Tom’s Big Picture

Steve Sailer compares the benign Cuban ethnic lobby to the totalitarian Israel Lobby.

England declares toddlers racist who dislike nasty foreign food.

I remember I had a friend in college for a while who was an Indian Muslim (as an aside, I remember the Muslim international students pharisaically getting their Aggie rings cast in some kind of freak aluminum alloy that looked like silver, because they can’t wear gold or silver; by this late hour the saying “Highway 6 runs both ways” was considered insensitive to those who bucked Aggie tradition).

He kept trying to tell me how great Indian food was.  Now, I have roots in Louisiana, so I have a pretty high standard for food.  So we go to this buffet place near campus at A&M that reeked of curry and other things hinting at their lack of proportion in seasoning their food.

And then I figured out why this particular Indian food was so bad.  Apparently, since India is such a messed up amalgam of various cults and sects, any restaurant serving a limited clientele (like international students at Texas A&M) must cater to every cult’s preferences.  Of course, the cult following Mohammed can’t eat pork or shellfish.

But the cult that really ruins the party are the Jainists, who believe that onion, garlic and salt are all foods that lead to sexual desire, which they find morally unacceptable.  Really, they believe that junk.  Last time I checked, you didn’t get onions or garlic on your food if you were potentially looking to indulge sexual desire, but no self-respecting Oriental cult is going to let logic get in the way.

So the food was basically really hot and over-seasoned, but with no salt, onion or garlic.  And way too much dang curry.  What’s up with the curry?  It’s like cinnamon but stomach-turning in large doses.  It’s like some cultures get stuck in these monotonic cul-de-sacs with their cuisine- way too much of one type of flavor.  Ever smelled soy sauce from outside someone’s house?

So to avoid hurting my friend’s feelings, I took to an old trick I discovered when I was seven.  If I cut my food into small enough pieces, I can swallow it like a pill without tasting it much.  Works like a charm on Brussel sprouts AND Indian “cuisine”.

This latest post by Chris Ortiz is very brave. Click here to read his post about Anti-Southern Bigotry.

I’m not exactly a theonomist, but I do keep up with their work and am working my way through Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (it’s a great study of the Law, even if one doesn’t always agree with the degree of strictness Rushdoony wishes us to observe). The heart of Rushdoony’s work IMO is his concept of Dominion, of limiting the scope of both church and state and expanding the realm of the multigenerational extended family according to Biblical principles.

We hear a lot these days about the outrages of CEO pay, of golden parachutes and the like.  This is natural enough in a system where a few at the top manage the assets of the many shareholders.  Democracy is a poor form of government and it leads to abuses, both in the private and public sectors.

The real mystery is why so many companies are public to begin with.  Why don’t the Fords still own all of Ford?  The reason is no one wants responsibility.  The descendants of great men who start great enterprises want the benefits of ownership but not its responsibilities.  And unethical men are more than willing to take a huge cut of the profits, sell rip-off common stock to the public and pocket the rest.  Common stock is a pyramid scheme at present, and its true value will be apparent when baby-boomer retirement forces investors to attempt to live on dividends instead of ephemeral capital gains.

These great men failed to nurture in their families the desire for ethical leadership and dominion over assets.  They produced trust fund babies.  Much of this can be chalked up to hyperindividualism, a defect of the post-Enlightenment West.  There is a construction company in Japan that has been in the same family for 1000 years.  The world’s largest cymbal company, Zildjian, has been in the same family for almost 400 years.

The inefficiency of the corporate form of ownership, on so many bases, should be an encouragement to those willing to take the task of wealth-building and child-rearing seriously.  Capital always flows to the hands best fit to manage it.  But we have to stop seeing wealth as a means to avoid responsibility (or worse, reject wealth as evil based on pietist nonsense) but an opportunity for stewardship.

The meat market for Albinos.

