The Anti-Gnostic

Moving day

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 00:23:00 +0000

I have decided to start posting at wordpress.com. The blogspot site is getting infested with spam and I'm getting tired of the format. Readers have mentioned that they would like to see me posting again and I intend to do so. It’s an invigorating time and the world remains as determined as ever to provide me with material. Comments have been closed. Please visit me at anti-gnostic.com.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

The Camp of the Saints

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 31 Mar 2018 17:42:00 +0000

Steve Sailer calls it the March to Re-elect Trump.

For five days now hundreds of Central Americans — children, women, and men, most of them from Honduras — have boldly crossed immigration checkpoints, military bases, and police in a desperate, sometimes chaotic march toward the United States. Despite their being in Mexico without authorization, no one has made any effort to stop them.
Organized by a group of volunteers called Pueblos Sin Fronteras, or People Without Borders, the caravan is intended to help migrants safely reach the United States, bypassing not only authorities who would seek to deport them, but gangs and cartels who are known to assault vulnerable migrants.

Is anybody funding Pueblos Sin Fronteras? That might be an interesting question.

When they get to the US, they hope American authorities will grant them asylum or, for some, be absent when they attempt to cross the border illegally. More likely is that it will set up an enormous challenge to the Trump administration’s immigration policies and its ability to deal with an organized group of migrants numbering in the hundreds.

I hope American authorities will stop them in their tracks and tell them to go to Belize, Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, or other countries where they won't have to learn a new language and the culture is much more amenable to their ethnography.

Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are tragic, insufferable places that can't govern themselves. Their quasi-fascist militaries can't do it. The imperialists around whose holdings all these borders got drawn around are gone. The Catholic bishops in Central America are silent about all the natural conservatives leaving their dioceses to get away from all the other natural conservatives and apparently hope they make it north to go be somebody else's problem.

The alternatives at this point are to either let these people stew in their failing countries there or have them stew in dreary apartment complexes or trailer parks here, where they can provide cheap labor and customers for social media and the title pawn industry. In a few years, we can start giving them student loans. Realtors, who make a good living turning over school districts, will get a shot in the arm.

Personally, I think it's time for my Modest Proposal of selling countries to billionaires and telling them they have to run them. After all, they already own numerous, influential non-profits and government bonds.

Please click on the links. It's been an educational morning.

On Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 11 Mar 2018 14:27:00 +0000

Democracy means keeping the borders open until the people get it right.

"We've been far too permissive to countries that have slipped away from democracy." @BrookingsInst's Robert Kagan sets the scene during the opening day of #BrusselsForum. Full remarks here: https://t.co/zKslIl0LwJ pic.twitter.com/AafVPoFYUH
— German Marshall Fund (@gmfus) March 8, 2018

On what is real

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Mar 2018 16:31:00 +0000

Idealism is delusion, and delusion equals damage. Three lessons:

1. Sex Change: Physically Impossible, Psychosocially Unhelpful, and Philosophically Misguided

Contrary to the claims of activists, sex isn’t “assigned” at birth—and that’s why it can’t be “reassigned.” As I explain in my book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, sex is a bodily reality that can be recognized well before birth with ultrasound imaging. The sex of an organism is defined and identified by the way in which it (he or she) is organized for sexual reproduction...
Male and female organisms have different parts that are functionally integrated for the sake of their whole, and for the sake of a larger whole—their sexual union and reproduction. So an organism’s sex—as male or female—is identified by its organization for sexually reproductive acts. Sex as a status—male or female—is a recognition of the organization of a body that can engage in sex as an act.

That organization isn’t just the best way to figure out which sex you are; it’s the only way to make sense of the concepts of male and female at all. What else could “maleness” or “femaleness” even refer to, if not your basic physical capacity for one of two functions in sexual reproduction?

The conceptual distinction between male and female based on reproductive organization provides the only coherent way to classify the two sexes. Apart from that, all we have are stereotypes.

"Transgenderism" shouldn't even be up for debate. Nobody has ever explained in scientific terms how a female Mind gets implanted in a male Body because, in the first instance, nobody has ever applied scientific methodology to transgenders to see if Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner's Brain is observably female. Transgender advocates bridge the gap by detaching the social construct of gender from sex. But if gender is a social construct, why do transgenders adopt the purportedly superficial affects of the opposite sex in order to achieve what is supposedly real? Women chop off their breasts, grow beards with the aid of synthetic testosterone, put on pants, and proceed to announce themselves as "male." Men adopt the female names which were popular when they were adolescents, manicure the nails on their large hands, get silicone implants, and put on dresses. The surgery is a lot more graphic so I'll stop there. The result per the linked article is what anybody should expect: damaged people become increasingly dysfunctional, drop out of healthy society, commit suicide.

2. MS-13 is ‘taking over the school,’ one teen warned before she was killed.

The Dec. 6 arrests of Rivera and four others thwarted what police say would have been the sixth murder of a Brentwood High School student by MS-13 in less than two years.

But the incident also shook the school for another reason.

All but one of those arrested attended Brentwood, according to Suffolk County police. Three were unaccompanied minors who had been caught at the border and then placed in the community by a federal refugee program...
Sanchez, the school district safety director, said MS-13 had long been overshadowed by gangs like the Bloods and Latin Kings.

“The last couple of years, when we had the unaccompanied children coming, that’s when we saw the change,” he said. By providing vulnerable newcomers with a sense of belonging, MS-13 “became a powerhouse.” A deadly one.

First, a former Brentwood student was fatally shot by the gang in November 2015, police say. Then Brentwood students began to go missing. A 15-year-old Ecuadoran named Miguel Garcia-
Moran vanished one February evening.

Two months later, Oscar Acosta, a 19-year-old Salvadoran, left home to play soccer and never returned. And in June 2016, Jose Peña-Hernandez, 18, a suspected MS-13 member, disappeared, too.

Three missing immigrant teens didn’t draw much attention to Brentwood. But that would change with the killings of Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens.

Kayla, a basketball player from a Puerto Rican family, had first clashed with MS-13 two years earlier at Brentwood’s Freshman Center, where gang members spat on her, stole or broke her things and taunted her, according to her mother’s lawsuit.

Things escalated in summer school, when an MS-13 member threatened her with a knife, then continued to attend Brentwood High, the lawsuit says.

“She used to tell me, ‘Ma, they are taking over the school. It’s like they’re everywhere,’ ” said Evelyn Rodriguez, who has become the face of MS-13 victims.

Rodriguez said she and her daughter reported the bullying to school administrators, who promised the knife-wielding student wouldn’t be allowed back. But when Kayla, 16, who had exchanged online taunts with MS-13, showed up for classes that fall, he was still there, the lawsuit alleges.

After a confrontation at Brentwood, federal prosecutors say, MS-13 put a “greenlight” — or kill order — on Kayla, and members made a “throat slicing gesture” toward her at school, the lawsuit says.

A week later, she was walking home one evening with Nisa, a basketball teammate one day shy of her 16th birthday, when MS-13 members spotted them and attacked with a machete and baseball bats, according to prosecutors. The girls were beaten to death.

What's this--immigrants not raining trillion dollar bills down on the sidewalks, doing the brutal, bloodthirsty jobs Americans just won't do? And kids these days. Well first, they're not "children" except in the addled heads of nanny-state bureaucrats, and second, they are products of a violent, r-selected milieu unthinkingly plopped down in an open, high-trust, K-selected society. The nanny state, unswerving in its belief of basic human equality, is unable to draw distinctions. Discipline and the ministrations of earnest bureaurats must be applied uniformly to the merely rambunctious and the low-g savage alike.

3. The 'American Century' Is Over, and It Died in Syria.

These events do more than simply demonstrate that the Syrian conflict remains an appalling humanitarian catastrophe. More significantly, Syria is the nexus for the destabilizing trends that are thrusting the entire global order into crisis.

That order was originally created after World War II, but it reached its full flowering and ambition after the fall of the Soviet Union. The post-Cold War era was characterized by widespread hopes that the forces of order and civilization were finally defeating those of aggression and inhumanity; that democracy was becoming truly universal; that great-power competition had vanished; and that the danger of major war was receding further than ever before. Nearly three decades later, however, the heady optimism of that period has given way to a darker set of trends, all of which are at work in Syria.

Begin with the obvious: Syria represents an assault on the very idea of moral progress. But it's not alone. Around the globe, longstanding legal and ethical norms are being eroded, and the world is being dragged back to a more ruthless, less-enlightened age. China, which may have a ruler-for-life, is chipping away at freedom of navigation in the Western Pacific; Russia has shattered the taboo against wars of aggression and conquest in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Oh the effrontery of these, people, rejecting Our Order, put in place by America, Britain, and France as if the End of History had finally been reached and all policy debate concluded forever. Search the linked article in vain for any hint of pragmatic thinking. Syria--the Middle East--is an extraordinarily complicated place whose modern States have only been around since 1945 (Year Zero, per the author). The ideologues simply cannot imagine that processes dreamed up on this side of the Hajnal lines might not be the best fit for a region molded by generations of Islam, polygamy, and cousin-marriage. For that matter, is there any doubt that any serious rebellion in the US would end with everybody in entire city blocks blasted into a pink mist? By the way, Syria was one prognostication I got completely wrong. Syria has not devolved into three States; the majority of Syrians believe in modern Syria. As for Russia and China, they are serious, mature countries with their own national interests. The belief that America knows best from the Ukraine to the Middle East to the South China Sea and that other sovereigns in an anarchic system will forever agree that nothing has changed since 1945 is pure hubris.

