Category: Uncategorized

Convergence is the corporate cancer

An Australian company intentionally devalues performance:

Atlassian says it will no longer tolerate “brilliant jerks” who deliver results for the company but make life hell for their co-workers as part of a complete overhaul of how the tech firm conducts performance reviews.

The $47 billion Australian software company, which was founded in Sydney in 2002 and floated on the US stock market in 2015, says two-thirds of every performance review will now have nothing to do with job skills.

Instead, equal weighting will be given to how each of its 3000 employees impacts others on their team, and to how they live the company values. Atlassian says the change will “more fairly measure people on how they bring their whole self to work”.

While it’s true that teamwork is an important element of success in any organization, establishing feelings as the basis for evaluating performance is assuring rule by the most sensitive. Which in this case means that gamma males and women will soon rule the company and the ability to actually get anything done will become irrelevant.

One need only to look at Apple in the post-Jobs era to see what difference the loss of just one “brilliant jerk” can make to even the most successful corporation. Then contemplate the consequences of eliminating all of them from an organization.

Not going anywhere

Sex trafficker to the stars Jeffrey Epstein is denied bail:

Multimillionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein was denied bail Thursday pending trial on child sex-trafficking charges.

“Starting with my conclusions, the government’s application for continued remand is hereby granted and the defense’s application for pretrial release is respectfully hereby denied,” Manhattan federal Judge Richard Berman said at the start of a hotly anticipated hearing.

“The government has established danger to others and to the community by clear and convincing evidence, and the government has established a risk of flight by a preponderance of evidence.”

It’s a sign that they might actually be serious. We won’t know, of course, until more arrests of the rich and famous start taking place. Which may be coming sooner than anyone thinks, if Vanity Fair has it right:

“There were other business associates of Mr. Epstein’s who engaged in improper sexual misconduct at one or more of his homes. We do know that,” said Brad Edwards, a lawyer for Courtney Wild, one of the Epstein accusers who gave emotional testimony at Epstein’s bail hearing. “In due time the names are going to start coming out.” (Attorneys for Epstein did not respond to a request for comment.)

Likely within days, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will release almost 2,000 pages of documents that could reveal sexual abuse by “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders,” according to the three-judge panel’s ruling. The documents were filed during a civil defamation lawsuit brought by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a former Mar-a-Lago locker-room attendant, against Epstein’s former girlfriend and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell. “Nobody who was around Epstein a lot is going to have an easy time now. It’s all going to come out,” said Giuffre’s lawyer David Boies. Another person involved with litigation against Epstein told me: “It’s going to be staggering, the amount of names. It’s going to be contagion numbers.”

Shine the light on them. All of them.

The Gatekeeper’s Ball

The Z-man infiltrates the neoclowns’ attempt to rebrand themselves as “National Conservatives”:

The final speaker of the morning session was Yoram Hazony. It was an interesting performance to behold. He started out criticizing neoconservatives, making the absurd claim that the current crop of neocons are not the real neocons. They have strayed from the original into imperialism. Then he let it be known that one of the sponsors for this show was The public Interest, a neocon quarterly founded by Irving Kristol. The fact that he said this without laughing was quite remarkable.

He then moved onto libertarianism. It’s interesting to hear these guys criticize libertarianism, because they don’t really know why they oppose it. They just associate it with the cultural decline, so they assume it is the cause. There’s also a reactionary vibe to their fight with the libertarians. These new nationalists don’t like the libertarians, because libertarians oppose nationalism. For their purposes, maybe that’s enough to dismiss the economic arguments against their brand of nationalism.

The third part of his speech was a trade about white nationalism. He fumbled around trying to say something about biological reality, but that made him sound like a nut from the flat earth society. Then he warned about the threat of white nationalism, especially among young people. Then he made the claim that there is no such thing as tribal loyalty, which is an odd thing, given that he claims a nation is a collection of tribes. As in his book, it’s clear he terrifies himself when he follows his logic to its conclusion….

The funny thing about this event is not a single person has bothered to mention that conservatism, whether neocon or Buckley, managed to conserve nothing.

They managed to derail the Tea Party, but I very much doubt they’ll be successful in jumping in front of the nationalist parade. I addressed this very topic in last night’s Darkstream.

Gladstone on free trade

A reader sends an informative quote from the great 19th-century British advocate of free trade, Prime Minister William Gladstone:

Advocacy of Free Trade goes back to the United Kingdom of 1846-1860.  However, what William Gladstone actually said as a defense of free trade is “It is a mistake to suppose that the best way of giving benefit to the labouring classes is simply to operate on the articles consumed by them. If you want to do them the maximum of good, you should rather operate on the articles which give them a maximum of employment.”

However, in 1846-1860 English manufacturing was the best in the world, though America had surpassed them in some fields. Free trade meant far larger markets abroad for English goods, and cheaper foodstuffs at home, meaning that the English labouring classes had more money to spend on their own manufactures.

