A Preference Cascade is when a large portion of the population begins to realize - despite relentless government and/or media propaganda - that a lot of other folks think like they do and that the propaganda is, well propaganda. This is almost always catastrophic for The Powers That Be, because Preference Cascades tend to accelerate. As this progresses, formerly reliable underlings begin to think that TPTB are going to lose, and start to refuse to stick their necks out to protect the current order.
It's one thing to stuff ballot boxes when you think that everyone on your side is on board and your guy is going to win - and any potential investigation will be done in the most slipshod manner. It's quite a different thing when you wonder just how many of the guys on your side are actually going to go through with this, and if the other guy wins will you be facing 20 years in Club Fed.
At the extreme, the security services join the preference cascade. They smell an emerging winner and want to be on side when that happens. At this point, things get pretty grim for TPTB.
I think we're at that stage now - well, not the up against the wall shooting stage - but a cascading loss of confidence and loyalty in the Democratic Party itself for Joe Biden. This will shrink the Margin of Cheat except in the most blue of blue states, and given that it looks like New York and New Jersey may be in play, there may not really be a lot of blue left.
In other words, everyone is starting to realize that the propaganda was just that - propaganda.
Add in the drop in contributions to the Democratic Party (the preference cascade is hitting the donor class, who are realizing that this "investment" may not have a return, and hedge their bets by contributing to Trump).
Now add in the media, who start to see that they are better off trying to help the Democratic Party, rather than mean old Joe Biden.
The question is not whether Trump will win, but whether the Preference Cascade will give him coattails, and how long they will be.
My guess is that the Preference Cascade is in full swing in the Secret Service, as competent and dedicated agents there start to wonder when (not if) to throw their corrupt bosses under the bus. There's a lot coming out about this Charlie Foxtrot in the SS, so that suggests that the lack of loyalty to Joe Biden is advancing nicely there.
Once the Preference Cascade begins, TPTB have precious few tools to counter it. For example, cracking down on leaking from within the Secret Service will do nothing but convince the undecided there that TPTB are untrustworthy and have to go.
Where my opinion diverges from his is that the old "left" vs. "right" paradigm is kind of ending. I haven't seen a good name for hte new emerging paradigm, so let's just call it "populists" vs. "business as usual". Lousy name, but this is where the political action is, both here and all over the place (Argentina, El Salvador, France, Germany, the UK).
Populism is regularly trashed by the Great and the Good, but the inroads that Trump is making with the Black community doesn't seem to be typical pandering, but rather tapping into a real sense of dissatisfaction with Business As Usual. Kind of like what the rest of us feel.
It also seems that RFK's support comes from the same well spring of dissatisfaction. If that's true, it implies that RFK's candidacy will hurt Trump more than Biden. And I still have the feeling that there's a non-trivial chance that the Deep State will try to assassinate Trump, and maybe succeed. The Great and the Good keep complaining that Trump has "overturned norms" but it sure looks to me that they're the ones that are doing that.
Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law.
Let’s be honest: it’s a US war against Russia... to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world. President Biden has said that was his intention — to get rid of Vladimir Putin. His Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, in April 2022, said that our purpose here is to exhaust the Russian army. What does that mean, 'exhaust'? It means throwing Ukrainians at them. My son fought over there, side-by-side with the Ukrainians and we’ve sacrificed 300,000 Ukrainians.
It's a long interview but I find very little to argue with him about. Which means that the Deep State will prevent him from ever becoming President.
It seems that one of Trump's Defense Secretaries has a new "tell all" book coming out, and in it he talks about how Trump wanted to bomb the drug cartels in Mexico and how awful that was.
I mean, what a shocking, awful, disgraceful violation of International Law - sending an attack into the territory of a sovereign ally. Unthinkable! I mean, he probably wouldn't have even let the government know he was going to attack!
Sort of like this:
That's Barack Obama his own self, saying that he basically knew he was violating International Law, for good reasons. And what was the reason? 3,000 dead Americans, and the Pakistani government unwilling or unable to do anything about the perpetrators on their soil.
More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2021, more than in any other year on record, according to provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics Wednesday.
So Osama bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans and was killed ten years later. That's 300 a year, or about one a day. The cartels kill 100,000 each year, or about 275 Americans a day. But it was awesome that Obama violated International Law and it's The Worst Thing Ever that Trump even thought about it.
It makes you suspect that all this pious bloviating from the "Elites" is a bunch of hooey. And it makes you wonder if they think that 275 people from Youngstown, Ohio and similar places in the hollowed out "Fly Over" America are less valuable (and less worthy of protection) than one person working high finance in the World Trade Center.
