Playing Hardball

At long last, it appears that the conservatives are learning how to fight and win. Until so recently, it appeared that Republicans had no will to rule, and were much more comfortable with the role of opposition party. For instance, they sent multiple bills to President Obama to kill his own healthcare plan, but have yet to send one to Trump. They also have the ridiculous habit of opposing the left within the left's own moral framework. Mainstream conservatives end up just being mainstream liberals who happen to profess a love for guns and hatred of abortion, for proper political posturing. For example, conservatives often go out of their way to demonstrate their love for diversity. It's nonsense. Government-sanctioned diversity has no greater moral legitimacy than government-sanctioned segregation, nor any more pragmatic value. (Pragmatically it's probably even worse, based on numerous studies which show that diversity kills social cohesion, lowers happiness, etc.) For a fantastic example of how ridiculous conservatives look when they indulge the left, observe Illinois Republican Governor Bruce Rauner's pro-diversity publicity stunt:

"It's really, really good," Rauner said as he drank chocolate milk. "Diversity!"

If voters want farcical pandering to leftist ideals, they'll just vote for Democrats. Trump's whole platform is to reject the "false song of globalism." He rejects the whole premise of liberal political theory, and doesn't grant them perpetual home-field advantage by adopting their rules. That has been the real handicap of the right: to abide by the leftists' rules, or to abide by rules that even the leftists don't abide by. As we say here a lot, selectively enforced rules are merely tools of tyranny. Conservatives like to selectively enforce rules on themselves. How stupid! We categorize the left as engaged in cultural suicide, but the right isn't immune either.

When it comes to rules, there are really just three scenarios the can lead to civil outcomes. First, everyone obeys the rules. That is a high-trust society, which is what America used to be. Let's not pretend that's where we are today. Second is that the rules are enforced, and people obey not out of a principle, but to avoid punishment. That was American until so recently. If you had to put a date on when that era ended, a good bet would be Jim Comey's infamous presser of June 2016. That's when selective enforcement of US espionage laws became the official government policy. It remains to be seen if the the rule of law will be restored, but it seems increasingly unlikely that Jeff Sessions will have anything to do with it.

The third scenario is that obedience of rules break down entirely. If you find yourself i this environment, your only options are to opt out (if you can) or to beat your opponents so ruthlessly in the lawless state that they are forced to agree to rule enforcement for their own good. You don't want to fight dirty, and you make it so they don't want to either. Clearly that's where we're at today. I've said it a number of times here: if the Democrats who abused state power against political opponents aren't brought to justice, then Trump has no good choice but to do so himself. Otherwise, he is giving license to the Democrats to do it again once they regain power. If the rules are not enforced, he must make his opponents wish they were. Well, how about this tweet:

Trump rarely disappoints. If there's anyone who's not going to lay down and be steamrolled by injustice, it's him. Now, he's not threatening here, but you got to love where his head is. He's merely pointing out the hypocrisy of it. Well, he should be threatening it! He really should. A flippant tweet like maybe I'll fund a phony dossier to get a FISA warrant against my opponent in 2020 would send them scrambling, force them to decide whether what Trump proposes is okay, or what Obama/Clinton did was bad. He won't do it now, but after the midterms I expect him to come out firing from all barrels. We need to give him the ammo by really turning out for him in November. (I'll be doing my part to help flip Missouri's Senate seat.)

Another reassuring sign of the Republicans refusing to play the suckers game any longer is the recent testimony of Bruce Ohr before a closed-door joint session of Congress. The proceedings, highly damning to the Democrats and their Mueller coup, leaked like a sieve. Finally! Everyone knows the Democrats leak anything and everything that might give a political benefit. Nunes estimated that Adam Schiff leaked over a hundred times from his intel committee alone. So the Republicans are now returning the favor. Everything politically expedient should start leaking. The White House could really open the flood gates. Soon the Democrats would be begging for some responsible information security.

So Long, Maverick

So long to John McCain, among the worst of what Washington has had to offer. He leaves a legacy of devout American imperialism, a failed presidential bid, and little else. McCain's career should have ended after the Keating Five affair, when he was formally reprimanded by the Senate ethics committee, and yet "he persisted". Self-styled as the Maverick...you have to be kidding me. Do you remember the last time he appeared on television for any reason but to toe the line of the Washington establishment? He was a stooge, a bagman, an apparatchik. "Maverick" is applicable only when uttered with extreme sarcasm.

You couldn't call McCain a political hack. No, he was quite willing to work with administrations of either party in the pursuit of war. Was there ever a proposal for military action he opposed? No, and it was quite predictable that McCain would show up on the television as giddy as a child on Christmas Eve, going so far as to sing songs about the next American bombing campaign, on camera. He just couldn't help himself.

Let's not forget that it was McCain who "delivered" the phony PeePee Dossier. Supposedly McCain received the dossier from its author, British intelligence veteran Christopher Steele, and delivered it to FBI top brass, even though Steele had been under the employ of the FBI for months! The media, of course, never forced him to explain whether he was a willing or unwilling party to intelligence laundering which had as its end goal the nullification of an American election. Since McCain didn't raise hell over discovering that he had handed the FBI their own document, we must assume he was in on the ruse.

It's not as if McCain cares much about democracy anyway. In his final re-election he campaigned as a "leader in the fight against Obamacare", and then proceeded to vote against its repeal. At this distance its hard to tell which of the 2008 presidential candidates was the biggest campaign liar. (I didn't vote for either one, which really is helpful when trying to sleep at night.) After some truly senile behavior in Congress, and even a fatal cancer diagnosis, McCain chose not to graciously retire, because he wanted his replacement to be picked by officials, not the people of Arizona. Even in death, he serves the oligarchy.

McCain was a lying political stooge who led America from one military boondoggle to another. I wouldn't wish a brain cancer diagnosis on anyone, but we are truly fortunate that the senile war monger has been removed from office. Songbird will sing no more. Good riddance to him.

Separation of Politics and Order

Mencius Moldbug wrote a post called Separation of Information and Security in 2007. Not terribly long ago, but then things were a bit different then. Bush was president. The media didn't like Bush, but they were compliant when it mattered. When it came to selling bunk intel to start a war that killed half a million civilians, expanding the security state, doubling the national debt, legislating away civil liberties, and making teaching-to-the-test the new national education strategy, the media was happy to help. But we didn't see the holy reverence which they bestowed upon Obama for eight years, nor the unhinged fury with which they seek the overthrow of the current president. Well, we though we had seen unabashed partisanship in their disdain for Bush, but truly we hadn't seen anything yet.

Moldbug saw separation of church and state as belonging to a more general separation of information and security, but you might also think of it as separation of politics and order. We don't want those tasked with maintaining order to be politically pre-occupied with politics in the execution of their duties. Imagine if the cops ignored calls from Democrats, while the firefighters stood to watch Republicans houses burn to the ground. That is worse for everyone, on both sides. At least in our current system, broken as it is getting, we still enjoy equal protection from firefighters and cops (besides California). Moldbug's logical decomposition of concerns (can you tell he's a programmer?) has possibly an even more general principle, the containment of politics from spilling out into all aspects of life. Anti-communism, you might call it, since the hallmark of communists is they start by politicizing everything. It's quite straightforward, really. First, you politicize everything, then scheme to attain political power. Once achieved, you have power over everything.

