Spreading the Good News

Muslim evangelism.

The message of modern Christendom is one of endless cession and accommodation to her illiberal enemies. Islam, by contrast, gives its followers certitude and tells them to bide their time. Secularized Christianity is now the Establishment, which is why the desert creed of Islam evangelizes.

When Muslims need their own space away from abominations such as gay marriage and feminism they take it, secure in their patronage networks, their patriarchal culture, and their unflinching sense of truth. Modern Christianity can only exhort her adherents to pray and do the best they can with such resources as the individual or nuclear family can muster, and even commands them to seek illumination from the anti-Christian view.

The age of Christian evangelism is over, with the modern Christian gospel of utter altruism and voluntary displacement being adopted by the secular State. The garment-rending of modern Christian evangelicals is pure theater at this point. The other day, I watched a commercial with a Christian missionary at least thirty pounds overweight stomping around, demanding I send his employer money as the camera panned on a doe-eyed Haitian girl in a ragged dress. At that point, I was screaming at the TV, "Build them a f***ing sewage treatment plant!" I'm going to start doing this in real life.

Time for the Church to feed Her sheep.

Ahead of the curve

Apparently that video I linked to yesterday from the court eunuchs of the Good Men Project is really making the rounds. Sailer takes it apart here, and so does Radix Journal here.

These jeremiads are getting pathetic. Like gun control, it's really just a Progressivist dog-whistle by hipster whites, begging to be allowed to live unmolested in urban centers. Another example is the "Take Back The Night" crusades at various colleges, which are basically pleas for help from female co-eds at campuses built in the 19th and early 20th centuries that now find themselves in the middle of some uniquely 21st century problems.

"One of three suburban Denver girls..."

Read on.

DENVER — One of three suburban Denver girls who authorities say tried to join Islamic State militants in Syria was confused about what her role would be if she had actually made it there, the girl's father said Tuesday.

"She told me they were going to get there and somebody is going to contact them," said the father of a 16-year-old Sudanese girl, who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because he is concerned for the girls' safety. "I ask her, 'Who's that person?' She actually didn't have a clear idea about what's going on. They're just like, you know, stupid little girls. They just want to do something, and they do it."

The FBI says the 16-year-old and her friends, 15- and 17-year-old sisters of Somali descent, were headed toward Turkey en route to Syria when authorities stopped them on Oct. 20 at the Frankfurt, Germany airport. They sent them back to Denver, where FBI agents again interviewed them before releasing them to their parents without pressing charges...

The father wasn't sure how his daughter, a typical high school girl who likes going to the movies and the mall, was lured to terrorism online. Officials have said one of the girls had planned the voyage and encouraged the others to come along.

The family moved to the U.S. in 2001 and to Colorado three years ago after living in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Less was known about the Somali family, but those close to them said they have been in Colorado for years. Their father, who works as a hotel housekeeper, is from Mogadishu.

Members of southeast Denver's tight-knit East African community are now concerned other children will follow the girls' path. The FBI has been investigating whether they had friends or associates with similar intentions.

Jeez lou-eez, these typical high school girls and their Muslim jihad problems. Kids these days.

My God, who are these creatures?

The Good Men Project.

I think I may have come across the name at Dalrock's or Roissy's without really thinking about it, and I know I've seen this picture somewhere.

I just never imagined a website like this could actually exist. There can't be that many eunuchs walking around with their nuts in a jar. Somebody please tell me this is a parody. I mean, the horror. For the sweet Name of Christ everybody, please wake up. Kill it. Burn it with fire.

I posted comments here and here, but I doubt they make it through moderation.

Satire really is no longer possible. And advertisers and subscribers will actually pay for this Shinola. Or maybe they're funded by Soros or the CIA or Third International. Holy effing crap.

At the very least, I have got to enable ads here.

You have to pay to be in this thing?

The EU sticks the UK with an unexpected bill for $2.7 billion due to GDP revisions.

Well, I suppose you would since bureaucrats and the office buildings that house them don't pay for themselves.

Britain's membership of the European Union has been threatened by an 'appalling' demand for an extra £1.7 billion for Brussels coffers, David Cameron warned today.