The Romans were hated by a lot of people in the ancient world. This bothered the Romans not a bit. Their attitude was spelled out in the post title, although the original latin has a certain je ne sais quois: Oderint, dum metuant.
The Powers That Be in these United States seem to have forgotten that this is a dynamic, and that things done to instill fear can lead to hate. Big Country hits this nail on the head looking at all the sanctions that the US PTB are piling on Russia:
Two is that #ourguys are purely fucking up by the numbers. Initially, the Russian Population was starting to protest against the war. Lots of Grannies, regular civvies, and yeah, Vlad had a crackdown on it, as he is wont to be. However, all this 'other stuff'... the cutting off of Paypal, Applepay, Goolagpay, services and well, just about any and all economic 'stuff' in Russia by OUR Oligarchs?
Yeah, that's not helping us... in fact it just goes to prove the point to the Russian People that Putin IS right and that they, the Russian People as a whole have been targeted by the dissolute and decadent west for elimination. Hell, it ain't a hard argument to make, and we're proving it by putting the hurt on the Russian People as a whole. The Russians as history has shown rally around The Rodina when shit like this happens. A nearly singlemindedness and even bloodthirsty willingness to protect The Motherland
No matter what the cost.
So this makes me nervous, 'cos instead of them blaming Putin, they're realizing, from their POV, he might be right and it's time to make US hurt as badly as we're making them hurt. And as far as I can tell, that'd be the Giant Flashbulb Option, as they really don't have a way of fucking up or fucking with the general Untied Staaz population.
So if our beef is with Vlad and the Oligarchs (their Oligarchs, not our Oligarchs) then why do the sanctions seem to be targeted at the Russian People? Oh, and I still don't have a good explanation as to why Ukraine absolutely positively has to be a member of NATO. Still waiting on that one.
Ya know, what comes to mind is the ancient Greek saying that those who the Gods would destroy first are turned mad. About sums up the US PTB, right there.
And an anonymous commenter leaves a really concerning comment over at Big Country's place:
More or less right on the money. Couple that with the administration coming up with shit like sanctions on India because they won't sanction Russia. Now India are looking at what they can trade without using the USD. Good work retards. Lot of Arab countries now talking about investing more in/with China too. Worth watching what the BRICS countries do, once the move away from trade in USD kicks in...
"Good work, retards" looks like it's fixin' the be an excellent epitaph for the US PTB once they destroy the dollar as the world's reserve currency and the US standard of living drops by 70%.
Ah, brings to mind the old days, working at Three Letter Security Agency back in the '80s. We all agreed that if the balloon went up we'd just go out and sunbathe in the parking lot and wait for that last big flash bulb to go off. Been a long time since I thought of that. And so, a musical tribute to the last tanning session (stolen from Western Rifle Shooters):
Damn, I wish we had a smarter and less reckless Ruling Class.
For me, at least, it’s hard to read any of the literature of [the 1920s and 1930s] without getting a potent sense of déjà vu. The same autumnal sense of an era past its pull date, the same spectacle of people and institutions going through motions that stopped functioning a long time ago, the same plaintive voices wondering why the world just doesn’t seem to make sense any more—it’s all present and accounted for, the familiar backdrop for the last few decades of public life in the United States and a good many other industrialized nations. The sole remaining questions are what combination of crises will topple the hapless ruling class from its position, and how soon that inevitable moment will arrive.
Yet admitting that the managerial class has turned out to be incompetent at running societies is unthinkable, to members of that class. It’s not just a matter of status panic, either. The entire collective identity of our managerial aristocracy is founded on the idea that they’re the experts, the smart kids, the people who really know what’s what. They justify their grip on the levels of collective power by insisting that they and they alone can lead the world to a sparkly new future. That’s the theme of the slogans under which they seized power, and it remains the core of their ideology and their identity: “We can make the world better!”
This is John Michael Greer, who used to blog as The Arch Druid. He seems pretty optimistic that the wheels are finally coming off of the Managerial State and that this is probably a good thing:
For the last six years now, accordingly, the failures of the managerial class have become a massive political issue across much of the industrial world. Britain’s Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election both marked important turning points in that process, as significant numbers of ordinary people decided that the experts didn’t know what they were talking about and refused to vote as they were told. The various tantrums thrown by pundits, politicians, and self-anointed influencers since that time haven’t accomplished much, aside from convincing even more people to ignore the increasingly shrill demands of a failing elite.