The problem with autocracy is that there is no feedback loop. National decisions are whatever the leader decides, and that's final. It's actually great if the leader is superbly competent and sympathetic to his people, but that's rarely the case. Democracy acts as a hedge on decision making. The great ones aren't able to do what they'd like to do, but then neither are the petty tyrants.  People only have two options to express their political will: by voice or by force. Democracy establishes a formal feedback mechanism to ensure that voice has some say in political decision making. That helps ensure that force is a lot harder to justify. The downside is that the nation's decision-making competency becomes roughly equal to that of the average voter.  (Yeah, that bad.) A more balanced approach would be if voting was limited to the smart half of society. Or quarter, even. (Kinda like what the Founders implemented, yes?) With this approach, the decision making stay competent, there is still sufficient feedback from the citizenry, although the lower tiers will feel voiceless. They're pretty distracted by Netflix and social media these days, so maybe that's okay...

The whole feedback mechanism doesn't work by itself. It's not enough just to allow voting. There must be an open and honest transmission of information. It's why the first enshrined right of the first modern democracy was freedom of speech. It's just that important. The government can't bias the public information, because the whole point is political will moves up, not down. And, they can't suppress the flow of public information, because that ensures faulty decision making that will lead to ruin. Moldbug gives the canonical example of a priestly class and a warrior class in a primitive tyranny - the norm throughout most of human history. The priestly class decides what the values are, and who is most holy in accordance with those values. The warrior class is okay to permit the powerful priests, so long as they are singing the praises of the warriors. Yes, the warriors could impose their political will on the people directly, by force. That works, but builds resentments. It's much easier and more stable if the people willingly obey the rulers at the urging of the priests. The warriors then only have to threaten violence against the priests, as opposed to everyone. Moldbug's example isn't really the worst example of politics and order colliding. In the rulers/priests scenario, there becomes a separation, to a degree, of politics and order. The warriors keep order, the priests have some degree of autonomy for the politics. A balance of powers arises. The rulers can kill the priests if they need to. The priests might initiate a revolt against an unpopular ruler.

One thing that should be obvious is that our situation today is closer to the priest-ruler dynamic than a free democracy. The priestly class is the media, who have enormous influence on American's values and information access. They convince the people what is good or evil, and amplify the sins of their enemies while hiding those of their allies. In the classic example, the priests' high status is permitted by the ruler, who might depose any found to be unfavorable. Today, it is the media who control the path to power and dethrones heretics. They are often compared to the Praetorian Guards of late Rome, who were actually a segment of the warrior class. Today the priestly class make similar decisions.

The notion of the separation of politics and security is something this blog stumbled on when exploring the idea of an Energy Backed Currency, which advocated not just a currency backed by energy production, but that the government should nationalize that industry and order itself accordingly as energy-dependent entity. It proposed an outer government, focused on security, diplomacy, and the acquisition of energy resources, and an independent inner government to manage the society. It seems the federalists had a similar idea, but without the focus on energy as a primary driver of national decision making.

With commentators now getting banned just for being conservative, it's clear more than ever that Moldbug was right. The issue at hand is not religion but the transmission of ideas and values. What we have now is a religious cult stifling the free flow of information in a quest to use the government to impose their political will on the populace. This is exactly what the Founders sought to prevent. The American experiment appears to be coming to its conclusion.

Illegal Aliens Kill Liberals pt 1

A few years ago, a young girl in my town was raped and murdered by a guy high on meth who happened to work for a local school, of all places. It was huge news in this area. To my state's credit, he was given the death penalty. To my state's not-credit, he wasn't hung on the town square within the  month, my minimum expectation of punishment for such crimes. In fact, the trial dragged out for years. One good thing you can say about my state, they'll kill people who commit gruesome acts against children...eventually. That's more than you can say for Iowa, which doesn't have the death penalty, or California, which does, technically, just like it technically has laws against foreign invaders killing its citizens.

The weird thing about the murder was the reaction of the parents. They were on the news a bit in the following days. I understand that extreme grief can be a strange emotion, and doesn't always appear like normal sadness. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that the mother seemed happy to be on TV. Some others agree with me. I do believe there was grief, but there was an eerie amount of happiness there. Later, as the trial was still ongoing, it was announced that the parents of the victim and the parents of the murderer were joining forces to promote some new Amber Alert state legislation. Despite the tragic act, they said, hopefully some good could come out of it all. Can you imagine saying that? A silver lining to your innocent child's brutal and inhumane death at the hands of a psychopath? And then becoming best buds with the murderer's father, whose truck was used to kidnap your daughter? The proper and natural response is a vengeful rage that you barely manage to suppress, so long as your intellect can make the case that justice will be best served through the legal channels. The normal response is to want to harm those who harm your children, not gratuitously befriend them.

It's utterly insane. Anonymous Conservative uses the metaphor of wolves and rabbits. Wolves of a pack share a common fate. They have deep emotional bonds and mourn the loss of family members. The rabbit strategy is just to reproduce at least as fast as they can be hunted. They have no strong ties to one another. A rabbit could happily graze alongside his brother's corpse and think nothing of it. These people are even worse than that. At least the rabbit is merely indifferent to the loss of his brother, parents, children, whomever. But these leftoids, for whom the greatest goal in life is to virtue portray a victimhood status and signal devotion to the liberal virtues, you can't even say there's a silver lining. It's a silver cloud with a black lining.

Here's another recent example, which comes my way via Heartiste.

From the family of Molly Tibbets. "Please remember, Evil comes in EVERY color. Our family has been blessed to be surrounded by love, friendship, and support throughout this entire ordeal by friends from all different nations and races. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you."

This is not how normal humans respond to the murder of their child. [Message actually came from an aunt, fwiw.] The first sentence cuts right to the chase: Please remember, we are enlightened liberals not hateful bigots and sooo not racist. Second sentence: Our family has been blessed [...] throughout this entire ordeal (also, still not racist). Put yourself in their shoes. Can you imagine wording your message like that. Have been blessed? Throughout the ordeal? Blessed? Ordeal? Who considers the abduction, rape, and murder a child to be an "ordeal"? To me, an ordeal is getting a flat on a country road and then realizing your spare is flat too. An ordeal is something you try to put behind you, maybe laugh about over some beers. It has the connotation of a personal struggle or trial. In the context of a family member who was brutalized and murdered, this was no "ordeal". Look at that statement: it doesn't even mention her. It's all virtue signaling and "we". Have you have heard of such narcissism? A post about your dead niece that's all about you. Incredible.

Heartiste says

Sickening. I’m beginning to lose the capacity to fathom the White shitlib mind. They are so alien to me now.

These same people make prenaticide their top priority. When news of a school shooting breaks, they tweet, "I hope it was a white guy who shot all those children." As with Muslim radicals, illegal aliens are more likely to kill leftists and their children, but just can't get enough of them anyway. [Mollie Tibbets was actually a raging liberal. Blunt enough to tweet, simply, "I hate white people."] So we'll call this post Illegal Aliens Kill Liberals pt 1, and it can just run in parallel with our Muslims Kill Liberals series. (Been kinda slow on that front, hasn't it?) But that's not the main point here. The point is that we already know liberals like to make victims out of various identities to use as political bargaining chips. They don't care about any of those people, they just use them. That's bad enough, but this leveraging the deaths of children...sickening indeed. It actually makes me want to throw up. They are so alien to me as well. This is not normal human psychology. You wonder why your reasonable arguments don't make a dent on them. Even the brutal murder of their own children doesn't get through.