In a furious rant against 'technocrats and bureaucrats without a heart or a soul', the Prime Minister insisted he would not write a cheque for the deadline of December 1.

The European Commission issued the demand after using rules dating back to 1995 and finding Britain's economy has grown faster than expected, so must pay a greater share to Brussels. To add insult to injury, France will receive a £790 million rebate because its economy is struggling.

Mr Cameron admitted he only found out about the bill yesterday, 48 hours after Chancellor George Osborne, but made clear the European Commission is at fault, adding: 'It is an appalling way to behave.' [Henry the Fifth wept.]

Via Vox Popoli.

Why would any self-respecting country agree to a supra-national arrangement like this? (Question begging: there are self-respecting Western countries.) Isn't free trade and free movement within the zone something each country could administer itself? They could send their own representatives to sit in executive session once a year to iron out administrative details. You could have a tribunal of jurists already on the payroll from their own countries to sit on a European tribunal and decide cross-border disputes.

Of course, that would mean most of your time would be spent just schlepping away as a German, French or Italian bureaucrat or judge, and you'd take the train to Brussels each year to hash out the format of ID cards or decide if a particular sales tax is an effective tariff. In practical application, you'd end up deciding very little--this is a league of sovereigns after all. Start hammering on minutiae, and the sovereigns start telling you to pound sand. But doubtless the EU bureaucrats, sitting comfortably behind NATO defenses ultimately backed by US nuclear dominance, consider themselves on the lofty heights of the imperial plane. The post-WW2 generation that spawned these bureaucratic horrors were really awful people. Technocratic, conformist, fascist living fossils.

The EU will probably follow the same organizational arc as the NCAA, which has wisely agreed to let its Division I members do whatever the hell they want in exchange for not being drawn and quartered in courtrooms across the US. Germany will be the most important country in Europe, notwithstanding everybody's efforts to pretend otherwise.

The Episcopal Church is another example of an organization that's scaled for no good reason. The bishops could elect one of their colleagues to be "presiding" for a term and fly to his diocese once a year to eat a really good dinner and take photographs. That all changed in the 1970's, when the Episcopal Church decided to be respectable instead of orthodox.

There's a pretty clear pattern here. These meta-level organizations are for leftist control freaks who know if they can just hijack the upper tier they can impose top down rule. But why do we put up with it? A few people just shrugging their shoulders at the same time, and the whole edifice collapses.

New label: scale.

How it all works

From a talk by Peter Schiff, summarized by Anglican Curmudgeon:

Every week, the Treasury auctions off a mixture of bills, notes and bonds (bills are short-term, bonds are long-term, and notes are in between) to meet the cash flow needs of the U.S. government. Normally what the Treasury has to offer is picked up by the bond market and by foreign governments (central banks) wishing to acquire dollar reserves.

But when the government runs a huge deficit, as it has during the latter Bush years and all of Obama's first and second terms, the Fed can step into the bond market to buy up any bills, notes or bonds that are not sold to dealers or central banks. By doing so, the Fed ensures that interest rates on the Treasury's borrowings remain stable in accordance with their maturity dates. (If, for example, the Treasury could not find a buyer for all of its long-term bonds at its offered rate of interest, it would have to raise the interest rate to find more buyers. But if the Fed steps in and buys what's left first, the Treasury does not have to offer higher rates -- it just pays the Fed the same rate it pays all the other buyers).

When the Fed buys, say, bonds from the U.S. Treasury, it simply credits the Treasury with cash from its bottomless checking account, and takes possession of the bonds. When the Treasury later buys back those bonds at maturity, as it must for every bond it issues, it has to pay the face amount of the bond plus the interest at the bond's stated rate. And to do so, it needs the required amount of cash in its accounts.

Now, think a minute: if the Fed buys $1 billion worth of 30-year bonds at 3% (say) interest per year, the Treasury is credited with $1 billion when it first sells them. But then it is has to pay the Fed $30 million each year in interest, for 30 years -- or a total of $900 million (almost as much as it borrowed in the first place). And when the bonds mature, it has to come up with another $1 billion to pay off the principal.