That’s sending waves of stark shuddering terror through the managerial aristocracy. If the deplorable masses stop bending the knee and tugging their forelocks whenever one of their self-proclaimed betters mouths a platitude, after all, how long will the authority of the managers last? That terror, in turn, gives rise to the displacement activities discussed above. Since it’s impossible for them to admit to themselves that they’ve failed, much less that everyone else is aware that they’ve failed, they find other things on which they can focus their feelings of panic. The Covid virus is one of those. It wasn’t the first and it doubtless won’t be the last, but it’s serving its purpose now, which is to allow members of the managerial class and its hangers-on in the media and the academy to distract themselves from the end of their era of power.
The problem is that the only people who will trust them to "fix" their problem are the ones who already trust them. That is a continually shrinking portion of the public despite the increasingly shrill social shaming that they are doing. They are not convincing anyone and indeed are doing the opposite:
My liberal friends (and yes, I do have a few still, though most tossed me under the bus as soon as there was any societal pressure to do so) will constantly chide me about my words, or my attitude, and go tsk tsk, how rude! But then when people on their side go bat shit fucking insane, they sit there meekly and stand for nothing, because they know the beast they fed will just as easily turn and eat them too.
Besides, as soon as a democrat stands for principle outside of the narrative, they get tossed. Pick any of them in media, punditry, or academia. Any at all. Glenn Greenwald. Tim Pool. Jordan Peterson. Those were all mushy moderates, until they say hey wait, the left is going nuts, and boom, now the left thinks they are the second coming of Satan-Hitler. The party is currently enraged at Sinema and Manchin.
And I’m not alone in this. Most politically alert non-leftists will tell you the same thing. You belong to a cult which will not abide heresy. You want to show us that you aren’t all authoritarian statist trash, DO SOMETHING.
J.Kb has an outstanding example of their closed - and clueless - world view. This is the Elite that will solve the Republic's problems? As John Michael Greer points out, Tomorrowland has fallen.
This so-called "elite" knows nothing of history. Basically every revolution in history was started by a starving underclass. While I think that Peter is right that they could very well pitch this country into that sinkhole, they do not seem to realize that each of these revolutions was against the Powers That Be who were running things. Just how they will harness all this underclass rage against The Man when they're him is beyond me.
They're desperate, and they're out of gas, and it sure doesn't look like their scheme to start revolution in the streets can do anything other than build their own funeral pyre, the Sardanapalus option:
“The Death of Sardanapalus” by Eugène Delacroix depicts the tale of Sardanapalus, a king of Assyria, who, according to an ancient story, exceeded all previous rulers in sloth and decadence.
He spent his whole life in self-indulgence, and when he wrote his epitaph, he stated that physical gratification is the only purpose of life.
His debauchery caused dissatisfaction within the Assyrian empire, allowing conspiracies against him to develop. Sardanapalus failed to defeat the rebels, and then enemies of the empire join the battle against him.
After Sardanapalus’ last defenses collapsed and to avoid falling into the hands of his enemies, Sardanapalus ordered an enormous funeral pyre.
On the funeral pyre were piled all his gold and valuables. He also ordered that his eunuchs and concubines be added to the fire, to burn them and himself to death.
Nobody did romantic doomed fate better than Byron and Delacroix. Alas, I feat that Hollywood will not be up to this level of artistic achievement for what the "elites" are bringing down on their own heads.
Rich People's Leftismis one of the clearest explanations I've ever seen for the utter failure of government in Blue States:
With this new approach in mind, let me contrast Rich People’s Leftism (RPL) with Poor People’s Leftism (PPL).
RPL thinks that its goal is to help poor people, while PPL thinks that RPL’s primary goal is to ensure that wealthy leftists dominate and get great jobs.
You really should click through to read about Rich People's Leftism, which dates to 2010. We've known about this for a long, long time. A different view is "red pill/blue pill":
... an old post from Isegoria (you do read him every day, don't you?) gives the best introduction to the topic, phrased in explicitly"Blue Pill"/"Red Pill" terminology:
The nature of the state
The state is established by citizens to serve their needs. Its actions are generally righteous.
The state is just another giant corporation. Its actions generally advance its own interests. Sometimes these interests coincide with ours, sometimes they don’t.
You should read Isegoria's post as well. Then think about the proposed $3.5T spending bill that is before congress. Who will it help? Who are we told that is is going to help, but won't? To ask the questions is to answer them.
If you are not entirely cynical about everything that the government does, you're really not paying attention. Take the Red Pill. Or swallow the Blue one; the circus is entertaining, and the bread is free.
