By 10pm on the night of 9th June 1983 BBC Television center was humming. In Studio Two, amid a beige version of the set from Alien, David Dimbleby and Robin Day were about to start the election results show, though everybody already knew Thatcher was going to walk it.
I was in the studio next door, which had been transformed into a vast Green Room, tables stacked high with food and booze. Us trainees had been brought in to help organise the guests and manage the hospitality.
And that party was only getting started. As the night wore on and the politicians, academics and journalists came and went, but mostly came and stayed, the whole place, and the labyrinth of corridors, scenery docks and stage lifts surrounding it, began to resemble something between a University May Ball and the last days of Rome.
People were being sick in corridors, being discovered “in flagrante” in lifts or sneaking off into unlocked offices. Some, bearing an uncanny resemblance to their Spitting Image puppets, became far too slurry and unsteady on their feet to go before Dimbleby and co at the appointed time.
Back then, juniors like me were often sent to pick up politicians and other public figures, because if they were not physically guided they’d forget to turn up altogether or go to the wrong place. We’d arrive rather sheepishly outside clubs, parties and private homes — sometimes not the private homes that they were supposed to be living in. We’d gently lead them away from whatever drunken dinner they were at and take them to the studio where more free alcohol was always available. And everyone was smoking.
For politicians and journalists alike, it was an especially louche time. And secrets, by and large, were kept along an arc of tolerated misbehaviour that ran from Westminster through St James’ to Notting Hill and White City. Albertines Wine Bar and Julie’s restaurant both had booths you could dissolve into during lunches that slipped toward early evening, and the “cinq a sept” trade in the local hotels was always healthy.
There was a BBC chauffeur driving company run by a man called Niven, and a late night “Niven Car” was the ultimate perk when the White City and Lime Grove bars finally closed. I’m not the only BBC veteran who’ll remember when a certain public figure left an item of intimate female clothing on the back seat of her “Niven” after an over-enthusiastic snog on her way home. It was duly recovered, popped into a plastic bag and discreetly couriered back to its proper owner.
I’m making it sound more fun than it was. There was a lot of awful behaviour that went unremarked and unpunished, especially the leering, groping and grabbing that my female colleagues had to put up with endlessly, some of which would today rightly be called sexual assault. And, of course, this permissive culture was the ideal environment for celebratory predators, the Jimmy Savilles, Stuart Halls and Cyril Smiths (one of David Dimbleby’s guests that very election night). We all heard the gossip, but nobody made a challenge.
But if I could have any part of that world back it would be this: we didn’t expect, need or want our MPs, ministers or their shadows to be plaster saints.
Phil Craig, “I’m done with po faced politicians”, The Critic, 2022-05-18.
September 9, 2022
QotD: The BBC behind-the-scenes in 1983
September 8, 2022
Liz Truss replaces Boris Johnson
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill looks at some of the many, many tasks already piled on new British PM Liz Truss’s desk in the wake of Boris and the pandemic:
So it’s prime minister Truss. No big surprise there. What we need next, though, is something that would be very surprising, almost unfathomably so. We need a PM who can buck the crisis of political will and take clear, firm action to save the country from economic collapse and existential malaise. Is that Truss? I’m sceptical, but we shall see.
At first glance, Truss would seem to be singularly unsuited to the task at hand. That task is nothing less than a revolution of will, a rediscovery of the political mettle that has been glaringly absent in Britain these past few decades. We live under a political class that is cautious, bereft of daring; which is hyper short-termist, more concerned with dodging controversy in the present than laying out a plan for the future. The energy crisis is the bastard offspring of this evacuation of vision from politics.
And in Truss we seem to have a leader who is more technocratic than visionary, more given to following the political consensus than to shaking things up. As the Telegraph put it, Truss has been a “dutiful servant”. Despite being something of a Tory party outsider – considered by many insiders to be “a bit odd” – Truss has always “diligently backed the consensus within the party”. She seems overly media-oriented, too. She’s clearly had her gauche edges smoothed by media training and she devotes a lot of energy to “savvy social-media use”. A politician who prefers consensual calm to bold action, and who is more concerned with virtual likes than real-world impact, is not what crisis-ridden Britain needs.
And yet, Truss is far from alone in lacking political audacity, in seeming to prefer the small bureaucratic task of managing public life rather than overhauling it. In this, she’s fairly typical of today’s managerial elites. Also, Truss’s political clarity seemed to improve during the leadership contest. She even became a little more daring in what she said – for instance, by bristling against Net Zero policies. No, this doesn’t prove she’s the leader we need, but it is a reminder that politicians often find themselves, and their cojones, in the heat of battle. Will the pressures of the crisis similarly bring out Truss’s slightly edgier side? We should hope so.
On that crisis, let us be clear: it is incredibly serious. It is the most serious crisis Britain has faced in decades. The political and media elites seem unwilling to acknowledge just how deep and menacing the crisis is. Even their focus on households’ rising energy bills suggests they do not appreciate the enormity of what is unfolding. Yes, millions are worried about how to keep the lights on this winter, but the impact of the energy crisis on business and industry will be graver still. Numerous businesses look set to go under, precipitating economic collapse and mass unemployment. Choosing between heating and eating will be a luxurious memory in the event of the joblessness and poverty that would follow such a calamity in British capitalism.
On a somewhat lighter note, it turns out that Liz Truss isn’t the same person as @LizTruss on Twitter:
September 7, 2022
“For those brave right-wing Americans… if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15. You need something little more than a gun.”
Kurt Schlichter begs to differ with Joe Biden’s “Triumph of the Shrill” warmongering from last week:
Hmmmm, but do they? Really?
