France's Summer of Love

 France’s Demographic Blindspot: Racial Inequality || Peter Zeihan

A police shooting sparked riots in France similar to the "Summer of Love" we experienced in the USA in 2020. The French do throw a good riot. Peter Zeihan gives a quick overview of the ethnic strife involved.

Here is a less nuanced take on what is going on.

The "Summer of Love" moniker was provided by the Mayor of Seattle after rioters took over an area of her city and declared it the "Capital Hill Autonomous Zone" (CHAZ). She predicted it would result in a "Summer of Love" -- until the murder and mayhem happened.

Inflatable Nation

Even a Recession Might Not Tame Inflation

Is it really that bad? Nah, it's worse. It's that "slowly, slowly all at once" problem.

Dealing with US inflation needs to account for the foreign entities that hold so many dollars for purposes that don't often align with our own (our declared enemies have a lot of it). Basically, the dollars will be used in a mercantilist manner to further the interest of these rulers -- often at the expense of the average American worker.

For the moment the dollar won't be replaced in international trade because it's backed by US real estate. We don't like the CCP buying American farmland in "State of Rode Island" sized batches, but the possibility of doing that in a pinch is a big attraction for the dollar (and land is an excellent inflation hedge). If we say, "No more of that, you'll have to buy Fords instead," then their dollars will flood back into the US to buy land and other assets while they still can. At this point, the world will stop trading its goods for our debt.

As international trade collapses, there's less need for US debt as "good" collateral for trade among third-party nations. With foreigners less willing to swap their goods for our debt, the supply of goods drys up just as more dollars race into the domestic market, sparking more asset inflation but not job creation. This likely results in high-interest rates to encourage foreigners to hold onto their bonds. Meanwhile, the Fed funds the government through the printing press and further fuels inflation.

Inflation could be used to lower the burden of the $31 trillion National Debt -- if we balanced the budget. But why do that if you can sell more and more debt at near-zero rates with foreigners willing to buy a lot of it? Well, things that can't go on forever, won't -- and we are heading for a wall of won't (so prepare a bolthole in New Zealand).

They Are Delicious (but with too much bad fat)

 Over at Sp!ked, Joel Kotkin says:

The rich are eating themselves

The oligarchs are playing a dangerous game by pouring trillions into woke causes.

Beware of plutocrats bearing gifts. The annual clown show at Davos epitomises how today, the global elites have embraced an unholy trinity of ‘progressive’ doctrines: climate-change apocalypticism, a belief in systemic racism and racial ‘equity’, and radical gender ideology. The super-rich hope that by genuflecting to these causes, they can buy themselves political protection and fend off the activists lurking in the ranks of their own companies. Yet, in the long run, this could end up fuelling their demise.

Dangerfield, Will Robinson, Dangerfield!

We don't get no respect. Our politicians tell us they identified lots of fat and colossal waste and would cut spending to trim it. Turns out the fat's on our waist and the spending they're targeting is ours -- on food. The good news: this will leave more room in the family budget for taxes and fees.

We don't get no respect.

Ever heard of The Continental Congress? That's the nation's founders. Now we got the con-man congress -- where the nation flounders. They only act continental when it impresses the league of woman voters. We should have listened closer during the campaign. They were actually saying, "Yes, we con." They're so good at it they could con a surgeon out of his scrubs -- and are, by the thousands. They're giving the entire nation a bath, charging us for the water before fining us for using the wrong soap. They help their lawyer buddies to eat our lunch, give our dinner to the government unions, and feed our breakfast to lobbyists and activists. Then they tell us not to complain 'cause they put it on our kid's tab -- only they're working on the grandkids now.

We don't get no respect. 

Wanna buy some health care deform? If you ask how much, you can't afford it. A decade ago it was all the rage. A House committee wrote a twelve-hundred-page bill to deform health care. The house then improved it by a thousand pages and sent it to the Senate. The Senate tossed all 2,200 pages in the can. They replaced it with 2,400 pages of their very own and sent it to the House. The House was appalled -- which means somebody read it. They came up with a fix. Some say it is one thousand pages of patches, some say two thousand, and some 36,482. Then they figured it out: put it online and you can do it in one really, really, really, really long page. I hear Hammurabi wanted to reform health care but the universe ran out of clay.

We don't get no respect.

