… we are undergoing cultural decay — ranging from the collapse  of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of  political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds  of reality television and popular entertainment

… how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change,  evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields?

When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s  and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration:   We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads  in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde  in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. …

… One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career.…

… In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and  a half.
…

The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, …

Incomes, stalled since 1973, are now falling, across the board, afflicting all income quintiles, with no end in sight. Japan has been in decline for over a decade. There is no reason to think that this decline will end until its causes are remedied – and if never remedied, we may well wind up like so many vanished civilizations before us.

Since the decline effects all of society, every aspect of society, we have the luxury of looking of looking for causes where the light is best.

Let us look at three well studied instances of decline:   the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, Wikipedia, and Washington Mutual.  I did not select these cases because they all support my thesis, but because they are conspicuous and good information is available for what went wrong.

1. The space Shuttle Explosion

   Low ranking engineers explained to their superiors in detail that the Challenger would explode if launched in cold weather and explained in detail how and why it would explode, but the high ranking “engineers” neither understood nor believed.

   Chairman Rogers: Well, let’s read it. “Loss of mission” – this is actual loss.

   “Failure effects summary: Actual loss. Loss of mission, vehicle and crew due to metal erosion, burn-through, and probable case burst, resulting in fire and deflagration.”

   …
   Mr. Mulloy: But about halfway through, after we had looked at all of the data, the conclusion and recommendation charts that Mr. Lundhad prepared came in and the logic for his recommendation, which did not specifically address don’t launch 51-L, what itsaid was that, within our experience base we should not operate any solid rocket motor at any temperature colder than we have previously operated one, which was 51-C.

   Chairman Rogers: Didn’t you take that to be a negative recommendation?

   Mr. Mulloy: Yes, sir. That was an engineering conclusion, which I found this conclusion without basis and I challenged its logic.

   Mulloy then repeats over and over again that he was not able to understand the explanation of why the shuttle was going to blow up, from which he concluded not that he was an idiot, but the engineers telling him it was going to blow up were idiots.

   “And this was a rather surprising conclusion, based upon data that didn’t seem to hang together, and so I challenged that.”

   Further, in describing how it did blow, he reveals he still does not understand the explanation of how it did blow up. In other words, he is an idiot, and, being too stupid to understand why the space shuttle was going to explode, and not wanting to believe it was going to explode, insisted on it being launched. Mulloy not only did not understand why the space shuttle was going to explode, but after it exploded, and the cause of the explosion had been found, studied, and explained again step by step, still did not understand how it exploded.

   So how is it that Mr Mulloy, and people like him, who do not know $#!% shit from beans, are in charge of people who knew and understood stuff?

2. Wikipedia

   Wikipedia has less information, and less useful information, than it used to.  This reflects its policy of presenting the official view on everything.  Where there is no official view, facts tend to get deleted as unsupported, or not encyclopedic, or some such.  Truth and knowledge is supposedly what comes from universities and the mainstream media.  If not in the universities or the mainstream media, is supposedly not truth. This leads to particularly bitter contention in political fields like climate science, evolutionary psychology, race, and Darwinism, but causes widespread damage in many non political fields, for example on computer science, since the vast majority of computer science knowledge is not academic.

   Contributors are instructed:  “Wikipedia is an encyclopedic reference, not an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook. Wikipedia articles should not read like … instruction manuals. ”

   When I look something up related to computer science, it is normally because I am working on a project, and need to know how to do something, so I need something that reads like an instruction manual, guidebook, or textbook.  Further, anyone who knows computer science stuff is usually an engineer, so is apt to write like a textbook or instruction manual.  The effect and application of the not-a-manual rule is to prohibit contributions from people who actually do stuff, which contributions they intend to share with other people who actually do stuff, in favor of contributions by people who do not do stuff, and are incapable of doing stuff – which is to say, in favor of academic knowledge.

