August 25, 2013

Irrationality unleashed.

Whatever happened at the end of the Cold War, it was not the defeat of socialism; for a new anti-capitalist formation predicated on environmentalism was already taking shape. Even as the hammer and sickle came down over the Kremlin, the spotted owl was becoming the battle cry of those who were seeking to smash capitalism and market freedom in the Great Northwest. . . .

It cannot be an accident that Earth Day was first celebrated on the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s birth. . . .

In practical terms, socialism signifies government intervention in the economy [link omitted], and typically signifies financial decline. There are many technical reasons for the failures of socialism, and these are covered in Mises’s book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Therein he wrote the following passage: “[That] since socialist society is not a [practical] possibility every step towards it must harm society.” Mises calls socialism a “destructionist policy” . . . . According to Mises, ". . . Socialism . . . works on the emotions, tries to violate logical considerations by rousing a sense of personal interest and to stifle the voice of reason by awakening primitive instincts.”

Those who seek liberation through the overthrow of capitalism are, in fact, revolting against freedom and prosperity. William Graham Sumner wisely noted, more than 100 years ago, “Modern civilization is built upon machines and natural agents, brought into play . . . through capital. Herein lies the true emancipation of men and the true abolition of slavery. . . .

Sanity and reason dictate that nearly everyone prefers the “comforts of high civilization” to barbarism. Therefore, only a madman would actively undermine the free market.[1]

Yet madmen rule the roost. As Mr. Nyquist says, "irrationality is becoming a power in and of itself."

This is surely the understatement of the decade. We spend ourselves into oblivion; import and subsidize foreigners by the millions; give away our precious citizenship like Mardi Gras titty beads; slobber over minorities; ignore massive black-on-white crime; weep when black rabble rousers cry out that "more must be done;" grovel before either the Chinese, Saudis or the Muslim Brotherhood; send our manufacturing capability to a communist dictatorship waging a currency war on us; wage war on coal and other fossil fuels; subsidize open-ended bastardy; implement a Dudley Do-Right foreign policy; and call Supreme Court subornation of the Constitution "constitutional law."

Our mystery-guest president announces and proceeds to effect the fundamental transformation of America and no one bats an eye. A screeching, rubber-burning, hi-rev, suspension-smashing exit from the interstate of centuries of custom and experience down the rock slide of socialist madness and cultural suicide? Why, what could be more reasonable?

Notes
[1] "When Rationality Breaks Down, So Does the Economy." By J.R. Nyquist, Financial Sense Online, 8/12/13.

August 23, 2013

Debased debate.

There are all sorts of candidates for the root cause of the systemic global financial crisis, but if we separate the wheat from the chaff we're left with risk and moral hazard. Pointing to human greed and cupidity as the cause doesn't identify anything useful about this era's crisis, as human greed, self-interest and opportunism are default settings.

That institutions have failed is self-evident, as is their inability to structurally reform themselves. If we ask why this is so, we eventually come back to the source: risk and moral hazard.

The key to understanding risk is to ask where it is being offloaded. Risk cannot be disappeared, it can only be transferred or cloaked. The question is: who is it being transferred/offloaded to? What are the consequences of risk pooling up in these reservoirs?

Moral hazard is a fancy way of saying those who have no risk act quite differently from those burdened with risk. Here's an easy way to grasp the concept: imagine two gamblers in a casino. One is backstopped up to $1 million by a wealthy patron; every loss he incurs will be made good until the $1 million is consumed.

The other gambler has only his own cash to put at risk.

Moral hazard means risk has been separated from consequence.[1]

I love the simplicity of Mr. Hughes's "human greed, self-interest and opportunism are default settings."

The left mendaciously believes these are loathsome characteristics of the "right." In their view "right-wing" means "Nazi," of course, exemplified by William F. Buckley, Sarah Palin, Russell Kirk, Justices Scalia and Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, Gen. Pinochet, and any graduate of Hillsdale College and Grove City College. Anyone, in short, who has the unmitigated gall to want a society with real popular sovereignty and constitutional government. Who wants a country free of municipal water treatment departmental SWAT teams, 24/7 video surveillance, U.N. kleptocrats, environmental nut jobs, communist Congressmen, judges who wrap their garbage in the Constitution, and mystery-guest presidents with school girl fetishes about the Muslim Brotherhood and electric power grids energized by Harry Potter.

