Individual Accountability Warfare

Here's a question:  Why do we say that Russia attacked Ukraine?  Sure, it's true.  But what is more true is this:  Putin decided to attack Ukraine.  Because it surely was not the thousands of conscripts he sent to do the job or die trying.  Or their families.  No, one man started this war and one man could end it.  Why on God's earth are we killing a bunch of non-decision-makers for the decisions of one man?

Well because that is how war has always worked, right?  But let's think about it....

How many actual decision-makers were involved in German aggression during the Second World War?  Hitler and a few others.  How many Germans had to die for those decisions?

Did the Iranian people decide to fund Hamas and Hezbollah?  Or was it a small group of ayatollahs? 

What if we could have just killed Hitler early on in the war?  Not only would many lives have been saved, but the decision-maker would have been held accountable for his decisions.  Sooner, prior to countless deaths.

Could we possibly just kill Putin?  Maybe not.  But we sure as hell could kill the ayatollahs.  We know where they are and we have the capacity to kill them.  We should hold them accountable for their decisions.  Hamas leadership is reportedly living in Qatar.  No doubt the NSA knows exactly where.  Don't ask the Qataris; just send a team.

Here's a proposed new rule for twenty-first century warfare:  Whenever and wherever possible, instead of killing a bunch of twenty-year-old conscripts, hold the decision-makers solely and individually responsible, and kill them.  Tell everyone in advance that this is how you will respond to any attack.  No, we are not going to kill the children of your country, we are going to kill the decision-makers.  In fact, I would simply make this US policy moving forward.  No more skirmishes off the coast of an aggressor nation.  No, no, we will target the leader, and we will kill him.

Now, I can hear the naysayers already:  But without a trial, this is simply murder.  But here is my response to that:  How is killing conscripts any less wrong?

Today we have the technology for this.  Maybe not against Russia or China, but surely against a country like Iran or Venezuela or Cuba, or against any African tinpot dictator.  It is the difference between our technology and their technology that would make this new type of warfare possible.  Exploit this delta to save lives.

In this developing century, let's bring individual accountability to warfare.

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The Faith of Atheists

Atheists are among the most religious and faithful of us all

Even among people who do not consider themselves particularly religious, most of us need something to fill the role that traditional religion provides its adherents.  It does not have to be a traditional religion.  It can be astrology or a cult or some new age gibberish.

But what is that role?  That is, what purpose does religion serve?  What do its members get out of it?

I can think of three primary benefits from religion, though I know there are others.  One, explanation.  People want an explanation for things that science cannot yet explain.  Two, order.  People crave order and religion provides it.  Three, guidance.  Moral guidance.  Most people cannot, or are unwilling to, provide this for themselves, so they turn to religion to do so.  It is a crutch for the intellectually lazy.

Without some kind of religion, most people feel a void, and they are desperate to fill it.  They will turn to some religion, old or new, or they will search until they find something to answer their questions, order their society, and guide their lives.

As for our atheist friends, if they rule out a divinity or divinities, what are they left with?  Because I can assure you, like everyone else, they still crave explanation, order, and guidance.  So where would an atheist turn to find these qualities?

Government, of course.

I have come to believe that the vast majority of atheists are among the most fervently religious of us all.  They have simply replaced faith in the divine with faith in government.  Their willingness to believe in the efficacy of government, without evidence and often in the face of evidence to the contrary, is indeed an article of faith.  In fact, it is a whole faith system, otherwise known as a religion.

While certainly not true in every case (see the self-described secular conservative, Heather Mac Donald), the correlation between secular beliefs and leftist political thought is astounding.  Government is their religion, and the irony is completely lost on them.

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The Banality of Academic Group Work

Back in the eighties, American businesses, large and small, were scared to death of Japan, Inc.  I am not at all sure this fear was justified, but at the time, it was all too palpable.  Consequently, business schools in the United States started studying the way business and industry worked in Japan, hoping to emulate some of their success.

Well it did not take a lot of work or intelligence to realize that Japan has a consensus culture.  And their businesses are also run by consensus.  And the only way to achieve consensus is to ask everyone for their input.  And pre-internet, the best way to do this was to bring together all the key players and discuss the situation and come to the hoped-for consensus.

