Archive for April, 2011

Democracy in the Ivory Coast

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

The UN refugee agency estimates that over a million people have fled.  Many of them are hiding in the jungle, and many of them have no food.

However, it piously avoids saying who is fleeing whom, and why.

The great majority of refugees are westernized Christians and animists  fleeing Muslims with a markedly lower level of civilization.  The great majority of refugees are not immigrants or the children of immigrants, but people who have lived on the coast for generations, who have now become exiles.

The refugees are people that made the Ivory Coast function.  Those that drove them out are immigrants, many of them illegal immigrants, or the children of illegal immigrants, that come from inland areas with a marked lower level of civilization, lower living standard, and less westernization – and less ability to operate a society that is, by African standards, advanced.

These immigrants were allowed in, in part to provide cheap labor, but in large part to provide cheap votes.  In due course, the tranzis bid for these cheap votes, and got them.  One of the things they offered in return for these cheap votes, was a takeover of the Ivory Coast by the new voting block, offered them the land and housing and equipment of the old voting block.

What has happened in that inlanders led by tranzis have taken the coast away from its previous inhabitants, and driven the coastal people  inland into the jungle.

These refugees are not fleeing a storm, or an earthquake.  They are fleeing democracy in action.

The Ivory Coast illustrates the two great problems of democracy:  The fact that bids for votes have no limit, since the politicians are bidding with the promise of stolen goods, and the propensity of governments, pursuing a cheaper vote, to elect a new people.  A government composed of people native to the ivory coast elected a new people, a people not native to the ivory coast, and that new people, in turn, elected a new government, a government of tranzis in place of a government of people native to the Ivory Coast.

Tranzis tend to have a socialist outlook, that stuff such as banks, ports, farms, belong to the people collectively, rather than individually, so it is natural for them to bid for votes with all of other people’s property.  And then those other people make problems, and have to be chased away from their property. And so they were.

The survival prospects of democracy

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Until the American Republic demonstrated impressive longevity, the conventional wisdom was that democracy was inherently short lived.  As soon as the masses discovered they could vote themselves rich, it would implode.

Today, we observe that if it does not fall apart immediately, the elite import cheaper votes, and then it falls apart.

The latest casualty of democracy is the Ivory Coast.  According the the mainstream media, everything is just lovely on the ivory coast, now that the Ivy League graduate and World Bank Bureaucrat has been installed by international forces over the evil dictator.

Yet somehow there are lots of anecdotes of ethnic cleansing and cannibalism, and those who are owed money by the Ivory Coast government are worried because the ports are closed, the banks are closed, and the crops are rotting in the fields.

In the Ivory Coast, we see the worst possible outcome of democracy.  First the top elements of the local elite imported cheap votes, then the transnational ruling elite used those imported voters as political cover to take power away from the top elements of the local elite, which process went out of control resulting in the ejection of the entire local elite – including the people who operated the farms, the banks, and the ports.  In the process, the cheap imported voters physically displaced the people who built and operated those farms and ports, and in some cases, ate them.

You think that could only happen in the third world?  Observe Detroit, though in Detroit they did not drop all the way to cannibalism.

What we are seeing in the Ivory Coast is an alliance of the top people (Ivy League and transnational bureaucrats) and the bottom people (Islamic illegal immigrants who have never had much contact with western civilization) displacing the middle people (farmers, bankers, and the like).  Unfortunately neither the top people, nor the bottom people actually produce anything.  The transnational elite, unlike the local elite that has just been replaced in the ivory coast, is parasitic and unproductive.

The Ivory Coast, where the banks are closed, the ports are closed, and the cocoa crop is rotting in untended fields, is the future of democracy.  The city of Detroit is the future of democracy.  Democracy collapses faster when you have blacks and/or Muslims voting, but Liverpool is starting to look a lot like Detroit.  In Detroit, the two legged feral animals are entirely black, in the ivory coast, entirely Muslim, but in Liverpool, mostly white,  Democracy, rather than race is the critical factor. The Ivory Coast would still be one of the most prosperous nations in Africa were it not for democracy.    In the Ivory Coast, democracy means that they really do eat the rich.  They have always been black, but were not eating people until the recent elections.  In the US, towards the end, we will very likely see members of one voting block eating members of another voting block, just as we are now seeing on the Ivory Coast.

And in America we cannot vote our way out of this problem, due to a combination of ballot box stuffing, as in the ivory coast, and the government electing a new people, as in the Ivory Coast.

Democracy has got to go, and is going to go, and the only question is how much damage it will do when it falls, and what will replace it.

