Archive for April, 2014

Shooting Gennady Kernes

Wednesday, April 30th, 2014

The Ukraine, like most of the former communist lands, experienced a five finger conversion to capitalism. State assets mysteriously wound up in the hands of some individuals. Gennady Kernes was prominent among those individuals. In the Ukraine the new plutocrats have proven less competent at utilizing assets than stealing them. Ukraine lacks law, tradition, and custom for the orderly exchange of capital assets, so, in the absence of Gennady Kernes, his fortune is probably sliding into other people’s hands. He was probably shot by some random militiaman who was worried he was next in line to be arrested, but his assassination must be making some Ukrainians wealthy and a lot of Ukrainians think that they could get very wealthy by the suitable application of violence.

What Ukraine needs is an environment where productive assets have clear owners, and are capable of being exchanged, sold, and mortgaged. That Gennady Kernes title was “Mayor”, not “CEO”, that he was arresting people, and himself threatened with arrest and execution by the authorities that the Cathedral recognizes as legitimate suggests that it lacks that environment and lacked it even before the coup. (more…)

Technological decline

Sunday, April 27th, 2014

If we cannot build high buildings any more, progressives say we are now so sophisticated that we are now superior to status competition based on giant penis substitutes, and status competition based on having a higher corner office than the other business executives.

If high art is an aids infested trannie projectile vomiting over the audience, progressives say that we philistines just don’t get high art.

But the most important thing about a military aircraft is that it can fly faster, higher, and further than its opponents, so that you can get away from enemies, but enemies cannot get away from you.  And of these, the most important by far is to fly faster, so that you can bring trouble to your enemies, but your enemies cannot bring trouble to you.

SR 71 Blackbird, first built in 1972, about the time we put the last man on the moon.

Cruising Speed Mach 3.2
Ceiling 85 000 feet
Range 3 200 nautical miles

Today’s latest and greatest American warplane, the impressively named F-35 Lightning II. Does not that sound so much more impressive than “Blackbird”?

Cruising Speed Mach 1.6
Ceiling 60 000 feet
Range 1 200 nautical miles nautical miles

So let us make a little table:

Capability Then Now
Speed Mach 3.2 Mach 1.6
Ceiling 85 000 feet 60 000 feet
Range 3 200 nautical miles 1200 nautical miles

(more…)

Joo talk

Friday, April 25th, 2014

I regard all religions as at best useful pretenses that provide divine authority for ancient truths, sensible collective behavior, and sensible individual behavior, at worst as memetic diseases, and am apt to give advice to the religious on the basis of what would make a useful pretense.  Such advice is not always enthusiastically received.

I have long argued that Jews should actually do what everyone accuses them of doing:  Have an ethnic national religion and and ethnic nation in which that religion is the ruling religion.

Trouble is that, during their long exile, Judaism has changed, becoming a religion of exile, has adapted rather too well to exile.  For the most part, Judaism is still in psychological exile, hence the reluctance to recognize Israel as Israel, and the reluctance to reach out and take the temple mount back.  Judaism is not only inherently subversive of its Christian host states.  It is inherently subversive of Israel.  It needs to come home.  Judaism is subversive because it authorizes all the bad things that Jews need to do to survive as exiles, but no longer authorizes all the bad things Jews need to do to survive as a nation in Israel.   Jews feel really bad about doing bad things to Muslims who are trying to kill them.  Armenians don’t feel bad at all.  Americans whacked Fallujah a lot harder than Jews whacked Jenin, with not nearly as good an excuse, and feel fine about doing so.   Every time Jews defend themselves against people trying to kill them, other Jews, notoriously Jews in the US state department, tell them they should just roll over and die, and they are apt to do so.

B, however, argues that his variant of Judaism is fine, is psychologically healthy, and will, in due course, become the dominant strand of Judaism.  I am inclined to doubt this,

The Cathedral interpret B’s variant of Judaism as waiting for the Messiah to do the heavy lifting, to make his religion the state religion, and to make the necessary amendments to B’s religion so that it will work as a state religion. If you are waiting for the Messiah to bring the Kingdom of Heaven, no threat to them, even if you were to get the temple mount back, since they don’t expect divine intervention – and neither do I.

The worst the Cathedral think about B’s variant of Judaism is that B’s faction are spoiling for a war with Islam in the hope that this will force the Messiah to miraculously intervene to save Israel.

If you are going to restore the Kingdom of Israel by non miraculous means, restore the Kingdom of Israel rather than the Kingdom of Heaven, have to propose an undemocratic one state solution, in which a distinctly Jewish Israel rules over non Jews within the land of Israel, and expels or eradicates any non Jews that get difficult about that arrangement. Now maybe they suspect B of secretly harboring that plan, but if so, B has been keeping it so secret that they neglect to accuse his sect of it.

