Feral Historian
Published 14 Jun 2024So the Federation doesn’t use money and magic walls give you anything you ask for. What kind of economy are we really looking at here, and is some approximation of this possible without first having those replicators?
First we have to talk about what money is, what a job is (vs just being employed) and a little historical detour into modern efforts at Universal Basic Income. All of which lead to a very hypothetical look at how we might be able to build a rough approximation of a Star Trek economy in the near-term future.
This is all analysis and thought-experiment. I’m not necessarily endorsing any of these ideas, just bouncing things around for consideration.
00:00 Intro
01:00 Qualitatively Distinct Model
02:27 The Triple Revolution
05:00 Jobs ≠ Employment
06:32 Universal Basic Income
11:35 Federation Credit
13:45 Impacts of Currency
15:16 Can We Really Do This?
(more…)
March 21, 2025
Star Trek: Jobs, Money, and Replicators
March 20, 2025
US Supreme Court to hear case that might overturn the Kelo decision
J.D. Tuccille discusses a US Supreme Court case on abuse of the power of eminent domain that might be the key to reversing the ridiculous Kelo precedent:
… the U.S. Supreme Court may soon overturn one of its worst decisions in recent memory — a ruling that justified government stealing property from its owners to pass it to better-connected private parties. On Friday, the court will decide whether to consider a New York case that could upset the precedents set by Kelo v. New London, an eminent domain battle that prompted books, a movie, and state-level legal reforms. While Kelo was a loss for anybody who wants to set boundaries around government power, the court could take the opportunity this week to set things right with Bowers v. Oneida County Industrial Development Agency.
Kelo Abandoned Basic Limitations on Government Power
In dissenting to the majority’s 2005 decision in Kelo allowing the taking of a house owned by Susette Kelo by the city government of New London, Connecticut to transfer it to a favored developer, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor quoted Calder v. Bull (1798): “[A] law that takes property from A. and gives it to B: It is against all reason and justice, for a people to entrust a Legislature with such powers; and, therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it”.
“Today the Court abandons this long-held, basic limitation on government power”, O’Connor added. “Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded — i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public — in the process.”
That dissent was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Also agreeing with the dissenters were a great many Americans horrified that the Supreme Court had signed off on the confiscation of private property so long as a potential new owner could show spiffy plans for the confiscated parcels and promise greater tax revenue. It wouldn’t even have to be a fulfilled promise — Susette Kelo’s house remained undeveloped when financing for the project fell through.
The response to Kelo included books, a movie — Little Pink House — and a wave of state-level court decisions and legislative efforts intended to rein-in the abuse of eminent domain.
Most States Have Reformed Eminent Domain — but Not New York
“Since Kelo v. New London, 47 states have strengthened their protections against eminent domain abuse, either through legislation or state supreme court decisions,” notes the Institute for Justice (I.J.). Of course, not all the reforms were created equal. I.J. grades the various efforts, with states like Florida getting an “A” grade and Connecticut — where the Kelo case occurred — lagging with a “D”. A 2009 study found that “states with more economic freedom, greater value of new housing construction, and less racial and income inequality are more likely to have enacted stronger restrictions, and sooner” on eminent domain.
And then there’s New York. I.J. gives that state an “F” because it failed to even attempt reform. In 2009, that state’s highest court conceded “it may be that the bar has now been set too low” as it approved seizure of private property for redevelopment. “But any such limitation upon the sovereign power of eminent domain as it has come to be defined in the urban renewal context is a matter for the Legislature, not the courts.” The legislature never acted.
March 13, 2025
This explains a lot … IRS employees aren’t issued personal computers (in 2025!)
You sometimes read a small item and the information in it is so unexpected, it’s like being suddenly dumped into icy cold water, like this little item from Reason‘s “Morning Roundup” email:
Everything’s computer! But not at the IRS.
“The upheaval at the IRS is already having real impacts,” reports The Washington Post, referring to plans (already underway) to reduce the workforce by half. “Sources familiar with the agency report that its level of phone service is falling, in part because employees are spending their time waiting to use shared computers to respond to [the Department of Government Efficiency’s] requests for weekly emails detailing their work. (Not all IRS employees are issued their own computers.) And they report that taxpayer behavior is already adjusting to the reality of a diminished IRS workforce: IRS receipts — taxes paid already and taxes the agency is scheduled to receive from those who have already filed — are significantly lower than they were at this point last filing season.”
Wait, back up. They don’t have their own computers? And they’re sitting in a queue like schoolchildren in the library, waiting to use a single shared computer to respond to Musk’s five-things-you-did-last-week emails? How long does it take to write those emails? And why don’t they have computers?
Look, I’m worried by the slapdash approach Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken. But the continued federal employee freakout over being asked to justify their jobs by detailing what they’ve done at work makes no sense to me.
I know a girl from college who is a “Work-Life Specialist and Mindfulness Facilitator” at the U.S. Department of Transportation. She leads yoga sessions and “meditation made simple” workshops for federal employees, per her LinkedIn. This is a job I don’t want my taxpayer dollars funding. For Musk to apply scrutiny to this type of thing is a huge win for the American people.
There are lots of legitimate criticisms to make about whether cuts in staffing will actually lead to a better IRS. Taxpayer services will surely suffer if there are fewer people available to answer phone calls and emails; refunds might be delayed, which comes at a real cost to people. Worse tax collection means less revenue for the government, and it’s not like spending is under control — expect the fiscal hole we’re in to get worse if this continues. But “we just can’t figure out how to ration computer use in the year 2025 to craft a bullet-pointed email” is an absurd line that elicits no sympathy, and just leaves me confused about what the hell they’ve been doing all this time. Everything’s not, in fact, computer in the federal government.