However long that might take.  And however good or bad the resulting decision.

What our crack business academics saw were groups of Japanese managers coming together to achieve some desired outcome.  And they said:  Hey, we need to do that too.

To be fair, business schools were previously teaching group collaboration.  But it was Japan, Inc. that supercharged the practice.

Now it just so happened that I was in business school in the late eighties.  And we students were early test subjects for this new urgency.  So the professors started assigning group projects.  The idea, ostensibly, was for us to learn to work together to achieve the best result.  Sounds great in theory.

And while the practice was new to me, at first I did not really mind it.  Just another way of getting the work done.  But it soon became clear, that in an academic setting, even at a top-tier school, as opposed to a real, profit-driven, operating business, some group members contributed more than others.  This was always going to be the case.  It is just human nature; some people are more motivated than others.

Yet I did have the opportunity to work with groups entirely comprised of smart, highly motivated individuals.  And I certainly have over the course of my career.  These groups prove the academics' theory is true if groups are in fact so comprised.  But most often teachers assemble academic groups with a diverse mix of contributors.  Here, and without apology, the academics fully expect the strong to carry the weak.

In a business, weak performers can be fired, or otherwise removed from a collaboration.  And even if this is not done, say for political or nepotistic reasons, everyone knows.  But in an academic setting this is never done because the academics do not really understand how things truly work.  They seem to believe that one must learn to work with and appreciate weak performers.  I never have.

Two immediate problems.  One, and the professors readily acknowledged this, is that groups tend to produce results that are better than what the worst-performing members could produce on their own.  But at the same time, inferior to what the best-performing members could produce on their own.  In the aggregate, coming in slightly above average.  This is just common sense.  I guess academics believe that slightly above average is still above average and therefore worth pursuing.

But the outcome is an inferior result; certainly inferior to optimal or best.

The second immediate problem is the result takes longer than necessary because of all the time spent coming to the magical consensus.  I mean the best group members have to spend time trying to convince the worst group members of the correct direction.  And even then, because consensus is the driving force, the group will elect a suboptimal approach.

This is what happens when the real goal is not an optimal and timely result, but rather a consensus-driven result.  So groups produce suboptimal and time consuming results.

Not to pick on Japan.  Because it is really American academics who are to blame for this nonsense.  But a great example of what I am talking about was the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, where indecision and delay led to more serious consequences.  Delay caused while they were trying to reach the Japanese cultural imperative of consensus.

Nevertheless, the idea that group consensus should determine our management and business direction took off in academic quarters.  Further, this idea infused other academic departments, most notably the notoriously less-than-rigorous education departments.  Education professors just loved the idea and added it to their pedagogical methods.

Over the decades since, as businesses will do, they have adapted what works and what does not work, into useful and productive business practices.  What I mean is that if a situation calls for group consensus that is what a business will do.  But if a situation would be ill-served by such a practice, they are not about to impose it to merely fulfill some academic standard.

But no matter what, top performers hate any practice which limits their, well, performance.  This is why you find the best people in entrepreneurial roles, not middle management.  Leave the corporate bureaucracy and academic claptrap to Boeing and Disney.

Now I have no idea if business schools are still teaching groups and consensus-driven decision making.  But they specialize in producing mediocre performers, so probably so.  But you know who is absolutely still pushing this?  Education departments.  The education academics in their wisdom have decided that groups produce higher quality pedagogical results.  It's nonsense of course because the same results happen in education that happen in business.  That is, the results are only better than what the worst-performing members could produce on their own.  But that seems to be perfectly okay for our educators.

So teachers, all kinds of teachers, have been taught to use groups.  Where a couple of generations ago, the teacher would have made an assignment to all individual members of a class, today they're likely to divide the class into groups and make the assignment to each group.

So has academic excellence been drilled out of our current generation of educators?  Do teachers even recognize the inherent problem of group suboptimal performance?  Do they even care?

I do not believe they do.

Why?  Because if a teacher has twenty-eight students in her class and divides them into seven groups of four students each, then the teacher has to read and grade only seven assignments instead of twenty-eight.  Yes, it is just that simple.

