Tag: The Managerial State

A Friday Lecture and the Laboratory of Real Life

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I spent my morning exercise time listening once again to the ZMan’s Friday podcast.  And once again it was a very illuminating hour.  Ostensibly it was about the degrading of college football.  But really that was only a single example of corporatism’s ability to dissolve the underlying value of an institution or business and convert it to short term gain.  And the whole talk is extremely well done.  It’s like a lecture by a college professor who knows his material pat and who also happens to be a gifted orator.  I’ll stop raving about it now but if you are interested in hearing how we’ve gotten into the mess we’re in with the managerial state swallowing the federal government and just about every other institution give it a listen.

After that I read through the news and my Twitter (I mean X) feed.  It was a combination of more bad news from Washington and some small bits of hope from some of the less crazy parts of the nation.  On balance I think the nation as a whole is growing tired of Biden’s America.  I haven’t seen any organizing in order to begin taking control of things above the state level yet.  I’ve been hoping that more cooperative action would begin.  But maybe the 2024 election is actually a barrier to people thinking in those terms until after it’s lost.  Maybe after the expected election fraud returns Biden to the White House next year people will realize that waiting to take back the federal government is a fool’s errand.  And that they have to control the things that they have power over and work around the things they don’t.

A nice summer day today so I tried to find some macro shots (insects and flowers) but there weren’t many bugs at all.  It’s as if the insects were on strike.  Even the mosquitoes and deer flies were missing.  But I found a dead toad and set it up as bait.  Later on, I saw a carrion beetle sizing the toad up.  We’ll see what develops.

I also tried to get some shots of Camera Girl’s free-loading turkey flock but they were MIA.  A little later I think I saw the reason.  An adult fox showed up and made the rounds.  It was a good-sized animal but the fur was very light in color.  I asked Camera Girl if she thought it was one of the gray foxes but she said it had red in its fur.  Now I’m color blind but I could tell it was very light.  It almost looked like a cream color to me.  Well, anyway, I hope it didn’t eat up all of Camera Girl’s gobbling welfare recipients.  She really does like them and I will admit I hear they eat lots of ticks and that’s always a welcome situation.

Now I don’t pretend to know how much impact a thoroughly cynical electorate could have on the regime of the United States but I definitely think that it does have an impact on the behavior of the people who live as captives under this regime.  One of the impacts is already being seen.  A migration out of the blue states and into the red states is ongoing.  People are doing everything they can to minimize their exposure to dysfunction.  The same kind of thing is going on in other aspects of life.  People are avoiding the public schools.  They’re looking for colleges that aren’t propaganda internment camps.  They’re avoiding the chaotic blue-run cities.  And lately they’re even trying to punish companies that hate them through boycotts like the one that’s currently strangling Bud Light to death.

So maybe the grand total of all these small changes in behavior might have some bigger effects.  All this remains to be seen.  But watching this stuff is the only show in town.  After all, saying the wrong thing will get you dragged off to the gulag or even shot in the street by the Stasi.  Much better doing the things within your purview and just observing how stupid and obnoxious all these feds really are.

So, the summer is winding down and there are a few more get togethers scheduled.  The grandkids have been away this week at the beach and it sounds like they had a lot of fun.  Now school is imminent and we’ll see if they can spend the last week or two in the pool while their parents scramble to get things done.  I’ve had my one-on-ones with them and watched as much Godzilla and Jurassic Park as an alleged grownup possibly can and still survive.  Soon it will be shifting over to Fall and the approach of Halloween.  There are still a couple who haven’t been initiated into the classics of Universal’s Monster movies of the ‘30’s and ‘40’s.

I guess that’s enough for now.  Enjoy your day.

Who Runs This Country?

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Of course, that title question is a joke.  Everyone knows who runs this country.  Just ask the people who thought they were protesting on January 6th.  The managerial class runs this country.  They control the federal bureaucracy, almost all of the private corporations, the non-profits, the media, the colleges and the schools.

Using the federal bureaucracy, they can crush any resistance regardless if the threat is a well-financed opposition party or a single citizen speaking his mind against tyrannical overreach.

I was reading an article that speculated that the Supreme Court was likely to rule against the long-established precedent that allowed federal agencies to essentially write laws by utilizing “expertise” to decide how a law allows them to regulate some aspect of life in America.

