How the Working Man got stabbed in the back

It's Labor Day, which means "It's the end of summer".  It used to mean a lot more than that - a celebration of labor in general and the working man in particular.  Just in my lifetime, this has been stood on it's head - literally, politics of labor is upside down from when I was a kid.

It used to be that the Democrats stood for the working guy, and the Republicans were the party of Wall Street and the Country Club.  Man is that different now.  I wrote almost a decade ago about the rise of Donald Trump is basically explicit Class terms.

Which seems weird, because it was the Democrats and their buddies the Socialists and Communists (and the University professors, but I repeat myself) who were always bringing up Marx' class theory about politics.  You don't hear that anymore, either, which is really interesting - it's the Dog who Didn't Bark.  An old post from Eric Raymond explains this completely:

Marx believed, and taught, that increasing exploitation of the proletariat would immiserate it, building up a counterpressure of rage that would bring on socialist revolution in a process as automatic as a steam engine.

Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.

I wrote about that here. Even in the 19thm Century - maybe even during Marx' own lifetime - this was a realy problem for Marxist theorists.

The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.

Early, on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.

Hey Vladimir, maybe the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously responding to their immiseration because they were undergoing the most remarkable increase in their standard of living that the world had ever seen?  No?  Better to kill 10 million of them?  Oooooh kaaay.

Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.

And the walls of the US House of Representatives are adorned with fasces.

During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.

Hey, none of OUR Representatives are fascists!  Don't look at the wall decorations!  I mean, fascism is for losers - HEY, stop looking at the wall decorations!

Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.

So the working class stiffs that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats all used to stand for were doing decently well, and might just start voting for the other guys.  What to do, what to do?

Outsource all the good high paying hourly jobs.  Use Environmentalism to justify this - I mean, you don't want your kid to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air, right?  Better for them to grow up to be methheads because there's no jobs and no hope for the future.

Meanwhile, the government and associated white collar employment exploded, pretty much at the public's expense.  These people voted in great numbers - and always for the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats, and big business found that they could really enhance their profits by getting in bed with the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats.  Some new regulations to kill new upstart competitors is just what the doctor ordered.

I wrote about that at length here.

And now people are mystified about the rise of Brexit/Donald Trump/Les gilots jaunes/Alternative fur Deutschland.  And remember how the UK Labour party got wiped out five years ago?  How voters in their heartland of formerly industrial Britain voted for Tory politicians for the first time in a century?  Sure, Labour just won (in a very low turn out election); does anyone think that their voters from Sheffield will ever be back in the way they used to be?

Raymond discusses at length this inversion of politics around Labor, using the UK as an example:

This is the Great Inversion – in Great Britain, Marxist-derived Left politics has become the signature of the overclass even as the working class has abandoned it. Indeed, an increasingly important feature of Left politics in Britain is a visceral and loudly expressed loathing of the working class.

To today’s British leftist, the worst thing you can be is a “gammon”. The word literally means “ham”, but is metaphorically an older white male with a choleric complexion. A working-class white male, vulgar and uneducated – the term is never used to refer to men in upper socio-economic strata. And, of course, all gammons are presumed to be reactionary bigots; that’s the payload of the insult.

Catch any Labor talking head on video in the first days after the election and what you’d see is either tearful, disbelieving shock or a venomous rant about gammons and how racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist they are. They haven’t recovered yet as I write, eleven days later.

Observe what has occurred: the working class are now reactionaries. New Labor is entirely composed of what an old Leninist would have called “the revolutionary vanguard” and their immigrant clients. Is it any wonder that some Laborites now speak openly of demographic replacement, of swamping the gammons with brown immigrants?

Is it any wonder that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats are bleeding support and desperately trying to import a whole new voting class of unassimilated immigrants?  Interestingly, Donald Trump is doing very well here among Latino Americans - and so Biden/Harris opened the border and Nancy Pelosi is pushing amnesty.  Parliament is dissolving the People and electing another one.

This is all very weird for me, because this has all happened in my lifetime.  I used to be a Democrat - a real one, a strong supporter of the party - because they stood for the Little Guy against Wall Street.  Now Wall Street is the party of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, not of Youngstown or Akron or Toledo or Fitchburg.  Those places are all going to vote for Donald Trump (yes, even Fitchburg in deep blue Massachusetts).

It's all upside down.  And it's upside down all over the Western World, for exactly the same reason.  On this Labor Day, ponder what it would take to get a bunch of political parties to sell out their strongest supporters - to stab them in the back, really.  They sure must have had some powerful motivation.

I do so wonder what that motivation might have been.

And the Leonid Brezhnev Memorial Award goes to ...

So UK Prime Minister Keir "Two Tier" Starmer has decreed that people saying hateful things will be jailed because their speech is actually violence, and he's making room for them in His Magesty's prisons be releasing violent criminals because their violence is actually speech, you guys.

Some big shot police constable has even said he was going to go all 1775-Bunker Hill on Americans for their speech, which is totally violence.  Ooooh kaaay,

All this totalitarianism reminds me of a joke from the Soviet Union, back in the day.  It was said about Leonid Brezhnev (and likely others).  I've somewhat rewritten it for modern times.  See if you can tell the difference.

So this guy goes to Red Square Hyde Park Speaker's Corner and yells "Leonid Brezhnev Keir Starmer is a senile fascist old fool!"  Of course, the police swarm him and drag him off to Ye Olde Gaol.  He is sentenced to ten years and ten days in durance vile - ten days for slander and ten years for revealing State Secrets.

Maybe I gave away my edits right there ...

