What is going on here? Well, I'd say, crossing the Churchillian "in victory, magnanimity; in defeat, defiance" with Trump's corporate win-win culture, that with China, Trump has won and so he is showing the Chinese that the United States is not a fearless competitor tussling for world domination, but a win-win benevolent partner that they should learn to trust.

But with the Dems, they have not yet cried Uncle, as the Chinese did on trade. So Trump has not yet reached the point where he has reached victory, and the point where he can switch his strategy to magnanimity, and proceed to a win-win partnership.

So it is still war to the knife with the Democrats. And if you didn't believe that then, after Speaker Nancy's behavior at the State of the Union speech, you certainly believe it now.

Actually, according to folks like J.T. Young at the American Spectator, the top Democrats have a problem. If they don't harass and impeach and investigate Trump at every turn then the lefty activists will primary the more centrist officeholders and pitch the centrists out of office.

And the lefty activists won't learn their lessons, at the earliest, until Trump wins big in November and the GOP wins back the House and maybe not even then.

I know this because I was there in the 70s, in the aftermath of the the Sixties lefty lunge, I know that it takes a while for our lefty friends to get the message. In the aftermath of the Sixties it took two Nixon wins and two Reagan wins and a Bush win before the Dems cried Uncle and decided that, with Bill Clinton, they were New Democrats and centrists after all. And so they won. And then Obama ran as a moderate and the First Black President. And then, under the radar, he hired platoons of lefty activists to run his administation.

Yeah. I blame Obama for lurching the Dems to the left.

And I get it. The educated Gentry class obtains Meaning from its faith tradition of Salvation through Politics. Gentry virtue issues from political action to help the vicitms. Used to be social legislation to help the workers. Now it is diversity and inclusion to counter a society that is institutionally racist and therefore, according to Elizabeth Warren, needs "race-conscious" laws to end the racism. Race-conscious laws so we Gentry can feel good about ourselves and develop meaning from our political activism.

I think that this is horrible. I call it a Great Reaction, going back to the past and its hierarchical political system. Whereas the new order is what Jordan Peterson might call a competence hierarchy.

I say that the modern era celebrates creativity, in which we create the future with our human ingenuity rather than just living in God's creation and God's law.

But how? Our Gentry elite thinks that creativity means more inventive ways to "help" the poor and the marginalized -- and not so incidentally wallow in power and privilege as a reward.

I think they are wrong. I think that creativity means the Hero's Journey of Joseph Campbell and the Sacrificial Hero that gives his life that others may live. In other words, the creative individual does not go out in the world like Lady Bountiful and distribute goodies, and then go home and feel good about herself. Because social justice. The life of the creative is a life of hardship, of a harrowing journey into the underworld of the unconscious, a journey from which few return to tell the tale.

But I don't think we can expect our lefty and Gentry friends to get this. Not for an eternity of winters.

And I think that the real scandal of Gentry creativity and self-congratulation is that it has notably harmed the recipients.

The reason that the working class crashed in the post-Sixties world is that the Gentry taught it to sit around as recipients of social insurance and worker benefits instead of becoming competent Commoners in the constant creative destruction of the modern market economy.

And the reason that marriage and children-within-marriage has crashed with the poor, blacks, and whites and everything in-between, is that the government social welfare system requires people to be victims in order to get in on the loot. Whereas, in the 19th century, workers and Commoners ran their own social welfare organizations, that we now call mutual-benefit societies -- like the Masons, the Elks, the Odd Fellows.

And the reason that the simple non-racism of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s transformed into the monstrous fact of today's "race-conscious" diversity and inclusion is that a simple ban on government racial discrimination doesn't have any Meaning for secular-religious activists in the Gentry.

I mean: where is the power, the glory in a simple law that says that government can't discriminate on the basis of race?

For the only way that well-born gentry scions know to have a meaningful life is through political activism. Poor things.

But hey. All I can say is that if it weren't for Trump, we'd have to invent him.

Because someone has to teach our lefty Gentry that the way to salvation is not through political activism but through the way of the Sacrificial Hero.

Just don't expect any result on the Sacrifical Hero front any time soon. These Gentry folk are not that smart. They are going to have to learn their lesson and learn it again. And then have the lesson rammed down their throats.