Grandpa Badfinger’s premise is that all you tens of millions of semi-fascists out there with your AR-15s would have no shot stopping the woke military, which would eagerly crush you with their potent force package of F-15s and esoteric pronouns. It is a flawed premise on more grounds than one column can cover (hence my book), but we need to focus and that means we will need to overlook some important questions. These important questions include:
– Why do you imagine your sorry band of socialist creeps who treat the Constitution like Jerry Nadler treats his boxers constitutes “the country”?
– The useless senior officer corps aside, why do you believe the normals who make up the vast majority of America’s combat forces will gleefully butcher their friends and family for the amusement of a bunch of Chardonnay-swilling blue checks?
– Have you ever heard of Afghanistan?
Let’s focus on his key sound bite. Gun vs. Jets … who ya got?
I’m putting my money on the guns. You dumb progressives can go for the jets and the points.
Now, let’s start raising the kind of facts that tend to undermine the soundbite that launched a thousand MSNBCgasms.
First up, what does a gun do? What does a fighter-bomber do?
Well, a gun gives an individual soldier – and that’s what civilian freedom fighters would be – the ability to dominate the space on the ground around them out to a couple hundred meters of open territory (let’s not argue about maximum effective ranges, or the fact that civilians have a lot of weapons that outrange the 5.56mm weapons systems currently used by the military – a weapon system whose bullets Mr. 10% Off The Top thinks fly “five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun“). In other words, a gun controls space on the ground. Coincidentally, the ground happens to be where people live.
A jet fighter dominates air space and keeps other planes away. Few people actually live in the air. Now, a jet fighter bomber like the F-15 can drop bombs on the enemy – which is, according to Crusty, us freedom-loving American citizens. Of course, this kind of tactical employment works to support guys on the ground dominating terrain with guns. Planes don’t hold territory; they help soldiers hold territory. So, it’s an apples and oranges thing at the threshold, which is appropriate since the whole discussion Slow Joe began is pretty much Fruit Loops.
Biden assumes he’s got soldiers to support with his jets. How many? Who knows? Some. But lots of colonels and generals, the kind who add (he/him) or (zip/zap) to their official signature blocks – would salute and carry out order to kill other Americans. Hey, maybe they can win this war and finally get one in the “Win” column after three decades! They’re due!
But the problem for them is quantity. There are tens of millions of American patriots with guns, AR-15s being only one color in the rainbow of freedom-defending firearms. Real diversity is 5.56mm alongside 7.62mm and .30-06 and 12 gauge and .45 and others, all firing together for a brighter tomorrow. So, there better be a lot of airplanes to balance out millions of patriots.
Um, how many fighter-bombers do we have anyway?
Well, let’s give America’s Greatest Matlock Superfan the benefit of the doubt and include all types of fighter-bombers – F-25s, F-16s, F-18s, F-35s and even A-10s. Let’s see – there are about 1750 planes for the Air Force, about 1100 planes for the Navy, and maybe 300 for the Marines, so call it 3150 aircraft. Okay, where are they? You have to have them here in America if you want to kill Americans for refusing to obey, so how many are in the continental United States and available for Hunter’s Dad’s open season on dissidents?
Call it two-thirds. We have lots of planes forward deployed – Europe, Asia, on ships. He’s got about 2000 aircraft to use to kill other Americans – that’s what he was saying, so we’ll take him at his slurred, semi-coherent word. Add maybe another 400 combat drones in the USA.
Now, there’s a thing called the OR Rate – operational readiness. That’s the percentage of planes that are ready to go at a given time. Planes need maintenance. They break, and even routine use requires massive upkeep efforts. And parts can be hard to get, especially when you are spending all your money on woke nonsense. What’s the real OR Rate? I don’t know – it’s probably classified and, as we know, today exposing classified material is bad and we can’t wait for it to go back to being A-OK when Hillary does it again, or when someone leaks something classified to the NYT or WaPo and they publish it. Let’s assume 75% – that loud laughing you just heard is military aviation professionals scoffing at a consistent 75% OR Rate.
This means President Gumby has 1500 planes and 300 drones to suppress those millions of dissenters. Hey, that’s 36 aircraft a state!
QotD: Gender Dysphoria
Beyond that, I believe that my art-based theory of “sexual personae” is far more expansive and truthful about human psychology than is current campus ideology: who we are or want to be exceeds mere gender, because every experimental persona that we devise contains elements of gesture, dress, and attitude rich with historical and cultural associations. (For Halloween in childhood, for example, I defiantly dressed as Robin Hood, a Roman soldier, a matador, Napoleon, and Hamlet.) Because of my own personal odyssey, I am horrified by the escalating prescription of puberty-blockers to children with gender dysphoria like my own: I consider this practice to be a criminal violation of human rights. Have the adults gone mad? Children are now being callously used for fashionable medical experiments with unknown long-term results.
In regard to the vexed issue of toilets and locker rooms, if private unisex facilities can be conveniently provided through simple relabeling, it would be humane to do so, but I fail to see why any school district, restaurant, or business should be legally obligated to go to excess expense (which ultimately penalizes the public) to serve such a minuscule proportion of the population, however loud their voices. And speaking of voices: as a libertarian, I oppose all intrusion by government into the realm of language, which belongs to the people and which evolves organically over time. Thus the term “Ms.” eventually became standard English, but another 1970s feminist hybrid, “womyn”, did not: the populace as a whole made that decision, as it always does with argot or slang filtering up from ethnic or avant-garde subgroups. The same principle applies to preferred transgender pronouns: they are a courtesy that we may choose to defer to, but in a modern democracy, no authority has the right to compel their usage.