And so the Leonid Brezhnev Memorial Award for Totalitarianism goes to Brit PM Keir Starmer, for fascism above and beyond the call of duty.  Well done you dirty commie bastard.

Happy "Punch A Commie In The Face" Day!

Well, it is.

Musical birthdays

Today has a bumper crop of composer birthdays, so I'll briefly highlight each. 

Heinrich Schütz is generally regarded as the most important German composer before J. S. Bach.  He led the transition from Renaissance music to Baroque north of the Alps.

Walter Kittridge was a self-taught musician and composer who wrote hundreds of songs, many with a Civil War theme.  This is his most famous one:

Pierre Chrétien De Geyter was a Belgian socialist most famous as the composer of The Internationnale.  Yeah he was a dirty commie, but even commies have birthdays.

Louis Victor Jules Vierne was organist at Notre Dame de Paris for almost 40 years.  As you'd imagine, he wrote a lot of organ music.

Happy birthday to all, even the dirty commie.

So Mikhail Gorbachev est mort

The Press is falling over themselves to talk about what a guy he was, and how the Soviet system was (in the WaPo's term) "a seven-decade experiment born of Utopian idealism". Well OK then.  Remember, I did not read Pasternak but I condemn him ...

Oh, and the cartoon at that last link?  The one with two Gulag prisoners working in the snow and with the caption that said I won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  What was your crime?  You know, the cartoon that won a Pulitzer Prize?

Yeah, the WaPo would never publish it today.  Scratch a journalist, find a commie.

And so, here's a (err) toast to Mikhail Gorbachev, from back in the day when truth could still be spoken.

The downfall of Czar Nicholas and the American Deep State

Big Country has a must-read post up.  Go read it now, then come back for my thoughts.  In it he lays out evidence that there is a three way power struggle going on between the Intelligence Community, the Pentagon, and the White House.  Peter adds some thoughts as well.

It reminds me of the last few years of Tsarist Russia: a war that was going poorly, indecisive leadership at the top that had no real idea what the citizens of the realm actually thought, and a fabulously corrupt and incompetent set of ministers who were more interested in looting the treasury than, you know, running their ministry.

And as to that last item, take a look at Joe Biden's cabinet (courtesy of J.Kb at Miguel's place).  It's deja vu all over again.  The last thing on any of these folk's mind is good governance.

And so, to BCE's post at the top.  The Biden Administration sure as shootin' ain't where the smart money is going to bet.  And so, on to the second of the three he calls out, the Dot Mil.  There are huge problems in our military, the biggest I've seen since the Vietnam days.  In a very disturbing way, the pathology is very similar: the senior officers give commands to a sullen and hostile enlisted force.  Back in the dark days of the '70s we had flag officers like Zumwalt (Navy) and Creech (TAC) who were able to reinstil discipline.  It sure doesn't look like the Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon are up to Zumwalt's (or Creech's) level.

And so I don't think that the smart money will bet on the Dot Mil, either.

So the Last Org Standing likely will be the Intel Community.  Heck, they already successfully overthrew a previous President, and guaranteed they have dirt on most of the players in Washington (Generals Petraeus and Flynn could not be reached for comment).

There really are only two questions.  First, how long will this take to play out?  The longer it goes on, the more damage the Republic takes (both externally and internally).  I can't say I'm optimistic that this will get sorted out soon.

Second, the Intel Community will want to rule from the shadows.  They are not Front Men - the acronym of one of the Three Letter Agencies was said to be "Never Say Anything".  Quite frankly, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the perfect empty suits for the Intel Community to stand up as "leaders" of the Republic - as they did last November.  The folks at Langley must be steaming mad that Biden isn't staying in his lane.  How this will play out is unknown, but unlikely to be pleasant for Joe, "Doctor" Jill, or Kamala.

Czar Nicholas came to a bad end in a basement in Yekaterinburg, along with his entire family.  Will our Checkists go this route to let the rest of Washington know they need to stay in their lanes, or will there still be more subtlety?  The nation wonders.

The Persistent Hammer of History

[This is a guest post by Tacitus]

Nobody saw it coming. Well, almost nobody. Gerald Ford mentioned off-hand once that there was “…no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe”. He was ridiculed and it was said he had played too much college football in the days before helmets. No, the Soviet Union would endure forever. Marx, Engels and Lenin, the hirsute triumvirate of Communist saints looked sternly over Red Square. Across 11 time zones the centrally planned economy provided “To Each According to His Needs”, an early form of Equity. Tass and Pravda solemnly reported ever increasing tractor production. The Soviet Union showed both strength (weight lifters! Tanks!) and grace (ballerinas! Chess Masters!).

There was one small problem. Oh, one hardly worth mentioning. It was all a crock and on some level everyone inside the Eastern Bloc knew it.

It took a million small taps of the persistent hammer of History to bring down the largest and most self important empire the world has ever seen. A tired worker standing in line, cheap shoes making his toes cramped and wet, sees a sleek black ZIL limo flash by. With an imperceptible shake of the head another small bit of faith is chipped away. With an inward sigh the worker goes back to his long wait for something only half way shoddy. That is to say, made in East Germany.

In 1989 someone in the Hungarian border police just said, “Eh, screw it”. They stopped trying to keep people from crossing over into Austria. The geriatric Central Committee droned on as usual, and tractor production figures still dominated the news. But oddly no consequences were forthcoming. And in a stunning display of how Immigration Policy Matters, it set of a cascade of disillusioned people saying in many different languages, “Eh, screw it”. Soon the Berlin Wall was being reduced to rubble by the persistent hammer of history and the less abstract hammers wielded by fed up people.

