So what I'd like to know is ...

How did the would-be assassin know where and when to find Donald Trump?  Was he just lucky like Gavrilo Princip?  Or was he "lucky" like Thomas Matthew Crooks?

Rubicon

The Democratic Party has crossed the Rubicon.  What's strange is that they're in a fairly weak position, which implies that we will see a ratcheting up of more of their actions to protect "our Democracy".  I don't see any possibility that they will ratchet any of this down; on the contrary, Trump's chances of being Epsteined in jail are getting a lot of discussion these days.

But Rubicon isn't quite the proper analogy.  I posted what I thought was the right analogy back on January 6, 2020.  It's sad to see that it reads every bit as true today as it did then, including an ancient Roman Epsteining.

Dura lex, sed lex.

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

- Enoch Powell MP, quoting Virgil in "The Rivers of Blood" speech

Enoch Powell was one of the first politicians to be de-platformed.  As with most of these sorts of innovations, this happened in the Old World in the 1960s.  I posted about this seven years ago, although Google can no longer find this; DuckDuckGo can, though (and that tells you everything you need to know about search engines):

45 years ago last month, British MP Enoch Powell gave a stunning speech.  In it, he looked on the immigration of foreign peoples into the Kingdom and the way that this was changing the UK's culture.  It was widely criticized by all Right Thinking People® but at the same time was wildly popular with working class Britons.  Indeed, a thousand dockworkers marched on Parliament in protest when Powell was sacked from his positions of leadership.

Dockworkers marching in support of a Tory politician.

The most famous line in his speech is where he quoted Virgil:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'.

He was roundly damned for his "inflammatory" and "racist" remarks.  And so the British Political Class went back to sleep - indeed, the last Labour government intentionally accelerated immigration to make the UK "less British".

Today we saw the occupation of the Capitol building by people "annoyed" by what they (and many others) see as the theft of a Presidential election.  The protesters chased off first the Capitol Hill police and then the Congress itself.  It looks like one women lost her life, shot by a cop.  We'll have to see - early news is notoriously unreliable.

But looking at this, I thought of Virgil.  He of course, did not make up the Aeneid out of whole cloth; Virgil wrote propaganda for the first Roman Emperor, Augustus.  The Aeneid was propaganda, but what propaganda.  It made Caesar Augustus' family history into legend.  Because it was propaganda, it was exaggeration, but it was useful exaggeration to Augustus who while not related to the Great Leaders of the previous century was able to deftly exploit those leaders' exploits to his own advantage.

The most important leader at the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic was Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus,  He was the guy who noticed that while the Roman Republic had swept all foreign enemies before it, the working class had suffered despite the great riches of empire.  Tiberius Gracchus decided to run for public office despite his great family wealth, and to put forth his formidable political skills to benefit the Roman Working Joe.  He failed, because the Roman political establishment buried their traditional political differences in the face of Gracchus' challenge, and in fact had him killed.    

In short, the Roman Deep State closed ranks to block needed reform.  It was the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic as long cherished political norms (Mos Maiorum) were cast aside.  And so two generations of the Roman political elite were exterminated in a civil war so profound that what was left of the exhausted Republican Elite welcomed the first Imperator with open arms because he ended the civil wars.

Throughout this whole period in Roman History, the Law was supreme.  Of course, the Law bent to the prevailing political winds.  As the Roman said, "The Law is harsh, but it is the Law".  Dura Lex, sed Lex.

Donald Trump is the Tiberius Gracchus of our day.  He is the guy who noticed that while the American Republic had swept all foreign enemies before it, the working class had suffered despite the great riches of empire.  Donald Trump decided to run for public office despite his great family wealth, and to put forth his formidable political skills to benefit the American Working Joe.  He failed, because the American political establishment buried their traditional political differences in the face of Trump's challenge, and in fact had him [well, we'll have to see if they let him live free, or jail him, or kill him].

But Tiberius Gracchus had many supporters, who didn't let the Roman political elite rest easy.  Likewise with Donald Trump, as we saw today:

Some of Gracchus' supporters were killed, as we saw today.  Looking forward, I am filled with foreboding.  Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Potomac foaming with much blood.  We're already started, it seems.  The only questions really remaining is who is to play the part of Augustus Caesar, and how many of the elite families (and, it must be said, other families) must die before a grateful Republic reaches for their savior Emperor?

But the Founding Fathers knew about the failings of the Roman Republic.  They strived to avoid them in their Republic.  As a student of history I must say that they avoided the Roman pitfalls for 200 years.  Not bad at all.

Never mind that the Romans avoided these for almost 500 years.  God Save this Honorable Republic.

Ray Charles - America The Beautiful

Alternate title: how The United States accidentally committed suicide.