You heard of "Hide the Salami," right? The Democrats play "who gets Salamied!" Then they go out on the town to do budget scoring. They want a budget with a big bust while they max out the credit card. They think the national debt means the nation owes them. They say a new program will cost two trillion over ten years but they don't include the cost overruns, so multiply by three. It's budget neutral, they say -- just like Belgium in World War II, it'll get rolled over by tanks four or five times. What about that trillion-dollar deficit? It could be worse and will be. Folks, this is not Smoke N. Mirrors' accounting. I know Smoke N. Mirrors. Smoke N. Mirrors is a friend of the Republicans. This is Smoking Fraud.

We don't get no respect.

Our rulers have low self-esteem. They think any nation that would put them in charge must be populated by stupid idiots and knuckle-dragging neanderthals. They want it to be an intelligent nation, like Denmark (but without the Vikings), one they can be proud of when they go to Bali in January for that global warming conference.

We don't get no respect.

We are blamed for global warming and are told to spend 100 trillion dollars to mitigate it. Politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and various fraudsters act as the mitigators -- meaning they get their mitts on the money.

We don't get no respect.

Our state department does not want to be allied with any nation that would be friends with us. Our Representatives take a tour of Arab Capitals. They expect the Arabs to suggest we bomb Iran. Turns out, they want us to bomb ourselves.

We don't get no respect.

The Chinese blame us for selling them bonds. The Europeans blame us for electing the guy they wanted us to elect. The world that wanted us to disengage from it is now disenchanted with our disengagement. They say we are disengaged when we should be concentrating on our disengagement. And everyone wants us to be poor and miserable while still buying their stuff, all at the same time. Solution: sell us junk.

We don't get no respect. And why should we? We put up with it. Budah-bing.

Don't change your mind, change your sex

Andrew Sullivan, who I've read off-and-on since he was at the New Republic magazine, asks: Is this "The Greatest Scandal In Gay Rights History? How journalists - yes, journalists - want to shut down reporting on child transition."

Discussing one program, he notes:

More than a third of the kids pushed onto the trans track had autism, sometimes severe. Others were victims of domestic abuse...No questions about other aspects of a child’s mental health were considered if the kid was identifying as the opposite sex.

It's the fall of 1968. I'm in a ramshackle college bar in a midwestern mill town nursing a Stroh's 3.2 beer -- a legal drink for 18-year-olds. A new girl (I'm unaware how new)  occupies the neighboring stool. I say, "hi." She says, "hi."

We start talking. She's from New York City. I ask if she's visiting relatives, one of two reasons an NYC native would turn up locally -- turnpike pile-up being the other. No, she's having medical procedures performed. "Oh?" says I, with a thoughtful pause, "what procedures are those?" I'm perplexed. My town is not known for medical tourism. She tells me she is having her sex changed from male to female and prepares for a confrontation she doesn't get.

As a Time Magazine reader back then, I knew everything that happened in the world a week after it happened. They'd informed me that sex reassignment surgery was available for those who were born one sex but were "hard-wired" for the other (with only two genders to choose from at the time). This is a rare condition, they explained, which affected maybe one in 100,000 -- whereas we now know it's half of the second grade at the local elementary school. How an otherwise credible publication could get its numbers so far off is beyond me.

Another possible explanation for the numerical disparity between then and now is "water fluoridation." The cumulative effect of all that fluoride could be fewer cavities and more gender-swapping. Naturally, the last part went unmentioned by the public health authorities to prevent undo discomfort in the rubes who simply refuse to cut down on their consumption of sugary sodas and would rather lose their teeth than rearrange their genitals.

There could be another possible, if unlikely, explanation. I once heard of a certain medical procedure where the number of operations performed in a locale was determined by the number of surgeons who perform it. Unfortunately, more people died who got the operation than among the people who remained ignorant of the cause of their suffering and took antacids instead -- death being the sometimes side-effect of the procedure. Apparently, this was not considered a sufficient reason to stop performing it.

Also, I had a friend who was a resident at the local trauma center.  He told me to avoid a certain surgeon whose blade should never be allowed to touch flesh. Everyone at the hospital knew about him but the guy still performed operations so...it's good to have a powerful union on your side. Sure, it's a delicate question, but one that needs to be asked: could the increased availability of medical specialists dedicated to the treatment of the condition account for the swelling caseload? Personally, I doubt it. Fluoridation, that's the cause.

It was the presence of a highly talented plastic surgeon, a man of my slight acquaintance, that made my town the "sex-change capital of the world." He had quasi-nude statues on the lawn in front of his office depicting the human form as GQ and the Swimsuit Edition intended (pre-body positive days). As a scruffy thirteen-year-old, I hitchhiked around town (considered safe means of travel by my peers -- which is not the same as being safe, though we had no problems). I got a ride from the doctor once. His "Truman Capote" like manner made him memorable. I knew him for a total of maybe eight-and-a-half minutes and rather liked him.

