Ukraine: I Don't Know Nuffink

Everyone has a lot to say about Ukraine and the Russian invasion. I have to say that I don't believe anything I read and I don't know what's really going on.

I just have questions:

Whatabout Color Revolutions? La Wik calls them innocent risings of the people. But Russia and China call them US-inspired meddling.

Is Ukraine a US puppet? I'd say a big "tell" is how President Biden was boasting back in the day about withholding $1 billion in aid. And how Hunter Biden has been involved in Ukraine energy companies like Burisma. Ukraine would give a dime to Hunter Biden if there weren't some sort of quid-pro-quo involved.

Is Russia winning, is Ukraine resisting? I feel that nothing I read about the war tells me anything. Wake me when it's over.

Whatabout NATO and the EU? Funny, we haven't heard much from NATO. But the EU seems to be getting involved. And the Germans seem to be waking up from a long slumber. And there seems to be popular support for helping Ukraine, in Europe and in North America: what's that all about?

Whatabout energy? I just don't get the disconnect between renewable energy and buying natural gas from Russia.

How powerful is Russia anyway? Here's the GDP table of estimates for 2022.

Country	GDP per capita nominal	GDP per capita PPP
United States	$74,725	$74,725
Germany	$51,860	$56,956
Poland	$19,056	$40,341
Lithuania	$22,412	$41,288
Russia	$11,654	$29,485
Ukraine	$4,958	$15,124

I mean. Russia and Ukraine are not exactly economic powerhouses. Even ex-Soviet satellites Poland and Lithuania are way ahead in the GDP game. So what's that all about?

Then there's China:

Country	GDP per capita nominal	GDP per capita PPP
Taiwan	$32,123	$56,959
China	$12,990	$20,667

Just for comparison. Interesting how Russia and China are both in the same GDP ballpark. And Taiwan is more or less in the Germany ballpark.

So what happens next?

Really, I have no idea, although I do expect our western leaders to exhibit a fair amount of stupidity.

But here's my idea. Suppose that the US backed out of NATO and ended the military occupation of Germany. Don't you think that Germany and Poland could do a pretty good job of keeping Russia at home?

And whatabout Nikole Hannah Jones:

What if I told you Europe is not a continent by defintion, but a geopolitical fiction to separate it from Asia and so the alarm about a European, or civilized, or First World nation being invaded is a dog whistle to tell us we should care because they are like us.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) February 27, 2022

You know. I think she has a point. We are outraged at Russia beating up the Ukrainians. But don't care so much when the US Imperial Forces beat up on rag heads and fuzzie-wuzzies.

I Know, How About a Great Reset on US Foreign Policy

One thing about ruling classes and the governments they work for: they ain't that smart.

And part of that comes from living in a court or working in a bureaucracy. Both kinds of institutions are go-along-to-get-along shops. Indeed, I've heard it said that the normal arc of a bureaucracy is to do less and less for more and more until the operation is nothing more than bureaucrats sitting around getting their paychecks and discussing their pensions.

So, if you are the president or the monarch it is very difficult to change policy. Because the bureaucrats and their jobs are all aligned with the same-old-same-old.

Such as NATO.

The whole point of NATO was to be an alliance of brothers that stood shoulder to shoulder against the Soviets. Because Stalin, because all the Commie eastern European puppet governments. Yay!

And then, just to prove we were right, the Soviets organized their puppet governments into a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact. Yay!

But then the Soviet Union -- an empire as a bureaucracy -- fell apart and the Eastern European puppet governments all became normal corrupt democracies like ours.

So, with the Soviet threat ended, our wise and worthy leaders...

They kept NATO going, and enrolled most of the Eastern European countries into NATO, and even invited Ukraine to be a part of NATO.

So, if you were the President of Russia, what would you think? Would you think that the eevil American empire had it in for you? Or would you just go about your business whistling a happy tune from Boris Godunov?

So here is my fearless forecast of the future, with help from one of my grandsons.

2021 - We lost Afghanistan

2022 - We lose Ukraine

2023 - We lose Taiwan

2024 - We lose Biden

Somewhere in there is losing COVID and losing on inflation. But that would make the message too complicated.

Yes, Democrats and Deep State and 17 intelligence agencies: how can you expect to win an election after you have lost three wars on your watch -- even if they are mostly phoney wars?

And then President Trump or DeSantis -- or whoever -- will have the mandate to completely cut the US Imperial Forces down to size. Then we

Cancel our membership in NATO.