The end state of democracy  is members of the winning voter blocks eating members of the defeated voter blocks as the lights go out. Democracy is not the American Republic, but the Ivory Coast.

Democracy in America started off as a republic of white property owning males, in a land where every hard working man could expect to eventually acquire property, so that most males eventually became eligible to vote.  The franchise inexorably expanded, because politicians always want voters whose votes are cheaper to buy.  And when there were no more cheap votes to be had by expanding the franchise, they set about importing cheap low IQ voters, the end state of this process being the Ivory Coast.

The ruling coalition of top and bottom, of ivy league and primitive savages, tends to get ever smaller at the top, and ever more inferior at the bottom, as at the top the self perpetuating elite becomes ever smaller and more detached from reality, and at the bottom, the votes it relies on get ever cheaper.  Vote buying is democracy’s weakness, because the ruling elite winds up relying on the cheapest and most easily manipulated source of votes, which tend to be the worst people – people incapable of operating a civilization, a ruling underclass, as in Detroit.

The ruling coalition of Ivy league and human garbage becomes ever smaller at the top, looking down on ordinary members of the elite, such as farmers from a vast height, till for lack of numbers the top element of the coalition loses control of the bottom element of its coalition – thus in Detroit, the community organizers took over, in the Ivory Coast, the cannibals.  The pretended democracy became all too horrifyingly real.

The transnational elite now have possession of the Ivory Coast banks and ports, but lack the ability to operate them.  Even less can the horde of savages that they have unleashed operate them.

Consensus

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

When Galileo explained the scientific method, he condemned consensus:

The testimony of many has little more value than that of few, since the number of people who reason well in complicated matters is much smaller than that of those who reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling I should agree that several reasoners would be worth more than one, just as several horses can haul more sacks of grain than one can. But reasoning is like racing and not like hauling, and a single Barbary steed can outrun a hundred dray horses

Peer review is consensus. Consensus is religion, not science. Peer review works as depicted in this excellent cartoon: Click on the snippet of the cartoon to see the full cartoon.

Peer Review

Peer Review in action

Observe the priestly robes worn by the scientists

The end is not nigh

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

But it is in sight.

There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but we have had a lot of ruin.

The US government lacks cohesion, and is insolvent. Lack of cohesion means that in a crisis it is apt to disappear, dissolve into its parts, with each part seeking its own interest. Insolvency means a crisis is looming.

I would expect the Euro to collapse before the US dollar, and the Euro is not going to collapse all that soon, and I would expect Europe to collapse politically before the US government collapses politically, and European political collapse is still far off. I predict interesting times in the 2020s.

A lot of people have made the metaphor that the Democrats have been driving the bus towards the cliff at one hundred miles per hour, and the Republicans propose to slow down to ninety eight miles per hour, but are willing to compromise for ninety nine miles per hour. What are they thinking?

Noble prize winning economist Krugman explains what he is thinking, which is pretty much what the Office of Management and Budget explains it is thinking, so I suppose this is what they are all thinking: The government is going to save pots of and pots of money by economizing on various things, especially health care.

How, you may ask, is it going to economize on health care?

Among the many measures the government is deploying to save pots and pots of money on health care, is that the government is forming two large new bureaucracies with the job of telling hospitals, doctors, and patients, how to save money on health care.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Like a poker player in the grip of tilt, our ruling elite plan to solve their problems by doubling down on what got them into trouble.

Who rules the world?

Sunday, April 17th, 2011

Tracing rulers academic connections yields an interesting picture. Thus Mugabe, like so many third world rulers, comes from the London School of Economics, but Harry Lee Kuan Yew was educated in Singapore. And lo and behold, Mugabe was installed in power by the “international community” aka the tranzis, while Harry Lee Kuan Yew was installed in power by Singaporeans.

A similar trace is visible in the Ivory Coast, where shortly before I wrote this, the “international community” held a blatantly rigged election, wherein Muslim cannibals were elected, under the leadership of a Muslim cannibal educated in an American Ivy League university. Since it was likely that the new elite would eat the old elite and their cats, the old elite was reluctant to acquiesce, so, as usual, the “international community” sent in peacekeeping troops. The “international community” says it is quite horrified that the new elite is killing the old elite and their cats, and sometimes eating them as I write this, and I suppose it truly is horrified, but not so horrified that they hold back from imposing the new elite. If massacres and sometimes cannibalism is taking place, it is supposedly all the old elite’s fault for resisting the benign prodemocracy forces of transnationalism.

