Quotulatiousness

November 23, 2022

“What we’re witnessing is, in short, the least expensive generational kneecapping of a geopolitical rival in world history”

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Stephen Green on the still ongoing Russo-Ukraine war:

Here’s a hard truth our friends in Kyiv need to remember: Lying isn’t helpful. There are limits to our tolerance.

Here’s another: You’re going to have to make some compromises to end this war because your total victory isn’t in America’s interest here; punishing aggression is. When we decide that Russia has suffered enough, you might find yourselves on your own. Come to the table and negotiate accordingly.

Here is a hard truth for conservative Americans — there are fewer of them than you’d assume from reading Twitter or internet comments sections — opposed to us aiding Ukraine for domestic reasons.

There is no doubt in my mind that much of Ukraine remains what it was: A financial playground for America’s rich elites, and that they have done nothing but increase their ill-gotten gains thanks to our part in keeping Ukraine in the fight. But that’s just one of the many prices we pay for letting our civic structures become so rotten.

The hard truth is, enriching a few corruptocrats is still cheap compared to a continent-wide war in Europe — which is exactly what we risked had we let the Russians march right through.

Here’s a hard truth for my Russian friends and their supporters: The point where Putin & Co. had hoped to aggrandize their country or themselves has long passed. It’s time to ask for a ceasefire and come to the negotiating table.

They know this already, of course, except for the most deluded of true believers. The trick is constructing Sun Tzu’s golden bridge for them to retreat across.

The hard truth I must always keep in mind is that Western leadership, particularly our own, is not up to Sun Tzu’s task.

There is another hard truth that Moscow must come to grips with: Putin threw the dice on an expansionary war but shrank his country’s standing instead.

Russia spent more than a decade modernizing its military. It is becoming increasingly de-modernized with every day of fighting in Ukraine. Destroyed T-80 and T-90 tanks — the most modern in Moscow’s inventory — are being replaced by T-62s that were obsolete 50 years ago. Soldiers in their 20s, casualties of war, are being replaced by ill-trained “mobiks” in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s.

It will take far longer than a decade to replace what Putin has wasted.

The way this war has squandered Russian resources, finances, and demographics has serious geopolitical implications. For a few tens of billions of dollars — admittedly, some of them squandered — our Number Two geopolitical rival has had the heart cut out of its conventional military forces, all without spilling the blood of a single American soldier.

November 13, 2022

Corruption in US politics? Where’s the fainting couch?

Filed under: Books, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nickson looks at several recent books covering political corruption in US politics:

Whitney Webb’s One Nation under Blackmail published late last month, explains in exhaustive detail how the American government was taken over by well-dressed thieves. Webb writes from the left, but she is dispassionate. In 1,000 pages, she explains the history of the turning of democracy, starting post WW2 with the heinous Dulles brothers, moving through Reagan with country club thugs calling themselves The Enterprise, to Jeffrey Epstein’s seduction of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Promising riches beyond their imaginings, the seduction led the couple, by increments, to sell out the country to China and Wall Street.

Webb explains how Epstein set up the Clinton and Gates Foundations promising a new iteration in “charity”, one that made profits, and pushed forward the founders as Saviours. Clinton in her years as Sec State, flew around the world eating brownies and demanding tithes for herself, in return for every beneficence she gave courtesy of the American taxpayer. The ’08 crisis was brought to us by the same crooks, and the same methods, chipping away at regulation. The head Fannie and Freddie Mae bureaucrat, James A Johnson walked away with $100 million leaving the world in crisis. Tens of millions lost everything.

Add this to [Profiles in Corruption] Peter Schweizer’s extraordinary detailing of how Pelosi etc. made their hundreds of millions using taxpayer money, pinpointed deregulation and insider trading.

Schweizer describes how the mega-criminal dealing of the Bidens with China and the Ukraine has walked us into a potential nuclear conflict with both Russia and China. The Lords of Easy Money shows how Wall Street and all the pension funds, all the index funds, have been rolling over corporate debt and taking profits, then borrowing more, selling, borrowing more, selling, and repeat. Which means that every American enterprise that is traded and somehow functional, is laden with corporate debt it cannot possibly pay the interest on, as interest rates rise. Jay Powell made his $50 million that way.

Webb shows how Epstein coached Gates through invading and then purchasing public health both at home and through the UN. Add in the Covid mess, and another bunch of corporate and government thieves walked away with $3 Trillion, in the US alone.

Do you really think they’d allow the endless prosecutions they deserve? Do you really think they want to give back the money they stole?

