The Fatal Conceit of the Schwabs and Soroses etc.

Yesterday I blogged about dear old George Soros, speculator and funder extraordinaire, and his speech to Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum at the meeting of the private jets in Davos, Switzerland.

Klaus Schwab opened the conference patting the fly-private worthies on the back for their wisdom and excellence.

Our multiple collaborative initiatives will drive progress by strengthening global and regional cooperation; by preserving nature and fighting against climate change; by developing new economic and social policies; by accelerating responsible ESG industry transformation, and by using the disruptive technologies such as AI, blockchain, and quantum computing, for the benefit of society.

The thing about this is that it is word salad, that nicely coordinates with what the rest of the educated global elite is thinking and wants to do. It imagines itself as a benign supervisor of the world, soothing its passions and directing it on the right path.

But Schwab is probably wrong. His ideas will probably die a painful death.

For instance, my guess is that "fighting climate change" is going to turn out as a gigantic mistake that may turf the current ruling class out of power. I am reading a detailed history of the French Revolution -- Simon Schama's Citizens -- and it mentions the critical importance of spiraling bread prices in early 1789. Ordinary people wanted the King to Do Something about it. Hello spiraling gas prices which President Biden calls an "incredible transition" to a post fossil fuel future.

And I think that "developing new economic and social policies" will probably be policies that seem nice and cosy to the global elite, but not to the ordinary punter.

For comparison, in 1787 the Frenchies had an Assembly of Notables to decide what to do about the finances of the French government. All very sensible, but then came July 13, 1788 and a monstrous hailstrom that took out the grain crops in France. Then followed a winter, the worst since 1709. The four-pound loaf went from 8 sous in summer 1787 to 15 sous in February 1789. You already know what happened next.

And I think that "responsible ESG industry transformation" will turn out to be a dead letter as the economy reels from the current inflation and gets completely transformed into something that nobody expected, least of all the fly-private barons of Davos.

It is, as Hayek wrote in his final book, a Fatal Conceit to think that you and yours can design and construct the political and economic order. Let alone the moral order! The world is the result of billions of experiments -- vegetable, fungus, animal, and even human -- that worked. It's odd that the official narrative accepts this with regard to Nature, but not with regard to human society. Let's take Hayek's words at the beginning of The Fatal Conceit.

To understand our civilization, one must appreciate that [it] resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection... of those groups that happened to follow them.

Our world is full of Fatal Conceits, of which the late lockdowns, the recent baby formula crisis, and the airline pilot shortage, and spiraling inflation are merely the ones we can see with our own eyes.

Another way of looking at it is to say that any number of things may go wrong for us humans. Obviously we can't prepare for all of them. And we can't decide which of them really will go wrong, and which we ought to prepare for. Because ten-to-one, the actual thing that goes wrong will be the thing we didn't think of. And all the preparations for the emergencies that didn't happen will probably have taken resources away from the effort to deal with the thing that actually did go wrong.

Another way of saying this is that humans have survived and flourished by adapting to changing conditions. When something goes wrong, we all pitch it to fix it. If we succeed, then we survive to live another day. If we don't succeed... Well, every story is a survivor story. The prisoners that died in the Kolyma goldfields, in the Holodomor, in the Great Leap Forward, in the dearth of 1789 in France: they are gone, and very few of their stories will be told.

For instance, my Dad left Russia in 1918 at the age of 16, just as the Bolshevik revolution was turning nasty. I wonder what happened to his school friends at the German speaking school he attended in St. Petersburg. My Dad's Russian mother escaped to England, and so did her sister. But what about their relatives?

There is a reason why most novels have a happy ending.

The World According to George Soros

One of the questions I have about the modern world is about George Soros. He says he believes in the "open society" described by Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies. And Soros was actually a student of Popper back in the late 1940s while a student at the London School of Economics.

My problem is that I don't see how a genuine follower of Karl Popper would be funding lefty activists and "Soros DAs." For instance, according to La Wik:

Popper indicts Plato, Hegel, and Marx as totalitarian for relying on historicism to underpin their political philosophies.

So why then does Soros finance so many lefty activists, followers of Marx? I don't get it.

Anyway, George Soros gave a speech on May 24 at the gathering of the private jets at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland and he has thoughtfully provided the text at georgesoros.com. Do his remarks help me understand him? Maybe. He begins thus:

Russia invaded Ukraine. This has shaken Europe to its core. The European Union was established to prevent such a thing from happening.