March 10, 2025
Deep State delenda est
Elizabeth Nickson calls for the destruction of the deep state, Cato the Censor-style: salt the earth and leave no stone standing upon another stone:
There has been some argument in my house about Trump’s tariffs on Canada, and indeed the rest of the world. I’m on the American side; why on earth should the Americans pay for everything? Because they do. They pay for Europe’s defence, they allow every single country to tariff American products while allowing their goods in for pennies. When anyone, anywhere is in trouble, who do they call? The Yanks. Where do the pleas of all the desperate people all over the world land? America. Who did the Israeli captives hope for? Trump and the Americans. (Actually just Trump. They didn’t think that the Biden people would lift a finger. Which they didn’t.)
Please explain why these countries below, numbering 550 million people, cannot defend themselves?
Why can’t they defend themselves? They are broke.
The following represents $150 billion in missed opportunity in the last FIVE years. Canada is so broke, it is broke-ass broke; it is a shriveling carbuncle on the American economy. We send 80% of our exports to you because we are TOO DAMNED LAZY to develop our own country.
If we had built those projects, Canada would be rich, the middle class would be crackling along, creativity would have soared and we would actually be proud. No one is proud of Canada except for the people paid to bloviate or who hope to be paid to bloviate, and those too stupid to bloviate. The rest of us are sullen and angry and so frustrated we don’t know what to do with ourselves.
But no. Climate Change. Look, I am sorry to say this, but anyone who “believes” in climate change being somehow catastrophic is stupid, malignant or has not done the required reading. Which means lazy. Which means childlike. There is no there there. Climate alarmism is nonsense, it is bullshit, it is utter crap made up by subsidized kids looking for “significance” and an endless supply of taxpayer dollars. The science is far too new to be reliable, there are thousands of real (not NGO) scientists in opposition to it and the policy implications are so vast we are looking at a new feudalism. Anyone promoting climate change is unserious.
Childhood is where we are. Canada is the only country in the Western Hemisphere which exacts a crippling carbon tax. And this:
The above is a perfect illustration of vanity, of a detachment from reality. And the only way people can detach from reality is that they are subsidized by the Americans. This means the Heartland people, the Flyover people. Those subsidies to the world added to a massive, unsustainable, insane, debt of thirty-seven trillion, created a giant fuzzy rainbow coloured cloud inhabited by perpetual children built by ghastly people like Samantha Powers, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and their legion of sick, larcenous, pedophile supporters, the ferociously stupid women on the east coat of America, the idiots at all the Ivies, and the two million federal workers who are about to be reduced by, I wish, 50%.
March 3, 2025
Is DOGE merely uncovering what used to be called “honest” graft?
Jon Miltimore explains where the expression “honest graft” came from and gives examples of what the DOGE investigations have turned up so far:
In 1905, George Washington Plunkitt made arguably the most famous defense of political graft in American history.
“Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft,” the New York state senator and Tammany Hall member wrote, “but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft”.
Plunkitt was responding to The Shame of the Cities, a book by journalist Lincoln Steffens that exposed sweeping political corruption in U.S. cities.
The ward boss’s shameless defense of “honest graft”, which is still assigned to undergraduates a century after Plunkitt’s death, comes to mind when looking at the fraud, waste, and abuse Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and others are uncovering.
To take but one example, consider the billions of dollars in taxpayer funds the Environmental Protection Agency awarded last year to Power Forward Communities. If you’ve never heard of the nonprofit group, you’re forgiven. Almost nobody has — because it didn’t exist until late 2023.
Power Forward Communities had no footprint, online or otherwise, until October 2023, when it was announced as part of the Rewiring America program, an organization linked to former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, which says its mission is “all about Rewiring America’s values, people, and culture.”
Less than a year after its creation, Power Forward Communities was awarded $2 billion via the EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund — even though it reported just $100 in revenue during its first three months of operation.
The payment, which is slated to continue through June 2031, caught the attention of Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator.
“It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion,” Zeldin said.
Indeed. It’s graft on a scale the Tammany Hall charlatans couldn’t have imagined.
Historical sources say 19th-century politician Boss Tweed and his ring of cronies took in at least $50 million in corrupt money in backroom deals, kickbacks, and skimming before Tweed was convicted of larceny and forgery in 1873 and fled to Cuba, and later Spain. In 2025 dollars, that’s about $1.3 billion — considerably less than the single payoff former President Joe Biden’s EPA awarded Power Forward Communities.
February 26, 2025
The more DOGE uncovers, the more we see that western governments are really vast graft machines
Elizabeth Nickson discusses the ramifications of all the wasted money uncovered by DOGE in the first month of investigations and what it almost certainly confirms about the actual value taxpayers are getting for their money:
So essentially the entire town of Washington, D.C. has been stealing. The anomalies are those who are not stealing. $4.7 trillion, almost impossible to trace, represents two-thirds of the annual U.S. budget. And if it’s happening in the U.S., it is happening everywhere: France, Canada, the U.K., Germany, where budgetary processes are probably even more opaque than those of the U.S.
How does the Department of Defence have a $35 trillion black hole?
