Category: Uncategorized

The PGA Surrenders

The PGA Tour waved the white flag and merged with LIV Golf:

In the bitter civil war between the tradition-steeped PGA Tour and its filthy-rich, Saudi-backed rival LIV over the future of golf, the money has come out on top. Leaders of the two organizations delivered a bombshell announcement on Tuesday that they will merge through a deal that will drag global golf into a ‘new era’ – whether the players, fans and sponsors like it or not.

The news, which blindsided players and executives on both circuits, follows years of bitter disputes that have pitted the sport’s leading figures against each other over money, power and ethics in the gentleman’s game.

While LIV poached some of golf’s biggest stars – including Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson – with deals totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, those loyal to the PGA, including Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods, have had the rug pulled out from under them after snubbing eyewatering paydays on moral grounds.

Ultimately, the PGA was unable to keep up with the relentless investment of oil money in a circuit bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the investment arm of a nation with a dismal human rights record. Something had to give.

I strongly suspect that LIV Football (aka Soccer) is next. In the aftermath of the failure of the European Super League and the massive offers being made to iconic players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, it appears obvious to me that the strategy will be to first buy the players, then use that leverage to force advantageous mergers with the existing powers.

Whenever money or power become central, the richest and the most ruthless are guaranteed control. Keep that in mind when you set your own priorities.

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Nothing Works Anymore: German Edition

A reader writes to share his recent experience attempting to get his car serviced.

Thought I would share my experiences with trying to get my car serviced in Germany.

I booked the appointment online at a major car garage chain, unfortunately when I booked I clicked the wrong service type, my bad, but the non-German guy at the garage gave me another appointment slot about 1 week later and confirmed it as he was clicking his computer. I ring up the day before to confirm that I can drop the car off that evening as I had to do a business trip. There was no record in the system that I have an appointment tomorrow. Now our holiday is approaching and we need the car serviced, I find a garage on their website that can do the service that week. It is a town about 80km away. I go there on the day and they told me that the IT system is not working and it´s allowing people to book services when there is no mechanic available. Fortunately, they were able to fit me in a day later. I caught the train 1.5hrs to fetch my car, on the day it was ready, and there is a big sign out the front of the shop that their IT system has problems so we cannot pay with card. I argued with the guy, another non-German, to let me drive my car to the nearest ATM instead of walking there and wasting 2hrs time. We finally negotiated that I leave my ID there. This is where they tell me they cannot give me an invoice as the entire IT system crashed but it will be back on line on Monday.

This was 3 weeks ago and needing the receipt to claim on my company they told me it will be another 2 to 4 weeks. Is it a coincidence that there has been a huge influx of Indian IT workers in Germany? My friend in IT says it´s almost 100 percent due to Indian programming and management.

Then, as I park in an underground garage, I found out about a day later before our holiday that they had scratched the shit out of the entire right back side of the car.

Apparently the German dirt is not magic either. And not being German, I can’t even imagine the full extent of how much this sort of inefficiency and incompetence must infuriate them. This is really just another lesson in the obvious:

  • Pick your own damn cotton.
  • Build your own platforms.
  • Utilize your own services.
  • Marry your own kind.

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Omitting the Obvious

Peter Turchin is doing some valuable work analyzing the whys and wherefores of societal breakdowns:

All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.

These forces have played a key role in our current crisis. In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated. As a result, our social pyramid has become top-heavy. At the same time, the U.S. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society.

The U.S. has gone through this twice before. The first time ended in civil war. But the second led to a period of unusually broad-based prosperity. Both offer lessons about today’s dysfunction and, more important, how to fix it.

However, being an immigrant, he naturally averts his eyes from one obvious contributing factor. It’s not an accident that the periods in which the crises were created were periods of high immigration, and it’s also not an accident that the way in which the second crisis was averted was during a time of very strict limits on immigration.

And since there is no appetite whatsoever for reversing the mass foreign invasion of the USA, there will be no fixing the current dysfunction.

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The Rape Factories

If, at this point, you are still putting your children in public schools, you are committing child abuse by proxy:

US public school employees who sexually abuse children are typically moved to different schools three times before they are finally arrested, preying on as many as 73 victims before they are eventually punished, according to a new report by a conservative think tank.

Published last week by the Defense of Freedom Institute, the report details hundreds of cases in which teachers in public school districts were accused of abuse, but had their records scrubbed before being moved to new positions, where the abuse continued.

Citing earlier research by the Government Accountability Office, the report noted that firing teachers can be a costly process for school districts. As such, the districts often negotiate confidentiality agreements with unions whereby a teacher can resign or be demoted to avoid disciplinary action, before being transferred to another school with a clean slate.

The average employee accused of abuse is passed to three different school districts before facing legal consequences, and can abuse up to 73 children in this time.

This system has allowed sexual assault to proliferate, the report claimed. According to the most recent Department of Education data, 13,799 cases of sexual violence and 685 cases of rape or attempted rape were recorded in schools during the 2017-2018 school year, up from 9,649 and 394 in 2015-2016.