There is Nowhere Left to Run

What does a murdered Iowan girl have to do with the squeezing of our president by the Mueller coup? Plenty.

The major reactions of whites to the new demographics being imposed on them have been either to pretend they enjoy it, or to move. They say white people moving away from cultural enrichment is racist. Maybe it is. But they also say that whites moving into diverse areas is racist too. So you can't really trust what they say. What whites don't do is to dare utter a word against it. Donald Trump, the great firebrand candidate, merely opined that perhaps we enforce the laws already on the books, and try to keep out the criminal elements flowing through our semi-open border. He was lambasted as Satan++. So whites don't complain much, not openly. And they certainly don't take any sort of action. Reagan has been anointed as the perfect conservative. His most significant action, it is said, was to force the Soviets into an arms race that finished off their empire. I think it's true that he finished them off, but that project was dying either way. No, Reagan's lasting impact was to grant amnesty in America's largest state, turning it a deep shade of irreversible blue.

Whites do their best to pretend not to care about their own displacement. So they move to neighborhoods with "good schools." (A school is measured by the quality of the pupils, followed by the quality of the teachers. Everything else is a distant third.) They move to suburbs to get away from crime or noise, or because the kids need a lawn to play in. There are always lots of good excuses for white flight. Birds of a feather flock together. Unless you're white. Then it's racist, so an excuse is found.

All the white flight has a cost. New neighborhoods are built, old ones crumble. In my small city, the bad part is creeping in on the old district with the stunning Victorian houses. The history is just fading away. The whites are moving to the outlying towns. Our neighboring county is the fastest-growing in the state. The typical rush-hour scenario has developed: logjam heading into the city in the morning, and one headed out in the evening. Road works are constantly adding lanes to roads. I object to the expenditures, but have little say in the matter. I loathe the new towns. Cookie cutter houses are designed with great pains taken to disguise how cheaply they are constructed. Neighborhoods come pre-packaged with no chance for organic growth. They are isolated from all amenities. It's assumed people will drive for, well, everything. Even the mail, you see a lot these days. Some subdivisions go up in the middle of nowhere, a field, just a gaggle of houses that are slightly tweaked so that they don't all look identical.

The boom towns hire city planners. I can't figure out if city planning is much harder than it seems, or if they mostly suck at their jobs. Well the first must be true, but I suspect the second is as well. Any planners worth their salt probably gets so frustrated with the various local government boards that they find something more meaningful to do. The towns are just a patchwork of developments. What ever happened to the grid? The 1960s ruined that too, as best as I can tell. Roads are deliberately curved and confusing, with no alleys, so houses are dominated by front-facing garages and trash bins. Usually there's a town core they try to work around, and a highway going through to connect to the city. It the highway has exits then it tends to break the town up into clumps, to where there is not discernible center of mass. If it's a regular highway then the town stays more focused, at least, but everyone going through must run a red-light gauntlet. The highway commercial zones are dominated by big box stores and fast food chains.

The point of all this complaining is that the new neighborhoods & towns are inferior to the old ones, and yet whites can't seem to move to them fast enough. It's quite apparent that they are moving away from, not towards, something. You wonder how long this can last. A couple generations of this and white people will become like gypsies, living in RVs, roaming to whatever bit of green grass they can find. I have friends in the big coastal cities. If they are even a little collapse-mindful, as I am, I ask, what will you do if there's some social breakdown or other calamity? (Everyone should have some sort of apocalypse-prepardeness plan.) Normally they're not worried, because they can always move back to the midwest. Ah, the midwest, the last great white holdout. We keep making the babies and sending about a third to coasts to become communists. [My running joke about Portland is that meeting another Portlander always includes asking each other where they're from... which they tell me is accurate.] Well, what could be more midwest than Iowa? It's like the cash-stuffed banana stand in Arrested Development. "There's always Iowa!"

Except there's not. Iowa is not the magical homeland we can always turn too. No, in Iowa, like San Francisco, your daughter might be murdered by an illegal foreigner that your government government failed to keep out, for lack of will. We suspect that in Iowa the "it wasn't me it was the gun" defense won't hold up, but who knows. There is no homeland. It there's isn't Iowa, there isn't anything. There's nowhere left to run. And you can't retreat your way to victory.

The same goes for Trump. The latest news is bad, people. He may have conspired to skirt some campaign finance laws. It's his own fault. He should have never paid that bimbo off. Absolutely foolish. And he shouldn't have broken laws to do so, if that's what happened. Surely he'd expect this to get exposed. Of course, in the big picture it doesn't matter. We know what the score is. The deep state made up phony dossier, then lied to the FISA court and did every other corrupt thing to get a permanent investigation of the president and all his associates. Well, they might have found something. Who cares that Hillary's campaign finance violations were aired out for the world to see in leaked & stolen documents? Selectively enforced rules are merely tools of tyranny. This isn't just a political witch hunt. It's a coup.

What's that have to do with Iowa? Because, Trump was our hail mary. He was the best thing we could have ever reasonably hoped for, and it is astounding that he was ever elected at all. If Trump can't save us, who can? No one, that's who. We have nowhere left to run. There is no delaying and hoping for a miracle. This was our miracle. We already lost the cities. We're about to lose our ability to compel Washington to act in our interest at all. Forever. I've never been optimistic about post-Trump America, but this is really getting into pre-civil war stuff now. The government overturns an election. That's a coup. The demographics problem isn't merely racial. It's that the leftists take over, for good. If the coup wins, we know we've lost. The leftists are going to come in with an absolute vengeance. They're sure Trump is a dictator. They will consider it open season. Alex Jones getting blacklisted from social media will be nothing. Leftists that take power through coups always turn violent on the citizenry. Find me a counterexample.

Iowans won't be safe from foreigners while Washington controls the borders. The only way for Iowa to keep out the unwanted will be to take over its own border control. Essentially, to declare sovereignty from Washington. Well, that hardly sounds like a great solution. In a real, hot civil war, more than a few Iowan sons & daughters will perish. But even worse might be waiting until you can't win a war to start fighting it. I don't know what will happen and I'm not saying what should happen. I want people to be very aware of what's going on. This is America, and a coup is underway.

External Salvation

Anxiety is a common ailment in the modern times, but it is by no means a modern ailment. Nearly 2000 years ago the great stoic philosopher Epictetus had something to say on the subject.

So, of course, we are going to experience fear and nervousness. Faced with external circumstances that we judge to be bad, we can't help but to be frightened and apprehensive. 'Please God,' we say, 'relieve me of my anxiety.' Listen, stupid, you have hands, God gave them to you himself. You might as well get on your knees and pray that your nose won't run. A better idea would be to wipe your nose and forego the prayer. The point is, isn't there anything God gave you for your present problem? You have the gifts of courage, fortitude, and endurance. With 'hands' like these, do you still still need somebody to help wipe your nose?