Really? The EU was intended to stop Russian aggression? I thought that was NATO's job. He continues.

The world has been increasingly engaged in a struggle between two systems of governance that are diametrically opposed to each other: open society and closed society. Let me define the difference as simply as I can. 

In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state.

Jolly good show, old chap. Then he continues:

Other issues that concern all of humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to that struggle. 

Oh really. Notice what he is saying? He just said that the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual, but then tells us that "fighting pandemics and climate change... maintaining global institutions" are almost as important.

Now I would say that if protecting the freedom of the individual is the role of the state then all the fun stuff like fighting pandemics and climate change is a buncha baloney. Because if you are in a fight against a pandemic or against climate change it means that the freedom of the individual takes a back seat to the prosecution of the war. And of course, if we good chaps of the open society are necessarily committed to fighting the closed society -- Russia and China, according to Soros -- then the freedom of the individual takes a back seat to that armed struggle as well.

Soros was there in the 1980s with his Open Society Foundation to help end communism, and the 1990s was a heady time. But then came 9/11.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the tide began to turn against open societies. Repressive regimes are now in the ascendant and open societies are under siege. Today China and Russia present the greatest threat to open society. 

But why? Digital technology and AI. "AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies." You mean like social media censoring anything that challenges the ruling class "narrative" as disinformation and misinformation and the abortive Disinformation Governance Board right here in the good old USA?

And yet, AI is not turning out so well in China, as President XI has locked down the whole country to fight the COVID Omicron variant. Why did he do that? Soros says:

Xi harbors a guilty secret. He never told the Chinese people that they had been inoculated with a vaccine that was designed for the original Wuhan variant and offers very little protection against new variants. 

 Really? But guess what. The whole Ukraine thing is giving Europeean leaders an idea. They see an opportunity to bind their nations into a federated Europe.

They wanted to use the invasion of Ukraine to promote greater European integration, so that what Putin is doing can never happen again. 

Enrico Letta, leader of Partito Democratico, proposed a plan for a partially federated Europe. The federal portion would cover key policy areas. 

In the federal core, no member state would have veto power. In the wider confederation member states could join “coalitions of the willing” or simply retain their veto power. Mario Draghi endorsed Letta’s plan.

Really? Well, bless my buttons. And imagine how the freedom of the individual will fare in this new federated European state. I wonder if there will be elections for the capo di tutti capi in this new federated state.

But it gets worse. Guess what is suffering as a result of the Ukraine war?

While the war rages, the fight against climate change has to take second place. Yet the experts tell us that we have already fallen far behind, and climate change is on the verge of becoming irreversible. That could be the end of our civilization. 

"Experts," you say? 

Well, this has been very helpful for me, in my quest to understand the mind of George Soros. It seems to me that he experiences himself as the monarch of the Open Society. And that this Open Society is, or ought to be, a federated Europe.

This ties with another feeling I have about George Soros, as a Hungarian Jew that grew up in the hell of Nazism and World War II. It is the "never again" idea that we must never allow nation states to have the power they had in the heyday of fascism and Nazism. Thus the EU, thus globalism. Because never again Hitler.

But I am a student of Karl Popper, who went on to develop his Three Worlds theory of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

World 1: the realm of states and processes as typically studied by the natural sciences. 

World 2: the realm of mental states and processes.

World 3: the realm of the 'products of thought' when considered as objects in their own right.

For Popper the "products of thought" are both scientific theories and actual products of scientific theory and technology like jet airplanes and nuclear plants. And, I suppose, the poltiical theories about open societies and closed societies and their actual implementation in actual states.

I have a real problem figuring out how the real Popper aligns with the Soros idea of Popper. But who am I to say?

But, all in all, it looks like Soros is just an ordinary globalist that has signed onto all the "world's gonna end unless we..." stuff. And, when you think of it, any top-down narrative these days needs the lefty activists to enforce the will of the overlords. So therefore Soros DAs to keep the peasants from stepping outside their lane.

Corporations Need an anti-Diversity Vaccine

We all know the vital importance of everyone getting the vaccime. Why, people should be fired if they don't get vaccinated.

But think of America's worst pandemic since the Sixties Kids: Woke Capitalism; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and ESG.

The fact is that any corporation that gets woke goes broke. Just ask Dis-e-ney.

The fact is that any corporation that has a Director of Diversity is asking for Trouble with a Capital T. Just ask State Farm that ran into a buzz saw over the trans books it was shilling into schools.

Any corporation that gets into ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) that focuses on "sustainability" is pointing itself to the exit.

