Why Green Energy Will Utterly Destroy The US Economy

I had an interesting conversation on Amtrak with a retired CIA spook who worked "behind the Iron Curtain", funnelling money and means to anti-Soviet elements.

Of course that was not how he introduced himself - he vaguely identified as some kind of businessperson who had some kind of undefined job at one of the major stakeholders of Paramount Pictures and other firms and also spent a lot of time during the 1980s doing undefined business in a bunch of countries "behind the Iron Curtain" (he loved that phrase). But given that there are CIA insiders in business and media who action the anti-populist goals of organized business, this is what they look like. It was a cincher when he got tremors when I parenthetically said (as part of a much longer and typically Aestu philosophical exposition) that we were reaching the logical limits of the Capitalist system.

Like many Boomers, this guy was utterly solipsistic. He complained about feelings of general discontent with his life and an exaggerated fear of death. He embraced my suggested to "shift the center of your identity outside yourself" by engaging in charity or whatnot, but he could only interpret this to mean to work within his comfort zone and was baffled when I suggested that there were good causes and people worth helping within 50km of where he lived, rather than in some faraway country. Fundamental to the crusade against Communism (or the latter-day "White Woman's Burden" movement) was and is a chauvinistic notion that there can't be injustice or genuinely needy people within the US. This is also why I think Misha Collins should be burned at the stake.

I freely admit that as I am unable to enjoy most of the things that make life worth living for most people, I derive great pleasure from using my strength to intimidate others. The spook repeatedly sought to make references to things, places, people that would be obscure to most Americans (the Trabant, Ceausescu, French Huguenots, Indochina, macular degeneration, etc) and was a bit unsettled that I was two steps ahead of him each time.

In true Men In Black style, he passed me his business card, with only his name and address on it. I responded in kind with my own, which included the pretense of a career, "Proficiency & Study Services". Seeking to regain the high ground, he made a point of chuffing at this. "This," - I made an ambient gesture - "is what I do".

While I was in Gambia, I had visited a gigantic mosque gifted by Qadaffi in his efforts to push pan-Africanism (which met with terminal resistance when he tried to sell oil for currency other than dollars). Years ago, when I took the FSOT, I remember being asked to write an essay about the "Triumph of Diplomacy" that was Qadaffi's "reformation" into the international community. My essay (the substance of which was characteristically cynical, presuming evanescence) won me a high pass. Less than a year later, of course, Qadaffi had tried to get off the dollar and wound up dead.

Such events in the last decade convinced me that banks, corporations and a cabal of right-wing insiders have total control over foreign policy, and that what we see in the media are simply rationalizations for what has already been decided at business roundtables. Indeed I believe this has typically been the case in Anglo-American nations through most of our history - less true of continental powers with stronger republican traditions (by that I mean that final power rests with the bureaucracy appointed by the democracy, rather than presenting the mere facade of a democracy offered by our winner-take-all two-party system).

After the conversation, I felt compelled to research the term "petrodollars" - I had wanted to better understand the macroeconomic issues underscoring oil wars.

As I understood it, American insistence that Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and other states sell oil in dollars created a strong external demand for dollars that allowed the US's debt-based economy to function.

I noticed something else, too. The term had popped into use by a professor at Georgetown at almost the same moment the US went off the gold standard. The light went on inside my head. The US didn't really go off the gold standard. The US just went from backing its money with yellow gold to backing it with black gold. Quite a revelation.

As with many Americans, debt is fundamental to my way of life, but unlike most Americans, I have the insight to plan around macroeconomic issues. That's not to say that I am putting all my cards on the dollar imploding - that would be foolhardy - rather I am structuring the debt so that it is payable should superinflation not occur, but maximizing benefit should it do so. In practice, this means maintaining low *fixed* interest rates on high levels of debt against monetizable assets (house, car, education, career), while keeping total credit lines long enough to maintain options and a good credit rating. If superinflation does not occur, then the debt will gradually be paid off; if it does, then I will simply leverage the monetizable assets to discharge it immediately, then buy more assets from cash-strapped Americans. This is also why I want to purchase more real assets - land, euro and copper (and not gold) - and build additional lives outside the country.

Anyway, reading more about petrodollars improved my understanding of the Ukraine crisis. It was my belief that Putin wanted to grab Ukraine to deny the EU an alternative source of petrol and to appeal to the many frustrated hawks and nationalists in Russia. I still think this is largely the case, but I think European indifference to the whole thing is driven by the fact that the actual target of the invasion is not Europe or Ukraine but the US.