A certain eloquence has been lost. Today we'd say to "man up" or something similarly terse. Then again, brevity is the soul of wit, so maybe we have a leg up on ol' Epictetus. Whoever gives the superior delivery of the message, it is indeed the same message. Why cry out for aid for a manageable problem? It seems there are generally two types of philosophy, which either promote internal or external salvation. The stoics were clearly of the former type - to the extreme. Jesus taught personal salvation, and the early Church did as well. Later, the Church drifted toward external salvation. In the late medieval period redemption meant buying indulgences. We consider that period to be a corrupt era for the Church. Because they were profiteering? No, it has always been a profit venture. It's because they lost sight of Jesus's directions for internal salvation, in favor of more earthly pursuits. It was precisely that corruption which Luther protested. Doesn't he sound a lot like Epictetus? 'Listen, stupid, you possess a copy of the Good Book yourself, why do you pay the priest to spoon feed it to you?' (Luther was only made possible by Gutenberg.)

Our Founders shared a similar sentiment. 'We pretty much govern ourselves, why do we need a king?' The stoic mindset was not universally held by the colonists, many of whom lobbied the king incessantly for protection from the French. (The king would then try to levy a tea tax to pay off their war debts incurred by the French & Indian War, and we know how that went.) The great success of early America was that the stoics won out. Their philosophy would guide the new federal form of government. Why empower the central government to solve problems that can be handled at a lower level? Note that the term 'federal government' as used commonly today is a misnomer, and we should stop abusing the term. Like the Church of the middle ages, our guiding principles have morphed from internal to external salvation. Look at all the effort focused on federal centralized versus local politics. Look at how much of your taxes goes to each.

The great tyrannies and backwater nations through history have in common a focus on external salvation. It's an interesting paradox, but focus on internal salvation tends to create worldly success, and vice versa. The Aztecs were likely to brutally murder your children on a public altar in the hopes that gods would grant salvation for the sacrifice. The fascists promised glory if they could construct an all-powerful nation-state. The communists promised deliverance from life's woes by a powerful ideological state. The promise is always the same. We can solve all your problems, if you'll just grant us the power to do so. It's the temptation of the devil, and it occurs over and over throughout all of human history.

Epictetus describes the people of his era as crying to the gods - an external power - to save them from their inner turmoil. The people of today are no different; they merely cry out to a different religion. Today, salvation is sure to be had by the virtues of diversity, inclusivity, and equity, which only a powerful state can champion in the face of opposition by evil, right-wing bigots. Their anxiety is imposed on them by external circumstances, so they seek an external solution. They are quite certain their problems result from oppression by white straight men, so they seek to leverage the state to combat their alleged tormentors. Even more, they see their external circumstances as being the work of backwards rubes who oppose "progress." The mere existence of such rubes is a cause for anxiety, and they implore outside powers to grant them safe spaces. If the mass media cartel doesn't exclude conservatives from the public forums, then they are guilty of inflicting anxiety on the progressives. Inclusivity requires a high level exclusion.

Wouldn't their anxiety be cured by state-run healthcare? Surely, a bad health diagnosis is a valid concern for anxiety in any era, but particularly in our environment where personal bankruptcy is a likely outcome. We see that their response is the predictable one. Grant the central government even more power to solve the problem which it has only managed to make worse. Take the devil up on his offer.  All other possible ailments - unemployment, homelessness, low intelligence, low pay - can all be remedied, if we just empower the state to take the resources it needs.

What the various entities of the leftist alliance all have in common is that they offer the devil's bargain. Bernie Sanders was the most obvious. Elect me to power and I will solve all your problems, which have been imposed on you by the 1%. Hillary Clinton isn't really a liberal but a power-hungry aristocrat who promised - to the extent she offered anything - elect me and I'll destroy the evil bigots. In general, they say pray to me and I'll relieve your anxiety. It's tempting to say that the conservatives offer the same promises, only differently. Perhaps that was true in the Bush/neocon era, when we were promised protection from "evil-doers" in exchange for some civil liberties and an expansion of the security state. But Trump did not make the same promises. He didn't promise to solve anyone's personal problems (and certainly not to cure their anxiety), but to fix a broken government that doesn't enforce its own immigration laws, makes terrible trade deals, and overtaxes & over-regulates the populace. Fix your feelings? Not even close. Those who protested his promises to reform the government were encouraged to "go home to their mommies." In Trump's America, there is no external salvation. He'll fix the government, but you have to deal with your own problems yourself.

The victimhood culture is nothing new. It is exactly what annoyed the stoics too. Epictetus was born into slavery, and banished - along with all other philosophers - from Rome by the emperor Domitian. More than any SJW alive today, he could have bemoaned his oppression by the privileged class. Instead, he adopted the mindset of self-reliance and made himself into one of the great philosophers of antiquity. It is interesting to note that the stoics arose during late Rome in response to the endemic softness and hysteria of the people. Their movement was not sufficient to prevent Rome's decay or the coming centuries of chaos and darkness. We find ourselves at what is probably late-stage America. I wonder if stoic philosophy is a typical reactionary response to the social decay of the late imperial stage. And more, I wonder if it has ever been successful in staving off collapse.

Inalienable Security Clearances

In one of the strongest moves yet by President Trump (and hopefully the first of many), former CIA Director John Brennan - who has broken all protocol of former intel chiefs by calling for the political overthrow of the elected government - had his security clearance revoked. Trump's many enemies have, predictably, denounced the move as tyrannical. There are two sides to the matter. On the one hand, Brennan is an enemy of the state and certainly deserves to be relieved of his privilege to state secrets. Anything else from the sitting government would be quite negligent. On the other hand, we believe that selectively enforced rules are not rules at all, but tools of tyranny. Trump should not be singling out political adversaries for special treatment, as much as they may deserve it. We expect this action to be part of a much larger program to revoke security clearances that are no longer necessary, especially from officials working to undermine the elected government.

That all said, you really have to hear the ACLU's take on this.

The First Amendment does not permit the president to revoke security clearances to punish his critics. John Brennan’s record is full of grave missteps, and we have been unsparing in our criticism of his defense of the CIA torture program and his role in unlawful lethal strikes abroad. But Trump’s revocation of Brennan’s clearance, and his threats to revoke the clearances of other former officials for the sole reason that they have criticized his conduct and policies, amount to unconstitutional retaliation. They are also part of a broader pattern of seeking to silence or marginalize critics, which includes forcing staff to sign unconstitutional non-disclosure agreements.

Accessing the statement on their website requires viewing an ad asking you to donate to help fight Trump's attack on civil liberties. Then you are confronted with that first sentence: The First Amendment does not permit the president to revoke security clearances to punish his critics. How the ACLU made that their leading sentence just boggles the mind. The rest fits in with what we've already described as a reasonable counter-argument. A counter-argument, mind you, that is easily overpowered by the fact that Brennan is a key player in a coup to overthrow a federal election. But nowhere is it reasonable to call a security clearance a First Amendment issue. Between that and the TDS-pandering fundraising - from the ACLU! - it is quite incredible. It's not that we should be surprised that the ACLU is neither politically impartial nor principled. Of course they're loony left-wing fanatics. The thing is that they're supposed to pretend to be apolitical. They at least have to extend the possibility of plausible deniability. Yet they are fundraising to "stop" the president, and labeling his actions as First Amendment violations without even trying to substantiate the bold assertion.