I used to think of people who worked for the government with a kind of veiled contempt or, in a more benign mood, compassion. I thought of them as pity jobs for those without initiative, as jobs paying off lefty campaigners, as a warehouse for the barely competent. In my own dealings with them, I found them punitive and extractive, papering me with demands to spend more and more money to hire more and more of their pet contractors, to get approval. In my working life, looking at the results of their involvement in America’s rural areas, I hated them for the hell they visited on people unable to fight back. They forced bad science on good people, and refused to see reason. They ruined forests, water courses, fisheries, and township after township turned to dustbowl status. The misery in rural sitting rooms in every state in the U.S. was palpable, long lasting; the green Blob ruined families for generations.
But I did not think of them as being embroiled in a theft so large as to be unparalleled in world history.
The level of the theft has now to be dawning on everyone not living off the public purse which is, what, 60%, 70% of us? The anger setting in is soul-deep, and very very powerful. People who live straightened lives, the poorly pensioned, those living off the laughable social security stipend, those waiting for health care, those whose children can’t even dream of an education, of college, of a six-figure salary which is now subsistence in the ruined cities. Those facing cancer treatment because of the vaccine, and don’t have excess funds. Their families, despairing, hurting, broke.
This isn’t going to go away. It affects everyone. Not addressed down to its deepest level, you are looking at a tax revolt, a national strike. A revolution. A real one, not a papered paid-for color revolution, which is what they have been doing to us.
Those living on social security should have five times the pension they do.
Can you count how many of those there are? Can you?
And meanwhile this:
Is this true? To this date, unknown; the digging continues. Look at this ghastly creature. She apparently has an account in the Cayman Islands. Look at her all compassionate and condescending. She started a war that killed 1.5 million people so far. And apparently got rich from it. A mass murderer celebrated at Upper East Side dinner parties.
Memes like this rocket around, and every one is now suspect. At this point who cares if it’s true, it’s truthy, it makes sense that she made out like a bandit, that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have millions hidden somewhere. Ocasio can say “I only have $500,000!” all she wants, but we don’t believe her. If the Wall St Journal says it is false, we don’t believe them. Do you actually think they’d have the money sitting in their savings account? No, it would be buried off-shore. The media is not only complicit, it is the principal actor in this scam. It built the fantasy world we live in, where people read The Guardian, the Times and the Globe and Mail and think they’re informed.
No, they are being propagandized. And as a result, no one sane believes anything any legacy newspaper or television or media says anymore. They hid the theft. They did not report on it. No one trusts a thing they say.
Update: Fixed broken link.
February 25, 2025
Likely trajectories of the victims of DOGE
Bruce Ivar Godmundsson identifies the most probably career dislocations of civil servants winkled out of their expected life sinecures by the minions of Elon:
To put things another way, the status deprivation experienced by erstwhile feeders at the Federal trough will eventually lead to a great deal of radicalization. After all, if history is any guide, it is not the victims of sustained oppression who raise the banner of revolt, but those who lost advantages that they had earlier expected to enjoy for the rest of their days. (It was not, after all, agricultural laborers, let alone vagabonds, who enlisted in the machine-smashing armies of General Ludd, but practitioners of “decent trades” who had previously occupied lucrative bottlenecks in supply chains.)
As they LARP as extras in the street fighting scene of Les Misérables, the outcasts will find, standing beside them on the barricades, youngsters who, as recently as the autumn of 2024, had expected to parley their ability to paraphrase (or, at the very least, parrot) the Party Line into an internship with an agency, a poorly paid (but prestigious) place in an NGO, or, for those especially adept at symbolic manipulation, a job with a name-brand consulting firm.
Leaving aside the cinematic metaphors, some of the dispossessed will, no doubt, resort to rioting. More will ride the protest circuit, which will do for them what comic-book conventions do for fancy-dressed fans of manga and anime. Most, however, will do little more than haunt the margins of the middle class, muttering about their masters degrees in public policy as they wait for the next command to appear on the screens above their grills.
Repeated encounters with the fallen may drive the final nail into the coffin of the assumption, once central to the world view of so many Americans, that possession of a sheepskin entitled its holder to a desk job. No longer will parents dining at McDonalds whisper to their children “if you don’t go to college, you’ll end up like that”. Rather, they will point to the technician repairing a self-service kiosk and say “that’s the sort of thing that you want to do”.
February 24, 2025
Rule by bureaucrat, believe it or not, was once considered a better form of government
In the 19th century, the Americans switched from a system where one of the major outcomes of a presidential election was the wholesale replacement of government employees to one where the civil service was “professionalized” to the point that only the very top levels were subject to presidential replacement (Trump 2.0 may mark a significant change in this). Fans of the professional bureaucracy would sometimes gesture toward the venerable Chinese model, which had been run in this way for a very long time until the 20th century. Lorenzo Warby considers the actual performance of these kinds of systems:
Excerpt from the handscroll Viewing the Pass List. Imperial examination candidates gather around the wall where results had been posted. Traditionally attributed to Qiu Ying, but now suspected to be the work of a late-Ming painter with Qiu Ling’s name added.
National Palace Museum via Wikimedia Commons.
Over the course of the C19th, Western states adopted the Chinese notion of appointment by examination for their government bureaucracies. Such appointment-by-merit did have the effect — for about a century and a half — of creating effective and responsive bureaucracies. So much so, that Western democracies gave more and more tasks to such bureaucracies.
This replicates the early stage of the Chinese dynastic cycle — the actual one (see below), rather than the traditional version — where, early in a Dynasty, rule through the bureaucracy is quite effective, even efficient. In modern Western democracies, the legitimacy of democratic action — the demon-in-democracy problem, where the all-trumping legitimacy of the democratic principle tends to overwhelm other ways of doing things — aided the massive expansion in government action, and so in the ambit of government bureaucracy.