Russia has been frustrated with the dominance of the dollar and Sino-American hegemony of global resources. Putin probably believes that by establishing strong relations with China, India and Iran - and now grabbing Ukraine - he can undermine the dominance of the dollar and make countries deal in rubles. Clearly, this is about as realistic as Stalin claiming that the language of the future would be Russian, but the basic premise - that the strength of the dollar is ultimately built on nothing more than the US's capacity to terrorize third-world nations, and that increasingly, the gig is up - is sound.

So the EU's indifference to the Ukraine crisis now makes sense: it doesn't directly concern them. They think they can win either way: either the US wins (and the reasonably acceptable status quo continues), Russia wins (and they shrug and pay in rubles instead of dollars, which will probably increase the EU's spending power), or both lose - and the Euro takes over the world.

But I said that I would explain how green energy would destroy the American economy. This is why: because green energy will destroy demand for dollars, vacillate the petrodollar system and the entire economy will go out like the Warsaw Pact.

I have gradually become convinced that the choice between fossil fuels and green energy is not really a microeconomic choice between alternatives in cost, quality and externalities. In truth, the choice between fossil fuels and green energy is a choice between two very different ways of life. The difference is as fundamental as the difference between societies based on feudalism, slavery or barter and societies based on freedom and commerce.

The economic changes that will accompany the historically inevitable conversion to green energy will change our political, economic, personal, "and yes, even spiritual", lives in a way few today can realize. Democracy, capitalism, and the very nature and purpose of life will come to mean things as different from today as what those terms meant in ancient Athens 2500 years ago.

I will explore this revelation in greater detail later. For now I am doing correspondence and tying up loose ends with my little African safari.

The Real Difference Between Public & Private Universities

In an era when the credibility level of the public educational system has never been lower, it's a bit rich to hear educators at public universities tut-tut about the relative quality of private education. Private universities are diploma mills, say professors, that print diplomas for anyone wiling to pay - and they're right.

But public universities are, too. Public and private universities both have infinitesimal fail-out rates; many more students quit for lack of funds than for lack of skill. And by all accounts, the higher one goes in the system, the more outrageous grade inflation gets and the lower fail rates go. As the saying goes - Harvard is very hard to get into, and all but impossible to flunk out of.

The difference between public and private universities, then, isn't the quality of education. It's the relative importance of money and other personal characteristics in entrance requirements. Note that I didn't say "academic performance", I said "personal characteristics". There are other forms of social influence than money (although of course money is the pre-eminent one). People make a big deal about affirmative action and Feminism in higher education, but what those phenomena really are, is symptoms of the Balkanization of American society into mutually opposed interest groups.

Now here's where things get interesting:

The strongest correlation with personal success in American society is your parents' wealth. IQ is probably second. Education isn't a pre-eminent variable unless graded along a very compressed bell curve - i.e., the advantage of having a doctorate or JD as compared to having a HS degree.

Therefore, since private colleges are more expensive than public colleges, and the fail rate of both public and private colleges is near-zero, all other things being equal, private colleges should have a stronger correlation with life success, for the reason that attendance correlates directly with the strongest indicator for life success.

If that isn't the case, then that would seem to prove the academics' argument. Or perhaps it merely proves that private colleges are for fools from declining estates who can't leverage their family wealth more effectively. Either way, I'm sure there's some interesting statistical study there for someone more knowledgeable than I.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Microwave Gun

Microwave weapons are no longer a matter of "conspiracy theory"; they are a matter of fact. The Active Denial System, the Marines' new torture toy, is in the public domain. For those who don't know, and are too lazy to Google, it is simply a microwave dish mounted on a Humvee, that causes an intense burning sensation on any who are in its field of fire. Man-portable versions (read: laser guns) are in the works and should hit the field within a decade.

There are those who worry that these new torture toys (which is exactly what they are) herald a new era of techno-tyranny, reminiscient of Orwell's 1984 or THX1134, which portrays a world in which technological and social progress have mostly stagnated, except for technologies designed to control and torment people. This is more or less the world we live in, although people do not realize it; although we have some new tech tools such as iPhones and the Internet (both of which started out as military toys), the greater part of really cutting-edge technology (particularly in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, rocketry and cybernetics) see only military applications.