So this is the why; my theory anyway.  But there is one last problem.  Who pays?  Well the best, most motivated students of course.  Because they end up doing all the work.  This is not terrible; if assignments were made individually, they would be doing all of their own work anyway.  But group assignments do tend to be larger (because supposedly all members are contributing).  But naturally this is not what happens.  The lazy, unmotivated students contribute little or nothing.  And the bright, motivated students have to carry them along.

Strangely, this never seems to concern the teachers.

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* Apologies to Hannah Arendt.

Feudalism 2030

The Age of Neo-Feudalism is Near

According to online statistics, there are approximately 24,000 private jets operating in the world today.  Which of course means there are twenty-four thousand private jet owners.  Of course, that is a small fraction of the billions of people who inhabit our planet.  It is however, arguably, just about the right number for a new noble class.  People with the connections to make the rules, and the wealth and freedom to ignore the rules themselves.

Sure, we can quibble about the numbers.  But even if the new nobility is one hundred thousand or one million, the results will be similar.  There will be two classes; one extraordinarily small group and the rest of us.  This is not an outrageous claim; most of human history worked on this very model.  China does to this day.

These people will be our new lords and princes.  It is important to note, this is not simply a question of the haves and the have nots.  That's a twentieth century analog perspective.  Today we have digital tracking in the broadest sense and the vast implications of that new reality.  No, I think this is more about freedom.  Those who have real freedom versus those for whom freedom is ever shrinking.  Our new overlords will do as they please.  The rest of us will do what we are allowed.

This is what the climate emergency, central bank digital currencies, automation, open borders, drug legalization, media capture and global healthcare administration capture, ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition, defund the police, etc. are really about.  Covid lockdowns and mandates offered a timely test of the new order.  Think anything you please about Covid and the way authorities dealt with it, but this was a very successful trial run of neo-feudalism.

In Asia, I have noticed a rush to digitalization, even before the technology has been perfected.  You see this often:  No you must use the app; no the app only works on the newest smartphones; if you don't have one, you can't do whatever it is you are trying to do.  Moreover, most of these apps require an active internet connection, which can be problematic if you are in a new area.  Say when you are traveling.

The authorities will tell you that this is about efficiency and convenience.  But I do not believe this for one minute.  It is about tracking and control.

My guess is it will be the so-called climate emergency, completely factitious, that drives the next escalation.  We will continue to drift in the direction of neo-feudalism, until our new lords get impatient, and use climate to accelerate the process.  They have been laying the groundwork for this for the last decade.

Our lords want us car-less and confined to fifteen-minute cities.  They want to limit our air travel.  Meanwhile, the princes will continue to drive their own fleet of automobiles and they will fly their own private jets as much as they like.  But we serfs will do what we're told and go where we are allowed.  Freedom of movement will be sharply curtailed in the name of saving the planet.

Sure, you can go anywhere you like.  So long as you don't have to fly or drive to get there.  You can take public transportation – But only to where they deem fit for it to go.

Government policy will interfere with how you are allowed to spend your own money.  Digital currency will include limitations on purchases.  No, no serf, you've already purchased your monthly allowance of beef.  Or you've already traveled your annual allowance of domestic air miles.  And obviously:  Your bank's credit and debit cards will decline any wayward potential purchases, like say firearms or ammunition.  Multiple attempts and you will risk debanking.  Maybe cheeseburgers will be next.

They want to buy up the farms and drive former farmers into the dystopian urban landscape that they themselves have created.  They will own the farms, or control them with regulations.  And you will eat only what they deem appropriate.

We recently traveled between two countries in Asia.  Fingerprints and photographs to exit, fingerprints and photographs to enter.  They want to know where you are and where you have been.  And of course, they're just getting started.  It was common to hear:  No sorry, we do not accept cash here.  So add, they want to know what you buy, and where and when you bought it.

And our travel required apps that, thankfully, worked on my smartphone, but not my wife's.  If you don't have the right gadget with the right apps, you don't travel.  So my advice here, to leave your smartphone at home, will not work.  It is worth noting that our founders did not envision a need to include the right to travel or freedom of movement in our Bill of Rights.  And you will certainly not find any such idea in other countries.