Co-blogger and Brother-From-Another-Mother ASM826 and I have had a number of conversations lately about how when we both started blogging 15 years ago, we still had hope.  Yes, I cribbed the alternate title from histories of Rome, but there's a fateful dynamic at play today that mirrors what played out back then.

In 400 AD, Rome stood tall.  Sure, there were problems, but Rome was the only super power. 76 years later, it no longer existed.*  It was simply unable to respond effectively to the barbarian invasions - the problem wasn't a military one, it was structural.  The Legions were still strong, but the ruling elite could not use them effectively to keep the barbarians out.  You see, they didn't want to keep them out.

Barbarian hordes were an opportunity to various members of the elite.  The rewards of power and wealth to those at the top of the Roman Empire were so unbelievably vast that, well, a wandering barbarian horde might be able to be used to put somebody new on the throne.  And so the elites played 27 Dimensional Chess against each other until the Empire was overwhelmed.  What temporarily helped local Senators and Provincial Governors quite frankly led to the downfall of them all.  I'm looking at you, Constantine III.

And so to today.  The Ruling Class in this Republic is institutionally incapable of dealing with the problems facing the Republic because they don't want to.  Indeed, there is a dynamic at work: never let a crisis go to waste.  This has come about in a shockingly short time - twenty years or so.

But this happened to Rome as well.  Between 410 and 430 AD, the Eternal City itself was sacked and Spain and Africa were lost to the Empire - and with them went the tax revenue that had supported the Legions.  Today we have a President who is a feeble-minded puppet; the Emperor Honorious was (at the time) compared to a jellyfish.

The grandeur that was America was very great indeed, but so was Roman grandeur.  Sic transit Gloria Mundi, and all that.

Entering this Independence Day weekend I wish I could be more optimistic.  I  leave you with a song from the dark days after 9/11, a reflection of a time when the grandeur of this Republic was great, even though the dynamic that has led us here was already formed.

America The Beautiful (Katharine Lee Bates, Samuel A. Ward):

Oh beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife
Who more than self, their country loved
And mercy more than life

America, America may God thy gold refine
'Til all success be nobleness
And every gain divined

Oh beautiful, for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain

America, sweet America
God shed his grace on thee
He crowned thy good, with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress,
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Oh beautiful for halcyon skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music hearted sea!

May God save this honorable Republic.

* Well, in the west, at least.

Things that make you go "hmmm"

Midterm elections are always bad for the President's party.  The only two exceptions in recent history prove this rule: 

• 2002 when the country was united after 9/11 and a blitzkreig special forces operation to remove the Taliban.  Does anyone think that this country is united?  Oh, and the contrast to the 2001/2002 Afghanistan war and Biden's botched pullout speaks for itself.
• 1998 when the economy was roaring and the GOP was making all sorts of noises about impeaching a popular President.  Is the economy roaring?  Is Biden popular/

Other than these two elections, you have to go all the way back to 1934 - in the midst of the Great Depression to find a midterm election where the President's party didn't get clobbered.

A President's popularity is a key factor here - see Bill Clinton in 1998.  Joe Biden is under water by double digits, and 75% of the country think that it's on the wrong track.

And yet Democrats did well last night.  They did very well.  Hmmmmm ...

UPDATE 9 NOVEMBER 2022 09:52:  Mike leaves a comment:

It looks like either the red side decided voting doesn't matter (possible after 2020, but wrong) or people are largely fine with how things are going. Either is depressing and gives little hope for the future.

But people aren't fine with how things are going.  As I pointed out, 75% of people say the country is on the wrong track.  The top issues (according to pollsters) were inflation/the economy and border security.  Both of these are pocketbook issues.  People continually report that their families are being hurt by these.  I guess it's possible that they all shrugged their shoulders and said "It's all good, brah" but this doesn't seem enormously likely to me.  It's another thing that makes you go "Hmmmm ..."

The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Divemedic has a must-read post about the coming Civil War, Innocent People Always Die: 

The civil war that both sides seem intent on having will be ugly. War isn’t a game where two sides engage in some football game where the players, rules, and boundaries are clearly defined. Americans think that war is some sort of game, a crucible where masculinity is defined. It isn’t. It’s messy. It won’t just be players getting targeted. The combatants will be targets. So will the people who deliver food. So will their families. Women. Children. The side who refuses to participate in that will lose.

He has a telling Civil War 1.0 example of how civilians were explicit targets, and I've written for a long time about how Billy Sherman was America's first war criminal:

Moving [south] from Yankeeland has made me realize the extent that the history of [The American War of Southern Independence*] as taught today consists of little more than red, white, and blue cardboard.