For precisely the same reason, the French have rigorous protections of their somewhat inefficient agriculture, namely it creates a maximum of employment.

For the United States of 2019, our labor is relatively expensive, so in many areas our industries are not competitive with places where labor costs little. Gladstone’s rationale for free trade thus indicates for us that protectionism, not free trade, is to our advantage.

Translation: it is a fundamental mistake for economists to focus on providing the US population with access to cheap imported goods instead of jobs that permit them to pay for more expensive domestic goods.

Impeachment attempt fails

And it wasn’t even close, because “racist, racist” isn’t working any better than “Russia, Russia” did:

The House voted on Wednesday to table a resolution from Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, to impeach President Donald Trump over racist comments he made about four Democratic congresswomen of color, effectively killing the measure.

The vote — 332 to 95, with one lawmaker voting “present” — marked the first time the Democratic-controlled chamber had weighed in on impeachment, an issue that has created a widening schism within the party. Progressive newcomers and several 2020 candidates have pushed for impeachment proceedings, but the House leadership, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has been resistant.

All Republicans joined with 137 Democrats and the lone independent, Justin Amash, to table the resolution.

Meanwhile, Americans are chanting “send her back” about the Somali woman squatting in the US Congress who allegedly married her own brother:

President Donald Trump slammed Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the members of ‘squad’ at his campaign rally Wednesday night with supporters responding with shouts of ‘send her back, send her back.’

While the president raged against all four lawmakers who make up the squad individually – and railed against several of the Democratic presidential contenders – it was Omar, who is a frequent target of his ire, who bore the brunt of his criticism.

Trump accused Omar of blaming terrorists attacks on our country just hours after igniting a debate over rumors she was married to her brother.

‘She smeared U.S. Service members involved in Black Hawk Down,’ he said referring to the failed 1993 raid in Mogadishu by the U.S. military. ‘In other words, she slandered the brave Americans were trying to keep peace in Somalia. Omar minimized the September 11th attacks on our homeland saying some people did something,’ he added.

Outside the White House earlier that day he had said, ‘I hear that she was married to her brother,’ repeating claims which have swirled around Omar since her 2016 campaign.

A Somali blog first accused her of marrying her brother and of being a bigamist. It prompted her to issue statements which have not helped in disproving the claims.

That sound you’re hearing is the Overton Window shattering again. And I do so enjoy the delicate phrasing of the term “prompted her to issue statements which have not helped in disproving the claims” which is considerably more accurate than the false US narrative of the claims being “baseless”.

National Cuckservatives

It’s a totally new and hip movement! Never mind the neoclowns behind the curtain:

Politics in America, Britain, and other Western nations have taken a sharp turn toward nationalism—a commitment to a world of independent nations. This has been disorienting to many, not least the American conservative movement, which has, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, grown increasingly attached to a vision of a global “rules-based liberal order” that would bring peace and prosperity to the entire world while attenuating the independence of nations. 

The return of nationalism has created a much-discussed “crisis of conservatism” that may be unprecedented since modern Anglo-American conservatism was formulated by Russell Kirk, William Buckley, and their colleagues in the 1950s. At the heart of this crisis is a question: Is the new American and British nationalism a hostile usurper that has arrived on the scene to displace political conservatism? Or is nationalism an essential, if neglected, part of the Anglo-American conservative tradition at its best?

The conference on “National Conservatism” will bring together public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.

We see this public conference as the kick off for a protracted effort to recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race. Our aim is to solidify and energize national conservatives, offering them a much-needed institutional base, substantial ideas in the areas of public policy, political theory, and economics, and an extensive support network across the country.

Conservatives couldn’t conserve the ladies room. Don’t count on them to save the American nation. They’re not nationalists, they’re Neoclowns 2.0.

The illogic of atheism

Miles Mathis explains why he finds atheism to be illogical:

A modern skeptic is like an agnostic, and he or she is likely to lean to a “no” answer every time. Are there gods? Probably not. Are there unicorns? Probably not. Is there a Bigfoot? Probably not. And so on. I resist this “skeptic” tag because leaning toward a “no” answer is a prejudice itself. It is unscientific. Beyond that, the so-called skeptic societies are stiff with atheists and agnostics and cynics and other faux-scientists, and I prefer to remain as far away from all that as possible.

Of course, with the existence of Bigfoot and unicorns and so on we do have a great deal of information. We have made searches. The Earth is a limited environment and we have populated it widely and heavily and long. Even so, the mountain gorilla was not discovered until 1902, and huge populations of lowland gorillas were only recently discovered in the Congo (this very decade). Which is to say that we may lean a bit to a “no” answer for existence of larger beings in smaller areas we have scoured quite thoroughly, but even then we may be wrong.