"Corporations" are greedy by leftist definition. And they exist only to distort the electoral process by donating billions to radical, racist, and anti-democratic causes and candidates. However, unions are never greedy, participate in the electoral process only to vindicate the interests of "good government," and are all out for the working man.

QED.

Individual leftists themselves are never greedy either. They only want "social justice," a tricky though still praiseworthy concept. A cynical friend observed that when leftists speak of "social justice" they really mean "what I want," but let's not go there.

The left's perpetual focus on right-wing greed, self-interest, and opportunism is yet one more illustration of the debased political debate in this country. Mr. Hughes raises well thought out points about the danger of offloading risk on the (wildly unconstitutional) central government and the moral hazard danger in doing so, but the left will want to keep the debate focused on greed, self-interest, and opportunism as though these human defects never ever were encountered until the spawning of the Eisenhower administration. So the centralization of risk and flirtation with moral hazard continue because we can't begin to have a rational debate about these problems with the left.

And note that it's no counter to this point to say that Republicans enthusiastically pursue centralization of risk and moral hazard. This they do do but this assumes that "Republicans" are somehow right-wing. A laughable, pathetic misunderstanding of the way it is.

Smith mentions institutional failure and institutional inability to structurally reform. These are hugely important points. Spending continues to reach stratospheric heights yet the citizen will search far and wide to find a currently existing institution that exerts even feeble efforts to control spending. The RHINOceristic Cong. Paul Ryan and the Simpson-Bowles Commission took a stab at chopping a narrow footpath through the jungle of rent seeking, redistributionist feeding frenzy, and financial sector criminality but their efforts disappeared into the background noise of the universe faster than Vince Foster's autopsy x-rays.

Notes
[1] "The Source of Systemic Crisis: Risk and Moral Hazard." By Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds, 8/21/13 (emphasis in original).

Back to the future.

It should be noted that the consequences of mass migration are all but indistinguishable from the effects of invasion and occupation, and multi-ethnic societies have shown a strong historical tendency to collapse amidst vicious ethnic violence. No one who recalls the intra-black violence in Rwanda, the intra-white violence in Yugoslavia, or the intra-yellow violence in Vietnam should be misled into thinking that expanding the range of population heterogeneousity is going to alleviate, rather than exacerbate, the eventual inter-ethnic violence. . . .

I understand that three generations of Americans who have been raised to venerate the Civil Rights movement will find it hard, if not impossible, to grasp that history may ultimately prove to be firmly on the side of those they have always believed to be monsters of bigotry. But if what logic suggests is the most probable outcome indeed comes to pass, I suspect that forced segregation and non-violent ethnic cleansing will be the best case scenario in consequence of the damnable social engineering of the grand multicultural experiment that began in 1965.

It may already be too late for a peaceful return to historical segregation patterns. But if history is an even remotely reliable guide, the West will return to them one way or another. . . .

There is a flaw in someone's assumptions. The error may be on my part. But based on the known historical patterns as well as the way in which increased integration throughout the West has observably increased racial tensions rather than eliminating them as the multiculturalists so confidently asserted, I very much doubt it.

Vox Day quoted in "Vox Day: Answering a Simple Question." Conan the Cimmerian, 8/19/13.

Ideological zealots.

In 2003 we published In Denial, which discussed how an embarrassingly large number of academics denied, minimized, avoided noticing, or, the last resort, justified Soviet espionage against the United States as well as such Stalinist mass murders as the Great Terror and the Katyn massacre.

It was bad enough that such deplorable history was written prior to the 1990s. But our outrage was prompted by the sad spectacle of supposedly trained historians continuing to distort evidence from Russian and East Bloc archives that contradicted their biases. [Footnote in article to John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage. (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003).]

