Telegraph service in the U.S. first slowed and then virtually stopped at about midnight on 14 May due to blown fuses and damaged equipment. Radio propagation was enhanced during the storm due to ionosphere involvement, however, enabling unusually good long-distance reception.

In response to the arguments of this section someone will say, “Society must find a way to give people the opportunity to go through the power process.” For such people the value of the opportunity is destroyed by the very fact that society gives it to them. What they need is to find or make their own opportunities. As long as the system GIVES them their opportunities it still has them on a leash. To attain autonomy they must get off that leash.

In primitive societies life is a succession of stages. The needs and purposes of one stage having been fulfilled, there is no particular reluctance about passing on to the next stage. A young man goes through the power process by becoming a hunter, hunting not for sport or for fulfillment but to get meat that is necessary for food. (In young women the process is more complex, with greater emphasis on social power; we won’t discuss that here.) This phase having been successfully passed through, the young man has no reluctance about settling down to the responsibilities of raising a family. (In contrast, some modern people indefinitely postpone having children because they are too busy seeking some kind of “fulfillment.” We suggest that the fulfillment they need is adequate experience of the power process—with real goals instead of the artificial goals of surrogate activities.) Again, having successfully raised his children, going through the power process by providing them with the physical necessities, the primitive man feels that his work is done and he is prepared to accept old age (if he survives that long) and death.

Would-be industrial societies that have done a poor job of subordinating personal or local loyalties to loyalty to the system are usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.)

The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual’s loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.

It is usually enough to act as a member of a SMALL group. Thus if half a dozen people discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint effort to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be served. But if they work under rigid orders handed down from above that leave them no room for autonomous decision and initiative, then their need for the power process will not be served.

Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary for every individual. But most people need a greater or lesser degree of autonomy in working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken on their own initiative and must be under their own direction and control.

For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people would want to attain even if their need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest.

leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.

Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black “underclass” they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black- style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects most leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white, middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to make black fathers “responsible,” they want black gangs to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The system couldn’t care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a “responsible” parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make him adopt its values.

Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power.

Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.

The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

The Tsar—whose public mind is a canon, not a discourse—gets almost exactly the same results as the cathedral, by the exact opposite methods. The Tsar punishes deviation from canonical thought. The cathedral rewards conformity with dominant thought.

Most notably, this pseudo-structure is synoptic: it has one clear doctrine or perspective. It always agrees with itself. Still more puzzlingly, its doctrine is not static; it evolves; this doctrine has a predictable direction of evolution, and the whole structure moves together.

And of course they react like we want to take their meth away. They react as if we had proposed to bury their grandmothers alive—as if we had literally asked them if we could come to their house, put grandma in a box, drive her out to the woods, throw the box in a pit, cover it with dirt, then come back to the house and open all the windows.

Man is the animal that works. A human being who does not work, and work to the limit of his talent and energy, is dehumanized. His spiritual health is damaged. The regime whose citizen he is has allowed its human capital to depreciate.A regime which, in conditions of widespread underemployment and unemployment, chooses to both import labor and outsource production

A healthy and stable government, like a healthy and stable business, funds operating expenses from operating revenues, with a healthy reserve and a pattern of consistent but modest surpluses, fluctuating only with unpredictable, extrinsic events.A healthy government does not lend or borrow. It does not print or debase its money; it keeps its accounts in a hard currency that it does not control; it does not manipulate financial markets; it does not guarantee private loans; it does not issue derivatives of any kind, formal or especially informal; and it does not tolerate or protect unstable or unsound financial structures.

The purpose of government is to maintain a monopoly of coercion.

It does not matter what passed, five hundred years ago and more, between Owen Glendower and Prince Hal; it does not matter that the Turk had no right to take Constantinople, or that the Buddha gave Ceylon to the Sinhalese; the arrangements of King Solomon are of no relevance to the Israeli-Lebanese border; we cannot say that history has no use; but nursing grudges is not a valid use of it.

In a regime change, every institution that used to matter either ceases to matter, or ceases to exist.This is victory. Takbir! This is what will happen—the only question is when it happens. (Don’t hold your breath, friends.) And since we are not part of the regime, we cannot make it happen (perish the thought!). We can only be ready when it does happen; we can only be ready to supply the demand for a next regime, once this demand appears.While this is not the fastest path to power, it is the safest and most reliable, and it has an excellent historical track record. Since the old regime knows it will last forever, it has no rational reason to take us seriously. But since we know no empire is forever, we are not afraid to take ourselves seriously.

So this subculture, unconditionally disconnected from the mind of the regime, can develop a more accurate perception of reality. This perception grows out of a new kind of discourse which is civilized and urbane—more like the lofty public conversation of Victorian science, less like the grueling bureaucratic warfare of modern academia.Not only does this intellectual renewal—on a scale comparable to the Renaissance or the Reformation—constitute flourishing in every possible way—but a more accurate perception of reality is always exactly what God needs in the brain of his next regime.

The result of a ban on power, if effectively enforced by social convention, is a market for ideas which is not distorted by power. Ideas in an urbane space do not compete on the basis of their impact; they are not trying to matter; they are trying to be right. But if for any reason you care what the “real world” thinks, the whole simulation decoheres.

So: don’t hate them, don’t fear them, just work hard to stay out of their way.Ultimately, they are not in command of themselves; the drug speaks through them; if you were in power, half of them would inform on their old friends just to impress you.

