Category: Uncategorized

Economists still puzzled by 2008

Robert Schiller, who chronicled the rise of housing prices that led up to the 2008 crisis, still can’t figure out why it happened. Neither, apparently, can any of his fellow economists.

There is still no consensus on why the last housing boom and bust happened. That is troubling, because that violent housing cycle helped to produce the Great Recession and financial crisis of 2007 to 2009. We need to understand it all if we are going to be able to avoid ordeals like that in the future. But the explanations for what happened in housing are not, I think, to be found in the conventional data favored by economists but rather in sociologically important narratives — like tales of getting rich through “flipping” houses and shares of initial public offerings — that constitute the shifting mentality of the era.

Strange, that the professional economists can’t determine the cause 7 years after it happened, and 15 years after I warned that it was going to happen. As those who have Collected Columns Vol. 1, Innocence & Intellect know, I wrote the following in 2002:

There can be little doubt that the implosion of the equity markets will soon be followed by the pricking of the credit and real estate bubbles. As great financial houses such as Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, it is well within the realm of possibility that the triple whammy of the equity, credit and real estate implosions will lead to the collapse of the entire global financial system. 


Complete collapse of the system was staved off by the bank bailouts combined with the easiest monetary policy in human history. But the system was not fixed. Far from it. The new stock market highs we are seeing today are not the result of a strong economy, but rather, a perilously fragile one that is subject to the very same catastrophic failure that was narrowly averted in 2008.

The triumph of oligarchy

Michael Lind has an intriguing and deeply historical article on what he calls the New Class War in the American Affairs Journal.

If I am correct, the post–Cold War period has come to a close, and the industrial democracies of North America and Europe have entered a new and turbulent era. The managerial class has destroyed the social settlements that constrained it temporarily in the second half of the twentieth century and created a new kind of politics, largely insulated from popular participation and electoral democracy, based on large donors and shifting coalitions within a highly homogeneous coalition of allied Western elites. Following two decades of increasing consolidation of the power of the managerial class, the populist and nationalist wave on both sides of the Atlantic is a predictable rebellion by working-class outsiders against managerial-class insiders and their domestic allies, who are often recruited from native minorities or immigrant diasporas.

Will the result of the contemporary class war among managers and workers on both sides of the Atlantic be a revival of fascism? In some countries in Europe, populist nationalist parties have emerged from tiny fringe fascist parties, or have attracted their supporters. But talk about Weimar America or Weimar Europe is based on a misunderstanding of history, which blames fascism on populism. In reality, despite their populist trappings, most interwar fascist movements were favored by military and economic elites as a way to block social democracy and communism.

It is not the Weimar republic but the banana republic that provides the most likely negative model. In many Latin American countries, politics has traditionally pitted oligarchs versus populists. A similar pattern existed in many Southern states in the United States between the Civil War and the civil rights revolution.

When populist outsiders challenge oligarchic insiders, the oligarchs almost always win. How could they lose? They may not have numbers, but they control most of the wealth, expertise, and political influence and dominate the media, universities, and nonprofit sectors. Most populist waves break and disperse on the concrete seawalls of elite privilege.

In the American South, most populist politicians gave up or sold out. In some cases, like that of Texas governor and senator W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a country music singer, they were simply folksy fronts for corporate and upper-class interests all along. The few populists who maintained some independence were those who could finance themselves, usually by corrupt means. Louisiana governor Huey Long could battle the ruling families and the powerful corporations because he skimmed money from state employee checks and kept it in a locked “deduct box.” In Texas, anti-Klan populist governor James “Pa” Ferguson, along with his wife Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who was elected governor after her husband was impeached on the slogan “Two Governors for the price of one,” sold pardons to the relatives of convicted criminals. As billionaires who could finance their own campaigns, Ross Perot and Donald Trump could claim, with some justification, to be free to run against the national establishment.

Those who believe in liberal democracy can look on this kind of political order only with dismay. Most of the time, coteries within a nepotistic elite run things for the benefit of their class. Now and then, a charismatic populist arises, only to fail, sell out to the establishment, or establish a personal or dynastic political-economic racket. Formal democracy may survive, but its spirit has fled. No matter who wins, the insiders or outsiders, the majority will lose.