Now, do I expect some leviathan to be collecting and collating information?  Not initially.  But clearly, we are moving in that direction.  And god knows that would please Herr Schwab, high priest to the new nobility, to no end.  You know, it's important to keep up with what the serfs are doing.

Will social credit scores follow?  Without a doubt.  They will combine our internet usage (including social media and search history) with our purchases, and god knows what else (the correct educational indoctrination, which charities we support, what subscriptions we maintain, what books we read, etc.), to give us all a rating.  Which will then be leveraged to improve or reduce the above listed freedoms.  Want more travel miles?  Make sure to behave yourself.  Can there be any doubt that one will get extra credit for affiliating with the correct political party?

Another question:  Can we get extra points for finking on our neighbors?  Again, we've seen this before.  But this is not East Germany; this time there will be a nifty website for you to report what your neighbors are up to.

Which brings us to this:  Our overlords will not be able or even interested in the administration of our new feudalism.  So they will need to employ a class of administrators, regulators, and enforcers.  Luckily for them, government will gleefully step into this role.  And here I mean all governments at all levels.  This has already started.  Here's a question:  Is there any national government on this planet today which actually serves its citizens?  Or have we reached the point in all nations, where it is the citizenry who serve the government?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Governments today, regardless of how they are installed, serve themselves.  But the new feudal overlords are rich enough to buy off governments and powerful enough to use government to enforce the new feudal order.  If you do not believe this is true, I again refer you to the Covid trial run, where government played its new role to perfection.  Just imagine how government will act in the coming climate emergency.

Finally, I know some readers will ask, to what end?  That is, what is the incentive for the princes to act in this manner?  Well it's classic rent seeking.  Our lords need a continuous source of wealth.  And they are more than happy to use government policy and enforcement to insure the continual transfer of wealth from serf to lord.  It worked in the middle ages, and it will work today.

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The Attack, by Kurt Schlichter

An Hamas-style attack on America

Yesterday, this site featured a new film that everyone should see.  Today, we bring you a new book that everyone should read.

The Attack, by Kurt Schlichter ★★★★★ Kurt Schlichter (Self published) 7 January 2024 336 pages Fiction $ 24.24 (Hardcover) $ 16.27 (Paperback) $  6.99 (Kindle) * Prices accurate on date of this post.

Schlichter sets the book in late August 2024.  But the truth is, this could happen any day now.  And while this book is fiction, the events it describes will absolutely happen unless the United States returns to a secure border policy, and a common sense immigration policy.  And what are the chances of that?

It's a great book and certainly worth reading.  But I disagree with one of the central themes of the book.  Schlichter believes that if the US is attacked in such a manner, the average citizen will fight back.  Or at least, enough of them will fight back.  But after the incredibly meek response by these same citizens during the Covid lockdowns and mandates, I just cannot agree with him.  Sadly, as we have seen, Americans have become sheep.  And they will be led to the slaughter.

Even more recently, look how people, especially younger left-of-center types (and even the police), have reacted to the Hamas supporters across the West.  Again, meekly.  In the US, they have a First Amendment right to say what they want.  But student visas and such could be revoked.  The FBI could monitor Dearborn radicals like it monitors conservative Catholics.  But in fact, the current administration panders to Muslims.

And as I have written before, if the federal government initiates gun registrations or confiscation, how will most people react?  Let's say for example, in a Kamala Harris or Michelle Obama administration.  My guess:  Compliantly.  In any case, this is one reason I think Schlichter set the book so soon in the future – to ensure that a lot of citizens still had firearms.  And his theory that people would be willing to use them makes for a great story.  I enjoyed it anyway.  But it is fiction.

I think Schlichter would argue the point with me.  And I hope I am wrong.  Though I will add this, if we altered his story just a bit, and the terrorists only attacked blue states (rather than all states as set out in the book), would the outcome not be vastly different?  The terrorists could still do tremendous damage and without being immediately gunned down.

I would like to share two passages from the book.  The first describes woke progressive students and academics, and their attitude towards the Palestinian/Hamas attack on Israel:

It meant that rape and torture and murder were allowed if the right oppressed people did it to the right oppressors.