I was thinking of this in particular with respect to the twerps at State Farm. What on Earth did Michael L. Tipsord, State Farm CEO, think he was doing by letting his Chief Diversity Officer Victor Terry get off the bit and get into "a project to push LGBTQ books into schools?"

The answer is obvious. Once a corporation has a Chief Diversity Officer there is no end to the stupidity that the officer and his underlings will get into. 

It's easy for the CEO to think: OK now I've got a diversity officer so that's taken care of the lefty activist NGOs that keep turning up at shareholders' meetings. The problem is that he has introduced a lefty virus into the corporation that, like any virus, will take over the host unless it is kept severely in check. And with a virus, experts agree, nothing less than universal vaccination will work.

It's not just that the diversity guy will go out and hire stupid fools with the right DNA du jour who will degrade the corporation's performance because they are not up to snuff and know that they can't be fired for incompetence. The problem is that -- as with all political and cultural fashions  --the diversity gig will get out of hand. And that, unlike Kansas City, it won't quickly go as fur as it can go, but will metastasize into all kinds of fashionable folly advocated by the Activist Culture that will actively harm the corporation and infuriate its racist-sexist-homophobe clients. Maybe the virus will actually kill the host!

So every corporation needs a high-level officer whose sole job is to put a stop to stupid diversity stuff. And woke stuff. And ESG stuff. And indeed any stupid stuff that has nothing to do with the job of the corporation, which is to keep churning out widgets for the benefit of the customers.

Actually, the problem is bigger than woke and diversity and ESG. As my boss complained 50 years ago, the people working for him were always going off at tangents. And young as I was, I understood what he was talking about. If you are a software engineer, it is always a temptation to work up some cool software tool that improves the elegance of the software. It is always tempting to clean up the sofware mess resulting from years of updates and make it real shiny and cool. It is always tempting to go off and do something that has nothing to do with the job in hand, because it is fun and the project in hand is not fun, but just boring work. If you are an administrator it is much more interesting to introduce some new fashionable idea than just grind away at your real job. Because work is hard. That's why we get paid to do it.

But what should the officer be called? Chief Diversity Veto Officer? Chief Woke Alert Officer? Chief Corporate Vermin Eliminator? Chief Bureacratic Bloat Eliminator?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Democrat Voters Suffer Least from Inflation

Here's a Quinnicpac poll mentioned on Instapundit and Washington Examiner where the respondents were answering the question as to "the most urgent issue facing the country today?" The result that "Everybody except Democrats sees inflation as the big issue." So I tabulated the responses, just to make it fair.

Inflation is the most important issue

Republicans	46%
Millennials	41%
Baby boomers	39%
Men	39%
Independents	37%
White non-college graduates	37%
White people	36%
Hispanic people	36%
White college graduates	34%
Youngsters	29%
Women	28%
Seniors	26%
Black people	21%

I have ordered the folks in descending order of their concern about inflation. The feeling I get is that the more people are exposed to the marketplace, whether in the labor market or prices in general, the more they are likely to consider inflation the biggest issue.

Notice the group that is right up there pretty well with ordinary independents? Hispanics. I wonder if it is because Hispanics work in the market economy, rather than for government, so they are exposed to the marketplace and notice inflation.

Notice who is at the bottom of the list, the least concerned about inflation? Women, seniors, and blacks. So does that mean that women, seniors and blacks are the most protected against inflation? By government, or something else? I suspect so.

Do you see who is missing? Democrats. Their biggest issue is abortion. As below.

Democrats most important issues

Abortion	18%
Inflation	14%
Election laws	13%
Climate change	10%

Really? Right now, you Democrats are more concerned about abortion than in getting gas for your car and diesel for your truck?

And inflation is way down, the most important issue for only 14 percent of Democrats?

It tells me, frankly, that Democrats all work for the government. Where they can say: inflation? That's the sort of racist issue that only ultra-MAGA racists pretend to be worried about.

But really, all this is as it should be. The whole point of being a ruling class is to protect yourself from the weather and, if there's enough money, to protect your supporters. The rest of humanity can go hang.

And when you are the ruling class, religious issues and their orthodoxy are really more important than mere economic issues.

Great Replacement? How About Great Realignment

Everybody knows that the Great Replacement Theory is a racist-sexist-homophobic conspiracy theory of white supremacist Republican monsters.

Properly, Steve Sailer ridicules the idea of a Great Replacement. As he writes:

The Emerging Democratic Majority is a purely natural phenomenon, like the swallows returning to Capistrano.