3. Washington Mutual

   Washington Mutual was able to take over many other better run banks, not because shareholders had confidence in Washington Mutual, but because regulators had confidence in Washington Mutual willingness to enthusiastically hurl vast amounts of money in the general direction of desired voting blocks. Kerry Killinger, CEO of Washington Mutual, became rich and powerful in substantial part through his cozy relationship with left wing activist organizations such as Acorn, which enabled him to control regulators as much as it reflected the fact that regulators controlled him.

   Washington Mutual took out ads condemning themselves for racism, and was given a bunch of other, more soberly run banks, to loot and destroy.

   Banks were told by regulators: “Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor … In reviewing past credit problems,  lenders should be willing to consider extenuating circumstance”

   If a bank prevented people with no credit history from borrowing, this was a practice with “disparate impact” – which is “Raaaacism”. “Disparate impact” means you cannot apply standards at which non Asian minorities fail disproportionately – such as having documented income, a past history of paying their bills, and so on and so forth.

   When your regulator tells you that you “should” make easy money loans, you will make easy money loans, or suffer dire punishment.  And indeed, banks that did not make easy money loans did suffer dire punishment – they got taken over by Washington Mutual and its merry band of idiots.

   It is clear that Kerry Killinger and Angelo Mozilo sincerely believed that lending unemployed no-hablo-english wetbacks money to buy million dollar houses no money down was a good idea. They conned everyone of gigantic amounts of money, but their biggest victims were themselves and their banks.

   They did not pretend to believe in order to become rich and powerful, rather the regulatory apparatus efficiently selected stupid people who sincerely believed stupid things to become rich and powerful. If their beliefs had been feigned and cynical, a lot more of the disappeared money would have stuck to them.

   That Kerry Killinger was quite genuinely stupid was also demonstrated by the inability of Countrywide and Washington Mutual to manage their paperwork. Many of the titles that passed through their hands now have no paper trail showing who is the rightful owner, which suggests that bank was for the most part staffed by people whose IQ was below 105.

   Because political correctness requires stupid beliefs, selection for people who are sincerely politically correct, such as Kerry Killinger, selects stupid people, who in turn hire and promote other stupid people, so that no one in his bank could do a banker’s paperwork.

This is consistent with Codevilla’s analysis:  That that we are ruled by a ruling elite, credentialed but not educated by the very best universities, that is increasing narrow, ignorant, out of touch, and stupid!

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. 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. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters – speaking the “in” language – serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. 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. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. …

…regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative “nonprofit” and “philanthropic” sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government.…

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity – being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs.…

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. … But didn’t our [ruling elite] go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn’t most of them get good grades?  … getting into America’s “top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

We have statistical evidence that our ruling elite selects people who fit in at the expense of ability – that people who are excessively able in unappreciated ways do not fit in.

Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”

all other things being equal, being an officer in the ROTC is likely to get you excluded from a prestigious university – any fool can see that political correctness counts more than ability or experience – whether in college admissions, or Obama’s picks for the federal reserve, or the post of CEO of HP, people are chosen primarily for their theology not their ability.

Codevilla continues:

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. 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 amounts to indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting unequivocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

This means that there really is no private enterprise any more. Everything is to a greater or lesser extent run by the ruling elite – and the ruling elite is not very bright, and is steadily getting dumber.

If someone is important and under pressure to perform (perhaps the board, being composed of major shareholders, wants the CEO to make a profit and will fire him if he does not) he will surround himself with the smartest people he can get – the Google policy. But if he is under no pressure to perform, he will prefer that those lower in status than him are not quite as bright as he is, other wise he is apt to find himself in the uncomfortable position of Mr Mulloy, wherein a low status person explains why he is wrong about something, and he fails to understand the explanation. Since our ruling elite exclusively works in fields where there is no pressure to perform it naturally finds itself more comfortable inducting new members of the ruling elite that are dumber than the existing members, so that with each generation, our ruling elite gets stupider and stupider. Once upon a time, the ruling elite was kept smart by the continual infusion of smart people from business, and was prevented from declining by an hereditary elite, but now, completely self enclosed, and under no pressure to perform, a purported meritocracy by slow degrees becomes an idiocracy.