But in the long run, microwave guns and other new torture toys under development for use by the US Marines and other evildoers won't really make a difference, and here's why:

The microwave gun, like the taser, is at its heart nothing more than a fancy cattle prod. That is it; that is all. If you really want to inflict pain on an individual, the means to do so have always been around. The alleged quality of the microwave gun, that it has the advantage of leaving no scars and can be used at range, and against groups of people, are dubious at best. Realistically, if there is a situation that compels the use of such torture toys, the decisive factor in managing the public's perception will be media coverage and cultural factors.

At best (at worst), the real difference is the technology's capacity to sanitize violence and cruelty, the cost to man's dignity by controlling him only through applying pain. The microwave gun also has the advantage of creating a perceived distance between the inflictor of the pain and the victim (like the creepy Button Assistant experiments at Stanford half a century ago, in which a mock "assistant" was asked to press a button believing it would cause a lethal electric shock to a "test subject" someone in the next room) which serves to lower the threshold for the use of violence against the innocent. The Agony Booth in the classic Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror" (which bears a disturbing resemblance to microwave torture) comes to mind.

The real motives for the creation of the microwave gun isn't that it's safer, more effective, etc. It is its capacity to sanitize violence, and, of course, its hideous expense serves to enrich contractors connected to the Bush family.

It is a cornerstone of Judeo-Christian ideology that evil is ultimately self-defeating, and as overly romantic or divine as the argument is made out to be, it is in fact factually correct. As this one princess once pointed out, the more authority relies on fear and pain to enforce its will, the more it guarantees its eventual demise. Reliance on fear and pain corrodes legitimacy, loyalty and ultimately competence, turns an affiliation inherently regressive. 

Let me explain here what the term "regressive" really means, as an antonym to "progressive". A progressive movement's fundamental nature is to enfranchise more people. A regressive movement's fundamental nature is to enfranchise fewer people. As soon as a movement must resort to fear and violence to achieve its goals, the movement has become regressive.

This is also why gun rights are stupid and self-defeating. Governments don't lose power when they are overthrown by armed citizens, they lose power when they cease to enjoy the faith and confidence of the citizens. The actual goal of successful terrorists is never to actually overthrow a government by force, it is to undermine government credibility.

The dualism between progressive and regressive is one of the major paradigms of history, and it is fundamental to the natural lifecycle of all Human political movements. All political movements begin with a specific social injustice they seek to correct. The injustice gradually expands as reactionaries refuse to deal with the problem, alienating more people. Eventually the reactionaries lose credibility and are overthrown by the revolutionaries. The revolutionaries then become institutionalized and begin implementing their vision. The flaws and contradictions of their vision gradually become apparent, and the institutional revolution must resort to lies, fear and pain to ensure continued obedience. The revolution has now become reactionary in nature, and is inevitably in turn overthrown.

This is a model for the success and decline of basically every ideological movement in history, from Christianity and Buddhism to Communism and Nazism to Feminism and Black rights. When movements become institutionalized, they sow the seeds of their own obsolescence.

Mao Zedong realized this, and his solution was "perpetual revolution". For very obvious reasons, it didn't work out; the result was spiraling violence, social instability, technological regression; ultimately basically everyone got tired of it and it took some of the bloodiest purges in the history of Communism to finally get things to calm down. More than that, revolutionary ardor, like hipster chic, can't help but become banal after a while. Nothing can't become a social norm. Even revolution.

Anyway, the fact of the matter is, the microwave gun won't save Capitalism any more than the crucifix saved Rome, or the Death Star saved Palpatine. History will have the last word; every day more people will watch life get harder, standard of living plummet, lies grow ever more outrageous, society and economy become ever more unworkable, until gradually the US turns into the USSR in 1989: a jaded, dysfunctional mess. Does anyone really think that the Berlin Wall would still be standing if Gorbachev had microwave guns?

So we should love the microwave gun, because it's just a signpost along the road of history, and, someday, when there is dawn after darkness, the good people of this country will have a chance to see that technology put to better use. Which will be the topic of my next rant.

How Feminism Caused The Rise Of Nazism

Some time ago I promised to explain this contention of mine. And today - here you go. I invite the harshest criticism of my thesis. Challenge me on any and all claims.

Feminists offer a lot of different explanations for the origin and purpose of their ideology, all of them wrong. There is, however, a correct answer: Feminism found its origins in World War I.