Schlichter adds:  And they made it clear that this moral construct applied to America as well.  I had not thought about it in such stark and extreme terms, but clearly this is correct.  Remember, the progressives revere Marx and Che Guevara, not Gandhi or even Martin Luther King, Jr.

Second, describing Islamist terrorists:

Some people try to call it madness.  It is not.  Do not think of them as insane.  That gives them a moral pass for choosing a barbaric moral framework.  They are not mad.  They are evil.  And they are usually fully prepared to die in perpetuating their evil, either from pride or what we see as ridiculous promises of paradise with their virgins and so forth.

The only thing I could possibly add is that a good number of ordinary Muslims share that barbaric moral framework even if they do not act on it.  Their religion is not like other religions, and until we accept this reality, we will not be able to counter it.  They do not have a Live and let live mentality.  They certainly do not have a Golden Rule mentality.  Rather their's is the mentality of ancient Arabian raiders:  Convert, submit, or die.  And this novel is a manifestation of that injunction.

Finally, let me say this about Schlichter's ending where the United States bombs Iran, expels all illegal immigrants, kills the Mexican cartels, and builds a serious border wall with a serious border protection force.  What would it take for that to happen?  Under any administration?  In his novel, the terrorists kill 162,172 Americans.  I think that number is correct.  It would take near-about that many dead Americans for our government to do its job, and take proper and responsible actions to protect the country.

How sad is that?

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The Climate Scam

Climate:  The Movie (The Cold Truth)

Since Google has shadow-banned this video, I am happy to post it here.  It was initially Unlisted on YouTube.  It was certainly not unlisted by the producers, who want it widely seen, but surely by Google itself.

The film does a good job explaining how scientists were corrupted, and continue to be corrupted, into going along with the climate narrative.  But one thing the film barely mentions is how politicians and other lefty elites have come to preach the narrative.  I mean, what is their incentive?

If you could identify a problem that would allow for, and encourage the public to accept and even demand, leftist, big government, and authoritarian policies, could you come up with something more ideal than the climate narrative?  This schtick ticks all the boxes for the leftist view of how the world should be run.  It does not matter to lefty elites whether it is true or not if it allows them to bring about utopia with, most importantly, themselves in charge, demanding and enforcing how other people live.

So the lefty elites corrupt the scientists with government money and research grants, and the scientists duly report on the problem and how it is getting worse, which the elites use to justify more government and more power for themselves.  It is an ongoing quid pro quo and...

It is the perfect scam.

It is worth noting that Google has also shadow-banned this website (Moore's Twilight Review).  But since I view this site as much a personal journal as a public weblog, this fact does not really disturb me.  Though that said, of course, we all want readers.  Even if you type the complete URL of this site into the Google search bar, they cannot seem to find it.  And how many people know the difference between the Google bar and their browser's address bar?

The left is scared to death of alternative views.  I'm not sure why, but one does wonder if they are that unsure of their positions.  Or are they hiding the absurdity of those positions?  Rather than have an open debate on any number of issues, the preferred tactic of the left is to simply hide the alternatives.  It is a sort of intellectual treason, and the most cowardly thing I have ever actually witnessed.

Google's actions are somewhat capricious.  Search Ace of Spades HQ, a site further to the right than this one, and Google is happy to oblige – Obviously Ace is too big to hide and Google's perfidy would be all too obvious.  And yes, one could make the argument that this site is simply too small to be included in their search results.  Okay fine.  But why deny the URL?

By the way, we're not too small for DuckDuckGo or Bing.

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The End of Thought

You get to choose:  War or a one-party state

I wrote recently that it is time to flee the United States.  Certainly the smart money is in the process of doing just that.  But for those who cannot do so, or are not inclined to do so, what will the country look like?  I mean intermediate term, say the next five to ten years.

Well US citizens have a choice.  They can choose war.  Or they can choose to live under the otherwise inevitable one-party state.

Let's take war first, because I think it is rather easily dealt with.  The possibility of war rests on the fact that Americans are armed to the teeth.  While Joe Biden threatens second amendment types with fighter jets and cruise missiles, any real conflict will be fought with small arms.  Why?  Because the enemy is not confined to any particular state or group of states.  The enemy is next door.  This is why, for all their advanced weaponry, left-of-center types remain so opposed to the second amendment:  They are scared to death that one day someone will simply shoot them with a small caliber weapon.