Camille Paglia, “Prominent Democratic Feminist Camille Paglia Says Hillary Clinton ‘Exploits Feminism’”, Washington Free Beacon, 2017-05-15.
September 5, 2022
“In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice”
Chris Bray uses the example of a new Disney show featuring the literal daughter of Satan — for the LULs — to illustrate just how unhinged our culture has become:
Give me a minute, and let me show you something without framing or a narrative. Then I’ll talk about it, but first just notice it. The company founded by Walt Disney has a new show about a middle school girl who has an awkward dilemma: She’s the Antichrist (as her mom reveals to her one day, after a weird day at school), and her Cool Dad is Satan, who has lots of funny lines about what a wild guy he is. Funny teen girl dilemmas follow, like this one time her parents show up to a party — which, like, super bummer and everything, but it’s even funnier when your dad is actually, literally Satan.
[…]
But no lines are being crossed, because there are no lines. Satan is a television character; immorality is impossible in a culture without morality, without a moral framework and moral anchors. Lacking principles, no one in power can violate any. They’re completely adrift, completely free, and completely ruined. They can go anywhere, and they often do. You can’t sin when nothing is a sin. Well, except for using the wrong pronouns, but more or less.
Now: There are people who are not adrift, who have moral reference points. I continue to believe they’re the majority, geographically prevalent and often thick on the ground, morally attuned as communities and families in a global and national milieu of amoral disconnectedness.
So we have people who see no lines, traveling freely across discarded boundaries, watched by people who are appalled by line-crossing that the line-crossers don’t perceive at all.
See also this essay from Dr. Robert Yoho, “Guess Who Passes the Psychopath Test?”
Psychopathic lying is successful because normal people do not believe that anyone lies as a routine. Debates with sociopaths are useless. No matter what we say, no matter how much evidence is given, it has no meaning for them. Their sole goal is to fool us into classifying them as normal so they can continue to deceive, control, and use us …
When major positions of power in business, government, industry, and society are filled by sociopaths, a downward spiral begins. The normal people eventually recognize what their leaders are and devise survival strategies.
We’re there, though it’s hard to place “there” on a map. We can see that a significant share of power and status — in politics, in economics, and in culture — belongs to people who have no perception of social rules or moral limits at all. And we see that some lines need to be reimposed, urgently and firmly.
After a few years of, “but these are the experts, right?” it feels like the beginning of the phase in which everybody finally knows the game and the stakes. In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice. And then?
September 4, 2022
Extreme Ultra-MAGA terrorist Trump voters are endangering “our” democracy!!!1!
Perhaps I exaggerate a tiny bit in my headline … but events here in Clown World metastasize so quickly that parodists and satirists are becoming an endangered species because it’s nearly impossible to come up with more incredibly stupid stuff than the political class do for real:
Over the past couple of weeks, it seems that the Regime has really been ramping up its rhetoric against its political and ideological enemies. In a coordinated rollout, talking heads across the media have been stating that “MAGA Trump voters” are “threats to democracy”, “trying to take away our freedoms”, “stochastic terrorists”, and so forth. This all has been timed to culminate with the pResident himself going on national television to explicitly state that the entire half of the country that didn’t vote for him are mortal enemies of the state. This takes on a somewhat more ominous tone when we remember that just a few days previous, this same pResident essentially threatened to use F-15s to bomb patriotic Americans who believe in the Constitution.
While these could be dismissed as the senile ramblings of a doddering old dementia patient, the thing to keep in mind is that Biden himself is merely a sock puppet. What he says reflects the words put into his mouth by the progressive theatre kids who staff his administration, as well as other elements within the Regime. Indeed, all of the huffinpuffery about how “your hillbilly AR-15 can’t take on tanks and fighter jets hurr durr!!” is basically the sort of thing you’d have heard on Reddit for years. But the fact that official channels are now openly talking about using the military against their own people for mere ideological purposes suggests that there is an acceleration going on in the Left’s subversion of this country.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — if there is to be an open civil war in the USA, it will almost assuredly be instigated and started by the Left. However, it is not one that they are likely to win, for a number of reasons that I will elaborate briefly below. They are ones that I suspect the Regime itself knows, which makes the current trajectory they seem to be setting appear all the more desperate. Common sense would dictate that they should try to keep the repression at just a high enough level to intimidate the citizenry into compliance without actually provoking a broad response, even if not a violent one. Yet, the Left is dynamiting what is left of the social contract because once they’ve got started down this path there’s no stopping.
So briefly, let’s talk about why the Regime would not win a war against Red America, despite the hopes and expectations of thousands of redditards across the country. First and foremost there is the unreliability (from the Regime’s perspective) of the current military. Simply put, most military personnel below the O-4 or O-5 levels are not ideologically indoctrinated into woke progressivism and are unlikely to be willing to wage war on their own countrymen. They’re especially not likely to go along with wokester fever dreams of bombing Red cities into oblivion and turning the heartland into ashes just to stick it to those Trumpsters. So there would be deep fractures, mutinies, fragging incidents galore.
Of course, that’s why the Regime is trying to wokify the military to be more ideologically compatible with the Left. In a sense, for the Left the drastic recruiting shortfall that the military is currently experiencing is a feature, not a bug, since it provides them with the justification to make up the difference by recruiting foreigners with no connexion to the American people (and thus no compunctions about shooting at them). Which then introduces a further competency factor in that when you recruit a third world army, you … have a third world army, so you’re sacrificing competency for reliability. Nevertheless, as it currently stands most enlisted men and lower-level officers are not going to be inclined to incinerate their buddy’s parents for believing in the second amendment.
