The Day After: "Groundhog Day"

A couple of years ago I determined to observe our sacred national festival of Groundhog Day by watching -- what else? -- Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day about a pompous twerp of a TV weatherman caught in a Nietzschean "eternal recurrence," reliving February 2 at Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and suffering the local yokels pulling the groundhog out of his den and announcing to the world that Phil the groundhog -- seer of seers, prognosticator of prognosticators -- has forecast another six weeks of winter. Again and again.

Nietzsche's line is that, when God dies, what you get is decadence, nihilism, and the eternal recurrence, over and over, until a new God is born.

In the case of Phil Connors the weatherman played by Bill Murray, he tries out all the sins of the world -- in particular manipulating women to get them into bed -- before he surrenders and just tries to do the right thing by little old ladies with a flat tire, performing the Heimlich maneuver on a local yokel choking on his breakfast, making his music teacher proud, being a nice guy, and finally winning the love of producer Rita Hanson played by Andie MacDowell.

This year, I particularly noted that the neurologist played in a cameo role by Harold Ramis is practically blind. Hmm. I wonder what he meant by that!

Also, I liked the moment where Rita is skeptical that Phil the weatherman knows the business of every local yokel in town. Phil replies, with a kind of existential resignation of a man that has perhaps relived February 2 three thousand times -- given that it takes ten years to become an accomplished musician -- that he knows all about everyone in Punxsutawney. And there is a kind of divine wisdom peeking through in that. We ought to know more about the lives and the needs of our neighbors, not because of prurient or curtain-twitching interest, but because of human concern.

Of course, one major theme in Groundhog Day is the same as America's Big Problem today, the cult among the elite -- even including TV weathermen -- that they are above the ordinary local yokels, the kind of people that dress up in top hats on Groundhog Day, or the fading beauty that makes it to Groundhog Day every year, or the bumbling armored car workers dropping coins on the ground. (Those armored car workers have nothing in common with health bureaucracy professionals making a mess of COVID vaccine distribution.) And, of course, there is the quintessential all-American "sure-as-heckfire" insurance agent, Ned Ryerson.

But ordinary people have a right to live their ordinary lives, and until our best and brightest acquire the wisdom to understand that -- and inwardly digest it -- then they, and America, are going to be living Groundhog Day for ever and ever, until they finally get that teeny-weeny bit of wisdom and release us all from our present Eternal Recurrence.

Meanwhile, like Phil Connors in the early part of the movie, the members of our ruling class, both the ruling clique and the broader educated elite, are in denial.

The Intersection of Innocence, Victims, Chastity, and Complaint

Yesterday I had a brainwave while categorizing a bunch of blog posts into my Culture of Innocence category.

I said to myself: but aren't helpless victims and innocent virgins and Little Darlings and women resisting the public square with their "safetyism" all the same?

They are all humans in the pre-responsibility culture. They are Adam and Eve before that nasty serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted the innocent Eve into tasting the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

So let's rehearse all this:

Three Peoples: The People of the Subordinate Self are people that attach themselves to a lord -- a feudal lord or a political boss -- and they are saying, thanks very much but responsibility is not for me. Of course, the Subordinate has no problem complaining if his loving lord goofs up and fails to protect him.

Little Darlings: If you are a Little Darling of the ruling class, given loot and plunder in return for your vote, you are like the rich man's mistress. One fine day, when your prettiness is not quite what it was, your Sugar Daddy will dump you for a newer model. In politics this is the fate of the white working class. I say that it will also be the fate of the feminists as the ruling class favors transgenders over whiny women. And blacks too as the ruling class pivots to illegal immigrants.

Women in the Public Square: I maintain that women don't want to be responsible people in the public square. That is what #MeToo and "safetyism" is about. Women expect to be protected, and rightly so. But that means that women are never going to accept the proposition of the public square, that you take the good with the bad, the ups with the downs. The very difference between the male Culture of Courage and the female Culture of Chastity that issues from the different conceptions of honor experienced by each sex mandates this. Women are not into courage. Their job is to stay alive and keep the kids alive. That does not include dying in a Forlorn Hope after King Henry V bellows "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."