We might be in a similar situation today. Everyone knows that that Equity, Economic Recovery and so much more are inevitable, right around the corner. Our versions of Tass and Pravda assure us of this. The current Central Committee is every bit as sclerotic as their 1980’s soul mates but don’t go in much for statues. Still, they have their own icons looking down across public spaces from murals.

I suppose we should make allowances. A certain percentage of people answering surveys are intentionally messing with their earnest or venal inquisitors. Another percentage, rather small in my opinion, are sincere people who have just not thought things through. But honestly, hardly anyone really Believes you can borrow and spend forever. Or that it makes sense to allow biological males to win medals in Girl’s Sports. Or that the current CRT nonsense is anything more than a veneer of pop morality spread thin over a reparations grift.

Maybe Gerald Ford was not surprised by the Hungarian border guards. Everyone else sure was. And who knows what the equivalent trivial event in our times will be?

There will be all sorts of compost once the Powers That Be go Green

Over at Miguel's place (I think it was J.Kb - hey guys, can you get a tag to show who posted what there?) we get a link to ravings at the UK Guardian about a Climate Change Final Solution:

The insane people at The Guardian published an article that sets up the historical precedent for that.

Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet
Laying waste to land scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

His empire lasted a century and a half and eventually covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface. His murderous Mongol armies were responsible for the massacre of as many as 40 million people. Even today, his name remains a byword for brutality and terror. But boy, was Genghis green.

Genghis Khan, in fact, may have been not just the greatest warrior but the greatest eco-warrior of all time, according to a study by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Energy. It has concluded that the 13th-century Mongol leader’s bloody advance, laying waste to vast swaths of territory and wiping out entire civilisations en route, may have scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere – roughly the quantity of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption – by allowing previously populated and cultivated land to return to carbon-absorbing forest.

Killing 40 Million people for the planet.

This fiendishly clever plan of theres will indeed lead to a lower population because people like me will put .45 caliber holes in the foreheads of genocidal eco-fascists like the Guardian writers.  Think of all the compost!

Sheesh, it's like these people don't ever listen to what they say.  If they did, they might think something like "Hmm, am I sounding like a deranged, genocidal fascist?  Maybe we should focus on something incremental, like bike paths."  Instead, they'll talk themselves into my proposal, above.

And these morons probably think they're the smartest kids on the block.

And to show that this isn't a one-off, a "Black Swan", an oddball proposal - but rather a recurrent theme from the Genocidal Eco Left, here are some other genocidal Save The Planet sooper smaht plans that we've mocked here, dredged from the Borepatch archives:

Save The Planet - Starve The Children

Kill The Children For Mother Gaia

Friday Follies: KillThe Children For Mother Gaia Edition

Kill The Dog for Mother Gaia

Cut Health Care To Save Mother Gaia

Global Warming Causes Totalitarianism

Oh, and that last one is a hoot - the link there goes to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  This sort of genocidal eco fascism is entirely mainstream in western medical establishments.  It seems that there must be some sort of education plan in action, to make all this easy to get along with.  Maybe something like this ...

UPDATE 18 April 2021 11:19: Very good reply posted over at The Silicon Graybeard.

The looting of the Middle Class

The Pandemic has been particularly useful to the Powers That Be:

This is what the COVID hysteria is all about. Without this, we would all be allowed to know that COVID is a mild respiratory disease that is only dangerous to the very old and the very sick. This is why we are being lied to and locked up:

Amazon: profit up 100%
Walmart: profit up 80%
Target: profit up 80%
Lowe’s: profit up 74%
Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google: stock at record high

Wealth increase in the pandemic for founder/CEOs of
Amazon: $91 billion
Walmart: $38B
Google: $37B
Microsoft: $33B
Facebook: $28B
Nike: $8B
Apple: $8B

Small businesses: collectively lost over $200 billion

We’re witnessing a record wealth transfer

https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1329277596685709315?s=19

(via)

Ten years ago I wrote that the Tea Party is a Marxian response to the looting of the Middle Class:

The deal that Progressives made in the 1930s - the economy would provide a surplus that the government would use to buy social peace - is shattered, as the government finds that it has consumed the entire surplus, and is still hungry for more. The median family is worse off now then they were ten years ago, because they pay more taxes and make about the same. Government at all levels is squeezing the majority of the population at an increasing rate, taking a higher share of National Income, with no end in sight.

Now I'm sure that I could do a better job with the numbers (say, another 15% accuracy), but the trajectory is unmistakable, and is one that Marx clearly understood:

Within the capitalist Progressive State system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour taxes are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker [...] All means for the development of production raising of tax revenue undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become a means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment, they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process [...], they transform his life into working-time, and his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital The State. [...] It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.

- Karl Marx, Das Kapital

My changes are highlighted.

The only thing to add is that Donald Trump was a symptom, not a cause.  Accelerating the immiseration of the Proletariat using Covid hysteria will lead to a very clear outcome, historically speaking.  It will come faster with the collapse of legitimacy we are seeing in the Organs of the State.

I would think that a bunch of Marxist Intellectuals would understand this, but maybe they're too busy looting their political opponents to notice.

The end of Progress

I always find it funny when Liberals shy away from that term, proudly calling themselves "Progressive".  I mean, who is opposed to progress?  Alas, there's a difference between progress and Progress (at least as defined by Progressives).