As Severian posted right after the “Triumph of the Shrill” speech by Biden:
I’d like to address the “they’re going in for the kill” argument, eloquently argued by MBlanc46 and others. I agree, there is exactly as much, if not more, evidence for this thesis then there is for my “they’re panicking” thesis. And whatever else they thought Brandon was doing last night, there’s definitely a “throw down the gauntlet” aspect to it.
The reason I favor “panic” over “going in for the kill” is that as hard as it is to believe, the Left always see themselves as the heroic underdog, struggling against a rigged system. Even when they’re throwing you into boxcars, they’re bewailing the fact — and in what passes for their minds it IS a fact — that you forced them to do it.
They cry out in pain as they strike you, as another demented shitbag collectivist said about a different group in an eerily similar context.
What all this — Biden’s big “My Struggle” speech (hereafter to be known, as Mmack put it, as “the Triumph of the Shrill”), the hiring of a zillion new IRS agents, the works — is designed to do is: provoke a reaction. To put it bluntly, there is no “domestic extremism”. Of course there really are some retards out there doing retard shit, but as we all know, the typical “Klan” meeting is an ATF agent trying to entrap a DEA agent who’s trying to entrap an FBI agent who is trying to entrap his own informant. Hello, fellow patriots!
But they keep failing to do roll-the-tanks-level shit. Which is a problem for the Apparat, because the ATF agent can’t get permission from the DEA to provide enough guns to the FBI agent to really kick things off (not least because he’s going to be foiled by the other undercover FBI agent who’s trying to entrap the other DEA agent and so on).
So they just keep upping the ante, hoping that maybe this time, finally, somebody will do a terrorism.
If they’re confident enough to put Brandon in a Darth Vader suit on national TV, in other words, they long ago passed the point where anyone not crippled by the psychological compulsion to see himself as a victim would’ve said “fuck it, drop the hammer”. We wore diapers on our faces for two fucking years, for Christ’s sake, and shot ourselves up with mystery goop because the same evil little goblin who turned AIDS from an easily containable plague of deviants into a legit public health crisis told us to.
September 2, 2022
The winner in 1932 campaigned against high taxes, big government, and more debt. Then he turned all those up to 11
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed notes that we often get the opposite of what we vote for, and perhaps the best example of that was the 1932 presidential campaign between high-taxing, big-spending, government-expanding Republican Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ran against all of Hoover’s excesses … until inauguration day, anyway:
Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.
If you were a socialist (or a modern “liberal” or “progressive”) in 1932, you faced an embarrassment of riches at the ballot box. You could go for Norman Thomas. Or perhaps Verne Reynolds of the Socialist Labor Party. Or William Foster of the Communist Party. Maybe Jacob Coxey of the Farmer-Labor Party or even William Upshaw of the Prohibition Party. You could have voted for Hoover who, after all, had delivered sky-high tax rates, big deficits, lots of debt, higher spending, and trade-choking tariffs in his four-year term. Roosevelt’s own running mate, John Nance Garner of Texas, declared that Republican Hoover was “taking the country down the path to socialism”.
Journalist H.L. Mencken famously noted that “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” If you agreed with Mencken and preferred a non-socialist candidate who promised to get government off your back and out of your pocket in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was your man — that is, until March 1933 when he assumed office and took a sharp turn in the other direction.
The platform on which Roosevelt ran that year denounced the incumbent administration for its reckless growth of government. The Democrats promised no less than a 25 percent reduction in federal spending if elected.
Roosevelt accused Hoover of governing as though, in FDR’s words, “we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible.” On September 29 in Iowa, the Democrat presidential nominee blasted Hooverism in these terms:
I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peace times in all our history. It is an Administration that has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs and the reduced earning power of the people. Bureaus and bureaucrats, commissions and commissioners have been retained at the expense of the taxpayer.
Now, I read in the past few days in the newspapers that the President is at work on a plan to consolidate and simplify the Federal bureaucracy. My friends, four long years ago, in the campaign of 1928, he, as a candidate, proposed to do this same thing. And today, once more a candidate, he is still proposing, and I leave you to draw your own inferences. And on my part, I ask you very simply to assign to me the task of reducing the annual operating expenses of your national government.
Once in the White House, he did no such thing. He doubled federal spending in his first term. New “alphabet agencies” were added to the bureaucracy. Nothing of any consequence in the budget was either cut or made more efficient. He gave us our booze back by ending Prohibition, but then embarked upon a spending spree that any drunk with your wallet would envy. Taxes went up in FDR’s administration, not down as he had promised.
Don’t take my word for it. It’s all a matter of public record even if your teacher or professor never told you any of this. For details, I recommend these books: Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal; Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression; my own Great Myths of the Great Depression; and the two I want to tell you about now, John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching and The Roosevelt Myth.
For every thousand books written, perhaps one may come to enjoy the appellation “classic”. That label is reserved for a volume that through the force of its originality and thoroughness, shifts paradigms and serves as a timeless, indispensable source of insight.
Such a book is The Roosevelt Myth. First published in 1948, Flynn’s definitive analysis of America’s 32nd president is arguably the best and most thoroughly documented chronicle of the person and politics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Flynn’s 1944 book, As We Go Marching, focuses on the fascist-style economic planning during World War II and is very illuminating as well.
US Navy to get its very own Zampolit cadre
CDR Salamander reports on the latest politically correct doings at the US Naval Academy, which he points out always filter down to the active duty fleet, both good and bad … and I don’t think he considers this particular initiative to be a good one:
The quasi-woke religion as promoted by the CNO provided all the supporting fires they needed and the commissariat decided to make hay while the sun shines.
You know the drill.