For instance, the EPA gets to decide that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.  The gas that is emitted by every living thing on earth is a threat to the planet that needs to be taxed, banned and demonized.  This ignores the fact that fire has been a human tool that produces light, heat and power for eons while producing a carbon dioxide as a necessary part of the combustion reaction.  It also ignores the fact that penalizing the use of fossil fuels is already bankrupting western countries and threatening the health and well-being of poorer individuals.

So, there is the chance that the Supreme Court could decide that Congress and the courts should be allowed to overrule unelected lawmakers in the federal bureaucracy when they decide to promulgate laws that no one voted on and most people don’t want.

But the first thing that came to my mind was that this will push the next Congress to add six more justices to the Supreme Court and in the meantime the agencies will just ignore whatever the Supreme Court says that they don’t like.

The Trump administration proved to me that the managerial class can and will game the system to resist any attempt by the common people to wrest power away from them.  It’s as simple as that.

Now that might sound both horribly pessimistic but I think the happenings of the last few administrations bears it out.  No outrage by anyone working for a federal agency has caused the least harm to that individual.  Even the one guy who was convicted of perjury during the Russia-gate scandal was reinstated and had his conviction reduced to a misdemeanor that didn’t even cause him to lose his law license.

And on the flipside every enemy of these bureaucrats has been put through a meat grinder where just waiting for a trial is made an ordeal that may include imprisonment in a dungeon with unbelievable abuse heaped on innocent Americans.

So, our enemies are immune from punishment for any and all offences and at the same time they can destroy the reputations, livelihoods and even lives of anyone who dares to challenge them.

I’d like to think that disgust at the tyrannical methods being used by this junta would eventually rally enough Americans to vote the Democrats out of office and allow the Republicans to defang the FBI, CIA, IRS and the other enforcers of the regime.  But I no longer think that likely.  The younger people in the country are mostly brain-washed to obey their masters.  And a huge chunk of the country is made up of people dependent on the federal government to continue a lifestyle that doesn’t include work.

I realize this is a pretty depressing post.  But I also think it’s necessary to face facts.  As far as any bright side, well, I guess the only advantage is you’re almost completely immune to horrible surprises.  You can basically see these things coming a mile away.  And alternatively, if anything goes unexpectedly right, you’re always pleasantly surprised.

I hope I haven’t ruined anyone’s week.  As I’ve been writing about lately it’s still possible to work around these odious people but expecting the feckless Republicans to beat them is laughable.  And America isn’t united in wanting them gone.  For the foreseeable future they own the country.

An Epiphany

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Listening to ZMan’s latest podcast was something of an aha! moment for me.  The way he laid out how the managerial state arose and evolved gave me a moment of clarity.  It made it clear what we are dealing with.  This is a system that interlocks all of the decision makers and their supporters across government, industry, academia, schools, NGO’s and almost every major institution in the western world.  This is not something we’re going to overcome by voting in a President and Congress.  Even if we had the Supreme Court, the White House and supermajorities in the House and Senate these people running the government will refuse to implement whatever programs those elected representatives legislate.  They’ll figure a way to stymie it.  And they will attack the leaders of those bodies and destroy them.

And let’s face it, we’re not going to have supermajorities in the Congress again.  The Left controls the federal government and unless they do something so disastrous that it destroys the support their programs have with the managerial state that’s how it will remain.

Okay.  That’s the starting point.  I’ll stop counting electoral college votes.  That at least saves me some time and aggravation.  I’ll stop worrying about the House and the Senate too.

So, what can be done?  To my mind the hopelessness of changing the federal government just reinforces the idea that the only place change can occur will be in states that have a solid Republican voting base and leaders who understand what needs to be done to protect their people from the federal government and its poisonous influence.

But the podcast on managerialism clarified what that protection looks like.  It’s wonderful to see Ron DeSantis and some of the other governors getting laws passed and using executive orders to cancel out the worst aspects of the federal overreach.  Banning drag queen story hour and criminalizing juvenile transgender medical treatments are wonderful ideas in and of themselves.  But you can’t win this fight by being against things.

What must be done is to think clearly about what things must be preserved in order for our lives to be worth living.  And then to transmit this information through schools and colleges to inculcate the young.  And then you have to have the state and local governments legislate a coherent program for enforcing the actions that will preserve the values that have been recognized as necessary for the survival of a healthy society.