October 17, 2022

QotD: Julius Nyerere

Filed under: Africa, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I worked for three years in the 1980s in the East African country of Tanzania, I was outraged by the quite unnecessary state of impoverishment and pauperism to which the policies of the long-time president, Julius K. Nyerere, had reduced the population. These policies – collectivisation of agriculture, destruction of commercial farming and the elimination of incentives for peasants to produce anything, one-party political control over every detail of daily life – were so obviously counterproductive of Nyerere’s repeatedly stated aim to develop his country economically and lift it from its poverty that I long concluded that he must be some kind of fool or intellectual incompetent. But it was I who was the fool.

One day, the not very difficult thought occurred to me that Nyerere’s stated aim was not the real aim, that the aim of his policies was not the economic development of the country or anything like it, but rather the maintenance of himself and his cronies in power. Once I made this simple assumption, I could see what should have been obvious to me from the first: that far from being a miserable failure, Nyerere was a brilliant and outstanding success. Not only had he maintained himself in power for more than twenty years with very little challenge, apart from an early attempt at a coup by the army, but he had successfully managed to present himself to the world as a man of outstanding principle: indeed, there are even now moves afoot by the Catholic Church, to which he was more attached even than he was to Kim Il Sung, to canonise him, notwithstanding his imprisonment of political opponents and his forced removal of the peasantry from where it was living into collectivised villages. One of his miracles was to have extracted huge sums of aid money from the willing dupes of Scandinavia and elsewhere, which disappeared in Tanzania as water through sand but was so essential to him in the maintenance of his power.

If the aim of politicians is the attainment of power, Nyerere was one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century, and very far from the fool or incompetent that I had thought him.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Brexit Doesn’t Mean Brexit”, Law & Liberty, 2019-04-15.

September 21, 2022

QotD: Why postwar western economic and humanitarian “interventions” almost always failed

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Asia, Economics, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it is a general truism that the majority of persons who run for office in North America and various European countries do so because they sincerely want to help and improve their communities/countries. However, in all of Africa and most of Asia, persons who seek public office do so for one purpose, and one purpose only: to steal everything that they can get away with. So when some ignorant, naïve, American shows up with buckets full of money, oblivious of the culture and the longstanding, entrenched, corruption, and with an announced intention to make the local community more like an American community, they are welcomed with open arms while suppressing their snickering. This also explains something where Americans exhibit willful blindness: other cultures don’t play fair. Honesty is seen as the trait of fools. Fools are to be taken advantage of. Especially in trade and diplomacy. Just look at China.

Prior to the Cold War, America’s interference in other countries’ internal affairs was practically nonexistent outside of the Caribbean where America’s preoccupation was with the stability in the region. What went on in Egypt, Thailand, Argentina, or Greece was none of our business, nor did we frankly care. However, having just survived the cataclysm of WWII, and the realization that Communism was a danger bent on world domination, and that each country that became Communist made that possibility much more likely changed that laissez faire attitude 180 degrees. Whereas NATO was formed for the purpose of deterring a military attack on Western Europe by the Soviet Union (the generals mentally fighting the last war as is always the case, not realizing that the war now was ideological and propagandistic rather than military), diplomats began to question how to best combat Communist insurgencies in the Third World. The arrived (wrong) conclusion was that the reason a country became Communist was because the dirt-poor people were so desperate that they became Marxists in order to improve their lives, so if the West helped poor countries economically Communists could not gain a foothold. As such, they ignored the fact that most Communist movements are organized and headed not by poor people, but by a cadre of power-hungry middle-class intellectuals.

As has been mentioned, the first approach was with foreign aid. The second was with military intervention, in Korea, Vietnam, Santo Domingo, Grenada, and Lebanon. Although such interventions were mostly successful, they carried a heavy price as American blood was spilled in foreign countries. America’s supposed allies hardly helped at all, including the citizens of the countries (Korea and Vietnam) that themselves were in danger of being conquered by Communist forces.

Armando Simón, “Schlimmbesserung“, New English Review, 2022-06-16.

September 14, 2022

“Americans, particularly the kind of Very Serious people who make up our intelligentsia, are desperate for a good war”

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freddie deBoer thinks he’s sussed out the reason so many Americans are so very, very pro-Ukraine in the ongoing fighting between the Russian invaders and the Ukrainian defenders (beyond the normal desire to “root for the underdog”):

Approximate front-line positions just before the Ukrainian counter-attack east of Kharkiv in early September 2022.

It was not until I was an adult that I realized that the absurd fervor for Desert Storm was in fact about Vietnam. Fifteen years earlier, American helicopters had fled in humiliation from Saigon, and nothing had happened to take the sour taste out of the mouth of Americans since. There was plenty of power projection in that decade and a half, but no great good wars for the United States to win in grand and glorious fashion, unless you worked really hard to talk yourself into Grenada. America had been badly stung by losing a war to a vastly poorer and less technologically-advanced force. Americans had been nursing their wounds all those years. So when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the “international community” rose to expel him, the country was ready. We were ready for another righteous combat of the Goodies vs. the Baddies. We were ready for the good guys to be the winners again.