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.
What is striking about the fraud is the blatant clumsiness on display: the Democrats aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are manufacturing ballots in industrial quantities. This is really, really interesting, and suggests that their motive is not simply to install their preferred candidate in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It suggests that the motivation is deeper, and darker.
Theodore Dalrymple studied Soviet era propaganda - the propaganda targeting not a western audience, but instead the populations of the Warsaw Pact. He was struck by how crude it was:
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.
I think that this is what they're after - showing the country that they can steal an election and there's nothing that we can do about it. It comes from the same source that causes cities to remove statues of George Washington. It's showing who's up and who's down.
The crudeness of it all isn't a bug - it's the primary point to these people, who believe that they have a fundamental right to rule.
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.
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:
A losing team fired their coach and brought in a new one, to get the team back on a winning track. As he was moving into his office he found two sealed envelopes in the desk. One was labeled "Open in the first crisis" and the second was labeled "Open in the second crisis". He thought this was a little weird but tossed them in the back of the desk drawer and forgot about them.
The new season opened, and it did not open well. The team was losing, and losing badly. The fans and the home town press started questioning what he was doing, and whether replacing the old coach had been a good idea or not. He was putting in 18 hour days trying to turn things around, and in the wee hours of the night, he found the envelopes in his desk. Figuring that this was a crisis, he opened the first one. It read, in its entirety:
Blame everything on me.
He called a press conference and talked about how he had inherited a completely messed up team. He went on about how the previous coach had let a thousand flowers of failure bloom, and that he was working on weeding out the old, bad regime and laying the seeds of success.
And it worked. The boos weren't as loud, and the press backed off.
But late in the season it came back. His respite was gone, and the boo-birds and scathing media were back in full swing. He figured that this was the second crisis, and so went to his office and opened the second envelope. It read, in its entirety:
Make two new envelopes.
POTUS Donald Trump is really good at firing people who he puts in a management position in order to fix particular problems. Your predecessor did not support the people under his command, and is now enjoying more time with his family. Observing how you choose to deal with people under your command - particularly CPT Crozier who looks like he is doing his best to suppress the virus outbreak on one of our capital ships so it can get back into action - suggests this as your next career step:
Make up two new envelopes.
Love, Borepatch
P.S. I had higher hopes that you might raise my estimate of the caliber of the inhabitants of the E-Ring. It appears that I was misinformed.
P.P.S. Don't let it hit you in the derriere on the way out, bucko.
Oliver Cromwell led the Parliament forces which overthrew and executed British King Charles I on this day in 1649. But no man leaves this life alive, and so it was for Cromwell, who died in his bed in 1658. The experiment with what was basically a Puritan theocracy fizzled out, and the late King's son was crowned as Charles II. The new King's problem was that the government was staffed with what were essentially Puritan mullahs. His Majesty set out to drain the swamp.
Part of that was to execute the men who signed his father's death warrant. These "regicides" as they were known were the key men in Cromwell's regime (I posted years about one of them who echoes down faintly to our time in the name for a really cool London pub). But the King was just getting warmed up. You see, he wanted all his subjects to understand that there was a new sheriff in town.
And so he had Oliver Cromwell's body dug up and executed. Yup, he executed a dead man.
The execution of Oliver Cromwell, January 30 1661
Afterwards they cut his head off, stuck it on a pike, and displayed outside the Houses of Parliament for 24 years. It was a not-very-subtle-at-all message.
Fast forward 359 years. Our swamp desperately needs drained, but to date it seems that only a few disgruntled employees have resigned from the State Department and the EPA - seemingly on their own initiative. Senior political figures are avoiding felony charges, probably because their friends or allies in the Justice Department are doing an extremely slow and thorough - but no doubt entirely slipshod - investigation of said felonious behavior. Why?
It may be because Trump doesn't want to unleash a purge until after the election. Then, when he can't run again he may take off the gloves. Or maybe not. Who knows?
But the institutions of the Federal Government have taken a crushing blow to their legitimacy. I mean, many are run by people who by all rights are felons. While we no longer display heads on pikes, is it too much to ask for some tar and feathers?
Against legitimacy is arrayed usurpation; against modest, single-minded, righteous, and brave resistance to encroachment is arrayed boastful, double-tongued, selfish, and treacherous ambition to possess. God defend the right!
― Charlotte Brontë
The global elites have been searching for an alternative to representative democracy as a source of legitimacy for two decades. They haven't come up with a viable alternative. Sure, the EU was successful in their keep voting on EU referendums until you vote the right way but that was only on the continent, and while it gave the EU political power it didn't give it political legitimacy. Not legitimacy in the sense that we've come to think of it over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
While the elites have generally been able to tamp down the opposition, the lid is starting to come off all over the world.