It's a shame, because until they learn their lesson, millions are going to suffer, in consequence of the disasters that the Gentry creates and the "unanticipated consequences"of their conceits.

"Joker" Reminds us about Life at the Bottom

I don't usually go to movies but, on reading about Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix, I ordered it up on Netflix.

I wouldn't recommend the movie; it is horribly dark and depressing. But perhaps we all need to be reminded about the gritty horror of Life at the Bottom.

Hey, that's what lefties say they are all about: rescuing the helpless victims of society from a fate worse than death.

Joker creates a narrative of what happens these days to clueless white people that fall through the cracks and get "cared for" by the welfare state.

Well, they don't get cared for; they get warehoused in public housing. They get delusional and angry; they don't work much and don't marry much. And then...

And perhaps, most humiliating of all, they live next door to non-whites in the public housing and they get lectured to by non-white social-services minions. They get to travel in graffiti-scarred subway trains and stations.

And they are reminded every day that the rich whites think of them as disposable vermin. If you didn't get that point it is emphasized in a scene in a movie theater where a rich white audience in black-tie is laughing uproariously at Charlie Chaplin's Tramp roller-skating precariously close to the edge of a stair landing where there are no guard-rails.

That's why you probably don't want to see the movie. Not unless you are a glutton for punishment.

And it doesn't help -- or does it? -- that I am reading Nietzsche writing that all the narratives, in religion, politics, philosophy, whatever, are pretty stories to distract us from the truth of existence, that it is a matter of either growing, using your Will to Power, or declining to oblivion.

Or that I am reading conspiracy theories about the end of World War II that represent the Nuremberg Trials as put-up jobs, based on straight-up torture of the Nazi bigwigs. In other words, after World War II we utterly ground the Germans into dust until, some time in 1947-48, we decided we'd better resurrect them as a buffer against the Commie Soviets.

Yes. What should "we" do about the People at the Bottom, whether white, non-white, or whatever? The original liberals said free market and free trade. The original lefties said privileges and government programs for the poor. Now we have advanced to privileges and government programs for all non-white non-straight non-males. Or whatever "diversity and inclusion" mean this week.

If I read Nietzsche right he's saying fuggetaboutit. If a person doesn't have a clue and just reposes somewhere without fighting upwards they are finished anyway.

OK, fine, Fritzi. But whatbout the rest of us?

If I had my druthers I'd create a society that pointed People at the Bottom to the Road to the Middle Class and its cultural lessons about how to make it in the modern city wok-for-wages culture. And I'd reform America using my American Manifesto: Life after Liberalism, which understands the need to cater for three kinds of people: subordinates, responsibles, and creatives.

But maybe the best we can do is teach people how to make it, knowing what we know, and warehouse people that have fallen off the wagon.

In other words, pace all the comfortable words of religion and history, maybe there will always be people that have fallen off the wagon, like Joker and his mother, and there's not much we can do about them.

But hey. In my view the welfare state worked a treat after the 2008 crash. People got unemployment and Medicaid and, if they had half a brain, disability. And there were no riots and there was no revolution. Instead we got a lefty president, and immediately thereafter a Tea Party and then a GOP Congress and now a GOP president who is ripping up the post-WWII consensus.

Even though the crash happened on Bush's GOP watch.

And now, ten years later, it looks like "everyone" is back to work, happy as clams except lefty SJWs who are beside themselves.

Isn't America Great?

What Do the Democrats Think They are Doing

So today Nancy Pelosi is saying that the president's defeat this year is an "absolute imperative for our country." Really?

I mean, is President Trump that far off the mid-point of anything, from political position to behavior to use and abuse of power? Is the country going to go off a cliff if the president is reelected?

See, I believe that the Democrats' problem is not so much that they have spent 4 years trying to pitch Donald Trump into the La Brea tar pits, by fair means or foul. I believe they have a bigger problem than that.

The problem is that their political world-view and program is reaching its sell-by date.

I think it was reasonable, back in the 19th century, to Do Something about the workers. After all, based on the record of the previous couple of centuries, the situation of the lower orders was extremely precarious. Agricultural workers in Britain had been starving ever since Henry VIII disarmed the nobles and the nobles discharged the excess peasants who were no longer useful as the soldiers in their private armies. But it turned out that, with or without social legislation, the workers did fine.