Switzerland is about the size of Maryland, but it is much more democratic. There are about as many cantons in Switzerland as there are counties in Maryland, but each canton has a legislature consisting of dozens of legislators, while our counties are run by small cabals. My county, which is the size of one of the largest Swiss Cantons, is run by a 9-person council, which in turn is totally dominated by the teacher’s union.

However, there remains no strict prohibition on yakuza membership in Japan today, although much legislation has been passed by the Japanese government aimed at impeding revenue and increasing liability for criminal activities.

In our hyperculture, professional sports are completely banned so it’s not possible to even become a fan. If you enjoy American football, Type 2 action is going to be your only viable option to get that experience. No simulation allowed.

The men in Group H (for hyperculture) are different. They have no access to professional sports, though they also enjoy American football. Twice a week, they get together at a park and actually play touch football with each other. After a hard game, they go to the pub together and down beer and nachos.

And to be clear, “drugs” are more than just pills. Instagram “likes” are a drug. Only Fans cash (and attention) is a drug. Video games are a drug. Porn is a drug. Literally anything that causes you to feel-happy without actually accomplishing anything is a “drug” that industrial society is all-to-happy to manufacture and sell to you.

Kaczynski’s second key insight is that—despite industrial society making everyone sick and unhappy—there is no effective feedback to prevent this from happening in the future. That’s because industrial society can overcome the harm it causes people by inventing feel-happy drugs for them to take.

Basically, industrial society produces a lot of material wealth, but does so in a way that is increasingly bad for people’s mental health.

no pheromonal substance has ever been demonstrated to directly influence human behavior in a peer reviewed study.

The "gay bomb" and "halitosis bomb" are formal names for two non-lethal psychochemical weapons that a United States Air Force research laboratory speculated about producing. The theories involve discharging female sex pheromones over enemy forces in order to make them sexually attracted to each other. The research and notion today is largely ridiculed for the bizarre idea, as well as the non-effects of turning combatants or subjects gay.

What is Azimuth? Azimuth is what we call the set of Ethereum contracts that make up a general-purpose decentralized PKI ("public key infrastructure") utilized by Urbit ID. It keeps a record of which Ethereum addresses own which Urbit planets, stars, and galaxies, as well as the public keys associated with those ships.

Easter greetings God påske

It has been interesting to watch their journey. In the beginning of the riots there were some commenters who were shocked about the scale of the destruction. Usually heavily downvoted. There were also fairly frequent posts about how NYC was going to come back from this better than ever. Also upvoted. Over time the tone has changed and it is not uncommon for me to see the sentiment that NYC has passed the tipping point and will not recover in their lifetime and that they don't see a future in the city. At one point those would have been downvoted, sometimes heavily. Nowadays opinions of that nature tend to be upvoted with a comment chain muttering in gloomy affirmative.

Perhaps the most significant fallacious principle in the Anglo-American democratic mind is the principle of division of authority—immortalized by Montesquieu as the separation of powers.

Especially, each realm and Patchwork as a whole will do their best to avoid any compromise of sovereignty. A slice of sovereignty is what each shareholder in each realm holds, and it is not to be surrendered for any reason.

Against the rest of the world, Patchwork is at least expected to stick together, possibly even forming joint security institutions—which are temporary, of course, based on the specific threat.

Transfers of shares that constitute a merger into bigger and bigger patches, eventually ending in a one-patch world, should be blocked in some way. Since realms do not control their shares, this cannot be done by restricting share transfers. However, it can be done by including a promise of independent ownership in the realm’s resident covenant. Like any other item in the covenant, it can be violated, but usually not profitably.

This is the current system of the world: a disaster. Absurd in every detail. It lives, it works in a sense, it even is mostly peaceful, but it is held together by chewing-gum and I don’t trust it to last another decade.

I used to ask people why they were for Obama, and what I heard—often from people who didn’t care at all about politics, normally—was that he would improve America’s image in the “eyes of the world.” It is generally a waste of time to engage anyone on why the “eyes of the world” should matter, or how exactly they got to pointing in the direction that they generally point in.

contributing to actual policies that are actually adopted, even just in some ridiculous forgery of a country in Nowhere, Africa, is an unmistakable feeling. Not only does it provide employment, it makes one’s gonads grow by at least a millimeter or two. Many will fight hard for this sensation.

Russia and China treat each other as sovereigns, and they are clearly intent on preserving some of their sovereign independence, although the imbalanced financial relationships with the Western world that they find themselves in are clear no-nos.

Even when populists win Presidential elections, they simply have no way to control Washington.

Consider an indubitably worthy recipient of philanthropic funding, NIH. NIH’s budget is $30 billion or so. If we separate NIH completely from the State and convert its budget, for which it must fight every year, into State shares producing dividends or other payments of $30 billion every year, what has changed? NIH is happier, because it now has $30 billion with no strings attached. Certainly the guidance of Congress, or whatever, does not assist NIH in doing its job. Quite the contrary! The less political and bureaucratic interference it receives, the better. We have just reduced this to zero, so NIH is happy. Moreover, it is even happier because this payment stream is presumably produced by shares, bonds, or other negotiable instruments, which NIH can sell and diversify. Thus creating a well-structured endowment for the long-term funding of biomedical research.

While this is completely independent of the design, I’m pretty confident that any conversion of a constitutional democracy into a joint-stock corporation will include a high level of continuity from charitable budget allocations in the democracy, to share allocations in the corporation.

Our present establishments, not to mention our tax rates, dwarf any divine-right monarchy in history. The attempt to limit the state, if it has any result, tends to result in an additional layer of complexity which weakens it and makes it more inefficient. This inefficiency gives it both the need and the excuse to expand.