As usual, the left are at all times scrambling for any blunt object to throw in the direction of the president, and anything resembling a valid appeal to reason is merely incidental. The ACLU is just jumping on the same bandwagon as the rest: pandering to the leftoids to acquire fame and funds. For those of us in it for the long haul, this is good news, whatever the outcome for Trump. These swamp creatures stay alive by maintaining plausible deniability, by propagating illusions. All pretense of principle over petty politics is long gone. Sure, these places are doing fine for now (but not great, looking at MSM ratings). TDS fuels the lefty organizations. But what about when he's gone? After years of gratuitous partisanship, do they think they'll just return back to the normal game? (Trick question...they aren't thinking.) The leftist capacity for selective memory knows no bounds, but still, I have to think that once Trump has moved along, these outfits that have undermined their own legitimacy in their zeal for the zeitgeist, they'll just deflate away.

As far as Brennan goes, well, which do you think is the more likely scenario. That this was petty, impulsive, uncalibrated vengeance? Or that this is part of the Trump playbook? Sure, you or I, mere mortals, might make our strongest case against Brennan when firing him, to provide justification. Trump doesn't do that. He holds his cards tight, and lures his enemies into weak positions. He'll make Brennan a martyr on purpose, so all the left circles around him, right before the rug gets pulled out from underneath them all. We've seen this enough times. I'll be looking forward to the next scene of Act Brennan.

Unbalanced Fantasies of Inflation

Charles Hugh Smith, whom we picked on a few days ago, has a new post out titled The Fantasy of "Balanced Returns" Funding Retirement. While we shouldn't get caught up in the notion that any investment strategy is foolproof, it doesn't mean there's merit to the economic analysis being made. Let's dive in...

He seeks to counter a prevailing belief that a balanced investment portfolio is a sure-fire recipe for retirement success. His major concern, as before, is with massive inflation that will be caused by government spending. He demonstrates that nominal yields can be much lower than real yields in the face of inflation. But really, anyone unfamiliar with real vs. nominal yields shouldn't be handling their own investments in the first place.

He warns that, once asset bubbles pop, runaway inflation will distort the massive losses people are actually accruing, and the government will print feverishly to cover its liabilities. Perhaps Of Two Minds economic analyses should be prefaced with a disclaimer. "Assuming hyperinflation, [...]" Let's not assume hyperinflation, and consider investment returns in the face of general inflation.

First, we have to remember there are two sides of inflation. You couldn't balance a budget by only looking at income. Spending must be considered as well. Likewise, inflation is more than just the money supply. It's the ratio of the money supply to the real economy. Smith fixates on inflation driven by the expansion of the money supply. But a contraction of the real economy could also cause inflation. He almost seems to get it at times. Consider this paragraph:

If inflation (i.e. the currency loses purchasing power) gets out of hand due to excessive money creation to fund interest on debt, entitlements and obligations, the only cure is to raise interest rates significantly. Higher rates destroy the value of existing bonds and they strangle speculation and debt-dependent projects and spending.

Here he defines inflation as the currency losing purchasing power, instead of just saying a growth of the money supply. It's tempting to give him credit, that he actually does understand the principles here, even if he frequently writes in shorthand. But consider that whole sentence. He's saying that, in response to inflation, the government will increase interest rates. (In this analysis the central banks would be regarded as an arm of the government.) But he's also saying that the government is going to flood the money supply to pay its own debts. Well, which is it? Will the government expand or contract the money supply? He seems to suggest that the government will seek to expand the money supply by taking on more debt, while at the same time containing the money supply by raising rates, causing its own debt payments to skyrocket. The government does irrational things, to be sure, but there needs to be compelling reasons to make predictions like that.

Smith doesn't actually make the argument that inflation will hurt stock prices. He argues that the government's actions to contain inflation will ruin the market. (This follows up on his recent piece where he says the government will certainly drive runaway inflation.) So what is the effect of inflation on the stock market? Well, it depends. If inflation is driven as he says - by government spending - then that means the money supply grows while the economy remains constant-ish. That's a recipe to hurt cash holders, lenders, people holding government bonds, etc. Stock holders own a portion of the real economy and shouldn't be too affected by inflation. Even more, Smith himself already told us in his last post that inflation was driving an increase in stock prices. If you're holding stocks, you must want an expanding money supply.

The other cause of inflation would be a shrinking economy, which would also cause lower stock prices. It would be incorrect to say, in that scenario, that the inflation causes stocks prices to fall. The shrinking economy is the cause, of which inflation and stock market measures would be results. Confusion on the matter must be common. One of the top hits in a relevant web search is Investopedia's Inflation's Impact on Stock Returns, written by a CFA.

Numerous studies have looked at the impact of inflation on stock returns. Unfortunately, these studies have produced conflicting results [...].

As expected. Inflation is not really a measurement, but a combination of two measurements.

Most studies conclude that expected inflation can either positively or negatively impact stocks, depending on the investor's ability to hedge and the government’s monetary policy. Unexpected inflation showed more conclusive findings, most notably being a strong positive correlation to stock returns during economic contractions [...].

The first sentence makes some sense, although it counters Smith's claim that all the hidden inflation has been going to the stock market. Expected inflation is priced into the market. To hedge against it, people will sell cash-denominated assets and buy commodities like gold and real estate. The stock market isn't strongly affected either way, being somewhat in the middle as far as inflation risk goes. The second part isn't so easy to make sense of. In times of economic contraction, unexpected inflation is good for stock prices. Or at least, less bad. Economic contractions tend to be deflationary. Yes, the real economy falls, but, thanks to fractional reserve lending, the money supply shrinks even faster as loans fail. Perhaps unexpected inflation helps keep people from bailing asset-backed investments for cash instruments.

I tend to believe that Smith is correct that upper-class wealth increases put upward pressure on stock-market prices, and that the study referenced (but not sourced) in the Investopedia article may or may not account for that. But in his overall analysis, it's quite a story. Government-driven inflation will cause government-driven deflation, which will hurt investments. He actually has to argue that rising interest rates will hurt retirees! Talk about fantasy... A better argument to make is the simpler one. Balanced return investments are likely to do well in a good economy, and poorly in a shrinking economy. Investments should be tuned in response to inflation, but it won't do any good to pay attention to arguments that amount to your retirement is doomed by inevitable inflation, and certainly not to logical contortions like inflation is bad because deflation is bad.

Poetic Injustice

Just as a reminder, the Conservative Treehouse is still going hard at it covering the greatest political scandal in American history. See here for a recent post on just how complicit the media has been in all this, which is why I label it the greatest political scandal. There are certainly other competing scandals for the title. A number of foreign wars based on lies & fake intel were highly scandalous, but at least weren't a direct assault on America's democratic process. The only thing that might be worse was the Kennedy assassination, which most Americans suspect was the result of some sort of conspiracy. But even if you believe the very worst, that Lyndon Johnson played a role, or - my preferred theory - that a CIA coup led by ousted directer Allan Dulles removed an existential threat, even then the scandal falls short of the current one, because of the role of the media in promoting a slew of obvious lies, not to mention a political party that has made the delusion it's primary platform, and a significant portion of the population adopting the narrative with religious fervor, despite all evidence to the contrary. The Kennedy conspiracy, if true, was at least relatively contained and didn't entail the broad-spectrum propaganda machinery we see in operation today.