Culture of Innocence: I maintain that it is the natural and physical imperative for small minorities to develop a culture of innocence. Small minorities always feel embattled and vulnerable. They never know when they will need to join together as one to defend themselves from the cold cruel world outside. To maintain the necessary unity the small minority has to develop a culture of innocence, that all the world is against us and the only way we can survive is if we all hang together. And when did we do anything to deserve this? Obviously in our own time this Culture of Innocence is most obvious in Jews and Blacks. But I believe that all ethnic immigrants to the United States have gone through this stage. We will probably see it grab hold of the white commoners in the next few years as the implacable acts of the educated elite make life more precarious for them.

 Notice that this Culture of Innocence is mandatory for anyone fighting a war. The leader must unite the country to fight the war if he is to have a hope of winning and he always does this by representing the enemy as a guilty monster and we the people as innocents. If the leader fails to unite his people in this declaration of innocence then he will fail to mobilize the necessary will to win. In fact, if you are the anti-war party you will always try to insist that, hey, we aren't so great. Whatabout such and such... Our liberal friends did a bang-up job on this front during the Vietnam War and also in the the Iraq War after a decent interval to mourn the dead of the 9/11 attacks.

I say that the beginning of wisdom is to get beyond the Culture of Innocence. And that is the meaning of the Garden of Eden story. Once Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge she was no longer an innocent, and Adam and Eve had to leave the pre-conscious Paradise and "eat the herb of the field" and "eat bread." Sounds like the Dawn of Agriculture.

Then there is the human guilt from putting Christ on the Cross. Admitting guilt and getting beyond the Culture of Innocence is the beginning of responsibility, admitting that you are not perfect, and that, here and there, you may have done things of which you are ashamed, and for which you are sorry.

Notice that our liberal friends have a peculiar version of this with their BLM signs and their #WeBelieve yardsigns and their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. They are saying "we are the good guys" because we help oppressed peoples and the other guys are the haters. There is not a whisper of doubt, that we think that, on the margin, we are doing the right thing, but you never know. No. We activists are the good guys, and don't you forget it.

To live successfully in the city you have to get rid of all this innocence. You have to accept personal responsibility for your life and surrender to the will of the market. If something goes wrong you pick yourself up and get back in the game. There is a big upside to this: you get to be a happy camper. You ditch the Culture of Complaint for the Culture of Courage and Responsibility. Even if it's not always your fault.

The Trump Lawyers Flap

According to the CNN five lawyers have left the Trump impeachment defense team because the former president wants to highlight vote rigging in his defense. They think he should concentrate on proving his innocence in respect of inciting the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he's left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard.

Well.

If I were Trump I would not be making my defense defensively, by saying: "who me" in respect of the Qanon attack on the Capitol. What's the point? Either the Senate will convict him because 17 Republicans decide to convict on purely political grounds that it will aid reelection. Or it will be a meaningless circus act.

No. If I were Trump I would grab the opportunity to advance my Narrative, that the election was stolen. Oh, maybe not actually by manufactured votes, but by manipulation of the mail-in voting system by "vote harvesting" and other techniques. Right now, You Are Not Allowed to Say That the Election was Stolen. But that would not apply in an impeachment trial in the US Senate. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if the Dems rule any argument about stealing the election out of order.

The whole point about Trump, from the escalator ride in 2015 to the present, is to fight back against the Deep State and its domination and hegemony. As I wrote in an American Thinker piece in November 2020, "Donald Trump, the Sacrificial Hero,"

Win or lose, Donald Trump has become a national Sacrificial Hero. If he wins, he is the conquering hero that vanquished the cowardly foe not once, but twice. If he loses, he might enter legend and myth as a demi-god, as others before him that gave their all in ancient times.

If I were the Democrats I would be executing on a strategy to make sure that Trump does not become a great Sacrificial Hero, because that would work against the Democratic Party domination. But I don't think our Democratic friends understand that. All they know is their Activism Culture of cancel and deplatform and censor.

But it looks like Trump understands that the issue in his impeachment trial is not whether he "incited" an "insurrection." Who cares? He is out of office and the Deep State is back in the saddle. The question is how the Great Rebellion proceeds now and into the future.

So if Trump gets his Narrative of a stolen election into the impeachment trial, he wins. If he is acquitted, he wins. If he is convicted, he wins. If his conviction is overturned in the Supreme Court, he wins.

If I can see this, why can't Speaker Nancy Pelosi see it? Or Sen Chuck E. Schumer?

I tell you Dems. You really do not want Donald Trump made into a Sacrificial Hero. It is just about the most powerful archetypal symbol known to mankind.