If she is for some reason not authorized to enter Berkeley, all sorts of alarms will flash.

All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both. Residents cannot use this data to snoop into each others’ lives, but Friscorp can use it to monitor society at an almost arbitrarily detailed level. In return, residents experience a complete absence of crime—at least at the level of present-day Japan, and ideally much lower.

Swallowing the red pill, departing the Matrix and donning our alien-detecting Ray-Bans, we realize at once that no government can limit itself. Limited government is a perpetual-motion machine: a product axiomatically fraudulent by definition. In any human organization, final authority rests with some person or persons, not with any rule, process or procedure.

And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

The standard Patchwork remedy for this problem is the cryptographic chain of command. Ultimately, power over the realm truly rests with the shareholders, because they use a secret sharing or similar cryptographic algorithm to maintain control over its root keys. Authority is then delegated to the board (if any), the CEO and other officers, and thence down into the military or other security forces. At the leaves of the tree are computerized weapons, which will not fire without cryptographic authorization.

In a tyranny, murder and madness become part of the fabric of the State. In a monarchy, however, the succession is clear, and if by some accident of law and fate there are multiple candidates, they are at least each others’ relatives.

But how should realms be administered? The answer is simple: a realm is a corporation. A sovereign corporation, granted, but a corporation nonetheless. In the 21st century, the art of corporate design is not a mystery. The corporation is owned and controlled by its anonymous shareholders (if you’ve ever wondered what the letters SA stand for in the name of a French or Spanish company, they mean “anonymous society”),1 whose interests in maximizing corporate performance are perfectly aligned. The shareholders select a chief executive, to whom all employees report, and whose decisions are final. In no cases do they make management decisions directly.

The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all “exit,” no “voice.”

Jesus looked like a typical Mediterranean, that is, just like a Southern European, and quite standard at that, as we will see below. The inhabitants of the cities around the Mediterranean, by his time, were already quite similar in looks, even if they didn’t speak the same languages, and (as today, in many cases) much different from those that reside say, a hundred miles inside

“unskilled” manual labor (not that there is actually such a thing as unskilled labor) which was once the domain of men, is in the West is in large part performed by immigrants, very many who are present illegally. There is very little impetus to remove them because they serve as ideal workers: they are extremely cautious not to break laws so that they can remain under the radar, they can be paid exploitative wages without complaint, and perhaps most crucially they are forever unable to unionize.

KANTBOT20K, for example, is undeniably artful, despite occasionally flirting with overt racism.

One of those events occurred on October 4, 1982, near the Ukrainian town of Byelokoroviche, when a disc-shaped object apparently hovered over an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) base for an extended period. At one point during the encounter, a number of nuclear missiles suddenly activated—without authorization from Moscow or any action being taken by the missile launch officers—and were preparing to launch.

“The dimensions of the UFO shocked us—as large as a five-story house! Barely-visible lights flew up to the object. The guys [and I] were on our way to dinner when we all saw it! The UFO continued to hover, slowly moving to the left, as if drifting. One officer tried to get closer to it in a car but the UFO flew away. At this time all of the missile launchers malfunctioned. The UFO [also] blocked radio signal reception in the bunker. We heard only complete silence, which we could not understand, because this had never happened before. We were [later] told that the radio equipment was burnt!”

“However, when the object passed over our flight, we started receiving many spurious indications on our console. The object was apparently sending some kind of signals into each missile. Not every missile got checked [out] by the object, but there were several that did. Maybe six, seven, or eight. Maybe all ten got checked, but I don’t think so. As this thing was passing over each missile site, we would start getting erratic indications on that particular missile. After a few seconds, everything reset back to normal. But then the next missile showed spurious indicators so the object had apparently moved on to that one and did the same thing to it. Then on to the next one, and so on. It was as if the object was scanning each missile, one by one."The next day, the logs and tapes were turned in, and personnel were told - "It never happened."

In 1971 Kaczynski wrote an essay containing most of the ideas that later appeared in the manifesto. “In these pages,” it began, “it is argued that continued scientific and technical progress will inevitably result in the extinction of individual liberty.” It was imperative that this juggernaut be stopped, Kaczynski went on. This could not be done by simply “popularizing a certain libertarian philosophy” unless “that philosophy is accompanied by a program of concrete action.”

In 1948 he sent a grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation proposing “the development of a system of procedures for testing the suitability of officer candidates for the navy.”

the OSS director, “called in Harvard psychology professor Henry ‘Harry’ Murray” to devise a system for testing the suitability of applicants to the OSS. Murray and his colleagues “put together an assessment system … [that] tested a recruit’s ability to stand up under pressure, to be a leader, to hold liquor, to lie skillfully, and to read a person’s character by the nature of his clothing. … Murray’s system became a fixture in the OSS.”

The atomic bomb, Murray wrote in a letter to Mumford, “is the logical & predictable result of the course we have been madly pursuing for a hundred years.”

In fact, China had long anticipated that the U.S. would change its China strategy.  In the Report of the 19th NPC, 'struggle' came to be one of the major key-words of the entire document.  This amounted to announcing before the fact China’s political standpoint concerning the attack measures that the United States was readying:  dare to fight, never surrender.