The events are disconnected in a quite striking manner.  Events just sort of happened, you see?  But since the desired outcome was reached, there's no sense in dwelling on things, and those that do are sore losers.

For example, the charming town where I reside includes a monument:

The concentration camps didn't start in Nazi Germany, or even the Boer War (as is often presented).  They began right here on these shores, started by one William T. Sherman's personal order.  But this is just an isolated event in the colorful cardboard history.

Only 2 of the deported woman returned after the war.  It's unclear whether the rest died or settled down elsewhere.  It seems that record keeping was poor or non-existent, and modern day historians are curiously comfortable with their red, white, and blue cardboard history of that era.

But art can pierce this veil, and allow us to view (if darkly) through the glass to see what civil war does to non-combatants.  I suspect that this song will need no introduction to most readers.  I also suspect it will attract the usual comment trolls saying that the folks living in southwest Virginia "had it coming".  A lot of people are happily ignorant of the true causes of that war and have no intention of doing anything about that ignorance.  That same ignorance is seen in Divemedic's post describing what is propelling us at Flank Speed towards Civil War 2.0.

May God save this Honorable Republic.  At this point it looks like only He can.  I sure hope that Bismark was right that the Lord looks after fools, drunks, and The United States of America.

* It wasn't a "Civil War" because the south didn't want to conquer the north.  "The War Between The States" is unspecific as to motive.  Thus, "The American War of Southern Independence" which tells you everything you need to know about the causes of the conflict.

Tab clearing

Here's a selection of what I've been looking at.  There's no connection other than I found each fascinating, even if I don't agree 100% with all points.

John Michael Greer (the artist formerly known as The Arch Druid) looks at the Georgia Guidestones (recently blown up) and connects them to Klaus Schwab and his Great Reset - and brings ancient Mycenae along for the ride.  Here's a flavor from a loong and thoughtful post recommending some modesty from today's "elites".  I expect he will be disappointed by their lack of humility moving forward:

Grant for a moment that modern American society crashes to ruin over the next few centuries, following the usual trajectory of civilizations on their way to history’s compost heap. Grant that the decline and fall has the usual effects: population drops to 5% or so of the precollapse peak, most technology and information resources are lost, literacy becomes a rare skill, and a long and bitter dark age settles over the land. The people of that future time will use storytelling the same way every other illiterate culture has done—it’s apparently hardwired into human brains at this point, after so many generations of evolutionary selection in its favor. What stories will they tell about us?

If you think the stories in question will be the sort of thing that would allow us to preen our egos if we happened to hear them, think again.

The Bitter Centurion echos this in a very personal way.  If the "elites" think that they will be remembered as Gods they don't understand just how much people hate them today:

I've never truly hated anyone the way I hate these 'elites'. These corrupt politicians, corporate oligarchs, and central bankers. The people who have gotten obscenely rich and powerful on the backs of the regular, common folks who are constantly forced to do more with less just to provide for their families.

The entire globe is on the cusp of a Third World War with the Russians, not to mention the internal strife and turmoil in several nations around the world we are seeing as a result of this 'Build Back Better/ESG' bullshit, cooked up at the World Economic Forum. All the major conflicts and problems we are seeing in the world today, every single one of them, is entirely THEIR fault. It is all their doing.

Why can't America build anything?  Basically elites and government bureaucrats.

What Edward Gibbon got wrong about the fall of the Roman Empire.  This is a good overview but Gibbon really needed someone to take him aside when he started blaming it on Christianity.  After all, the Eastern Roman Empire was much more devoutly Christian than the Western portion and survived the West by a thousand years.  A millennium isn't exactly a rounding error, Eddie.

So why is Joe Biden so under water in the polls?

Russia -

The world’s largest exporter of wheat.

The world’s largest exporter of fertilizer.

The world’s largest exporter of natural gas.

The world’s second largest exporter of oil.

America -

The world’s largest exporter of LGBTQ+.

— RAMZPAUL (@ramzpaul) June 16, 2022

 

It's a real mystery,that's for sure.

Hat tip: Don Surber.

The most famous case of cross dressing in history

You've very likely heard something about this, although probably not put in these specific terms.  Back in ancient Rome, a man was caught disguised as a woman in the house of the Chief Priest (Pontifex Maximus) in Rome.  It was during a festival to honor the Good Goddess (Bona Dia), and the rite was strictly restricted to women only. Except Publius Clodius Pulcher was there, in drag.  It was said that he was there to seduce the wife of the Pontifex Maximus.

And who was the Pontifex Maximus?  Julius Caesar.