So, from transgenderism to immigration to foreign policy we see the effects of prioritizing delusion over reality, and delusion equals damage, from psychosocial human wrecks to teenagers beaten and hacked to death to entire countries blown up. Why don't we focus on the real? To return to the first author above,

While the current findings of medical science, as shown above, reveal poor psychosocial outcomes for people who have had sex-reassignment therapies, that conclusion should not be where we stop. We must also look deeper for philosophical wisdom, starting with some basic truths about human well-being and healthy functioning. We should begin by recognizing that sex reassignment is physically impossible. Our minds and senses function properly when they reveal reality to us and lead us to knowledge of truth. And we flourish as human beings when we embrace the truth and live in accordance with it. A person might find some emotional relief in embracing a falsehood, but doing so would not make him or her objectively better off. Living by a falsehood keeps us from flourishing fully, whether or not it also causes distress.

This philosophical view of human well-being is the foundation of a sound medical practice. Dr. Michelle Cretella, the president of the American College of Pediatricians—a group of doctors who formed their own professional guild in response to the politicization of the American Academy of Pediatrics—emphasizes that mental health care should be guided by norms grounded in reality, including the reality of the bodily self. “The norm for human development is for one’s thoughts to align with physical reality, and for one’s gender identity to align with one’s biologic sex,” she says. For human beings to flourish, they need to feel comfortable in their own bodies, readily identify with their sex, and believe that they are who they actually are. For children especially, normal development and functioning require accepting their physical being and understanding their embodied selves as male or female.

Unfortunately, many professionals now view health care—including mental health care—primarily as a means of fulfilling patients’ desires, whatever those are.

I conclude with a religious reflection: the title of this blog corresponds with my conversion to Orthodox Christianity, itself an illumination, not an idealization, of the real World. We are fed physical bread and wine that become the Body and Blood of Christ. The old man born into sin is washed away in the waters of the world blessed by Christ with His own Baptism. The physical icons are windows to the Divine. Our churches have domes with an icon of Christ Pantocrator. The building is a physical representation of an infinite and God-ordered Universe. The architectural elements can be pointed to and their roles explained in the illustration of the Divine plan. The Faith is practiced not in abstract ideation but with physical compounds: water, oil, bread, wine, flame and smoke.

Ideology is toxic. Things should be kept real.

I have seen the Future and it is beautiful, bigots

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Mar 2018 20:52:00 +0000

These Are the Voyages of the Starship Diversity (From TAC):

Star Trek: Discovery, however, is not an optimistic vision of a re-imagined society. It is a didactic presentation of a peculiarly zeitgeist identity politics fully imagined and realized in the future. The vision is terrifying: characters are reduced to a diversity check box, thin, not fully-realized, and robotic.

No more so than the central character, the non-captain, Michael Burnham, a woman with a man’s name, adopted by mixed-species parents. She is the central lead and fulfills the function usually played by the captain: she calls the shots, uses renegade or maverick tactics, and demonstrates that little bit of extra Star Fleet magic (though nothing she ever does is that spectacular.) This captain who never sits in the captain’s chair is a critical and central element of the identity politics imagined here.

...

Even the heterosexual Ash Tyler (Shaza Latif), Captain Burnham’s former lover, is drippingly pathetic. His relationship style is entirely co-dependent, deriving his slim sense of identity from his relationship to Burnham. He offers nothing, often cries, and ends up murdering the gay doctor. In previous episodes of Star Trek, Tyler would be the relative non-entity in a red shirt that dies in episode two on a planetary excursion (of which there are almost none on Discovery). Here he survives to the season finale where, at last, he self-identifies as trans-Klingon having undergone a sexually abusive relationship and/or species reassignment surgery (we’re never quite told which). But we are happy he leaves with his abuser or surgeon, who is now female leader of the Klingon Empire—even this warrior caste have accepted the non-patriarchy.

Outside of a few PS4 games, Game of Thrones is about the only mass-entertainment product I've watched in at least 10 years. Apparently I haven't missed much.

To be fair to the writers, science fiction suffers from the general, non-political problem of Fermi's Paradox. There just doesn't seem to be anybody else out there, as if a Great Filter cuts the civilization off before interstellar travel. After a certain point of saturation, it's hard for people to remain compelled by a fantastic idea. Imagine trying to weave a compelling plot twist over the existence of phlogiston, or magic as in the now-shopworn Harry Potter universe. People watch Harry Potter to revel in the archetype of the good guy/foundling vs. the bad guys, not to admire Harry's skill at the Magickal Arts.

Speaking of phlogiston, there's a great sci-fi/alt-history story out there called "The World as We Know 't." The plot turns on the apocalyptic consequences which follow from an 18th century scientist's reliance on the phlogistonic theory of combustion. But the story works because of the very novelty of the concept to the modern reader. The plot compels by juxtaposing the anachronistic theory with unforgiving reality.

No such wry picaresque may soil the dignity of our Grand Unified Theory of Diversity, and the latest iteration of Star Trek is a jealous, status-obsessed matriarchy, and absurdly and unself-consciously so. Part of the problem is fundamental. The notion of a single much less dozens of sentient species out there doesn't have much hold on the popular imagination after millenia of, nobody else. The other is the sheer unreality and ignorance of human nature displayed by the writers. Jesus Christ tells parables drawn from reality. Aesop's Fables, Kipling's Just So Stories, Harris's Uncle Remus all use this device. Moderns have a great deal of cocooning between themselves and reality much less tradition, so there's just not much to draw on for our morality plays. This tells us something about the future of humans in super-affluent society: they become obsessed with status, and since heroism isn't required they elaborate on victimhood. So maybe Star Trek: Discovery isn't so fantastical after all.

I'm the kind of person who sees The Hunger Games and wonders why a society that can generate man-eating beasts out of the ground to make things exciting for athletes still has to rely on an impoverished, restive workforce shuffling off to the mines to dig up iron and coal.

One of these is a movie.
So when I hear tales about the glorious, pan-sexual future, my first reaction is to think that if the future belongs to those who show up, it will probably be more religious and patriarchal.

As for the Great Filter, my hypothesis is that civilizations eventually become incapable of maintaining the technology upon which they have become reliant.

Even Michael Oakeschott agrees with me

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 03:59:00 +0000

Remember him? Me neither. But apparently he made this point in 1947:

[Michael Oakeschott’s] very influential long form essay “Rationalism in Politics” (1947) ... argues against the Axiomatic Rationalism underlying various ideologies from Marxism to Libertarianism. The attempt to build a system of governance from the ‘ground up’ vis-à-vis axiomatic principles (e.g., the non-aggression principle, etc.) represents mankind’s vanity with regard to Reason’s potential, and is acted out through a reductionist scientism itself guided by a progressive assumption about an ever-improving Enlightenment Reason unfolding over over time.

The entire approach works under a one-sided version of Reason that is based largely (and sometimes entirely) on abstraction. Completely ignored is the innate and necessary incompleteness of our attempts to understand both ourselves (e.g., Nagel and McGinn and other ‘New Mysterians’ in philosophy of mind) and society writ large, let alone the chimera of building a utopian form of government that will continuously optimize our navigating human follies. Practical reason, and a more Aristotelian approach as well as Hobbesian approach, is ignored.

From Logical Meme.

Austin Bramwell, writing in American Affairs, describes this "principled conservatism" as, what else, a set of principles generally orbiting around ideals of individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise. Good stuff of course, but what the individual should be free to do, how big or how small the government should be, and whether I am free to sell pornography or have the government bail out my losses are up for debate. The principled conservative tries to square this circle with process: we write a Constitution that tells the government this far and no farther; wise and dignified judges scrutinize for Constitutional propriety; the best and brightest are sent by the rest of us to the capitals to protect the common weal. Well, at least I still have the Constitution.

Obviously principles, being pure abstractions, can't save principled conservatism since all it takes is enough people with different principles and more guns to make sure your principles end with your bullet-riddled corpse. This does not trouble the principled conservative as he becomes a stranger in his own land, has his sensibilities assaulted, and his children propagandized. With the detached assurance of the true fundamentalist he simply doubles down on his abstract beliefs even as their immanentization is rendered impossible. As Bramwell observes, "Principled conservatives ... love America only as an idea. They see nothing of tragedy in our politics and, through every setback, present always a cheerful face. Axiomatic conservatism yearns to outlast the very nation that made it possible." "Like characters in a gothic horror, principled conservatives are drawn more to the necrotic form of the country than to its living flesh."