It’s important to distinguish between one’s politics and likely reality. What I mean is that one’s politics is based on some high but reasonable percentile of the possible, a lofty goal. One’s planning, however, should be for the likely reality. The following is not what I want to happen, but it is what has happened and will likely continue to happen:

This morning I had occasion to venture into a mall, a place I rarely go. Given the inhospitable summers where I live, and being out and about in the earlier morning hours with my family, we decided to go and walk around in the retail temple of American life. Indoor malls tend to attract unsavory characters with nothing better to do than loiter, but in the two hours before lunch, before most of the urban wildlife wakes from their post-nocturnal slumber, it can be a tolerable experience.

I think what shocked me today were prices. Father’s Day cards and a couple of trinkets from Hallmark: $23. A few paperbacks and a children’s book from the bookstore: $33. With a median income per wage-earner person of about $30,000, my morning outing represented four hours of labor, or 10% of someone’s workweek. In 1998 dollars (just ten years ago, and approximately where my price indexes are stuck mentally), that’s just $23,500.

What Pat Buchanan predicted fourteen years ago in his seminal work The Great Betrayal has come to pass. The American elite has abandoned any pretense of being a real nation and thus, they have killed the middle class.

Debt will sustain the trend a bit longer, but American living standards are going to drop.

Part of me sees this as inevitable. Absent a restraining force (a sense of loyalty to one’s nation or family, which Westerners seem to pathologically lack), the animal spirits of capitalism will do their job. Capitalism has succeeded in providing abundant material goods at cheap prices to masses of people. But it is also having a leveling effect.

If a Chinaman can assemble cars as well as an American at a cheaper wage (and this is especially true if their competitors are the affirmative-action-crippled unionized-spoiled-brats of GM and Ford), then if the gap is sufficient to pay for the switching costs and transportation costs of bringing goods to market, then the work will go to China. Combine this with an alienated and decadent elite in this country who would rather lose money outsourcing (as many of them do) than give their own people decent-paying jobs and the process is inevitable.

And once it starts, even paternally-minded business owners will be forced to offshore or else be driven out of business by consumers increasingly driven by price. Losing jobs makes Americans poor which makes them more price sensitive which makes companies offshore to cut costs and then Americans lose more jobs. The decapitalization of this country is occurring at a breathtaking rate. Since Bush took office, U.S. manufacturing jobs have declined 25%.

This is an important statistic because for most of world history, wealth has been distributed very unequally. Economists believe this is because of a phenomenon called information asymmetry. The most valuable roles in society are physically idle roles that specialize in information processing. Unfortunately, the genetic lottery is very unequal in its distribution of information processing skills (i.e. intelligence, with a strong non-linear component due to the winner-take-all economic law of “low price gets the sale”), thus resulting in wildly unequal distributions of wealth. This is not fundamentally unjust, just reality.

The advent of manufacturing, on the other hand, for the first time made it possible for an average person to have enough productivity to justify a middle-class wage. In a national setting with high material demand and a limited labor supply, wages can rise to just under the actual economic value of the work.

But it does not have to be this way. Open up your labor markets to an influx of people, and those wage rates will be bid down. Profits will be beat down and the temporary anomaly of a middle class will be destroyed.

This is happening in American at a pace unprecedented even by the decadent standards of the contemporary West. Europe, with all its socialist rot, is careful about preserving jobs for its people. They suffer from immigration problems as we do and also from moral degeneracy, but there is something admirable in many European countries’ genuine concern for the plight of their average people. We may disagree with some of their methods (high taxes, ugly socialism), but the elites of Europe are somewhat better than the elites of America in this regard.

This may go back to our Second Revolution of 1865. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said “Live not by lies”. Post-Lincoln, this country has tried to define itself not as a particular nation for a particular people, but as a country based on an ideology, Equality. This ideology is so evidently false that like the Soviet system before it, the elites merely mouth the politically-correct words while undermining its basis in their behavior and actions. Intel isn’t offshoring to Gambia, but to China, based on the very real inequality between the two nations of people living in those places.