I think it was reasonable, back in the mid 20th century to Do Something about Jim Crow in the South. Of course, the whole point of Jim Crow was to force private actors to discriminate against Negroes, to force the railroads to have white-only and black-only railroad cars. Or, in the Davis-Bacon Act of the 1930s, to stop employers from bringing cheap black labor Up North. But, as we have seen since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, the real problem is racist activists and liberals trying to divide the country by race and sex.

The point is that the economy is so compicated that any government effort to set it to rights is likely to be a cure that is worse than the disease.

However, I grant that all politics is a game of loot and plunder, offering the voters something for nothing. The mere fact of grocery store specials shows how ingrained free stuff is in the human psyche.

The problem is that the game of loot and plunder is running out of good options. And the truth is that the money has been wasted. Put it this way. Social Security is baloney. People will naturally save for their old age. So that's a trillion dollars a year in government expenditure wasted. Ditto Medicare. Daughters will naturally look after the health care of their end-of-life parents. To spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on Medicare is a waste.

When I say Social Security and Medicare are a waste, what I mean is that they have taken two trillion dollars a year out of the something-for-nothing treasure chest. Imagine that the politicians had instead enacted mandatory private savings programs where everyone was forced to save their own money for retirement and end-of-life health care, with a few subsidies thrown in for luck. Think of the money and the promises that politicians could swing around today with the two trillionen released from the cold dead hands of the middle-class elderly like me.

So I think that the Democrats' present enthusiasm for Medicare-for-All and complete overturning of the economy with the Green New Deal and College-for-All and debt forgiveness for all the foolish virgins that accumilated $100,000 in college debt represents a kind of buying panic you see at the top of a stock bull market, or the selling panic you see at the bottom of a bear market. It is equivalent to the Reign of Terror and Virtue at the end of a revolutionary movement. Or the end-of-the-world prophecies of a religious cult. It is the climactic frenzy before the return to normal.

And now, I read, the Democrats are planning to take their California attack on the gig economy national. Look, I get the idea that everyone should have a full-time job with benefits. Only, suppose you just want a temporary job to make a little extra money, and you don't need the benefits because you got them at your day job. Or your husband's day job. Or you are a college student and you get health benefits at school. Yeah, I get that the unions want to force everyone into the full-time-job-with-benefits model because it benefits unions. Look. The labor market is complicated, especially now that, per progressive demand, it is no longer just male-breadwinner-working-in-factory-for-40-hour-week. There is just no way that beneficial legislation is going to magically come up with a perfect labor market that is just and fair to all parties.

But think of the Democratic problem. Their political coalition is an over-under coalition of the Gentry and the Clients, the educated creative class using the subordinate marginal lower class to provide them with meaning and power. So their political program will always be offering some sort of handout to their subordinate followers while also, behind the curtain, doling out goodies to the upper-class Gentry.

But suppose the majority of Americans are Commoners. They want protection from life's vicissitudes but not exactly in the form of a cradle-to-grave array of "benefits." In other words, Commoners respond more to President Trump's politics at his recent State of the Union speech which offers limitied goodies to make people feel good. But the basic economic policy is a growing economy in which all Commoners can participate and take a certain pride in their individual achievements in job, family, their home, their car and their 401k and being a citizen in the Greatest Nation Ever.

If the subordinate Client group is becoming smaller relative to a larger Commoner group then our Democratic friends would find that, as they press the old familiar buttons that won elections for them with the votes of the Clients for the last century, something was wrong. The candy wasn't dropping into the tray as it should.

And you would expect them to start becoming desperate, starting to see Reds under the bed and conspiracies everywhere. Maybe they would even feel that the only thing to do is impeach the president and remove him from office in order to restore the old regime that we all knew and loved.

See, the logic of the good old regime was that, after you had satisfied the worthy workers and women and minorities on their plantations, then the noble elite could implement their vision of a global world order for and by the educated and evolved elite. Obviously. We are the smart ones; we are the people that freed the slaves, liberated the women, and stopped the homophobes and gay baiters cold. We are the good guys. Our vision for the world is the just and the only vision. Everything else is hate and bigotry.

So of course they are beside themselves.