The trouble with adopting the Chinese model of appointment-by-merit bureaucracy — including selection-by-examinations — is that folk failed to take a good hard look at the patterns of Chinese government. This despite the fact that the keju, the imperial examination, was introduced under Emperor Wen of Sui (r.581-604) and was not abolished until 1905, so there was quite a lot of history to consider.
The patterns of Chinese government are much less encouraging, because the quite effective, quite efficient, stage of bureaucratic administration does not last. The problem with appointment-by-merit is that it selects for capacity, but not character. Confucianism tries to encourage good character, but it repeatedly turned out to be a weak reed compared to incentive structures. (Almost everything is a weak reed, compared to incentive structures.)
The actual dynastic cycle was:
- Population expands due to peace and prosperity in a unified China. This pushes against resources — mainly arable land — creating mass immiseration, an expanding underclass with no marriage prospects, peasant revolts and falling state revenues.
- The number of elite aspirants expand — a process aggravated by elite polygyny — but elite positions do not, leading to disgruntled would-be elites who provide organising capacity for peasant revolts (including through sects and cults).1
- Bureaucratic pathologies multiply, leading to a more corrupt, less responsive, less functional state apparatus, eroding state capacity and increasing pathocracy (rule by the morally disordered). Late-dynasty imperial bureaucracies could be astonishingly corrupt and dysfunctional.
In contemporary Western societies, mass migration interacting with restrictive land use, and other regulation (e.g. “net zero”), so that:
- housing supply is blocked from fully responding to demand for housing—thereby driving up rents and house prices; while also
- inhibiting infrastructure supply from responding to demand—increasing congestion and other (notably energy) costs
is creating immiseration pressures. Figures about the “macro” health of the US economy, for instance, are misleading as much of the growth is either not reaching people further down the income scale or is failing to compensate for rising rents.
Western commercial societies are sufficiently dynamic that elite over-supply is much less of a problem than in pre-industrial societies. There is, however, very much a problem of toxic parasitism — the entire (Diversity Equity Inclusion) DEI/EDI apparatus to start with. What we might call malign elite employment or bureaucratic parasitism.
1. NR: I’ve read that the Taiping Rebellion in China was led by a man who’d failed the Imperial Examination and raised the banner against the entire system as a form of revenge. By the time the rebellion was quashed, somewhere up to 30 million people were killed in the fighting or as an indirect result of the conflict. (Traditional note of caution about any statistics from pre-20th century China … well, any Chinese statistics at all, really.)
Update: Fixed broken link.
February 21, 2025
QotD: Why does it cost so much to build modern infrastructure?
Now, obviously, there are reasons why building infrastructure is expensive. One is that politicians have taken unto themselves the power to decide what infrastructure should be built how and where. Therefore infrastructure is built by fuckwits, obvious, innit? We’ve also allowed far too many people to dip their ladle in the gravy — that £300 million planning inquiry into a tunnel under the Thames. And did I say fuckwits already — that £100 million bat tunnel.
But one reason all these things are so expensive is because we’re not doing them on terra nullius. If we start with a bare field a ground source heat pump might well not be that bad an idea. Communal heating systems into an entirely new development, maybe.
But putting ground heat pumps into central London? Can’t do that ‘ere mate, someone’s already built central London right where you want to dig up. HS2 goes right through some of the most expensive — and inhabited by the highly vocal — countryside in the nation. Edinburgh, minor though it is, still has that central London problem.
This also explains why Mercury Comms employed the ferrets. The tubes already existed and fibreoptic could be stuffed down them. They didn’t have to dig up central London, see?
Agreed, this isn’t one of the world’s truly great insights but it is something to keep in mind. The reason building the infrastructure for the next level of civilisation costs so much is because we already have a civilisation. The existence of which gets in the way of the building men …
Tim Worstall, “Why Is Infrastructure So Damn F’n Expensive?”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-11-18.
February 17, 2025
A maple-flavoured DOGE? Maxime Bernier proposed this in 2020
It’s both amusing and alarming seeing the kind of things the US government has been pouring money into, as the young auditors of Elon Musk’s DOGE dig into the accounts. Some folks on social media have been asking for a Canadian version of DOGE, but they’re nearly five years behind PPC leader Maxime Bernier:
Did you know that the Canadian government is spending $143,000 to help the African country of Senegal implement a “sectorial gender strategy” in its armed forces?
Or $46,793 to improve healthcare for intersex people in the Chinese province of Shandong?
What about $4.6 million to develop programs promoting a “positive masculinity” in Cuba?
There are hundreds of such crazy programs costing Canadian taxpayers billions of dollars every year to fund the Liberals’ woke ideology in other countries.
Many people on social media just found out that these programs exist last week, after they started looking for them on the website of the Government of Canada.
They were inspired by similar crazy programs that Elon Musk has unearthed with his DOGE team in Washington.
The DOGE – or Department of Government Efficiency – was created by President Trump and has already cut tens of billions of dollars in frivolous spending after only a few weeks.
I’m being asked if I support having the equivalent of a DOGE in Canada.
Not only do I support it, but I didn’t wait for Trump and Musk to do it to propose one. I did years ago!
In 2020, I stated that a PPC government would have a Minister of Government Downsizing to examine every federal program and cut or abolish everything that is inefficient, wasteful or not essential.