The story was a sensation in Rome.  The sacrilege led to the trial of Clodius, with none other than Cicero himself as prosecutor.  Cicero couldn't stand Clodius, and so went out of his way to seek a conviction.  Clodius was influential in Rome, which put Caesar in a delicate spot.  He was the (or a) wronged party, but as an up and comer he didn't want to alienate Clodius' supporters.  And so when Cicero put him on the stand to testify, he went all Stg. Schultz.

I wasn't there.  I didn't see anything.  I don't know what happened there.

Cicero was incredulous, because Caesar had divorced his wife after the incident.  He asked why, if nothing had happened, had be divorced her?

This is the part that you might have heard before.  Caesar replied: Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.

It was all fake, of course.  Caesar knew what had happened, or could have figured it out if he wanted it.  It was more convenient for his political plans to "not know" anything.  And adding to the fakery was his buddy Crassus and the jury tampering that took on epic - and entirely undisguised - proportions.

Clodius walked, because power and money talked.  Those without power and money were routinely convicted on trumped up charges.  Rome's constitution and institutions were in tatters.  Everyone knew that everything was fake, except for naked power.  30 years later the Roman Republic was gone, with Caesar's great nephew hailed by the Senate as Augustus, the first Roman Emperor.

Michael Sussmann also beat the rap.  The jury was tampered with in an epic - and entirely undisguised - manner.  America's Constitution and institutions are in tatters.  Those without power or money languish in prison without trial 18 months after what the rich and powerful called an "insurrection" - seemingly the first in history where none of the "insurrectionists" brought weapons to the "insurrection".

Fake.

Caesar's wife must be above suspicion, but if you have money and power in Washington D.C. you can pretty much do whatever you want.  We will see if a grateful Senate will welcome a strongman to end the civil war in thirty years' time, as did the Roman.

How to save public education

Kevin Baker - whose blog just celebrated its nineteenth blogoversary - has an uberpost about the dire state of education in this country.  You should go read the whole thing which lays out in detail (it's an uberpost, remember?) just how FUBAR'ed public education is on these shores.

It's an uberpost so it's impossible to excerpt, but Kevin's conclusion is what made me think:

The public school system cannot be reformed. I must be destroyed and the people in it must never have power over children again. 

Alas, destruction would be very difficult as there are too many vested interests at play here.  What we need to do it minimize the enemies our plan will make, and maximize the allies it will get.  I posted about this several years back, and still think that this plan has at least a fighting chance of getting through:

A modest proposal to prevent the fall of civilization

Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.

― Edward Gibbon

The Silicon Graybeard muses on the fall of civilization:

Over the years, I've said (and more often hinted) that what I see in the future is not just the chance of an economic collapse due to the world's unsustainable debt levels. I see a real chance for another Dark Ages. The main driving force there is the Postmodernists in academia pushing the idea of "my truth and your truth"; the idea that there isn't anything other than our perceptions of things. That works fine for simple questions like, "what's your favorite color?" but is completely wrong for "what's the speed of light?", "will this virus survive in air?" or any interactions with the real world. VDH follows those trends to the conclusion a Dark Age may already be starting.

When civilization falls, it falls hard.  We hear mostly dry statistics about the collapse of civilization, things like the population of Rome in 100 AD was around a million people.  That's impossible to visualize.  Instead, we should look at this:

Immagine gentilmente concessa da Wikipedia

This is Monte Testaccio in Rome.  It is a hill made entirely of broken pottery, and it dates to the first and second centuries AD.  It's over 100 feet high, around a kilometer around, and historians think that it used to be much larger but has eroded over the last two millennia.  The Roman "bread and circuses" was a huge welfare project that fed much of the city's population, and which required huge imports of not just grain but also olive oil - over a million gallons of oil each year, every year, for hundreds of years.  The oil was shipped in big clay pots, but what do you do with the pots when you've distributed the oil?  The Romans were the best engineers until at least the eighteenth century, and so they came up with an engineering solution: they made a mountain out of broken up pots.

And then it all fell, and fell so far and hard that it was forgotten.  The Roman Forum itself - the political center of the Ancient World for centuries - became a cow field, the Campo Vaccino:

Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino by J.M.W. Turner, painted in 1839

It's been said that any system can survive only three generations before facing crisis. The first generation is the generation that created the system. They knew it intimately. The second generation saw the system being created, and so at least understood its main functions and how they worked. The third generation inherited the system. They may or may not know anything at all about how it works.

If this is a system created by the government - and remember that government is politics - then politics will be the main thing that we can expect the third generation to understand.  NASA is an excellent example of this dynamic: the generation that won World War II created it.  They landed a man on the Moon and returned him safely to the Earth, all in that decade.  The generation that followed watched that.  They were able to make a Space Shuttle and a Mars Rover.  Now NASA is in the third generation and the Space Launch System is pushing a decade late and $20B over budget, all while offering less capability than SpaceX at ten times the price.  But hey, a Senator is happy so it's all good, amirite?