Since I regard religions as at best useful pretenses, what I would favor for Israel is an official religion that does not have the secret police spying on people’s washers and does not send people who get wool lint mixed with linen lint to the gulag, but rather restricts participation in the state apparatus and the most prestigious universities to those that plausibly claim to have the correct washers. Those who attempt to subvert or overthrow this restriction get sent to the gulag, as do those who attempt to tighten up on this restriction so that only those as holy as their extremely holy selves get to exercise power.  You are going to need soldiers on top of priests, and from time to time, soldiers are going to going to need to smack down turbulent priests hard, even if they are genuinely holy.  Indeed especially if they are genuinely holy.

If relying on overtly miraculous divine intervention, I don’t think Jews of B’s type are any great threat to the Cathedral, and even less is the Cathedral likely to think they are a great threat to the Cathedral.

To get to a one state solution you need to tell people that Israel needs a one state solution, and tell them that a one state solution is incompatible with democracy and equality, and propose dismantling democracy and equality without waiting for supernatural rule by the messiah. If B is telling people that, the Cathedral has not noticed, for if it had noticed, would rocket through the roof like an exploding hot water system.

Sunshine Mary bows out

Friday, April 25th, 2014

I will greatly miss you, Sunshine.

The American right is deader than God

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2014

In the last presidential election, nominated governor Romneycare

In the election before that, nominated Senator McCain-Feingold

The current huge increase in government expenditures and substantial increase in taxes reflects a bipartisan budget that your Tea Party congressman voted for – which means that your tea party congressman voted to fund Obamacare.

And, very shortly after the 2014 election, the Republican party is about bring in thirty million Democrat voters.  (Each person amnestied gets to bring in relatives, and, in the 1986 amnesty, promptly did so.  We also had a huge, though short lived, baby boom among immigrants, probably because immigration rights for kin boosted and, for a little while enforced, marriage.  This caused some people to say that the immigrants were naturally socially conservative, though fertility eventually declined to normal underclass levels as the freshly imported women started normal underclass sexual behavior, responding to welfare incentives, rather than immigration control incentives.  It eventually became glaringly obvious that Mexican immigrants are not socially conservative, once they become eligible for welfare.)

It is deemed essential that the Democrat party appease its base, hence the ban on the Keystone pipeline, while the Republican party can take its base for granted, and should always do what maximally offends them.  Every Democrat agrees it is essential to pander to the most radical democrats, while most Republicans agree that the Republican wing of the Republican party are ugly hateful racist neanderthals.

And remember the Reagan Revolution.  Without the 1986 Reagan Amnesty act Obama would not have won the election, and probably would not have been nominated.

At election time, candidates posture about how right wing they are.  Sometimes they do dramatic things like “shutting down the government” – which invariably and predictably end in the total and complete capitulation of the right.  When it is time to pass a budget or a law, they are all leftists.  Just as you don’t get into Harvard except you can do an adequate simulation of leftism, you don’t get into politics unless you can adequately simulate leftism, even though you have simulate rightism for those hateful despicable disgusting voters.  Democrats are the inner party, Republicans the outer party.  They are all one party, the party of the state, preaching the religion of the state.

 

Raising fertility

Sunday, April 20th, 2014

Singapore has terminal fertility – a fertility rate so low that it is likely to end Singapore. Smart people go to Singapore, and just do not reproduce. Black hole dysgenesis. The Singaporean government has issued a bunch of laws and incentives intended to raise fertility, with rather small effect.

Similarly, the emperor Augustus, noticing that Romans were on a similar path to oblivion, passed a bunch of laws to encourage marriage and fertility, with similar lack of effect.

I have a lot of hope in Singapore as a place where technologically advanced civilization might continue as the rest of the world slowly slides into another dark age, but that is not going to happen if Singaporeans do not reproduce (more…)

Ukraine government fades

Sunday, April 20th, 2014

Government is a shared pretense. We imagine governments into existence. Blatant puppetry can puncture the illusion.

The NY Times tells us

One of the armored columns stopped when a crowd of people, many of whom were drinking or yelling taunts, gathered on the road before them. Later in the day its commander agreed to hand over the soldiers’ assault rifles to the very separatists they were sent to fight.

Another column from the same unit, the 25th Dnipropetrovsk paratrooper brigade, surrendered not only its weapons but also the tracked and armored vehicles it had arrived in, letting militants park them as trophies, under a Russian flag, in a central square.

A pro-Russian militant climbed into the driver’s seat of one of the vehicles and spun it around on its tracks, screeching and roaring, to please the watching crowd.