As Bannon said, if the U.S. allows China to achieve its goals in cutting-edge technologies as stated in 'Made in China 2025,' One Belt--One Road, and 5G, then China will first become the high-tech superpower of the information revolution, next an economic superpower, and finally a financial superpower.  Once China achieves these goals, American financial hegemony built on the U.S. dollar system will collapse.  In Bannon’s view, the U.S. has five years or so to stop China’s development, which meant that nothing is more important than launching economic war on China.  If America misses this opportunity, it will be very difficult to right things in the future.  As a result, Bannon not only supported Trump in his attacks on Huawei, but argued that restricting and sanctioning Huawei were not enough; Chinese companies should be kicked out of the U.S.-dominated world economic and financial system. No one likes extreme rhetoric like Bannon’s, but it is precisely statements like his that bring the reality of politics to light.  Politics are not like morality, and must include naked struggles for interests and contests of power, the dominator and the dominated, the ruler and the ruled, all resulting from struggle and competition, the eternal themes of politics.  The reason that Bannon’s or Trump’s words can have such a huge impact on the people is because these words speak to Americans’ fear of China’s development, and it is this fear that has led the Sino-American relationship into a Thucydides trap.  Which means in turn that China must face this ever more urgent trade war, financial war, geopolitical war, and even a military war."

economic privatization, intellectual liberalization, and political democratization, which led to the USSR’s rapid disintegration

One might say that the 16 years between 1993 and 2009, when Clinton and George H. W. Bush were in the White House, were the golden years of relative political détente and close economic cooperation between China and the United States.  And the ten years between 2008, when China held the Olympic games, and 2018, when Trump launched his trade war against China, were the crucial decade in which China and the U.S. continued to cooperate economically and sought to find a new political relationship.  And it was during this crucial decade that the U.S. decided that its policy of engagement with China had been a failure.  An important reason that Trump was elected president was the failure of this policy, which is identified with liberals and with the Democratic party.

The United States took this badly.  Seemingly overnight, China changed from a relatively docile junior partner in American-led globalization into an upstart competitor, daring to challenge the U.S. for market share, even in high-tech fields like cell phones and 5G.  The Chinese presence in Africa, and the development of the One Belt—One Road initiative, represented still more unexpected competition.

The association of conservatism with a strong commitment to epistemic and moral truth, both in general and regarding particular doctrines, is far more contingent and ahistorical than some partisans may expect. In fact, there is a long history in conservative and other rightwing circles of rejecting strong epistemic and moral truths. As highlighted by Leo Strauss in his seminal Natural Right and History, the modern origins of this rightwing rejection of epistemic and moral truths are in the work of Edmund Burke. Burke was staunchly critical of the abstract intellectualism of the French revolutionaries, and their desire to rationalize society. Against abstract and scientific approaches to knowledge and morality, Burke emphasized the need to pay close attention to history, tradition, and the identity of a particular people.

Lower-income earners rate taking care of and treating employees as particularly important;

Wang has written extensively on anti-corruption, national sovereignty, and China’s political system—works that are crucial to help understand where is China headed today. He is known as an advocate of “neo-authoritarianism,” the doctrine holds that political stability is fundamental for economic development, and that democracy and individual rights should come later when the time is appropriate.

The future of conservatism will be: the GOP as a post-leftist revolutionary party.

Nazi Germany had a process called Gleichschaltung—which is sometimes even translated as coordination, and which simply meant forcing everything to be Nazi. There could be no soccer—only Nazi soccer.

The fact that Facebook could be bullied made journalists want to bully Facebook. It literally evolved their perspectives toward hating on Facebook, because Facebook’s enormous power leak emitted a pheromone that made all the haters in the world hard. Journalists, like political pornographers, had no choice but to service these super-needy readers: if one journalist didn’t, the next five would.What we see here is a form of ideological coordination that, oligarchically, gets the same result as monarchical coordination, without any coordinating center. No one ordered all these journalists to start thinking Facebook is bad. Maybe Facebook is bad; but if it wasn’t, the incentive structures of journalism would make it look bad anyway. The bully does not create the victim—the victim creates the bully. Of course, plenty of victims genuinely deserve to be bullied. But deserving is not an incentive.

The strange idea that there can be “no compulsion in religion” makes no sense and is essentially an anti-religious idea. The root lig is the same as in ligature.

The optimal management structure is the accountable monarchy, which is precisely why most successful organizations, large or small, use it.

We also merge all banks, etc, into the Fed; debts to them are debts to the Fed. There are no financial intermediaries at all—just the blinding monetary light of the naked, divine, all-powerful Federal Reserve. Which now owns all productive assets.

In fact it provides more, because there is no “beta,” only “alpha,” in such a market. Confusing beta with alpha is a major cause of the cruise-control fat-cat CEO. In a boom, not even God can tell the difference. How do we create this alpha-only market?

Now the Fed buys $120B of Treasuries a month, setting the 10-year risk-free discount rate below 1%. The price of a capital asset is a function of this number. If the rate is 0, the present value of a constant and permanent revenue stream is infinite. Managing interest rates means manipulating the price of capital. So there is nothing remotely “natural” about the perpetual rise of the stock market and the housing market. Cut off the heroin-steroid drip, and you’ll see what these assets are really “worth.”

This is what “socialism,” in the lives of those now living, is. It is an aristocratic and oligarchic ideology of patronage.

Roman aristocrats—the source of the word patron—measured each others’ status by the number and quality of their clients—the dependents on their aristocratic largess. So did medieval lords with their serfs: the word “lord” is from the Saxon hlaford, which means “giver of bread.” So, of course, did the Southern plantation masters.

What is socialism, as a movement? Socialism is a mass movement of the working class to promote the interests of the working class. If this definition is proper, and if in the real world today there neither is nor can be any movement that matches the definition, there neither is nor can be any such thing as socialism. If there is and can be no such thing as socialism, anyone claiming to be a socialist can only be a fake socialist. Therefore, socialism both is and must be fake.