Homeschooling your children should be your #1 first priority. It doesn’t matter if you have to move, add a side-hustle on top of your primary job, or lower your standard of living. Just do it! Neither your nor your children will ever regret it.

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Showtime

The Russians report the long-awaited Ukrainian offensive has finally begun.

Ukrainian forces have attacked the Russian troops along five sections of the frontline in Donbass during their “large-scale offensive,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in the early hours of Monday. According to the MOD, the assault began on Sunday morning. “The enemy’s goal was to breach our defenses in what they assumed was the most vulnerable section of the frontline,” the ministry said in a statement carried by the Russian media.

It will be interesting to see the shape of the Russian response. As I was discussing with William S. Lind the other day, the historical Russian response has been to launch a counteroffensive with far more forces than had been anticipated. That may not be possible anymore in the day of satellite flyovers, but it’s worth noting for the record.

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It’s Afraid

Even the Left is beginning to see that Christian Nationalism is inevitable as Clown World continues to crumble.

Once Trump became “normal”, events that seemed even more extreme did too. A 2022 survey found that two in five Americans thought civil war was “at least somewhat likely” in the next decade. One political scientist speaks of the possibility of rightwing dictatorship in the US by 2030.

The same creep of normalisation is happening in European politics. At the turn of the millennium, when Austria’s far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) – led by Jörg Haider, who had made comments suggesting he was sympathetic to the Nazi regime – entered a coalition with the conservative People’s party, mass protests not only erupted in Vienna but across Europe and in the US. The EU even imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria. It was understood that an important red line had been crossed; that given Europe’s blood-soaked history, the far right had to be kept firmly outside the tent.

No longer. When the FPÖ formed a new coalition in 2017, the protests were relatively small. Today, the party picks up victories in local elections and leads Austria’s opinion polls. Now the country’s main political force, it has every chance of leading the next government. Meanwhile, under pressure from its right flank, the People’s party has adopted ever harsher anti-migrant policies.

Then there’s Spain. For years after the financial crash, the country appeared to buck the trend of many European nations because of its lack of a rising far-right party. Leading lights in the leftwing Podemos party had an explanation: the mass indignados protests against austerity, which erupted in 2011, seemed to ensure that discontent was directed at powerful interests, rather than vulnerable groups such as migrants. But in the 2019 general election, the far-right Vox party – defined by its hostility to migrants and opposition to regional autonomy in Spain – came third, and in last weekend’s local elections exceeded expectations. A snap general election has been called for July, and Vox could soon be in government, the first time the Spanish far right would be in corridors of power since the fall of Franco.

The pattern is strikingly clear. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is surging: one recent poll forecast it would come second in a general election, ahead of the ruling Social Democrats. While other parties claim they will refuse to work with the AfD at the national level, such relationships already exist at the local level, leading Foreign Policy magazine to recently declare that “Germany’s far-right ‘firewall’ is starting to crack”.

This is, after all, what happened in Sweden, where other parties refused to work with the Sweden Democrats party, which has neo-Nazi roots. In 2016, Anna Kinberg Batra, the leader of the conservative Moderate party, denounced it as racist. But in the last election, it came second, and negotiated a deal to prop up a rightwing government.

It’s not exactly a mystery. All the alluring promises of Clown World have turned out to be false, evil, and astonishingly destructive. The centrist ruling parties of the USA and Europe promised a shiny, sexy, secular, science-fiction technotopia according to the principles of Equality and Enlightenment, and instead delivered stinking societies of decaying infrastructure, inflation, unemployment, crime, and mass invasion by literally unwashed barbarians with a taste for rape and sex trafficking, all being run by satanic foreign clowns who criminalize any criticism of their rule while financially pillaging the natives.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the eucivic traditions of Christendom are looking more and more appealing to those now dwelling in the squalid shadows of its post-Christian ruins. At this point, the Left shouldn’t be worrying about future elections, it should be worrying about the coming crusades and eventual inquisitions.

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Same As it Ever Was

Voting for Republicans will not fix anything at all. It makes no difference what they say before they’re elected, they’ll do whatever they’re told once in office.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has changed her position on the public release of the tapes documenting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, warning Friday that their release could “put the security of the Capitol at risk.” Greene said in an interview on the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice that releasing the video footage publicly would jeopardize the Capitol’s security and endanger those who were present at the Capitol grounds but did not enter the Capitol nor commit crimes.

It’s all just so tedious. The inevitable appeal to “national security” is ridiculous in any country with borders as wide-open and undefended as the USA’s. Put not your faith in politicians, for they will break their promises and betray you.

Every single time.

Nobody cares what the excuses are this time. There are always excuses for not doing the right thing, for not doing what you were literally elected to do. But we are rapidly approaching the point that most actual Americans would rather take their chances with the whole thing burning down and fighting it out with the invaders among the glowing ashes of Clown World.

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