The events on Wednesday underscored the weakness of the new Ukrainian government as it begins critical talks about the country’s future with the United States, Russia and the European Union in Geneva on Thursday. Officials unable to exercise authority over their own military seem increasingly powerless to contain a growing rebellion by pro-Russian militants.

The core function of government is to enable the army and the police to act as one. An army needs something outside itself to give it cohesion – the gods, the spirits of real or mythical common ancestors, the man born to rule, the mandate of heaven. Failing that, the will of the people. What has the Ukraine government got?

On the attack on Sunshine Mary

Friday, April 18th, 2014

Some boring people are attacking Sunshine Mary in particular and the entire Manosphere in general.

According to Matt Forney, Sunshine Mary said various things about her own life and activities, and the truth is various other things. I am a big fan of Sunshine Mary and yet don’t remember her saying most of those things, and if she did say those things, to find out the truth on those matters would require some seriously obsessive stalking, indeed merely paying attention to her saying those things, supposing she did say them, is stalkerish.

According to Matt Forney, she is not in fact submissive to her husband. Did he camp out in her bedroom and check out their relationship? If he says one thing he cannot know, it is a lie. If one lie, all lies.

But suppose that the things he claims, and could perhaps know, are true, for example he claims she was a slut in college. Supposing all that stuff is true, suppose everything he says is true. If it is true, then he is a stalker. If a stalker, the person stalked is interesting, and the stalker is insane.

Supposing that everything Matt Forney tells us about Sunshine Mary is completely true, what does this tell us about Matt Forney?

It tells us he responds to opinions to which he disagrees by investigating where the children of the person he disagrees with go to school.

wife goggles

Wednesday, April 16th, 2014

Notoriously, husbands tend to see their wives as hot, when they would never see some other woman of similar age as hot. If they are separated from their wife for a year or so, for example by divorce, the wife goggles fall off.

Wife goggles appear to happen primarily to fathers. If the wife does not have children, then as she grows older, she rapidly becomes less attractive, as any woman rapidly becomes less attractive past thirty.

In the ancestral environment, particularly in northerly lands, women and children were dependent on males for food. Therefore we are descended disproportionately from males who stuck around, but we are also descended disproportionately from males who only saw fertile age women as attractive.

One possible resolution of these conflicting requirements (natural selection wants man to hang out with fertile age woman, but natural selection wants man to stick with the mother of his children) is for a man to see his wife as always that age when he had children with her, or always as sexually attractive as she was at that age, which is to some substantial extent what happened to me. Which suggests that one should have children as young as possible.

US State Department hints at invading Ukraine

Tuesday, April 15th, 2014

We currently are working with Ukraine to determine its requirements across the security sector. Based on those requirements, we will review options for potential additional security assistance. 

This follows the path that the Soviet Union followed into Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union mistreated its allied government in Afghanistan, after the style of Darth Vader

I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further. 

The allied government, upon being treated as a servant, became difficult, so was overthrown and replaced by a puppet government. The puppet government faced rebellion and a military disinclined to follow orders, so the puppet government was brushed aside and replaced by direct rule of imperial troops. Long, messy, expensive war ensued. Eventually the Soviet Union decides to retreat – but discovers that retreat under fire is a difficult and dangerous maneuver.

Similarly the Cathedral mistreated, then eventually overthrew, its ally in the Ukraine, creating a puppet regime that now finds itself with a rebellion on its hands and a military disinclined to fight. Perhaps the Right Sector is willing to fight, but it is far from clear whether it will fight the puppet government’s enemies, or fight the puppet government, or, quite likely, both.

Could the Cathedral be that stupid? Probably not this time, but sooner or later they will do something that stupid. They are blind, crazy, and not as smart as they used to be.

Obama’s gut instinct in international affairs is to avoid trouble and make concessions, and right now is the time for that policy, but there are some in the State Department beating the drums for a more martial policy, to cover the fact that the coup was just a bad idea, badly executed, from which the Cathedral needs to retreat.

Obama is infamous for bowing to our enemies, but the USG has also been busily blowing quite a few of them up, a contradiction resolved if we suppose that he is just the PR guy and is not always told what is going down – which is roughly how the Kaiser found himself in World War I.

Puppet regimes have a tendency to disappear. The most easily attainable peaceful outcome would be for Russian speakers to rule the eastern states of a loose Ukrainian federation, and Right Sector to rule the western states of a loose Ukrainian federation, while the puppet regime remains nominally in charge, but abandons real power. The Cathedral and Obama, however, think that the natural flow of history is ever leftwards, and that such an outcome is “on the wrong side of history”. The State Department was happy to hand China over to Mao, that being the correct side of history, but is profoundly reluctant to yield Ukraine