But we are a fat, rich country of lazy couch potatoes, and armed or not, I just don't see your typical right-of-center American shooting anyone.  On the other hand, I can see left-of-center government types shooting their fellow citizens.

So the left is rightfully scared to death of all the small arms.  And they will continue to erode, and eventually revoke, the second amendment.  And I suppose it is possible that this constitutional treason could spark a war.

But this is not at all clear to me.  How will gun owners react to state-mandated gun registration and later to gun confiscation?  For now, some loudly proclaim bold resistance.  But my guess is that most gun owners will grudgingly comply; so much easier than the risk of becoming an unemployable criminal with a record.

And with their compliance the possibility of war dies.  But as bloody as a second civil war might be, it is the preferable of the two possibilities.

Because short of war, we can only look forward to the coming one-party state.  I view this as inevitable.  What will this look like?  Think the current university environment applied to society as a whole.  But with guns.  Another reason why left-of-center government types want a monopoly on firearms; so they will be able to do anything they like.  And no one can stop them.

So they will be absolutely free to rig the elections on a broad scale.  Who is going to report this?  And who is going to stop them?  No one.

There will be kangaroo courts (we're already seeing this), we will also see an increasing number of political prisoners, and yes, we will see gulags.  Although they will come up with new vocabulary for all of this.  Something less Soviet.  Because Soviet is exactly what it will be.  Something woke and friendly like:  Center for re-inclusion.

If you think Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and Elon Musk are going to stop this, I applaud your optimism.  But if the government is not able to shut down their content distribution, they will find some excuse to disappear these guys.  I mean if the FBI has to plant child pornography on their laptops, again, who is going to stop them?

Now one final question:  Can we avoid a one-party state without war?  Two points.  First, look at the current tactics of the left, and understand that they are going to get more extreme and more dirty.  Second, for the most part, right-of-center types are not street fighters.  And they are under the illusion that we are in the middle of a civilized constitutional debate.  They could not be more wrong.

How do you have a constitutional fight where the other side completely ignores the constitution?  And the constitution will not provide much protection when the Gestapo shows up at your door looking for child pornography.  I have written before on how, in the United States, the constitutional process is over, and like it or not, right-of-center types need to adjust.  I just do not believe they will, or even have the capacity to, do so; it is not in their nature.

So get used to the idea of life in a Soviet-style authoritarian system.  Sure, you may find full compliance difficult.  But there is one redeeming quality that so many of our fellow citizens truly desire.  Over the last few generations, certainly back to the baby boomers, Americans have lost any faculty for critical thought.

And soon, they won't even have to pretend to think.

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Toxic Black Culture

The courage to speak the truth

In the United States, some African Americans are angry that, as a group, they lag behind other racial groups.  But rather than taking responsibility for their own failures, it is easier for blacks to lay the blame for their persistent poor performance on racism.  And while some residual racism surely plays a part, most of the responsibility lies with toxic black culture.

This starts with children.  Having children out of wedlock, children you cannot afford, and children with multiple partners.  And then the parents do not place adequate importance and priority on the education of these children.  The fathers are not in the home and they play little role in the raising of their own children.  So the children grow up without immediate role models, and therefore limited exposure to authority, structure, discipline, respect, and responsibility.  And they are thrust into a world which requires these qualities in order to succeed, or even to just keep up.

So where are the fathers?  We also have to consider employment, crime, violence, and incarceration rates.  It is a cycle and a generational downward spiral.

Look, this is not complicated.  Like everyone else, regardless of race, an African American man must get an education, find and maintain steady employment, find and keep a wife, make a home with her, and then have children with only her, and finally raise and educate the children properly.  In that order.  If you cannot or will not do this, you will fail.  If most men in a community, any community, cannot or will not do this, the community will fail.

I think it is worth pointing out that the black men who have done this are successful, by any standard.  These are the quiet, unsung heroes of the black community.  But they do not receive proper and appropriate credit for their role.  And there are just not enough of them.