And speaking of DOGE, Coyote Blog shares some thoughts about some of the reasons Democrats are critical of the organization’s efforts:
… having thought about this longer, I think this is about more than just money. It is also about class. Just listen to how the cool kids in the media talk about Musk’s group of young weirdly-nicknamed geeks. This is fairly typical:
He was speaking specifically about a Trump executive order that decrees that the Department for Government Efficiency can force federal agencies into firing four people for every new hire. “Who the hell voted for Mr. Musk?” Begala raged. “Who the hell voted for — excuse the phrase — a guy who calls himself Big Balls? A 19-year-old kid going in there and trying to fire cancer researchers and scientists and teachers and agricultural specialists. It’s, it’s appalling.”
This is moderately hilarious from a) a party who still has not told us which unelected people really were making decisions behind the curtain for a senile Joe Biden; and b) an individual (Begala) who wielded immense power and influence across all departments of the Clinton Administration. The department staffs in DC are 99.99% people who are both unelected and unconfirmed by Congress. The issue is not that they are unelected, the issue is that they are “the wrong sort”. I am reminded of the British aristocracy in the 19th century that would tolerate almost any sort of governmental incompetence or malfeasance as long as the people were “the right sort” — meaning of their class.
The mention of Victorian England reminds me of another way that class is likely involved here. In the English aristocracy the oldest son inherited the title and often all the land and income (which was entailed to the title). This left little for any additional sons, so an income had to be found somewhere for them in a profession that did not require them to sully themselves with “trade” (daughters were handled a different way, through the marriage market). Reading for the law was an acceptable profession for a son with brains, and the army or navy were outlets for many. But most families needed a way for their sons without too much brains or ability and not militarily inclined to make a living. A position in the Church was often the solution.
Modern American blue-blood parents are no different — they need a way to secure a living for their kids who won’t or can’t land a job in the modern elite career choices (law, consulting, investment banking, or a sexy startup). Unlike in Victorian times, the military or the Church are no longer preferred elite options. So what to do with your 22-year-old gender studies major? The parents need her to get an income and they need her to do it in a context that they can proudly report to their friends — Paul Begala does not want to tell his friends that his son’s job is maintaining distributor pricing lists (anyone who does not believe the latter criteria should have been at my Princeton or Harvard Business School 25th reunions).
The solution? Get them a job at a non-profit, the modern American version of going to the Church. As Arnold Kling noted once, non-profits tend to have much higher status than do for-profits. And without competition they don’t have to carry the same performance standards as for-profits. And they are incredibly susceptible to trading a position for your kid in exchange for a nice donation.
The employment rosters of non-profits and NGO’s are stuffed with the children of privilege. So much so that there are many non-profits that seem to do nothing EXCEPT employ and pay the travel expenses of 20-something kids from rich and/or influential families. I have been writing about the non-profit scam for years. As I wrote then:
From my direct experience, I would go further. There is a tranche (I don’t know how large) of non-profits that are close to outright scams, providing most of their benefits to their managers and employees rather to anyone outside the organization. These benefits include 1) a salary with few performance expectations; 2) expense-paid parties and travel; 3) myriad virtue-signalling opportunities; 4) opportunities to build personal networks. This isn’t just criticizing theoretical institutions — people I know are in such jobs in these organizations.
The spending that DOGE is going after at USAID and other departments likely threatens the income of a number of under-qualified elite kids. So I will update my meme:
February 13, 2025
The downfall of the “theatre kid occupied government”
Theophilus Chilton says that one of the biggest weaknesses of the Biden administration was their addiction to the idea that appearances mattered far more than reality:
For the previous four years, one of the constant refrains from the Left that we kept hearing over and over was “the adults are back in charge”. Trump is “childish” while Biden was “the adult in the room,” or so the media-driven narrative kept telling us. Trump just hung out on social media and made fun of people during his first term while Democrats did the serious business of guiding the ship of state through the rocky shoals of the modern world when Biden was in office, and all that. The whole point was to mask the serious deficiencies in the previous administration and its underlying ideational premises, deficiencies that existed at both the structural and personnel levels because of the fundamental ideological puerility of the Left.
It’s become common for observers to (only partially jokingly) note that until very recently we had a “theatre kid occupied government”. What’s that mean? Well, everything we saw from the past four years (and really, a lot longer than that) was performative — it was about giving appearances rather than getting anything useful done. All the way back to the terminally midwit show The West Wing, the belief among up-and-coming leftie PMCers was that government could essentially be conducted by stagecraft. All you have to do is write the script, teach the actors their lines, and create whatever you want out of the production. More generally, the theatre kids in government thought that they could rule the world merely by wishcasting things into reality, which explains a lot of the “questionable” spending to and through USAID and various NGO organisations. They have the very juvenile tendency to think that wanting something to be a certain way can make it so, regardless of intervening realities.
Fundamentally, that is the whole character of modern Western and American progressivism. Modern leftists display a whole suite of childlike behavioural patterns that, as it turns out, are not conducive to good government. Really, progressivism is essentially based on wishful thinking and daddy issues. Once you understand this, you understand about 90% of where the Left’s thought process comes from.
One good example of this is the whole transgender push. While there is obviously an element of grooming/recruiting involved with it all, the main point to it is that it’s a means of social conditioning and control. They pretend — and demand that others pretend — that boys can become girls and that girls can become boys. Until recently, they were able to punish normal people who didn’t at least pay lip service to this. Even without this power, there is still a good deal of attempting to emotionally manipulate people about the matter (you don’t want to commit TRANS GENOCIDE do you???), which is itself a means of trying to exercise power, though in a juvenile manner.