Expect a new re-branding from them, because Progress has screeched to a halt:

It’s a very familiar landscape of ideas to anyone who knows modern history.  Abolition of private property?  Check.  Constant intrusive surveillance?  Check.  Everyone’s personal lives dependent on the actions of cadres of apparatchiks?  Check.  Fawning propaganda about how wonderful life is in the worker’s paradise?  Check. That is to say, when the World Economic Forum set out to imagine a new, exciting, cutting-edge future as a goal for humanity, the very best that they and their pet Danish politician could do is reinvent the Soviet Union.

That colossal failure of imagination, in turn, marks a historical inflection point of immense importance.

Over the decade and a half since I first started posting essays on the internet, one subject I’ve discussed repeatedly is the civil religion of progress:  the belief system, as passionately held as any more obviously theological faith, that newer always means better and change is always good, that the ideas of the past have been disproved and the practices of the past rendered obsolete by the mere passage of time, and that history follows an inevitable trajectory from the ignorant squalor of the past to a shining gizmocentric future somewhere out there among the stars. That belief is the established religion of our society.  Those who have the indepence of mind to reject it can count on facing the same sort of baffled rage you’ll reliably get by asking true believers hard questions about any other variety of blind faith.

What makes that baffled rage so pervasive these days is that progress hasn’t exactly lived up to its billing in recent decades.

This is a long but very important post by the blogger who used to post as the Archdruid.  Here, he shows just how pathetically out of gas the Left's propaganda is.  Highly, highly recommended.  And his summing up is 100% spot on:

The Great Reset is being marketed by a gallimaufry of politicians, plutocrats, and tame intellectuals:  some of the most cosseted people on earth, sheltered in a cozy bubble of privilege that keeps them safe from any untoward encounter with the harsh realities of life.  Not for them the world the rest of us have to deal with—the bleak and violent urban neighborhoods, the grinding poverty of the countryside, the cracked and crumbling highways and bridges, the stealth inflation of shrinking product sizes and plummeting product quality!  Flitting from gated residential communities or high-end condos to office towers to exclusive vacation resorts, they aren’t the Lenins of today’s world—they’re the Brezhnevs, the Andropovs, and the Chernenkos.  They represent the end of an era, not its beginning.

The broad public reaction to the Great Reset, in turn, is a good measure of just how tone-deaf today’s corporate aristocracy has become. Across the political spectrum from far right to center to far left, people are regarding the prospect of being dependent on the vagaries of a vast and unaccountable corporate technostructure for their next change of underwear and their next day’s meals with the anger and mockery that it so richly deserves.

This brings some perspective to the election that the Left is trying to steal.  It's these same people - the ones who are on the Wrong Side of History, who are trying to reset the propaganda clocks by 100 years - these are the people who think they can ram this down our throats?  It is to laugh.  They may be successful in the short term, but in the long term they will end up on the ash heap of history.

Quite frankly, that's the best case they can hope for.

It's September 10 all over again

 Co-blogger ASM826 posts about the last day that was normal.  Then Al Qaeda flew the jets into the buildings.
We were asleep that day, and had a rude awakening.  In a sense, it seems the same thing is happening now with Antifa and how people keep underestimating them.  Adam Piggott has a must-read post telling us to stop all that:

Every Antifa member that has been killed or unmasked in the past couple of weeks has been revealed as a convicted criminal, some with quite disturbing rap sheets. In other words, they have nothing to lose. They are highly trained to reach demonstrable objectives on the ground of their own choosing. These guys are not the cartoon idiots that we were encouraged to believe. They are far from it.

Most disturbing is his discussion of the local government authorities actively working to support Antifa, specifically in the courts.  This is quite disturbing.  Really disturbing.  It makes me glad that The Queen Of The World and I got out of Maryland.

Read the whole thing.  It feels like September 10, 2001 all over again.

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the Democratic Party

 I've posted frequently about The Iron Law of Bureaucracy here:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

 First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

So how does the Iron Law apply to the Democratic Party?  Just like to every organization:

I had an interesting discussion over the weekend with an acquaintance of mine, a building contractor.  He's Black, and he and his family have voted in lock-step with the Democratic Party not just for years, but for decades.  Now?  Not so much.  He's so angry at this latest nonsense that he told me openly he's going to vote Republican in November.  He believes the Democratic Party is trying to manipulate him and "his people", deliberately lying to them in the expectation that they'll respond in blind obedience.  "They want me to jump when they say 'Frog'.  Well, this frog ain't gonna jump for a lie!"

He's not a veteran of military service, but he has some (of all races) among his workforce.  He told me their discussions about the matter on job sites have been really angry, with almost nobody believing the talking points being circulated in the mass media.  They're such obvious, blatant propaganda that they can't pass the "smell test".  Anyone with half a brain knows they're contrived.  They're such a clumsy smear attempt, with no evidence whatsoever to prove them except unsubstantiated, anonymous allegations, that it's almost embarrassing.

This made me think of Theodore Dalrymple's famous quote:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. 

Now think on today's Democratic Party, withered by the Clintons and then the Obamas and now Slow Joe Biden.  Think about the obvious lies.  Think about how loyalty uber alles has shaved off bits of their partisans' souls, burned as offerings on the altar of someone else's political ambitions.  Think of the small death that takes place each day among those (supposedly) most fervent partisans.

It's no wonder that the Democratic Party is being taken over by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa rioters.  The Iron Law says that they're the ones who will rise to the top.

You see, all paths other than radical revolution are closed, at least for advancement.  Who even talks about John Kerry anymore?  And the media covers for all of these people so there is no possible correction.  The result is over determined, as Peter points out:

When even its long-term supporters can see that, and openly resent that they're expected to believe such brazen fabrications, then the Democratic Party has a major, major problem on its hands.