This dynamic, I’m certain, is the source of American bloodlust over Ukraine.

We have now spent twenty years without good, noble wars against the Baddies ourselves. Afghanistan was a war effort undertaken in rage and terror, and was accordingly never intelligently conceptualized at the most basic level. The war aim of finding and capturing bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda gave way to a war on the Taliban that ensured an endless occupation. The Potemkin government we installed was never popular with the people of the country, entailed comical levels of corruption, and showed no ability to train a loyal and effective Afghan army. After 20 years our country tired of spending hundreds of billions on that failure, we left, the government collapsed almost without resistance, and the Taliban are in power again. In Iraq, the basic arguments for the war (WMDs and a Hussein-al Qaeda connection) were swiftly revealed to be bullshit. Saddam’s army fell quickly and he was dispatched after a show trial, but a persistent insurgency inflicted thousands of American casualties. The chaos enabled the rise of ISIS and its various horrors. The new Iraqi government we’ve installed is impossibly corrupt and scores a 31/100 on Freedom House’s ratings of a country’s dedication to political rights and civil liberties. That’s what the United States has gotten for $8 trillion spent on warmaking since 9/11.

America loves a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. So I once heard. Americans, particularly the kind of Very Serious people who make up our intelligentsia, are desperate for a good war. A just war. A war where we win. They’re sick of wars that feel morally complicated, sick of wars that they have to feel queasy about, sick of wars that aren’t just Goodies and Baddies. They are very, very hungry for good war. I think Ukraine is the Desert Storm a lot of people have been waiting for: a war with (they insist) perfectly simplistic moral stakes, an impossibly noble (they assume) set of Goodies, a marauding and senseless (they demand) set of Baddies. All they’re waiting on is victory. And it’s for this reason, this view of war as one big cope, that the pro-Ukraine position is the single most rigidly enforced consensus in our country since 9/11. There is no other issue on which the majority has more vociferously demanded total consensus or more viciously attacked any who dissent or even ask questions. Because America needs a win. People need to believe in a Goodies and Baddies world again.

There are, of course, all manner of hard questions that we could ask, even if we were supportive of Ukraine in this war. That this is a conflict that has constantly inspired left-leaning people to literally say “well, yes, there’s Nazis, but …” might be seen as a matter of some concern. Perhaps, we might just say, isn’t that a little disturbing? But not in this discursive environment. Or we might consider that a total loss for Russia could be one of the most dangerous outcomes for the world even if you support Ukraine. What do you think happens, with a wounded and isolated Russia? Let’s say people get what they want and Putin is deposed. What do you think happens next? We finally get that shining city on a hill in Moscow that we were promised with the collapse of the Soviet Union? That we’ll get the world leader we expected Bagdhad to be in 2003, that a foreign country with foreign people and foreign concerns will suddenly become a docile member of the liberal-capitalist order? Maybe the best post-Putin outcome would be for a similar corrupt autocrat to take his place; at least then there might be stability. A far more likely and more frightening outcome is that leadership is splintered, you have in effect a set of rival warlords squabbling over the spoils, and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal is exposed in a terrifying way. Seems like something to worry about.

But, no. To a degree that genuinely shocks me, hard questions have been forbidden. Complications have been denied. Comparisons to previous conflicts have been forsaken. And this from Democrat and Republican, liberal and leftist, neocon and Never Trumper. It’s constant, everpresent, and relentless, the denial of any complication in the case of Ukraine and Russia. The glee and the gloating and the urge to ridicule anyone who takes even a single step outside of the consensus is remarkable, unlike anything I’ve ever really encountered before. And I find that I can’t even get people to have a conversation about that, a meta-conversation about why the debate on Ukraine is not a debate, about why there are many people who will consider any political position except one that troubles the moral question of Russia’s invasion, about why so many people who learned to speak with care and equivocation during Iraq now insist that there is no complication at hand with this issue at all. I can’t even get a conversation about the conversation going. People get too mad.

August 27, 2022

The hallmark of modern government is the institutionalization of corruption

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple identifies one of the unifying trends of governments throughout the western world:

One of the most remarkable developments of recent years has been the legalization — dare I say, the institutionalization? — of corruption. This is not a matter of money passing under the table, or of bribery, though this no doubt goes on as it always has. It is far, far worse than that. Where corruption is illegal, there is at least some hope of controlling or limiting it, though of course there is no final victory over it; not, at least, until human nature changes.

The corruption of which I speak has a financial aspect, but only indirectly. It is principally moral and intellectual in nature. It is the means by which an apparatchik class and its nomenklatura of mediocrities achieve prominence and even control in society. I confess that I do not see a ready means of reversing the trend.

