End Times Review, Part 2 – Defining the Dragon

“Right.  We are consumers. We are byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.  Murder, crime, poverty?  These things don’t concern me.  What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear.” – Fight Club

Why is it so hard to start a relationship with a Social Justice Warrior?  They have such high double standards.

A general note:  The Civil War 2.0 Weather Report would normally be on Monday.  Due to getting this post finished, it will likely be next Wednesday before the CWWR comes out.  It will still be wonderful and fresh as daises on a fresh daisy ranch.  I will also (likely Tuesday?) post a combined version of this book review stitched together, so we’ll have a very rare Tuesday post.  I’m doing that so that if someone wants to read it from start to finish, well, there it is. It will be slightly different for continuity and error correction. 

When last we left the impending disaster of the 21st Century, we were talking about Turchin’s theory that Elite overproduction was a primary driver in causing societies to disintegrate like records of voter irregularities in swing states in 2020.

The pool of people attempting to be elite has increased – ludicrously.  As I’ve mentioned before, it used to be that only 15% of people tried to go to college.  That’s probably the right number.  Now?  According to Turchin’s figures, over 65% of kids are trying to grasp that gold ring.

Again, the normal distribution matters, and that means at least 15% of people going to college have an IQ of less than 100.  This explains all of those Grievance Studies degrees, and Leftists pretending that education is a substitute for intellect while working behind the makeup counter at the department store.

Every time you smoke a cigarette, it takes seven minutes off your student loans.

Now, the number of doctorate degrees have tripled since 1970 (again, a Turchin number) and there’s no real sign that this is stopping, even though it’s clear that this is producing only frustrated people who have useless degrees.  Even useful degrees in STEM fields are, at this point, being overproduced in the United States compared to the number of available jobs.  Yet, the companies keep wanting the bring in foreigners on H1-B visas to take jobs that could be filled by actual Americans.

But the Americans would want a higher wage, and there would be less competition.  This would lower Google’s® profits.  This is, again, Turchin’s Wealth Pump in action.  Google© wants H1-B workers because they’re virtual slaves that they can bring in that would be happy to live four to a pod because it’s better than the monsoon-drenched mud hut in India that is consistently destroyed by volcanoes or communists or bird flu or whatever they have in India.

During COVID, gatherings of more than 260 million were banned in India.

As I talked about stability a few posts back, ideology was one of the pillars of a stable society.  Turchin pegs the 1950’s as the time of greatest ideological stability in the United States.  People felt that (again, following Turchin’s list, which is similar to previous content here, so I don’t disagree much, though I add commentary to his list from p. 100):

  • Family was a man and a woman and kids. As I’ve discussed before, this is the atom of civilization, and has been since forever – other arrangements (polyandry, polygamy) tend to be unstable in large societies.  Men want a mate.  However, in 2023, the push is on to have “anything goes” as the basis for society.  Out of wedlock babies?  A scandal.
  • Men were men, women were women and men had men jobs and women had women jobs.   Now we can’t even define what a woman is.
  • Natural bodies are better. Tats were for sailors and .mil folks, and weird piercings were borderline trashy and foreign.
  • Belonging to a religion was normal, divorce and being an atheist meant you weren’t going to be elected unless . . . no, no unless. Atheists were simply not trusted in positions of public power.

But look what progress has brought us!  (Meme as found)

Turchin then talks about some of the things that kept the Wealth Pump in check – labor unions, minimum wages, progressive taxation, welfare, low immigration.  I’d disagree on the impact and general consensus on, say, welfare, but in general.  Many of those, however, coupled with a healthy export-focused economy with targeted tariffs created a situation where the middle class flourished and grew at the expense of the Elite.  The Left and the Right were more or less together on the goal.  It was Ike who warned us about the Wealth Pump, though Eisenhower described it this way:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”  He was a Republican wanting to make sure that the military remained sane, and that the most invulnerable weapon system wasn’t one where parts were made in every congressional district.

Now?  Turchin notes, “The ideological center today resembles a country road in Texas, almost deserted save for the yellow stripe and dead armadillos.”

I wonder if they deserved to get hit by a car, if they’re karmadillos?