The voters in the UK expressed their frustrations at how their clearly stated (and voted on) preference for BREXIT has been thwarted by three years of increasingly desperate backroom deals, shady political tricks, and double dealing. As far as the EU is concerned, yesterday's vote was a resounding "No means NO" to the elites. A large number of MPs who had said that they would support BREXIT but who then changed their minds - in the voters eyes broke promise and stabbed the electorate in the back - were turned out of office. The Tories won their biggest victory since Margaret Thatcher, almost 40 years ago.
There really isn't any substitute to legitimacy via representative democracy. At least, nobody's been able to come up with one. Lord knows they've tried.
The problem for the Elite Technocratic worldview is generational:
The first generation knows the system thoroughly, because they built it. This was the Greatest Generation who beat the Nazi and Japanese Supermen, landed a man on the moon, stared down the Soviet Bear, and brought unprecedented prosperity to the peoples of the West.
The second generation understood how the system works because they saw it being built by the first generation. This was the generation who built the original Internet. But the financial benefits of the system were not as evenly distributed as before, with the emergence of "Rust Belts" as a result of government industrial policy. Hey, learn to code, amirite?
The third generation inherited a system whose functioning is a mystery to them. Increasing resistance to their rule is met by censorship ("Hate crime" laws) and blackballing (elimination of all conservative voices from the faculty lounge). Status hierarchy is no longer based on accomplishment as in the first generation, but via credential - especially Ivy League diploma.
The peoples of the West were right to vote for the first generation. That support began to decay in the second generation but old habits (reinforced by propaganda) die hard. By the third generation you see what had once been unthinkable - Appalachia voting solidly Republican and long time Labor districts voting Tory. The world is turned upside down.
But legitimacy is earned, and the peoples of the West are quite right to vote against this third generation. That generation lives in a bubble divorced from the reality facing much of the peoples of the West. Until there's a replacement for legitimacy via representative democracy, it's buh bye Third Generation.
And quite frankly, good riddance. They are self-important, self-indulgent dullards and fools. They're Smart Dumbasses. Many still don't know why they've lost, years after the fact. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at their confusion and hopelessness -I mean, didn't their Harvard professors tell them that they were all Philosopher Kings?
Snerk. They are "adequately predictable".* That none of them will have read this book - written by one of the towering intellects of the left - tells you all you need to know about them. Now comes the American election of next year, following hard on what looks to be a spectacular flameout of a Deep-State/Democrat coup. This will be above all a legitimacy election. The American people will ponder the years of increasingly desperate backroom deals, shady political tricks, and double dealing and will vote accordingly. May we see a similar result to Britain's, to warn the elite not to try that again.
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.
- Barbara Tuchman
* John Kenneth Galbraith is one of the poster children for the First Generation. He has been followed by the likes of Thomas Friedman. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Britain's is in crisis. 88% of people polled think that Parliament should be dissolved and new elections held to allow a real vote on how to BREXIT, but the Remainders are doing everything (including rubbishing the UK unwritten constitution) to prevent BREXIT. Tempers are running high:
The Deep State is dug in like a tick over there, and simply don't give a damn about democracy or the voters. It's instructive to watch, and to compare with our anonymous "whistleblowers" and non-impeachment impeachment. This is a global rebellion against a common Imperial Ruling Class.
Alex emails to point us to an excellent retrospective on the anniversary of Ruby Ridge. There's a lot there that I hadn't known - the Fed.Gov paid out almost $4M to the survivors of the siege, that "Cadillac" Deval Patrick found no government wrongdoing (this was before he was Governor of Massachusetts), and that the Agents involved in the shootings all got commendations.
[spit]
And Lon Horiuchi's whereabouts is currently unknown, although he seems to no longer be the marketing face of H-S Precision firearms. The ghost of Vicki Weaver whispers to us that we should not forget her, or Horiuchi, or H-S Precision. In that spirit, allow me to roll this out from many years back:
No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.
- Dr. Sam Johnston
Mr. Horiuchi is well advised to get used to it.
If you've never heard this story, go read Alex's post and check out the Resistance Library they have there which has much food for thought. Also think about the Deep State, and how long it's been around. Remember, Ruby Ridge happened under the Presidency of George H.W. Bush. Of course, we've known for a while that he's a dirty commie, and the Deep State runs deeper than anyone talks about.