I happened to read the other day an article in the Times Higher Educational Supplement titled “Can army of new managers help HE [Higher Education] tackle big social challenges?” The article is subtitled “Spate of new senior roles created as universities seek answers on addressing sustainability, diversity and social responsibility.” One’s heart sinks: The old Pravda must have made for better reading than this.

As the article makes clear, though perhaps without intending to, the key to success in this brave new world of commissars, whose job is to draw a fat salary while enforcing a fatuous ideology, is mastery of a certain kind of verbiage couched in generalities that it would be too generous to call abstractions. This language nevertheless manages to convey menace. It is difficult, of course, to dissent from what is so imprecisely asserted, but one knows instinctively that any expressed reservations will be treated as a manifestation of something much worse than mere disease, something in fact akin to membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

It is obvious that the desiderata of the new class are not faith, hope, and charity, but power, salary, and pension; and of these, the greatest is the last. It is not unprecedented, of course, that the desire for personal advancement should be hidden behind a smoke screen of supposed public benefit, but rarely has it been so brazen. The human mind, however, is a complex instrument, and sometimes smoke screens remain hidden even from those who raise them. People who have been fed a mental diet of psychology, sociology, and so forth are peculiarly inapt for self-examination, and hence are especially liable to self-deception. It must be admitted, therefore, that it is perfectly possible that the apparatchik-commissar-nomenklatura class genuinely believes itself to be doing, if not God’s work exactly, at least that of progress, in the sense employed in self-congratulatory fashion by those who call themselves progressives. For it, however, there is certainly one sense in which the direction of progress has a tangible meaning: up the career ladder.

August 24, 2022

QotD: Cromwell dismisses the “Rump Parliament”

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice.

Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess?

Ye have no more religion than my horse. Gold is your God. Which of you have not bartered your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices?

Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance.

Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do.

I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place.

Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!

Oliver Cromwell, speaking to the so-called “Rump” Parliament, 1653-04-20.

July 26, 2022

What’s worse than having a nepotistic elite running the country? Having an incompetent nepotistic elite running the country

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kurt Schlichter isn’t a fan of the kakistocratic “elite” running most of the western world at the moment:

The things we took for granted decades ago are uncertain, and there’s always an excuse — inevitably one that blames us. Like the new take on air conditioners, which is that they are an extravagance we should learn to live without. What the hell? Why?

And don’t get me started on the bizarre insistence of the resetters that we all need to give up beef and start eating bugs. I have a better idea. How about we eat ribeyes and burgers like Americans instead of crickets and locust like Third World famine victims?

A proper ruling class would see the problems and move to solve them, because the proper relationship between the ruling class and the rest of us is that the ruling class provides prosperity and security and the rest of us let them skim some cream off the top. If they were doing a decent job, their riches and luxuries would not bother us much; but when they have failed yet still expect full pay and benefits anyway, that grates. It is unsustainable.

So why doesn’t the ruling class try to get America moving again instead of telling us that we should settle for less and less? For one thing, because our ruling class is not competent. Joe Biden is, in a way, the perfect president for the resetters — stupid and getting seniler, corrupt, yet absolutely sure of his own genius despite literally no basis for that self-regard. Look, the solutions are there. Want to fix crime? Do what Giuliani did in New York City in the nineties. Want energy independence? Do what Trump did in 2016. Want the economy roaring? Do what Reagan and Trump did. These tactics are not secrets, yet they seem to be too hard for our elite to pull off. Our reset revolt will be to embrace someone who can.

Of course, the incompetence issue assumes that our elite wants to succeed in doing what elites should do. Does it really? Does it really want us prosperous, secure and free? Oh, the elite wants to succeed for itself, and it sure has. The elite is richer than ever. And it intends to stay that way even after you are reset to “Peasant” mode. The elite won’t be taking public transportation among the hobos like you. They will be safe behind armed guards while you are disarmed and victimized — defend yourself at your peril! And they will keep eating steak tartar while you slurp up beetle paste. Yum yum, proles!

The ruling caste has no intention of you living like a civilized citizen. No, you are their sacrifice, to Gaia, the angry weather goddess or whatever other pagan idol that empty void inside them worships. Your pain is the point. Remember, bullies love the raw exercise of power. Making you miserable is a manifestation of their urge to dominate and crush. That’s the genesis of those seemingly insane moves around the world like Sri Lanka giving up fertilizer or agricultural powerhouse Holland evicting farmers. But these moves — including the destruction of our own energy industry — only seem insane if you refuse to accept their ultimate goal. They want to hurt you. Your pain is a feature, not a bug — which will be your next meal if they get their way.