But that is the point of democracy. To give the people the opportunity to give the ruling class a kick in the pants for being totally self-obsessed and blind to the rest of the world. And to get it done without actual bloody revolution.

You can see the point. Suppose the Chinese people are fed up with the corruption and the abuse of their present government and President-for-life Xi. What do they do? There is no opposition party to rally to. There is no national election for president. There is no peaceful way to throw the rascals out.

How I thank God for the genius of our American system, that started with its man-on-a-white-horse saying, OK, I'm done; I'm going home to Mount Vernon. See yer. And then the genius of Madison and Hamilton and the Constitution they cooked up.

Do you think that the Founders thought through what would happen after an aborted impeachment effort like the recently concluded episode, where foolish Democrats evidently thought that just the process would cover President Trump with enough dirt to deny him reelection? How's that going, sports fans? The impression I get is that Trump's supporters are all arrayed, rank on rank, behind him, and the Democrats are right now depressed and demoralized. Hey, Trump! This is just the moment to send the cavalry in to bust up the Democrats' rear.

Now, it is my understanding that the point of wise and seasoned political leaders is that they can see a step or two ahead and can therefore advise their more enthusiastic supporters against foolish actions that might rebound against them.

We haven't seen too much of that lately. I wonder why. It's not as if Nancy Pelosi, 79, and Chuck Schumer, 69, are impulsive young punks too young to have finished their political apprenticeships.

Surely it can't just be that Nancy and Chuck just aren't up to the job?

Could it be that they are too old for the job, and are past their prime?

Revolution, Baby

Today Angelo Codevilla is mourning the fact that we are in the middle of a revolution, because the ruling class's "growing sense of its own separate identity, of power and of entitlement to power."

Our country is in a state of revolution, irreversibly, because society’s most influential people have retreated into moral autarchy, have seceded from America’s constitutional order, and because they browbeat their socio-political adversaries instead of trying to persuade them.

The ruling class doesn't care about elections:

Trump notwithstanding, this class will rule henceforth as it has in the past three years. So long as its hold on American institutions continues to grow, and they retain millions of clients, elections won’t really matter.

So we are in a revolution; we need to fight, to "hurt the other side until it loses the capacity and the will to do us harm."

But what kind of peace we may get depends on the extent to which we may compel our enemies to leave us in peace. And for that, we must do unto them more and before they do unto us.

Lilke I say, we are in the era of the Rise of the Commoner. What Trump means and what the response to him means is that there is growing movement of Commoners, ordinary people who are neither elitists or clients, that just want to wive and thrive in peace without having to touch our hats to our Gentry masters every time we want to do anything: take a course, make a comment on social media, or buy a car or a house. And we are rising up.

For a century, the educated Gentry class has defined itself in opposition to the middle class, the bourgeoisie. And has defined itself as the champions of the marginalized: the workers, minorities and women. Back in the day this was a cool strategy because the numbers were with the workers, with the middle class a minority band between ruling class and underclass.

But I would say that the middle class is now the Commoners, the folks that used to be workers but are now various employees in various skilled and semi-skilled trades: people with a family, a house, and a car. Yesterday on my daily walk I ran into a couple of Commoners. One was a construction worker that had forgotten where he parked his truck; the other was a contractor, born in a yurt to a hippie couple, who was building a 4,000 sq ft house right there in north Seattle. Both these men, Commoners, were as happy as clams, and their good cheer was infectious.

And thus, by an imperceptible process the Gentry that once advocated for the helpless workers is now advcating for illegal aliens, for minority tribes, and for Gentry hot-house LGBTs against the ordinary Commoner, now defined as a racist-sexist-homophobe deplorable. Happy Commoner construction guys need not apply.

Back in the day the Gentry could win the votes of the marginalized with the promise of loot: Social Security, Medicare, free education, worker benefits. But now the game has shifted. You can see that in the failure of Elizabeth Warren to sell her Medicare-for-All. What is the problem? More free stuff, right?

Right. Except for one thing. The vast majority of ordinary Americans already have health insurance through their employer or through Medicare or Medicaid. And the vast majority looks at Medicare-for-All and sees that their access to health care is going to be disturbed.

That is the problem that Democrats are facing right now. They are still offering free stuff to their clients, but the clients are no longer the vast majority of American voters, but limited subgroups. And the vast majority sees that the free stuff on offer is going to cost them personally and benefit some guy behind the tree. No sale.