But in looking for proof of gods, our search is pathetically limited. By definition, a god is a being whose powers are far greater than ours, who we cannot comprehend, and whose form we cannot predict. This would make our failure to locate a god quite understandable. A very large or small god would be above or below our notice, and a distant god would also evade our sensors. Not to mention we only have five senses. If we are manipulated by gods, as the hypothesis goes, then it would be quite easy for them to deny us the eyes to see them. Only a god of near-human size in the near environs would be possible to detect.

Again, this does not mean I believe in gods, any more than I believe in aliens or unicorns. I only point out that, as a matter of logic and science, a hypothesis that has not been proved is not the same as a hypothesis that has been disproved. I agree with the atheists and agnostics that the existence of gods has not been proved, but I do not agree that the existence of gods has been disproved. It would require a much more thorough search of the universe than has so far been completed to even begin to lean. As it is, our data is near-zero.

For this reason, I find atheists to be just as sanctimonious, illogical, and tiresome as the deists and theists, if not moreso. Because the atheists are often more highly educated and often better able to argue (in limited ways), they use this education and argument to prop themselves up in the ugliest ways. They blow apart the beliefs of religious people and imagine this solidifies their own beliefs in some way. But it never does. People of faith are actually more consistent in their views, since they never claim to believe in science anyway. They are not immediately hypocritical, at least, since it is possible for them create a closed system of illogic that circles back in a self-affirming way. The search for truth is no part of their system, so it is no failure when they find none. But atheists cannot say the same. They base their system on science, so that the very first instant they fail to act scientifically, they are back to zero. Yes, it is the same zero as the theists’ zero, but the theists aren’t measuring and the atheists are. A theist at zero is just a theist, and no harm done. But an atheist at zero has had a fall, and must be damaged.

I would go farther, of course, as I observe most atheists to be not only illogical, but irrational. And thank God for that! It’s the rational atheists who are by far the most problematic.

Support for the President rises

A poll shockingly discovers that Americans don’t like being ruled over by invaders who hate them:

Support for U.S. President Donald Trump increased slightly among Republicans after he lashed out on Twitter over the weekend in a racially charged attack on four minority Democratic congresswomen, a Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll shows.

The national survey, conducted on Monday and Tuesday after Trump told the lawmakers they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” showed his net approval among members of his Republican Party rose by 5 percentage points to 72{739b910556a9cc9c1a54a816a1fda004c1b87c8f235f686ea012b71861344b41}, compared with a similar poll that ran last week.

On the imaginary downside, the paper citizens who didn’t vote for him and would never, ever vote for him under any circumstances now double-dog won’t vote for him.

They have to go back.

Naturally, the Republican establishment professional politicos got it all wrong:

President Donald Trump’s advisers are concerned that his attack on four Democratic congresswomen Sunday may have backfired, Politico reported. The advisers reportedly think that Trump veered wildly off his campaign message and helped unite a Democratic Party that the week before was split by infighting.

Fire those idiot advisers, Mr. President. Listening to them will not help you win re-election in 2020.

Red flags in Germany

But the German political class just keeps doubling down on immigration:

Mayor of Hockenheim, a city in southwest Germany, was left bloodied and hospitalized after an unknown assailant punched him. One politician has already died, and reports suggest that such attacks are becoming more common.

Dieter Gummer, a member of the left-wing Social Democratic Party, answered his door on Monday evening to find an unfamiliar face outside. The visitor punched the 67-year-old politician in the face, according to police in nearby Ludwigshafen. Gummer fell on the floor and hit his head, requiring treatment in hospital. The culprit fled the scene. The attacker was unknown to the mayor, and is described by police as a man of slim build, around 40 years old, with dark skin. More puzzling is the fact that Gummer is set to retire in August, and anyone disagreeing with his policies will get a chance to vote for his successor.

Police in the southern German town say they’re baffled as to the motive, and are “investigating in all directions.”

However, across Germany, anger and violence against public officials is on the rise. Last year, more than 1,200 threats, criminal insults, and acts of physical violence were committed against officials, Leipzig Mayor Burkhard Jung – who also chairs the German Association of Cities – told a meeting of concerned mayors last week. Nearly all German states have reported yearly increases in violence since at least 2017.

At the meeting, the mayors described how rude comments in public and on social media would progress to action. They told of finding the wheel nuts loosened on their cars, discovering rifle cartridges on their doorsteps, and receiving death threats in their mailboxes.

“The people in my administration are afraid to open their doors,” said one Bavarian mayor, quoted by Der Tagesspiegel. “This cannot be.”

I’m amused by the way they are all affecting to be surprised by the inevitable. What could possibly be the motive when the mayors are aiding and abetting the invasion of the country? It is, indeed, a mystery.

If Deutsche Bank goes down and the Germany economy implodes, all bets are off.