There was recently a fake scandal from the White House because Sarah Sanders would not state, as demanded, that the media is "not the enemy." Good on her for refusing to adopt their frame-up job. The game where they make you denounce various things as evil, or you yourself are evil, is merely a tool of control. Either answer makes you their puppet, so the correct response is not to play their game at all. The public demand for spiritual purity is just what would be expected from the Neopuritans. "Do you denounce Satan and all his works?" has become "do you reject Putin and all his Russian bots?" Likewise, "do you believe in one Holy, Catholic and apostolic Church?" has become a demand for fealty to the various liberal institutions. When the reporter grills Sanders to say the media is not the enemy, he is merely trying to virtuously expose a heretic before his high-status Cult peers.

Well, the thing about it is that the press are the enemy. This was all in context of Trump, and the media have made themselves his enemy from day one. They are engaged in a program of lies to try to destroy him entirely. Their primary effort is political opposition to the elected president. That much is objectively true. The case is made very well by Sundance. The media have had a leaked copy of the FISA application for over a year, but have refused to report the truth about it because that would be politically beneficial to the president. That is one example of many, but is in itself sufficient to prove the point.

They are clearly the enemy of Trump. It is not even a value statement. They are trying to remove him from power, thus they are his enemy. It's too bad Sanders didn't flip the script on them, asking whether or not they are the president's enemy. It is, after all, their question to answer.

But even in the more general sense, they are the enemy. They are the enemy of conservatives, no doubt, but also of the whole experiment with liberal democracy. Crooked politicians are an enemy, but we kind of expect that, and so did the Founders. That's why they worked so diligently to ensure the various self-insterested entities would be balanced against each other. We also expect the voters to be somewhat irrational. Again, the Founders were very concerned to buttress against the tyranny of mob rule. But, that the press would be engaged in co-ordinated programs of absolute deceit....well, even if the Founders foresaw such a scenario, they did not architect a preventive solution. And how could they? In reality, if a political propaganda machine is successful, there is no good legal counter. The Soviet Union had an even better bill of rights in their constitution than we do, which only amounted to a "parchment guarantee." If the truth is blocked from the people, it hardly matters what the laws are. For that matter, it hardly matters what the government is. An absolute monarch reigning over an informed, reasonable population would be far less tyrannical than a liberal democracy with a majority obeying a cult of ignorance and hysteria.

The media are the enemy, because only they can enable or prevent tyranny. The difference between an honest media and a lying media is the difference between an investment agent who gets you a good return, and one who embezzles your retirement and disappears to a tropical island. Whose side the media on is quite important. Those pre-occupied with the acquisition of power will seek to limit the information that gets to the public, while those dedicated to freedom will battle to liberate information. The most insightful thing Alex Jones ever did was to grab the domain Infowars.com for his news/entertainment outfit. Because it is all an information war. Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery. How fitting that he has now been banned by the media. It is poetic injustice that shouldn't be lost on anyone paying attention.

Kill Shots & Martyrs

There is hardly a slow news week anymore, and the past few days have been no different. The first interesting thing to happen was the discovery that the New York Times' newest editor has a highly racist Twitter feed. Even more interesting was the decision not to fire her. We're well aware that the foremost sin of The Cult - racism - is selectively enforced by race. Still, it's quite a thing to see the New York Times, their "paper of record", officially adopt the stance that only white people are racist.

Candace Owens sought to showcase how racist Jeong's tweets were by retweeting them herself, but replacing all instances of white with black. In one of the most stunning confirmations of an argument perhaps ever seen, Twitter - who had not taken action against Jeong - suspended Owens! The incident proves that the New York Time's hired an editor that is certainly racist, unless one adopts the racist credo that only certain races can be racist. And it follow right on the heels of the discovery that the New York Times was literally prostituting itself to government employees for access to documents. What a piece of tabloid trash. It's the left's vaunted institute. What next, Harvard dealing crack?

I say it's a killshot, because you don't get more persuasive than this. Good on Candace Owens for the role she is playing. Twitter later canceled her suspension and called it a mistake. Well, it was, because it underscored the racism going on at the Times. But it's all quite consistent from their viewpoint. Jeong can't be racist. Owens's logically equivalent tweets were racist, because they were about blacks, so she was suspended. Then they realized she is herself black, so she can't be racist, so she was re-instated. The whole ordeal has made it very clearly that the left hates white people. The only whites that could possibly remain aligned with them are the grossly uninformed, the self-hating whites, and the sociopaths who use minorities, as Owens puts it, as "political bargaining chips."

The next big news was Alex Jones getting deplatformed. It wasn't completely unexpected. I had decided just a number of weeks ago that Infowars would serve as my Facebook politicization litmus test. If Infowars was banned, I'd close my account. (Hardly used anyway, these days.) It was pretty clear that if they wanted to start outright banning conservative voices, it would start with Infowars. What I didn't expect, however, was the co-ordinated strike across multiple platforms. Who would have thought they'd be so brazen behaving openly like a social media cartel? Well, we tend to underestimate just how brazen they can be.

The Anonymous Conservative talks about how the r-selected - who can't naturally compete, are terrified of being out-grouped above all things. Psychologically, for them, out-grouping is like a death sentence. They can't survive on their own. Their own out-grouping campaigns are largely a matter of psychological projection. They do unto their enemies that which they fear having done to themselves. Getting an enemy banned from mainstream & social media is their killshot. That is the progressive going for the jugular. Does anyone really think they care about the major principles of liberal democracy, like freedom of speech? Please. The entirety of their political existence is to have the tribe provide them with resources, and isolate anyone who might oppose that outcome. That single sentence explains their behavior with more consistency and predictability than any body of political theory out there. How else can you account for the fact that they say blacks are economically disadvantaged but push for unlimited illegal immigrants; that they hate religion, misogyny, and homophobia, but love Muslims; that they hate racism but also hate the white race; and on and on. Their internal contradictions are unending and confounding, until you realize the prime directive of progressives. I deliberately say the prime directive of progressives - rather than the prime directive of progressivism. Often we think of liberalism as a mind virus, infecting hapless victims. Thus, we try to attack the disease rather than the patient. But, at the core of it, there is no ism there. There are progressives, the group of people who tend to share the prime directive within their psychological fabric, and all ideology is downstream from that.

Outgrouping isn't necessarily the killshot the left believes it to be. It can be fatal, no doubt, but often it has served as a catalyst that drove the great men of history. Famous examples include Genghis Kahn, Jesus, El Cid, Napoleon. In the 20th century, Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin were all politically imprisoned or exiled, as were Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Out-grouping can be as ineffective against a strongly self-driven man as a rational argument is against a progressive. The wind extinguishes a candle but fuels a wildfire. Not only does exile make an opponent more resolute, it gives him status amongst his compatriots, and sympathy in general as people always love an underdog. If they are going to make Alex Jones a martyr, and other conservative voices, they had better make sure they can thoroughly destroy him in the process. Hence the collaboration to ban him from all major outlets. It is possible that this all ends up hurting the social media giants more than Alex Jones. He's already working on marketing spin, encouraging viewers to Subscribe to the Banned Show.

