Michael Anton to Return to a Trump Administration Job

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“Donald Trump announced Sunday his selection of Michael Anton to be the director of policy planning at the State Department under the prospective secretary, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Anton held a position on the National Security Council during Trump’s first administration, and was also appointed by the president to the National Board for Education Sciences.”

 

Anton to Lead State Department Policy Planning

Anton famously wrote the “Flight 93” essay during Donald Trump’s 2016 run claiming that despite any personal shortcomings Republicans needed to embrace Donald Trump to avoid the disaster that a Hillary Clinton extension to the Obama presidency would entail.  And in retrospect he was very right.

On a personal not Anton once quoted from an OCF post which I found very surprising.  The power of the internet.

Well, best of luck to Anton in his new position.  I hope he remembers the hopes and fears of people who read his words and now hope that Donald Trump’s new administration begins to apply the philosophy that he has avowed and make America great again.  But at the very least they should strive to make America sane again.

That is the Takeaway

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Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny.  What do they have in common?  They’re the two luckiest white men in America.  Somehow both of them managed to get an honest jury in the face of relentless anti-white propaganda and incredibly hostile media coverage.

So, what is the takeaway from what these men went through?  I think the important point is the miraculous nature of their acquittals.  And the fact that clearly innocent men attempting to defend themselves and the public at large from rioters and lunatics that the police have been forced to ignore were brought up on murder charges proves that we have been thrown to the wolves by the governments in the blue jurisdictions.

The truth of the matter is the police in New York City and Kenosha should have been the ones to stop rioters and lunatics from turning the streets of their cities into war zones.  New York City subway cars are now as dangerous to innocent people as the streets of Beirut.  Any day of the week you can see footage of gangs of marauding urban thugs victimizing law-abiding people on YouTube, X or TikTok.  And it’s the thugs themselves who put the video on-line.  They’re proud of it!

After four years of this madness, I’m beginning to hear of voters in blue jurisdictions voting out mayors and prosecutors who are responsible for the carnage.  Even in Los Angeles and San Francisco this is happening.  And a state-wide question in California succeeded in cancelling the recent law that said that shop lifting $900 or less of merchandise was essentially unpunishable.

Could this signify a restoration of law and order in these cities?  I’m going to say no.  The baby steps currently taken will not convince the police that the government has their back and will demand that the crime be throttled back to pre-George Floyd era standards.  That would take a consensus among city leaders that doesn’t exist and maybe never will exist again.  At least not under the present party coalition.  What it would take would be something along the lines of the Trump working class coalition coming into power in the cities.  But it would need to be large and durable enough to weather the blowback that would occur when the prisons would begin to fill up again with the large criminal element among the urban underclass.  There would be video that people would say looked like the George Floyd arrest.  And unless the coalition could stomach that kind of pressure nothing would improve.

No, I don’t think we should expect that kind of turnaround, maybe ever.  The real lesson is that cities and other areas that want to remain livable cannot allow law enforcement to be turned into a chew toy for race hustlers and the media.  They need to be defended against any amount of pressure by their mayors and governors.  And they must be willing to go toe to toe with the Justice Department and the FBI if they come meddling into local jurisdiction.

Florida has seemed to be working in that direction.  I’m sure other jurisdictions are doing the same.  For regular citizens, use whatever evidence you can to live where the crime doesn’t happen.  That is the takeaway.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 09DEC2024 – Machine Efficiency vs Human Boredom

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Valid points. However, social credit is not working for the Chinese very well. Imagine a time when you cannot start your car because you offended someone on social media. When AI doesn’t like your choice in blogs, music and political speech. There are oh, so many ways to silently pressure you to conform. Cranky internet speeds, debit card refusals even though you know you have money in the bank. AI will make a wonderful servant, but an awful master.

Yes, people need work, something to do. I agree that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. I can get into trouble if idle too long. I tend to think “what if I do this?”. Like the time I took a 4 bore rifle and changed out the solid slugs for explosive dumdums when the weather had been gray and gloomy for two weeks.

Or the time the blasting boss at a local quarry was on vacation. Then his second came down with something nasty but temporary. That left the rookie in charge of blasting. The owner, whom I know, was worried about this youngster being in charge of that much BOOM, so I said I would “help” him. It was glorious from my prospective and we shifted twice the rock tonnage and kept the quarry on schedule. However, the seismographs at the major university about 50 miles away noticed the sudden change in activity, triangulated it, and the ATF visited. The owner said to please go back to the old method. So we did until the blasting master returned from vacation.