From the book:  “In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of – historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.”  Whoa!  That’s radical, and I’m glad that Turchin is saying the quiet part out loud:  something wicked this way comes.  We all feel the tension, that’s why he sold thousands of copies of his book.

We know it’s coming.  And why.

It’s the Wealth Pump.  It’s not new, and it’s been the goal for a long, long time.  Turchin quotes a 1901 edition of The Bankers’ Magazine:

“When business men were single units, each working out his own success regardless of others in desperate competition, the men who controlled the political organization were supreme . . . .  But as the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its purposes . . . .  Every form of business is capable of similar consolidation, and if other industries imitate the example of that concerned with iron and steel, it is easy to see that eventually the government of a country where the productive forces are all mustered and drilled under the control of a few leaders, must become the mere tool of these forces.”

This is the goal, not a meme, but this meme is as-found.

Again, wow.  I’ve said before I have a strong distrust of big government, and the groups that really benefit from regulations are big businesses since those regulations form a barrier to entry to smaller groups.  Who runs Bartertown?  Big businesses do – who do you think hires the regulators after they “retire” from the government?  If history is a guide, businesses are attempting to run government for their benefit – hence, the Wealth Pump.

Don’t believe me?  You’re soaking in it.  A longer quote from Turchin, (p. 129):

“The political scientist Martin Gilens . . . gathered a large data set – nearly 2000 policy issues between 1981 and 2002.  Each case matched a proposed policy change to a nation opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative. . . .

“Statistical analysis . . . showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes.. . . . What is surprising is that there was no – zilch, nada – effect of the average voter.  The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent.  There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies.  Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Proof in a graph that voters don’t matter, since Brexit was about immigration.

Yup.  They’re not listening.  They don’t care that the majority has always wanted to deport, and deport promptly the unending stream of illegals invading our country.  That’s not good for business, so the Left has (oddly?) picked this up as a Social Justice Warrior© mantra:  “no human is illegal” meaning that they’re working to make actual workers, especially black workers, poorer.

SJW™?  It’s just another term for the intellectual elite in the pocket of big business.  Who would have thought that the SJW© would be on the same side as the military-industrial complex?

Stonetoss©, that’s who.  (All Stonetoss™ comics are used with permission.)

Why do Social Justice Warriors hate dentists?  They make teeth straight and white.

Part three of this review hits on Monday.  And it’s a doozy – you won’t want to miss it.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

40 thoughts on “End Times Review, Part 2 – Defining the Dragon”

  1. Competition in practice

    No, cartels break up due to competition unless policemen kill the would-be competitors. Ford Motor Company keeps sending me advertisements saying I should buy their products, and I keep trashing them. Businesses can’t force themselves onto anyone, only governments can. Agreeing to submit to and be ruled by a government in order to force businesses to be nicer is the communist sales pitch, and it’s a lie. All government is communism, different ones just have different starting conditions and start in different locations on the same exponential growth curve to genocide. America is not an exception.

    1. The government can send men with guns to your house. Businesses can’t, at least not legally.

      1. The cartels BECOME the local government. And they don’t care about whether it’s legal or not, because they are illegal cartels engaged in crime to begin with.

        nick

    2. Nope. Explain that to the company who can’t get a bank account because of their ideas. Explain that to the author whose speech can’t be sold on Amazon.

      Just because it exists today doesn’t mean it’s right. Amazon is not about libertarianism, it’s about control by those who hate you and me. Specifically, you. Specifically, me.

  2. The wealth pump was probably developed by DARPA, whose true mission is to throw a blanket of secrecy over the process of awarding new advanced systems contracts to the big M-I-C developers who create the most innovative ways of enriching GS bureaucrats past, present, and future.

    I can’t prove I’m right, but you can’t prove I’m wrong. (And I didn’t kill myself.)

    1. No, it’s been far longer than that. 1880 was the big mover, when corporations could live forever. Wonder why your senator doesn’t represent the state but is instead a “super congressman”?

      That, too.

  3. Not only is there a significantly higher percentage of high school graduates going on to college, the average IQ of those matriculants has plummeted. Comparing enrolled freshman today to those who didn’t even apply to college 50 years ago, I suspect you would find the non-college cohort to have on average a significantly higher IQ than the average freshman class at most colleges and universities.