So by selling $1 billion of bonds to the Fed, the Treasury commits its budget to come up with a total of $1.9 billion over the next thirty years. And so it goes, week after week. As Sen Everett Dirksen once famously noted: "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

Now, here's the wrinkle: all interest the Treasury pays to the Fed gets turned over, at the end of each year to: (you guessed it) the Treasury! (The Fed simply deducts what it needs to erect and maintain all of its splendid marble buildings, and to pay all of its officers and staff the very best salaries and benefits.)

So it is not quite a merry-go-round, because of the Fed's needs for money to operate. Out of the $1.9 billion the Treasury pays to the Fed in my example, $1 billion (the principal) is a wash, and the Treasury might net, say, $870 million out of its original $900 million paid in interest. The figures don't matter as much as the fact: the Treasury still, after everything is said and done, has to come up with new money in order to clear its books with the Fed.

By using "quantitative easing" to help out the Treasury, therefore, the Fed is really simply delaying the ultimate day of reckoning. For if the Treasury did not have the Fed buying those bonds from it, it would have had to come up with a full $1.9 billion to pay them at maturity, instead of being able to use what the Fed returns to it each year.

The same result occurs in the end, however. As long as anyone keeps buying bills, notes and bonds from the Treasury, the Treasury has to come up with more cash to pay back the principal plus the stated interest.

The Fed's QE to date has kept the interest rates the Treasury has to pay artificially low, because the Fed always buys whatever bonds are left without demanding higher rates. But how long can the game continue?

And that is just what Peter Schiff points out. The Fed has thus far "phased out" QE three times. Each time, it said (at first) that there would be no more QE, but then as interest rates began to threaten to rise, and the stock market threatened to panic, the Fed would step in again and announce "another round" of quantitative easing. Thus we have had QE#1, QE#2 and QE#3 so far. The Fed is now almost done with the process of phasing out QE#3, as it has been buying less and less bonds each passing month.

And how has the stock market taken this? Exactly as it always has -- with panic drops and uncertain swings because of the inability to predict how high interest rates will have to rise for the Treasury to sell all of its bonds without the Fed being the buyer of last resort. And if bond interest rates rise, the stock market will really plummet.

Moreover, if interest rates rise, the Treasury will have to come up with ever more and more cash to pay the interest on each new bill, note or bond it issues. Since it cannot print money itself, the Treasury has to go into the market to borrow that extra cash. And the more it has to borrow, the more the interest rates will rise -- it is a vicious cycle.

Mr. Schiff therefore predicts the Fed will soon be forced to announce QE#4. Most agree with him, because the alternative is to let the Government default on its debt, which would lead to institutional and commercial failures of all kinds, all around the world.

But QE#4 will at best be a temporary solution. How long will the Fed be able to continue to tell gullible markets that each new phase of quantitative easing will be only "temporary"? The fact is that, having started down the QE road, the Fed cannot reverse course permanently without disastrous consequences for everyone.

And once the Fed's game is seen to be what it is -- the repeated printing of paper money with nothing to back it except the promise to print more paper money as needed -- the notion of inflation will begin to get a toehold on the economy. Would you accept the promise to be paid in a year with paper that will be worth less than what you turn over to your borrower today? Not without demanding a suitably high rate of interest, you wouldn't. And so the Fed's policies inevitably will lead to a war between the demand for more interest to compensate for the shrinking value of paper money caused by the printing of ever more and more paper money to pay that interest.

This is a great summary with one cavil: the dollar is not actually "unbacked." Rather, it is backed by all the goods and services which dollars can buy. And that, dear readers, is the explanation for nearly everything. If we are going to print ever more dollars to service ever more debt, we must grow ever more and ever larger markets. Therefore,

* The US must prop up multi-lateral organizations such as the UN, NATO and the OECD to maintain open channels for global trade. US imports must necessarily be paid by US exports, which requires overseas markets for our goods, services and financial instruments.

* The US domestic market must grow and grow and grow to sop up the never-ending stream of new dollars entering the economy. The stodgy, extant K-selected population can't do it, so we must import r-selected peoples to provide eyeballs to Facebook, subscribers to Comcast and debtors to Titlemax (pawn-title loans are now bundled and securitized, I am informed by someone well up the food chain in that sector).

* Open borders require the US to invade the homelands of imported Americans to nip threats in the bud, whether due to militant Islam or the Ebola virus, because there is no question that we are going to let everybody in.