This much resembles the Tranzi reaction to the crimes of Mugabe, and the Tranzi reaction to the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi, which genocide was supposedly not happening, was happening but was supposedly the fault of the old colonial elite, not the new Tranzi elite, and which the Tutsi supposedly brought upon themselves by their evil collaboration with the old colonial elite.

The man being imposed by Tranzi troops in the Ivory coast is Alassane Ouattara, educated in a US Ivy Leage university, and then sent directly from the Ivy League to the World Bank (a classic tranzi institution to rule those benighted third worlders) and then sent directly from the world bank in a rigged election to directly rule the ivory coast. He is not an ivory coast politician, but a World Bank bureaucrat. Seems, however, that because of the great respect for cultural diversity in the Ivy League, they overlooked to teach him that eating people is wrong. He may not personally eat people, but in the glorious Ivy League tradition of tolerance, is alarmingly tolerant of those that do.

The man being overthrown by tranzi troops in the Ivory coast is Laurent Gbagbo, who was also educated in a western university, though a somewhat less classy and prestigious one than Ouattara, but unlike Ouattara arrived in back in the ivory coast as a mere ordinary teacher, and worked his way up to ruler in local politics, unlike Quattara who worked is way up in the World Bank bureaucracy, and arrived in the Ivory coast from overseas to rule.

The power transfer in the Ivory Coast looks like it may have much the same effect as it did in Rhodesia, where politically unreliable farmers were removed from their farms, to be replaced by politically reliable non farmers, resulting in a total collapse of production. If the tranzis create a desert in the Ivory coast, as they did in Rhodesia, this will confirm that they would rather destroy wealth, than let anyone politically unreliable control it.

The same transnational elite runs the US, most of Europe, and most of the third world. Observe that when “gay pride day” was exported to most of the world, they used the made in US Ivy League word “gay” which shows who is calling the shots.

India was initially ruled by the LSE, but in India local elites have taken charge, and Singapore was independent of the LSE from the day it became independent of Malaysia. Stalin thought he was running the western progressive ruling elite, but the reason they were so on board with Stalinist infiltration is that they thought they were running Stalin. Maybe they were, but they were not running Khrushchev. China, they thought, was run by Stalin, and they ran Stalin, so they thought, but China was not run by Khrushchev, and they did not run Khrushchev.

So we have, already, furtively and conspiratorially, a united ruling elite that runs the US, Europe, and most third world shitholes – observe, for example, what is happening in the Ivory Coast – made-in-France massacres of the Christian and animist minority. The French ruling elite get the money, the power, and the chocolate, and the local Muslims get to kill and eat infidels, and their cats.

However, the tranzi elite does not run that part of the formerly third world that is doing OK, indeed getting out from under that transnational ruling elite seems to be a precondition for doing OK. You cannot get rich unless you let competent people run production, and if you let competent people run production that is a threat to tranzi power. The tranzi elite colonized in the name of uprooting colonialism, a strategy that, as in Rhodesia, is apt to create deserts. In Singapore and Hong Kong the local eurasian elite, colonialist descended, held power. In Botswana, the partially black, colonial descended elite held on power for a while, but may have lost it now. Zimbabwe, a tool of the tranzis, invaded, Botswana had to turn the tranzis for help, and the tranzi assistance came, naturally, with strings attached, with the result that Botswana, like South Africa, may now be descending into the usual African chaos. Hard to tell, since the each elite hides behind the other.

So at present, if the world ruling elite simply dropped their cover, the transnational elite would rule a large part of the world, but not enough of the world to call themselves “United World Government” in place of “United States Government”

Hide the decline, part umpteen

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Stephan and Rachit cored lots of trees, to estimate weather in past years.  In a cold climate, near the tree line, a tree will generally grow more if the weather is warm than if it is cold, though lots of other things affect it too.  Still, if you check lots of trees over a wide area of very cold land, other factors will probably average out, and the rate of growth,the width of the tree rings, will largely indicate temperature.  And Stephan and Rachit cored a lot of trees, over a lot of very cold land, while being attacked by hordes of ravenous mosquitoes.

Yet somehow, strange to report, only about a tenth of the trees they cored were used to construct a hockey stick graph.  Most of their data was quietly buried as unwanted, but leaked in the climategate files documents/briffa-treering-external/stepan.  Recently Climate Audit took a look at this neglected data.

Why, you may ask, were some trees included and other trees, the vast majority of the trees, not included?

Climate Audit constructs a graph of growth.  The red line is the growth rate of the small set of trees the Anthropogenic Global Warmists chose to use for their hockey stick of doom.  The black line is growth rate for all of the trees that Stephan and Rachit cored while fighting off mosquitoes, including the vast majority of trees which the the Warmists somehow chose to not use.