All the companies that have acted in solidarity to deplatform Jones have effectively signaled their membership within a social media cartel. I am moving to deplatform myself from all those services, and I encourage everyone else to do the same. (Yes, I even canceled my Spotify.) This blog is hosted through Google. I've wanted to change that for quite some time, and this event has given impetus to finally do so. The migration process is already started. This blog will be moved to a neutral platform and rebranded in the coming weeks. We'll make this blog great again.

Hypedinflation

One of the things we've learned as this blog has critiqued the left over the last few years is that they are wrong on virtually every subject. Pick any contentious social problem, and we can show how their proposed solution is inferior. It's even worse, really, because they aren't even getting the problems right. Most of their biggest gripes are imaginary - systemic prejudice, for example - and they ignore the real problems, like a political system that is destroying the democratic legitimacy on which it rests. Even when I agree with their positions, they are still wrong. For instance, I think abortion should be legal, yet I find fault in all the left's arguments in favor of it. I merely believe that they kinds of people who'd equate infanticide with political freedom shouldn't be reproducing anyway.

This conclusion - that the left is always wrong about everything - was updated from the previous viewpoint that they are usually wrong. For instance, the left used to love Noam Chomsky, who literally wrote the book on how the US corporate media is an even more effective propaganda instrument than state-directed media at selling Americans on the CIA-driven policy of secret wars around the world. Trump has tweeted just that: that the media are the enemy and lead us to war. So, naturally, the left suddenly consider the whole idea to be ludicrous. They are wrong, but only because Trump is right. Since their entire platform now consists of almost blind opposition to Trump, they now are capable of being right, but only to the extent that Trump is wrong. These days there really is no reason to examine the Democrat platform at all. We can just study Trump, knowing the leftist stance is deterministically deducible. It's likely the least interesting political theory of all time; opposition to one guy. Their entire platform is hatred of Trump, albeit with a few lesser planks consisting of hatred of white people, western history, men, and straws.

Just because the liberals are always wrong doesn't mean the conservatives are always right. Correctness is not a zero-sum game, because there are many more ways to be wrong than right. It's the reason why Socrates spent more of his time dismantling false arguments than advancing correct ones. It's why we dismiss the advice of some alt-right leaders to "never punch to the right" as cult-like drivel. The same goes for people like Mark Levin assuring us he is a "true conservative." He thinks that, if liberals are wrong (they are), and he is the opposite of them (a reasonable claim), then he must be correct. Often he is, but it's an overly simplistic binary mindset, to be sure.

The one domain where I see conservatives getting it wrong the most is in economics. It's somewhat understandable, given how liberals are nearly as allergic to economics as they are to Darwinism. After the absolute nightmare that was the 20th century, they still advocate for socialism. So it's easy, as a conservative, to pick up a complacent sense of superiority. Still, less wrong does not equal right. It's still essential to critique the faulty economic arguments from the right, and really it's the only game in town anyway. A critique of the left's economics normally consists of a series of facepalms. Therapeutic, perhaps, but not productive.

Now that the excessive introduction is out of the way, let's take a look at Charles Hugh Smith's piece Here's Why Rip-Roaring Inflation is Inevitable. (I have previously critiqued his blog, which is linked in the sidebar.) It's the kind of sky-is-falling headline that a lot of people will ignore anyway. Still, it's worth trying to articulate whatever faults can be found in the piece, to improve our own understanding of monetary systems. We'll just take the piece bit by bit. It begins with the thesis:

One of the enduring mysteries of the past decade is why inflation has remained tame while the central bank and government have pumped trillions of dollars of newly created money into the economy.

It's a fair economic question to ask, the but the wording of "enduring mystery" is a bit heavy. When one's model continually fails to predict reality, that often means...well, you know what that means. He then proceeds to explain in four "basic points."

1. Adding newly created money but not generating new goods and services of the same value reduces the purchasing power of existing money. [...] In effect, the new money robs purchasing power from all existing money.

Correct.

2. Where "inflation" (higher prices for the same item) shows up depends on who gets the newly created money. [...] The net result of giving all the new money to the wealthy is the inflation of an asset bubble, which is precisely what's happened in the past decade.

The claim is that there is already inflation in investments. In effect, there is more money looking for investments than there are investment opportunities, so we see the ridiculous tech-sector valuations, real-estate bubbles, etc. It's not clear what this means in reference to his original thesis. Does this solve the mystery of missing inflation, on his second of four points, or not?

3. The inevitable consequence of asset inflation is rising income and wealth inequality. The wealthy few have gorged on assets with all the newly issued credit-money, and as the assets soared in value, they've become immensely wealthier. A funny thing happens on the way to extremes of wealth/income inequality: social unrest, disorder, revolt.

Perhaps I was wrong and Mr Smith is not really a conservative. It reads more like a Bernie Sanders campaign speech than an economic analysis. The situation is not the rich sucking the lifeblood out of the poor. It's more like a Ponzi scheme. The only way the rich "gorge on assets" is if they have the good fortune to buy early and sell before the plunge. A lot of wealthy people lose their shirts when the bubbles pop.

4. To quell the revolt of the many, the Powers That Be will create trillions in new money and helicopter-drop it to the masses.

It is quite clear that the author has abandoned the thesis put forth in the opening sentence - the question of the missing inflation - and has instead chosen to service the provocative title. The theory is now that, in response to unrest caused by inequality, the government will unleash trillions in ransom payments to buy peace, directly spending unprecedented inflation into reality. It's such a fantastical tale that you wonder if the author understands what hyperinflation is.

This is precisely what Venezuela has been doing for a decade: distributing newly created money that isn't matched by a corresponding increase in the production of goods and services.

No, it isn't "precisely" what has happened in Venezuela. Yes, the government has increased spending dramatically by several times (in USD) since Chavez was elected. But the currency hasn't inflated several times. It's inflated several thousand times. Hyperinflation happens when the people lose faith that the currency has value. Other factors were involved. The real GDP of Venezuela is falling. Partly because they were so dependent on oil prices, and also, we assume, because socialist economies aren't known for efficiency. Spending went up while the economy shrank, and people lost faith in the currency. The government is not currently engaged in printing because it wants to appease its people. It's doing so to make its own debt payments in the face of declining tax revenues in a currency that no  one wants to hold.

Real-world inflation will blow the doors off every forecast of low inflation forever. From the point of view of the wealthy few who control the status quo in the US, they have a stark choice: either continue pushing wealth/income inequality to extremes that trigger social and political revolt, which puts their control at risk, or create and distribute trillions in "free money."

Welfare or die, it seems.

Well, as mentioned earlier, analyzing a bad argument can be instructive. In his opening thesis, the author refers to the mystery that trillions have been pumped into the economy without generating the expected inflation. It's not certain how many trillions he's talking about, but at least four trillion can be accounted for by foreign reserves, which increased from $2.5 trillion to $6.5 trillion in the last decade. Any monetary analysis that forgets the USD is the global reserve currency is likely to be error-prone. It's too bad the author misses that, because it is itself a hyperinflation risk to the US. Imagine if, tomorrow, all those countries holding USD foreign reserves decided amongst themselves that the dollar was bogus and they would trade in some other currency. All those dollars would be "sold" back to the US in exchange for real wealth. Dumping $6.5 trillion in cash back on the domestic economy would certainly drive serious inflation. Many commentators talk about China's "nuclear option" to dump its US treasury holdings. Well, someone will buy the debt, if the price is right. The result will be a higher interest rate to service the debt. But that's not nearly the damage that could be caused by dumping foreign exchange reserves. The government would be forced to counter by jacking up interest rates & taxes and cutting spending. Of course, likely they'd jack up interest rates & taxes and leave spending alone. They could also pre-emptively strike by devaluing the dollar. That would weaken the calling-on-the-loan aspect of foreign USD dump, but the inflation would still have to be dealt with.