Of course it's an economic Mobius strip: the US dollar is backed by all the goods and services exhangeable for US dollars. This is why we must be perennially going back to step 1 and repeat.

As I put it, if you could just print money and buy your own debt with it, the US would not exist; we'd all be loyal subjects of Caesar in Rome. But at the same time, there are real goods and services that can be purchased by dollars, so the dollar remains a marketable commodity and, due to the size of our market, the most marketable commodity.

This game of economic musical chairs ends when the US can no longer uphold its end of the balance sheet: the US military is no longer able to assure global hegemony; the US populace is no longer adding value; US markets no longer supply or demand products with long, sophisticated production chains.

It will end when it ends. And it will end.

A day in the life of Michael Brown

Amerika (Brett Stevens) considers.

So Mike Brown comes staggering out of the convenience store in a state of utter confusion. He got high, got confused, panicked and did something dumb, and now he is totally unsure of himself. Worse, he is now in the badlands territory of the enemy. He knows he is high and thus vulnerable because stoned people are sort of like large children. He is paranoid from the effects of the drug. He is also afraid because of years of racial divide, racial myth and racial enmity, and he believes that white cops are out to get the black kids. What else explains the ghetto? He doesn’t know and no one he knows knows either, so it’s assumed to be the pigs and the racists in government. Now we have a paranoid young man who is barely in control of his large body, and he is in a stage of utter mental disorder. Then the worst possible thing happens: he is hailed by authority, but even worse, one of them. The white cops who want to jail him for their racist plans are trying to talk to him, trying to get him on something. He panics again and we all know how it shakes out.

Over time I have come to the regretful conclusion that most human activity consists of denial so that we can hold on to whatever social positions we have as individuals. People do not like to look at the core issue but instead take sides that represent their interests. In the case of Mike Brown, two sides pop up immediately: those who want to pity him and use him to argue for more equality and less authority, and those who see him as a threat and want to use him to argue for less criminal activity. Both have truth to their statements, but they miss the real issue here.

The real issue here is that diversity does not work for anyone. By work, I mean function as a system of social order. Diversity makes us distrust each other. It strips away our identity, so we are always paranoid. We will never trust the cop of a different race because we perceive that he has an agenda against us. We will never feel good about living in a country where our people are not the dominant authority. This is not just hard-wired into our gut instinct, but it is also pure logic. People divide on differences, and wishing that away by saying “we are all one” has never worked. We need communities of our own. Diversity puts us into conflict and creates situations like the one that got Mike Brown killed. There may be no fully good guys, and no fully bad guys in this one, just another broken human system that betrays us for the convenience of those who want not to rock the boat.

Mike Brown wasn't inferior, just very different from you and I. In other settings, aggressive men who outweigh most of us by over 100 pounds do quite well for themselves. In an integral community for Michael Brown, old bulls with similar time preference and T-levels are on hand to channel aggression into socially redemptive pursuits. (Black America has been decimated of its older, steadier males thanks to welfare enabling women to sleep with attractive lotharios, and criminal laws drafted by whites who prefer higher levels of organizational complexity.) Instead, he's in a dysfunctional, matriarchal stew ruled by vestigial public sector whites hanging on for pensions and seniority, even as their private sector peers slip away to the next county.

Going up a number of levels above Mike Brown's world, African Big Men like Robert Mugabe are not actually cynical. Robert Mugabe is as sincere in his principles as Ron Paul is in his: you reward your friends and punish your enemies; you get while the gettin's good; you spread the green around and buy status for your family. The Non-Aggression Principle? Nigga pleaz. This is the problem with good-hearted whites: they think inside everybody is just another classical liberal or social democrat trying to get out.

As a commenter at the OP notes, liberalism is cruelty.

John Zmirak lets fly

Via Rorate Caeli

... The men who are leading the Synod do not need theology lessons from me. If only because enough good men remain among them and tell the truth, these saboteurs know exactly what they are doing.