The tragedy of this false ideology is that the true American nation, the Anglo-American core, is denied the use of language that could express a common interest and the means of self-defense. The elite cravenly attacks the middle classes when they attempt to organize themselves (witness the decrying of calls for immigration law enforcement as “racist”), all the while engaging in highly unequal, discriminatory practices among themselves.

Their kids will never be bussed into the ghetto and don’t even apply to the public universities where affirmative action is most rudely practiced. They rarely have to interact with the sheer incompetence and annoyance of everyday life in America these days, as more and more competent Americans are replaced with hostile foreigners in every sphere of life. When was the last time the CEO of Citibank or Microsoft stepped into a post office and came face-to-face with modern American reality?

Politically, it is our duty to continue to fight for our nation, whatever the odds. But, on a personal level, we must plan for what seems likely. I’ll paint that picture more specifically in a subsequent post.

“[the so-called sentiment of equality] is not, in fact, a sentiment of equality and is not related to any abstraction, as a few naive ‘intellectuals’ still believe; but it is related to the direct interests of individuals who are bent on escaping certain inequalities not in their favor, and setting up new inequalities that will be in their favor, this latter being their chief concern.”

-Vilfredo Pareto, Italian economist

Conflict over scarce resources among groups of people is the reality for fallen man, and all talk of equality, of somehow avoiding God’s judgment by creating the Tower of Babel here on Earth, are nothing more than shams designed to separate our children from their inheritance.

I feel really torn over the Mormon sect out in San Angelo. On the one hand, I recoil at the thought of the government taking kids away from their parents. Their practice of polygamy and teen marriage is deplorable, but it’s not acute child abuse so much as it is a warped alternative culture. What bothers me is how this is portrayed in the media, as they harp on the fact the kids wear modest clothes, don’t watch television, don’t eat junk food, are homeschooled and are polite. I think they’re pulling a guilt-by-association to smear homeschoolers in general.

And I do have a natural loathing of Child Protective Services, and all the little tyrant social workers who in their heart of hearts hate parents with a traditional view of childrearing and family, eager for the least reason to use the guns of the state to remove children from homes they deem “abusive” because they have the wrong political views. And now we learn that the whole raid was triggered by a fake abuse claim, yet they still keep the kids.

But at the same time state governments have been dealing with various sects of polygamous Mormons for over a hundred years, and they simply violate Western norms of society to such a high degree that their tolerance is impossible. But, really, they aren’t doing anything that wasn’t done in the Old Testament by Abraham or others that we admire. They’re wrong of course to do so, but still.

We’re talking about people of essentially Scandinavian descent (Mormons pull from the same high-latitude stock as the Quakers historically) with all the discipline, fertility and extended kinship solidarity of Muslims. If allowed to grow, they might be unstoppable.

Sometimes the public school system can be quite the source of comic relief, as evidenced by this recent historically-challenged protester of China’s hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics:

On a related note, here’s the Chinese Olympic Stadium now under construction:

Did they really mean to make their stadium look like the ejected remains of some bad Lo Mein takeout? And here is the 1936 Berlin stadium:

Of course, the Chinese might have preferred a more monumental stadium, but the fundamental reactionary nature of political correctness forbids it. The Nazis had good taste in music, art and architecture, largely because it was a malignant hypernationalism that celebrated the natural German talents in those areas. So in reaction we must all suffer through ugly architecture, dissonant “modern” music and degenerate art. Thank goodness the Germans aren’t renown for their cuisine, else our senses be deprived of at least one remaining pleasure.

I once heard a conservative describe liberalism as a religion like Christianity, except that instead of Jesus they substitute Hitler, or rather what they view as anything that is anti-Hitler.

Even the immigration issue can be seen in this light. So while Germany went down in flames, Hitler has his revenge at last. The following is from the introduction to Peter Brimelow’s excellent book Alien Nation:

There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia. Eventually, it enacted the epochal Immigration Act (technically, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments) of 1965.

