That is NOT what is required of an American president

Steve Sailer has no comment concerning Bernard-Henri Lévy’s declaration of U.S. presidential priorities, Jews, Be Wary of Trump in the New York Times.

There is a law that governs the relations between the Jews and the rest of the world. That law was articulated in one form at the time of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when the great Jewish thinker Gershom Scholem faulted Hannah Arendt for falling short of “ahavat Israel” — for showing insufficient “love of the Jewish people.”

This love is precisely what is required of an American president in dealings affecting Israel. … Whether Jon Stewart or the Jewish Republican donors disdained the kitschy builder with his flamboyant hair, his money, his bling and his properties, including the now world-famous Trump Tower, is obviously not the question.

The essential thing is that President Trump thinks they did, that he seems to see Jews as the caricature of the New York establishment that, for decades, took him for an agreeable but vulgar showman.

This is a perfect example of the self-defensive contempt that has so often fed anti-Semitism, with the Jews appearing, once again, as representatives of an elite that patronized him and against whom he can, now that he is in power, quietly take his revenge.

It reminds me of a story from the Talmud that illustrates this logic well.

It is the story — part history and part “aggadic” embellishment — of Rabbi Yehudah Nessia, one of the foremost figures of Jewish thought of the third century.

Rabbi Yehudah ran a school that a young Roman swineherd would pass by nearly every day. The students at the school, their heads full of knowledge and a sense of their own superiority, never missed a chance to mock and beat the pig farmer.

Years later, Rabbi Yehudah was summoned to the distant city of Caesarea Philippi, to appear before Roman Emperor Diocletian. It seemed that the emperor was full of consideration for his guest. He sent to him one of his most distinguished ambassadors and ordered that a sumptuous bath be provided to allow his guest to cleanse himself after his dusty voyage.

But Diocletian also sent his ambassador on a Friday, so that Rabbi Yehudah would be forced to travel on the Sabbath, violating the most important of commandments.

The emperor also heated the baths to such a degree that the rabbi would have been boiled to death — a fate from which the rabbi was saved by the last-minute intervention of an angel, who cooled the waters.

When the rabbi appeared before Diocletian, he recognized the former swineherd, who said to him with spite, “Just because your god performs miracles, you think you can scorn the emperor?”

I cite this story because it provides a good metaphor for the West today, where, as in ancient Rome, the triumph of nihilism can enable a pig farmer — anybody — to become emperor.

It is a good example, too, of Jewish wisdom, which responds to the situation as follows: “We had contempt for Diocletian the swineherd, but we are ready to honor Diocletian the emperor provided he, like Saul — who, before becoming king had tended donkeys — heeds the prophecy, rises to his office, and becomes a new man.”

Not unlike one reader’s self-defeating attempt to explain how trying to renegotiate the price after receiving what one has bought somehow does not qualify as attempting to cheat the other party, reading this sort of thing makes me wonder if this gentleman even listens to himself talk. He clearly has no idea how reprehensible he sounds to both American and European ears.

I have considerably more respect for swineherds and farmers than for Bernard-Henri Lévy or the sort of “scholar” who believes it is acceptable to mock and beat people because knowledge. Nor is Lévy alone; Bill Kristol also does not believe in prioritizing American national interests, for as he said in response to the God-Emperor’s inaugural speech: “It is profoundly depressing and vulgar to hear an American president proclaim “America First.”

This demonstrates, as if it were necessary, the truth of Jesus Christ’s observation.

No man can serve two masters: for either he. will hate the one, and love the other; or else. he will hold to the one, and despise the other. 

Could be big

Or it could be trolling and therefore nothing. We’ll see. But I would LOVE to see the God-Emperor start defunding the universities regardless. Why not? They are converged. They’re no longer fit for purpose, they no longer perform their primary function, and they are the enemy.
One thing the Alt-Right understands that the cucks and cons never have. DO NOT FUND YOUR ENEMY.

Darkstream: free trade part 1

I’ll be doing a Darkstream tonight at 7 PM Eastern on the subject of free trade. This is part 1, and it will focus on David Ricardo and the comparative advantage theory that is the primary economic justification for free trade.

UPDATE: The replay is here. For those who want to prepare for Part 2, read Chapter 11 of Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.

For those who want to do a little preparation, here is a partial transcript of an interview I did with Ian Fletcher, the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work, which played a major role in my reassessment of free trade.