Remove the occupation force in Germany.

Close 97.2 percent of US bases overseas.

It is essential to do this right away while the accusation of "He lost Afghanistan; He lost Ukraine, etc." made in the 2024 campaign is still echoing through the corridors of power, and before the deep state has a chance to organize and push back against the new president and his operatives.

Curtis Yarvin recommends that we give the retired bureaucrats full pensions. Because that's all they care about anyway. But I also think they should each get a medal.

Now, I don't really blame our Democratic friends for this total cock-up on the foreign policy front. All this is normal. It is what you expect from government. Governments keep doing same-old-same-old until the day that the whole thing falls apart. You got something you don't want to change? Turn it into a government program.

You want a society that responds flexibly and creatively to the inevitable storm and stress of life on this planet? Then keep government down to the absolute minimum.

Our globalist friends have been talking a big line in recent years about The Great Reset, by which they mean a whole raft of new government programs from climate change to Social Credit ID. The fact that they think that such a thing, pushed by the ruling class, is a good idea just tells you how little they know.

But I think it would be a good idea for the next president to steal the notion of the Great Reset, and call his revolution in foreign policy a Great Reset. 

Just to confuse things and throw dust in the eyes of the current ruling class.

Truckers are not Revolutionaries

My pal Curtis Yarvin is sneering at the Canadian truck parade as a failed revolution. And he has a point: if the truckers were trying to overthrow the Canadian government they were a pathetic zero. Successful revolutionaries look and act like The French Revolution's Saint Just and our own Lenin and Mao.

It is understandable that Yarvin would look at the truckers that way; his thing is "the next regime" and his ideal is a revolution where the present ruling class just walks out the door, accepting that its time is over.

But the truckers weren't trying to take over the government of Canada; they were just looking for some R-E-S-P-E-C-T. As the song goes. They were just saying, please stop messing with our lives and our jobs.

Hey, Canadian ruling class! How hard is that, to listen to the truckers and say, yes, you guys have a point? And then ignore them, as the ruling class generally does with jumped-up peasants? Or maybe concede some ridiculously small issue, patting the peasants on the back, and laughing to each other as the peasants  touch their forelocks before going back to the farm.

Anyway, now the whole thing is over, because all of a sudden on February 24, Prime Minister Trudeau announced the end of the emergency, just two days after the House of Commons voted in favor of a 30-day extension. Was the sudden change because the emergency was going to be defeated in the Canadian Senate? Or because Canadian banks were experiencing a run on accounts that could be frozen at any moment for any reason?

So I would say that the Canadian government made a ridiculous overreaction to the trucker protest. Hey, geniuses, you think that after two years of government ukases and mandates that the natives would be getting a bit restless? What? You never thought of that?

Remember back in the day when the Brit imperialists would report that "the natives are restless?" The point to understand is that the Brit imperial colonialists understood that they were governing a people that they didn't really understand. So when the natives got restless they understood "Houston we have a problem."

They did not spew out a paragraph of pejoratives, as Trudeau did, calling the truck protesters out for "antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia."

OK, let us understand, as economist Ludwig von Mises did when dealing with Austrian government officials in the 1910s to 1920s, that the vast majority of them are startlingly ignorant. As Joseph Schumpeter wrote in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, the trade of the politician is re-election. That he should do anything effective on the governing front is remarkable.

What Justin Trudeau is teaching us is that he really believes the political formula of today's educated class, that they are allies of the oppressed classes against white oppressors. And that the white oppressors are the enemy, and that the average white middle-class person is the enemy.

I suppose that it is a danger for any ruling class, that its functionaries actually come to believe the narrative and the lies that support it.

And the narrative of every ruling class is a farrago of lies, whether it is the feudal lords plundering their peasants, or the American revolutionaries that didn't want to pay for the French-Indian War, or the Progressives that gave us our administrative state and its entitlement programs and regulations, or the current woke elite that is desperately blaming the ordinary middle class for the failure of all the welfare-state programs from education to welfare, or the Trumpian nonsense about Making America Great Again.

What a wise ruling class understands is that over there in flyover land, the peasants see things differently than the rulers, and that this is normal. And a wise ruling class understands that everything it does takes monies away from A and gives it to B, and that A tends not to like that. This truth is inscribed in the First Amendment, which speaks about "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The First Amendment, in its wisdom, understands that there will always be this group or that group that gets all riled up and reckons that "we was robbed" and wants to do something about it.