GameStop and Bailouts

The ruling class is shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on at Robinhood, the stockmarket app that helped rocket failing retailer GameStop into the stratosphere and apparently ruined hedge fund Melvin Capital that had shorted GameStop.

Of course, for us deplorables this is all great fun, and "far-right" writer Vox Day, wants to go all the way and suggests

One thing is clear from all of this. The America public is not going to support another bank bailout once the next financial crisis begins. They'd rather see Wall Street burn, and rightly so.

Er, no. The trouble is that when Wall Street burns, we the people get nuked. Big time. As in the Great Depression, when the Fed failed to bail out the banks. As in the Great Recession of 2008-09, when Little Ben Bernanke failed to bail out Lehman Brothers.

Yes, I'd like to see the malefactors of great wealth taught a lesson they will never forget. But I don't want to be caught in the blast zone.

And as far as I can determine, it is just not possible to design the credit system so there is no chance of a meltdown.

Most credit, as far as I can see, is the anticipation of income in normal trade. Thus, a merchant borrows money against the sale of his merchandise at a future date. The question is: how much borrowing is safe? One hundred percent of the anticipated sale price? Fifty percent?

The problem is that, 99 times out of 100, borrowing 100% of the anticipated sales price is perfectly safe. Until the day that your ship gets wrecked, or the market price of the merchandise takes a tumble before you sell it.

Then, if the merchant doesn't have other resources, he is bankrupt and his creditors may go bankrupt and their creditors go bankrupt, and so on.

It is all explained in Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street. Everything is copacetic in the credit system so long as borrowers make their payments and that loans can be liquidated by selling the collateral. But if the borrower can't pay, or the sale of the collateral isn't enough to liquefy the defaulting loan, then you got trouble right here in River City.

Bagehot's Big Idea in Lombard Street is that the central bank should be the "lender of last resort." So when a financial institution goes broke the central bank steps in and buys it. Thus the illiquid debt of the defaulting institution is diluted in the capital of the central bank. But Bagehot recognizes a further risk. What if the central bank can't absorb the defaulting debt of the defaulter? Well, the answer is that the central bank is backed up by the state, and its ability to issue debt.

But what if the state doesn't have the capital or the "confidence" of the market? Like, say Venezuela? 

Exactly. That is why it is best to make sure that the credit system does not allow hedge funds and other reckless investors to put the whole system at risk. That is why an ordinary stock investor is only allowed to borrow 50 percent of a stock's value "on margin." That is why, back in the day, before the gubmint got into the act with Fannie Mae, Americans could only borrow 50 percent of the value of a home.

Yes but what if the Wall Street smarties have come up with another way of "laundering" low-quality debt like they did back in the 2000s with their derivatives and credit default swaps. It looked like a good idea until it wasn't.

That is probably the Big Problem. Wall Street smarties are always thinking up new ways of sailing too close to the wind. And usually, their folly is only discovered after it is too late, and the system is already in meltdown. This is what happened with default swaps and derivatives in the 2008 meltdown. It turned out that the financial legerdemain did not in fact make all those high-risk mortgage bonds into low-risk bonds. Oh dear.

That is why we are always going to need that "lender of last resort."

Here's the thing though, as you can see from my report on the 2008 bailouts. The biggest item was not the bailouts, of monies lent to weakened banks and financial mastodons. The biggest item was $16.9 trillion in guarantees for money market mutual funds.

Yeah. And the cool thing about the guarantees was that the Federal government didn't have to shell out a penny in debt or outlays. All that was needed to keep the money market mutual fund business going was the guarantee that the Feds would keep it lubricated. How cool is that?

Very cool, until our ruling class figures out how to take advantage of it.

Yarvin: Trump Never Had a Chance; Plus He's Incompetent

Now that Trump is returned to Florida, Curtis Yarvin reminds us that Trump's job as president was to be a King. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the skills and attributes to be a king.

Trump has never shown any particular gift for management or delegation, and he has the attention span of a rabid chipmunk. 

Nor did any of his people know how to be a king and actually run the government.

But then, Yarvin continues, what authority does the president have anyway? Practically none, especially if he is going up against the System and its bureaucracy.

With regard to the System he references a 900-person Zoom call of all the lefties where they coordinated the street action -- or lack of street action -- after the election. Wow. I get that the lefties all somehow coordinate like a flock of birds.