When most people think of opposition to free trade, they think of three things. They think of the 18th century mercantilists that were supposedly routed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo. They think of the UAW opposing cheap Japanese cars in the 1970s. And they think of Pat Buchanan and his pitchfork populism in the 1988 presidential campaign. How are the arguments you put forward in Free Trade Doesn’t Work distinguished from those three things? 

You’ve got to remember that those three examples you gave all consist of people who are, for one reason or another, disreputable in some way and in some currents of opinion but they are also people who did have a point. Mercantilism for example is not just something from the 18th century. It goes back to the very dawn of modern capitalism and the renaissance.

You have to remember that global trade is not something that was invented in 1990. It can go back hundreds of years back to the era when it was conducted with sailing ships. And very shortly after international capitalism began to take shape, various nations and their governments began to learn there were enormous advantages to be derived gaming the system. And surprise, surprise this is still going on it’s what China is doing today it’s what Japan has done for decades.

To some extent, it’s what the United States itself used to do for most of its history.  For most of its history the United States was very exclusively a tariff protected economy. The Founding Fathers were protectionists. The economist among the Founding Fathers is Alexander Hamilton, the guy on the ten dollar bill. And he wrote a report entitled “The report on manufacturers” which he submitted to congress in 1791, in which he layed out a rationale for protectionism that still holds good today. Hamilton was a very smart guy. Among other things you might be surprised to learn that he is the inventor of the R&D tax credit, which he proposed in 1791.


I had no idea. I knew he was big on central banks. I didn’t realize he was up on tax credits as well.

Yeah. The point is that mercantilism is not something that was brought out of the water by Adam Smith who was in many ways, although he was  brilliant guy, he was also the servant of various economic interests in his own time, particularly the economic interests of the Scots who had their own quarrels with the English.  Adam Smith is not a fully reliable guide in the sense that everything he said was true.

And you mentioned David Ricardo. One of the interesting things about Ricardo is if you actually go back and read his original book in which he enunciated for the first time the theory of comparative advantage, you discover that he says things like well, I have this theory, and one of the provisos to this theory is that if you have international mobility of capital, then my theory that free trade is always your best move ceases to be true.

Joseph Schumpeter is extremely harsh on Ricardo’s manner of constructing arguments. He said that Keynes and Ricardo had a lot in common in that way.

There are any number of problems with Ricardo; you have to remember that Ricardo was writing in the early nineteenth century, and his main book came out in 1817. So, to some extent I can forgive him, but the fact that a lot of his reasoning is, by present day standards, exceedingly primitive.  Among his other great discoveries was the so-called Iron Law of wages. According to which, you can never help working class peoples, so you might as well not try. There’s a lot in Ricardo to object to if you actually dig into all the economic theories and the constructs that supposedly given to us to prove that free trade is always our best move, under all circumstances. It just isn’t true.  That’s just not what these ideas actually say if you dig into them.

That leads into my next question. You’ve taken econ 101, and I’ve taken econ 101. Everyone who has is familiar with the theory of comparative advantage. And the example that Ricardo provided using the cloth and wine trade between Portugal and England.  But how has it persisted and remained dominant so long, considering that it contains, as you noted, no less than seven dubious assumptions? 

The theory of comparative advantage, which basically comes down to the idea that nations trade for the same reason people do. And the reason that you buy your coffee in the coffee shop rather than making it for yourself is not that you can’t make it for yourself. It’s not even that you might not even be more efficient at making it yourself than the guy in the coffee shop. It’s just that you have other things to do with your time.

And to fully elaborate, you can understand why it’s advantageous not just to import products, but to import products from nations that are less efficient producers than we are. I mean, we import a huge quantity of goods from China, but China is not a more efficient industrial machine than the United States. In fact, by any of the standard measures they are much less efficient.

Now, the problem with the theory of comparative advantage is that, although it does tell you a lot of good things which are true, and it’s a useful analytical construct for dealing with a lot of economic realities, it was never intended by its own inventor and its own intrinsic logic will not support its being turned into a blank check for 100 percent free trade with 100 percent of the world 100 percent of the time.  That’s just not what the theory actually says.  As opposed to what the US Chamber of Commerce and multinational corporations attempting to corrupt the congress with direct and indirect bribery would like you to believe that it says.