A series of forts and stations was spread out along the major road systems connecting the regions of the Roman world. The relay points or change stations (stationes) provided horses to dispatch riders and (usually) soldiers as well as vehicles for magistrates or officers of the court. The vehicles were called clabulae, but little is known of them. A diploma, or certificate, issued by the emperor himself was necessary to use the services supplied by the cursus publicus. Abuses of the system existed, for governors and minor appointees used the diplomata to give themselves and their families free transport. Forgeries and stolen diplomata were also used. Pliny the Elder and Trajan write about the necessity of those who wish to send things via the imperial post to keep up-to-date licences.[4]

Multiculturalism grew out of an economy based on outsourcing jobs and importing cheap labor.

A class of people achieve economic benefits like a priesthood, work jobs where they tell others how to think, and promulgate nonsense “values” as a tool to achieve their own ends. Could that possibly be related to the rise of a pseudo-religious political movement that tells people what to think and promulgates transparent nonsense to achieve its own ends? It’s not a coincidence that Barack Obama always used the quintessential corporate phrase “our values.” 

Many members of the elite earnestly believe the most radical tenets of woke thought. They have nothing but contempt for conservatives.  The classic Marxist response is that this doesn’t matter. The ideology of the upper classes grows out of their class position, obscuring that position in a “false consciousness.” The Bolsheviks disregarded all objections because they considered them a stalking horse for class interest. The Nazis pulled the same trick by replacing class with race. Western liberals did the same thing with the “authoritarian personality,” replacing class with “therapy.”

Conservatives should spend more time thinking about what it would mean to build effective 21st-century labor unions or guilds.

The forum was enclosed by a wall made of brick surfaced with stucco and measured 100 meters by 80 meters. A total of 61 rooms, each which was 4 meters by 4 meters, opened up to the forum. The rooms were separated by a wooden partition and were arranged based on geographical origin of the merchant or business, the majority which were based in Africa. There is also a temple in the middle of the forum to Annona Augusta, the Divinity of Imperial Supplies, or Ceres Augusta. This temple served as a guild temple and reflects the role of religion in all aspect of Roman life, including business.

The rod itself would penetrate hundreds of feet into the Earth, destroying any potential hardened bunkers or secret underground sites. More than that, when the rod hits, the explosion would be on par with the magnitude of a ground-penetrating nuclear weapon — but with no fallout.

The first thing the Romans did upon entering a new region, after winning the war that gained them their new territory, was construct roads, bridges and a water supply. That was the quickest way to "Romanize" the new areas.

The most important professions in the modern world may be the most reviled: advertiser, salesperson, lawyer, and financial trader. What these professions have in common is extending useful social interactions far beyond the tribe-sized groups we were evolved to inhabit (most often characterized by the Dunbar number). This commonly involves activities that fly in the face of our tribal moral instincts.

Third, governance: galaxies (the top of the sponsorship tree) form a senate that can upgrade the logic of the Urbit ID system by majority vote. We think Urbit ID will last for quite a long time, but if it ever needs to be updated, the galaxies can vote to approve, reject, or propose changes to the contracts. Code may be law, but ultimately we acknowledge that human judgment can’t be factored out.

Second, decentralization: Urbit IDs are distributed by a sponsorship tree. Each sponsor issues a fixed number of addresses. Since there are lots of sponsors, there are lots of ways to get an Urbit ID — not just one central authority. Once you get one, it’s yours forever. One point that’s useful to understand about sponsors is that while Urbit IDs always need a sponsor, or parent node on the network (primarily for peer discovery), it’s always possible to change sponsors and sponsors can always reject children. This means bad actors can be banned and abusive sponsors can be ignored. We think this strikes a nice balance between accountability and freedom.

“A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.”

The whole pageant of insurrection across the last four centuries, from the Grand Remonstrance to the Arab Spring, returns in the mosaic-chips of the broad panorama of MAGA, Trump and Q.And when we look at all the sources of this pastiche, we see something interesting. All of these insurrections—every one in the above list, certainly including the (original) Tea Party—was a revolt of left against right. But Trump is obviously right against left. Wait…Could it be that you’ve been turning the screwdriver backward? That the screw only comes out counterclockwise? Maybe that’s why you’re just stripping the head!

Over the last four years, we have all watched the development of the classic machinery of the total state—which demands total obedience to official thought in every context. In the last two years this cancer has spread even into the corporate sector—so that you can be politically awake for your entire waking life. And indeed you have to be.But until now, your obedience has always been indirect. You are not asked—or rather, ordered—to support the government. Of course not! You are supporting black lives or the workers of the world. Everyone who isn’t an ally lacks empathy and is a racist or a snob.Your comment has been moderated because it was hurtful to workers and peasants. You were committing the brutal, sociopathic crime of assault by keyboard. Tons of people get arrested for tweets in the UK today—and it’s coming here.But this is always a pretense. Over time, the pretense becomes thinner. Eventually it is stretched so thin that it can no longer stretch; and the brutal reality is clear.

American missionaries bound for Hawaiʻi used the phrases "Owhihe Language" and "Owhyhee language" in Boston prior to their departure in October 1819 and during their five-month voyage to Hawaiʻi.

In my view the Age of Politics is over too, because power is over. One proof is climate change. If we have to give our rulers power to save us from frying a century from now, then I gotta bridge to sell you.

Corruption in elections is the great enemy of freedom.