And like the Pharisees, they already have their reward — their attaboys from the New York Times and their Methodist and Unitarian golfing pals. The Synod leaders have neutralized the nastiest attacks from homosexual activists, and bought peace with the secular state for the next ten years or so. Like Henry VIII’s compliant bishops, they will be “safe.” For a decade at least, they will keep the hundreds of millions of dollars gathered in Germany from the “church tax,” and in the U.S. from federal contracts to agencies that are Catholic in name only, such as Catholic Charities and diocesan immigrant offices. Bishops will get to pretend that they preside over powerful, consequential institutions, and the world will pretend to believe them. For now. Until the hatred of Christianity ratchets up another notch, and demands an even more craven surrender.

Bishops who are so inclined — including the Bishop of Rome — can continue to garner headlines for their attacks on a mythical “unregulated capitalism,” their demands for radical redistribution of the wealth and the dismantling of borders. They can praise the mass influx of Muslims into Europe, and cash a check every time an illegal immigrant arrives in America. As men without children, they don’t need to worry about their descendants. They are confident of eternity, since they don’t believe in hell.

Let me give these men something to worry about. These men who are fracking the Church to produce the current “earthquake of mercy” are hungry for recognition and legitimacy. They want to be seen as leaders — which is why they dash out in front of every crowd, wherever it’s headed. But legitimacy is precisely what the bishops and even the pope will sacrifice if the Synod ends up approving the radical proposals that are before it ...

Much more at the link. Zmirak is one angry Catholic.

You don't need to be a seminarian or even a professing Christian to spot the flaws in +Francis's sloppy theology.

As he beatified Pope Paul VI who implemented the Second Vatican Council’s vast changes, Pope Francis said ‘God is not afraid of new things’.

Traditionalists, the Pope said, risk a temptation of ‘hostile inflexibility’...

Remarks that follow are premised on the article cited above being genuine and not an Onion-style fake news satire. I will hope to be informed this assumption is incorrect.

So the fundamentals of this pope’s position:

* The church offers no timeless message of Christ, but should instead merely reflect the whimsy of societal fashion.

* Traditionalists (and presumably the static bible they read) are at “risk” of “inflexibility.” One must be flexible in adhering to God’s designs.

* The most amazing statement of all: “God is not afraid of new things.” What would qualify as a “new thing” to the omniscient creator of the Earth and heavens? Is it possible that such a being had never considered the virtues of male buggery until a U.S. judge found them hiding under a penumbra? Is Francis implying that God toddles along behind the will and impulsion of man, rather than the opposite?

I'll venture a prediction that the most insidious part of this synod was the beatification of +Paul VI.

At some point, I imagine the Roman Rite will split along its traditionalist and modernist fault lines. Who seizes the Vatican, in a future Europe wracked by sectarian conflict and resurgent nationalism? I am being completely serious. People have washed themselves in their countrymen's blood over less. Change a few extant circumstances--weaker government, lower population density, younger median age--and dust-ups like the current US Episcopal lawsuits get settled in the streets. And there are a lot more people, properties and status at stake in the Catholic conflict.

Work

I have been doing what I do to earn my keep for the past 23 years. Before that, since age 14, I went to school and did labor-intensive jobs. This blog is my personal bitching-post about the macro, and the tone is perforce negative. Personally however, I still manage to string some victories together, like those few shots out of 18 holes that keep you coming back to golf. That's life.

Thanks be to God, I have a comfortable existence, good health and the love of good people. I also have appalling stress levels and can only watch numbly as the world marches from idiocy to idiocy. (Exhibit A.) I cannot believe, at the tender age of 50, how much error and shortsightedness is mechanically repeated, over and over. My esteemed father, age 70, assures me that nothing changes in two decades' lead time.

There are a lot of us of my ideological stripe and time in life from the tail end of the Boom, and I hope we all hang on for the next few decades. I have been at several funerals of those who did not. Anyway, al-hamdal'Allah, I have managed to carve out a position a little above the fray of naïve youngsters brought in and told to work harder for that brass ring which is kept perennially dangling out there, and devil take the hindmost.

Obviously, a business can't carry sloth, and God has commanded His creatures to work. (Note that this is not part of the Woman's curse.) This implies a duty on employers to make that work dignified and remunerative. Otherwise, it is probably not work that a human being should be doing.

Resources should instead flow toward more capital-intensive models.

To put it another way, if the marginal product is so low that the producer can't pay more than the cost to keep somebody alive, with the difference to be made up by the taxpayers, then the employer needs to change his business model, or go out of business.