Proto-Feminists had existed before the war - since the beginning of time, really - but they always were (and in their institutional state today, still are) unnatural perverts and malcontents who hate women, men, children, and society - prime examples being the ominous seamstresses in "A Tale of Two Cities", or historical figures like Jiang Qing or Theodora - crazy women driven by nihilistic rage. It was the turbulence of World War I and the succeeding triumph of the social and moral aberration that is Capitalism that allowed Feminism to finally get a foothold in society.

Something like eight million Western European men died in the Great War. Many times that number were crippled, lost a limb, or had what we would now call very extreme PTSD. Because of this, they could not hold jobs, marry, or be family men.

In the world of the early 20th century, marriage was an institution equated with social legitimacy, for both men and women. To be unmarried was to not be socially respectable. World War I created a massive deficit in the supply of men, and as a result, tens of millions of European women found themselves shut out of respectable society.

There was another serious consequence. Women, like men, really like having sex. In the society of the time, people were expected to be monogamous for life. But due to the shortage of eligible men, tens of millions of European women were also being told they could never have sex. Ever.

Faced with this impossible situation, countless women simply said, "No social respectability, AND no cock? Well... Well... SCREW YOU!!!" And so began the drug- and alcohol- infused Roaring Twenties. Remember that the war disproportionately claimed the lives of those fit to fight: able-bodied, law-abiding members of mainstream society. Those unclaimed, were disproportionately the physically or mentally infirm, the disreputable, the socially abberrant. So due to the shortage of cocks, during the 20s, the same few cocks had to fit many more vaginas. Women, disaffected.with the impossible demands of society, got knocked up by criminals, lowlives and even homeless people.

Drugs are mostly illegal today, but they are also known variables. Weed or meth or cocaine or whatnot are not strange or mysterious to us; we know what they are and what they do, whether we do them or think they should be legal or not. In the 20s, however, drugs flooded into a society completely unaccustomed to them. The result was madness.

Because all the men were dead, crippled or insane, women flooded into the workplace. The rise of American capital and the crushing cost of the war to infrastructure further depressed the economy and reduced the number of available jobs. With the flood of women into a much reduced job market, countless men found themselves unable to get work.

Into this crazy, chaotic world of women coming home knocked up by homeless people, hordes of demented men who knew how to do nothing but kill, unemployed masses and the looming power of the overpowered American economy - with tremendous natural resources, unfettered by the costs of war - churning out vast quantities of goods far more cheaply than Europe could hope to (much like contemporary China) - into this, stepped Adolf Hitler.

The rise of Hitler is widely misunderstood. It had almost nothing to do with anti-Semitism or poverty, conditions that had been widespread in Germany at various times. About a hundred thousand Germans had starved to death during the war and even after - the embargo against Germany was not lifted until 1920.

What ultimately was decisive in Hitler's rise to power was the profound social chaos of 1920s Germany. Britain and France suffered similar problems, largely overlooked in the shadow of Hitler. But they also had far greater resources to deal with them, and had not lost nearly so many men in the war.

We must understand the enormous impact of a specific bias in the historical record here. Sex and how it affects human motivations is fundamental to the human condition, but the people of the time had absolutely no socially appropriate way of describing its impact on them as individuals or as a society. There just wasnt the means to come out and talk about what i just described...so the dialogue was about other things, never mind the 800kg gorilla in the room - sex-driven social chaos.

This is why this thesis of mine has no place in the historical record - proof being that in fact there is very little talk of any kind about the actual social conditions or sex lives of interbellum Westerners.

A key element of the Fascist and Nazi platforms largely overlooked by historians was the demand for traditional gender roles. Both the Fascists and Nazis actively forced women out of the workplace, and back into the home.

It is too easy to conflate this with Nazi atrocities such as the Holocaust and world domination. To be bigoted is to refuse to understand - what must be understood here are the social conditions that drove these policies, and also, that the policies were largely successful in fixing the problems. Men had jobs, women were safe, and children were cared for.

And so it was there was never a Nazi Rosie the Riveter - women never entered the Nazi workforce for these ideological reasons, even though having men and not women work kept those men off the front, to the detriment of the Nazi war effort. The very few exceptions - Leni Riefenstahl and Hanna Reitsch - served to prove the rule; both had grossly abnormal sex lives and seemed to direct their sexual affection onto the regime or Hitler personally.