Idle hands.

The problem is finding gainful work for people. Real work. Not the equivalent of counting the hairs on a caterpillar by touch sort of thing. That will be the hard part. You remember why Henry Ford had to pay such high wages for the time? Assembly lines bored people to death. They would quit if he didn’t. Repetitive work is boring as hell, as I found out pulling mess duty as a private. A common punishment for minor infractions while on mess duty was to peel enough potatoes to feed 3,000 Marines each meal. Or onions. Made you shape up pretty quick. Now, modern messes buy bags of peeled, chopped onions and potatoes.

Solving the problem of machine efficiency vs human boredom is going to be tough. Machines don’t get bored. Machines don’t get into trouble when idle. Humans can get into all sorts of mischief if left to their own devices too long.

H.O.P.E.

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Elon Musk is all over the place.  Everywhere you look he’s involved in any number of important and cutting-edge endeavors.  And this is in addition to his business ventures.  He runs a space company (SpaceX), a satellite communications company (Starlink), an electric car manufacturer (Tesla) and whatever X is.

Most recently Musk has volunteered to assist the nascent Trump administration in taking a chain saw to the federal bureaucracy (the imaginary D.O.G.E. or Department of Government Efficiency).  And considering that Musk fired about 80% of the employees of Twitter to make X less unprofitable, it makes sense that he might be supremely qualified to pare back the Washington payroll.  And based on the favorable results of Argentina’s experiment with government reduction I wholeheartedly endorse Trump employing Musk, Ramaswami and any other tech bros who want to help us get the national debt under control.  Amen.

But if Elon Musk really is a very smart guy who understands how automation and other technology breakthroughs can be integrated into a livable world order then that would be a much more worthwhile contribution to the mess, we’re currently in.  As things currently stand the last fifty years of computer advancement have revolutionized the efficiency of the workplace.  Programs like a world processor and a spreadsheet have allowed on person to do the work that previously required whole departments.  The secretarial pool is a thing of the past.  Even the technical departments have been pared way back because a pc on every desk means that a computation department is unneeded.  At most you need a couple of IT nerds who troubleshoot network issues.  And in the factories, machinists have been replaced by CNC machines.  Well, let’s say they’ve been replaced ten to one with a CNC technician.  And so on and so forth.  Even engineers and scientists have seen the handwriting on the wall.  AI will begin to make them redundant too.  And supposedly it will replace authors, musicians and other kinds of artists.  And finally, AI is supposed to eventually replace software coders too.

If you’re a tech entrepreneur you are probably saying to yourself, “Duh!  That’s what’s supposed to happen.  That’s efficiency and progress.”  And from your point of view, you’re right.  Better, cheaper, faster.  But if you’re a human being and the parent of human beings you’re saying to yourself, “Then what the hell do we do?”

And that is what the big brain guys should be thinking about.  People like Jeff Bezos have been perfecting a way to eliminate ninety percent of the humans who sell us stuff.  And then they want to whittle down that last ten percent forever.  Instead, what we need is a plan to keep one hundred percent of Americans gainfully and happily employed.  If you’re a libertarian you’ll say that competition is a good thing and allowing Amazon to bankrupt every retail seller except Walmart is a good thing that brings down the price of goods and helps everyone.

I disagree.  Machines are more efficient and cheaper to use than humans.  That’s proven.  But we are human beings.  If the machines aren’t benefitting us then they are the enemy.  And we should fight back against them.  In a sense, that’s what this recent election was about.  The people who have been made obsolete by automation and globalization and efficiency voted to throw out of office the people who represent the people who make, run and own the machines.  They want Donald Trump to turn back the clock and bring back a world where they could work in a factory that made cars or toasters or pencils and make enough money to raise a family.

Well, he can try and he can do a lot of things that will tilt the playing field in favor of those that have been left behind.  But in the long run efficiency will triumph.  So instead of a Department of Government Efficiency I think Trump and Musk and Ramaswami would be better off inventing a Human Optimization Planning Effort (HOPE).  And they could use the existing monopoly laws to force people like Bezos to design their processes and systems to accommodate a new parameter; human happiness.  If they don’t, then one day the forgotten men may come visiting the tech lords.  And they may be armed with the proverbial pitch forks and torches.  And despite what we saw in “Terminator,” my money is on the peasants.