But why is it persistent and been so dominant and for so long, considering that not only does it have those seven dubious assumptions, but that it’s quite clear that it can’t possibly be applied in the manner that it usually is applied?

Because it is advantageous to powerful special interests. That’s the main reason. I mean it gives the answer that these guys want to hear, which is that America should practice free trade towards the rest of the world. Which means that multinational corporate interests can produce in China, lay off their American workforce, bring those goods to the United States, and sell them here at an enormous profit which you get when using slave labor. There’s no secret.

The subsidiary reason why the theory has remained more popular than it deserves to be is it gratifies the desire of academic economists to have one simple formula that explains the whole world. I mean, if you’ve dealt with academics. It’s a beautiful ivory tower construct because once you master the mathematics of this one simple formula you’ve got a magic wand that tells you just about everything about international trade without your even needing to consult any empirical facts or statistics on the matter. Let alone actually visit a factory or a dockyard or a shop to see what’s really going on.

The cucking intensifies

Rod Dreher does not disappoint as he wrings his hands over the God-Emperor’s surprisingly restrained rule:

The astonishing audacity and recklessness with which Trump has begun his presidency is a bad sign. For me, it is not so much what he has done (though I do object to some of it) as it is the reckless manner in which he has done it. As every well-raised Southern child knows, manners express morality. Yes, manners are artificial, but they embody a social code that governs the conduct of people who live under it. True, it is always better to do the right thing than to work unrighteousness under the cover of minding one’s manners. But as Brooks points out, there’s something crude and vicious about the way Trump goes out of his way to provoke, to rub the noses of his opponents in the exercise of his power. In Trump’s case, manners express the man.

In other words, we know what kind of president Trump is going to be by the way he has carried out his executive actions so far. He does not consider himself bound by law or custom. He is a law unto himself. That doesn’t make him wrong about everything, but it does serve as fair warning to Republicans and conservatives, both on Capitol Hill and out in the country: sooner or later, he’s going to make us take sides. In the moment of testing, you will only be able to make the right call then if you have prepared your conscience, and exercised it by being more faithful to the Truth than to your president.

Demonstrating, as always, that for the moderate, it’s not what you do, it’s the genteel manner with which you do it.

Moderate: Okay, gentlemen… take 5 paces, then turn and shoot. SJW has won the coin toss and will shoot first. Understood?
Conservative: Yes.
SJW: Whatever.
Moderate: One…
SJW: turns and points pistol, hand trembling in terror
Moderate: looks at SJW scornfully Two…
SJW: CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE! shoots in Conservative’s general direction… misses horribly
Conservative: What the deuce? turns around You bastard!
SJW: How dare you turn around! You’re not a gentleman!
Moderate: Conservative! You must take three more paces before you may turn around!
Conservative: That coward shot at me after two!
Moderate: Do not lower yourself to his level! Death before dishonor!
Conservative: That doesn’t mean what you think it does! aims at SJW
SJW: EEK! cowers
Moderate: How dare you! draws pistol on Conservative If you do not turn around this instant, I shall shoot you myself, you dishonorable cur!

Ross Douthat, meanwhile, claims populism is always doomed to failure and assumes both incompetence and an inability to learn on the part of a man who not only specializes in A/B testing, but went through THREE campaign managers in his successful campaign for the White House.

The great fear among Trump-fearers is that he will deal with this elite opposition by effectively crushing it — purging the deep state, taming the media, remaking the judiciary as his pawn, and routing or co-opting the Democrats. This is the scenario where a surging populism, its progress balked through normal channels, turns authoritarian and dictatorial, ending in the sort of American Putinism that David Frum describes darkly in the latest issue of The Atlantic.

But nothing about Trumpian populism to date suggests that it has either the political skill or the popularity required to grind its opposition down. In which case, instead of Putin, the more relevant case study might be former President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood leader whose brief tenure was defined both by chronic self-sabotage and by the active resistance of the Egyptian bureaucracy and intelligentsia, which rendered governance effectively impossible.

The Egyptian deep state’s sabotage of Morsi culminated in a coup. This is not my prediction for the Trump era. But what we’ve watched unfold with refugee policy suggests that chaos and incompetence are much more likely to define this administration than any kind of ruthless strength.

I, on the other hand, observe that the God-Emperor is simply starting small and testing the waters. I don’t think we’ve seen anything at all as yet. But if the best he can do is to burn down the entire edifice, well, that’s just fine too.