Sure does.  It's fixin' to go the way of the Whig Party.  Even with the industrial-scale cheating they're going to do.  It won't help them - not when even their "base" is leaving them en masse.

 It's going to be a blowout, but the Democratic Party apparachicks can't allow themselves to see that.  Not if they have hopes for advancement in the Democrat Party Apparat.  Instead, they have to repeat the most obvious lies about this election.  Crude lies.  Lies that everyone knows are lies.

But lies that they cannot allow themselves to recognize as lies.

The Left used to call itself "the reality-based party".  That's quite funny, given how crude their propaganda is.

"Peaceful" protests

Adam Smith famously said that there's a lot of ruin in a country - that it takes a long time to wreck a nation - but he didn't have Twitter.  Sadly, we do.  But history shows what it looks like as the wheels come off, and the Roman Republic was instructive to the Founding Fathers so it it well worth while to look at that slow motion car wreck.  After all, our wreck might be in fast forward (depeche mode) with the help from Twitter.

The Founders intentionally fragmented power, with three branches of Government presumed to be antagonistic to each other and jealous of their powers.  This structure was a result of looking at the structure of the Roman Republic where there was little effective power fragmentation - the Senate granted near supreme power to the Consuls, thinking that since they granted the powers, they were in the driver's seat.  So how'd that turn out for them?

Veni, vidi, vici.  I came, I saw, I conquered. 

- Julius Caesar, the last of the Consuls and the first of the Emperors

But by Caesar's time, the Republic was dead in all but name.  It died at a particular point, when what everyone agreed were sacred Roman political lines - never to be crossed - were crossed.

The Romans called these lines Mos Maiorum, which is fiendishly hard to translate but sort of means "the way things should be done."  Once those lines were crossed it was Open Field running which would only be settled by someone who knew how to score a touchdown without spiking the ball.

Julius Caesar could not not spike the ball, and so was assassinated.  His nephew and heir Octavian could score - repeatedly - without feeling the need to spike the ball and so became the first Emperor.  In between them, there was a lot of bloodletting in Rome.  Octavian learned from all of the violence of his early days growing up in the end of the Republic; he became Caesar Augustus because he figured out how to gather power to himself while keeping the appearance of not gathering power to himself.  That only worked for him because everyone was really, really tired of the violence and murder that had come before.

That came from the collapse of Mos Maiorem.  Once that was gone, it was anything goes.  The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must.  Marius (Julius Caesar's Father-In-Law) posted proscription lists - lists of his opponents who were declared Enemies Of The State and who could be killed on sight.  The killers got to keep the proscribed's possessions.  As you'd imagine, a lot of false accusations led to a lot of folks being added to the Proscription Lists.

Marius' mortal enemy Sulla took that rule and did one better on Marius' supporters.  Even Caesar himself went into hiding as a reign of terror seized the Roman elite by the throat.  Fortunately for Marius he was dead, but the streets of the Eternal City ran red with blood.  Sulla wrote his own ferocious epitaph: No friend has ever served me, and no enemy has ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.  Sulla was the Reckoning for Marius' supporters.

It feels like that's coming here.  It no longer feels like there is a common "us" that both sides recognize.  That's new in American politics.  It's like a line has been crossed; the Mos Maiorum of the early days are held now in contempt.  It's Winner Takes All; The Strong do what they can, the Weak do what they must.  If you get lumped in with The Weak then it sucks to be you.

And so record numbers of Americans find themselves as first time gun owners this year.  Millions of new gun owners - although it must be said that those are rookie numbers.  They'll be higher come the election.  It's a Bad Moon Rising, and no matter who wins the election that's going to accelerate.

Because Mos Maiorum is dead.  The losers in 2016 refused to accept the results of the voter's choice, and that looks fair to repeat when Donald Trump wins by an even bigger margin this coming November.  What is to be done, when rioting in the streets is the New Normal?

What was done in Rome?  Alas, we can read about this in the writings of Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (in the Agricola): 

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

The Romans didn't screw around.

The Democrats aren't screwing around, either.  If you look at Portland, or Seattle, or Baltimore, or St. Louis - all you can think of is they've made it a desert and the Media is calling it "peaceful protest".  The American public looks on, and many realize this.

So where does this go, come November?  Donald Trump will win without doubt; the Republicans will also retake Congress (remember, 29 Democrats in House districts won by Trump voted to impeach; we shall see how that plays out in the election).

I've written before about Game Theory, a branch of mathematics that tells us much about human behavior.  In particular, Tit-For-Tat is a strategy where you play the opponent's last play against you.  If they cooperate with you, you cooperate with them.  If they oppose you, you oppose them.  Like I said, there are Mathematical proofs that show that this leads to a stable outcome.

That's not what we have today.  What we have is the Democratic Party and the professional Civil Service, and the Media and the Universities doing everything they can think of to overthrow the last election.  But respecting the election results is the Mos Maiorum of the American Republic.  That's gone.

And so Tit-For-Tat (and Cornelius Sulla) says there's a different way.  It's the Reckoning.

This is perhaps a better sense of how half the country is looking on the riots, from the same film:

A third of the country no longer wants Mos Maiorum - the way things have been done - rather, they want The Reckoning.  Another third of the country has already abandoned Mos Maiorum, grasping at any straw - including "peaceful" riots - to get rid of OrangeManBad.  The other third has yet to realize that come the Proscriptions, they will have to choose a side.