And yes, all assemblies, and demonstrations, and protests are really a show of strength, to communicate to the government that here is a bunch of people that are mad as hell and are not going to take it any more, to threaten, by their very presence and numbers, that they could turn the show of force into actual violence. But all such shows of force are better than an actual deployment of force.

And by the way, elections are another show of force, for when you win an election by getting the most votes, you are basically saying that we have the biggest army.

So I think that the Trudeau policy of actually representing the truckers as regime opponents is a strategic mistake. Just as I believe that the whole January 6 narrative of the Democrats is a strategic mistake.

Instead, I would recommend a National Committee to Review Cross-Border Trucking Regulations for our Canadian friends. And a National Commission to Investigate 2020 Election Irregularities for our Democratic friends.

I mean, there's nothing to worry about, right? The trucking regulations are as right as right could be, and a National Committee would soon confirm that. The 2020 presidential election was completely on the up-and-up, and an in-depth Commission would merely confirm it.

Exactly. So why are Canada's Liberals and US Democrats so touchy about all this? Surely, there is no possibility that where there is smoke there is fire?

I tell you, as I write this piece, I am thinking to myself: what is the problem with our ruling classes? How come they are so touchy? How come they are deploying pejoratives left, right and center?

Could it be that there is something rotten in the State of Denmark?

We are Heading for an Energy Armageddon

It's all very well to cut off Russia from the world economy, because Ukraine. And teach that Nord Stream gas pipeline a lesson. And Putin! Who does he think he is?

But have you globalist chappies thought about what that does to your Build Back Better agenda?

It means Germany freezes to death. Because the Germans decided to go all-in on their Energiewende. Which is German for close the nukes and build lots of windmills and solar power. Oh and dirty brown coal electric plants.

If there ain't any natural gas to fill in on the days without wind and/or without sun, then Germany goes dark.

And here in the United States the price of gas is something that ordinary deplorables really care about. Add Hispanics and blacks to that.

It means that you greenie chaps look like a bunch of complete idiots to ordinary people.

Yes, I know. But Putin!

Of course, high gas -- gasoline and natural gas -- prices doesn't really bother the Laptop Class. We can afford it, they say. And we should, because climate change. Science is Real™ and all that.

Let me say, up front, that I don't like this. I don't like the Germans freezing. And I don't like poor Americans getting hammered by high gasoline prices and accelerating prices for rent and food.

But, I realize that no ruling class gets shown the door unless it has really screwed up, big time. It makes sense, for ordinary people just go about their lives; they aren't engaged with the vital issues that consume the ruling class and their lackeys, the Laptop Class. For, ever since the dawn of time, ruling class courtiers have been consumed with the status games at court. It might be the cut of their silken court knee breeches. Or getting that vital sinecure at the Circumlocution Office. Or saving the world from climate change and systemic racism.

But ordinary people don't pay much attention to the ruling-class status games. Not until they can't pay their bills. Then, and only then, they cry to their leaders: "make it stop."

Of course, by that time it's too late.

But really, it all makes sense. The ordinary middle class will go about its business, until the pain starts to hurt. And the lower class will go on cashing their government checks until the checks don't cover their day-to-day costs.

Hey ruling class! This is not that hard! Do whatever you want, but don't frighten the horses in the street. And don't crash the economy with your fashionable ideas.

But, I guess it's too late for that. We are going to have soaring energy prices. We are going to have a couple years of 10 percent inflation. We are going to have some sort of a crash. And it's all on Joe Biden's watch.

Now some enthusiasts think it's all going to add up to 100 seats in the midterms and 100 years of Republican dominance. I doubt it. But there is a good chance that our ruling class is going to get a good punch in the solar plexus this fall. And that ain't bad.

But what I am thinking about is how to come up with the memes, the slogans and the maxims that will speak directly to ordinary white deplorable Americans, rising Hispanics, trans-canceled feminists, and aspiring black rappers. Something that will convince them, for a year or two, that Democrats don't care about people like them.

The memes would need to be about jobs, prices, rent, energy, stuff like:

A president that raises gas prices 50 percent doesn't care about people like you.

And so on.

How Humans Deal with the Unknown

My pal Fritzi Nietzsche famously wrote "God is dead." La Wik comments that

Nietzsche used the phrase to express his idea that the Enlightenment had eliminated the possibility of the existence of God.

Then La Wik starts to waffle. 

However, proponents of the strongest form of the Death of God theology have used the phrase in a literal sense, meaning that the Christian God, who had existed at one point, has ceased to exist.