By the erection of various tribunals, to register the laws, and exercise the judicial power — by indulging the petitions and remonstrances of subjects, until by habit they are regarded as rights — a controul has been established over ministers of state, and the royal councils, which approaches, in some degree, to the spirit of republics.

The inventions in mechanic arts, the discoveries in natural philosophy, navigation, and commerce, and the advancement of civilization and humanity, have occasioned changes in the condition of the world, and the human character, which would have astonished the most refined nations of antiquity.

Since the last general crisis of 1867 many profound changes have taken place. The colossal expansion of the means of transportation and communication — ocean liners, railways, electrical telegraphy, the Suez Canal — has made a real world-market a fact. The former monopoly of England in industry has been challenged by a number of competing industrial countries; infinitely greater and varied fields have been opened in all parts of the world for the investment of surplus European capital, so that it is far more widely distributed and local over-speculation may be more easily overcome. By means of all this, most of the old breeding-grounds of crises and opportunities for their development have been eliminated or strongly reduced. At the same time, competition in the domestic market recedes before the cartels and trusts, while in the foreign market it is restricted by protective tariffs, with which all major industrial countries, England excepted, surround themselves. But these protective tariffs are nothing but preparations for the ultimate general industrial war, which shall decide who has supremacy on the world-market. Thus every factor, which works against a repetition of the old crises, carries within itself the germ of a far more powerful future crisis.

If you include only the clock arithmetics that have a prime number of hours, Langlands conjectured that these two number sequences match up in an astonishingly broad array of circumstances. In other words, given an automorphic form, its energy levels govern the clock sequence of some Diophantine equation, and vice versa. This connection is “weirder than telepathy,” Emerton said. “How these two sides communicate with each other … for me it seems incredible and amazing, even though I have been studying it for over 20 years.”

From the start of a voyage to the last docking at the home port, dead reckoning was a strict regimen that never stopped: day and night, in calm and in storm, its measurement, recording, and diagramming protocols were rigorously followed. Measuring or estimating the speed of a ship was a craft mystery the nature of which is still debated today

The Hajnal line is a border that links Saint Petersburg, Russia and Trieste, Italy. In 1965, John Hajnal discovered it divides Europe into two areas characterized by different levels of nuptiality. To the west of the line, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low and a significant minority of women married late or remained single; to the east of the line and in the Mediterranean and select pockets of Northwestern Europe, early marriage was the norm and high fertility was countered by high mortality.

Self-loathing is a luxury reserved for empire.

The gulf between indexical and non-indexical is sometimes crossed in the exact sciences, through coordinated effort and much in-the-moment situated problem solving. (The Periodic Table of the Elements is a good, ongoing example of this.) However, the inexact sciences (the social or soft sciences) have had much less luck in their attempts to discover the universal truths of social reality, according to this mysterious group that I have not yet named. “Indexicality” is this group’s specialist jargon.

If I build a fireplace for myself, it is natural for me to make a place to put the wood, a corner to sit in, a mantel wide enough to put things on, an opening which lets the fire draw. But, if I design fireplaces for other people—not for myself—then I never have to build a fire in the fireplaces I design. Gradually my ideas become more and more influenced by style, and shape, and crazy notions—my feeling for the simple business of making a fire leaves the fireplace altogether.  So, it is inevitable that as the work of building passes into the hands of specialists, the patterns which they use become more and more banal, more willful, and less anchored in reality.

Christopher Alexander’s work exhibits signs of semantic deconversion. The patterns in A Pattern Language, developed in earlier works, especially A Timeless Way of Building, offer names for picking out aspects of well-functioning beauty in the world. They operate similarly to words. Alexander offers them as hopeful replacements for the available building “patterns,” which are ugly and inane. 

To lose faith in words, to find the words broken in general rather than here and there, is an unpleasant deconversion experience. Those who have undergone this crisis in faith—Heidegger, Korzybski, Wittgenstein, Garfinkel—often attempt to leave a record of it, swallowing the irony that they can only communicate using the now-distrusted words. Wittgenstein’s is the most cogent and least brain-melting; the others, and many like them, adopt new jargons, put all kinds of unfamiliar weight on parts of speech, multiply clauses, troll typographically with brackets and scare quotes, and wrap it all in puns, jokes, and absurdities. It seems to be difficult to go through this transition and remain sane, or retain the ability to articulate things in the usual way, if there is a difference between the two.

Pinnacle ranges are a biome unique to Snaiad. They are characterized by open plains dotted regularly by vast, cathedral-like pinnacles; reef-like collections of symbiotic plants. In such an environment, normal plains-type grazers can live alongside island-like concentrations of isolated, jungle-type microhabitats.

Scans have revealed that the tubes in the worm basket squirm, twist, corkscrew and coil against themselves when Snaiadi “vertebrates” are dreaming, or engaging in intellectually demanding tasks. It is highly possible that the Snaiadi worm basket is an “endocrine brain;” a chemical, as opposed to nerve-impulse-based seat of consciousness. The world-view offered by such a brain must surely be an unconventional one.

Of course, this is not the only problem with nutrition surveys. The more important issue is that answers to food survey questions are treated as quantitative data, and compared to various outcomes (many of which are also determined by surveys), with the assumption that differences in reported food consumption are causally related to health outcomes, while assiduously avoiding to the extent possible any consideration of factors that might confound the purported causal association. But it is important to keep in mind that even though there are many problems with nutritional analyses, they are generally based on survey data at their core.