Yes, back in the day Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority could confidently predict, in 2002, the coming age of Democratic Party political dominance because of immigration -- and the educated, women and young people.

But, the most significant political move in recent years is the movement of Hispanics from the Democratic to the Republican column. Quinnipac has Biden approval among Hispanics at 26 percent compared to 55 percent last year. And there's this:

Biden is less popular among Hispanics than any other demographic, including age and gender, the poll found. 

Even Ruy Teixeira is jumping the sinking ship. Why is this?

Could it have something to do with the fact that my Hispanic immigrant mailman, who works on his brother's nursery business on weekends, and whose children are the first in the family to go to college, is all work? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the guys that delivered our new freezer were Hispanic? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the Hispanic area of southern Texas along the Mexico border are all switching to the Republican Party?

And by the way, why weren't the guys delivering the freezer weren't black? How come it's always Hispanic roofers not black roofers, Hispanic gardeners not black gardeners?

Could it have something to do with the notion that you don't appeal to Hispanics with identity politics and woke trans ideology but with jobs, jobs, jobs?

It's hard to tell, because as Steve Sailer points out, what everybody knows, that

Republicans are too low IQ to understand sophisticated Democratic concepts like We’re Good, You’re Bad.

The answer to all this is pretty obvious if you have made a comprehensive and mandatory study of my reductive Three Peoples theory -- or have grasped the idea of Three Layers theory. 

The People of the Subordinate Self vote Democrat. They don't feel that they are in control of their lives; they need a powerful lord to be their patron. But the People of the Responsible Self figure that if they live by the rules and work hard then they will get their reward. They don't need no stinkin' federales to help them get ahead.

It seems to me that the Hispanic migration that began, shall we say, with the 1965 immigration act, has been proceeding at battle speed from subordination to responsibility.

And why not? It's the American Way.

Maybe the problem is that Hispanics are too low IQ to understand the truth that Democrats Good, Republicans Bad.

Meanwhile it sure does look like the purely accidental Great Replacement of white oppressors with oppressed peoples is turning into a Great Realignment of ordinary Commoners from Democratic to Republican.

The Idea of Neutrality in Politics

We all know that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. Or, as Curtis Yarvin now puts it:

When we say that the essential political distinction is the distinction between friend and enemy, we say that the military and the political are one.

As he says: "The political war is a cold war." And the military war is a hot one. Then, he adds:

One of my strongest beliefs is that everyone should turn their military emotions off—whether or not they are at war.

Why? Because "the test of humanity is the power to overcome animal emotion." As compared to chimps. In other words, when you are in a conflict you need to think, tactically and strategically. And that means keeping your inner beserker in check.

Except when you are actually fighting in an actual battle.

You may remember, in reading The Last Kingdom books by Bernard Cornwell, our hero Uhtred of Bebbanburg always gets into a battle rage during a battle. Everything blacks out except the fight. But the rest of the time he is strategizing.

Thus there is "neutrality." It helps humans escape the eternal conflict of the friend vs. enemy distinction.

Neutrality made it possible to address the outsider civilly, as neither friend nor enemy, but united under law—owing the due duties and respects due to a stranger under law. Neutrality is the source of all true peace—universal friendship is universal conquest. 

Neutrality. That's the point of law, of prices, of the market, of contracts, of buyers and sellers. You don't think of other people as enemies -- or as friends. That, of course, is one of the reasons why our lefty friends have a problem with law and the market and capitalism. It takes all the emotion and the fun out of things. And if you believe in politics as the road to justice -- really believe in politics -- then every human on this planet is either a friend or an enemy. They are either an ally of the oppressed peoples or a white oppressor enemy. One or the other.

But under neutrality, if a guy kills your wife, you don't make him and all his family an enemy. You just call the cops.

And it makes complete sense that our lefty friends get emotional about everything, whether it's the monstrosity of reversing Roe v. Wade or insisting that trans women are biological males or else. The whole point of logic and reason is to carve out a region in interpersonal dynamics that is free of emotion. The whole point of politics is to classify everyone as friend and enemy. You are either with us or against us. Everyone is either one or the other.

Another thing that Yarvin stresses is that in politics and war today your enemy is not really another human being. The enemy is the system or the regime: a machine, if you like. There is no point in killing people in a rage; they are just servants of the regime, part of the system. So that

the humans who operate this machine may be (and I believe are) entirely innocent and even well-meaning. They are just cogs in it. On the day after it breaks, they will be harmless—like former Stasi officers.