Do you want Political Officers, USNA’s own Zampolit? You’ll get them.
Want blue and gold Red Guards? You’re going to have them.
You want red in tooth and claw racism, quotas, and different standards based on self-identified racial groups? You’re going to have more of it.
First let’s pull some nice bits from the governing document; COMDTMIDNINST 1500.5, the “Diversity Education Program” from February of this year. You can read it at the link, or below the pull quotes;
BEHOLD!
1. Purpose. To provide guidance and designate responsibilities for implementation of the Diversity Peer Educator (DPE) Program.
…
b. DPEs support moral development at USNA by facilitating small group conversations that educate and inform midshipmen, faculty, and staff and foster a culture of inclusion across the Yard, resulting in cohesive teams ready to exert maximal performance and win the Naval service’s battles.
I’m not sure you could get more Orwellian … but they’re going to try;
4. Responsibilities
a. USNA Chief Diversity Officer. The Chief Diversity Officer is the final approving authority for all matters pertaining to the DPE Program and will ensure the program is in line with Department of the Navy and Superintendent’s guidance in reference (a).
a. DPE Program Manager. The program manager for DPE is an active-duty officer appointed by the Chief Diversity Officer. Faculty/staff from the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, the Naval Academy Athletic Association (NAAA), or other cost-centers on the Yard will aid the program manager.
Yes, the football booster organization will “help” the Zampolits. Huh. You see that, yes? Pull that thread …
c. Brigade Dignity and Respect Officer. Reference (c) delineates the roles and responsibilities of the Brigade Dignity and Respect Officer (BDRO) who is accountable for the training, development, and qualification of the DPEs. However, the DPEs are organized and managed by the Midshipman DPE Lead.
d. Midshipmen DPE Lead. A midshipman selected annually by the DPE Program Manager and confirmed by the USNA Chief Diversity Officer. The Midshipmen DPE Lead is typically a First Class Midshipman. Responsibilities include:
(1) Work with the DPE Program Manager to ensure the mission of the program is met.
(2) Provide feedback and keep the DPE Program Manager informed regarding anything that may impact the DPE program.
(3) Serve as the senior DPE, and as the program representative to the BDRO.
(4) Lead and provide guidance to the DPE Midshipmen.
(5) Appoint and manage DPE leads in each battalion, company, varsity athletic team and club sport team.I’ll let you do the math on how many bodies “each” means. That is a lot of Zampolits. I guess MIDN have a lot of extra time.
Again, I want you to ponder the opportunity cost of this across USNA and how it relates to professional development.
September 1, 2022
“This rise of non-profits is reminiscent of feudal times, when the rich and powerful donated to the Church to ensure that its message wouldn’t threaten their power”
At UnHerd, Joel Kotkin considers the parallels between Oedipus Rex and the wider political/cultural situation we face in much of the western world:
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet.
Fox Business.
As in Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex, we are witnessing a generational drama in which inheritors kill their proverbial father to marry their mother, in this case Mother Earth. The psychology behind this pattern is above my pay grade, but many of the richest people on the planet, and their heirs, now seem anxious to disparage the economic system that created their fortunes. With few exceptions, the new rich, and particularly their children and ex-wives, embrace a racial, gender and environmental agenda that, while undermining merit and economic growth, still leaves them on top of the heap.
The ideology of the mega-rich will shape our society for the next generation, in large part through philanthropy. The non-profit sector, the primary vehicle for inherited wealth to be laundered into political influence, has been growing rapidly; in the US, non-profits’ assets have grown nine-fold since 1980. In 2020, non-profits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting over 5.6% of the US economy. Increasingly, much this money came from the new tech elite: among the most prolific donors were Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott; Bill Gates and his now-discarded wife, Melinda French Gates; Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; and Laureen Powell Jobs, the Left-leaning publisher of the Atlantic and the widow of Apple’s founder.
This rise of non-profits is reminiscent of feudal times, when the rich and powerful donated to the Church to ensure that its message wouldn’t threaten their power. Indeed, our society is becoming more like the Middle Ages all the time, with entrepreneurial success becoming more difficult and property and wealth becoming ever more concentrated. “Inherited wealth”, notes Thomas Piketty, is making a “comeback”. In the US, according to the consulting firm Accenture, the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers will gift their heirs up to $30 trillion by 2030 and $75 trillion by 2060.
Of course, the use of inherited wealth to push Left-wing causes is nothing new. As Heather Mac Donald demonstrated in 1996, big-money foundations in the US have been bankrolling far-Left politics for several generations. But the rise of the tech oligarchy seems likely to accelerate this move to the gentrified Left. Many of these billionaires are still in their 30s and 40s but have accumulated more cash than anyone since the Gilded Age. And unlike their early 20th-century counterparts, today’s robber-barons — with a few notable exceptions, such as Peter Thiel — are decisively aligned with the Left. In 2020, five of the top eight donors to Joe Biden came from people tied to tech firms.
This is partly explained by Trump’s toxicity, which engendered something of an oligarchical jihad to overthrow a man who was both needlessly crass and potentially threatening to their monopolies. Particularly critical in the 2020 election was the weaponising of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, which poured over $300 million into state and local election administration to stoke turnout. Conservatives claim, with some justification, that these efforts were concentrated in highly Democratic areas of swing states, and therefore may have tilted the outcome. But what is beyond question is that Zuckerberg and the others participated in what Time — owned by yet another oligarch, Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com — gleefully described as “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes”.
August 30, 2022
The plasticity of language, slippery definitions, and the ongoing gender wars
In The Line, Allan Stratton considers some of the reasons for misunderstanding, argument, and anger in the suddenly huge gender wars in western culture:
Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.