Surveys are perhaps the only way to get certain information, information about the most important and pressing phenomena, about happiness and suffering in all its forms. These are eggs that most of us need. So even though surveys are bullshit, they are not “turned in” like the unfortunate brother in Woody Allen’s joke, but embraced in a plausibility structure whose maintenance is widespread and in which we are all complicit.

I think it is important to remember that there is no ancestral practice equivalent to surveys. That is to say, there is no ancient human practice or context in which people anonymously tell the pure, innocent truth with language, in response to questioning, with no thought for the motives of the questioner or the effect of their answers. However, in the new, wholly invented ethnomethod of [doing a survey], it is imagined that subjects do tell the innocent truth, comprehending the underlying sense of the question but not answering with any motive or particularity of context. The anonymity of survey takers is given as proof that they feel free to tell the truth, rather than being perceived as a bar to asking them what they might have meant by their responses.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has suggested that racism won't disappear till the idea of whiteness disappears. He's on to something. America is actually very good at assimilating minorities— in the 1800s people saw the Irish, Italians, Slavs, and Jews as separate and inferior races. That seems ludicrous today: we've accepted them as white. But for some reason, whites can't seem to let the process work with blacks.

People playing the harder modes understand them better than you do. Listen rather than lecture.

where the right wing has its own universities, think tanks, newspapers, magazines, TV networks, radio stations, and cash-dispensing billionaires, and controls Congress and most state governments

Be aware of when the system is broken. Are your actions helping to fix it or keep it broken?

Is that pleasant or amusing for them? No, it isn't.

what would strike a Martian observer is that it's the white males who are invariably the nastiest

then, sorry, dude, but you're part of the problem. But hey, it's a solveable problem— you can get better!

People will happily accept that racism is bad and declare Martin Luther King Jr. a hero, while ostentatiously proclaiming that they aren't feminists.

When you feel that defensiveness creep into your own reactions, ask yourself if you're being rational, or just rationalizing. Your brain doesn't want to see you in a bad light, so it uses the above evasions. So think hard about whether you're doing that.

In short, be skeptical: not just about government, but about business, and about the motives of the people who want to get government off their backs.

Censoring the Internet. Hey, you Republicans, what happened to limiting government intrusion?

if the market can't do it the government should.

Economic stabilization: the Fed

Anti-poverty programs have more than halved the level of poverty in this country: from 23.1% in 1959 to 10.5% in 1988.

Protection from abuses of the market. That includes the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the Product Safety Commission, truth in labelling laws, investigations into mail fraud, laws against race and sex discrimination.

Education. Absolutely the most suicidal plank of the conservative platform is its disdain for public education. Throw away Americans' educational levels and you throw away America's future prosperity.

businesses that people don't trust don't grow too big either.

You can't prudently make large business deals, because your contracts can't be enforced.

The solution to most of those problems was government

Didn't we try laissez-faire capitalism, and wasn't it a disaster? Filth in our meat, shantytowns, racism, 'No Irish need apply', company towns, union-busting goons, monopolies, corruption scandals, a punishing business cycle, old folks living in poverty, failing banks, Boss Tweed, gunboat diplomacy.

If you look at what Congress is doing, rather than what it's saying, you'll see who's really in charge. Obstructing pollution and health regulations; defunding product safety laws; opening national parks to logging and mining, or closing them entirely; reducing taxes for the rich; eliminating the capital gains tax; allowing companies to fire striking workers; making it easier for big telecommunications companies to make money; limiting companies' liability for unsafe products

Even Bill Clinton says that "the era of Big Government is over."[3] How did such a looney idea catch on?

For another, there's no evidence that they'll have fewer babies if welfare is reduced. In general government is a lousy instrument for enforcing Puritanism:

For one thing, there's absolutely no evidence that anyone has babies to get more welfare.

Having people work instead of just accept money is an excellent idea; it won't succeed, however, unless there's jobs for them to work at. There just aren't enough jobs for everybody on welfare, and those that exist aren't good enough to replace it.

Here's a basic summary of where their money comes from and where it goes. The most important thing to note is that government aid (here, AFDC plus welfare) covers only about 58% of income. Welfare isn't enough to live on.

how much money goes to the poor. In 1995, however, the total was about $116 billion. That's 8% of a budget of $1519 billion. Now, that's certainly real money, but compare it to the 33% of the budget spent on Social Security and Medicare; the 21% spent on defense; the 15% spent in interest on the national debt, or the 8% spent on handouts to business (farm subsidies, S&L and bank rescues, export/import assistance, tax credits, guaranteed loans, reimbursement for advertising, etc.).

English won't take over the world; localism will lead to a resurgence of local languages, whose inconvenience will be mitigated by technology.

Half the economy will be bit production and consumption-- an amalgam of entertainment, news and business analysis, science, education, religion, and the increasingly abstract support industries that these require.

When the oil runs out, mid-century,

Acceptance of gays and lesbians will be mainstream in a generation

Conservativism will remain, of course; though it will end up implicitly accepting everything that 20C liberalism stood for.

Religion is here to stay; but the fundies, frustrated with their inability to impose theocracy, will lose interest for a generation.

The Republicans will find that they like governing; as a result their anti-government rhetoric will fade away, to be revived only on ceremonial occasions

The natural state of any religion is not zeal but moderate acceptance on the part of the majority.  If no one can force you to conform any more, then the people who didn't take it that seriously anyway end up drifting away from organized religion entirely.

Arguably the pundits got cause and effect backwards.  Science didn't cause the dethronement of religion.  Rather, the dethronement liberated science to question everything.  The One Church could arrest Galileo; the disestablished church could only rant at Newton or Darwin.