I think it is also worth pointing out that white men who cannot or will not do this also fail.  It is behavior, responsibility, and culture, regardless of race.  It is the same for Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, North Africans, and immigrants from Uzbekistan.  In fact, in the United States, the success of any demographic group largely depends on their willingness to follow the above formula.

If you doubt my thesis, just listen to the anger expressed by African Americans today.  It is not anger that an unemployed man has six kids with five different women.  No.  It is, still, anger at the white patriarchy for keeping the black man down.  And since overt racism is largely a thing of the past, today we blame systemic racism.  But with affirmative action, CRT, DEI, and other racial frictions, if anything, today we have systemic black privilege.  And yet...and yet, the black community still struggles.  So it is not systemic dynamics that are the cause of their trouble.  It is culture.

And if we cannot identify and discuss the source of the problem, we will never fix it.  White people are scared to death to address this for fear of being labeled racist.  And black people seem to believe that they get more mileage out of talking about racism, now defined as unequal outcomes, rather than the behavior, responsibility, and culture which actually cause the inequity.  Short term, they are probably correct.

Long term, this is a disaster for the black community.

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American Political Failure

Why is America Failing?

Sure, we can quibble about the exact numbers, the lines are definitely blurry, and perhaps we can even quibble about the order.  But this chart is close enough to get the point across.  I purposefully did not label the bar.  Consider it what you will:  Political Intelligence or maybe Voter Intelligence.  I am tempted to label it just plain Intelligence, but I am sure that would be unfair.  In my view, it is definitely some concept of reason versus emotion, religion, and self-interest.

One reason left-of-center elites (the Con Men) often outperform right-of-center elites is that they understand that it is not about policy.  Rather it is about making winning emotional arguments.  Meanwhile, the much less clever right-of-center leadership struggles to make good policy, which is extremely difficult, and often fails.  But this is not a problem if you don't really care about policy.

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Time to Flee?

The Psychosis of the American Left

First let's make a list.  In no particular order:

• Mass Narcissism  Social media use, tattoos and piercings, smartphone addiction, celebrity culture, the popularity of TikTok and OnlyFans.
  
  
• Urban Decay  Crime, lawlessness, homelessness, and an unwillingness to seriously address these issues.  The people who run our large cities are corrupt and/or incompetent, and as a result the cities do not work and are not safe.
  
  
• Gender  Pronoun madness and the cult of gender ideology, including transitioning children.  And the self-righteousness that surrounds these issues.
  
  
• Woke Ideology  The oppressor/oppressed narrative, the intersectional oppression olympics, patriarchy/privilege ideology.
  
  
• Racial Friction  The current movement against a color-blind society, the promotion of race over merit, DEI and CRT driven racial animus.
  
  
• Reparations  Using the fantasy of reparations to further gin up anger in the black community and interracial discord.  Reparations are a lose/lose proposition:  Pay them and go bankrupt; don't pay them and further aggrieve the black community.
  
  
• Free Speech  The rejection of free speech, censorship, and cancel culture.
  
  
• One-Party State  The desire for single-party rule (as in California) at any cost, and the end of free and fair elections to insure it.  This is why the Left hates the idea of any requirement to show identification to vote.
  
  
• Anti-Semitism  The rise of left-of-center anti-Semitism, and at the same time, the promotion of the ridiculous and factitious concept of islamophobia.
  
  
• Israel Attitude  Israel is the only western-style democracy in a wasteland of autocratic theocracies.  Yet many on the left actively support its enemies.  Hamas kills babies and takes hostages; only the truly psychotic would support these barbarians.  Yet there they are, overflowing on the streets and in our universities.
  
  
• Open Borders  Replacement theory, systemic stress, or merely leftist stimulated chaos?  Drug entry, use, and violence up.  Certainly we see economic migrants as well as an influx of military-aged males without families, most notably from China.
  
  
• Big Pharma  The doping of America:  Over 65 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription.  And over-the-counter drugs sit on top of that.  Further, big pharma has completely corrupted American healthcare, its regulators, and American media.
  
  
• Marijuana  Deregulation, because what we need are more non-productive citizens, who aren't paying attention.
  