This Republic has a population that is observably more stupid than when I wore a younger man's shoes. This isn't just get offa my lawn ranting, it's a measurable fact:

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), test scores for 17 year olds have not improved since the early 1970s. That is, the average 17 year old in 2012 got about the same score in reading and math (287 and 306, respectively) as a 17 year old in 1971 or 1973 did (285 and 304, respectively). 

The response from professional educators?

Carr argues that flat scores aren’t terrible. “It’s a good thing that they’re not going down,” she said.

Well okay, then.  This is the same time period when per-pupil spending on K-12 education has skyrocketed:

If anything, this understates the scope of the problem: there is lots of discussion about how incoming college students can't read or do math very well, and so they have to take remedial course (and take on student debt while doing so) before they can start what would otherwise be their studies.

Note that this discussion has been about the portion of the public education system that is arguably working; it doesn't work at all in the inner cities.  None of Baltimore's schools graduate students who can do mathematics, and Atlanta's school system had a huge scandal where test scores were massively manipulated so that administrators could get their incentive bonus.  People went to jail for that, but the system is no better almost a decade later.

In short, the more government has gotten itself into education, the dumber the population has gotten - and at fabulous expense.  The system is broken, and since it's a government system (in which politics is uber alles) it will not reform itself.  Further, the public education system is generally popular throughout the land, so the normal political process will be useless for reform.

And so the Republic slouches towards the Campo Vaccino.  The third generation will lead to a fourth, and as Graybeard fears, a new Dark Age approaches.

Immodestly, I believe that there is a solution.  It's one that will improve performance, reduce costs, and be politically acceptable to large portions of the voters.  The Department of Education can issue a rule saying that if a public school system does not issue vouchers allowing parents to send their children to the school of their choice, that the Department will withhold education grants to that school system equal to the average per-pupil cost in that district.  The Department will then issue an Income Tax credit to the parents for that amount.  The Department will provide a free home schooling curriculum and teaching materials for free with the tax credit.

Simples.  No fuss, no muss.  It may even be that the Education Department can do this without any action of Congress.  I Am Not A Lawyer, but Congress has granted a huge amount of authority to the Regulatory State.

So why do I think that this is politically possible when the Teacher's Unions and Democratic Party (but I repeat myself) will fight this to the death?  Consider:

• Vouchers are popular among blacks and hispanics and have been for a long time.  This makes sense, as its their kids who are locked into failing school districts.  You don't get much more White Privilege than mandatory public schools.
• Tax Credits allow stay-at-home Moms to school their kids if they want.  Home schooling three kids at an average tax credit of around $12,000 per kid is the equivalent of a pre-tax job paying around $50,000/year.  Politically, this will play very well with women.
• We can expect this to be especially popular with black and hispanic women.  No doubt some upper middle class white women will complain that these women of color cannot be trusted to educate their children but we can dismiss this as veiled racism, and the women certainly can't do any worse than the current inner-city schools are doing.  At the very worst, the money wouldn't be going to an impenetrable education bureaucracy but rather directly to voters.
• Public schools will have to do a better job, at a lower cost.  Competition will focus on results, rather than on a politicized curriculum.

Now what's interesting about this is that politically this would hurt democrats and help republicans.  However, the people who think that politics doesn't enter into the public education system shouldn't concern themselves about, well, politics entering into the public education system.  And anyway, since government is politics, a better  description of "public education" is "government education", leading to "political education".

This is no panacea against the New Dark Age.  However, it puts resources in the hands of parents who presumably care more about their kids than a set of bureaucrats.  Eliminating all the nonsense permeating the schools (hello, Critical Race Theory!) will let teachers and parents focus on reading and math and you know, education.

What happens when tens of millions of Americans become convinced that elections are shams?

I don't know the answer to that, but I dare say that we're likely to find out. 

Peter posts a review of the documentary 2000 Mules that lays out in gory detail how the election of 2020 was stolen.  It's hard to argue with his conclusions.

Adaptive Curmudgeon compares and contrasts the 80:1 long shot that won the Kentucky Derby with the election of 2020.  This is the key bit:

Let me repeat this known and undeniable fact because it’s important; I could watch the Kentucky Derby and see every damn hoofbeat frame by frame if I wish. But during an American election campaign 51 “intelligence experts” all collectively lied. One single event like that would ruin horseracing pari-mutuel betting for decades and yet we watched it happen in a presidential election. This was not one or two bad apples. It’s 51 of the motherfuckers. They all lied. I can’t get 51 people to agree on the best pizza topping but the press got 51 of them to sign their names on the record to an actual verifiable lie.

...