This is broadly in line with my own expectations, but it tends to contradict anacyclosis and the Ciceronian political cycle, which sees tyranny following democracy rather than aristocracy. Of course, an elite that has learned the importance of keeping its head down may have had the wherewithal to simply skip that aspect of the cycle in favor of the amorphous vampire squid ink of the corpocracy and rule by artificial  judicial persons, each of whom can support thousands of oligarchic insiders like a legal form of Lovecraft’s Nyarlatothep.

The section on Hobson’s predictions is almost alarming in its prophetic accuracy. It’s long, but definitely read the whole thing. I’ve seen what I personally call “the pirate class” in operation myself, descending upon every promising young corporation and seeking to either drain it dry or personally profit by offering it up as a sacrifice to a larger entity.

A complete abandonment of common sense

The Scandicucks in Minnesota have always been as clueless as they are nice, but they’re taking the former to new heights with their hijab-wearing Mayor of Minneapolis and their inability to bring themselves to ban the mutilation of young girls by Somalis:

In Minnesota, the state’s Democratic leaders are perplexed by whether to advance a bill banning the barbaric, Third-World practice of female genital mutilation. After first passing the bill unanimously in the state House last week, lawmakers are now having “second thoughts” about whether to continue pushing the bill through to the governor’s desk, according to a report in the Star-Tribune.

The bill’s GOP sponsor said her colleagues in the Senate have gone wishy-washy on the bill due to pushback from certain segments of the refugee-resettlement industry, which is very powerful in Minnesota, getting paid millions in federal dollars annually to distribute Somali refugees throughout the state.

The bill would crack down on parents who submit their daughters to the grisly procedure in which doctors remove all or part of a girl’s clitoris. If passed, the bill would revoke parental custody and set a prison term of five to 20 years for any parent found guilty of having their daughter mutilated.

Or, perhaps they could all just be sent back. Then they would be free to engage in whatever barbaric practices they wish. At this rate, in another 10 years, mutilation will be obligatory in Dinkytown.

America’s Indian heritage

A commenter at Steve Sailer’s explains why Americans tend to feel differently about Indians than Central and South Americans, or Canadians, do:

In America, the Indians fought back with everything they had not for years, not for decades, not for generations, but for centuries.

And the resistance began at the beginning, so to speak, as they were whipping the Spanish at least as early as 1513, when the Timucua drove Ponce de Leon off near present-day St. Augustine, Fla., and later that year the Calusa drove him out of San Carlos Bay, Fla. Four years later Hernando de Cordoba’s fleet, returning from a campaign against the Maya, dropped anchor in San Carlos bay to replenish water and supplies, but their landing party was driven off by the Calusa, who were described as “very big men with very long bows and good arrows.”

Ponce de Leon and Cordoba returned to San Carlos Bay in 1521 with 200 soldiers, settlers and supplies to establish a colony. The Calusa again defeated and drove them off, killing both de Leon and Cordoba.

Then there was the disastrous Navaraez expedition into northern Florida in 1527 with 600 soldiers, where the Spanish crossbows were no match for the Indians 7-foot long bows, as thick as a man’s arm, that could penetrate six inches of wood at 200 yards. Only four Spaniards survived the catastrophe.

In 1539, Hernando de Soto, who had been Francisco Pizarro’s chief military adviser and among the 168 who conquered the Inca empire, and a veteran of 15 years of warring against south-of-the Rio Grande Indians, landed in Tampa Bay with 330 infantry and 270 cavalry, most veterans of the Spanish conquests in the south. They had given up European armor and adopted Aztec quilted cotton armor covered with leather as more effective protection.

They marched north reaching the Choctaw town of Mabila on the present site of Selma, Ala., which they assaulted and took after prolonged fighting, estimated having killed 2,500 inhabitants. But no Indian surrender ensued. Instead, they forced the Spaniards to retreat and harried them, the Chickasaw attacking and burning de Soto’s winter camp, inflicting severe losses. Ultimately, only about half of de Soto’s force survived the expedition — not including him.