But I think that they are all missing the point.

I say that all humans have to deal with the things we do not know. And I say that the problem has got worse with the explosion of knowledge in the last 500 years.

Take the whole question of life. How did life get created? Every civilization has a story about that, and it usually involves God -- or one of the gods -- creating the first living thing.

And today? We are still unable to account for the creation of the first animate object. I am reading a review of current thinking on the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" by a Brit philosopher J.J. Clarke. His book is The Self-creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview.

The book is really about how to talk about things that we really don't understand. Like Evolution. Used to be that we attributed it all to God. But then came Darwin and evolution. Animals and plant "evolved" to form new species and characteristics. But how? Well, because of the natural selection of small, inherited variations. Then came the gene theory, of gene variants that changed from parent to child. Now, I believe scientists are talking about "microevolution.̈"

But how? Clarke side-steps that question with the notion of "emergence." Changes in plants and animals and communities and the market "emerge."

Do you see how clever this is? It avoids dealing with the actual mechanism of change, whatever it is, and just proposes that the way the world works is that change "emerges."

Another clever sidestep in the notion of "agency." We avoid the sticky issues of "freedom of choice" and "rational decisionmaking" versus "instinct" and unconscious decision making by noting that all living things exhibit "agency." They seem to exhibit a decision-making ability. Really, it comes down to observing that even simple organisms seem to exhibit purposeful behavior, such as in the pursuit of food. Where does it come from? Never mind. Call it "agency."

In other words, humans -- and other living things -- need to make decisions all the time without fully understanding what they are dealing with and how it works. So we come up with all kinds of cunning notions about the world that fall short of really understanding what is going on.

So I tend to chuckle about our current Creation Myth, the Big Bang. It's a very satisfying myth, and engages all our knowledge about the the way the world and the universe works. So far. But that was true in the Genesis account of Creation.

Now, I might say, why bother with a new Creation Myth? Why not just say this? Here we are. We don't know how we got here; we don't know where we are going. We don't know if our modern technology is a boon or if it is destroying the planet. We don't know what came before life, and we don't know what happens after life.

But we don't. Doesn't matter if we are hunter-gatherers or lefty activists. There is always a Creation Myth. There is always a God and a Satan. There is always Heaven and Hell. There is always a Beginning and an End.

And the person that doesn't believe in God? Don't worry: they have a god. They just call it something different.

And we humans are always inventing of new ways to think -- and opine confidently -- about things that we don't quite understand.

It really is amazing.

Two Views of Our Ruling Class and Its Power

If you are like me you are always looking for reports of cracks and infirmities in our ruling class. To keep hope alive!

But the question is: is the ruling class on its last legs, or cunningly playing us all for mugs?

Or, to put it directly, has Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just administered the coup de grace to the Canadian truckers? Or has he displayed a fatal weakness and overreaction that will bring the rule of the Canadian educated crashing down in the weeks and months ahead?

The Zman has a piece out at Taki's that presents the rulers -- and particularly the media -- as all part of a seamless coordinated monster. He mentions Joe Sobran writing twenty years ago about The Hive. Exactly:

The managerial class is now an organism. It now has collective awareness in the class-consciousness sense, but none of the subsystems are aware of themselves as integrated parts of this organism.

Thus its propaganda, its policy, its reaction to events, everything about it is as natural as a coordinated hive of bees. The ruling class doesn't need to tell its functionaries what to do or what to say. They already know, instinctively.

On the other hand, Victor Davis Hanson views the elite bubble as a weakness.

Our elites like Trudeau and Newsom seem angry they are unfairly underappreciated by their clueless beneficiaries. The latter supposedly never appreciate the needed remedies for climate change, the thought cleansing required to eliminate systemic racism, and the mind reprogramming demanded for true diversity, equity, and inclusion thinking. 

Or is it like this?

On stage, a petulant cast of clueless Justin Trudeaus and bumbling Joe Bidens simply cannot fathom why few anymore are listening to them.

My view is that both Zman and Hanson are right. Our rulers do indeed act like a Hive, instinctively knowing what to say and do to guard and protect their power.

Until.

I've been reading a biography of Andrew Mellon, banker and industrialist and Secretary of the Treasury in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. And Mellon didn't know what to do as thousands of banks were going under in 1930, 1931, and 1932. Of course his liberal biographer, David Cannadine, Hive member, contrasts the cluelessness of Mellon with the all-knowing all-successful Roosevelt. 