  
• Covid Response  The utter insanity of how lefty elites responded to Covid, with lockdowns and vaccine mandates.  But that is not the worst of it.  The worst is how everyday, garden-variety left-of-center types went hysterical.
  
  
• Climate  The so-called climate emergency, the authoritarian possibilities it presents the left, using the Covid lockdown and vaccine hysteria as a model.
  
  
• Energy Policy  Whether it is oil, renewables, coal, nuclear, natural gas and LNG, electric vehicles, consumer appliances, whatever, everything the left does is absolute madness.  All of it.
  
  
• Government  The weaponization of the Justice Department and all other government departments.  The politicalization of the Border Patrol; the FBI has become the DNC's Gestapo.
  
  
• Media  The end of independent media, the rise of the government-media complex.  The end of journalism and the rise of narrative and dogma.
  
  
• Truth  The rise of subjective truth.  In the past we disagreed over the meaning of facts.  Today, we disagree over even the most basic facts themselves.
  
  
• Debt  Unsustainable (and still rising) sovereign debt.
  
  
• Education  The complete collapse of K-12 and post-secondary education, the rise of indoctrination masquerading as education.
  
  
• Foreign Policy  A completely chaotic foreign policy.  Entanglement in conflicts outside of US interests.  Which is part of a greater lack of focus, where our allies cannot depend on us, and our adversaries do not fear us.
  
  
• Political Globalization  Surrendering sovereignty to global entities such as the WEF, WHO, and the UN, run by unelected and unaccountable lefty elites.
  
  
• The Progressive Agenda  The entire academy-led progressive religion.  Let's call it the government is god doctrine.
  
  
• The Obama Factor  The coming Michelle Obama presidency.  This will start, January, 2025.  It will be Obama's fourth term.

Also coming soon:  The rise of political prisoners.  The Left will label right-of-center speech and assembly terroristic or incitement to terrorism and will prosecute accordingly.  They have been testing the waters on this strategy.  It will begin in earnest in the next administration.

That's quite a list.

And writing it out, I could not help but think that there must be some method to the madness.  It's insanity, but is there a purpose?  What we seem to have here is resentment, conflict, deception, and chaos, as political tools.  How long before we see widespread violence?  And maybe some level of violence is the intermediate goal?

But why?  One theory is:  Because then, the people will demand that government do something about it (the violence).  Right?  And the something will be something that ordinarily the people would never allow.  And whatever it is, it will lead to a more autocratic government.  Which of course, is the ultimate goal.  Call this the Rahm Emanuel theory.  Emanuel of course said, Never let a crisis go to waste.  But the part left unsaid is, Even if you first have to manufacture the crisis.

But we have to admit that, there is another other possibility.  What if there is no plan other than chaos and the breakdown of society?  Call this the George Soros theory.  Here I think the people controlling the biggest guns are assuming that it will work out in their favor.  And of course, they're probably correct.  In any case, we will again end up with a more autocratic government.

One final theory, and of course there may be others, is that the above list is completely organic.  Our culture and society have simply deteriorated to this deceptive, violent, and chaotic state.  This is the Occam's razor theory.  And to the extent that lefty elites would acknowledge a problem, this would surely be their argument.  But even if this is correct, at some point we'll see the rise of a strongman or competing strongmen.  And that'll be fun.

Now, who's to blame?  I make this point all the time, but it is impossible to overstate.  I do not blame Obama or Biden or Rahm Emanuel or any of their perfidious ilk.  These guys are simply power-hungry rent-seekers, taking advantage of the cultural milieu, broken as it clearly is.  These guys could not care less about the above policies, or any policies.  They are only interested in policy to the extent that it helps them achieve and maintain power.

No, rather, the fault lies with the half of the country that votes for these policies and votes for the politicians, like Obama and Emanuel, spuriously supporting and advocating for these policies.  That's your neighbors, your family and friends, your colleagues and co-workers, etc.  Half the people you know either actively or tacitly support the above listed insanity.  They are the problem.  They are not going to change.  And what, with their tattoos and drugs and subjective truth and woke ideology, they are too unthinking to change.  And most importantly, they are not going anywhere...

So, I cannot tell you whether it is time to flee, or not.  I can only tell you that I have already left.

𓐵