July 13, 2022

Creating an American Homo Sovieticus

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray has had to visit a large urban hospital frequently in the last little while and he’s noticed just how readily some people have adapted to the pandemic world situation:

A large urban hospital (not the one Chris is talking about here).
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Observers of the Soviet Union noted the presence of Homo Sovieticus, the species adapted to the culture: “a double-thinking, suspicious and fearful conformist with no morality”. It seems fairly clear that the Blue Zones are birthing a version of this creature, well accustomed to a life centered on compliance rituals and the production of the Required Documents™.

But Soviet subjects usually found a layered response to the compliance culture, with backdoor deals and systems of baksheesh. Factories and offices evolved a set of people who learned the skills of a fixer, greasing supply chains and easing problems with a little something for your family. I just happen to have a couple of extra cartons of cigarettes, friend, and about that delayed shipment of ball bearings …

So one of the things that’s interesting about Large Urban Hospital, where the rules are the rules and I’m sorry, sir, that’s our policy, is that the rules aren’t entirely the rules, and the luck of the personnel draw sets your course. I already know the helpful front desk check-in staff — Hi, welcome back! — and I already know which one scowls at the computer, and asks if you’re sure you cleared your visit in advance, and says she’s going to need to make a few phone calls to check on your paperwork, and I need to see those test results again (she says, pulling on her scowling at documents glasses). Checking in at the lobby desk can take thirty seconds, or it can take ten minutes; it can be miserable and hostile, or it can be relatively pleasant and human. But in both cases, the person behind the computer, and the people who put them there and provide them with the systems that govern their work, believe that the work is standardized, and everyone at the check-in desk is enforcing the rules.

We have literally insane systems of ritual behavior, but within those systems we have people who are still people, and people who have very much embraced the compliance behaviors. There are dehumanizing institutions, and holy shit are there people who like it.

June 29, 2022

COVID Exposed the Truth About the CDC

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 28 Jun 2022

The agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from politics.
——————-
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was once widely viewed as the gold standard in public health, considered an apolitical, science-driven bulwark against all pathogen threats, foreign and domestic.

Today, trust in the agency has plummeted because COVID-19 exposed the truth: The CDC is thoroughly corruptible, and federal regulators will never be impartial experts. They respond to political incentives just like everyone else, and a fact-driven, purely technocratic state is an impossible dream.

The Trump administration pressured the CDC to narrow the scope of testing so case counts would drop, blocked officials from doing interviews, and edited its flagship scientific reports. The CDC provided a scientifically dubious public health rationale for rejecting migrants at the southern border. President Joe Biden continued that policy, and under his purview, CDC guidance on school closures was surreptitiously written by leaders of the country’s second-largest teachers union.

Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, co-authored a 2021 op-ed with three other former agency heads expressing hope that Biden’s incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky would “restore the public’s confidence in the CDC’s scientific objectivity,” with its reputation “a shadow of what it once was.” Yet, Frieden endorsed large-scale protests against racial injustice two months after writing in The Washington Post that “the faucet of everyday activities needs to be turned on slowly. We cannot open the floodgates.” Meanwhile, public health officials were keeping people from attending the funerals of their loved ones.

And could it be pure coincidence that the CDC chose the Friday before President Biden’s State of the Union address to drop its indoor mask recommendation for the majority of Americans, even though the supporting data were months old?

In other words, it doesn’t matter who occupies the White House — political incentives mean that, no matter how dedicated or competent the career scientists who work at the CDC are, the agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from the “hurry and strife of politics,” as Woodrow Wilson wrote. After decades of mission creep, the CDC’s role should be strictly narrowed, limited to surveillance and coordination, leaving the heavy lifting to local officials and private and academic researchers who are more reactive to direct feedback from their communities.

Written and produced by Justin Monticello. Edited by Isaac Reese. Graphics by Reese, Tomasz Kaye, and Nodehaus. Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Music: “Robotic Butterflies” by Evgeny Bardyuzha; “We Fall” by Stanley Gurvich; “Free Radicals” by Stanley Gurvich.

Photos: BSIP/Newscom; BSIP/Newscom; Sarah Silbiger/UPI/Newscom; Shawn Thew – Pool via CNP/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Alex Edelman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; SMG/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Simon Shin/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Adam Schultz/White House/Newscom; Brazil Photo Press / SplashNews/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Polaris/Newscom; Jonathan Alpeyrie/Polaris/Newscom; Aimee Melo/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Julian Stratenschulte/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/Newscom

June 21, 2022

“Schlimmbesserung is a lovely German word which means making something worse by trying to improve it”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the New English Review, Armando Simón considers some of the oddities of American worldview that seem so often to make worse the very things they try to “fix”:

Americans’ ignorance of other countries, their cultures, their history and their geography is legendary and world renowned and the subject of countless anecdotes and jokes by foreigners. This ignorance is inexplicable, as it is not found in America’s northern or the southern neighbors, so it cannot be due to geographical isolation. It is also a fact that foreigners know more about America than Americans know of their countries. Or even their own.