If you ever wondered how the Roman Republic turned into the Roman Empire, just open the newspaper.  It seems like the bloodletting has started; if so, it will not end until we have a later day Caesar Augustus who can end the bloodshed.

This Train Wreck would be known to the Founding Fathers, although they might have taken some satisfaction that they got two and a half centuries before the wreck of their plan.  But Twitter has pushed everything into fast forward.  The French call that depeche mode, which brings to mind the greatest cover of American Past ever recorded:

God save this Republic.

A tragic date in Bernie Sander's life

Thirty years ago the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union voted to dissolve the USSR.

Why The Queen Of The World and I will not watch the Superbowl

NFL rejects "Stand for the Flag" advert:



NFL allows Michael Bloomberg's gun control ad.

Remember when the NFL banned a pro-second amendment ad a few years back?

Screw you guys.  Just when it seems like saner heads might prevail and let the whole festering pustule stop swelling and oozing, the jackwagons running the NFL clown show shoot themselves in the foot.  Again.

Sideways with a chainsaw.  I don't need to watch your dumb game to see the funny ads anymore because they're all online.  This one is really funny, and has a cameo who will be recognizable to Red Sox fans:



UPDATE 2 February 2020 20:25:  I have to say that The Queen Of The World and I are enjoying the Puppy Bowl way more than I expected.  Wolfgang isn't paying any attention, but TQOTW tells stories about her old Golden Retriever, Skipper.  He would watch with doggie fascination.

And speaking of Golden Retrievers, the Suburu adverts are simply brilliant:

How Big Business and Big Government get ahead by slowing down the economy

I was saddened to read of the death from leukemia of Clayton Christensen.  He wrote a very influential book titled The Innovator's Dilemma that I posted about years ago:

Clayton Christensen wrote the single most terrifying business book I've ever read. In The Innovator's Dilemma, he says that it's obvious why badly-managed companies go out of business (they're badly managed, duh). He asks a very interesting question: why do well-managed companies go out of business? He says that it's all about managing innovation.

Christensen posits two types of innovation. Continuous innovation (what he calls sustaining technologies) is easy to manage: it's more of what we have, only better. Well managed companies excel at growing sustaining technologies. There are also revolutionary innovations (what he calls disruptive technologies) that change how the game is played. It doesn't matter how much better your buggy whip is, you won't be able to grow your business on that product line.

Companies almost always fail at managing disruptive technology transformations, because they are well managed.  The entire corporate structure is based on producing and selling at a particular price point. A product that kills your cash cow because it's priced 50% lower probably can't be sold effectively at that company, no matter how brilliantly disruptive it is. IBM sold million dollar mainframe computers. While they certainly knew how to make minicomputers, all the incentives were for them to push customers to bigger and more expensive machines. Minicomputers couldn't become too compelling without undercutting the quarterly sales targets, and so DEC ate IBM's lunch. And then Compaq ate DEC's lunch with PCs.

That's actually a pretty good post, which has stood up well after a decade.  It actually explains a lot about the rise of Donald Trump who is nothing if not disruptive to the well-run establishment political establishment, but that's beside the point here.

But think about innovation, and Donald Trump.  I posted a couple years back about this, too:

What was striking about this was that each industry would exhibit precisely the same growth characteristics. The "S" curve described a slowish initial takeoff, an exponentially rising growth period, and then a slow tailing off. All of these industries followed it in turn: cotton, iron, steel, railroads. What was key to the miracle that occurred between 1720 and 1990 was that as one reached the top of the curve and began to falter, a new industry emerged to drive things forward. Income per capita went from around $450 in what would become the United States (in 1700) to $18,300 in 1989.

 

In many ways, this seems to be spinning down. More and more industries seem to be in the top flat part of the curve. Fewer new industries are emerging with robust growth to pick up the slack. People look towards the future and do not see a doubling of real per capita national income.

Now go back and think about Christensen's premise: well managed companies excel at managing innovation in the steep and top flat part of that S-curve.  What they don't excel at - because they're well managed - is bringing the next, new S-curve to the market.  You see, the products in that innovation stream very well might undercut their current cash cow products.

So what do they do?  Enter the Regulatory State.  The Government starts issuing all sorts of regulations about this and that, to protect children and kittens and sunshine.  Where do these regulations come from?  Well, a lot of big businesses are happy to help craft these wise and important protections for children, kittens, and sunshine - I mean, who wouldn't?  And along the way the regulations seem to throw up roadblocks to the next set of disruptive technologies.

These new technologies typically come from small companies.  These companies don't have the money to staff up a building full of compliance managers to ensure that the new disruptive products don't kill children and kittens, or block out the very sun itself.

The reason for this is regulation (and its bastard child, litigation). That's the problem. We have buildings full of people that make us stop what we're doing, fill out forms in triplicate, and then wait months or years before we are allowed to pick up where we stopped. Think for a minute what this does. It pushes some of the middle of the S-Curve into the flat part, reducing the overall value of the industry, as resources get sidelined instead of being engaged in production. More damagingly, it pushes the next S-Curve to the right, increasing the time that it takes to bring a new industry online. Most damagingly of all, it possibly completely eliminates some S-Curves from appearing at all, because the risk is too high to attract investors.

It's not the tax rate, it's the regulation rate that's making the economy run down.

This situation is called Regulatory Capture, and is a situation where Big Government and Big Business scratch each other's backs:

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Source: Office of the Comptroller of Currency, as of 31 Dec 2009

The banking system melted down at late in 2008, because weird, opaque transactions like Credit Default Swaps made pricing risk pretty difficult. So what did the shiny new StatistDemocratic administration do? Ensure that these risky transactions are all held by companies that are Too Big To Fail.