I could go on. I could link ten times as many images and endless bits of evidence and statistical anomalies. You’ve seen the same information as me. You’ve seen the images. You watched the vote tally change enormously in the middle of the night. You saw the vote counting stop in the middle of the night and then restart with vastly different results. You’ve seen the vote count charts. You’ve seen the mule videos. You’ve seen the Hunter Biden photos. You read the same Time magazine article.

Does any of that sound, look, or smell like the Kentucky Derby race?

Larry Correia posted a former auditor's impression of the election immediately after results were announced in November 2020.  His conclusion was pretty chilling:

I can say without hesitation though, that fuckery is afoot, and if an actual real investigation happens they’ll be able to prove it. Only this is politics, so who knows. The only thing I do know for certain is that this election is so fucked up it is just going to make America’s two halves hate each other even more. [My emphasis - Borepatch]

The United States was never a democracy: it was intentionally set up as a representative Republic.  For much of its history it was a plutocracy (government by the rich).  We managed to survive those times because growth trickled down to the masses.  That hasn't been true this last 50 years, but the rich still use their control of the Organs of the State to keep themselves in the money.

Everyone else?  Well if you live in Youngstown Ohio, or Leominster Mass, or Detroit Michigan at least the fentanyl is cheap.

But look at that bit from Larry Correia that I highlighted.  We're on that trajectory.  It looks something like this:

2008 - John McCain screws up and puts an actual populist on the ticket as his running mate.  Sara Palin's winking and sense of humor and unabashed normalcy almost won him the election before the Powers That Be reined her in.

2010 - the Tea Party rallied in their millions, but were polite and picked up their trash when they were done.

2012 - the IRS illegally abused the Tea Party and other conservative groups.  We know that they think it was illegal because Lois Lerner (head of the office that did this) pled the Fifth.  Of course she has rights, and cannot be compelled to offer incriminating testimony against herself.  The fact that she thought that this might happen is enough to convince me that she knew she committed a crime.  The Powers That Be got her off.  Oh, and the IRS apologized later.  After the election, of course, but no blood no foul, amirite?

2016 - Donald Trump shocks the world by beating Hillary Clinton.  He was the equivalent of a late entry 80:1 shot at the Kentucky Derby.  Quite frankly, he was the only candidate (other than Bernie Sanders) who spoke to those voters in Youngstown and places like that.  And suddenly they found their paychecks bought them more than they had a year ago - for the first time in 30 years.  

But Trump was brash and said mean stuff, so the Powers That Be did the hoodoo they doo so well in the 2020 election.  And here we are with gasoline costing twice what it used to and stores running out of baby formula.

So what is that hypothetical voter in Youngstown going to think?  Go back and look at that quote from Larry Correia: it is just going to make America’s two halves hate each other even more.

The American Plutocracy is acting like they think they will never face any consequences.  They are acting like they can push anyone around and do anything to anyone at any time.  I do not believe that they have thought about what our hypothetical voter in Youngstown wants.

For our hypothetical Youngstown man, he may think that the problem is that Trump wasn't mean enough.  And he's very unlikely to be alone in that thought.

God save this Honorable Republic.

I think I've seen this movie before

Via Insty, new poll shows Biden losing to Trump by double digits in 2024:

“A majority of voters think President Joe Biden shouldn’t seek reelection in 2024, and he would lose a rematch with former President Donald Trump by double-digit margins,” read the early analysis of the Rasmussen Reports poll sponsored by the Heartland Institute.

That's very sweet, but has the Heartland Institute been asleep for the last two years?  Trump could beat Biden by 100% and Biden would get re-elected.  Math is hard, amirite?  Especially when people cheat.

But everybody vote harder next time!

This is the most important blog I've read since The Archdruid Report

Dominic Cummings has a substack where he posts the most insightful musings that I've read since I ran across The Archdruid Report back in 2016.  His post about how to reboot the Government Agencies is an absolute must-read. 

He is very thoughtful, and probes deeply.  I think his criticism of Donald Trump is mostly fair:

And Trump showed:

1. He does not understand power in Washington.

2. He doesn’t have a CEO mindset or skillset in the Bezos/Gates/Jobs/Musk sense of being able to execute at scale and speed.

3. Like Boris Johnson, his insecurities mean he can’t face his lack of skills and trust/empower anyone to build the team to run the administration for him.

4. He has some showman skills, a good nickname game and a sporadically good twitter game. But like Johnson, he prefers to spend his time babbling about and at the media rather than the (often mind-numbing) problems of institutions and incentives you need to focus on to change big things.

This combination meant Trump made a lot of noise but got very little done.

He could not control the government. He was sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes idiotic, often right in his complaints that the media were lying, but very little he said mattered because his words did not connect to power. He annoyed the swamp but he couldn’t drain the swamp — not the tiniest corner.