The point to take away from all this is that the hyperinflation occurs when governments print to meet their debt obligations in the face of declining revenues. Eventually a loss of trust erodes revenues even further, causing a spiral of spending. That is not the same as a mere increase in social welfare spending, which may or may not lead to hyperinflation.

The Great Covering

In today's post, The Great Questioning, Z states

I can’t remember the last time a liberal friend or acquaintance mentioned someone on the conventional right. It’s all Trump and his secret allegiance with Putin for them. To a lesser degree they obsess over people like me and our plans to bring back slavery, roll back women’s rights and turn America into a medieval fortress.

It's true, and has been since early in the election cycle. His opponents facilitated it, too. The Democrats and their media allies worked to shift the focus towards the "pied piper" candidates like Trump, Cruz, and Carson, and away from establishment favorites like Jeb! If you want a real facepalm moment just read Trump's bit from 1987 on using the press, and then read the DNC email where they adopted the strategy of throwing kindling to his upstart candidacy. In fact, I'll paste the whole section here. It's probably an egregious copyright violation, but I doubt the author will mind.

Get the Word Out

You can have the most wonderful product in the world, but if people don't know about it, it’s not going to be worth much. There are singers in the world with voices as good as Frank Sinatra’s, but they're singing in their garages because no one has ever heard of them. You need to generate interest, and you need to create excitement. One way is to hire public relations people and pay them a lot of money to sell whatever you’ve got. But to me, that's like hiring outside consultants to study a market. It's never as good as doing it yourself.

One thing I've learned about the press is that they're always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better. It’s in the nature of the job, and I understand that. The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you. I've always done things a little differently. I don't mind controversy, and my deals tend to be somewhat ambitious. Also, I achieved a lot when I was very young, and I chose to live in a certain style. The result is that the press has always wanted to write about me.

I’m not saying that they necessarily like me. Sometimes they write positively, and sometimes they write negatively. But from a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks. It's really quite simple. If I take a full-page ad in the New York Times to publicize a project, it might cost $40,000, and in any case, people tend to be skeptical about advertising. But if the New York Times writes even a moderately positive one-column story about one of my deals, it doesn't cost me anything, and it’s worth a lot more than $40,000,

The funny thing is that even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business. Television City is a perfect example. When I bought the land in 1985, many people, even those on the West Side, didn’t realize that those one hundred acres existed. Then I announced I was going to build the world’s tallest building on the site. Instantly, it became a media event: the New York Times put it on the front page, Dan Rather announced it on the evening news, and George Will wrote a column about it in Newsweek. Every architecture critic had an opinion, and so did a lot of editorial writers. Not all of them liked the idea of the world’s tallest building. But the point is that we got a lot of attention, and that alone creates value.

The other thing I do when I talk with reporters is to be straight. I try not to deceive them or to be defensive, because those are precisely the ways most people get themselves into trouble with the press. Instead, when a reporter asks me a tough question, I try to frame a positive answer, even if that means shifting the ground. For example, if someone asks me what negative effects the world’s tallest building might have on the West Side, I turn the tables and talk about how New Yorkers deserve the world’s tallest building, and what a boost it will give the city to have that honor again. When a reporter asks why I build only for the rich, I note that the rich aren’t the only ones who benefit from my buildings. I explain that I put thousands of people to work who might otherwise be collecting unemployment, and that I add to the city’s tax base every time I build a new project. I also point out that buildings like Trump Tower have helped spark New York’s renaissance.

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.

I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion. 

It's so satisfying to think about. They were so fixated on getting their queen-bee aristocrat installed into power that they really didn't think about anything else, resulting in their worst nightmare. Certainly it will stand to be one of the great all-time examples of poetic justice.

Thanks to Trump's penchant for playing the press to his advantage, and the Democrats' penchant for screwing things up, Trump is, really, the only new story. Nothing else comes close. There are already a number of sentences littered throughout this blog to the tune of The best thing about Trump is... Let's add another. The best thing about Trump is he gives cover to conservatives. A conservative can say something to infuriate our overlords of political correctness, but the focus will always return to Trump within a few days. It reminds me of the Lord of the Rings movies. Frodo, deeply infiltrated into Mordor, catches the attention of the eye of Sauron, whose piercing gaze assures a quick demise. At just the right moment, the army of men arrives at the gates, which conveniently distracts the singularly threaded lord of darkness.

The Trump distraction gives conservatives cover to actually, well, be conservative, without being burned down by the media's beam of focused rage. It would appear that not many conservative politicians are making as much use of the situation as they should, but there is still time. Little by little, they will learn that the backlash for conveying "hate facts" and other such mortal sins is attenuated enough that it can be survived. Steve King, the Congressman from Iowa, is a great example. He committed outrageous heresy when he stated that we can't replenish our nation with other peoples' babies. He really drove down to the core of the matter. It's hard to believe he's survived. Had Hillary won, his outlook would likely be grim. He'd be the recipient of constant media outrage, which would fuel all kinds of money from the coasts towards some RINO usurper. But that's not happening. He will coast through an easy re-election. They don't have the ability to mount a sustained assault on him. Not when Trump is meeting with the evil dark lord of Moscow. REEEEEE!!!!!!

This is all more significant than it might seem. It's happening slowly, and quietly. Think of Paul Ryan, who's on his way out. Probably towards some high-paying consultancy - a fat reward for being a good boy and writing Mr Obama's blank check - but his political career is nevertheless terminated. Not a bad place to end, but you know how ambitious these people are. You have to understand how a guy like Ryan got to where he is now, in a position with very real power. He certainly didn't do so by appealing to conservatives. Nor was it from support from the left. Not direct support, at least. Go to any lefty forum. The consensus is still that he's a terrible bigot, racist, etc etc. Well, he's a Republican, so they have to think that. His support from the right is soft, and from the left is indirect, at best. But that indirect support sustains him. In general, the media create an environment where real conservatives are eviscerated, so only slimy RINOs can ever level up. It's like chemotherapy, but in reverse. The good cells tend to be eradicated faster than the cancer. Ryan's big advantage was that he had a big powerful lord of darkness dedicated to the task of smiting his opponents. To the establishment, a faux conservative who kowtows to the aristocracy is far more valuable than another Marxist Democrat. These players are essential to keep the political theater alive. In a lot of ways, the establishment liberals would rather have a Republican Congress funding the Obama agenda. It conveys a signal of... perhaps legitimacy, but at least one of insurmountable political unity. It energizes the believers and discourages the dissenters.

The longer Trump holds the attention of the media eye, I suspect we'll witness an increasing rate of evidence to support the notion that the RINO protection mechanisms have been neutralized.