Of course, the fact that the whole trans agenda rests of wishful thinking, on the attempt to stage manage reality into accepting something blatantly at odds with it, should go without saying. There has been a concerted effort to build a Baudrillardian hyperreality around this issue, to create a “consensus reality” that muddies the distinction between fact and fiction. Baudrillard himself defined hyperreality as “… the generation by models of a real without origin or reality”. The entire process is essentially semiotic, which explains the obsession of the modern Left (not just now, they tried this in Weimar Germany in the 1920s as well) with transgenderism — it’s a spearhead which, once successfully pierced through the veil of classical reality in this one area, can justify the same exact process being carried out in any other so that any symbolic-yet-unreal consensus can be built, even if by fraud or force.
There are real world consequences to this sort of theatre kid performativism. It leads to them impeding traffic on busy highways to protest whatever their idiotic cause du jour happens to be (physics isn’t real bro!). It’s also why (ostensibly adult) Democratic elected officials think they can impede federal immigration enforcement efforts. For so long, progressives in our TKOG were able to force everyone else to go along with their delusions or face punishment. Even though they’re now not able to do this (at least here in the USA, other places in the West aren’t so lucky), they still think they can obstruct and counteract the implementation of policy simply because they don’t want these things to happen. Like little kids who can’t accept that they lost at a game, these folks believe they can roll back the results of the latest election by throwing tantrums and trying to get in the way. Hopefully, a few arrests will clear up this misconception.
February 11, 2025
“As it turns out, you can just cut things”
John Carter outlines the left’s long march through the institutions and explains why a conservative counter-operation of the same kind would utterly fail. Instead, Donald Trump (of all people) launched a political blitzkrieg that used none of the strategies of the long march — because the establishment knew intimately how those worked, as they’d used them for generations to become the establishment:
Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot
Fedele Fischetti, 18th century.
But a counter-revolutionary long march through the institutions was always a doomed project.
The left understands the method quite well, having perfected it themselves, and its defences against counter-infiltration were well advanced. It was never enough merely to say the right things, and not say the wrong things – the left knows how easily such signals are faked, as these are mere words, and words have no meaning to an egregore which sees in discourse nothing but the currents and tokens of power. Much of the seeming insanity of the Cancelled Years is best understood as the imposition of elaborate, difficult to fake displays of loyalty: offering your child’s genitals to the hungry gender gorgon, opening your veins for the gene therapy injection. Then of course there is DEI, whose explicit intent was to simply deny opportunity to those most likely, on a demographic basis, to oppose the left. There is very little point, as a young white man, in keeping your mouth shut if you will be locked out simply because you are white, no matter what you say.
The psychological demands of stealthy infiltration are spiritually toxic. Anyone attempting this path finds himself embedded in a social context in which all of his friends and colleagues adhere to values which he privately despises, and moreover, he knows that the instant they discover his true beliefs he will be not only fired, but ostracized and isolated. Worse, he’s constantly placed in the position of betraying his own convictions, of going along with and even actively supporting things he knows are wrong, because failing to do so would be immediately suspicious. Since the left is a hive mind, he must “pretend” to give up his agency … and insofar as you are what you do, there is very little difference between pretending to give up your agency, and actually doing giving it up. Living like this is miserable. It requires iron discipline, and there is very little reward. Some of you doubtless have direct experience of this.
The most important reason that a long march was never viable, however, was that there was not enough time.
The West is in crisis. Public debt has broken up through the exosphere, its rise ever more vertical as the deficits fuelling it continue to expand, and we can all see in its meteoric rise that its inevitable descent will hit the land like rods from God. Third world invaders pour into our countries by their millions at the open invitation of seditious governments whose open aim is to reduce native white populations to second-class minorities in their own homelands within the space of a generation. These two crises of the Great Inflation and the Great Replacement could never be solved by the tactics the left used to bring them about. Even if such a long march could have succeeded in the face of the barriers the left so astutely erected, by the time it came to fruition the victors would preside over wreckage.
The left’s tactics were those of a chronic disease, gradually wasting the patient, leaching the strength from his limbs. You cannot cure a patient by becoming an opportunistic infection in your own right.
So what to do? Many, despairing, looked to civil war. A coup d’état, likely followed by blue states separating from the Union. Battle lines would be drawn, brother would be set against brother, cities would be ruined, vast pits would be excavated and filled with the stinking dead. Such a war would never have been limited to continental United States. It would have dissolved the Pax Americana, with brushfire wars springing up across the globe as great powers sought to expand their territories by grabbing resources or strategic trade corridors. Those powers would have gotten involved in the Civil War themselves, backing one side or another, prolonging the conflict in order to ensure the Union remained shattered forever.
On J6, the American government teetered on a precipice. Had Trump applied so much as the gentlest pressure with his baby finger, it would have toppled over. The other side would then have screamed that he was a tyrant who had seized power by force; his own supporters would have rallied to the cause that the election had been stolen; America, and the world, would have been bathed in blood. So Trump pulled back, allowed the heroes of J6 to be imprisoned, and permitted the sclerocracy to impose four years of malevolent mismanagement on the American people.
Many were furious with Trump. He’d lost his nerve; he was a coward.
As it turned out, they were all wrong. It was a strategic withdrawal.
And now, instead of a Long March, we are getting a blitzkrieg.