With regard to the bureaucracy he notes the case of Trump and a Pennsylvania lawmaker getting together, in a "Plot" with a mid-level Justice Department appointee to maybe get a bit of investigating on the Big Steal. But the other bureaucrats shut it down.

So, in fact, the left's Activist Central decides what goes down, or does not go down in the streets, and the permanent bureaucracy decides what goes down in the actual government. Presidents need not apply.

Who knew?

So, the benefit of Trump is that he did get to do some pro-Commoner stuff for four years, and in the aftermath the lefty Activism Central were part of the System, and the bureaucrats showed their teeth.

If we didn't know how the System worked before, we do now.

Bottom line is, of course, that the current System of the ruling class ain't going down until it runs out of money and thus can't keep all its bureaucrats and its activists on-side.

So of course the Biden administration is executive-ordering the agenda of the lefty Activism Culture. In particular because, since President Biden is in mental decline he really lacks the horsepower to moderate his lefty crazies.

And of course the bureaucracy is not going to apply the law to its own and to the lefty activists that break the law.

Says Yarvin about Trump's real achievement.

[The left] has succeeded brilliantly in pretending to be the underdog. Thanks to Trump, and to its response to Trump, this charade seems no longer viable.

So now the left will have to be upfront about power: that it has the power, that it believes in power, and that you'd better behave because power.

It's a start. 

Biden's Two Front War: Climate Change and Systemic Racism

Everybody knows that fighting a two-front war is a Very Bad Thing. It was Germany's fate in both World War I and World War II. And it didn't go well.

Now, the Biden administration is proposing to fight both climate change and systemic racism. All at once.

Now, according to my theory, governments exist to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. So your average foreign war is all about protecting the people from the furriners. And your average civil war, or political campaign or witch-hunt, is about the domestic enemies and traitors and witches.

Of course most wars and most politics are ginned-up rubbish, because if you don't have a war you don't have a reason for all that taxing and spending and borrowing.

But still: only one war at a time, Senator.

For instance, after 9/11 we had unity in the United States for about a year because all Americans were united to Do Something about crazed Islamic terrorists. But after a while normal politics resumed and our Democratic friends went back to posting ReDefeat Bush bumper-stickers on their Subarus.

Good old FDR had a grand old time uniting Democrats against the dastardly Republicans from 1933 till 1939. Although, in fact, the scapegoat President Hoover was a pretty progressive Republican in favor of government solutions for most everything, just like FDR.

But then, when FDR wanted to get into World War II, suddenly we were all Americans, united to defeat the Japs and the Huns. Democrats, Republicans? We were all Americans.

Now, I am wondering if President Biden should be making a decision about which war he wants to fight. Does he want to save us from the nightmare of climate change and unite all Americans to fight that existential threat? Oh, how glorious that day will be when climate change has been arrested and our human community saved! Or does he want to hunt down and cancel all the racist-sexist-homophobes wherever they may be found? Oh, the wonders of an America purged of all the white oppressors by the noble allies!

Because if President Biden wants to fight both existential perils, then maybe he is Literally Hitler. Too dumb to avoid getting himself into a two-front war.

Of course, I realize the difficulty of the president's position. He is the leader of the party that includes a whole barrel full of different activist interests. Every educated woke person must be into activism, and the key is to find a new activist field for your very own. But when all these activisms all come to power... Well, it is the job of a wise leader to make wise decisions about which activist agenda to concentrate on.

(Yes, I know. If he were really wise he would tell all the activists to take their activisms and put 'em where the sun don't shine.)

Of course, it is a bit of a problem when the president is already well advanced into senile dementia, and is merely the creature of his activist staff. It becomes hard to make sensible, strategic, decisions that are good for the Democratic Party and good for the United States of America.

Actually, of course, I believe that the president is making a mammoth strategic error by not concentrating all his power on the post-COVID economic recovery. Never mind all the activist rubbish about climate change and systemic racism.

Now I am a retired guy and my IRAs are doin' fine thank you very much what with all the money printing and such.

But, just between you and me and don't tell your wokie neighbor who won't get it, I think that tens of millions of Americans have had their lives blitzed into oblivion by the COVID economic shutdowns. And it is going to take years to dig them out the the hole we have pitched them into.

Correction: In my belief many of the tens of millions of Americans will never recover from the hell that they were pitched into. Shades of the Great Depression and the Skid Rows that resulted. And, I believe, this fact will very likely transform American politics.