A few years later he was on a local television show to talk about prophecy, not puberty blockers. He combined the rhymes of Nostradamus (also a doctor) with the Book of Revelations to place the Second Coming at the close of the second millennium. He mentioned his own modest role in it (he was in one of the crowds, I think). With hindsight, his foresight was a bit off -- unless it was the second coming of crazy he anticipated.

He was the reason the "journeyman-lady" came to town for her transformation. Today, she'd go into the military. She was born a boy, she explained, but always had the mind of a girl. She was required to go through counseling and live as a girl for a time as she underwent hormone treatments. She seemed very much a female when I met her but the below-the-tummy "tuck" was still in her future. I thought, sure, changing your mind can be hard, but is changing everything but your mind easier? I did not try to dissuade her, though, because of what happened a couple weeks before.

I was in a different bar, one with "lounge" in the name, a classier place where the upholstery ain't held together with tape and they charge an extra nickel a drink to keep out the riff-raff. I'd spent several weeks on a summer job in a hot and loud foundry that produced missing fingers among the employees. Having worked overtime and escaped with digits intact, I felt both fortunate and flush with cash. I also found myself in the surprising position of talking to a beautiful, well-accoutered girl. She told me she was going to have a nose job because she didn't like her nose and she was finally doing something about it. This made no sense because, in her case, nature had achieved the pinnacle of nasal perfection, or so I thought.

Admittedly, I come from a family where the proboscis is a prominent facial feature. My father said we had "Noble Roman Noses," even though we weren't Italian. Perhaps it was my distorted view of nasal normality that caused me to counsel her hotness against the action. She had a quite lovely nose, I said, and a simple cost/benefit analysis -- given the possible downside risks -- shows she should not undergo the procedure. She reacted with great hostility, the way wrong-headed people often do when a right-headed person tries to correct their behavior for the overall benefit of the entire society -- a society whose medical resources need to be focused on real medical problems rather than catering to the vanity of stunningly attractive, cash-flush females. In her defense, she did leave town to have the procedure performed, maybe because she wanted to wake up still a girl.

Back at the shabbier bar, a large man came over to the "journeyman lady" and gave me a stern look as he addressed her. "Time to leave." He seemed more like a bodyguard than a friend or relative. As they left I thought, given how open she was about her transition, a bodyguard might be a prudent precaution. 

A few weeks later she was in that bar again and at the center of a celebration. She was now as much of a woman as she was ever going to be. I thought of that old saying, "no matter where you go, there you are!" I wondered if that applied to bodies as well as places.  If so, her problems were by no means at an end.

Hollywood has lost the plot...

...and substituted a conspiracy.

In a comment on Disparu's youtube channel, I made the mistake of comparing Amazon's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power to a low-budget Xena, Warrior Princess that could have used a Lucy Lawless in the lead. Understandably, that really upset the Xena, Warrior Princess fans, and maybe Lucy Lawless as well. I should say I was impressed with the range Lawless displayed as an actor in Eurotrip. She's New Zealand raised but made a convincing Dutch Dominatrix.

I also said that if you ignore what The Rings of Power did to Tolkien (which might constitute felony murder were he still alive), it was not a horrible show.  This, too, was a controversial statement, with others claiming it was clearly horrendous and how could I possibly think otherwise? However, my reasoning here was quite simple: if it's horrible, and I watched every episode, what does that say about me? Rather than stare into that particular abyss, I decided it was a bad, expensive flop -- that if they were trying to make it horrible (a possibility), they hadn't quite succeeded.

Expensive flops are nothing new for Hollywood, but these days a creative mess isn't allowed to sink into the obscurity it deserves. Hollywood now sees itself as the declining Rome of the Entertainment World, offering treasures for protection to a barbarian horde outside its walls, only to anger and whet the appetites of others. It's entered the realm of politics which, these days, is not just "a house divided against itself," but an old mansion where it's every room, closet, and cubbyhole for itself (and don't leave out the servants' quarters). As a result, Hollywood doesn't know whether to fight, flee, or fortify.

Politics has always played a role but it wasn't of paramount importance at Paramount or universally agreed upon at Universal or really dizzy at Disney -- or, for that matter, the lead actor in acting. Left-leaning filmmakers could make a conservative-themed movie and a conservative executive might green-light a left-wing consciousness-raising effort. In the last decade, consciousness-raising has taken over (Hollywood, having found its religion, won't shut up about it).