This is a very short overview of his thoughts on what would avoid these pitfalls:

So, the most important thing for the next GOP candidate and their team to appreciate is this: if you want to have a serious effect, if you want to have a chance of dealing with serious crises, if you want to bend the arc of culture rather than just have a cool-sounding job, then you should generally not be trying to ‘take over the institutions and run them’, you should not develop a traditional ‘reform’ agenda, instead, like Lincoln and FDR, you need to be the once-every-~70 years sort of a President who actually controls the government.

This means appointing people to many parts of DC not to ‘reform’ the department/agency but to close it while someone else runs the startup to replace it (if it needs replacing) operating on completely different legal and management principles and staffed by completely different sorts of people. This does not of course mean closing everything — there are parts of the regime that can carry on pretty much as before — it means closing and reopening those parts necessary to control the important parts of government, such as the Pentagon.

 Highly, highly recommended, even though it is a very long - dare I say Borepatchian? - post.

Hat tip to Isegoria, who finds the most interesting stuff.

What I would do if I were Xi Jinping

Here's what I would do if I were Xi.  I'd invade Taiwan.

Consider: America is weaker and more divided that it has been for 50 years.  A weak, divided America is likely what Xi will see as being in China's best interests.

Consider also: NATO will find itself strained in any response, because it has sent so much equipment to Ukraine that it might not have a lot left to send to Taiwan.  NATO seems to want to keep the pressure on Russia, to bleed Putin and get regime change.  NATO will either be distracted from Taiwan, or will have to give up their dreams of different rulers in the Kremlin.  It may take NATO long enough to figure out what to do that the Taiwan invasion becomes a fait accompli. Advantage: China.

Consider also [2]: A June or July invasion will likely wrap up before the elections in November.  Losing Taiwan (after a pretty disastrous  response to Ukraine and a completely disastrous pullout from Afghanistan) will likely contribute to a rout of the Democrats in the election.  Big GOP Congressional majorities will further weaken Biden.  A weakened Biden is likely what Xi will see as being in China's best interests.

Consider also [3]: Even if a strong Republican gets elected to the White House in 2024, that will be 2 years after the fact, allowing China to consolidate/reintegrate Taiwan.  It will be hard to put that toothpaste back in the bottle.

The downside is looking like an aggressor in public.  Perhaps the biggest fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the prospect of Finland and Sweden joining NATO out of a sense of needing help against the Russian bear.  You could see something similar with India, Indonesia, Philippines, Korea, and Japan joining together in an anti-China bloc.  My take is that Xi doesn't care - China has never been expansionist outside of China (and they absolutely see Taiwan as part of China).  The domination they seek is economic, not military, and since the hypothetical Asian bloc would never be able to invade the homeland, this is likely not much of a consideration.  Also, if America and NATO are weakened then there may not be a credible alternative to China in Asia.

So the downsides are low, the benefits to China are likely high, and both of these could very well change in the next two (or even one) year.  The iron is hot, right now.  Timing will probably never be more in China's favor than now.

This is maybe a good time to short Taiwanese stocks.

The restoration of the Republic

In my sixth and seventh consulships, when I had extinguished the flames of civil war, after receiving by universal consent the absolute control of affairs, I transferred the republic from my own control to the will of the senate and the Roman people. 

- Caesar Augustus, Res Gestae 34

The Res Gestae Divi Augustus was Imperial Roman propaganda, commissioned personally by Augustus to put out his side of the story of his reign.  In it, he declares that he restored the Roman Republic, torn after a century of bloody civil war.  Well, that's how it has been translated by historians.

Except the ancient Romans did not have the idea of a "Republic" as we know it.  Plato famously wrote a book called The Republic, although since he wrote in Greek it was actually called Politeia. Translated into Latin as De Republica, Plato's politeia bears no resemblance to any modern concept of a Republic so we should not be surprised that the Romans didn't really understand notions of bicameral legislatures and all that.

Translations are funny things.  A better translation of politeia might be "the body politick" - this expression was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  It ran a wide range of options, from individual democracy (as in ancient Athens) to tyranny (rule by a Tyrant, or dictator).  Check your concept of "Republic" at the door.

Likewise with Caesar Augustus, who unsurprisingly did not speak English nor have an Ivy League education.  He used the term res publica, not Republic.  Res publica is notoriously hard to translate because the translations come out clumsy but more accurate, or graceful but less accurate.  It combines government, the economy, public morality, and the happiness of the people.  You see why it is so hard to translate.

So when Augustus restored the res publica, he did not mean at all that he "restored the Roman Republic".  But his propaganda was very much that he restored things to the way they were supposed to be, before all that nasty civil war stuff.