Classical conservatism, by contrast, roots its ideals in a sociological context. Again Bramwell, citing Burke:

Burke’s view that liberty in America arose not from ideology or “abstract liberty” but from a fortuitous set of ethnic, religious, governmental, economic, educational, and geographical circumstances implied, negatively, that American liberty could not easily be replicated elsewhere. A quarter century after the Speech on Conciliation, Burke made that implication explicit in his most famous work. (Burke’s foes in the ensuing debate—the axiomatic Whigs of his day—accused him of jettisoning his principles, yet the consistency of the themes running through Burke’s work is unmistakable.) In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke affirmed his love for “a manly, moral, regulated liberty.” Yet Burke denied that he must praise liberty “as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” Liberty, he argued, must coexist with government, public enforcement, military command, taxation, morality, religion, property, order, and manners. Without these, Burke wrote, liberty is not a benefit but merely permits individuals to “do as they please.” The “manly, moral, regulated liberty” that Burke prized, and throughout his career defended, in short, has multiple, intersecting preconditions.

Axiomatic conservatives, by contrast, believe that liberty derives from ideology or systems of belief, which are easy to identify and easy to transmit. They assume away the context that, Burke thought, makes liberty possible in the first place. Burke, and his disciples up to the present day, hold that liberty is embedded within a particular institutional and sociological background. Just how fortuitous and singular one regards the Anglo-American and Western traditions of liberty will almost entirely determine whether one is an axiomatic, ideological conservative or instead a Burkean, classical conservative.

Trump, I'd observe, is a Burkean.

In sum, if you want to defend your principles you have to defend the people who thought them up and lived them in their geographic redoubt because after all, if you change the people, you change the place. If you want a conservative country, you have to grow conservatives: encourage marriage and childbearing over careers and libertine behavior, reduce the cost of housing, eliminate credentialism. Starve the universities, fire the bureaucrats, seal the border, give Christianity primacy in the public square and dare anybody to do anything about it. This is thankless and perhaps hopeless and even dangerous work for conservative politicians and public figures at this point.

The Think Tank Archipelago

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 17:30:00 +0000

The Gulag Archipelago was the term used by Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solshenitzyn to describe the secretive network of precincts, star-chambers and labor camps by which the Soviet government terrorized its own citizens. (Reminder: things like the "Secret Service" and the "Department of the Interior" mean very different things outside the US). I've borrowed the term for the network of think tanks, magazines, and political consulting firms that became much more noticeable with the 2016 Republican primary and general election. Z-Man calls them The Rackets. (Again, no copy-pasta, so you'll just have to click through). I was unaware of most of them until Trump started threatening to put the supposedly conservative GOP into actual power. Then all these people I never heard of came out of the woodwork to tell us Trump would grab your wives' cootches and put everybody in the camps and Russian troops would be sleeping on cots in the very White House.

When people squawk that hard, usually the real concern is not so much policy as loss of money or status. Jeb Bush lavished millions on people who couldn't tell him that the fly-overs don't want to be made strangers in their own country and don't care whether Jeff Bezos gets a few more million in tax savings to tack on to his multi-billion dollar net worth. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio ran expensive, hard-fought campaigns premised on the subtleties of Constitutional law and how awful it would be if we socialized medicine for anybody who's not employed by federal, state or local government, military or ex-military, and anybody who's not old or poor. (That leaves the rest of you to pick up the tab, schmucks).

I recall hearing the name Rick Wilson a lot in 2016, and wondering who in the world that was.

Apparently there's this whole industry of people who make a very good living off political consulting. I hadn't really thought about them at all until they started crawling out from under rocks in 2016. Political campaigns are scrupulously managed by an army of paid consultants. Then a blowhard like Trump comes along and tweets off his cellphone and rents arenas and gets the locals to volunteer the entertainment and spends an hour extemporaneously telling people what they want to hear. You don't need to pay anybody several million dollars to figure that out.

The related pundit and journalist classes have the same problem: their product is not particularly unique or arcane, and people are wondering why they ever paid for it. You can fork over your credit card information and wade through all the ads and pop-ups to sniff through George Will's precious droppings, or you can just type in anti-gnostic.blogspot.com. Or click on Sailer, or Z-Man, or anybody else in the blogroll, or thousands of others.

Trump and Trumpism threaten livelihoods and status of a large class of feeders, and this motivates the animus toward him as much as any actual policy. The Think Tank Archipelago subsists off favorable treatment under 501(c)(3) and tax-sheltered gifts from wealthy individuals. Naturally, therefore, the Archipelago broadcasts the sort of policies that keep the wealthy wealthy. It's also no coincidence that many of these entities are clustered in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic, near Washington D.C. Trump calls them The Swamp--a whole political-economic sector whose members rotate among government employment, government contracting, government lobbying, campaign consulting, and lecturing the rest of us via legacy media.

Bitcoin

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 15:02:00 +0000

From Investopedia:

What is 'Bitcoin Mining'
Bitcoin mining is the process by which transactions are verified and added to the public ledger, known as the block chain, and also the means through which new bitcoin are released. Anyone with access to the internet and suitable hardware can participate in mining. The mining process involves compiling recent transactions into blocks and trying to solve a computationally difficult puzzle. The participant who first solves the puzzle gets to place the next block on the block chain and claim the rewards. The rewards, which incentivize mining, are both the transaction fees associated with the transactions compiled in the block as well as newly released bitcoin. (Related: How Does Bitcoin Mining Work?)

BREAKING DOWN 'Bitcoin Mining'
The amount of new bitcoin released with each mined block is called the block reward. The block reward is halved every 210,000 blocks, or roughly every 4 years. The block reward started at 50 in 2009, is now 25 in 2014, and will continue to decrease. This diminishing block reward will result in a total release of bitcoin that approaches 21 million.

How hard are the puzzles involved in mining? Well, that depends on how much effort is being put into mining across the network. The difficulty of the mining can be adjusted, and is adjusted by the protocol every 2016 blocks, or roughly every 2 weeks. The difficulty adjusts itself with the aim of keeping the rate of block discovery constant. Thus if more computational power is employed in mining, then the difficulty will adjust upwards to make mining harder. And if computational power is taken off of the network, the opposite happens. The difficulty adjusts downward to make mining easier.

In the earliest days of Bitcoin, mining was done with CPUs from normal desktop computers. Graphics cards, or graphics processing units (GPUs), are more effective at mining than CPUs and as Bitcoin gained popularity, GPUs became dominant. Eventually, hardware known as an ASIC, which stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, was designed specifically for mining bitcoin. The first ones were released in 2013 and have been improved upon since, with more efficient designs coming to market. Mining is competitive and today can only be done profitably with the latest ASICs. When using CPUs, GPUs, or even the older ASICs, the cost of energy consumption is greater than the revenue generated.

I want to know if anybody has bought a car for 1 Bitcoin–maybe this is happening. Like Tyler Cowen says, the valuation seems to be a Mobius strip: Bitcoin is valuable because a lot of people think it's valuable.

What makes money valuable? The Austrians say its anticipated purchasing power, from which they conclude that only commodities originally valued for their own sake can function sustainably as money. This doesn’t seem right, since fiat money seems to function just fine for the foreseeable future, or maybe that’s just normalcy bias. I’ve also read the explanation that fiat money is backed by all the goods and services available for exchange, which strikes me as a way of saying it’s backed by the ability of market actors to compel its use as tender. Does Bitcoin have this ability and to what extent? The technology is way over my head, but my dim understanding is the relative scarcity is ironclad and the units are portable and divisible. Is it durable? Where do the bitcoins “exist” and can they be taken out with a well-placed EM pulse or hack? Or maybe they’re too diffuse for this to happen. If I print the code out on a piece of paper can I take my sheaf of papers to Publix and trade them for groceries?

Fundamentally, if all you end up with is a square of Python code derived from an increasingly difficult and eventually insoluble set of equations, then Bitcoin seems to be just a competing fiat currency. And if that’s the case, is Bitcoin a bet that the dollar will crash spectacularly–i.e., that the ability of the USG to compel the dollar’s acceptance as market tender will be severely curtailed? What are the odds on that bet? Pretty long from what I can see. I guess we’ll find out when we find out.

Anyway, the number of question marks probably indicates that at my level I have no business buying Bitcoin. So I’ll just resume standing by the side of the road here with my cardboard sign: “Will work for food.”

Bert gets his own post

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 13:04:00 +0000

Not this Bert:

This Bert:

Bert is a longtime fan. I can't tell much about him from his terse, grumpy comments but I appreciate his reading and participation in my tiny corner of the Internet. Reminder: if you comment, even if to grouse that I should post more and what about the Flynn indictment and what's this Orthodoxy crap, expect it to be published when I get around to reviewing it. I went to moderated comments--much against my grain--to handle a few people (perhaps the same one) posting fatuous, half-baked comments that warp the discussion as everybody chases down all the strawmen and question-begging. Not. Productive. Ideas matter but people matter more, and the Enlightenment is over so try to keep up.