I’ve been silent for the last month partly for personal reasons that deprived me of the time and energy to write, which I won’t elaborate upon here save to note that it’s nothing anyone has to worry about. But I’ve also been silent because I haven’t been sure what to say. The last weeks have been one of those ‘weeks when decades happen’ periods, and that pace of change doesn’t appear to be letting up. Executive Orders flying off of the big man’s desk, birthright citizenship being struck down, entire government departments getting defunded, the J6 heroes being pardoned, trade wars starting and then stopping before they start, the military heading to the border, DOGE siccing broccoli-headed zoomers armed with large language models to rip through the sprawling financial records of acronym agencies like a cyclone of destruction.
As it turns out, you can just cut things.
These are all great, wonderful things. We are winning, and the pace of winning is dizzying. It’s like we’ve spent the last several years slamming again and again against a seemingly immovable wall, bashing our brains out upon it like an enraged tiger, only for that wall to suddenly turn to sand upon our final desperate push, leaving us sprawled and disoriented on the ground.
That is at least what it has felt like to me. The people on the inside of the Trump administration are not disoriented. Far from it. They are executing a detailed, thorough plan. They’ve identified the enemy nerve centres and are neutralizing them precisely, rapidly, and ruthlessly. Handpicked squads of very competent young men have been turned loose inside the Beltway. It is clear that they are not being micromanaged, but are being left to develop their own action plans on the fly as the tactical situation evolves. This is manoeuvre warfare, with small, nimble, lethal teams dropped into the heart of enemy territory and being given maximum latitude to pursue the campaign’s strategic objectives.
QotD: Scientists, in their natural habitat
Hector Drummond, “Soap-opera science”, Hector Drummond, 2020-03-29.
February 2, 2025
Captain Trumpmerica versus the Post-national Maple Protectionists
Donald Trump has made picking fights with the corrupt oligarchs of Mexico and Canada a key part of his appeal to American voters. Canada used to be a proud nation, but after years of deliberate mismanagement and stubborn opposition to innovation and growth, we’ve become — as Justin Trudeau so smugly put it — the first “post-national state” that has “no core identity [and] no mainstream”, because we’re a plaything for the WEF and other transnational organizations. Elizabeth Nickson calls us a “failed state” and that swapping in globalist WEF’er Mark Carney for globalist WEF’er Justin Trudeau will make no positive difference:
25% tariffs will ruin us. The tariffs mean one million small businesses — all which sell to the U.S. — will contract and many will close their doors. And then Trump, as he promised the unions, will pull “our” auto industry. Then we’re done.
Who is to blame for this?
The following is going to be crude because Canada is so boring (that’s deliberate) that no one cares. There are a thousand ultra-complex rationales on why Canada is failing and all they do is obfuscate. I’m not pulling punches, softening rhetoric — it is bad. It is urgent. This is the death of something that 75 years ago was shining, sunlit, exciting. That country? That country was killed by the Laurentian elite, weak, cosplaying Marxism to stay in power, themselves outwitted by investment bankers who plan to steal everything not nailed down. In so doing new elements were forcibly injected into the population: envy, resentment of the successful, sloth, the refusal to grow up, be strong and independent. We effectively sit on top of the U.S., seething with envy, in wet diapers.
We are a broken country. Everyone who understands the world knows this. The only people who don’t are deluded Canadian socialists, which is to say our entire elite and all our “knowledge class”. Dissent is ignored. Or jailed.
Central banker Mark Carney, WEFer paramount, is being parachuted into the Liberal party in order to sell us off to the investment banks who will harvest us for our resources. Our people? Future serfs in Special Enterprise Zones. We already have the regulation in place. No taxes, no worker rights, no enviro controls, no self-determination, no agency, no freedom. Time frame? Ten years, twenty at the outside. The inevitable end of hard-core socialism.
That is what Carney did to Canada in the ‘08 crisis, a crisis entirely created by larcenous government and investment bankers: he loaded us up with so much debt that the moment the economy turned, the working class — and Canada is now 75% working class — paid for it through interest rates so high they crippled and broke every middle class family with a mortgage. Then, he moved to England and did it to the English. His name there? Mark Carnage. During the ’08 crisis, he in Canada and the UK and Obama in the US transferred trillions in public wealth to the investment banks to keep them going after the worst crisis since ’29. A crisis they caused. That was the people’s money, not theirs.
However, as Peter Menzies points out, our Laurentian Elite are still 100% protecting us from the baleful influence of American culture … well, the commercial bits anyway:
Next Sunday, the federal agency responsible for the flourishing of national culture and identity will be swamped with complaints. The grumbling will emanate from Canadians enraged they can’t get more American culture. Yes, America may be in the process of humiliating Canada as its lamest of lame duck leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, waddles into the sunset. And, for sure, most of us are mortified that U.S. President Donald Trump has chosen to make an example of us as he launches his mission to bring the globe to heel and Make America Great Again.
But the bitching directed in the days to come at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications (CRTC) headquarters in Gatineau will originate from Canadians angry they can’t watch American Super Bowl TV ads along with the game. A perennial contender to be the most watched TV event in Canada, the Super Bowl also has traditionally been the most controversial event on the CRTC’s calendar.
The USA can slap us silly with tariffs. It can send hundreds of thousands of us into unemployment and despair. It can mock our disinterest in maintaining the essentials of nationhood and drive us into unsustainable debt. Trump can brutalize our national esteem and taunt us for our cavalier attitudes towards the defence of our sovereignty. And he can lick his big beautiful lips while pondering our potential as the 51st state.