It is also a paradox. One would expect logically that a country that is principally composed of immigrants and the descendants of immigrants would have an encyclopedic knowledge of other countries, as is the case with Britain, which had a world-wide empire. Not so.

And this may explain America’s unintentional policy of schlimbesserung, the worsening of something that it is trying to improve, or as Greene described it so aptly of an American character in one of his novels, “armored in his ignorance and good intentions”.

As an aside, let me also say that this naïve optimism — to put it charitably — has enabled foreign governments to easily steal diplomatic and military secrets with little trouble, according to Gordievsky’s KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. John Walker, an American traitor who spied for the Russians for 17 years once said in a public interview that Walmart guards a tube of toothpaste better than the Navy guards its secrets. He should know.

Many individual American philanthropists and government bureaucrats go energetically out in the world upon hearing of some terrible condition in some part of the world through the television, convinced that they, yes they, can personally correct the situation when in reality they have no idea of what the hell they’re doing, who they are dealing with, or what is really going on in that part of the world, nor of the cultural, historical, and geographical circumstances. Nor can they even speak the local language! They are simply confident that they will solve the problem. And so they will feel good about themselves (for example, there is no question in my mind that some dirt-poor African doctors, upon learning that some idiot Americans, obsessed with AIDS, were going to send millions upon millions of dollars in their countries “to combat AIDS”, and having very few actual cases of infected patients, simply falsified the statistics. Or worse.). It is as if they were hopscotching across a cultural minefield with an idiotic grin.

The cultural values that one takes so much for granted that one is not conscious of may not be present elsewhere. For example, Americans do not understand that many countries e.g., Greece, Ireland, tend to explain their present problems by blaming other countries (Turkey, Germany, England) over what happened centuries ago instead of actually solving the problems. People in other countries are backward looking in that their sights are rigidly focused on their past, whereas Americans’ eyes are always on the future (and which might explain why Americans are addicted to science-fiction) while being generally ignorant about their past.

Also, it is a general truism that the majority of persons who run for office in North America and various European countries do so because they sincerely want to help and improve their communities/countries. However, in all of Africa and most of Asia, persons who seek public office do so for one purpose, and one purpose only: to steal everything that they can get away with. So when some ignorant, naïve, American shows up with buckets full of money, oblivious of the culture and the longstanding, entrenched, corruption, and with an announced intention to make the local community more like an American community, they are welcomed with open arms while suppressing their snickering. This also explains something where Americans exhibit willful blindness: other cultures don’t play fair. Honesty is seen as the trait of fools. Fools are to be taken advantage of. Especially in trade and diplomacy. Just look at China.

June 5, 2022

Odessa Madre, the female Al Capone of Washington DC

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his latest excerpt from the full Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan reviews a new book from James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, including a fascinating character I’d never heard of until now, a woman who ranked with Al Capone as an underworld boss during Prohibition:

Odessa Madre
Queen of Washington’s Underworld

Odessa Madre grew up in a section of Washington DC called Cowtown, because farm animals would occasionally wander its streets. Born in 1907 in abject poverty, she nonetheless lived and thrived in a deeply segregated city as a dark-skinned African-American woman. “There was only three Blacks at Dunbar (High School) back then — I mean Black like me,” she later recalled. “I had good diction, I knew the gestures, but they still made fun of me.” Dess, as many called her, was also a lesbian, and not too shy about it. “I just couldn’t keep no watchamacallit — a man. I guess I was just born to give orders not take them. What kind of man wants a woman like that?”

She went on to become one of the wealthiest African Americans in an overwhelmingly black city — hauling in over $100,000 a year at her peak — by becoming “the female Al Capone”. She ran brothels, pimped women, owned speakeasies, as well as owning a legit and legendary institution on 14th Street, Club Madre. Jamie Kirchick conjures up a scene from the 1940s:

    The crowd roared its approval whenever Madre, covered in mink furs and diamonds and trailed by a multiracial retinue of women for sale, entered the premises and sauntered over to the central table, denoted as hers by an ever-present vase holding a dozen long-stemmed roses.

Among the performers at the club: Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Madre kept all her illicit businesses alive by the old-fashioned method of bribing the fathomlessly corrupt DC police — “You know I practically ran that damn police department,” she later quipped — and became a renowned mediator of mob disputes across the country.