Any way, to repeat my comment from the previous post, there seem to be four fundamental spheres in which people, including me, construct their worldview:

1. Spirituality/being (ontology, morality, purpose)
2. Nationhood/community (group identity and society)
3. Economics (hierarchy of needs)
4. Inter-personal relations (love, family, community, group dynamics)

I think that runs the gamut of human existence, and there's lots of overlap so the material is finite and the other limitation is my personal creativity and time. I'm more deductive than inductive so I don't post unless a particular event strikes a chord with me. If I did this for a living, you'd get more posts. Also, as commenter patrick kelly observes, truth is a broken record (for those of us who remember "records").

I am flattered and grateful to hear that my rants switch on some light bulbs. We are indeed in interesting times. Vox Popoli and Stefan Molyneux are big, concrete examples of the paradigm shift if you review their posts from way back to the present. Steve Sailer seems to be getting angrier as well. All the intellectual ferment is with the Alt-Right. You won't see it from public figures with mainstream gigs because they are paid not to offend.

I've gotten some interesting e-mails over the years so I'll set that up again. Thanks for reading and commenting.

Ghost dancing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 03:47:00 +0000

The Ghost Dance (Caddo: Nanissáanah, also called the Ghost Dance of 1890) was a new religious movement incorporated into numerous American Indian belief systems. According to the teachings of the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka (renamed Jack Wilson), proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits of the dead to fight on their behalf, make the white colonists leave, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Indian peoples throughout the region.

The basis for the Ghost Dance, the circle dance, is a traditional form that has been used by many Indian peoples since prehistoric times, but this new ceremony was first practiced among the Nevada Paiute in 1889. The practice swept throughout much of the Western United States, quickly reaching areas of California and Oklahoma. As the Ghost Dance spread from its original source, Indian tribes synthesized selective aspects of the ritual with their own beliefs.

The Ghost Dance was associated with Wilson's (Wovoka's) prophecy of an end to white expansion while preaching goals of clean living, an honest life, and cross-cultural cooperation by Indians. Practice of the Ghost Dance movement was believed to have contributed to Lakota resistance to assimilation under the Dawes Act. In the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890, United States Army forces killed at least 153 Miniconjou and Hunkpapa from the Lakota people. The Lakota variation on the Ghost Dance tended towards millenarianism, an innovation that distinguished the Lakota interpretation from Jack Wilson's original teachings.

There is a lot of ghost-dancing going on these days.

Conservatives chant the old mantras of limited government, low taxes, and THE CONSTITUTION (their ghost-shirt) to resurrect Ronald Reagan and drive the godless heathens into the sea. Liberals screech about “Nazism” and “fascism” (neither of which survived World War 2) and pine for a newer, darker Franklin Roosevelt to confiscate all the guns and turn us into a Scandinavian social democracy. Both are hilariously backward-looking and inapt. A government with over 300 million people to tax is not going to be limited, and I don't care what you write into its charter. Low taxes mean nothing when the government just prints all the money it needs. Social democracy only works, assuming it ever works, so long as you have more net producers than net consumers and everyone puts their shoulder to the wheel. We no longer have the demographics, the mean IQ, or the cultural consensus for either ideal.

The world has changed but the hunter-gatherers don’t have a lot of attractive options when the farmers show up. So in the face of irrevocable change the conventional thinkers double down on their invocations and dance frantically to exorcise the demons polluting the land. The fly-over people, God bless them, saw that things had changed and voted for a coarse 70-year old billionaire who's never held public office.

Conservatives are an easier target for this critique since "conservatism" is, one might say, backward-looking by definition. But above all else one must be a realist; to be realist is to embrace truth. The Old Calendarists are an example of extreme conservatism, dutifully following a calendar which no longer reflects the actual movements of the God-created celestial bodies. Or Orthodox following an ecclesiology based on the administrative structure of an extinct Empire. But I digress.

It is noteworthy too how in the current political debates the liberals rely less on their traditional Year Zero rhetoric and more on a rehash of 1965, or 1933, or 1860, or even 1789, retconning Alexander Hamilton as America's First Black President. Of all things, it is now the nominal conservatives arguing for Year Zero, in the firm conviction that history has ended.

This is a titanic shift, and only myself and a few others are remarking on it. Here's the always excellent Z-man's contribution. (You'll have to click through, because he's disabled copy-pasta.)

Our strangely demotic elite

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 18:12:00 +0000

A comment on Marginal Revolution got me thinking about this. The OP talks about nurturing entrepeneurship, and the linked comment chimes in on government funding:

Of course, government funding–such as NSF grants– as a source of innovation are not popular to the more libertarian minded who focus on the “gov’ment “rgulation” as the impediment.

But, if we continue to cut back on government funded research and develop, and then later get surprised that innovation and entrepreneurial activity using this work declines, well, we get what we didn’t pay for and what we deserve.

I have a lot of issues with this. Public funding is like the quantum observer: its very existence distorts the market. Would cancer research end if the public funds dried up? I suppose quantum physics would take a hit, but is it socially just to tax people so a few geniuses can pursue such arcane areas? Silicon Valley and Wall Street have enormous amounts of wealth piled up by brilliant people. Let the quantum physicists make their pitch to them. And governments, like oligopolistic corporations, have their own agendas. The public sector is not going to fund research that reveals there's very little that government can do about a certain problem, just like a corporation is not going to fund research that shows its product is literally killing people.

On the other hand, there’s an odd demotic trend among modern merchant class-elites (who are THE elites at this point) that undercuts my thesis. Formerly, aristocrats derived prestige from subsidizing intellectuals and high culture. The current elites don’t seem to think along those lines. Museums and orchestras are perennially broke, even as the people you would think care about such things are accruing enormous wealth. But they can't even get the more broad-based, populist things right either. Facebook is devoting lots of money to getting Africans more access to Facebook, which would increase the company’s eyeball-count and its founders’ already obscene wealth, but doesn’t address more basic (and life-changing) advances, like potable water and functioning sewers.

There really is a lot of low-hanging fruit still to pick in development economics. But things like municipal water systems and sewage treatment don't seem to attract nearly the enthusiasm as making sure the Third World can post on social media and learn how to emigrate from the Third World. I've written before about the billions of dollars and thousands of NGO employees lavished on Haitians, who still can't seem to get a functioning sewage treatment plant.

There are a lot of "think tanks" out there funded by wealthy people, but their resident scholars seem content drafting papers to wave around at Congressional hearings and penning an essay in their flagship publication that nobody reads. The conservative think tanks don't seem to do much other than occasionally send a scholar to go trigger protests at lefty campuses and agitate for democracy in low-trust countries. They are unmotivated and appallingly ineffective on the cultural and demographic fronts back home.

The wealthy don't seem to know what to do with their already obscene levels of wealth other than use it to generate more wealth, like lobbying for Open Borders and "free trade" and buying their own media outlets to get the word out. Per my title, the modern elite seem to have a strangely pedestrian vision.

My semi-serious suggestion is that once you notch a billion dollars we just give you a region of the country for life, and after your death to your heirs for life. Then you and yours have to figure out how to nurture the Louis Pasteurs and Michelangelos and Leonardo Da Vincis instead of bribing State actors and rigging the democratic process.

An episcopal Church

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 13:19:00 +0000

Protestant solutions to Catholic problems: "Pope Francis asks Brazilian bishops to discuss overturning priestly celibacy": report | News | LifeSite https://t.co/YdPqT6BewF
— Fr. Kevin M. Cusick (@MCITLFrAphorism) November 3, 2017

The spirit of Vatican II marches on, with +Francis now calling for a re-examination of priestly celibacy. The doctrine is not of itself the real controversy. After all, the Orthodox allow priests to marry with some important qualifications: a priest cannot marry after ordination, and bishops must be celibate. A good illustration of the twin dignity of both sacraments is the person of Antiochian bishop +John.

A priest married for 33 years, he was elevated to bishop after the repose of his wife. He now carries the Church in his person and cannot remarry.

The problem is, again, not the new doctrine being explored but the fact of the exploration. This has come up before, on the issue of lay divorce and remarriage, and was previously commented upon by Catholic writer John Zmirak:

It's essential to understand the stakes:
No Marriage, No Infallibility, No Papacy, No Catholic Church
- If no subject is "taboo", the authority of Bishops is not taboo either

No, don't expect any insane theory, or a "heretical pope" argument, to salvage this. If the Pope endorses polygamy, including in its spread-out format as any kind of legitimacy of the "remarriage" of "divorced" individuals, with the redefinition of the dogmatic theology of one of the seven Sacraments, then Trent, Vatican I, and the entire edifice of Catholic claims of authority fall with it. Catholic claims on the absolutely indissoluble Sacrament of Matrimony (1), from which spring forth the children who are Baptized (2), Confirmed (3), Ordained (4), hear confessions (5), celebrate Mass (6), confer Extreme Unction (7), and marry new couples (1 once again) are dogmatically strong and at the same time systematically fragile. They fall down, and the Papacy as it has always been understood falls with it. [From Rorate Caeli.]