Recently, I rewatched The Hunger Games and wondered if these days the people making it would have more sympathy for the Capital -- the ignorant folks in the districts just don't understand the problems the experts face just keeping things together! Meanwhile, Indigenous Activists complain about the portrayal of the indigenous inhabitants of an alien planet in the Avatar sequel. Using their criteria, every human should boycott that film. In fact, that's what I'm doing -- until it makes it to Tubi, at least.

My advice to Hollywood is to get on "The Right-Side of Story-Telling" and forget about history (which they find an easy task in the movies they make).

Proto Fascist or Moto Democrat?

"What does Giorgia Meloni's Win Mean for Italy?" asks Peter Zeihan, conjuring up the ghost (or is it the Spirit?) of Italian Fascism, on account of her "God, country, family" mantra.

Benito Mussolini, the Godfather of fascism, was a socialist. Back in 1964, I was in tenth grade reading a novel by Upton Sinclair (himself a Socialist) and he introduced a loud-mouthed Socialist agitator named Mussolini. Imagine my surprise. Turns out Mussolini modeled his fascist party on Lenin's Bolshevik Party, which ruthlessly ran the United Soviet Socialist Republics of the day (aka Russia). True, Benito was all about "the country" as long as he and his gang were running everything in the country, but as for God and family -- not so much. The fascists had party members in every organization to enforce the party line, so the people who ran businesses were run by the party.

According to Upton Sinclair, the National Socialist "brownshirt" street brawlers who slugged it out with the communist/socialist Antifa during the Weimar Republic were also Socialists -- so it was kind of an intramural sport. Later Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Third Reich found common ground -- Poland. Given the history, I never agreed with the progressive propensity to label small government conservatives as fascists, at least here in the U.S. After all, what American Conservatives want to conserve are things like the Bill of Rights and local governments with local control.

As for Italy's political future: who knows?

Whither Italy?

More Lite than Light!

During the first Obama/Biden administration I decided light opera was the best format for commentary. With music and song, it would float above the mess the way those mountains in Avatar float above planet Pandora. So this Opera will not just be light, it’ll be anti-gravity: No matter how grave the situation, it will be anti-the-gravity of the situation.

The Opera is set on the island estate of the multi-billionaire Artful Shortseller. Art hosts “The International Conference to Solve All the World's Problems with One Foul Swipe.” What is the foul swipe, you ask? Sorry, you are not supposed to ask and I'm not allowed to answer.

It starts with a big production number. The new President's team marches through the gates like parading Olympic athletes planning to disrespect the flag. As they enter they sing:

The DC Press Corps and Officials

With Diplomatic Creep,
We cross History’s Stage.
Both shy and meek
As The World Turns, amazed.

Praise we spread in full,
Without a boastful word,
We give credit to our Bull,
Not just the nagging herd!

President Biden

(Wanders about as he mumbles):

Salute the Marines, Mr. Jill Biden. Salute. What.

(Bumps into the scenery; Consults his mePad; begins to sing.)

Like a mentally stable-man
World leaders, I’ll approach.
One I’ll treat like a door-man,
as I deliver my reproach.
But them that Trump has cowed,
I’ll look squarely in the knees!
As I offer a gracious bow,
And sincere apollo-gee.

Hail, hell! What do I do next? 

(Checks pad) 

"Tell European Nations
Of Power abrogations!"
But Poo-tin calls me a tease.
So I’ll implore “believe me, please!”

I call this number, “History Brought to Boil by a Cracked Pot.”

At the center of Art’s estate is “The Mean-Well.” This is a deep well, as well as a mean well. For some mysterious reason, well-meaning people (mostly voters) get sucked in, fall past the mean, and even plunge below average, which drags down the average, causing the mean to become even meaner. These folks don't mean to be mean, they mean to be equitable. What is the powerful attractive force of the Mean-Well? Could it be the mean-welling of the Mean-Well?

Actually, the attractive force is the fabled Lost Thirteenth Law of an Admired Marxist (choose one). This lost law is forty thousand pages of progressive legislation that, if adopted in its entirety, will yield the forty million pages of regulation that will, in the end, make all this stuff work. The Thirteenth Law was typed before white-out, back when progressives didn’t make mistakes. However, it has been rewritten by AIs (Artificial Intellectuals) using out-white (and there’s a lot of that in it).