And this, quite accidentally, triggered a renewed mass immigration, so huge and so systematically different from anything that had gone before as to transform—and ultimately, perhaps, even to destroy—the one unquestioned victor of World War II: the American nation, as it had evolved by the middle of the 20th century.

Today, U.S. government policy is literally dissolving the people and electing a new one. You can be for this or you can be against it. But the fact is undeniable.

There are so many double standards in this story it boggles the mind. Apparently Hasidic Jews, among America’s most wealthy ethnic groups, were able to get “minority” status for themselves for purposes of federal contracting. Sailer breaks an important story that sweeps from a roid-raged punk in Miami Beach to an Israeli-owned gun shop in LA to Michael Jackson (yes, that Michael Jackson):

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/amazing-adventures-of-men-with-gold.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/hey-feds-theres-this-thing-called.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-did-diveroli-family-qualify-for.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/general-theory-of-afghan-ammo-swindle.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/is-aey-hasidic-enough-to-be-eligible.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/03/alleged-transcript-of-diveroli.html

isteve.blogspot.com/2008/04/packouz-were-not-hasidic.html

These are the same people who run the rip-off lowball “camera shops” you see in magazines that operate out of Brooklyn.  Unfortunately, I’ve had this experience personally!  Sailer’s working theory is, oddly enough, loosely based on the 2nd amendment:

Why the Hasidim?

First, there is the “in-group morality.” Some Muslim in Afghanistan loses an eye because his bullet explodes in his gun? Eh … The taxpayers of America have to shell out more to make up the loss? Eh …

Second, there is the simple psychological ability to not be distressed about other people’s anger, whether justifiable or not. Most people become uncomfortable when people around them become angry and they try to mollify the angry person. (The Japanese are among the world leaders at feeling psychic pain when people around them aren’t content.) In contrast, the kind of people who flourish in these kind of bait and switch businesses don’t mind other people getting angry at them. They just get angry right back, angrier even. It’s fun.

My cocktail party theory of the origins of this stems from Robert Heinlein’s famous phrase, “An armed society is a polite society.” In most of medieval Europe, you didn’t want to get into screaming arguments with acquaintances because they might pull out a sword and run you through. Well, medieval ghettos were largely disarmed, so the verbally hostile weren’t excused from the culture and gene pool.

So, the bottom line is that anybody sensible would be cautious before buying from Hasidic-owned businesses that don’t specifically have a good reputation, like B&H. Take that super-duper quoted price and add a percentage to account for all the hassles you are letting yourself in for.

But, of course, nobody is supposed to think like that. The media won’t print that kind of advice. And the poor federal government isn’t supposed to treat Hasidim skeptically, they’re officially supposed to bend over backwards for them and treat them like a legally privileged minority!

Update: Of course, in neither of Efraim’s two mugshots is he wearing a beard or a hat, so I guess he’s Hasidic for federal contracting purposes, but a wild and crazy guy for the ladies.

Not many people know this, but 90% of the costs of affirmative action are hidden from sight. One engineer getting a promotion over another because he’s black causes a bit of economic damage, and certainly a lot of personal damage to the victim. But where the bills really get paid for the Racial Extortion Coalition is in government contracting.

You see, the leaders of minority groups aren’t usually so interested in the welfare of their group as they are in their own personal wealth and power. The elites of any group, your Barack Obamas and Jesse Jacksons, are the most important to placate and preferences in contracting allow minority elites to accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of taxpayers. As Tom Wolfe’s Reverend Bacon put it, it’s a highly leveraged investment in “steam control”.

This system of preferences milks taxpayers for shoddy goods and/or exorbitant prices based on quotas that various governments have to meet when contracting with suppliers. It’s the soft, fat underbelly that no one talks about, as the taxpayers get quietly fleeced.

Even Texas does it!

www.window.state.tx.us/procurement/prog/hub/hub-certification/

Hint: make your wife the owner of your business if you want to do business with the state.

The real conservative movement has always been a coalition between libertarians and social conservatives.  Both groups have been sold out and used at times by Republican Party elites.  Many leaders of the grassroots have themselves been grafted into the Washington establishment.