I predict that wherever membership of the government bureaucracy is controlled by some meritocratic test, the test will be subverted to that it no longer has much to do with intelligence, because bureaucrats do not much like smart people.

Observe that even at Google, though they get the smartest engineers that they can, they have a very different policy for other parts of the company. Those that might have to deal with the state, are selected to fit in, and if you are dangerously smart, you are unlikely to fit in.

We are in decay because the our ruling elite, including our top scientists (who are not really scientists, but rather a priesthood who preach pseudo scientific rationales for whatever our rulers desire to do), are steadily getting dumber and dumber.

No way Jose.  Democracy is doomed, or the country is doomed, or, quite likely, both.Both in Europe and America we are seeing the collapse of private employment – the much prophesied death of the host under the impact of the parasite is finally unfolding:   People just are not getting into private jobs, and an ever diminishing proportion of private jobs are genuinely private,  genuinely producing stuff that has a price and a market.  Instead, it is stuff like “green jobs”.

Of course, this means an ever diminishing number of voters that will vote for the survival of the host, ever diminishing prestige and influence for the elite members of the host, and ever increasing prestige and influence for elite members of the parasite.

The parasite cannot restrain itself to match the diminished capability of the host to support it.  As things fall apart, the parasite will launch austerity measures to shrink its demands, but the austerity measures will shrink the parasite far more slowly than the host shrinks.   Russian agriculture still has not recovered from the liquidation of the kulaks.   Consider, for example, schooling.  New York spends $17 713 per student per year, which fails to pass the smell test.  It is past time for government to simply get out of the schooling business and let parents educate their children or not.  That would be a cut.  “Austerity” is never cuts, but merely reckless, extravagant, and self indulgent waste growing less quickly than the political elite would prefer.  What we need is cuts, not “austerity”.  Can you imagine how few votes a candidate who proposed actual cuts would receive?

The BLS  tells us that the normal July youth labor force participation rate before 1989 was 81 to 86% (always looking at July figures, since young people tend to be at school least in July)

Supposedly youth unemployment is a mere 18%, but since young people tend to be ineligible for unemployment relief, they do not necessarily register with the BLS, so a more realistic measure is the proportion presently employed, 51.4%, to the proportion looking for work or employed in good times, 84% in a typical july.

As everything goes to hell in a handbasket, the regime becomes more and more unpopular, but sound policies that would put everything right also become more unpopular – a vicious cycle we have regularly seen in Latin America which cannot be cured.  Only the employed and productive vote for measures that would permit productive employment.

To actually cut government spending down to what the nation can afford, you examine each government activity, and compare it with private sector businesses that do the same thing or a plausible substitute.  If the government activity is costing enormously more, as for example education, the government then abandons that activity.   As a general rule, the more unthinkable it is for the government to abandon some field of activity, the more outrageously extravagant and wasteful the government’s activities in that field are.  So if you want to cut the government back, the first place to look is at those things that are unthinkable to cut back.

The Congo was the poster child for the dreadful evils of colonialism.  We were supposed to look at how cruelly the Belgians treat the poor natives, look at how many natives colonialism has murdered to maintain its savage rule.  In 1961, it got independence.  The whites fled rape and murder.  Two or three weeks after independence, the Congo became a savage hell hole, and has remained that way ever since, Zimbabwe in fast forward.  The whites fled the Congo faster than they have fled Zimbabwe, so the descent into savagery was faster.  Yet now, the outcome of decolonization has been forgotten, and the Congo is back to being the poster child of the evils of colonialism, and we repeat the same disaster over and over again:  Haiti foreshadowed the Congo, the Congo foreshadowed Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Until the Soviets collapsed, 99% of Academia enthusiastically agreed that the Soviet Union’s command economy was growing much faster than the US’s old fashioned semi market economy, and the remaining 1% agreed that it was growing at least as fast – or at least that is what they said when anyone was listening. Since the general consensus outside of Academia was that the Soviet Union was a festering economic basket case whose central plan existed only on paper, collapsing into disorderly pillage in actual practice, one wonders what happened to any academic inclined to say that the Soviet Union was a festering economic basket case, whose plans and statistics were utterly disconnected from the chaotic and destructive reality.