And so it went for hundreds of years, into the 20th century, if we count the 1911 Shoshone uprising, which was not called a “war” but a “riot,” as nomenclature was changed after Wounded Knee.

It is remarkable that some 350 years after the Calusa crushed Ponce de Leon and Cordoba, the Sioux defeated Crook and annihilated Custer.

So the American Indian earned respect and a place in our history that he does not have in Latin America or Canada. That’s even reflected in our language. Only the American armed forces to this day speak of going into Indian Country, and mean it ominously. Only American paratroopers legendarily shout “Geronimo!” as they leap from airplanes. Only a famous American general was named after an Indian. We speak of being off the reservation, and on the warpath. We Indian wrestle and walk Indian file. Indians are a part of, in today’s parlance, who we are in a way they are not in Canada or Latin America.

I find it fascinating that Indian ancestry is so respected that some whites will even attempt to deny that those they don’t like could possible have any. In any event, the Indian experience is one more factor that tends to separate the American colonist/settler from the later US immigrants.

And yet still curiouser

DC surgery resident on call the night of Seth Rich’s death says Rich’s gunshot wounds were non-fatal, access to him by the doctors was blocked by DC police, and no code was called when he died.

That’s not fishy, right?

The insanity of the imperial USA

This is a solid analysis of the lunacy of US imperialism and its intrinsic weakness:

When the leader of some imperial territory or vassal acts against U.S. interests, or even just gets strong enough that they might, U.S. assets stir up “popular movements”, “moderate rebels”, and “refugee” crises, or subvert their internal operation with NGOs, diplomats, and “grassroots” activism. Or, if that isn’t working, in case we have all forgotten 2003, the U.S. military directly invades in the name of “human rights” and “democracy”, neither of which need to ever materialize for this to work. One way or another, the leader in question ends up deposed.

The occasional genocide, mass rape, persecution of Christians and actual moderate minorities, enormous expense, damage to civilization, loss of historic sites, damage to our reputation, loss of the cultural and material produce that order would bring, destabilization of regions and populations that later need to be bailed out at our own material and demographic expense, and hostile mass-migration into the lands of our own people, which are the byproducts of this indirect form of rule, are overlooked as necessary collateral damage, unfortunate random happenstance, or, when the victim is of our own white race, even celebrated.

Why does this happen? Why are we, good people most of us, caught up in an evil empire? It’s easy enough to blame traitors and Jews and the devil, but the problem goes deeper.

The root of the problem is the principles by which the empire is administered. To start with, we don’t call it an empire, we call it “the international community”, composed not of vassals, provinces, states, territories, colonies, and protectorates, but of “sovereign” “democratic” “nations”.

In other words, we don’t even have language to talk coherently about the empire, which means it’s hard to think about it; we can’t issue orders to our “sovereign” subordinates, have no widely understood imperial authority, and can’t extract straightforward imperial tax, but still have to administer an empire. So, American foreign policy grabs the next-best mechanisms available to it: rebel groups, NGOs, subversion, “human rights” and associated leverage and inconsistencies, petrodollar shenanigans, exports of easily subverted democracy, weaponized mass-migration, and so on.

The worldview attempting to govern the empire and build coherent sub-states fails, because it doesn’t dare recognize what it is actually doing, and doesn’t dare use the “enemy” methods of effective statecraft that actually work. Instead of clear rights and duties of imperial provinces, states governed by clear chains of command and authority, and open negotiation for tribute and protection, we are forced to use destructive, clandestine methods to govern our empire, which in turn create the evilness of the empire.

Obviously, the people in charge of it are the bearers and purveyors of this destructive ideology, but they are not senselessly evil; there is a twisted logic to it all that is generated from the deep structure of modern political thought. Replacing the elite would be insufficient to fix our problems without a new imperial and political ideology. Any replacement elites, though they might go in with the best of intentions, would have the same incentives and would develop the same characteristics and ideology, if the formal structure of the thing stayed the same.