The mainstream libertarians castigate Paul for daring to declare that Caesar has no clothes: every tax cut achieved by the libertarian wing of the party has been neutralized by the hidden tax of inflation, as the government simply prints the money they need instead of taxing it.

The evangelical social conservatives delude themselves of their influence.  About the only measurable difference they’ve made is starting a war with Iraq, half-convinced Saddam was the anti-Christ, even dusting off the Nostradamus to justify their pre-ordained conclusion.  Devoid of hope and alienated from the culture of their country, much of Christian activism has become a rapture cult about as practically relevant as the Heaven’s Gate people out in California.  For if all hope is pinned in the rapture, then if they are wrong about the rapture, the strategy is suicide.  We have the Iraq War because the power elite (or rather the Likud wing of the power elite) wanted it for Israel, and American evangelicals served as the useful idiots to move it along.  Witness Pat Robertson’s early endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, cross-dresser and supporter of gay rights and abortion, as an example of evangelicals’ decadence in their Israel Uber Alles delusions.

And now it is 2008.  Libertarians and social conservatives, having abandoned principle long ago, get bland liberal John McCain as the nominee, a recycled rerun of Bob Dole (the scary thing is that unlike Dole, McCain is crazy, and will probably win against the Democratic nominee, as the idiot white liberals indulge their multi-culti fantasies by nominating Barack Hussein Obama; they had their shot at a southern white boy, John Edwards or even good-old-boyish Bill Richardson, who would have fooled enough of our people to have defeated McCain, but their fantasies got the better of them).

The continued enthusiasm for Paul and Huckabee, however, represents a remnant among Republican primary voters.  This remnant has denied McCain majorities in many states and is a thorn in his side as he tries to convince us that this year’s choice between two evils is not a toss-up.

The enthusiasm for Huckabee, as I’ve documented, is unwarranted, but represents a healthy form of identity politics among evangelicals.  He’s our ess-oh-bee, dang it, and we want to be represented by him rather than a Yankee from Massachusetts.

Paul, on the other hand, has very much to admire.  Problem is, he advocates an early Virginian and Jacksonian libertarianism with the language of a third-generation German Pennsylvanian.  Germans are a great people, arguably among the greatest, but theirs is a culture with low emotional content, an objective voice so-to-speak and this comes across with Paul.  Everything is abstract, to the point that he would not attack his opponents.  To backcountry Celts, this smacks of weakness.  To my Celtic brain, if they’re so wrong, why the heck are you so nice to them?   We’ve got Martin Luther passive-aggressively nailing theses to churches (a very German thing to do) when we really need William Wallace to work up the Celts for war and unite the clans.

Paul is a great man, the greatest in our government, but I don’t think he is the man.  He’s too great, really, to ever lead a mass democratic movement.  Doesn’t he know you can’t just go around telling the truth anymore?  I mean, he just came out and said that we were to blame for putting ourselves into a ant’s nest in Iraq.  We started a land war in Asia and we’re bleeding to death financially from the occupation.  But, Mr. Paul, don’t you know you can’t go around saying that?  Blame it on the neocons or another scapegoat, but never tell the voter he is responsible for self-inflicting his problems.  That’s not a winner politically.

Divided into libertarian and evangelical camps, this remnant will continue to suffer defeat.  As a member of both groups, I think we need each other.  It’s clear at this point that the libertarians have the money; Paul gets about 10% of the vote but has more money than anyone.  The evangelicals have the votes, but Huckabee can barely keep his campaign afloat.

But what we really need is a leader who understands both groups and the two most powerful themes in politics: us versus them and something for nothing.  This person will have to be astute enough to sell something to the American people that they don’t really want to buy, yet be pure enough to deliver on it once in office.

Rather like someone innocent as a dove and wise as a serpent.  The odds are against it, but to paraphrase Huckabee, we’re long past the point where the odds were for us.  We need a miracle.