Before 1972, every historian of science agreed that Darwin’s big idea was natural selection, and those of them that addressed the issue of Lamarck and common descent agreed that Lamarck proposed common descent.

Natural selection, however tends to lead to disturbing thoughts and disturbing words, for example “Once the superiority of races with a prevailing aversion to incest had been established by their survival …” Superior races! Oh the horror, the horror. Natural selection suggests endangered species have it coming to them, that women are not naturally equal to men, that genocide is, if regrettable, nonetheless natural and in the long run frequently inevitable, and lots of similarly horrifying stuff like that, and I have left out the really shocking stuff to avoid offending the readers too much. So it was progressively de-emphasized to students in the textbooks. But if you de-emphasize natural selection, this leaves a mysterious gap. What was Darwin famous for?

So in 1972, history was corrected, Winston Smith style. Darwin got common descent to fill the gap left by the removal of natural selection, just as Winston Smith invented comrade Ogilvy to replace the vaporized unperson Comrade Withers, and common descent was taken away from Lamarck. The textbook “Biology today” page 638

… in the Origin of Species. The central claim of that book can be fairly simply stated. According to the Darwinian theory, any natural group of similar species-all the mammal species, for instance-owe their common mammalian characteristics to a common descent from a single ancestral mammalian species.

And has for Lamarck, he got the shaft. Page 641

Lamarck’s theory is not a hypothesis of common descent, which ascribes the common characteristics of a particular species to their common descent from a single species. … He claims that … although all mammals are descended from reptiles, they are not descended from the same reptiles

Somehow, after 1972, no one in Academia was able to mention that before 1972 everyone thought that Lamarckism is the doctrine “that all plants and animals are descended from a common primitive form of life.” (Century Cyclopedia)

Before 1972
After 1972

Just as one wonders what happened to academics before 1980 who were inclined to doubt the great success of central planning, one wonders what happens to academics after 1972 who remember that before 1972, the history of science was different.

We have always been at war with Eastasia

Someone in Academia received an order like that given to Comrade Winston Smith, and all of Academia fell into line, and remains in line to this day, a thousand megaphones attached to one microphone.

The reporting of Big Brother’s Order for the Day in The Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.

…

… Withers, however, was already an unperson. He did not exist: he had never existed. …

… To-day he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.

At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.

But has everything goes to hell in a handbasket, it will all be blamed on free markets, despite what Brutally Honest calls “change some continue to believe in”.

The fundamental political strategy is that the more moochers, the more votes there will be for mooching.

In 1999, people warned that CRA loans, affirmative action loans, racial quota loans, began to endanger the financial system

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people …

…These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, …

… “If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

1977 was the start of turning the finance industry into a political slush fund, and with each regulatory  intervention, the amount of money at risk increased  exponentially

How many CRA loans, affirmative actions loans, racial quota loans, were there?

Fortunately the data for new house loans by race is available, and from this data we can calculate that CRA loans, affirmative action loans, racial quota loans, for new house purchases, in the period 2000 to 2007 were at least  six hundred and thirteen billion dollars, which is pretty close to the total US bailout cost.

613 billion dollars.

So this was an affirmative action financial crisis, and we are for the most part bailing out financial institutions that were forced to lend to unqualified borrowers by race, and perhaps also bailing out the culture of corruption that results from rating mortgage securities AAA that were generated in the course of signing up people to vote democrat with a bottle of cheap whiskey and a million dollar mortgage – because rating them differently would be racist, much as Princeton was corrupted because when it graduated Obama’s wife, fearing that it would have been racist had it failed to pass her thesis merely because it was a barely literate rant against racism.  We are required to pretend Obama’s wife is educated, and we are required to pretend that these borrowers are credit worthy.  It corrupts the universities, and it corrupts the financiers.