But what will really light us up Feb. 9 will be being unable to watch Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reinvent their famous restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally or Michelob Ultra’s production starring Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara as a couple of pickleball hustlers. Or Matthew McConaughey channeling legendary Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka for Uber Eats. And the Clydesdales. Everyone loves those Budweiser Clydesdales, particularly the cute little foal making a debut.
It doesn’t matter that the ads cost $7 million U.S. (which will convert into heaven only knows how many bazillion loonies in the months ahead) for a 30-second spot. Or that for more than a decade many of the commercials have been available on YouTube. Canadians don’t want to watch a Super Bowl adorned with Government of Ontario and Maple Leaf Foods ads. They want to watch the game like real Americans and relish the full, unfettered American experience.
At the National Post, a sad recounting of just how badly we’ve been let down by our politicians — and not just recently … this is a decades-long list of conscious self-harm for short-term domestic political advantage:
Bold counter-attacks against the U.S. can’t work, because all the ideas Canada could have put into action to make such a response viable are collecting dust on the cellar shelf. Drop interprovincial trade barriers that amount to a $200-billion penalty on the national economy every year? That only became a serious conversation in the last month. It should have been a serious conversation 10 years ago, if not more.
End supply management? Out of the question — think of the Quebec votes such a move would cost. The Big Milk lobby is a strong one.
How about resource development? Because Canada is ultimately a resource-exporting economy? No; we’ve been cancelling energy projects at the slightest objection and building more legislation to stand in their way. Industries like mining and fishing, already mired in growth-choking regulations, are increasingly refashioned by governments into welfare and “reconciliation” initiatives, repelling private investment that would have brought prosperity to the country as a whole.
Diversify away from the Americans? We’ve only done the opposite: since 2017, Canadian trade has become more focused on the U.S.
Canada should be a prosperous, growth-oriented economy, but instead, its government — and the people who continuously vote for economy-stagnating policy — settle for subsistence and redistribution of a shrinking pie of wealth. Their choices for the past decade have left us without enough fat to get through a cold trade winter.
Prompt retaliatory counter-tariffs are hence unwise. Such a move would put Canadians in the path of two separate blows, one from the front, the other from the back. And while immediate counter-tariffs could affect Americans whose support the president depends on — as was the case in the 1930s, when Canadian counter-tariffs prolonged the American Great Depression (while inflicting domestic pain) — those Americans have much bigger economic fat stores. In a trade war of attrition, expect Canada to lose.
That leaves us, unfortunately, with the less-glamourous immediate option: play this by the book. The United States-Canada-Mexico free trade agreement, which will be violated by any across-the-board tariff Trump applies, needs to be challenged with the mechanisms agreed upon by party states. During the process, Canada must remind Trump that it’s just following the agreement that he made.
February 1, 2025
DOGE’s first week
J.D. Tuccille on the odd position DOGE finds itself in, as many Americans seem conflicted about cutting back the federal government:
The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is off to a quick start, if we consider the advisory board’s claimed savings in federal spending and the voluntary buyout of workers that could reduce the ranks of federal employees with a minimum of drama. But while the public agrees that corruption, inefficiency, and red tape are serious problems for the government, DOGE itself enjoys mixed popularity and majorities believe the government spends too little on big-ticket items, leaving little room for savings. The American people themselves are a big obstacle to paring the federal government to size.
DOGE Off to a Good Start
“DOGE is saving the Federal Government approx. $1 billion/day, mostly from stopping the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, deletion of DEI and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations, all consistent with the President’s Executive Orders,” the DOGE X feed boasted this week. “A good start, though this number needs to increase to > $3 billion/day.”
The Trump administration also sent a letter to the majority of the federal government’s roughly three million workers, offering a “deferred resignation” plan. Those who accept the deal could stop working for the government as of February 6 and still be paid through September of this year. The administration expects up to 10 percent of workers to take the offer. The voluntary nature of the plan blunts inevitable complaints from unions about “purging the federal government of dedicated career civil servants”.
We will have to see what the results will be in the coming months and years. But if that works out, it’s a pretty good launch for an administration and its advisory board that are less than two weeks old. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t sure where they stand on all this.
The Public Frets About Corruption, Inefficiency, and Red Tape …
According to AP-NORC polling, majorities believe that corruption (70 percent), inefficiency (65 percent), and red tape such as regulations and bureaucracy (59 percent) are “major problems within the federal government.” These findings square with the results of other surveys revealing that “nearly 2/3 of Americans fear that our government is run by corrupt officials” (Babbie Centre at Chapman University, Spring 2024), that 56 percent of Americans say government is “almost always wasteful and inefficient” (Pew Research, June 2024), and that “55% of Americans say the government is doing too much” (Gallup, November 2024). That’s exactly what the Trump administration created DOGE to combat, so it should be a good sign for the project.
But Americans are torn over DOGE. Asked by AP-NORC to share their opinions of “an advisory body on government efficiency led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy” (before Ramaswamy left to run for office), only 29 percent support the venture while 39 percent oppose it. That seems to reflect its leadership. Fifty-two percent of those polled have an unfavorable opinion of tech titan Musk, while 36 percent view him favorably.
Why the hate? Musk’s problem may be that he’s a high-profile rich guy with things to say at a time when that type of person isn’t especially popular. Sixty percent of respondents believe it would be a bad thing “if the president relies on billionaires for advice about government policy”. That disapproval crosses over into opinions about DOGE, even if people say they support its goals.