I've been reading Deirdre McCloskey's Why Liberalism Works. Around p.213 she praises liberalism -- as trade tested betterment -- as the Good Thing while nationalism and socialism are the Bad Thing. Well, yeah, I get that. But liberalism, especially economic liberalism, is meat and drink for people that are up for "creative destruction" and most people aren't. Nationalism can lead to fascism and Nazis, but I'd say that it is the natural tribe of the Commoner. In other words, if you are a commoner you identify as a Brit or a Yank but not as a educated enlightened gender-crosser of the world like McCloskey. Whatabout socialism? McCloskey points out that socialism appeals to the children of the educated, because socialism is a family thing and the children of the educated stay in the family longer than most because they hang around getting an advanced education and must worry about whether they can actually make it in the world: so socialism works for the white educated SJWs because they are really terrified about facing the real world in which they might come out second best.

We are going to see more of nationalism because that is the natural tribe of the Commoner. But whatabout the Nazis? Well I'd say that Nazis is what you get after you have lost a war and the victors impose a Carthaginian peace and it seems that everything is going to hell and here is a leader who promises to fix things and restore the glories of the nation and cares about people like me.

Last night President Trump gave us a lesson in how to appeal to the Commoner. First of all he praised America the nation and Americans the people. And how we were going from strength to strength. That is how you appeal to Commoner men and show that you care about Commoner men like them. Then he set up a stack of emotional catharses with people in the gallery. The kid who wanted to be an astronaut and -- wait for it -- whose great-grandfather was a Tuskegee airman right there next to him! The mother and two children whose husband was in Afghanistan and -- wait for it -- here's the father back from Afghanistan right here in the Capitol: tears and hugs all round! Even Rush Limbaugh, diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, so you have Melania hand a Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck right there in the House gallery! That is how you appeal to Commoner women and show that you care about women like them.

How come. How come, you might ask, does a huckster real-estate mogul and reality TV star figure all that out?

I don't know. But I can tell you that there are dozens of politicians around the US and A right now saying to themselves: I Can Do That. Maybe they can, maybe they can't. But Trump is showing us Commoners the way out of our subordination to the proud and dull rule of the educated administrative elite of the globalist Gentry.

Maybe it will all end in a successful revolution that humbles the educated Gentry. Maybe it won't.

But at least Trump is lighting the way. Maybe not the way, but a way.

And that is better than just sitting there letting the SJWs walk all over us.

More Proof That God Exists

Suppose God wanted to give President Trump a helping hand in his reelection campaign in 2020. What would he do?

Would he appoint Rep. Schiff (D-CA) to be a House manager of the president's impeachment trial in the Senate?

Would he arrange the epic fail (or maybe corruption) of the Democrats' Iowa caucus?

Would he arrange the State of the Union Speech and the Iowa caucus fumble and the aquittal of the president all in the same week?

I tell you, that chap Bismarck had a point that "There is a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America." Only it's not certain he ever said it.

But then there is Rush Limbaugh's announcement of stage four lung cancer. Years ago I read a critic who sneered at Rush's "jaunty optimism." But that is exactly the point of Rush, to get up every day and face the world with optimism. And, of course, despite all the sneers, it turns out, according to Mark Steyn, that Rush is a kind man. Who knew?

I tell you what I think is going on. I think that the the existing ruling class and its supporting Gentry is panicking. You see this in losing gamblers, and corporations that suddenly get in financial trouble.

They start to cheat.

People don't usually cheat when they are doing well; they don't need to. But when they are looking at not being able to make payroll, or facing bankruptcy, or losing everything at Vegas: That's when they start to cheat, to double down on their bets, to falsify records and steal money out of the till.

And that's what the Democrats have been doing ever since Donald Trump rode down the escalator back in 2015.

We had the Obama administration cooking up an excuse to spy on the Trump campaign.

We had the late hit on Trump with the Access Hollywood tape.

We had the entrapment of Gen. Flynn.

We had the Comey game with Trump that set up the Special Prosecutor probe.

We had the game to get Attorney General Sessions to recuse himself so that Rod Rosenstein could run the Special Prosecutor process.

Then we had the swamp creatures setting up the Ukraine caper, various chappies in the "interagency process."