And it still goes on. One conclusion we have reached is that many of those who continue to write historical nonsense about Soviet espionage and communism are not consciously dishonest. It is not a matter of their knowing the truth and lying about it (although there is some of that). More frequently, we are dealing with intellectual “true believers,” ideological zealots who are mentally incapable of accepting or processing information that undermines their historical world view. To use a metaphor coined by the historian Aileen Kraditor, it is as if they wear special glasses that can only see what conforms to their world-view. Information that contradicts their fiercely held view is denied, explained-away, or, most often, simply ignored.[1]

This blindness is peculiar to the left in my opinion. The so-called Right is invariably accused of bad motive and nasty thoughts but not of a lack of realism. Leftists, by definition, subscribe to economic, social, and cultural fairy tales as their life's foundation. Hence, nothing can be permitted to crack that foundation. Haynes and Klehr are exceedingly courteous to wayward historians by characterizing their failure to deal with inconvenient facts as being a result of the historians' being ideological zealots. However, to borrow a formulation from a friend, if these historians were being dishonest, how would it be different from merely being ideological zealots.

I can't think of a lot of things that I'm zealous about except the obvious: totalitarian government will invariably be run by or taken over by human scum; free markets are better than regulated markets; government intervention in human affairs is invariably wasteful, destructive, or poisonous; the United States Supreme Court has betrayed the Constitution; it's a peculiar form of misery to have to put up with bureaucratic morons; and the civil rights revolution has failed utterly. These being true, I nonetheless cannot think how any of these beliefs impel me to ignore facts or arguments that undermine them.

Notes
[1] "Washing White." By By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Washington Decoded, 8/11/13.

August 22, 2013

Comanches and Hollywood lies.

S C Gwynne, author of Empire Of The Summer Moon about the rise and fall of the Comanche, says simply: ‘No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.’

He refers to the ‘demonic immorality’ of Comanche attacks on white settlers, the way in which torture, killings and gang-rapes were routine. ‘The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward,’ he explains.

‘All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.’

Not that you would know this from the new Lone Ranger movie, starring Johnny Depp as the Indian Tonto.

"The truth Johnny Depp wants to hide about the real-life Tontos: How Comanche Indians butchered babies, roasted enemies alive and would ride 1,000 miles to wipe out one family." By Jonathan Foreman, Mail Online, 8/18/13.

August 20, 2013

That which is known.

How can you tell if you're living under one-party rule? Your media aren't going to tell you. Your government isn't either. Your schools are part of the mob monopoly. But there are signs: the biggest one is that open scandals and crimes have no consequences. We all know Holder is a perverse attorney general, that the EPA is run by scientific know-nothings, that Wall Street has high-level lines running into this administration, that "green technology" contradicts the known facts of physics, and that "catastrophic climate change" is a self-serving farce.
"Dangerous Times: Obama's Perversity." By James Lewis, American Thinker, 6/29/13.

August 19, 2013

The ongoing farce.

America’s credibility in the Middle East, thanks to the delusions of both parties, is broken, and it cannot be repaired within the time frame required to forestall the next stage of violence. Egypt’s military and its Saudi backers are aghast at American stupidity. Israel is frustrated by America’s inability to understand that Egypt’s military is committed to upholding the peace treaty with Israel while the Muslim Brotherhood wants war. Both Israel and the Gulf States observe the utter fecklessness of Washington’s efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear weapons program.[1]
A great cartoon during the Carter years had two beefy, exhausted men with rolled up sleeves briefing a two-foot high Carter looking at a map of Afghanistan. "Oh, I get it," exclaimed Carter. "The Russians are bad guys!"

Our own malevolent naïf's membership in the Choom Gang and his two drop-in senatorial gigs appear to have been an inadequate preparation for the business of conducting serious statecraft as president of what was hitherto considered to be a country to be reckoned with. Clueless – one can only hope – as to the basics of economic growth and fiscal sanity, Mr. Obama has also rushed to intervene in every pestilential backwater south of Sicily and east of Cyprus. He has embraced the hateful Muslim Brotherhood and championed the interests of millions of third-world illegal immigrants over those of his own people. There simply are NO federal policies today that are not remarkable for the absurdity of their goals, the destructiveness of their effects, or the malevolence of their formulation.

This is a president who plays at being president, assuming that another phone call from Percy Sutton, one more tirade from Al Sharpton, or one more presidential speech to some class of rapt fifth graders or liberal suckers will silence all critics and set things back on track. Hillary brought the "reset" button to the wrong world capital. Vladimir Putin for sure didn't have to call a cabinet meeting to name the genius who thought up that painfully naive "idea" for bringing forth a new era of lemonade and candy canes in U.S.-Russian relations.