So, if the Catholic understanding concerning the sacraments of priesthood and marriage becomes malleable once enough bishops disagree with it, then Synods aren't discerning eternal Truth guided by the Holy Spirit. They're just secular policy-making bodies with no more theological and thus ecclesial authority than a parish book club. Or, in another context, no more authority than the Parish Life Conference recently attended by several Orthodox Patriarchs. Or than me.

In other words, the Catholic Church is becoming not so much hierarchical as episcopal, which means it will become Episcopal. The geography is important as well: Rome is becoming a Global South Church. Catholics like Ross Douthat banking on the Global South to save the institution are going to be disappointed. And as with The Episcopal Church, the crack-up (which I should add I consider probable, and not certain) will be bitter indeed. Our good friend Porter is even less optimistic.

Prayers for all of Christ's Church.

The end of conservatism as we know it

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 01:17:00 +0000

I've staked my ground on the thesis that ideology is no longer the primary driver of US politics, and here's somebody who agrees with me:

Is ‘Classical Liberalism’ Conservative?

Trump didn’t divide the right. Centuries-old philosophical divisions have re-emerged.
American conservatism is having something of an identity crisis. Most conservatives supported Donald Trump last November. But many prominent conservative intellectuals—journalists, academics and think-tank personalities—have entrenched themselves in bitter opposition. Some have left the Republican Party, while others are waging guerrilla warfare against a Republican administration. Longtime friendships have been ended and resignations tendered. Talk of establishing a new political party alternates with declarations that Mr. Trump will be denied the GOP nomination in 2020.

Those in the “Never Trump” camp say the cause of the split is the president—that he’s mentally unstable, morally unspeakable, a leftist populist, a rightist authoritarian, a danger to the republic. One prominent Republican told me he is praying for Mr. Trump to have a brain aneurysm so the nightmare can end.

But the conservative unity that Never Trumpers seek won’t be coming back, even if the president leaves office prematurely. An apparently unbridgeable ideological chasm is opening between two camps that were once closely allied. Mr. Trump’s rise is the effect, not the cause, of this rift.

As I put it, conservatism now finds itself polarized between the End-Of-History camp and the Clash-Of-Civilizations camp. Yoram Hazony distinguishes between the Enlightenment-era classical liberalism that came to suffuse so much of modern conservative thought, and WASP-American pragmatism.

In his “Second Treatise on Government” (1689), Locke asserts that universal reason teaches the same political truths to all human beings; that all individuals are by nature “perfectly free” and “perfectly equal”; and that obligation to political institutions arises only from the consent of the individual. From these assumptions, Locke deduces a political doctrine that he supposes must hold good in all times and places.

The term “classical liberal” came into use in 20th-century America to distinguish the supporters of old-school laissez-faire from the welfare-state liberalism of figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt. Modern classical liberals, inheriting the rationalism of Hobbes and Locke, believe they can speak authoritatively to the political needs of every human society, everywhere. In his seminal work, “Liberalism” (1927), the great classical-liberal economist Ludwig von Mises thus advocates a “world super-state really deserving of the name,” which will arise if we “succeed in creating throughout the world . . . nothing less than unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions.”

Friedrich Hayek, the leading classical-liberal theorist of the 20th century, likewise argued, in a 1939 essay, for replacing independent nations with a world-wide federation: “The abrogation of national sovereignties and the creation of an effective international order of law is a necessary complement and the logical consummation of the liberal program.”
Classical liberalism thus offers ground for imposing a single doctrine on all nations for their own good. It provides an ideological basis for an American universal dominion.

By contrast, Anglo-American conservatism historically has had little interest in putatively self-evident political axioms. Conservatives want to learn from experience what actually holds societies together, benefits them and destroys them. That empiricism has persuaded most Anglo-American conservative thinkers of the importance of traditional Protestant institutions such as the independent national state, biblical religion and the family.

As an English Protestant, Locke could have endorsed these institutions as well. But his rationalist theory provides little basis for understanding their role in political life. Even today liberals are plagued by this failing: The rigidly Lockean assumptions of classical-liberal writers such as Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand place the nation, the family and religion outside the scope of what is essential to know about politics and government. Students who grow up reading these brilliant writers develop an excellent grasp of how an economy works. But they are often marvelously ignorant about much else, having no clue why a flourishing state requires a cohesive nation, or how such bonds are established through family and religious ties.

Hazony points out that modern conservative unity was, in retrospect, a product of the times, specifically the great and defining Cold War. Then the Cold War ended (we won) and a certain class of thinker waited expectantly for the rest of the world to join us at the Eschaton. Thus imagine the shock, the anger when, as it turned out, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Muslims remained stubbornly parochial. For the true-believing classical liberal, it was the equivalent of continued heresy in the face of the physically incarnate Christ. This same aggrieved shock and anger manifests in the reactions to Trump, who casually tore up the ideological rule book and beat a whole bench of well-funded political pros at their own game.

As I've mentioned before, it's useless to talk about fiscal prudence in a country where half the people are net tax-consumers and the government prints all the money it wants. It's dishonest to lecture people about the free market when the central bank will backstop Goldman Sachs' and AIG's bad investments. And if Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, India, Greek Cyprus, the Vatican, and lots of other places can have border fences well, why can't we? Principled Conservatism doesn't really have a response. The Left, of course, is completely honest about its aims: white people are systemically, irredeemably racist, sexist, and just all-around awful and their social and economic clout must be reduced via immigration. Whites outside coastal socio-economic bubbles quite naturally voted for the billionaire who tells them he won't let that happen. Why wouldn't they?

Las Vegas

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 07 Oct 2017 14:11:00 +0000

You have to be quick in the ranting game. Here I was strolling to the weekend collecting my thoughts while an astute troika already summed it up.

Pat Buchanan points out Stephen Paddock had no soul.

Steve Sailer suggests the ex-Christians no longer fear Hell.

Vox Day observes we can no longer answer sentient Man's oldest question, "Why not?"

Healthy society has three fundamental elements: hierarchy, aesthetics, and transcendence. We are distorting and deconstructing all three: everybody is equal, the aesthetics suck, and secular progressivism has replaced religious faith as the moral center.

The big mystery is the shooter's motive. He was not completely delusional and actually quite functional. He planned the massacre rigorously over a period of months. Recall anti-hero Anders Breivik transformed himself into a successful small farmer to get the licensing he needed to nearly take out Norway's governing class. By contrast, nobody knows (or nobody will yet reveal) Stephen Paddock's manifesto but that's beside the point. It could have been anything: holy war, bolshevism, environmentalism. Lots of people have agendas; I have an agenda. Most people have outlets that keep them from going into full berserker mode. Something is removing those outlets but I imagine the questions will peter out before we get too far down that path.

I love a good conspiracy theory but operationally I think we're going to be disappointed. Paddock may have had knowing assistance but that just gets us back where we started--his enablers were as broken as he was. Paddock had a hypotenuse of around 300 meters. The effective range of a decent AR-15 is 500 meters, and Paddock had a big, fat target of around 40,000 feet by area. Lots of people can do it. A middling Muslim couple could do it. Sixty-four year old white guy real estate investors can do it. For around $3,000 a rig (rifle, bump stock, bipod, scope, magazine, ammo--all commonly available), Stephen Paddock was able to project the killing force of an infantry fire team. Combine atomized society and normalcy bias with a not-uncommon amount of income and you too can go full berserker mode, and this gets me to my final point.

In the old days when somebody went off the rails all they had was a sword or muzzleloader. Capitalism and The Industrial Revolution have not only democratized luxury goods but the tools and technology of war, and delivered them to an atomized people. In the inevitable gun control debate to follow, Second Amendment advocates will ignore the technology, and liberals will ignore the atomization.

Why Capt. Villanueva had to apologize

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 17:25:00 +0000

I've bestirred myself to write on the current NFL mess.