As homework and for extra credit, graph the campaign contributions of these same five organizations and their corporate officers by party donated to.

What is ironic (in a funny way) is just how clueless today's young (or old *cough*Bernie Sanders*cough*) socialists are about this.  They think they're really going to stick it to Big Business by having the Government control pretty much everything.  The lack of understanding on display is Epic.

They should read Clayton Christensen.  Rest in peace.

Thirty years after the Berlin Wall

The Usual Suspects® are ignoring the anniversary, but that's to be expected.  After all, pas d'enemies a gauche, n'est-ce pas?  But the cold reality of that monster regime is ever green, with explicitly socialist presidential candidates and large numbers of this Republic's youth thinking that socialism - and even communism - is the bee's knees.

I wrote this ten years ago on the 20th anniversary of the fall, hard on the heels of the Newsweek Cover story "We're all socialists now".  The Useful Idiots® are still idiots today.  They're also useful, to some.

Originally posted November 10, 2019.

The Line

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

- Cicero

I used to be a leftist, proudly "progressive."  No more. I no longer have the stomach to sleep with evil, even evil in the name of the greater good. In all of the retrospectives about the fall of the Berlin Wall this score of years ago, something is missing. Recognition of tyranny is there (mostly). Recognition of how (mostly) the once unfree populations have embraced freedom is there, too (mostly).

What's missing is any description of the depth of evil that was our enemy. Col. Jeff Cooper saw it, and wrote of it in To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak The Truth:

Starting at its western edge, The Line is composed of several strata. First comes the actual linear boundary, surveyed and marked to the centimeter. There is no fence here. Free people can walk right up to it - but they do not step across it. Death looms. Some ten paces beyond the marked boundary, to the eastward, is the outside fence. It is a single barrier some ten feet high, electrified and sown with directional mines set to fire along its inside surface. Beyond the outside fence is a band of dead ground some 100 meters in width, cleared of life and planted at random with pressure-release anti-personnel fragmentation mines. When the snow melts in winter thaws these go off erratically in the sunshine - "Lenin's serenade."

At the inner edge of the dead ground are the dogs - German shepherds chained to an overhead trolley that allows them to run parallel to the inner fence but not back into it (electrocution) nor forward away from it (explosion). ...

At intervals watchtowers loom fifty feet into the air, manned and equipped with enhanced-vision devices, cameras, weapons, and release controls for packs of killer dogs which can be set free at command behind the inner fence. ...

Behind the inner fence lies a belt of Zombie-land five kilometers deep. No one moves here except those whose duties demand it. The fields produce. Roads and roofs are mended. There is an occasional dilapidated vehicle in motion. At first glance it seems a viable countryside. On closer inspection, however, it is death-in-life. There are perhaps two lighted windows where there should be scores. Such villages in which there are lights are inside electric fences. The sickening effect grows as the sun sets. ...

With exquisite cruelty the very existence of The Line is concealed from those it contains. The east border of the 5 km Zombie zone is marked - from the east - simply as the border. Good slaves do not cross it, not because it is fearful to behold, but because they are good slaves. Bad slaves sometimes do cross it, but because they do not know what they face they usually die.

My staff sergeant guide on this occasion told me of a case he witnessed. A young woman, apparently driven to desperation, dared to cross the eastern 5 km line and lead her small child west towards liberty. As she approached the inner fence, the orcs in the watchtower loosed the dogs.

"I stood there with a rifle in my hands, but I was not allowed to shoot." He said, "I hear those screams every day. The mother's were louder than the child's. They were long and very high. They drowned out the growling of the dogs.

"For a while."

The worker's paradise was not above selling its slaves to the west:

Between 1964 and 1989, 33,755 political prisoners were ransomed. A further 2,087 prisoners were released to the West under an amnesty in 1972. Another 215,000 people, including 2,000 children cut off from their parents, were allowed to leave East Germany to rejoin their families. In exchange, West Germany paid over 3.4 billion DM – nearly $2.3 billion at 1990 prices – in goods and hard currency.^[117] Those ransomed were valued on a sliding scale, ranging from around 1,875 DM for a worker to around 11,250 DM for a doctor. The justification, according to East Germany, was that this was compensation for the money invested by the state in the prisoner's training. For a while, payments were made in kind using goods that were in short supply in East Germany, such as oranges, bananas, coffee and medical drugs. The average prisoner was worth around 4,000 DM worth of goods.^[118] The scheme was highly controversial in the West. Freikauf was denounced by many as human trafficking but was defended by others as an "act of pure humanitarianism";^[119] the West German government budgeted money for Freikauf under the euphemistic heading of "support of special aid measures of an all-German character.

I'm thankfully not the only one to notice this strange amnesia, and judge. And to find today's leftist intellectuals to be wanting:

The first person shot dead at the Berlin Wall was 24 year old Gunter Litfin, as he tried to swim across the Spree River on August 24, 1961. A year later, East German guards shot 17 year old Peter Fechter as he tried to scale the wall, and left him to bleed to death in that barren and desolate area of open land east of the Wall.
The last person known to be killed at the Wall was 20 year old bartender Chris Gueffroy, shot ten times for good measure on February 5, 1989. 
...
I find it obscene that [New Zealand] National Radio broadcasters Geoff Robinson and Lloyd Scott this morning recalled the Berlin Wall, its twenty-eight years of bloodshed and the 1200 slaughtered East Germans, with wistful nostalgia. They even appeared to excuse the East German secret police, the Stasi, as people just doing their jobs.