Anyway, after the war, Europe and America settled on different answers to the question of labor and sex that had been up in the air since the start of the century. Europe developed democratic socialism, defusing the gender conflict by externalizing the cost of unemployment and child-rearing to the state. A decent compromise.

In postwar America, however, tremendous wealth flowed into the economy, from exports to Europe, the strong dollar, and the exploitation of the former colonies. At the same time, automation put huge numbers of men out of work. America became a nation run by the free market like never before, with the control valves - the power of labor and scarcity of capital - removed.

This undermined the man's role of breadwinner and gradually forced women into the workplace to ensure positive cash flow and the ability to compete with the spending power of two-wage households.

Women, however, are physically weaker, less aggressive, and less technically oriented than men. In an atomized, everyone-for-themselves society - and the vacillation of the male breadwinner with the end of monogamy and mass automation - women were forced head-to-head against men.

The founders of the feminist movement were sick people - mostly petty criminals and "alley cats" - mentally ill women too crazy, too histrionic, too out-of-control to survive in mainstream society. Like street thugs, they lived in packs and resolved their differences through catfighting. Many of the mores and institutions of feminism today can be directly traced back to women's prisons. Women's prisons today are still strongholds of lesbianism; women who are inclined to become bona fide lesbians are invariably people basically hostile to civil society.

They were also all white. The feminists were, and are, overwhelmingly white, middle-class Anglo-American, because the reality is that the most fundamental social divisor is not gender, but economic class, followed by race/nationality, followed by physical/mental/emotional strength, and then, possibly, by gender. It is so, and it has always been so. A rich woman has infinitely more power than a poor man, even if the fortune is in her husband's name. A white woman has more power than a black man. A smart, or educated, or strong, or attractive, or pious, or willful woman, has more power and credibility, is more employable, than a man lacking in those qualities.

So feminists claimed to speak for all women. But really they spoke for only a very few: Anglo-American white women from middle-class backgrounds, unwilling to accept the lot in life of a poor or black woman or man. Only a small minority of English-speaming women, and probably not even 1% of women worldwide.

After failed attempts at making waves through terrorist attacks (blowing up shoe stores) and pseudo-Marxism, in the late 60s the feminists hit on the idea of enlisting more white women in the service of their cause by way of a simple stratagem:

They would promise white women the moon.

Feminists voted themselves into academia and systematically spun a web of lies about oppression of women, with one target audience: other, more mainstream, white middle class Anglo-American women who wanted more stuff in life. They created a perverse system of incentives to enrich themselves through the destruction of men, through "family law", harassment/discrimination suits, breast cancer research (a giant moneymaking scam) and various forms of rackeetering involving "consulting services".

Planned Parenthood makes headlines for "killing babies", but the true dark secret of the organization and many like it is that its spending on medical care versus administration and publicity is worse than any other public or private medical service provider. Planned Parenthood doesnt make its money by killing babies, it does it by billing governments and individuals outrageous fees for services then pocketing most of it. This can be easily verified by browsing PP's financial statements, which, per US law, are in the public domain.

Feminism is what it has always been: a sort of cult with a few "in the know" hardcore constituents and a wider cadre of individuals somehow sucked into the movement by way of its sales of moon pie. It is a scam that will come undone as it loses credibility and its inability to construct a viable social model becomes apparent.

I lay the blame for this not on women, but on the evil that is Capitalism, how it forces people and classes into conflict rather than cooperation and degrades man to an economic object rather than a moral being. Feminism is a pillar of capitalism, feeding on the blood money of fiat dollars and Chinese imports, to keep the corrupt and evil system going through patronage.

Feminists like to claim that women have skyrocketing rates of employment in business and law because women are "empowered". In reality, the truth is the opposite. Institutions today prefer to hire women because they are easily controlled. A fundamental difference between men and women is that the male world view is fundamentally cosmic while the female world view is fundamentally social.

Men compare themselves against everything and anything, ("because it is there"), while women define themselves through the social matrix. This is also why women instinctively resort to the insult "creepy" - it is a denial of that which they most prize, social legitimacy. It is also for this reason that there have been only a few female scientists and leaders - and absolutely no female philosophers or explorers. (Ayn Rand and Sacajawea are the exceptions that prove the rule).

And it is for this reason, our Capitalist status quo finds as its most ardent defenders those who build their entire reality around whatever the status quo may be. Feminism, in the final analysis, is properly understood as the ultimate front for Capitalist tyranny.