Out of all this, an NFL player and Army veteran named Alejandro Villanueva is the only one who's had to apologize for his behavior. Here's the Wiki entry on his military career:

After graduating from the United States Military Academy Villanueva was commissioned into the United States Army on May 22, 2010 as a second lieutenant in the Infantry.[5] Directly after being commissioned he attended various military schools, including the Infantry, Airborne and Ranger Schools; all located at Fort Benning, Georgia. After completing the three courses he was assigned to the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York. It was with the 10th Mountain Division he deployed for the first time for 12 months to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom - Afghanistan as a rifle platoon leader.[5] As a result of his actions during this deployment he was awarded a Bronze Star Medal with "V" device for rescuing wounded soldiers while under enemy fire.[5] When he returned from his deployment, he was reassigned as a company executive officer.[5]

Villanueva volunteered for the 75th Ranger Regiment's Ranger Orientation Program in 2013.[5] He was assigned to the 1st Ranger Battalion. His roles within the Battalion have included plans officer, platoon leader, and company executive officer.[5]

He has deployed two more times to Afghanistan for a total of eight months between both deployments.[5]

Solid, right? Here he is apologizing for leaving the locker room and standing respectfully with his hand over his heart as the US anthem was played:

Remember the Martin-Incognito dust-up I wrote about four years ago? Goggle-eyed sports fans were shocked, shocked! at Incognito's effrontery toward a teammate. But that’s just life among platoons of big, violent men. Whitey-white-white Peyton Manning and the not-terribly athletic Irish Catholic Brian Finneran negotiated the culture successfully. You hang with the bros, or you really will hang.

Football players have to depend on each other for, among other things, deterring an opponent's potentially career-ending cheap shot by threat of violent retaliation from your comrades. So when the majorities in the locker rooms voted for BLM, the owners ignored their own operations manual and pivoted to the locker rooms, and so did the white quarterbacks and linemen. Majority rule, and enlightened self-interest.

And that’s why Capt. Villanueva apologized.

This is actually a pretty big deal. As Steve Sailer explains, the hidden theme in American football's unscripted drama is defense and capture of territory, and we passionately support the physical exploits of "our" young men against "their" young men. Americans love these pageants because they demonstrate national solidarity despite deep-rooted racial and cultural differences--we fight for you, because you fight for us! Not surprisingly, the US military enthusiastically joins in the pageantry, with color guards and fly-overs and lavish recruiting ads.

Athletic events channel powerful tribal instincts into non-destructive outlets, but this gets kind of awkward when you have different tribes.

The News Business

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 18:42:00 +0000

Hurricane Harvey, and now Irma, remind us that the news media is not a public service: it is a for-profit business. The Business sells ratings to advertisers, not actually useful information or analysis. Thus, the hurricane is the story, not the fact that cities like New Orleans and Houston are sitting at sea level with nowhere for the water to go or that the building codes of the Florida coast bear no relation to its geography. Cities are also behavioral and economic sinks, filled with people with no means to weather a natural disaster--which, of course, is the only reason a natural phenomenon becomes a "disaster." Cities are, in a word, fragile.

The Business is also an oligopoly, thanks to IP laws and founder effects, in the economic and cultural sense. Like all oligopolies, the Business is concerned primarily with maintenance of its oligopoly status.

The State, special interests, and others use this oligopoly to great effect. The interests of the State and its patrons coincide very nicely with the interests of the Business. They create Panic where there is no need for panic and Complacency where there is need for Urgency. Thus, in Atlanta today, hysterical people shut down a city over wind and rain; meanwhile, population density increases and giant poplars and oaks tower over power lines.

Apply this analysis to any crisis out there: hunger in Africa, not explosive r-selected reproductive practices; HIV/AIDS, not self-destructive behavior; poverty, not poor life-choices.

None of this is to deny the tragic and often capricious nature of human suffering nor to suggest that we should not seek to alleviate suffering. Poverty can result from illness or economic displacement. Unforeseen natural disasters and social catastrophes do occur. But there is a stubborn resistance to thinking critically about root causes and perverse incentives. And the Business, of all the institutions, is fundamentally and structurally not motivated even to ask the right questions.

Passings

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 09 Sep 2017 15:16:00 +0000

Chaos Manor's Jerry Pournelle has passed away. This is his Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

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.

Such clear thinking is now rare.

You must see this

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 13 Aug 2017 12:34:00 +0000

Wealthy, influential Anglo-Europeans develop plan to rule foreign countries. From Marginal Revolution.

Comments are just getting cranked up as of 8:30 a.m. Hilarity ensuing.

The Anti-Gnostic August 13, 2017 at 8:16 am
“The first thing that you are missing (probably because you never lived in poor and dangerous countries) is that walls matter, this is why rich people tend to live in closed communities. Crime hits the poor much more than the rich. I move around with an armoured car and two bodyguards: not being a narco, I am afraid only of police, not assault by usual criminals.” [Emphasis added].
_______________________________________

Wait, what?! I am repeatedly assured by many wealthy, intelligent people that walls don’t work!

I can see where this whole “wall” thing might catch on. Like-minded people, many of whom aren’t individually wealthy enough to afford a gated community, two bodyguards, and an armored car, could pool their resources and pay some agency to build a wall, say, a “Border” and hire some guys, say, a “Border Patrol” to keep out all the people who can out-thug, out-breed and out-vote them and take their stuff.

It’s like, you either have a single public wall for your community of culturally-similar people who trust each other, or you have hundreds of private walls reserved for those wealthy enough to afford them. Intriguing.

Environmentalism's racist history

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 11:26:00 +0000

In case you had any doubt that environmentalism is now a racist cause.

"When was the Golden Age of conservative intellectualism?"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 16:00:00 +0000

Tyler Cowen asks:

Paul Krugman says a mix of “never” and “certainly not now” (my paraphrases, not actual quotations from him). Here is one bit:

On environment, a similar turn took place a bit later. The use of markets and price incentives to fight pollution was, initially, a conservative idea condemned by some on the left. But liberals eventually took it on board — while cap-and-trade became a dirty word on the right. Crude slogans — government bad! — plus subservience to corporate interests trump analysis.
I believe this is pretty far from the reality, here are a few points:

Tyler proceeds to mount a vigorous defense of conservative thinking on the environment but he needn't have bothered. Environmental stewardship is already reviled as a racist, i.e., conservative, i.e., old-white-guy cause.

Anyway, it's a worthwhile question but not one that I think can be answered at this point because the consensus on what constitutes conservatism has broken down. Who are conservatives--Hillaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton or Bill Kristol and David Frum? The former would probably be denounced as, what else, fascists by the latter. Not True Conservatives.

“Conservatives” are irrevocably split between the Clash-Of-Civilizations camp and the End-Of-History camp. The former argues for conserving a civilization and the latter argues for conserving universalist ideals. My previous entry sets out the two worldviews. I regard the End-Of-History camp as naive and impotent, operationally resulting in conservatives forever apologizing Left and punching Right, thereby consolidating progressivist gains. Whig “conservatism” which conserves nothing. So that’s my Not True Conservative two cents.

I’d say the Golden Age of conservative intellectuals would be the late Victorian period of Belloc and Chesterton, and the astounding Rudyard Kipling. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and Enoch Powell were the last heirs to that intellectual tradition. I’m biased toward England (which is where Belloc ended up), so there are doubtless some Continental thinkers I’m overlooking.

I agree with Krugman: conservatism in its ideological, universalist iteration has never had an intellectual Golden Age.

The dismal health care debate

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 01 Jul 2017 18:49:00 +0000

I don't have a head for numeric concepts and I bore easily, so the details of the health care legislation making its way through the sausage factory elude me. I'm also blessed with good health and income, so I tend not to think about this that much, other than to marvel at how much I pay for coverage which I have never tapped into. Apparently 48.6 million Americans lacked coverage and, since Obamacare, only 27 million do. Obamacare, I am told, is intended to address that gap of people with no available employer-sponsored plan who are too young for Medicare and too affluent for Medicaid.

Individuals who lack employer-sponsored coverage tend not to make a lot of money and will forego insurance, particularly if they are young. They also tend to be less healthy and make poor life choices. So not enough premiums coming in, too many claims paying out, which is the insurance death spiral. Therefore, Obamacare subsidized this scheme with all sorts of taxes including one on "Cadillac" plans offered by large public companies with expensive workforces. Of course, this resulted in regularizing coverage across the board. Health insurance is perforce expensive and not really economical unless you are badly injured or get diagnosed with a chronic illness, and the disincentives and inefficiencies just pile up from there.

This is actually well-trod ground in these parts. I'll summarize by pointing out that there's really no such thing as "health insurance." There are a lot of genetic diseases and pre-dispositions that can't be incentivized away, and everyone is also 100% destined to get older, sicker and more expensive. There's also no such thing as "preventive medicine." Access to medicine does not actually make people healthier.

All that being said, with over $3 trillion in federal tax revenue and 320 million people to spread the costs among, we seemingly should be able to find enough change in the sofa cushions to fund comprehensive medical insurance coverage, which is the norm in the civilized world. The purported horrors of national medical coverage don't seem to be showing up where you'd expect in the metrics. The US actually has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality for higher cost.

With the election of Trump, largely thanks to the efforts of working class whites who don't seem nearly so squeamish over the prospect of national medical insurance, one would expect some soul-searching and political calculation among Republicans. I personally would be licking my chops over my time at the podium:

"My fellow Americans, today I am proud to announce that from this day forward, no American will ever go bankrupt from a horrible accident or a cancer diagnosis ever again!" [Cue release of a dozen bald eagles, 21-gun salute, and the Sunshine Gospel Mass Choir].