Yep. I reckon that President Biden is making a strategic error, and his court historians will have their work cut out for them if they expect to give him an honorable place in the history books.

Whatabout the Next Crash?

Now that we are First and Ten with the Biden administration and we learn that President Biden is at 50 percent mental capacity, let's talk about the real question.

What happens at the end of the current deficits and money printing?

There's a piece at American Spectator about this. Donald Devine quotes a bunch of experts that say there is nothing to worry about. Not yet. Then he makes his prediction:

My prediction is that Biden’s control of executive and legislative branches will produce a short economic boom in 2021, followed by a big bust in 2022 that takes down the whole progressive edifice with it.

One of the problems he sees is the modern "repo" market.

“In repo, broker-dealers, hedge funds and banks construct short-term transactions. You put up collateral — Treasury bills or sometimes less-pristine instruments — with an agreement to buy them back the next day or week for slightly more, and invest the proceeds in the interim.”

The question is: what happens when things turn South?

But eventually, iffy collateral sneaks into the system. That’s also fine, until markets hit an inevitable rough patch, like, say, March 2020. No one will take the junky stuff anymore, and everyone scrambles for good collateral. So there’s a mad dash, a brawl really, to buy Treasuries — like musical chairs with six to eight buyers eagerly eyeing one chair.

If this sounds too complicated, let me give you Walter Bagehot and his 1873 book Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. 

As I understand Bagehot -- he was the founding editor of the London Economist -- the credit system needs the following to work:

All loans must be properly collateralized so that the borrowed money can be recovered if the borrower defaults.

All borrowers must be able to service their loans.

If either of these things breaks down, then you got trouble, right here in River City. If both things break down you got nuclear Armageddon.

For instance, in the runup to the Crash of 2008 we had the US government encouraging low down-payment mortgage loans. See the problem? If there is a downturn in home prices then some of those low-down payment loans can't be liquidated if the borrower defaults.

Then, in addition, the US government was encouraging, even mandating, that lenders lend to borrowers -- such as minority borrowers -- with low credit ratings, i.e., borrowers with a higher than normal risk of not making the payments.

So when the Fed tightened up on credit in 2006 many borrowers with adjustable-rate loans couldn't make their payments and because their homes came on the market the price of homes went down and banks could not recover the principal when liquidating defaulted loans.

And so you get a credit crisis where traders in the system don't want to trade in securities with "iffy collateral."

Then you get a credit meltdown which, according to Bagehot, can only be stopped by a central bank, a "lender of last resort" buying up distressed loans. It can do this because the assumption is that the central bank has, as capital, the whole wealth of the nation to back it up. You can see how the central bank acting as "lender of last resort" solves the crisis. It buys up dodgy debt, and pays for it with newly printed money that people trust more than the dodgy debt. So the panic subsides.

Usually, however, the guy in charge of the central bank, being a mere ruling-class courtier, partially flubs the "lender of last resort" bit. So, in the Great Depression of 1929-33 the Federal Reserve did not bail out the Bank of United States when it failed in 1931, probably because it was a Jewish bank. In the Crash of 2008, Little Ben Bernanke decided in September that he did not have the authority to bail out Lehman Brothers. 

The incompetence of the courtiers means that the credit crisis goes on longer and is deeper than necessary and ordinary people get wiped out.

The question you may ask is whether in the next credit crisis the market will believe that the central bank can in fact act as lender of last resort, or whether the problem is so big that it is beyond the ability of the Fed or the IMF to turn bad debt into good debt.

Here's an interesting factoid. In the 2008 crash the US government had an actual $700 billion TARP bailout program to bail out the banks where is borrowed and spent actual money. But it "guaranteed" about $16 trillion in money market mutual funds.

I wonder if the whole bailout could have been done with a "guarantee." It would have been a whole lot cheaper.

But there is something else to worry about. It is "MMT," or Modern Monetary Theory. It is Keynesianism on steroids and supported by lefties like Bernie Sanders and AOC and says that pedal-to-the-metal with debt and spending is OK for government. At least for now.

The real question is: what do you do when the balloon goes up? Gold? Bitcoin? And whatabout any asset that is held in a financial institution that you access over the Internet? How hard would it be in a great crisis for the government to seize 23.2 percent of all assets at Fidelity and Vanguard? When everything is just a record in a database.