From my perspective, much of the controversy stems from academic redefinitions of language and concepts over the past 60 years. As these changes affected a small subculture, mainstream society paid them no mind. But language has consequences.
I’m a gay man in his early seventies, who’s paid close attention to the decades of linguistic manipulations that have turned sense into nonsense. Once, words and concepts had clear understandings that helped to create widespread support for LGBT rights. More recently, they have been conflated and inverted, and threaten to negatively affect the rights of women, the safety of gender-nonconforming children, and the lives of gays, lesbians, and transexuals.
A quick primer on the change in key terms may help to clarify our current mess and suggest a way forward:
Today the trans umbrella is understood to be a single movement within the Alphabet alliance, but in 1960s North America, it referred to three specific groups: self-identified transsexuals, transvestites and transgenders. There was some overlap, but none of the three were specifically attached to the fight for gay rights at all.
Transsexuals gained public prominence thanks to American Christine Jorgensen. After serving in the United States Army, Jorgensen had a sex change operation in Denmark before returning to America in 1953. She never identified as homosexual, but, rather, said she had born in the wrong body. Jorgenson was extraordinarily popular. I urge you to watch these two interviews, one from the ’60s and the other from the ’80s. Her wit, charm, self-assurance and intelligence demonstrate the power of persuasion, especially notable at a time far less tolerant than our own.
Transvestites (a term now considered derogatory) dressed and used the pronouns of the opposite sex, but fully acknowledged the material reality of their biology. Some were gay like the legendary Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Norman, who co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Most, however, were straight men like Virginia Prince, who published Transvestia Magazine, founded the Society for the Second Self, and published the classic How to be Woman Though Male. They distanced themselves from the gay community, fearing the association hurt their image. “True transvestites,” Prince assured, “are exclusively heterosexual … The transvestite values his male organs, enjoys using them and does not desire them removed.”
The term transgender, coined by psychiatrist John Oliven in 1965, was designed to distinguish transsexuals, who wanted to surgically change sex, from transvestites, whose inclinations were limited to gendered feelings and presentation. But its definition soon morphed to ungainly proportions. By the ’90s, trans academic Susan Stryker had re-re-re-defined it as (deep breath) “all identities or practices that cross over, cut across, move between, or otherwise queer socially constructed sex/gender boundaries (including, but not limited to) transsexuality, heterosexual transvestism, gay drag, butch lesbianism, and such non-European identities as the Native American berdache (now 2 Spirit) or the Indian Hijra.”
It’s key to remember that, at this time, trans people typically considered themselves the opposite sex spiritually and socially, but not literally: To repeat, trans women like Virginia Price insisted they were straight male heterosexuals, and would have been outraged at the suggestion that they were lesbians. As a result, women’s rights were never infringed. No one insisted that “sexual attraction” and “biologically sexed bodies” be defined out of existence. Nor were “tomboys” and “sissies” expected to seek gender clinics or consider puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery.
Under those circumstances, trans people gradually gained public support for human and civil rights protections. It’s easy to empathize with the distress of feeling trapped in the wrong body, and the horror of wanting to claw one’s way out. And how can a live-and-let-live world justify discrimination against people for simply wanting to imagine and present themselves as they wish? Progress, though imperfect and incomplete, was real.
But, as we have seen practically every day in the last few years, for true Progressives, mere “progress” isn’t enough and there are no waypoints on the road to Utopia…
QotD: The secret language of tattoos
We normal folks have the same problem when confronted with Leftists. Just to stick with a theme, consider tattoos. A quick googling suggests that something like 20% of Americans ages 18 and older have at least one tattoo. This Federalist piece doesn’t cite its source, but the claim that 40% (!!!) of those aged 18-29 are tatted up sure feels right — anecdotes aren’t data, of course, but I taught college for years; I’ve got lots of anecdotes. Kids these days are slathered in garish, gaudy ink.
Now, it’s probably safe to assume that those tats don’t mean anything criminal … but how would you know? Back when only sailors and military types had tattoos — you know, those dim dark days before about 1994 — tats had fairly obvious meanings. Globe and anchor — Semper Fi, buddy. But these days they seem entirely random. Which is the point — if you catch yourself wondering “What kind of idiot would get that permanently etched into his flesh?”, then by definition the message isn’t for you. But think about how much time, effort, and money is expended on tattoos. They mean something, I promise you.
Dealing with Liberals is like that. Every element of every tattoo is recognizable, but the meaning of the whole is utterly opaque. So it goes with Leftist language, Leftist gestures. We understand all the words that they say, and they do all the things normal people do, but not for any reason any normal person can figure out. We don’t live in their world.
Actually it’s worse than that. We think we know what they’re doing. We’ve got a cute label for it: “Virtue-signaling”. But that doesn’t go far enough. What virtue, specifically, are they signalling? Figure that out, and we might be able to find a way to break it.
I suggest that the key to understanding Leftism is: Conspicuous consumption. I think it’s the point of all those weird college-kid tattoos, too. The whole point of the exercise is to show that you have the resources — the money, tight young skin, and above all time — to undergo such a laborious process. Time is the most precious commodity of all. All the money in the world won’t buy you a single second more. Every second you spend worrying about your pronouns is a second you can’t spend doing anything productive … which is, I submit, the entire point of worrying about your pronouns. Only the young, or those stuck in permanent adolescence, can be so profligate with time.
Severian, “Skin in the Game”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-10-28.
August 28, 2022
Why do millions of people try to get into the US from Central and South America?