I'll reign for 40 years, and my marble tomb will be ensconced in the Lincoln Memorial.

And after that a lot of things start falling into place: sensible immigration policy--we can't afford net consumers; labor mobility, as people are no longer shackled to a job by medical coverage; moms can choose to stay home or work part-time, lowering the costs of family formation, which is how you grow conservatives; a sense of priorities, and national cohesion finally returning to budgets--war in Bumfuckistan, or medical coverage for US citizens?

Doubtless such Machiavellian calculation is beneath the quiet dignity and rock-ribbed principle of the Republican leadership, but this message is beginning to resonate with some pretty prominent Megaphone Holders:

The difference in the competing visions could not be more stark:

[MR. TRUMP, YOU'VE HEARD THE ARGUMENT THAT YOU ARE NOT A TRUE CONSERVATIVE. TELL THE VOTERS WATCHING TONIGHT WHY YOU ARE. WELL, I THINK I AM. AND I VIEW THE WORD CONSERVATIVE AS A DERIVATIVE OF THE WORD CONSERVE. WE WANT TO CONSERVE OUR MONEY. WE WANT TO CONSERVE OUR WEALTH. WE WANT TO CONSERVE, WE WANT TO BE SMART. WE WANT TO BE SMART, WHERE WE GO, WHERE WE SPEND, HOW WE SPEND. WE WANT TO CONSERVE OUR COUNTRY. WE WANT TO SAVE OUR COUNTRY. AND WE HAVE PEOPLE THAT HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO DO THAT AND THEY ARE NOT DOING IT. IT'S SOMETHING I BELIEVE IN VERY, VERY STRONGLY.

MR. TRUMP, THANK YOU. SENATOR RUBIO, YOU HAVE SAID YOURSELF THAT YOU DON'T THINK DONALD TRUMP IS RUNNING AS A CONSERVATIVE. DID HE CONVINCE YOU? WELL, I THINK CONSERVATISM IS ABOUT THREE THINGS. THE FIRST IS CONSERVATISM IS ABOUT LIMITED GOVERNMENT. ESPECIALLY AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS LIMITED BY THE CONSTITUTION, WHICH DELINEATES ITS POWERS. IF IT IS NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION, IT DOES NOT BELONG TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. IT BELONGS TO STATES, COMMUNITIES. IT IS ABOUT FREE ENTERPRISE. IT ALLOWS EVERYONE TO SURVIVE WITHOUT PULLING ANYONE DOWN. THE REASON WHY FREE ENTERPRISE IS THE GREATEST ECONOMIC MODEL IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD IS BECAUSE IT IS THE ONLY ECONOMIC MODEL WHERE YOU CAN MAKE POOR PEOPLE RICHER WITHOUT MAKING RICH PEOPLE POOR. IT'S ABOUT A STRONG NATIONAL DEFENSE. IT'S BELIEVING THAT THE WORLD IS A SAFER AND BETTER PLACE WHEN AMERICA IS THE STRONGEST.]

I'll leave the details to the experts. If the Republican Party can pass comprehensive medical insurance coverage, they will hold the levers of power for the next two generations. Then they will have all the political capital they need to close the border, de-fund the colleges and propaganda organs, ignore and ridicule the national media, and trample all over toxic political correctness. The conservative long march through the institutions can begin. This is using the Left's tactics against them to advance conservative goals, as opposed to current conservative ideology which adopts the rhetoric and moral framework of the Left ("Dems r the real racists!"), resulting in tactical impotence.

Remember: the end to be kept in mind is not how to spread conservative ideas, but how to grow conservatives.

Housekeeping, and sad news about Bob Wallace

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 04:08:00 +0000

A few changes to the blogroll:

Happy Acres' Tumblr account got yanked for hate. Apparently the musings of a married, retired software engineer with two kids living near Lake Tahoe are dangerous! Follow this despicable thoughtcriminal on Twitter.

The Anarcho-Monarchist has been silent for a long time and locked up his content.

Radish has not posted in a while. I hope he's okay and I'm leaving him up for now. He last posted on Twitter on March 1 of this year.

Per the comments, Bob Wallace at Uncle Bob's Treehouse passed away unexpectedly this Spring. He used to post articles at lewrockwell.com before getting banned for hatespeech. He seemed to have lived a pretty hardscrabble life in the Midwest, driving a taxi and working for a newspaper. Judging from his commentary, he despised newspaper work and the broken people doing it. It's a zombie-industry at this point, which is probably why he left it and started posting on the internet. He was apparently just doing menial work in warehouses toward the end. That sort of life-arc is hard on reflective people and I hope he was at peace. God rest his soul. No spouse, no children. He was 60 years old.

Finally, a voice from the past has resurfaced. Please visit Generic Views. He needs to retire from the Department of Defense so he can really let loose. I've referred to him before as one of the few people who grasps that international law is the law of sovereigns, not citizens.

I'd like to have a news site in the blogroll but I'm not sure actual news reporting exists any more. The sites are full of misleading headlines, content by incurious people who don't know how to ask a question, and irritating click-bait.

Anarcho-Capitalism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 02:11:00 +0000

In September 2016, I posted on the conundrum faced by Clayton County landlords given explicit policy choices by juries to hold them responsible for acts perpetrated by criminals on their premises:

In summary, whites are fleeing, vibrancy is moving in, and incomes are stagnant and declining, despite the unmitigated boon of cheap immigrant labor. I know white rednecks who just up and left, dropping their keys off at the bank. Central American stoop laborers, paid in cash, stumbling around drunk, are easy marks for black predators.

The security measures necessary to keep Bradford Ridge Apartments predator-free would likely price the unit costs out of the reach of the late Perez-Hernandez. The tactics necessary to keeping his assailants away would be illegal. This is quintessential anarcho-tyranny: the property owners are placed between the Scylla and Charybdis of pricing out their own customers thereby eliminating their income stream, or assuming the full expense for the general criminality of Clayton County and its dysfunctional demographics, which is frankly uninsurable and impossible.

Let me unpack this a bit more: a Clayton County jury (none of whom, I assure you, were landlords) apportioned practically no fault to the actual trigger-pullers (that's what the "post-apportionment" means) and simply speculated that something could have been done to prevent a group of human predators from preying on their unfortunate marks (machine guns? Ghurkas? a crocodile-filled moat?). Note also the strange tale of the survivor: they hit him over the head, and apparently drag his buddy 50 to 100 feet away where they shoot him, then conveniently disappear, allowing Perez-Lopez to regain consciousness, return to the apartment, then go looking for the decedent whom (hey, presto!) they find shot dead. I'm not an actor on Law & Order, but this story stinks to high heaven.

Which gets me to my Anarcho-Capitalist Proposal: If the costs of general criminal activity in counties are going to be socialized on to the county's property owners, why not just give the property owners the county?

I also posted this meme, which needs to be spread far and wide, and shoved up the effete snout of every libertarian and "anarcho-capitalist" you encounter:

Now, the Georgia Supreme Court has enthusiastically piled on, in the recent case of Martin v. Six Flags Over Georgia, a decision issued June 2017.

First some context: Six Flags is an amusement park on the far south side of Atlanta. I went there a number of times as a child and as a teenager in what were, as we shall see, much more innocent times.

"Never again!," as the saying goes, and the Martin opinion dutifully underscores, laying out in excruciating detail the lengths to which we have distanced ourselves from these embarrassingly idyllic photos:

On July 3, 2007, Martin went to Six Flags for the day with his brother, Gerard Martin, and a friend, Devon Carter. As the park’s closing time approached, the trio exited the park, walked to a nearby hotel to use the bathroom, and returned to Six Flags property in front of the park entrance to await the arrival of a Cobb County Transit (CCT) bus. The three sat on a guardrail in an area adjacent to the park’s main entrance along Six Flags Parkway, the roadway leading into the park. The bus stop, which was visible from the guardrail, was situated just around the corner of the intersection of Six Flags Parkway and another public road, some 200 or so feet from the Six Flags property line.

During the course of the day and early evening, a throng of young men were roaming the park. Throughout the day their numbers ranged from 15 to 40. The young men in the group, which included several off-duty Six Flags employees, were dressed similarly, most in some combination of white or black T-shirts, jeans, and bandanas. The men were observed running through the park, yelling obscenities, and otherwise causing commotion. In the early evening, park patrons John Tapp and Eric Queen, who were visiting the park with their families, were accosted by the group after one of its members nearly knocked over Queen’s young son. Tapp testified that, after he diverted the near collision and admonished the man who was running, approximately 15 men surrounded him and Queen, “fixing to beat the sh*t out of us.” The confrontation lasted five to ten minutes, until park security appeared. As security approached and the group began to back off, they made “finger gun” gestures and admonished Tapp and Queen to “watch your back,” “we’ll get you in the parking lot.” Tapp and Queen reported to the security officer what had happened, including the parking lot threat. The officers confronted the assailants they could locate, reprimanded them, and released them back into the park. A Six Flags security officer testified at trial that this response was contrary to Six Flags’ policy, under which the assailants should have been ejected from the park.