These laws will impact every layer of society and every institution.  Corporations, towns and cities, religious organizations, even professional societies like the AMA and the state bar will be held accountable.  The laws will be clear and enforced stringently.  During a transition period maybe the state can accommodate helping dissidents to relocate to blue states when life becomes too much for the lefties that find themselves left high and dry in red states.  For instance I’m guessing that the majority of people living in Austin, Texas will have to flee to California if my plan were carried out.

Now this all sounds very draconian.  And the idea of all society bound by an inflexible code that doesn’t allow for many behaviors that we have grown used to allowing seems almost outlandish.  But think of where we are.  We now have teachers telling impressionable young children that they are not boys or girls but the opposite.  We have men playing in women’s sports and sharing locker rooms with them.  If what we have now allows for these dysfunctional and frankly insane situations then drastic actions to get things back to normal and keeping them that way are completely understandable and necessary.

So, this is what I’ve realized.  We need to fix things from the ground up.  And the federal government will fight this tooth and claw.  I don’t doubt that everything from intimidation to assassination to military action may be brought to bear.  And maybe there’s no hope.  The federal government as I’ve said is backed up by the managerial state that encompasses an enormously powerful collection of organizations.  They really do control a lot of what we call America.

But this is the only way it’s going to happen.  Someone somewhere has to get the ball rolling and begin the process of standing up a state government that is committed to restoring all the things that make life worth living.

What are these things?  I’ll leave defining the full list to wiser heads than mine but what I know is indispensable is preserving families.  Whatever has to be done to allow men and women to raise their kids in functional and healthy families is the most important business of society.  After that we can add the Ten Commandments and go on from there.

ZMan Clearly Explains the Managerial State

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ZMan has a podcast (below) providing a very convincing explanation for how our present bureaucratic system allows government bureaucrats and bureaucrats in business and education control essentially all aspects of our lives.  If you’re interested in understanding how the system you live in works, listen to this hour long podcast.

What the ZMan does not explain is how we get rid of such a system. He says the whole system has to be replaced.  That leaves the question how exactly you go about such a thing.  Curtis Yarvin would tell us we would have to somehow install a King/CEO who would fire/pension off the entire federal bureaucracy.  It would be interesting to hear these two fellows discuss this idea but it would probably turn into a food fight.

Highly recommended listen.

Managerial Polyarchy

Being Managed by the Managerial State

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One of the hallmarks of the current system we live under is that it is assumed that people cannot manage their own lives anymore without the guidance (control) of experts in government and industry.  The computerized systems we must negotiate to satisfy the requirements of daily life are arcane to the point of impenetrability.  And they’re constantly patched and endlessly updated.  At every turn we need to employ the “help” of experts and agents of the government and quasi-official agencies or just corporate customer service.  Some of these in the corporate ranks are, to be fair, quite good.  You might buy a phone or a service contract from a vendor and they might do excellent work providing customer service for their products or services.

But for every good example there are a dozen where customer service is provided by someone in Mumbai with English language skills that would test the patience of Job.  And sometimes the results of consulting these representatives are worse than useless.  Rather than alleviate some initial problem they sink you deeper in a morass of problems.  And going through these sometimes hours-long ordeals saps your energy and raises your stress levels through the roof.

And this is just trying to get the service on a device working.  Imagine what it’s like when the IRS gets its claws into you.  Then we’re talking about terror.  And taking it all the way to infinity, imagine dealing with the FBI when they take a battering ram to your front door at 3 a.m. prior to dragging you off to the gulag.  I guess you could describe the whole system as assault by expert.  We are no longer allowed to live our lives in a simple reasonable way.  We have each become just a cog in the machine.  And every cog must be cut into the precise size and shape needed to conform to the requirements of the machine.

It might be bearable if it wasn’t apparent that the stress, embarrassment and pain inflicted in the machining of the cogs is obviously a feature of the process and not a bug.  Just as in the Soviet system, control is maintained through fear and confusion.  Orwell described this system in his novel “1984” and Solzhenitsyn confirmed its reality and provided details in his memoir “Gulag Archipelago.”

So, what’s my point?  Well, just this.  Winning elections is not going to gain back the country we had.  Whoever is president is going to have to demolish the Deep State.  And that means eliminating thousands and thousands of bureaucrats whose jobs are meant to bludgeon us into submission, literally cause death by a thousand paper cuts.