Obama backed forces in Egypt, Libya, and Syria that were formless, faceless, and amorphous and whose ad hoc, shifting leadership provided no assurances -- and could provide no assurance -- of any advantage to the U.S. in exchange for its support. Mel Brooks was kidding when he used a stage production "Springtime for Hitler" in "The Producers." When Obama fell in love with "Springtime for Egypt," he wasn't.

Frat boys at drunken initiation rites would have done better in devising the foreign or domestic policies of this absurd, tragic joke of a president. The Middle East will go up in flames, Russia and China will surge into the vacuum left by our kiddie president, Iran will be emboldened by its capacity to smuggle a dirty bomb into any U.S. city, or we'll alienate the now-dominant Egyptian army for the foreseeable future. It's a clean sweep for radical leftist Democrat lunacy and Barry's still playing at being a grownup.

Notes
[1] "America’s Problems in the Middle East Are Just Beginning." By David P. Goldman (Spengler), PJ Media, 8/15/13.

August 7, 2013

Mishandled 2008 crisis, god-like bureaucrats.

The [United States Department of Justice] may also be attempting [in preventing a deposition of Mr. Bernanke] to preclude an open investigation that will show how Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner mishandled the 2008 financial crisis. This is not a secret. Books by Sheila Bair and David Stockman, as well as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (by the FCIC) have already done so. Yet, the media continues to report how we "must thank Bernanke (or the others) for saving us from a nuclear winter." These advocates have avoided the evidence.

A segment of Bernanke's ignorance was discussed in "The Professor Who did NOT Save the World."[1]

Mr. Sheehan chokes on the Department of Justice's claim that the proposed "deposition would interfere with Mr. Bernanke's important duties in managing the nation's economy and fiscal policy." All by himself. Managing the economy and fiscal policy. Here's a short take on the Fed's ability to to that. Since the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the value of the dollar has declined by 95%. [2]

I'm so jaded by the avalanche of evidence of our cultural and moral decay and our complete indifference to the wholesale abandonment of the Constitution, I can't be bothered to place an exclamation point at the end of the sentence at the end of the preceding paragraph. If you had a dollar in the bank in 1913, the government stole 95 cents from your account in the intervening years.

And why is it again that we're so darn exceptional? Because we're a vigilant, independent citizenry jealous of our liberties? If the Central Nebraska Consumer Protection Product Safety Commission SWAT team (Jamaica Provisional) breaks down our door, well then, maybe . . . we'll rouse ourselves to defend our liberties.

Maybe. But certainly not before.

Me? I'm thinkin' it's way past time for a Chinese brewski.

Notes
[1] "David Boies v. Citizen Ben S. Bernanke." By Frederick J. Sheehan, Authority Contrarian, 8/1/13.
[2] "The contention that a central bank run by private banking interests would promote a safer financial system and a stable currency is laughable. The Federal Reserve and the bankers who control it have created three stock bubbles, the largest housing bubble in history, a bond bubble and the mother of all debt bubbles, while destroying 95% of the dollar’s purchasing power in the last 100 years." "Trying to Stay Sane in An Insane World – Part 2." By Jim Quinn, The Burning Platform, 8/4/13.

August 4, 2013

Recklessness without cost

The Late Man, according to [Oswald] Spengler, acts like a mouse-sized, self-adulating simulacrum of the god whose existence he dogmatically denies but whose role of unmoved mover he wants to assume. Guided by his theories, the Late Man, as liberal-socialist, tinkers persistently with the social and moral universes, while granting no possibility of unforeseen or untoward consequence in respect of his agenda. The Late Man, with his contempt for the past and his narcissism, cannot acknowledge that anything inherited, whether custom or institution, has ever justified its function.[1]

This isn't new. The ancients knew all about hubris. Icarus is the template. More than ever before simpletons, thugs, naifs, connivers, and liars now have income, leisure, a megaphone for their views, and, of course, access to the ballot and the public treasury.

Folly unleashed.

I recently had occasion to mention the medieval Church to a new but elderly acquaintance. Her immediate reaction, and I do mean immediate, was that it "did a lot of bad things." She had a professed interest in theology but had blithely cast off from 2,000+ years of effort to establish workable moral and theological ideas to guide imperfect humans.