This may be our future.  Our Res Publica is in pretty bad shape, and getting worse.  It very well may take things getting very bad indeed until someone with the right marketing and messaging "restores the American Republic".  What it will look like is anyone's guess, but Augustus' model was an entirely new one that was very carefully draped in the cloak of the Old Ways.

I wrote about this a long time ago: The Fifth American Republic:

If we were going to vote ourselves out of this, we would have done it 60 years ago.  But even then, it wasn't really America.  Moldbug yet again:

By my count, Anglophone North America ex Canada is on its fifth legal regime. The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.

Of course, all these coups are confirmed by the principle of adverse possession. Otherwise we would find ourselves looking for the rightful heirs of Metacom, or Edward the Confessor, or whoever. Nor is there any automatic reason to treat any of these five regimes as better or worse than any of the others. If, like me, you're tired of the Fourth Republic and would like to see it abolished, all we know about its successor is that it will be the Fifth Republic. It has no need to resemble the Third, the Second or the First. 

We snicker at the French, always rewriting their Constitution.  We gloss over that our Constitution has been a "living document" at least since the time of James Polk.  At least the French had the decency to write their changes down in public.

Archaeologists unearth layers of detritus, reconstructing ancient living patterns from the cast off, scattered rubble.  Similarly, we can observe the layers of parasitic attachment to the Res Publica.  RTWT, all of the links.

And so Obama is a commie, as it Mitt Romney, George Bush major, and Eisenhower.  Non-commies (Sarah Palin [and Donald Trump - Borepatch]) are fiercely excluded from the political Great Game.  What's different is that information flow now is possible outside of the political and intellectual elite.  The perceived legitimacy of this class is now at a historic low.  How will it end?

Who can tell?  But one thing is clear - it cannot continue as it is, with the Elite papering over the cracks with increasingly low caliber drivel.  The Republic waits, expectantly.  Maybe it will just be a higher caliber drivel.

Or maybe it will be Peace.

 

The problem with our Military leadership, in a single picture

Zerohedge has an article about how NATO Supreme Commander Gen. Tod Wolters had to walk back Biden's comments on Ukraine.  That's embarrassing, but the photo of Gen. Wolters caught my eye:

Man, that's a lot of ribbons.  Here they are in expanded form (via Wolter's Wikipedia page):

That's thirty-four ribbons by my count, plus Pilot and Basic Space Operations badges.  Now compare with a different General who only had ten ribbons after a longer career:

It makes you wonder which General had the more impressive career, doesn't it?  (Actually, it doesn't).

Our Navy ships are covered with rust and keep running into huge container ships in an empty Pacific ocean, we evacuated Afghanistan while leaving tens of thousands behind - after losing a 20 year war), the Military spends more time on correct pronoun use than on actual warfighting training.  A fish rots from the head.

Let them hate, so long as they fear

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.

Why Joe Biden is in trouble

John Michael Greer looks at the bumbling and incoherence seen from the current Administrations and ponders how they can be so incompetent.  It's the Soviet Union all over again, where ideology is everything and results nothing:

The more tightly you focus your educational system on a set of approved abstractions, and the more inflexibly you assume that your ideology is more accurate than the facts, the more certain you can be that you will slam headfirst into one self-inflicted failure after another. The Soviet managerial aristocracy never grasped that, and so the burden of dealing with the gap between rhetoric and reality fell entirely on the rest of the population. That was why, when the final crisis came, the descendants of the people who stormed the Winter Palace in 1917, and rallied around the newborn Soviet state in the bitter civil war that followed, simply shrugged and let the whole thing come crashing down.

We’re arguably not far from similar scenes here in the United States, for the same reasons: the gap between rhetoric and reality gapes just as wide in Biden’s America as it did in Chernenko’s Soviet Union. When a ruling class puts more stress on using the right abstractions than on getting the right results, those who have to put up with the failures—i.e., the rest of us—withdraw their loyalty and their labor from the system, and sooner or later, down it comes.

We've seen this play out before.

I Meme to misbehave, Kyle Rittenhouse edition

I got these from a fellow Deplorable.

 

And now that we have the acquittal ...

Prepping on steriods

There's building stockpiles of food and supplies to get you through bad times, and then there's building a collection of technologies and machines that can help you keep civilization going if things really get bad.  The Global Village Construction Set is a set of open source designs for the 50 machines most critical to keeping civilization functional.  Some of these are things that I quite frankly would not have thought about - like the compressed earth brick press which costs $4000 for the materials and which can make 6 blocks per minute.

They have designs for a tractor, a 3D printer, a backhoe, a rototiller, and many others.  Essentially, this is a set of plans for low cost machines you can use to reboot civilization.  Impressive.