Not just judged to be morally void, but intellectually as well:

In 1922 Ludwig Von Mises explained that socialism would eat itself and the people whom it enslaved – that it couldn’t plan, it couldn’t produce, that it couldn’t calculate -- that it was and always would be both morally depraved and economically unsustainable. Sixty-seven years later he was proven emphatically correct when the illusion that was socialist Eastern Europe collapsed, and the symbol of its totalitarian state was torn down.

The barest minimum qualification for an intellectual is to examine and test your first premises. To reject them, if they do not model the world effectively. Philosophers all the way back to Plato would hold today's left in contempt, with their hope that some how, this time it will be different.


Here's a different way of saying the same thing:



Such a strange forgetfulness by the Moral Titans of the left: chattel slavery, Schießbefehl ("Order to fire" - shoot to kill), thousands of dead, the souls of millions crushed. For their own good, of course. The People must be protected from the people.

So strange that the left cannot take this moment to reflect on actual evil, and to condemn it without mistakes were made and for a noble cause excuses, without clinging to that most slippery word "but". They believe - and I generally concur - that they are good people, motivated to do good. But they flinch from examining the actual truth. They are behind their own mental Iron Curtain, trapped by an unexamined world view. Behind their own, intellectually-imposed Line. 

The east border of the 5 km Zombie zone is marked - from the east - simply as the border. Good slaves do not cross it, not because it is fearful to behold, but because they are good slaves.

Tear it down.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Quote of the day: Capitalism beats Socialism edition

pic.twitter.com/g6XyK3gJxh

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) October 15, 2019

Obligatory Imperialist Post

Happy Columbus Day!  In this election season pitting normal Americans against a witches brew of socialists and latter day fascists (**cough** Beto **cough**) it's worth taking a look back on one of the epochal turning points in world history.  The key term that you really need to know for any discussion on Columbus Day is the Great Divergence - the point where Europe passed, and then pulled away from the rest of the world in terms of production and wealth per capita.

In 1000 AD, nobody would have predicted that Europe would lead the Great Divergence.  China had cities of hundreds of thousands when Paris was a few thousand thatch-roofed huts.  In 1500 AD it would have seemed pretty unlikely.  Mogul India was fabulously wealthy.  By 1800 AD it was pretty much all over but the shouting.

The reason for this quite unlikely turn of fate is relevant to our upcoming election.  Forms of government are important and while the old Chinese and Indian governmental structures excelled at distributing wealth (as do today's socialists), none of them were very good at fostering wealth creation.  Then, politics interfered with economic growth.  If Elizabeth Warren gets her way she'll bring this to our shores.

This is an important topic and there's a lot here.  I highly recommend the Tides of History podcast on setting the stage for this: 1492: A Guided Tour of Europe on the Brink.

(Originally posted October 13, 2008)

Obligatory Imperialist Post

Because it's Columbus Power-Mad Dead White Dude Day.  Insty posted about Admiral of the Ocean Sea (great book) which gives you a great Columbus overview, but entirely misses the Power-Mad Dead White Dude thing.

As a public service, here's something that you should read if you really want to make a liberal's head explode like the fembots in Austin Powers. Or understand why the world's economy is the way it is.  The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes. The title is intentionally taken from Adam Smith, but Landes focuses less on describing economics per se, and more on the constraints that a society puts on their economy.

It traces the history of economic development over the last 1000 years, and asks some very politically incorrect questions:

• Why did China, the world's richest and most powerful country in 1000 AD not only lose her lead, but lose it so badly that it was dismembered by the European (and later resurgent Japanese) powers?
• Why did India, fabulously wealthy and populous, not conquor the west, rather than vice-versa?
• Why did England, an undeveloped backwater as late as 1500 AD, ultimately lead the Industrial Revolution and become the world's most powerful country?
• What explains the vast differences in economic development between the USA and Canada, and other New World countries? After all, in 1700, Mexico's GDP per capita was $450, not far short of the colonies' $490 (1985 dollars). In 1989, Mexico's GDP per capita was $3,500, vs. $18,300 for the USA.

No, it wasn't "western imperialism" by dead white dudes. Landes' politically incorrect thesis is that society counts, and some societies foster faster economic growth than others. He uses many, many examples.

The quote for this [2008] election season, if we're smart enough to listen, is about the post-Cold War economies:

Among the heaviest losers in this period of record-breaking economic growth and technological advance were the countries of the Communist Socialist bloc: the Soviet Union at the bottom of the barrel, Romania and North Korea almost as bad, and a range of satellite victims and emulators struggling to rise above the mess. Best off were probably Czechoslovkia and Hungary, with East Germany (the DDR) and Poland trailing behind. The striking feature of these command economies was the contradiction between system and pretensions on the one hand, performance on the other. The logic was impeccable: experts would plan, zealots would compete in zeal, technology would tame nature, labor would make free, the benefits would accrue to all. From each according to their ability; to each according to his deserts; and eventually, to each according to his needs.

The dream appealed to the victims and critics of capitalism, admittedly a most imperfect system - but as it turned out, far better than the alternatives. Hence the Marxist economies long enjoyed a willful credulous favor among radicals, liberals, and progressives in the advanced industrial nations;

You'll hate this if you think that economics a la John Kerry and Barack Obama is the shizzle flippity floppity floop.

Contradiction between pretension and performance: nice phrase, that. For an example, see Patrick, Deval. For extra credit, compare and contrast Obama, Barack.

Dang, I think I must have just got my Hate Speech on, right there.