Labor mobility destroying nations

The map above demonstrates what has happened as a result of the European Union’s establishment of a free trade zone throughout Europe. Notice that despite the absence of the promised economic growth throughout the EU, the increase in the international mobility rate has increased considerably in the last decade, even in the wealthier countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Incredibly, some of the Balkan states have seen more than one-third of their populations abandon the country!

This conclusively proves what I have concluded with regards to the way that free trade inevitably destroys nations. The freer the trade, the more endangered the nation. How can you have a nation when its people are scattered all throughout the world, trying to find employment? It is evidence that confirms what I’d first warned about in a free trade post back in 2012. As Dr. James Miller admitted in our debate, later published as On the Question of Free Trade, labor mobility, and its societal costs, are something that no free trade-advocating economist has ever taken into account

In the former EU15, only about 0.1% of the working age population changes its country of residence in a given year. Conversely, in the US, about 3% of the working age population moves to a different state every year, These institutional and cultural differences suggest comparing internal geographical mobility in the US with the situation within EU Member States rather than between Member States.

In doing so, the figures narrow the ‘mobility gap’ between Europe and the US. Between 2000 and 2005, about 1% of the working age population had changed residence each year from one region to another within the EU15 countries, compared to an overall interstate mobility rate of 2.8%-3.4% in the US during the same period of time.”

What this means is that US workers are about 3x more willing to change their state of residence than European workers are willing to change their region of residence within national borders, and 30x more inclined to change their state of residence than Europeans are inclined to change their country of residence, even though the US state-to-state change likely involves a bigger geographic move than the EU country-to-country one.

It should be noted that increasing this country-to-country labor mobility rate within the EU is not only a major goal of the EU economic advisers, but the explicitly stated reason for this goal is their belief that increased labor mobility is required in order to increase economic growth.

Now, let’s look at what that annual 3 percent intra-US mobility translates to in terms of the overall population. The statistics are as follows for Americans between the ages of 25 and 44:

  • East 54.3 percent
  • Midwest 65.0 percent 
  • South 47.3 percent
  • West 40.2 percent

This is why the Midwest has changed much less over the last 40 years than either the East Coast or the West Coast; more Midwesterners stay in the Midwest and maintain their laws and cultural traditions. But more importantly, note what this signifies for the USA if the apostles of free trade were ever able to achieve their goal of permitting international trade to take place on the same terms as American domestic trade in a manner that realized the anticipated economic benefits: very nearly half of all American workers would be expected to leave the USA by the average age of 35!

This vast exodus of young Americans would say nothing, of course, of the hundreds of millions of non-American workers who would be expected to enter the USA, with all of the various consequences to be expected as a result of immigration that is an order of magnitude larger than the current wave.

The logic of free trade is inescapable. It amounts to a choice between a steadily declining living standard if free trade is limited to goods and capital versus the total destruction of the nation and the replacement of a majority of its population within a single lifetime if it is pursued to the full “beneficial extent” of the concept.

Milo brings the chaos to Berkeley

Milo ends his campus tour with a bang:

Protesters armed with bricks and fireworks mounted an assault on the building hosting a speech by polarizing Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos Wednesday night, forcing the event’s cancellation.

Several injuries have been reported and at least four banks have been vandalized after demonstrators marched away from the scene of a violent protest at the canceled speaking event by controversial far-right writer and speaker Yiannopoulos on the University of California at Berkeley campus.

UC Berkeley officials said the protest was infiltrated by vandals.

Yiannopoulos was making the last stop of a tour aimed at defying what he calls an epidemic of political correctness on college campuses.

With masked activists joining the already large group of protesters gathered in the area between Sather Gate and the north end of Telegraph Avenue as night fell, campus police were holding their positions near the entrance of the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building hosting the event.

As the gathered crowd got more agitated, masked “black bloc” activists began hurling projectiles including bricks, lit fireworks and rocks at the building and police.

Some used police barriers as battering rams to attack the doors of the venue, breaching at least one of the doors and entering the venue on the first floor.

In addition to fireworks being thrown up onto the second-floor balcony, fires were lit outside the venue, including one that engulfed a gas-powered portable floodlight.

The area on Upper Sproul Plaza grew thick with smoke, and later tear gas, as the protest intensified.

At about 6:20 p.m., UC campus police announced that the event had been cancelled. Officers ordered the crowd to disperse, calling it an unlawful assembly.