She also reflects a pattern that occurs throughout Kirchick’s new book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. She is within a core group of lesbians and gay men somehow living their best lives in the mid-20th Century, simultaneously at the center and the periphery of power. They were capable, whip-smart and hard-working, resilient beyond measure, yet never free from the threat of being taken down by the criminal law, exposure, blackmail, violence, public shaming and utter ostracism. Madre was convicted in 1949 on various drug offenses, spent over 13 years in prison on one charge or other, and died in 1990, without a penny to her name. Her corpse stayed in the morgue for a week until someone claimed it.

The same terrible story could be told of countless others. They were powerful until they were powerless. They lived on probation their entire lives.

One of several wonderful things about Kirchick’s book is that it doesn’t condescend to these people, but seeks to understand them on their own terms. It shows the tenacity, nerve, and brilliance of a woman like Madre — as well as her immiseration. It brings to crackling life the many gay men and lesbians who were under persecution so brutal and terrifying it is hard for anyone today to appreciate — and yet they lived, worked, loved and often succeeded. Some details (from the magazine, Washington Confidential) leap out:

    Today one can only marvel at the courage demonstrated by the “1700 Negro men, all dressed as women, who held a party on a Potomac River cruise incongruously named the Robert E Lee until it was rudely interrupted ben one hundred police officers.

It’s a rare book about gay people that isn’t burdened by the constrictive dogma of “queer theory” and “intersectionality”, free of the nonsense that the gay rights movement began in 1969. The book treats gay people as complex human beings, not socially constructed victims; and it is unafraid to note how gay men were for long by far the principal targets of American persecution.

April 24, 2022

Let us bid an unfond farewell to all the “cool city” initiatives

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on a few of the ways that governments’ and pan-national organizations’ love for urban intensification looks to be finally fading away:

A decade ago cool cities were all the rage and tax money was pouring into cultural events and buildings to “attract” and densify people because “climate change”. Richard Florida, drawing upon a dubious book about cultural creatives had started his ferocious PR drive towards the mega-city as the apex of modernist civilization, a mixed-race cauldron of creativity and more, an economic engine that would power the world and leave the countryside to the bees and trees. Smart Growth was insinuated into every regulatory structure in order to, just like Captain Picard, make it so.

There were a few oppositional voices. There was me, a very minor chord along with Randal O’Toole, Wendell Cox, Joel Kotkin who detailed the risks. But mostly it was all rah rah rah. If we build it they will come. Masses of public money poured in to attract “them”. Country infrastructure was starved, and if broken, left to rust.

And did they come. To all the glamorous cities came the genius thieves of the modern age, oligarchs creating bolt holes for their money and mistresses, looters from Communist regimes, ditto for Africans stealing aid money. Every crime syndicate facing looser immigration rules started branch-plants, laundering money, and seducing the marginal into lives of misery.

Increased levels of crime was one of our objections, but hell on wheels, the devastation in LA, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Vancouver sure wasn’t foreseen.

Housing affordability would collapse said Wendell Cox, and was he right. In Vancouver, which has been taken over by Chinese mega-crime-syndicates, is the third most expensive city in the world. People whose families founded the city, can’t afford a studio apartment.

Politicians did nothing but take the laundered cash earned by ruining the lives of their citizens, and used it to build casinos so laundering drug money from all over North America would be easier. We Canadians are so helpful. And nice. To everyone, Even child traffickers. Yeah, come here, the scenery is grand and we can take care of all the people you broke with our “free” health care.

I objected to the potential noise being noise sensitive. Also viruses. That was a big one. Courtesy of my ex-husband’s trips to Asia, I picked up a couple viruses which my immune system couldn’t suppress, since I had no built immunity. The indiscriminate mixing, flooding of people overwhelming resources would create health catastrophes I thought, and lo and behold, it looks like WHO is planning for world-wide pandemics as far as the eye can see.

So, like all the other bad ideas of the age, cool cities failed leaving massive massive debt. Everyone with a scrap of money and initiative is plotting to leave the mega cities for the distinctly uncool country these days. Out here we are bracing ourselves for your bad ideas, but we are also ready. We know what you are like. You are as dumb as rocks, and you would destroy the country just like you ruined the cities. You have zero humility. You are a nightmare coming to join the other nightmare visited on our home places, the mass confiscation of our land. The land that feeds you idiots.

April 15, 2022

Vladimir Putin as real-life Bond villain

Filed under: Books, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams makes a case for Vladimir Putin being all of Ian Fleming’s fictional 007 adversaries brought to life in a single person:

I am certain Vladimir Putin has a giant coloured globe, or maybe a huge map set in a wall, which at the tap of a button, silently slides in and out of view. In his mind, he will no doubt have experimented with his artist’s palette, of coating many of his geographical neighbours with his favourite shade of bright, bloody crimson.