Elizabeth Nickson on what is driving so many people to leave their homes and trek north to the US (and, to a much lesser extent, Canada):
Mostly they are coming because Black Rock, the UN, the WEF are grabbing their lands, the more fertile the better, driving them from those lands and sticking them into tenement cities where they have to scratch like chickens for a living. Agenda 2030 is ravening under the radar in the US and Canada, where “civil society” in the pay of the government and environmental NGOs funded by oligarchs, is taking as much land and as many resources as possible out of the productive economy and shoving it into the land banks of BlackRock.
In the south, it’s not surreptitious. It is state policy to destroy their lives, to take their ancestral lands, whether it’s 40 acres or a half acre and leave them begging by the side of the road.
This piece was removed from the UN website within a day
Climate Change is a complex financial mechanism which under the guise of “saving the planet”, is meant to save the predator class.
Which is not only morally bankrupt, but is dealing with a level of government and corporate debt that they know they cannot sustain. In the healthiest economy in the world, the US, all profits now are coming from either some mechanism of government subsidy – the $6 Trillion of the Covid catastrophe – or Collateralized Default Obligations. For instance right now Penguin is in court attempting to buy Random House. Why? Because they can borrow money to do that, buy back some of their stock and pay their shareholders. It will mean middle managers will lose their jobs, and marginal books will not be published, but the ravening maw of Jamie Diamond and Larry Fink will be satiated. For the moment. There is no other reason. Growth, real growth has stalled in every single enterprise.
This is how it works at the top of the class pyramid:
Last week on my island we were treated to the spectacle of well-heeled, highly educated, well-spoken older men and women arguing that the impoverished elderly, the young, and families starting out should not have housing because of climate change. Our island is 74 square miles with 10,000 residents. That means we have one resident per five acres.
Our government, the trust, had proposed the use of accessory buildings, brought up to code, for long-term rentals.
The extreme form of land conservation we practice has meant that housing prices have skyrocketed, so only the rich and the well-pensioned can afford to live here. A thousand or so working age people manage to make a living, generally via remote work. We have no staff for the schools, hospitals, businesses, restaurants. They cannot afford to live here.
About 200 people on our islands, mostly in their 70s and 80s, tightly aligned with the hysterical wing of the environmental movement work the process to stop any growth. Every new resident who pulls a permit is visited and threatened by a by-law officer. The woman who instigated this specific weapon, a former enviro bureaucrat from LA, demanded full time by-law officers for years until she won, after which she fought for aggressive enforcement.
With this one act, she set islanders against each other, creating conflict where there was none. This too is deliberate. A community divided is easily controlled.
Ring any bells?
August 27, 2022
On the verge of leaving No. 10 Downing St., Boris is still Tory voters’ top choice
In UnHerd, Dominic Sandbrook discusses the astonishing popularity of disgraced Tory PM Boris Johnson among ordinary Tory voters:
Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
With just over a week to go until the climax of the Conservative leadership contest, the name of the people’s favourite is surely not in doubt. After five ballots of MPs, weeks of campaigning and more than ten public hustings, the will of the members could not be clearer. The punters have weighed up the two candidates, examined their pasts, studied their principles and reflected on their promises. And faced with a choice between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the finger of fate points to … Boris Johnson!
Such is the implication of a recent YouGov survey, which found that fully 49% of Tory members would choose as their leader the darling of the Greek tavernas, if only he were allowed to run – a higher proportion than those backing Sunak and Truss put together. And as The Times reported earlier this week, this was echoed in findings of focus groups among swing voters, who seem exceptionally unenthusiastic about either of Johnson’s potential successors.
Again and again, in fact, the same theme appears: Boris was robbed. “I really liked Boris and I was really, really disappointed in the way he was treated,” said one swing voter in Esher and Walton, speaking for the rest. “They’re picking on minor things. You know, furnishings and wallpaper and making such a big deal about it. And it’s the media. The media are the ones that turn everyone against him.”
Was Boris robbed, though? You didn’t often hear that line in June and July, when he narrowly survived a no-confidence vote, led his party to crushing defeats in the Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton by-elections and was forced to watch the collapse of his government as some 31 ministers from all sides of the party, equating to just over a quarter of his entire administration, resigned in protest. On 7 July, the day he finally threw in the towel, YouGov found that his public favourability had sunk to truly diabolical levels, with just 19% having a positive view, and fully 72% a negative one. That made Johnson even more unpopular than Theresa May just before she quit, and almost as unpopular as Jeremy Corbyn at his nadir. So much, then, for the populist hero of the Red Wall masses.
And yet, as extraordinary as it may sound, the Big Dog’s fightback began that very afternoon. The opening shots came as he stood outside 10 Downing Street, reminding the cameras of his “incredible mandate: the biggest Conservative majority since 1987, the biggest share of the vote since 1979”. Then came Johnson’s insistence that it was “eccentric to change governments when we are delivering so much”, and his dismissal of the Westminster “herd” that had moved against him. And then, in his final Prime Minister’s Questions appearance a fortnight later, came those ominous words “Mission accomplished, for now”, as well as that classic Johnsonian sign-off: “Hasta la vista, baby.” The only surprise is that he didn’t use another Terminator payoff: “I’ll be back.”
Ever since, the idea that Boris was robbed, cheated, stabbed in the back has been gathering force. The Tory tabloids insist that he was the victim of a “putsch“, while his adoring Culture Secretary, the ridiculous Nadine Dorries, maintains that he was removed by a “ruthless coup” led largely by Sunak. And among Tory activists, the idea that he was toppled by a sinister media campaign has almost visibly gathered strength — enthusiastically fed, it has to be said, by Liz Truss. When, at one Tory hustings earlier this month, the former Sun political editor Tom Newton Dunn asked if Johnson had been the author of his own downfall, an activist shouted that it was “the media”. “Sounds like you’re being blamed, Tom,” said Truss with a smirk, “and who am I to disagree with this excellent audience?”