Or former Nazi apparatchiks. Believe me, the day after Germany falls in 1945, just about every Nazi gets it: he realizes he was just a cog in the machine. An he gave the best years of his life away, for nothing.

The point is that all the Sturm und Drang of the liberal race war and gender war and trans war is fake, fake, fake. There is no "essential conflict between black and white, red and blue, rich and poor, male and female, etc, etc, etc."

All these cold civil wars are epiphenomena of a broken political system.

Our liberal friends have to gussy up their identity politics, their armory of pejoratives, because their system is failing, broken. And they can't believe it. And so they regress to the primitive, as described by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

And the fault cannot lie with us. No. In politics the fault always lies with the other guy, the enemy. 

Ain't that the truth about our liberal friends. Bless their hearts.

Washington State Hybrid Electric Car Ferries

My state senator here in the 36th District in north Seattle sent me a nice four-page newsletter cataloguing all the magnificent ways in which he is spending our money.

Sen. Reuven Carlyle (D-36) is leaving the State Senate aftar 14 years of service in the state capital of Olympia, and what he's most proud of is "passing this year's $16.9 billion Move Ahead Washingotn -- a climate-friendly investment package that I believe moves our transportation system into the 21st century."

As the greenest transportation package in state history, Move Ahead Washington invests more than $4.2 billion in transit, bike and pedestrian projects. Notable projects include $836 million to build four new hybrid-electric ferries, $2.4 billion for fish culverts to preserve and protect salmon, $3 billion for road preservation and maintenance, and $3 billion for public transportation.

And not a cent for new road construction.

And guess what! There's $440 million for affordable housing, including $300 million for Rapid Housing Acquisition to house "unsheltered individuals as quickly as possible."

"Four new hybrid-electric ferries?"

I wondered about the hybrid-electric ferries -- meaning car ferries. What does it mean? Apparently Washington State plans to get its ferry system to emissions-free by 2050. Right now, the system burns 19 million tons of diesel fuel every year. Based on this promotional video, it seems that hybrid-electric ferry means:

• Charging ferries at ferry terminals between trips.
• "Using your diesels really just as a backup."
• "You can get over 20 percent improvement or reduction in fuel consumption"
• Terminal electric hookup and charging will be really safe.
• In Pacific Northwest a good proportion of power comes from hydro and wind.
• "25 minutes to charge the boat."
• "Cost effective, efficient, and responsible."
• "There's a lot of really cool technical challenges that we'll have to deal with."
• "Hybridizing the largest ferry fleet in the United States is a really monumental task."

You can see the red flags: 20 minutes to charge gigantic batteries? Cost effective, efficient, and responsible? Cool technical challenges?

You know sports fans, if they had Elon Musk in charge, I might believe they could do it. But a bunch of gubmint bureaucrats? And gubmit contractors? Dealing successfully with "a lot of really cool technical challenges?"

Senator Reuven Carlyle. I gotta bridge to sell you. Real cheap.

And of course it's all going to be more cost-effective, etc. And benefit the fish.

You know what I think. I think that Washington State is going to throw a lot of money down the plug hole for nothing in return.

And the idea of a gubmint ferry system doing a successful project to turn its diesel-electric car ferries into plug-in hybrid Priuses? Please! The current Jumbo Mk II diesel ferries each use four diesel engines developing 16,000 horsepower or 12 MW. So you realize what kind of battery is needed to power a ferry like this on a 30 minute ride?

And then we'll have the worst transportation system in the country, and Gov. Inslee (D-WA), or whoever inherits his lifetime position, will blame the failure on "systemic racism" and "right-wing extremism." Because every problem in this world is the result of Republican malevolence.

Oh. And whatabout when the first battery explodes from all the fast charging. Because the batteries will, no doubt, be under the car deck. At least with hybrid buses, the batteries are on the roof.

This is just an example of the problem with the climate change grift. It encourages government to embark on foolish, conceited, useless projects that will be the modern equivalent of the Soviet Union's White Sea Canal, of which La Wik says:

The canal runs 227 km (141 mi), partially along several canalized rivers and Lake Vygozero. As of 2008, it carries only light traffic of between ten and forty boats per day. Its economic advantages are limited by its minimal depth of 3.5 m (11.5 ft)... inadequate for most sea-going vessels.

We will say nothing about the 25,000 worker deaths during the building of the White Sea Canal. At least nobody will die on the hybrid-electric ferry project. Until the first battery explodes.