Talking of sliding panels operated by secret switches, I would be surprised if the Russian leader has not watched all the James Bond movies, if only out of professional interest. He would see, if so, that he is every one of Ian Fleming’s villainous creations — Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Le Chiffre, Sir Hugo Drax, Auric Goldfinger, Emilio Largo, Dr Julius No and Francisco Scaramanga — all rolled into one person.

Presiding over the robber state that is the Russian Federation, Putin is at once militarily and politically all-powerful, but also the master international criminal. At a 2017 US Senate Judiciary Hearing, the Putin arch-critic and American financier, Bill Browder, estimated the Russian had “accumulated $200 billion of ill-gotten gains”, describing him as “one of the richest men in the world, if not the richest”.

It was the Second World War espionage boss, Commander Ian Fleming, who brought not only his world famous spy to life, but also the lairs of James Bond’s opponents. Fleming had inspected many of the Nazi underground factories and subterranean rocket bases immediately after the defeat of the Fatherland in 1945. In print, they appeared as his villains’ secret headquarters.

Fleming’s novels were in turn translated into celluloid by the talent of set designer Ken Adam. He worked on seven Bond movies, beginning with Dr No in 1962, via You Only Live Twice, and Diamonds Are Forever, and devised the circular War Room in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove of 1964. If you don’t remember the scene, you’ll recall its most poignant line: “Please, gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room.”

Adam was also working with inside knowledge, for he was born in Berlin, to Jewish parents, who fled to Britain in 1934. On the outbreak of war, Adam enlisted into a British army engineering unit composed of Axis nationals, designing bomb shelters. He later joined the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot, where he was known as “Heiney the Tank Buster”. After VE-Day, Adam toured the concrete structures and German bases he had attacked. “I flew fighters in the war, made some great movies and was Knighted by the Queen [in 2003]. Not bad for a Jewish lad from Berlin,” he told me in an interview.


A screen capture from Alexei Navalny’s YouTube video on Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea palace.

In a bizarre case of real life imitating fiction, it was Alexei Navalny, now rotting in Russia’s harshest penal colony for his exposé, who discovered Putin’s covert lair. Sprawling on the Black Sea coast, it might have been designed by Ken Adam. The Russian leader’s $1.9 billion palace comes with a below-ground grand salon, hollowed-out of the cliff-face, lit by a gigantic panoramic window, that, at the touch of another button, can be retracted to let in the sea breezes. Access to the beach or the rest of the complex is by tunnels carved into the rock.

Its existence is naturally denied by the Kremlin, but the site, at Cape Idokopas, near the village of Praskoveevka, is equipped with two helipads, and reputedly 39 times the size of Monaco. I make the basic assumption that scores of designer-stubbled security muscle, dressed in black, toting sub-machine-guns, with a shoot-on-sight brief, will be prowling about.

April 1, 2022

Underbusing Hunter Biden?

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Long after the story was initially reported, and the New York Post was hammered for publicizing it at the time, the rest of the legacy media is showing interest in Hunter Biden’s laptop contents:

… If someone disappears for a while, it could mean nothing more than he is having a blood transfusion at one of Google’s secret rejuvenation centers. On the other hand, disparaging information about an oligarch in regime media could simply mean that one mob family is unhappy with another mob family and this is how they are communicating it. Using the media promotes the interests of the gangster class and delivers the message.

That is probably how to interpret the sudden interest by regime media in the famous Hunter Biden laptop from two years ago. For those not interested, this was the laptop that President Biden’s drug-addled son abandoned at a Delaware computer shop, which contained a trove of embarrassing information about the family. In addition to thousands of naked selfies and pics of Hunter smoking crack and meth with prostitutes, it had details of the Biden family criminal dealings.

Regime media dutifully covered this up by declaring it Russian propaganda and going as far as to imply it was a Trump campaign dirty trick. The New York Post, which was the first to report the laptop story, came under withering assault from the Silicon Valley crime families until they dropped the story. Facebook started banning people from their site for mentioning the story. Like the people air brushed from official photos in the Soviet Union, this story was erased from public view.

This is nothing new. The power of regime media is in what they can make the public ignore and this was a typical example. They do this by framing the issue as good guys versus bad guys, which is catnip for the American moralizer. Then they declare the thing to be ignored as the black hat and let the moralizers do the rest. Anyone mentioning the laptop on-line or even in private conversation was declared a crazy QAnon conspiracy theorist by others in their circle.

For no reason at all, the laptop story is back. First the intel community told the New York Times to admit they lied two years ago about it being fake. They did not mention that it was the intel community that lied, of course. Then the Washington Post was told to write about the Biden family’s criminal dealings that were on the laptop. The Post is the official organ of the intelligence community. You will recall that the Post was instrumental in the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.

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