August 26, 2022
It’s now apparently illegal to tell a Californian elected official that they’re “not God”
Chris Bray discusses the recently signed California law intended to prevent proles from “bullying” elected officials from now on:
The Romper Roomification of the American political class continues apace.
I’ve written several times about SB 1100, a tedious bill written by tedious people to stop the “bullying” of tedious elected officials at the tedious public meetings of tedious local legislative bodies. Hold on a moment while I see if I can work the word tedious into that sentence one more ti— nope, we’re good.
This week, California’s tedious governor signed the tedious thing, so everybody has to be nice from now on and not hurt anybody’s tedious widdle feewings. The tedious California legislature spews out so many tedious bills that Newsom doesn’t usually offer signing statements on the things, group-signing them in box lots and paying about as much attention to them as anybody else does. So.
For a look at what the state has supposedly just prohibited, do yourself the very mild favor of reading this piece of tedious pearl-clutching from some television news idiots in San Francisco:
Here’s the example of “bullying”, using the tedious example of the tedious Los Gatos politician Marico “Tedious” Sayoc as the tedious designated martyr:
Last year, anti-vaccine and anti-LGBTQ groups targeted Los Gatos Mayor Marico Sayoc during town council meetings.
One Los Gatos resident spoke at the podium during an October meeting to say, “Madam Sayoc, you are not God! How dare you force your ideologies on our children! We the people of Los Gatos do not consent to the forced mutilation of our bodies, mind, and sovereignty.”
They targeted her! For example, they spoke during the public comment section of a public meeting and told an elected official — loudly and angrily, but still — that they disagreed with her. The public spoke at … public comment.
Taking the story at face value, telling a member of a suburban city council that she isn’t God is bullying, and state law now prohibits the bullying of the members of city councils, so you can no longer tell the members of California city councils that they aren’t God, because that’s being mean. If I’m reading the theological implications correctly, I believe this means that the members of California city councils have now been legislatively elevated to the status of actual gods, and will therefore no longer know death or suffering, and so we’ll have to sacrifice livestock to propitiate them or they’ll destroy our crops. But we may have to wait for the courts to weigh in on all of that.
In practical terms, the bill means literally nothing at all. After amendments that removed some even dumber stuff, the version passed by the legislature and signed by Newsom just says — I am not making this up — that city councils may remove individuals who are disruptive, which the law defines as people who engage in disruption. Free tautology lessons in the senate chamber, stop by anytime.
The rise of “Davos Man”
Conrad Black on the early days of the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos gatherings:
… if any place could be identified as the birthplace of the Great Reset, it must be the small, drab, German-Swiss Alpine town of Davos, a center of contemporary anticapitalism, or at least radically altered and almost deracinated capitalism, and site of an ever-expanding international conference. (It grew exponentially and has spawned regional versions.)
I attended there for many years by invitation in order to ascertain what my analogues in the media business around the world were doing. The hotels are spartan and the town is very inaccessible. When I first attended nearly forty years ago, the Davos founder, the earnest and amiable Klaus Schwab, had ingeniously roped in a number of contemporary heads of government and captains of industry and leaders in some other fields and had sold huge numbers of admissions to well-to-do courtiers and groupies from all over the world, attracted by the merits of “networking”.
Davos, and its regional outgrowths across the world, gradually came to express a collective opinion of the virtues of universal supranationalism (the Davos variety of globalism): social democracy; environmental alarmism; the desirability of having a nonpolitical international bureaucracy; a public sector-reflected image of the Davos hierarchy itself (and in fact, in many cases, preferably the very same individuals); and gently enforcing a soft Orwellian conformity on everybody. It must be said that many of the sessions were interesting, and it was a unique experience being amid so many people capable in their fields, and this certainly includes almost all of those who were revenue-producing, “networking” spectators and not really participants.
Davos is for democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world. It was the unfolding default page of the European view: capitalism was to be overborne by economic redistribution; all concepts of public policy were to be divorced from any sense of nationality, history, spirituality, or spontaneity and redirected to defined goals of imposed uniformity under the escutcheon of ecological survival and the reduction of abrasive distinctions between groups of people—such obsolescent concepts as nationality or sectarianism. (My hotel concierge stared at me as if I had two heads when I inquired where the nearest Roman Catholic Church was and was even more astonished when I trod two miles through the snow there and back to receive its moral succour; the parishioners appeared a sturdy group.)
The Covid-19 pandemic caused Davos Man to break out of his Alpine closet and reveal the secret but suspected plan: the whole world is to become a giant Davos — humorless, style-less, unspontaneous, unrelievedly materialistic, as long as the accumulation and application of capital is directed by the little Alpine gnomes of Davos and their underlings and disciples. This is a slight overstatement, and Klaus Schwab would earnestly dispute that the purpose of Davos is so comprehensive, anesthetizing, and uniform. His dissent would be sincere, but unjustified: the Great Reset, a Davos expression, is massively ambitious and is largely based on the seizure and hijacking of recognizable capitalism, in fact and in theory.
There has indeed in the last thirty years been a war on capitalism conducted from the commanding heights of the academy and very broadly assisted by the Western media that has been gathering strength as part of the great comeback of the Left following their bone-crushing defeat in the Cold War. As international communism collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated, it was difficult to imagine that the Left could mount any sort of comeback anytime soon. We underestimated both the Left’s imperishability and its gift for improvisation, a talent that their many decades of predictable and robotic repetitiveness entirely concealed.