Thank dog this is a work of fiction.

The Opera needs a love story but not to worry: with so many malignant narcissists involved, it has lots of love stories.

The Noble Much Obliged

This was a comment I left at the The Belmont Club.

In a feudal system, the military leaders that conquer a region become the new aristocracy. In Western Europe's recent wars, the conquering Military was not aristocratic or European. Nor was it interested in holding the reins of power, but did protect those who would pick the reins up. This has allowed a new aristocratic system to evolve.

Because after the last century's wars, it was the clerks of Europe (sometimes confused with intellectuals) who emerged triumphant. Their means of control are not martial but material in nature (basically, the disposition of taxes in a system of political "group" patronage). This allows women to acquire positions of great power without having to work through the male family line. In this system, power grows from an inked rubber stamp, flowery prose, poisoned logic, and a purple ribbon. In this (is it proper to say?) women are the equal of men.

Europe now develops into a "Clerical aristocracy" with de facto primogeniture at its center. In an emerging static system of hierarchy (National and European), the most prepared child of either sex will inherit a position of similar prestige to that of the parents. The guaranteed inheritance is not (yet) total and not (yet) explicit.

In a martial aristocracy the "militarists" control, with some difficulty, the clerks. It is more essential that the clerical aristocrats control the military. In both systems, the Aristocracy wants to control the "guns" and keep them out of the hands of the commoners (unless especially trusted and favored). But not so much out of the hands of the "healthy" criminal class (those uninterested in attacking the aristocracy). Aristocrats look at healthy criminals as competitors and, at times, allies in the exploitation of commoners.

The Noble clerks perpetuate their ruling class by properly designing the education and testing system so that the "class favorites" are from the favored class. Selection from this "merit pool" would be influenced by family connections -- with the candidates culled as they are promoted up the ranks.

In such an emergent system having more than two children would be considered suspect. You could argue the third was an accident. But the fourth would constitute a kind of rebellion, since the promotion of your brood will leave fewer choice positions for the "child" of others. This "gang of siblings" could become bandits grabbing control of bureaucratic turf. As a matter of "noble" self-defense, they would be held back.

A clerical aristocracy would not be wealth creators but wealth administrators. The multiplication of social programs would be accompanied by a multiplication of noble positions (with squires and yeoman attached) and a cohort of dependent clients. The nobles would be highly suspicious of freewheeling capitalism since it provides an independent route to status and prestige. Besides, who knows where those free wheels are going to go a-wheeling? The Noble clerks sell free lunches, and their little hot dog stand might get knocked over. The free lunch is a con, of course, but it is also a living for the proprietor and his Noble patron.

The (ideally unarmed) commoners would be dependent on this system even as they became cynical about it. They see that children, as a class, are an excuse for the multiplication of Noble positions -- and an excuse for higher taxes. This turns their own immediate descendants into a class enemy. Also, in a static society, it makes sense to concentrate your limited influence on preparing and marketing one child to achieve one low-level clerical position -- a position from which the child can climb the greased pole and establish a clerical line.

But the "Nobles" need a population that the domesticated commoners are not producing. One solution is to import them -- but in a manner where they will provide additional Noble positions (meaning additional expenditures to the "department" and, ideally, tax revenues to the government) while not competing for those positions. The Nobility does not need a second generation of honor students from their immigrant class -- quite the opposite. Keeping them separate from the native commoners and engendering mutual hostility between them is "Maintaining an Aristocracy 101." They put that "Marxist dialectic" they all studied to work -- in reverse.

What is the way forward?

1. Make the new Aristocracy explicit, along with a new Chivalric Code. Only one, or at most two, noble children continue the clerical line. Lesser children enter a class of lower clerical gentry. Or they can be married into the class of (properly regulated, constrained, and most of all administered) business people. This will strengthen a system of family alliances and make all dependent on the "new chivalry."

2. Recognize that the system is exploitive of future generations and cut the commoner parents into the deal. This can be done by selling new infants a reverse "savings bond" where the parents keep the money. Right now only the Nobles profit from the immediate entry of a new baby into "the system." With this bond, commoners will get a monthly stipend for each child they have. The children will begin paying the bond back when they reach 22. This will be a clear profit for the first generation of commoner parents. The second generation would have to perpetuate the system to get their money back. If they don't have children they will live in poverty even worse than what they are already experiencing (we are not designing a system that allows people to thrive -- only one that pretends to).

Perhaps the Swedes can lead the way here. US to follow.