I’ve read that eliminating those bureaucrats can’t be done.  That all those bureaucrats’ jobs are protected by federal law.  To that I say, “So what?”  Surely the President can transfer all of these torturers into completely harmless parts of their departments.  If need be, he can create sections where the offending individuals can be employed stuffing envelopes with letters that won’t be mailed.  He can keep them doing that until they’re forced into retirement by extreme old age.

But by whatever means he comes up with to do it, that’s what must be done.  All those FBI agents who currently spend their days enticing disgruntled Americans into joining phony militias with phony insurrections can be reassigned to a division where all their time is spent ticketing double parked limousines outside the State Department.  All of the IRS agents can be repurposed as latrine inspectors for the National Parks Service.  All of the bureaucrats currently hassling utilities companies about the carbon dioxide emissions of their combustion plants can be safely transferred to Denali National Park in Alaska where they can monitor the temperature of the grizzly bears with a rectal thermometer.  Or they can try to at least once.

All kidding aside.  Whoever wants to save this country will have to dismantle wide swaths of the managerial state just to start regaining control of the federal government.  There’s no other way.  Think about that Mr. Trump and anyone else who thinks he wants the job.  And then think about how you can get it done.

This Guy Thinks the Afghan Rout Will Be the Deep State’s Undoing

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Interesting read.  Will it really spell the doom of our Cloud Elite?  It would be nice but I’m not sure I see it that way.  It’s definitely a blow to Joe Biden’s credibility.  It’s an object lesson to Iran, China, North Korea and Russia that the people in charge have grown feckless.  Maybe it’s a sign to us that our enemies are a lot stupider than we thought they were.

What Afghanistan told me was that we can’t trust any of the suits in Washington.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have our interests at heart.  They’re globalists and they believe in things that we abhor.  My take away is we need new leaders.  And we’d better be real careful choosing them.  We can’t afford to make these mistakes again.  They’ve already almost bled us dry.

On–Line Article Review – TheZMan – The Managerial Clique

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http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15101

Whether you agree with all, some or none of what TheZMan writes, I don’t think you can doubt his analytical ability.  In this article he paints a pretty convincing case for the current American power structure being basically a bunch of interlocking old boy networks stretching across industry, academia, media and the government bureaucracies.  Now that’s hardly an original concept but what he stresses is that the pettiness and parochial nature of the mindset allows us to understand how for instance, the Swamp’s attack on Trump works.  It’s Frasier at the FBI meeting up on the Vineyard with his old prep school buddy Chad at the New York Times to plant a story about Russian collusion by this gauche upstart Trump.  It’s Everett at the EPA calling up fellow Yalie, Chaz at MIT’s Climate Institute to schedule a symposium announcing the latest “Climate Change Doomsday Milestone” and by the way, “let’s get together for a last weekend in the Hamptons.”  Looking at it in that context, allows us to see how the bureaucracy can thrive whether the President is W or Obama.  As long as you play ball with them and allow them their prerogatives they’ll play ball with you and even work to destroy your enemies, well, as long as they’re the wrong kind of people, of course.

Reading this makes it a little easier to understand how it all works but is the play forcing them to play ball with us while slowly draining the swamp or just nuking the swamp.  I’m not sure what it would be like to have two million unemployed WASPs whose only job skills are manipulating bureaucratic power for fun and profit but I think I’m starting to warm to the idea.  Everyone who works in the cold-blooded world of modern-day mid-level corporate life knows that every day you will be challenged with proving to the company that they actually need your services.  Can you imagine if Muffy or Chad were suddenly looking for work on their own merits?  Of course, their cousins heading up the Fortune 500 companies they’ll be applying to would like to help them out but it’s just that without the clout of their former positions in government there really isn’t a quid pro quo there.  And with so many of these swamp dwellers cut loose all at once there just aren’t enough feather-bedding opportunities to go around.  My gosh they might have to start out in the stock room.  Oh, but wait there is no stock room anymore it’s been outsourced to Amazon and Fedex.  Sorry.

Seriously, none of this stuff is surprising.  It’s as old as the priestly class in Sumer.  People form hierarchies and use them to feather their own nests.  But at a certain point the parasitic load overwhelms the vitality of the host and either a vermifuge is administered or the host dies.  Draining the swamp is another way of saying worming the United States.  It can be done.  But it takes a courageous mean bastard to do it right.  I think Trump could be that.