And that's the point. When the economy in going good, ordinary people just go about their business while the ruling class builds castles in the air "tackling" climate change and "fighting" systemic racism.

But when inflation hits ten percent, and gasoline is up 50 percent and the people are harassed by a blizzard of COVID regulations and ukases from the laptop class, that's when ordinary people rise up and dump the old rulers for new ones.

Not because they know what the rulers did wrong. Or because they know what needs to be done. But because the only thing The People can do when everything seems to be going wrong is to dump the rulers and try new ones. 

That's what they did in 1932, when clueless Mellon didn't know what to do. Looking over the blizzard of projects that Roosevelt's brain trust came up with, I'd say that only two were worth a dime. First, was an Emergency Banking Act that printed a bunch of money so that banks could meet heavy withdrawals, and banks wouldn't fail any more. And the second was going off the Gold Standard. All the rest, the NRAs, the CCCs, the TVAs? Baloney and nonsense on stilts and Jobs for Gentry.

The point is: will the same ruling-class rejection happen in 2022 and 2024? The answer is simple. We Don't Know.

And if we kick out the current ruling class from executive power, will it make a difference? We Don't Know.

But we do know this. The century-old ruling-class doctrine of wise top-down regulation and organization goes right against the Science™. Because the science today says that the universe works not by mechanical organization but by creative emergence, lots of people trying new ideas and the good ones surviving and making a fortune for their inventors.

As in: Elon Musk thinks that his reusable Starship spaceship and booster system can replace current jet passenger transportation, and do it cheaper. Is he right? We Don't Know. But stay tuned...

Changing the Tribal Rules

Here's a piece from Carl M. Cannon on the "Five Tribes" of America.

Back in 2018 the Five Tribes were:

Make America Great Again	12%
Mainline GOP	14%
The Detached	24%
Independent Blues	24%
The Resistance	26%

That was then. Now in 2022 the numbers are a bit different.

MAGA	14%
Mainline GOP	27%
Institutionalist Democrats	20%
Woke Democrats	19%
Multicultural Moderates	20%

Hmm. It seems to me that the second set of percentages are intended to obscure what is happening.

Is The Detached now supposed to be the Multicultural Moderates? 

Is The Resistance now the Woke Democrats?

Or what?

Or should we add the MAGAs and Mainline GOP together and make 26 percent in 2018 and get 41 percent as GOP supporters in 2022?

And add Independent Blues  and The Resistance in 2018 to get 50 percent Dem supporters in 2018, and add Institutionalist to Woke Democrats and get 40 percent Dem supporters in 2022?

So we would get Three Tribes, like this for 2018:

GOP Supporters	26%
Not interested	24%
Dem Supporters	50%

And again, Three Tribes, like this for 2022:

GOP Supporters	41%
Not interested	20%
Dem Supporters	40%

In other words, are the establishment pollsters trying to obscure the collapse in support for Democrats and the surge in support for Republicans, or what?

Look. There is no politics without an enemy. If you are into politics, the First Question is: who is the Enemy?

Ever since Marx (and probably before) the rising ruling educated ruling class has operated a political formula where an enlightened ruling class uses its enlightenment to advocate for the helpless lower classes. The Enemy was the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Only today, two things have changed.

Back in the day, the Helpless Ones were the workers. Today the Helpless Ones are non-whites and non-heterosexuals. Back in the day the Enemy was the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Today the Enemy is the broad white middle class. That is all.

Only, of course, there is a little problem. There is a real danger that the broad white middle class is now starting to include the rising Hispanic middle class, and the Tiger Mom East Asian middle class.

Nobody thought about that back in the day. Not that anybody thought about anything. They just established their political formula and the Enemy as the broad white middle class without really thinking about which side Hispanics and East Asians would end up on.

And even then, the Hispanics and East Asians might have stayed as Democrat voters. I mean, it's the sensible and practical and no-decision thing to do if you want to stay out of trouble, truckers. But now we have the lockdowns and the mandates and the inflation, and they are falling hard on the broad white-and-every-other-color middle class.

And what is the ruling class doing? It is not saying: wow, bit of a cock-up on the political formula front. Maybe we should have an all-hands meeting of the ruling class to figure out what to do.

No, the ruling class is doubling down on its folly. It is declaring emergencies over a peaceful trucker protest. It is declaring an armed insurrection when the wrong sort have a mostly peaceful protest. 

And that won't end well, ruling class.