There was a massive increase in the value of loans to black and hispanic borrowers.  To the extent that these loans grew much faster than loans to white people, this most likely represents affirmative action.  This is a conservative estimate, since affirmative action lending has been enforced by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) since 1977.  What was new in 1999 was not affirmative action lending, it was affirmative aciton lending on a scale that threatened the financial system.

In 1999, mortgages to black and hispanic new house borrowers were 10.4% of mortgages to white new house borrowers.

In 2006, mortgages to black and hispanic new house borrowers were 36.5% of mortgages to white new house borrowers.

I calculate what new home mortgages would have been had new home mortgages to black and hispanics remained 10.4% of new home mortgages to whites.

The excess, the difference between hypothetical mortgages and actual mortgages, is a conservative estimate of CRA loans, affirmative action loans, racial quota loans.

In this table, the first column is new housing loans to whites, the second column is new housing loans to blacks and hispanics. Estimated CRA loans are the difference between the actual and hypothetical loans, and at the bottom I total numbers.

The numbers for new house mortgages in billions of dollars come the government racial quota monitoring website.  The number for affirmative action loans is my estimate, calculated as new house mortgages to blacks and hispanics minus 10.4% of white new house mortgages

The numbers for new house mortgages in billions of dollars come the government racial quota monitoring website.  The value for affirmative action loans is my estimate, calculated as new house mortgages to
blacks and hispanics minus 10.4% of white new house mortgages

Home Purchase Mortgages in Billions of dollars

Unfortunately, no racial breakdown on default rate is available, but the Hispanics I saw buying houses in Sunnyvale in 2005 and 2006, looking at them from twenty paces, you could tell in two heartbeats that the chances of them making payments was very poor indeed.

Implicit government guarantees produce a vast river of easy credit to the too-big-to-fail beneficiary of that guarantee, and inevitably politicians are tempted to direct that river to political voting blocks – sometimes political voting blocks that are unlikely to repay the money.

It is a fundamental moral hazard problem in government regulation and intervention, which cannot be regulated away.  Instead of regulating, the beneficiaries of these guarantees must be shrunk – regulated to become small enough to fail, instead of regulated to benevolently hand out money to the politically favored.  Instead of sending that mighty river of money in the direction of desirable voting blocks, politicians must shrink it – which, like dieting, is hard for them to do.

The financial crisis in America was one of affirmative action and the community reinvestment act, of Black and Hispanic deadbeats robbing honest hardworking whites, but thinking of it in those terms of the particular voting blocks is not useful, will not get us to a financial system that moves savings from honest thrifty savers to honest hard working investors who can put the money to profitable use.  Such thinking, thinking in terms of voting blocks, will at best merely change the skin color of the deadbeats robbing the honest folk.  The financial crisis in the rest of the world had different beneficiaries with diverse skin colors, but the common factor was political favor sending funds to political voting blocks, rather than to people able to put the money to profitable use.  It is more useful to think in terms of moral hazard – that politicians cannot regulate, for they have perverse and dangerous incentives, and therefore corrupt financiers.

That politicians dispatched our money to cat eating wetbacks should enrage us, but we should be enraged at the politicians, rather than at migrants looking for work who have difficulty affording meat from a butcher, migrants who are prohibited from honest work by those politicians, and then offered welfare and a million dollar mortgage no money down by the same politicians.  The politicians corrupted Hispanics and financiers alike.

The courts have appointed Natalie Malonis to supposedly represent her and two other polygamist “children”, which lawyer has been conducting trial by media against her supposed client:

“I believe that [Teresa Jeffs] was avoiding service because of coercion and improper influence from Willie Jessop.”

…

“There is no question I am absolutely looking out for her, … What’s happening is really a shame because people who purport to care about her are really doing her a disservice.”

…

“I’m trying to help her. It’s really not in any child’s interest to waive their attorney-client privilege. I’m not going to fight with her in the media.”

…

“And one of the big problems in this case is that the victims really don`t consider themselves victims so they`re not — it`s difficult to help them.”

This kind of public @#$% would be improper even if Malonis was a prosecutor instead of supposedly a defender. If a lawyer’s client starts fighting her in the media, she is not allowed to fight back in the media.