Then we had the cooked up impeachment process rushed through the House and dumped in the US Senate.

Then we had the frou-frah about witnesses.

It's easy to assume that this is a deep dark conspiracy from deep in the Deep State.

But suppose it's just a Keystone Kops farce, a bunch of people running around in circles that couldn't believe that the interloper Trump was crashing into their cosy little stitch-up like the proverbial bull in a china shop.

Then the list of anti-Trump actions above is not the mark of a cunning conspiracy but of desperate people that couldn't believe that their whole comfortable world was crashing down in ruin. And so, month after month, they tried to stave off the horror. With stupid spying on the Trump campaign, with the attempt to trap the Trump people after the election, with the laughable Russia Collusion narrative, and ending up with the Keystone Kops impeachment farce.

Maybe there is no there there. Just a bunch of late dynasty mandarins running around in circles.

Could it really be that simple?

But let's all pray for Rush. He is an American original.

The Intersection of "Groundhog Day" with Nietzsche and Religion

A while back I purchased a copy of Groundhog Day at HalfPrice Books intending to watch it religiously every February 2. I credit Jonah Goldberg with putting me onto Groundhog Day and I see that he gets a lot of credit at La Wik.

Oh, and by the way, don't miss the Jeep Groundhog Day commercial from yesterday's Super Bowl.

And then there is the real Groudhog Day life of screenwriter Danny Rubin.

But when I watched the movie last night, February 2, 2020, which, from its numbers 02/02/2020 should be the groundhoggiest Groundhog Day for millennia to come, I realized that the whole thing echoes Nietzsche's notion of Eternal Recurrence. And, of course, when I Googled "groundhog day nietzsche" I found that thousands had already tumbled to this. Even La Wik gets into the action.

OK, so I only read Nietzsche over the last year or two. So I have an excuse.

But let us be clear what Nietzsche was on about, before the "Nietzsche was the Nazis' favorite intellectual" chorus starts up. I notice that most of the quotes on the Internet come from The Gay Science but I take my text from The Will to Power.

It is all about the sequence of morality, decadence, nihilism, eternal recurrence, will to power. You can get my long form in "Nietzsche in 900 Words -- If You Can Take It."

First, there is morality, as in a stable religious tradition. It "protect[s] life against despair and the leap into nothing." But when God is Dead, then you get decadence. Nothing to be ashamed of, it's part of the rhythm of life, growth and increase are followed by "waste, decay, elimination." Obviously, when people lose the faith that protected them against despair then they start to lose their bounce and joi de vivre. So we get to nihilism:

Nihilism is a symptom that the underprivileged have no comfort left; that they destroy in order to be destroyed; that without morality they no longer have any reason to "resign themselves"[.]

And so when you have descended into nihilism, you are reduced to "existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: 'the eternal recurrence'."

And that, pretty clearly, is what is happening to Bill Murray's character Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. But is that all there is? Not at all. The next step is the Will to Power. In other words, to break out of the descent into decadence and nihilism and the eternal round of Groundhog Day, the same-old same-old day after day you have to break out. And you don't have to be a Homeric hero.

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not demand extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account: those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes -- human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride. (§55)

In Groundhog Day we can see that the key is for Phil Connors to stop being a cunning rascal, figuring out how to flatter the babes to get them into bed, using knowledge about people to manipulate them, but just going ahead to serve others -- even if they don't thank him -- and also becoming the man that the girl of his dreams would like him to be.

The interesting thing is that, in the Special Features of the DVD, in "The Weight of Time," the director Harold Ramis, who is part lapsed Jew and part Buddhist, related that he got calls from just about every religion thanking him for being one of them:

The first inkling I got of what is was going to mean to me was [that] someone called and said the Buddhists love this movie. And I meet a yogi that said this is the yoga movie; this totally expresses our philosophy. Then I started getting letters from Jesuits, from fundamentalist Christians, all saying the same thing... you must be one of us because this movie perfectly expresses our philosophy of life.

 So. There's something that Nietzsche gets and just about every religious believer gets that gets expressed in an ordinary -- OK, not so ordinary -- Hollywood movie about a jerk of a weatherman and how he got to be unjerked.

Maybe there is hope for us and for America and for the world after all.