Shortly before closing time, as the Tapp and Queen families prepared to exit through the park’s main gates, they noticed the same group of men, whose numbers had grown to approximately 40. Surveillance video footage filmed at that time showed a group of similarly-dressed men running to the front gate in what one witness described as a “frenzy.” The group exited the park, followed by security guards, who then stood outside watching. Once the guards reentered the park, the families, believing the group had left, exited the gates towards the parking lot, only to find the same group congregated on the sidewalk, outside the gates but still on Six Flags property. Despite their efforts to be inconspicuous, the families were spotted by the group, who began following the families and yelling at them. Alarmed, the families hurried to their cars; Tapp heard one man say “drop the hammer,” which Tapp believed was a reference to a gun. The families reached their cars and were able to depart without further incident.

The group of young men then made their way back to the area outside the park’s main gate where Martin and his companions were sitting. Two members of the group testified that others within the group were actively planning a fight. One stated that when he met up with the group he “found out that they were going to fight people at the bus stop”; another said that he heard the group planning for the beating and that the group “knew they needed to fight somebody.”

Aware of the group’s presence, and overhearing talk to the effect that “some guy’s going to get messed up,” Martin and his companions got up from the rail to move away, proceeding towards the bus stop. The group followed the trio to the bus stop, where, without any provocation or delay, defendant Franklin approached Martin and began beating him with brass knuckles. Others among the group joined in on the attack, with one witness estimating that nine people participated in Martin’s beating. This same witness testified that the attack began only five minutes after the group concluded their pursuit of the Tapp and Queen families; Franklin, similarly, testified that “it happened so fast.” Carter and Martin’s brother Gerard were also victims in the attack. The beating and stomping inflicted on Martin rendered him comatose for seven days, and resulted in debilitating permanent brain damage and other injuries.

The ensuing police investigation revealed that the assailants were affiliated with a gang-like group called the “YGL,” and other evidence established that the park was routinely the site of gang congregation and activity. Multiple witnesses testified to the presence of gang members at the park, both as patrons and employees; one witness, who was himself a Six Flags employee, testified that the “majority” of Six Flags’ park employees were affiliated with one gang or another. Evidence of gang “tags” and similar graffiti in the male employees’ locker room, and the testimony of a Cobb County police officer who worked off-duty as a park security officer, indicated that Six Flags’ management was—or should have been—aware that many of its employees were gang members.

A Six Flags security officer testified that, during the park’s daily security briefings, gang-related issues were reported, on average, at least once a week. Following the attack on Martin, one Six Flags employee was reprimanded by her superiors after reporting to the media that gang members frequented the park, often bullying others. Nearly one year to the day prior to the attack on Martin, Six Flags had been the site of a gang-related drive-by shooting. According to the Cobb County police officer who investigated the incident, a fight involving gang members had erupted in line at one of the park’s rides, and the fight continued as the participants left the park. Approximately 20 minutes after the fight began, the intended target of the shooting was standing at a bus stop located within Six Flags’ west parking lot and was approached by a car whose passenger, a member of the “Southside Mafia” gang, called out, referring to the earlier incident. The passenger then fired a pistol, missing his target but hitting three Six Flags employees who were standing nearby. Remarkably, despite their injuries, none of these employees were willing to make a statement to police.

The investigating officer testified that, a few days after the incident, a Six Flags official contacted him seeking assurances that the police would “not release any information that would lead the public to believe that Six Flags Over Georgia was anything but a safe, family atmosphere.” This officer further testified that he had refused to make any such commitment, and that he had told this official that he would not take his own family to Six Flags, “[b]ecause of the numerous incidents that I’ve responded to there, the criminal gang activity that goes on there.” According to this witness, 18 to 20 percent of the Cobb County Police Department’s call volume per day comes from within a two-mile radius of Six Flags.

On the above facts, the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed the jury's verdict against Six Flags for 92% of a $35 million award for an attack that occurred off its property. Of course, the Court scrupulously avoided discussion of the legal whipsaw under which Six Flags as an employer and property owner operates, pursuant to which platoons of lawyers can sue under Title VII for Six Flags' refusal to hire or allow entry to certain "young men," while simultaneously sticking them with the tab when these same young men beat another such young man nearly to death.

Also left unanalyzed by the Court, what is really going on here is that the State is too broke, too dysfunctional, and too inept to enforce a stable civil order. Therefore, idealistic judges resort to banging their gavels and yelling "Fix it!," like spoiled children, insisting that Six Flags bear the liability and expense for generalized civil breakdown and rending of the social fabric.

The obvious solution is to depose the inept and ineffectual government and turn over the public commons and order to the business and property owners who are going to get stuck with the tab for all of this in any event.

Anarcho-capitalism, that is, neo-feudalism is coming, whether the statists and, not least, the anarcho-capitalists themselves, are ready for it or not.

My problem with the Benedict Option

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Jun 2017 03:59:00 +0000

Rod Dreher has spilled a lot of ink on this. I have a lot of sympathy for Rod's vision but ultimately, I think the "Ben Op" is the same approach to rapacious secularism as that taken by the Middle Eastern Christians in response to rapacious Islam. That is, in exchange for payment of taxes and pledges of loyalty to their Arab overlords, the Christians were allowed to raise their children in the Faith and function as mercantile middlemen. This has not worked out well as Christianity slowly goes extinct in its former homelands. In like fashion, Rod Dreher begs to be left alone with his nuclear family and a few close friends in rural Louisiana as the world goes to Hell and our children slowly slip away from us.

There is also the ahistorical understanding of St. Benedict's mission and his context. The early Christians practiced their faith and seized the levers of State power as soon as they could. Modern Christianity by contrast practices secularism as the first and greatest Commandment.

Contrast Christianity's endless cession to its enemies with the robustness of Islam in the West: when they need their cultural space, they simply carve it out, and nobody lectures them about the lack of female imams or refusal to recognize gay marriage. In similar fashion, the Amish are expanding into the American Southwest and Mexico, and the Hasidim maintain their millenium-old bloodlines. Even the Mormons with their bizarre creed have managed to insinuate themselves into much of the United State's national security apparatus.

The future belongs to those who show up, and the "Ben Op" doesn't seem to be a strategy for showing up. Rather, it strikes me as a rear-guard action by aging converts begging to be allowed to die in peace.

In case you were wondering if the Age of Ideas is over,

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 15:44:00 +0000

It's over.

I'll just let Steve Sailer carry the ball on this one:

From the NYT’s new columnist Bret Stephens formerly of the WSJ and Jerusalem Post.

Only Mass Deportation Can Save America

Bret Stephens JUNE 16, 2017

In the matter of immigration, mark this conservative columnist down as strongly pro-deportation. The United States has too many people who don’t work hard, don’t believe in God, don’t contribute much to society and don’t appreciate the greatness of the American system.

They need to return whence they came.

I speak of Americans whose families have been in this country for a few generations. Complacent, entitled and often shockingly ignorant on basic points of American law and history, they are the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning.

On point after point, America’s nonimmigrants are failing our country. Crime? A study by the Cato Institute notes that nonimmigrants are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of illegal immigrants, and at more than three times the rate of legal ones.

Okay, so you want to deport African Americans. Got it. …

Because I’m the child of immigrants and grew up abroad, I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers
In other words, if your ancestors started arriving as slaves in 1619, American doesn’t belong to you in Bret Stephens way of thinking.

— the people who strain hardest to become a part of it because they realize that it’s precious; and who do the most to remake it so that our ideas, and our appeal, may stay fresh.

That used to be a cliché, but in the Age of Trump it needs to be explained all over again. We’re a country of immigrants — by and for them, too. Americans who don’t get it should get out.

I’m sure Bret wrote lots of editorials when he was editor of the Jerusalem Post about how Israel needs lots of non-Jewish immigrants. Right?

_________________________________________________

A little context on Stephens:

Stephens was born in New York City,[3] the son of Xenia and Charles J. Stephens, a former vice president of General Products, a chemical company in Mexico.[4][5] His parents were both secular Jews. His paternal grandfather had changed the family surname from Ehrlich to Stephens (after poet James Stephens).[6]

How does one reconcile these competing worldviews? Is the middle ground we only deport 25% of native-born Americans?

According to Stephens' crazed vision, America is and must always be a nation of immigrants, and must never be allowed to become a nation of natives. Thus the categorical imperative to import evermore remote, exotic future-Americans to whom we can bequeath our birthrights.

Stephens' absolutist view leaves no room for debate: it really all boils down to Who gets to live Where and Run things.

The Age of Ideas is over. The great Glubb Pasha saw it all coming.