This phenomenon is the inverse of Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm Syndrome is that we are apt to love those who control us by fear and murder. Hatred of softly influential minorities, such as anti Americanism and hatred of overseas Chinese in various third world countries, is that we are apt to hate those whose intellectual creativity entertains or inspires us.

Amy Chua, author of the book “World on Fire”, which examines the problem of softly influential groups, under the demonizing and politically correct name “Dominant Minorities”, is a pretty good example of a self hating Filipino Chinese. It would seem that the Chinese sinned by being industrious and successful, and therefore the system that allowed them to succeed is supposedly to blame for bringing repression upon them in the Philippines, and massacre upon them in Indonesia.

There are a great many diverse newly affluent ethnic groups, among them the overseas Chinese of various Asian countries. An ethnic group succeeds, perhaps because of genetic superiority, perhaps because of a culture that encourages education, thrift and hard work, and so people hate that ethnic group – hate Amy’s ethnic group among others. Her analysis of the problem is absolutely accurate and spot on, though of course her implied solution – a political elite that imposes equality on all the non elite – has failed disastrously. She sees, and explains in detail, that her ethnic group is in the same hole as the Jews, and as a great many other similar groups, correctly analyzing the problem that afflicts overseas Chinese and Jews and many other groups as a single problem with many groups and many examples. The flaw in her analysis is the self hating and politically correct phrase “dominant minority”.

The groups she is talking about are not dominant, rather they possess soft power. If Americans wandered around shooting people to force obedience, everyone would love them, but Americans are hated because they persuade people to drink coca cola and watch terminator movies.

Similarly Hitler, a failed artist, was primarily enraged by the influence of Jewish plays and art. When people complain that America rules the world, they really complaining that they watch American movies, and thus people are playing attention to Americans instead of themselves.

The correct description of the problem is “non coercive influence”, and “softly influential group” Non coercive influence, soft power, is what a softly influential group possesses, and it makes that group hated. Dominant minorities are often loved, and are never hated. The problem, rather is hatred of softly influential groups.

I observe that since the surge, since Americans flattened half of Fallujah, we have at last seen large numbers of Arabs clerics, all of them Iraqis, most of them not very far from Fallujah, preaching genuinely moderate Islam, and large numbers of Arab intellectuals, a great many of them Iraqis, arguing for moderate and realistic behavior by Arabs and Arab countries, accurately perceiving the faults of Islam and the Arabs. The American attempts to directly build a state were all miserable failures, and continue to be so, but when the Americans showed persistence in slaying their enemies, there was considerably greater willingness to examine American ideas and beliefs honestly and thoughtfully. Arab intellectuals and clerics changed their position, and we now increasingly hear from Arabs that Arabs have problems because their society has something wrong with it, not because the outsiders are holding them down. Seeing that Americans would fight and not yield made in much easier for Arabs to understand and agree with the Americans, though I think Americans could have made the same point at considerably less cost to themselves.

The critical variable is hard power, and hard power is the costs you can inflict on others. If a softly influential minority exercises sufficient hard power – that is to say, hurts enough people and destroys enough wealth, or demonstrates willingness and ability to do so – irrational hostility diminishes among those people who are potentially vulnerable to being hurt, and the softly influential group becomes able to make its case intellectually, able to win hearts and minds through persuasion and good deeds. The good deeds are only appreciated from people who can and do also do bad deeds.

Not only is the group less hated, but it less apt to hate themselves. Not so very long ago Americans were having orgasms of guilt because a guard at Gitmo tortured a poor helpless terrorist by pissing a short distance upwind of a Koran. Today Americans have flattened half of Fallujah and no one gets indignant.

When Americans knocked down a few dozen houses in Fallujah and killed a few people, there was a big outcry about the Fallujah massacre, just as there was about the Jenin massacre when Jews knocked down a few houses and killed a few people.