Cherry picking a hockey stick

What the real data showed

Observe that the red line, the cherry picked trees, show something dramatic and unusual happening in the twentieth century, especially the late twentieth century, show something like a hockey stick.  The unselected trees, the vast majority of the trees, show a slight warming trend over centuries, but no more so in the twentieth century than in any other century.

Conservative bloggers declare victory

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

According to Strata and others, the outcome of the budget negotiations (to reduce by one percent spending that was recently increased by by thirty percent) was a mighty victory.

By a vote of approximately ten to one, the US House of Representatives voted to continue at slightly lower speed on a course that leads to bankruptcy, hyperinflation, social collapse, and, if we are lucky, civil war in the next decade or two.

The shape of things to come

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

We are seeing a political singularity – the leftwards slide that has been under way since 1710 or so is going faster and faster.

Many people have already commented on the ludicrous absurdity of calling 1% cuts in a budget that rose 27% in three years, “drastic”. Supposedly this makes the Tea Party not merely conservative, but “ultra conservative”.
If the tea party is ultra conservative, what then would we call someone who attempted to restore the status quo of 2004? Super fanatical ultra nazi right wing extremist?

In the blogs people are presenting the usual Keynesian rationalizations for spending money that we do not have – but the Keynesian rationalization assumes that goods are going unsold and that we have deflation, whereas in reality there has been no deflation and we are starting to see empty shelves that can only be filled at substantially higher prices, foreshadowing rapid inflation soon. We have already seen substantial inflation that the US government is lying about, and the dire state of the supply chain foreshadows a lot more inflation. The Keynesian excuse for big spending, if it ever had any validity, has no validity today. It looks to me very much as if an inflationary shock is coming down the overly tight supply chain on top of the already disturbing rate of inflation – not a hyperinflationary shock – that is probably a decade or so down the road, but shocking enough.

We are not seeing a technological singularity. Technological change slowed down in 1970, at about the same time as political correctness started to be enforced on science and scientists by increasingly drastic means. The last man on the moon left in 1972. The tallest building in the united states was finished in 1974. Cars are becoming humbler. The history of science was abruptly rewritten in 1972, with natural selection being deprecated. Instead of Darwin being famous for natural selection, after 1972 he was supposedly famous for common descent, which necessitated common descent being removed from Lamarck. Lamarck was abruptly rewritten so that after 1972, he supposedly had proposed separate and parallel evolution instead of branching evolution with family resemblances between species resulting from common descent, though you can still get his original books from the internet archive.

That which cannot continue, will stop. Trees do not grow to the sky. This does not, however, necessarily mean that freedom will be restored and everything will be lovely. The last time we had theocracy, we had stagnation for four hundred years.

The explosive expansion of spending and regulation represents a collapse of discipline within the ruling elite. The way the system is supposed to work, and the way it mostly did work several decades ago, is that the American Federal Government can only spend money on something if the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President agree to spend money on that thing, so no government employee can be employed, except all three agree he should be employed, so the government cannot do anything unless all three agree that it be done.  A public servant, and indeed his entire department, was apt to be fired if he pissed off anyone. Conversely, the individual was free to do anything, unless all three agree that he be stopped from doing that thing. We are now approaching the reverse situation, where for an individual to do anything requires a pile of permissions from diverse governmental authorities, but any governmental authority can spend money on anything unless there is near unanimous opposition to them spending money.

Obviously this cannot continue. Eventually the money runs out, in that we shall have a hyperinflationary crisis, and revert to some other form of money, such as the gold standard. As that happens, the increasily lawless behavior of the rulers against the ruled will become increasingly lawless behavior of the rulers against each other. Civil war, or something close to civil war, or the dire and immediate threat of civil war will ensue.

At that point, we will have the political singularity, probably around 2025 or so. Beyond the singularity, no predictions can be made, other than that the results will be surprising. It is possible that tax producers will win over tax consumers. I hope for that outcome. The alternative is centuries of poverty and stagnation.  Whether it is probable, I cannot say. Such an outcome, however, necessitates the ending of democracy with universal franchise, since tax consumers substantially outnumber and outvote tax producers.