Of course, the Amish are canny: they don't require teenagers to follow all their rules until they (voluntarily) join the church, and they don't tell the rest of us how to live. 

Increasing the wealth beats redistributing it.  Some people don't get enough of the pie.  Reslicing it just makes enemies; better to make a bigger pie.

Liberals believe in fairness

many people abandon the Christianity of their childhood without ever achieving an adult understanding of their religion.  They think they've left the religion for rational reasons, when all they've defeated is the Sunday-school simplification of it.

It also stops explaining itself with any eloquence or passion. 

I wonder if Frank Sullivan's theories about firstborns and laterborns fits in here.  Firstborns tend to be more conservative; they easily adopt adult values and feel comfortable in the world as it is.  Laterborns are more rebellious (they have to be to get any attention; they can never outcompete the older brother in maturity).  I suspect that firstborns are going to feel ill at ease with liberalism.

the people we're talking about just don't know anything about what it's like to live in the ghetto, or to be gay-bashed, or to have no health insurance.  They judge liberal sentiments based on their own experience, and of course condemn them... hey, I don't need state assistance, why should Joe Black in downtown Detroit?

They are unable to dismiss it as a fringe phenomenon

Randism seems to be built for billionaires.  It's a transparent reponse to socialism: When people are calling for your blood as exploiters, it's mighty comforting to be told that your place at the top of the heap is heroic and even moral.

As well, people with real power are not likely to have an adversarial relationship with government.

though there is a solid core of Clinton-haters in the country, they are simply a minority, no more than 25% of the electorate, and it turns out to be a bad, bad move to let that 25% dictate policy. 

Back in the '80s, it seemed like the fundies were going to take over everything; and the feeling returned in 1994 when the Repubs took control of Congress.  Yet somehow, in six years, they haven't got around to recriminalizing abortion

And the sixties were widely perceived to have produced social chaos.

for God's sake, these hippies were getting naked, taking drugs, and questioning authority.  Riots and bombings, increased crime, and lawsuits against school prayer showed that things were truly spiralling out of control.  Feminism seemed like an attack on the way things should be.  And above all there was abortion, which was not just perverse but truly evil.

The Democrats are pro-business, but their power base includes unions, disenfranchised minorities, and statist academics-- all of whom are going to want to push the government's nose into business.

If you look at what they actually do, it's pretty much dictated by what big business thinks will be good for it: free trade, except where foreigners can do things better than us; subsidies for business, reducing taxes on the rich, bailing out failed S&Ls, opposing minor impediments to business like universal health care, unions, and regulation.

The Republicans have controlled Congress for six years, but they still seem to think like an aggrieved minority, and do reckless things like impeaching the President or shutting down the government. 

it can be bracing and informative to look for the power relationships in any political situation.  Who benefits from a proposal?  Whose point of view is easily predicted from their financial interests?  Who runs an institution, and how can it go wrong?  These are essential questions that are invaluable for intelligent thinkers of any political point of view.

But the anti-government meme is not about facts, it's about myth.

As a corollary, if you want bipartisan support, don't talk about feelings.  Leftists love to delve into psychology, and worry about the psychological trauma of racism, or how patriarchy is encoded in texts.  This just infuriates consies, who are not simply 'not in touch with their feelings', but take pride in rising above them-- that is, ignoring them.

The hierarchical alpha male worldview fails on its own hardheaded terms.

Thus libertarians support civil liberties, but for very different reasons than liberals: out of a conservative concern with self-reliance and adult  independence from the parent/government, not from a liberal concern with equality and fairness.

This view also does not explain why Republican libertarians ally themselves with the religious right-- doesn't it bother them to have allies that would support government intrusion into personal life?  And shouldn't they feel as close to left-liberals (who share their dedication to personal liberty) as to right-conservatives (who differ with them on this)?

These flip-flops are reminders that many a political battle is nothing but that.

Republicans decried special prosecutors when Reagan was being investigated, loved them when Clinton was under the gun.  Democrats were all for pursuing sexual allegations against Clarence Thomas, but grew suspicious of the tactic when it came to Clinton. Progressives lambasted the Gulf War, but found themselves gunning for a fight in Bosnia.  Republicans found no need to fight there, but were all for projecting our presence in Grenada (pop. 100,000) and Somalia. Republicans lambasted Hillary Clinton for suggesting that children could have legal rights opposed to those of their parents… until Elián González came along.

And it's conservatives, not liberals, who want communities to be able to force the local atheists to pray with them and pay for their religious schools.

Not making distinctions is a sign of insanity.

to craft a “living” Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to “positive rights” — meaning charters of government power.

That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in “climate change.” At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any “green jobs” thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies — that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on “global warming” is debatable.

For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public.

Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class’s solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming.

Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth.

As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself “scientific,” this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in “scientific” terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno’s widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the “F scale” (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned Herbert McCloskey’s Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers’s Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved “scientifically” that conservatives were maladjusted ne’er-do-well ignoramuses. (My class project, titled “Liberalism and Personality,” following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more amusing ones.)

Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Times and National Geographic found much to be imitated in these regimes because they promised energetically to transcend their peoples’ ways and to build “the new man.”

Their domestic management had not improved Americans’ lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people’s backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America.

As the 19th century ended, the educated class’s religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers. Thus began the Progressive Era.

Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges.

being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs.

The heads of the class do live in our big cities’ priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston’s Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate — just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists.

Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people.

When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences “undecided,” “none of the above,” or “tea party,” these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind.

Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job.

These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints.

Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.”

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use.