But when Americans came back a couple of years later and proceed the flatten half of Fallujah and kill a great big pile of people, not only are Fallujans fine with that, but more importantly, Americans are fine with that. If you google, you will still get five times more hits on Jenin massacre than on Fallujah massacre, and most, probably all of the hits for Fallujah massacre are for much smaller events from long ago where Americans were doing very little damage to people or property. When Americans rolled their sleeves up and really started killing people and breaking things in vast numbers, then there was no more talk of “Fallujah massacre” – not from Arabs, not from Europeans, and not from Americans.

The solution to the problem that Amy so accurately describes is the Fallujah solution, the opposite of the solution she inaccurately prescribes. The answer to irrational hatred is to hurt people and break things. Since the hatred is irrational, crazy, and self destructive, a sufficiently hurtful and destructive response to hatred snaps people out of their madness, and creates an environment where communication and good deeds can work, as is happening in Fallujah and Anbar province.

Of course, that strategy can also lead to holy war, if people incorrectly evaluate other people’s legitimate grievances as irrational, crazy, and self destructive, but what we are seeing in Iraq is the quenching of holy war, with, to my great surprise, a massive outbreak of moderate Islam, We are not seeing any signs of a functional democracy or national unity, which was supposed to be the mechanism that would supposedly produce moderate Islam, but we are seeing moderate Islam despite, or perhaps because of, the severe disfunction of the institutions that were supposed to encourage it.

How much hard power is required? Small doses are counter productive, merely giving people superficially rational excuses for their irrational hatred. Gitmo produced the insane hysteria about torturing a prisoner by pissing upwind of a Koran, making the problem worse, not better. The Fallujah sized dose, however, has had dramatic good effects in Fallujah and noticeable good effect in America, winning the hearts and minds not only of Fallujans, but of Americans.

Instead of an ID card that tells any purported authority everything about you, an ID smart card that verifies what authority the authority actually possesses, and reveals the minimum information that that authority is authorized to know, for example that you are over 18, to be read by cell phone with nfc cardreader.

“If Americans said they were no longer interested in Europe, it would be a catastrophe here.”

“You think?” Sean said.

“Yes,” David said, “because Europe can’t stop anything.”

The military weakness and incapacity of Europe in Serbia startled the Serbs, even more than America’s capacity stunned them. Since then, Europe’s martial weakness has been on display in one humiliating debacle after another. Recall Britain’s startling display of fear, weakness, cowardice, and dhimmitude in the Persian gulf.

All that wealth, and no capacity to defend it. The vultures are circling.

For a state to exist, it has to be able to destroy those that oppose it, or might oppose it, to inflict famine and ruin on hostile populations, has to be able burn the crops and flatten the cities, after the manner of General Sherman, and has to have confident belief, a belief shared by officers and men, that it is right to do so.

To do this, it needs some source of cohesion. It cannot provide its own cohesion. Pay and threats will not work to motivate soldiers, for when things go bad, when your soldiers most need motivation, these motivations cannot function, for nothing will motivate people impose the discipline.

The usual source or cohesion is ethnic identity: the nation state. Other sources of cohesion are religion, as for example the various theocratic states, such as the caliphate, and ideology, as for example the American revolution and the various communist coups.

So if a state’s cohesion came from ethnicity, then when it goes multicultural, then its soldiers and police are fighting for pay and pension and nothing more, and then it is are doomed. Similarly, when the last shreds of liberty are crushed out in the US, when the second amendment is utterly gone, and little left of the first amendment, US troops will be fighting for pay and pension and nothing more and then the US will be doomed.

Global Guerrilas reports that Mexico and Nigeria are falling, as bandits, revolutionaries, and suchlike take possession of the Mexican drug trade, and bandits, revolutionaries, Islamists, and suchlike take possession of Nigeria’s oil. But there is a lot more available for the stealing in Europe.

If the Nigerian or Mexican government goes, the Pentagon should secure the oil, but will not be able to do so without will and belief that it is right to do so. That would require an ideology that it reasonable to protect the private property rights of American and allied businessmen – which argument will not fly when they threw them to the wolves long ago, when long ago they allowed the oil and the oil rigs to be stolen by governments that are now failing.