If we had a different imperial ideology, it would be possible to allow the components of the empire a much greater degree of peace and leeway to do what is right, while simultaneously exerting more efficient and fine-grained control over those aspects for which it is in our interest to do so. And we would no longer have to bear the negative by-products of a destructive and evil imperial operating system.

Don’t deceive yourself. The US is an empire that is held together by force and has been since 1865. The lack of a formal emperor doesn’t mean that it’s not an empire nor does its false veil of “democracy”; the US is observably less democratic than the Athenian and British Empires were. And the complete inability of the electorate to even acknowledge what the empire is means that it’s not even possible to discuss what it should, and should not, be doing.

Moreover, the empire is divided and schizophrenic. As the author notes, this has not escaped the attention of the other two global powers, China and Russia. There is absolutely no chance either of them, or a number of the lesser powers, are going to be inclined to follow the imperial USA’s lead, as it is inevitably leading to decline, collapse, and war. Indeed, if they are smart, they will gently assist the empire as it moves even deeper into self-destructive madness, in self-defense if nothing else.

Mailvox: the next Literally Hitler

Is apparently not from the Middle East at all. The news from Austria is encouraging, and not entirely unexpected.

In Austria the coalition of the center-left and center-right party broke up and there will be a new election in October 2017. Currently, the center-right and right-wing party have nearly half the seats in the parliament already. The green party is expected to loose voters, while the left-liberal and right-liberal partie (Neos and Team Stronach) will maybe and surely drop out of the parliament, respectively. The center-left party is not expected to make gains. The big winners will be, and must be, the right leaning parties.

Usually I would not put much faith into the conservative cucks, but now Sebastian Kurz has taken over leadership. Despite being 30 years old, he has already done a much greater service to Europe and Austria than most conservatives do in their whole life. Being Austria’s foreign minister since age 27, he was the single most important political figure responsible for closing the Balkan route, thus keeping hundreds of thousands if not millions of invaders out. He is in the process of closing the Italian route and already has publicly called out NGOs for cooperating and actively assisting the human traffickers bringing the Africans over. From an Austrian point of view his most bally move was to politically break with the Germans, thereby doing what no other Austrian politician dared to do in many many decades. His recent immigration laws aim towards removing islam from public life.

The left leaning Austrian media and all of Germany’s media are already writing their hit pieces on him. Apparently, he is the first Austrian politician since Haider deserving the title literally Hitler, which these days appears to be a compliment.

Our next government will likely be strongly right leaning. It seems as if you were right, and the times are really changing. Note also that according to polls, if there was a vote right now in Vienna, around 40% would vote for the right wing party, giving them a vast edge over the social democrats coming second at around 25%. The same social democrats that have won every single Viennese election since 1919.

The tide has turned. The EU is dying. The forces that will propel Reconquista 2.0 onward and restore a revived Christendom are beginning to grow and gather.

This is the time for courage and confidence, not cowardice and cuckery. Within eight years, we will see NGOs being banned and the surviving architects of the invasion being put on trial for treason in multiple countries.

As the young Sweden Democrats say, Europe belongs to us.

Old advisors, outdated strategy

Mike Cernovich explains why the Trump team is having such a difficult time with the media.

When WaPo or NY Times drops a “devastating” story on Trump, do you know who reads these stories — liberals!

Thus one can see the problem with Trump’s media team. They are spending all of their time, energy, and focus responding to news that most Trump supporters won’t even see, and if we see it, won’t believe it.

Trump was right (for the wrong reasons) when he jokingly claimed he could shoot someone on Fifth Ave. Most of his supporters would never see the story, and absent a clear video, wouldn’t believe the story if they saw it.

Want to know how out “out of touch” Trump supporters are with what liberal media is saying? I don’t even notice most of the media hit pieces on me, and even with a massive online following, people rarely ask me about anything nasty the media is saying about me. My readers, like me, aren’t reading liberal propaganda outlets.

Trump’s media team is playing defense, running around responding to stories that most of Trump’s base will never read, and if they read, would never believe.

He’s absolutely right. When the battleground is disadvantageous, refuse to play on it. Force the enemy to meet you on your chosen ground. This isn’t new, it’s literally ancient strategy.

All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.