Theocracy

Friday, April 8th, 2011

All Most theocratic religions are officially anti theocratic, in the sense that supposedly people believe in the official religion because it is simply the truth, not because of state sponsorship, and if anyone doubts the truth, they are supposedly seeking the power that rightly belongs to those who preach what is simply the truth, so it is those horrid heretics that are the theocrats.  Thus the well paid wise progressive from Harvard sees a church in a wooden shack in the countryside, and cries in horror and outrage “Theocracy!”.  Islam, the most theocratic of them all, is openly theocratic in the sense that they claim that God literally rules them, which however means that they have to pretend their doctrine is unchanging.The Roman Catholic Church on the other hand, was after 1277 almost as furtive about theocracy as Harvard.  Official lists of forbidden thoughts, such as the condemnations of 1277, were officially unofficial.  The Spanish inquisition was operated by kings, and the Church, like Harvard, merely advised kings on the truth.

And if the truth requires frequent rewrites of history and the forceful suppression of dangerously inconvenient facts, such is a perfectly legitimate and reasonable response to the irrationally foolish heretics.  We have to help people perceive the truth by lying to them, as for example “hide the decline”.  That is the way you do science.  You delete the data you know to be misleading, and replace it with data that shows  what you know to be the truth because it is the official consensus.  All properly scientific scientists do that, and if they don’t they deserve to lose their jobs.  We know all scientists are reliable, because they are continually peer reviewed to make sure they stick to the consensus of their peers – and if their data fails to correspond to observation, who cares. It is more important that it correspond to the real truth than mere observation.

So how do you tell a theocratic religion if it fails to post a big label saying “Theocracy”?

Theocratic religions are always stronger the closer people are to the center of power, because they originate and are upheld by the center.  That is how you tell a theocratic religion.  That is what a theocratic religion is.

Thus:

  • Washington is more progressive than flyover country, and Cairo more Islamic than the Egyptian delta
  • The American rich are more progressive than the American poor, and the Egyptian rich more Islamic than the Egyptian poor.
  • Ivy League educated Americans are more progressive than Cow University educated Americans, and similarly in Egypt, those with higher status Egyptian educations are more Islamic.

And that is how you can spot a theocracy.

A theocracy that requires improbable beliefs about the next world can nonetheless recruit people who are sane, in that they can recruit people who have the required beliefs about the next world, but base their beliefs about this world on reality testing.   The Jesuits were good at that. But progressivism is a religion, or substitute for religion, which requires beliefs about this world – thus tends to recruit people who are crazy and/or stupid.  And as the required purity of belief becomes ever more and more extreme, the required real or feigned insanity becomes crazier and crazier, as magnificently illustrated by the events surrounding Major Hasan.

The Major Hasan incident illustrates the required craziness, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman illustrates the required stupidity.

The craziness is illustrated by the fact that when Major Hasan gave a power point presentation on why he was going to murder his audience, they all listened politely and respectfully, is illustrated by the fact that the State Department is installing the guys who raped and sexually mutilated Lara Logan into power in Egypt, is illustrated by the fact that Imam Rauf who is erecting a victory mosque at ground zero on the body parts of his enemies is hailed as a moderate and gets government funding.

If anyone had said of Major Hasan “Hey, this guy is saying he is going to kill us!  Let us lock him up right now and throw away the key”, that would have been raaaciist.  They would have been discriminating.

Our policy of exporting democracy to Muslims is as transparently demented as our policy of affirmative actioning Hasan to Major.  It is as crazy to allow Muslims to vote anywhere in the world as it was to affirmative action Hasan to Major instead of locking him up.

US policy is to export democracy at gunpoint in the expectation that it will turn Muslims into progressives – but quite obviously democracy is having the opposite effect.  Democracy turns them into Islamists – and anyone who could not have foreseen it was going to turn them into Islamists was batshit crazy, willfully blind to the glaringly obvious.

An individual Muslim ruler who decides for war, or, more commonly, actions likely to provoke war, gets a warm glow of religious piety by so doing, but faces the consequences of his actions, because his decision makes a large difference to the likelihood of bombs falling through his roof.  Since most Muslims are not in fact very pious, he, instead of piously deciding for war, swigs down a shot of whiskey, snacks on some pork, then impiously decides for peace and adopts measures to encourage tourism and western investment – for example as the United Arab Emirates does.

A Muslim voter who votes for trouble gets as much of a warm glow of piety as a ruler who decides for war, but since one vote makes no difference, does not increase the chances of bombs landing on his head.  So just as western voters piously vote for redistribution of wealth and preservation of the environment regardless of the consequences to themselves, Muslims piously vote for hatred, murder and war regardless of the consequences of for themselves.

The most peaceable and prosperous Muslim states are long established monarchies with secure hereditary rulers, such as Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.  Muslim party states are considerably less peaceful.  The more power is distributed, the more a Muslim state will act Islamic – the more it will make war upon us infidels.