Of course, if I'm so smart, I should be implementing these models and raking it in.

Good intentions

It's the thought that counts.

As global civilization stumbles along to a collapse from multiple elements which represent the fruition of our various equality policies, we must reconsider what future we want: do we wish to descend with the rest of the world to third-world status, or rise above and be an example of what steps a civilization must take to evolve? The popular answer will always be to flatter the human individual by declaring that diversity, equality and human rights must take precedence before all else. This however is preference and not reality. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and “wishing does not make it so,” and if our well-meaning help destroys the chances of many for a good life, it is not mercy but cruelty.

We have gone far enough along this road to see what happens with these policies. Equality leads to a rabid mob out of control, drunk on the power of the vote, which spends money it does not have and destroys the value of its own currency. Diversity leads to ethnic groups in constant enmity with each sure it is being victimized any time it encounters an official of another race. Human rights lead to people behaving irrationally and passing the cost on to society at large, turning social order into a circus and leaving no standard of behavior for future generations. We are creating an apocalypse within our society with these policies.

If we care about future generations and the legacy we leave behind, it is incumbent upon us to recognize that we must know when to fish and cut bait — and that it is time to cut bait and move on from these centuries-old policies which have failed time and again. Two centuries of equality and 150 years of diversity have left us with alienated, ruined societies and internal paranoia while the criminal get rich and exploit the middle classes. And for what? We have not built Utopia. We have regressed to the conditions our ancestors struggled to escape, and in the name of good intentions, we have imposed those same conditions upon our grandchildren.

There's apparently a song by a woman named Joanna Newsom called Good Intentions Paving Company. (There's an official music video somewhere). It seems apt, but I never know if artists are self-consciously making traditionalist expressions. Maybe, like my observation on white withdrawal, it's instinctive. Maybe we yearn for heritage and posterity whether consciously or not. As committed as Ms. Newsom may be to the secular liberal ideal on the conscious level, at another level there's a yearning for something deeper, and the suspicion that the current proposition is rather contrived and ephemeral.

More on the ultimate conservative position

Come on folks. We can take care of a lot of things just by not subsidizing self-abuse and bastardy. But we've got to protect our poor from competition from the global poor for wages, and our middle class from competition from the global rich for housing. "Inefficient!," "Sub-optimal!," scream the economists, but it is no more inefficient or sub-optimal than the unfolding social and demographic disaster known as the welfare state.

In sum, we need a society where people can find their own level, because hierarchy is natural. And, yes, we've plowed this ground before, when I attempted to coin the phrase "small pond strategy."

Love

Here.

We sway in the starlight of your eyes.

The ultimate conservative position

That is, the position I think conservatives are going to arrive at, ultimately. (The Republican Party, having ceased conserving anything for some time now, will not.)

The perennial political question is what to do with the left side IQ/time-preference distribution. After all, we don't need to bother with what to do about people on the right side distribution. They don't need government; they fund government. They police themselves. As Sheriff Bell puts it in No Country For Old Men,

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

Cormac McCarthy has read Plato.

The debate continues to this day. It's practically all that's debated in domestic politics, anywhere, anytime.

The welfare state solves nothing. We have tried it in enough iterations to arrive at the conclusion: taxing K-selected producers to support r-selected consumers results in less of the former and more of the latter. The welfare state ends in universal impoverishment as the K-selected withdraw or shut down. The left-side tail is literally devolving thanks to welfare.

Free trade was supposed to equalize global living standards, but the Western prole class is getting absolutely creamed, and the Third World remains corrupt and violent.

Vox Popoli has posted again on free trade, reiterating his view that there's no such thing. I'm coming to the same conclusion.

So what is to be done with the left-side tail? I'd say abolish welfare, abolish the minimum wage, abolish the income tax, and protect the employment prospects and cost of living of our less endowed citizens with immigration restrictions and tariffs. Romaine lettuce will cost more, there will be some sclerotic industries, but you are going to pay at the cash register or you are going to pay welfare bureaucrats and their constituencies. One of these two is less dystopic and dysgenic.

Anybody got any better ideas?

Racism rears its ugly head

Have they no shame?

Washington Post recommends living around white people.