She's not an opinion leader herself but she and millions like her enable this deadly toying with our civilization.

Notes
[1] "Oswald Spengler On Democracy, Equality, And 'Historylessness'." By Thomas F. Bertonneau, The Brussels Journal, 5/31/13 (emphasis added).

August 2, 2013

Short course on Marxism.

During the first stage of his intellectual rebellion, [Polish intellectual Leszek] Kolakowski relied on Karl Marx’s early philosophical writings. Later, he moved away from Marxism altogether. He saw Marxism as a sophisticated rationalization of social and political resentment, a gigantic, cosmic fantasy of redemption bound to beget new forms of slavery. One of the most impressive essays included in the anthology [Is God Happy? Selected Essays] deals with the Marxist roots of Stalinism. Many on the Left were (and still are) ready to accept the Leninist heredity of Stalinism, yet they found unacceptable connecting the advent of the Bolshevik dystopia to the ideas of Karl Marx. Kolakowski was suspicious of any mechanical determinism, not only in political history, but also in the history of ideas. He did not claim that Marxism did inevitably bequeath totalitarian hubris. But he found in the Marxist dream of complete unity, in the repudiation of pluralism, the premise for the authoritarian experiments that followed. Leninist neo-Jacobin absolutism was rooted, in Kolakowski’s interpretation, in the absolute rejection of the rule of law and the demonization of private property.[1]
Gigantic cosmic fantasy seems strong but it, Marxism, has been a something that has gripped the minds of many otherwise intelligent people who abased themselves in the service of a pathetic revolt against poverty, inequality, downright meanness, or, more to the point, some transient, unchangeable, or inconsequential facet of life common in any age on this planet. Squire Wright better off than you? More influence? More privilege? Why, then. Time for a complete makeover of society. Wife have an irritating laugh? Cheeky kids? Get rid of them. Out and away!

Countless millions have lost their lives in the service of totalitarian regimes, no small number of which murdered and enslaved millions upon millions of their own citizens as a direct result of deliberate state policy devised by thugs and hideous sociopaths handed power to commit great crimes by intellectuals, journalists, artists, operatives and citizens joyfully carrying the banner of Marxist "liberation." An expensive and bloody "liberation" if ever there was one.

Kolakowski, the later philosopher of the Polish Solidarity movement, may not have believed that Marxism inevitably led to totalitarian hubris but that has certainly been the way to bet in light of the slaughter of the last century. Considering how limited government has been destroyed by all manner of constitutional subversion, one can only ponder how a supposedly sovereign people in the home of the brave and the land of the free – with the absolute ultimate of constitutional protections and independent courts with centuries of law protecting individual rights to call upon – could so easily have been head faked and neutered.

Their metrosexual, globalist, secular, historically-ignorant, power-loving, contemptuous, educated elites grasped at globalist mist, embraced scientific and economic flapdoodle, and stole their liberties and it all went down with hardly a whimper of protest. See any unruly street protests ever? God bless Glenn Beck for his work in highlighting the progressive's hate for normal America but he could only organize polite tapioca nothing gatherings centered on "restoring honor." It fires the blood.

Kolakowski was overly generous in thinking that totalitarianism was not the inevitable result of Marxist practice, though I doubt the sum of the man was as naive as that. The piecemeal drift to statist gluttony is unstoppable even without an overt Marxist rationale. Mindless Western populations have loved every step taken in the direction of evisceration of their liberties and in the pursuit of statist fiscal and economic madness.

Perhaps there is some tectonic political interface that is about to shift and restore constitutional government and forever bring to an end the adulation of parasites and revolutionaries (seething with hatred for nature and nature's God), but I don't see it. The re-election of Barack Hussein Obama – the very name of the man alone stuns anyone whose mind is not addled – is a simple but clear indication of the current mile marker on the road to anarchy and tyranny. Considering the disdain the person has for his supposedly native country ("God damn America! God damn America!") and his far-left, terrorist connections, it's a high number indeed.

Pretty much, you can put a fork in the American Republic of old. It had few protectors and the educated classes slobbered over every subversion of it.

Notes
[1] "Why Kolakowski Matters." By Vladimir Tismaneanu, FrontPageMagazine.com, 7/19/13.