The DNC doubles down

It is looking more and more likely that Keith Ellison will be the next DNC chairman:

The Democratic National Committee is kicking a candidate out of the chairmanship race after he told The Hill that Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) should not be the party’s next leader because he is a Muslim.

In a Jan. 5 email to The Hill, Vincent Tolliver, a former House candidate in Arkansas, said that Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, should not be chairman because of Islamic positions on homosexuality.

“His being a Muslim is precisely why DNC voters should not vote for him,” Tolliver wrote. “Muslims discriminate against gays. Islamic law is clear on the subject, and being gay is a direct violation of it. In some Muslim countries, being gay is a crime punishable by death.”

“Clearly, Mr. Ellison is not the person to lead the DNC or any other organization committed to not discriminating based on gender identity or sexual orientation,” Tolliver continued. “I’m shocked [the Human Rights Campaign] has been silent on the issue. A vote for Representative Ellison by any member of the DNC would be divisive and unconscionable, not to mention counterproductive to the immediate and necessary steps of rebuilding the Democratic Party.”

The Hill did not report on the remarks in early January because it was unclear whether Tolliver would be an active candidate for chair. However, on Saturday, Tolliver participated in the DNC-sanctioned candidates forum in Houston. The DNC announced on Tuesday that Tolliver would also be one of 11 candidates participating in the next forum in Detroit on Feb. 4.

But Tolliver is no longer invited to participate in the event.

“The Democratic Party welcomes all Americans from all backgrounds. What we do not welcome is people discriminating against others based on who they are or how they worship,” interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile said in a statement to The Hill.

I look forward to seeing the Democratic Party endorse both “love wins” and “gravity wins”. And maybe, just maybe, we will get Bannon 2024!

Alt-Right banned by Reddit

Reddit banned the Alt-Right subreddit today.

This community has been banned

This subreddit was banned due to a violation of our content policy, specifically, the proliferation of personal and confidential information.
Banned 2 hours ago.

My reaction? So what? What else did you expect? Every SJW-converged organization is eventually going to ban every group and individual to the right of CNN. Don’t be surprised, be prepared. You can be certain that r/The_Donald is next.

This blog is on Blogger, it has been on Blogger since 2003, but I back it up every week because I don’t know when SJW convergence will overcome the corporate objectives. At this point, Google and Amazon are SJW-amenable, but they are not yet fully converged because they are more interested in making money than in thought-policing. I still have Facebook and Twitter accounts, but I don’t use either them because they are converged to the point of uselessness to me.

Whatever absurd reason Reddit gives doesn’t matter. If the SJWs there can’t find an excuse, they’ll manufacture one. Andrew Torba managed to get his account banned from Twitter when he hadn’t even logged into it for months; he had, quite literally, done nothing at all.

Don’t whine, cry, or complain. Build your own institutions. Support the Alt-Tech organizations. You simply cannot expect to successfully lobby an authority that not only is not amenable, but is actively hostile to you, your beliefs, your nation, and everything you value.

Darkstream: Trump and the revival of heroism

Tonight at 7 PM Eastern I’ll be doing a Darkstream in which we’ll be discussing the heroics of the God-Emperor and how his actions fly in the face of modern anti-heroism. To find it once it goes live, search for #darkstream. I’m kind of excited about this one, since I received my new Rode microphone today. I hope it will improve the audio.

My thoughts on the topic were inspired by a recent post at the Castalia House blog, How Star Wars Stole Pulp, which you might like to read first.

What really happened is this: The audience didn’t abandon F&SF. F&SF abandoned its audience. Its appeal became more selective.

Post-WWII was the era of the Campbellian Silver Age, the era of “Men with Screwdrivers” SF. Action and adventure were childish and frankly embarrassing, as were purple prose and laser swords. Barsoom? Silly. Buck Rogers? Childish. Northwest Smith? A gunslinger, not a scientist. And this was the age of SCIENCE.

Science was the focus, technology the touchstone. Stories had to be cerebral, intellectual. They had to be REALISTIC. Real science, none of this fuzzy-headed soft science stuff. SF had to shake off the wooly-headed thinking of Fantasy, the embarrassing antics of Space Opera, the adolescent focus on Adventure and Action. SF was serious business. Real Literature. It was time to grow up.

UPDATE: The replay is available here.