    1. When I graduated in ’84 my professors were always whining to me about the stoonts. Most people skated or cheated. Or both.

      I responded to this dilemma by doubling my rations of PEZ.

      2. Generally, teachers blame the parents. They are not wrong. It is what they choose to do about the excrement sandwich that inffuriates.

    2. It’s certain – if 65% are going to college, then at least 20% of them are less than 100 IQ, and probably much more than that.

  4. My stepson runs an independent service and repair shop for older Mercedes cars with a total of 9 employees. He can’t find good techs in the Birmingham area, which is known more for its murder rate than its scholarship.

    https://www.trussvilletribune.com/2022/07/07/birmingham-ranked-no-3-nationally-in-homicides-1/

    https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/alabama/districts/birmingham-city-108670

    He is in the process of sponsoring H1-B Mercedes techs from South Africa. According to him, it’s pretty straightforward.

    https://www.stilt.com/blog/2018/01/find-h1b-visa-sponsor/

    1. Well, that just makes sense. You’d have to live as far away as South Africa to be ignorant enough to move to Birmingham on purpose.

  5. so we need to choose the best “elites” to survive the culling – ones who will not go overboard on the pump – and then better monitor them so that we do not come back to the current state of affairs – so better educate our progeny and train them accordingly
    —– “In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of – historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.”

    1. Oh, we don’t choose them. But we do need to constrain them. Our founders did a great job, but didn’t envision the Kleptocracy.

      1. Kleptocracy happened day one, Hamilton argued for it at great length. George Washington fought on the banker’s side of the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion to destroy people manufacturing honest money which wasn’t a debt to a banker. Imagine the interest on the national debt was 2%/year. After ten years, the bankers would own 2*10=20% of the currency, which is a controlling percentage of the whole GDP. Arguing that George was innocent because he didn’t understand isn’t sufficient, you have to argue that nobody could get a letter to George explaining it all. Thus George and all the rest of the founding lawyers, none of whom blew the whistle, were the first generation of kleptocrats.

        1. The so-called Anti-Federalists were the good guys. You can also blame whoever invented the Federal post office.

        2. I can see that point. However, many factors kept the wealth pump at a reasonable level until 1860 or so . . .

        3. > However, many factors kept the wealth pump at a reasonable level until 1860 or so . . .
          Who had reserve currency status for about 100 years each: Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, France, Britain. I claim it’s useful to model government size/impact as a sawtooth waveform, exponential growth followed by collapse, with a cycle time around 200 years. In each case there are many factors, but I claim it’s important to pay far more attention to the phase of the cycle than to details about factors, because it appears the details of factors tend to average together to a similar cycle shape.
          I claim the faster-than-exponential growth in technology, with the shift in power to the middle class it produces, is an unrelated trend, which will upset the reserve currency cycling. The technological singularity is going to produce a liberty singularity, because groups sized 1,000 will be able to deliver mutually assured destruction to far larger groups. Imagine the Knob Creek Gun Range Machine Gun Shoot & Military Show but with Bubbas showing off their privately-owned submarines with ICBMs and torpedos.
          > You can also blame whoever invented the Federal post office.
          http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/u-s-postal-system-established
          Benjamin Franklin.

      2. The US Constitution was a copy of the British government; they just changed the names like ministers become secretaries and house of lords/commons becomes senate and house of reps. More people were eligible to become king, but if you weren’t close to one that didn’t change much. What the founding lawyers actually did was become an aristocracy just like the British, taking the title to the tax cattle away as treasure, and the high military cost of projecting power across the Atlantic let them do it.

        1. Well, with a few more tweaks, one of them being federalism. Could have had a better starting point, but it was fairly close.

  7. Military contractors are an overlooked potency in the deep state complex. War is profitable, ask the corporations that played both sides in WW2.

    The U.S. has been a warring/merchant empire, so grift opportunity is unprecedented in all of history. Desert Storm, Afghanistan etc. The buzzards catch the scent afar off, swoop in for easy pickings. Dying empires, tender meat. Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard do the laundry.

  8. Women communists arguing about taking stuff from others / women communists arguing about having their stuff taken. Communists make both arguments.

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