Many watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials. And from a social observer’s point of view, the ads are more important than the big game in revealing social mood and national character. The Super Bowl is the most watched event on television, and among the lower classes, its popularity is likely close to universal. In most cases, this results in the most vulgar, insulting, and stupid advertising imaginable...

In the past two years, though, I’ve been more impressed by the Chrysler corporation’s serious, filmic dramatizations. Instead of avoiding the stigma of Detroit—and, more subtly, the 2008-09 bailouts—Chrysler has dared to embrace it. The company  depicts itself and its city as having “almost lost everything” and “been to hell and back,” and thus more rough and tough and experienced in the ways of the world than those pretty boys in Stuttgart and Tokyo. Chrysler is attempting the ultimate “soft sell”—the name of the company and its products go unmentioned—while everyone else does the most egregious “hard sell.”

Hard—Buy this compact Fiat, you wimpy Beta, and maybe it will have pity sex with you.

Soft—We are all Detroit now.

Last year, Chrysler presented something like Detroit qua “Negro Fascism”—certainly a gutsy play for luxury-car buyers! This time around, Clint Eastwood was hired as the narrator, and he didn’t disappoint, putting on a gruff and leathery persona that might intimidate Dirty Harry. Ironically, the sell was even softer.

Foseti:

If I’m reading Charles Murray’s thesis [in Coming Apart] correctly (and it’s certainly possible that I’m not, since I haven’t read the book), I think there’s an argument within his thesis that the education bubble is not in fact a bubble.

There are two points to Murray’s argument that I’m concerned with here.

1) Murray argues that America is increasingly efficient at sorting people by cognitive ability. As such, you can live basically your entire life among people within a narrow range of cognitive ability similar to your own.

2) The closer you are to the top end of this intellectually sorted landscape, the better your life will be, by virtually every measure of success.

Let me draw some conclusions and add some premises.

I would suggest that colleges are the mechanism by which the sorting described in 1) is accomplished. The main function of colleges is not education or signalling, or whatever your favorite theory is. Their main function is to sort people into groups based on cognitive ability. (Note that this theory explains why people would be willing to pay $40,000 to attend certain schools that are not necessarily top-tier – it’s worth it, as long as it gets you in a different cognitive ability grouping than the state school alternative).

I would also suggest that this sorting service is a very valuable service – and it is getting exponentially more valuable over time, as society becomes more efficiently sorted and the benefits of being in a high-ability group become more pronounced.

Therefore, the increases in college tuition that we continue to see are justified by the increasingly valuable service that colleges are providing. Unfortunately, it’s a service that: nobody wants to discuss; and that colleges will adamantly deny they provide. Perhaps everyone will continue to moan about an education bubble while shelling out $50,000/year for their kid to attend a college, much like they currently moan about lack of diversity in the public schools in their hometown which they moved to because it has good schools.

Gary North: 

Where religion is involved, people rarely change. College education is part of a religion: salvation (healing) by formal education.

The voters believe in tax-funded K-12 education. It gets worse. The budgets increase. The test scores fall. Yet voters just refuse to give up. They think one more reform will do the trick. It won't.

This same faith is transferred to college. Nothing changes for the better. Year after year, decade after decade, student performance falls and costs rise. This is what state funding always does. There is no negative feedback system that says: "Stop!"

To speak of college as a bubble is silly. A bubble does not pop until months or years after the funding ceases. There is no indication that the funding for college education will cease.

Until there is a rebellion against tax-funding of all education, beginning with kindergarten, college costs will rise and performance will fall. The horror stories will continue.

We get what we pay for. We especially get what we pay for with our tax money. What you see is what you get: a self-policed monopoly, a self-serving bureaucracy, and entrenched resistance to change imposed by representatives of the people who are funding the system. "Academic freedom" has always meant the same thing, from Prussian universities in 1820 until today: tax-subsidized intellectual kidnapping of children.

We do not get bubbles. We get quagmires.

Growing up, I remember being informed by various female school teachers and former Flower Children that “if women were in charge,” there’d be no more wars (among other things), because...you know...women are about caring and sharing and the only reason why there’s violence in the first place is because of testosterone and penal rivalries...und so weiter...

There is, of course, a kernel of truth to such claims. No doubt, Paris abducted Helen out of a blinding lust that all men, and only men, can understand. That said, anyone who has ever witnessed female relations in High School recognize that the fairer sex is more than capable of vindictive violence. (Mencken quipped that the definition of a misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women hate one another.)

Whatever the case, the Obama administration’s foreign-policy team offers all but definitive proof that women have the gene for bellicosity. Obama’s intellectual guiding light, Samantha Power, has written tomes scolding Washington for not intervening militarily enough over the past century. Hillary cackles over the brutal death of a foe. And then there’s Susan Rice, Obama’s UN ambassador, whose sepia skin tone might led one to believe that she has more than one reason to oppose the war-making ways of “The Man.”

No so! Today, China and Russia wisely vetoed a resolution that would, quite likely, have been a precursor to regime change in Syria (much like the Libya adventure began as a UN mandate for a no-fly zone last March). Rice reacted to this offense much like a bitchy HR manager who feels compelled to lecture her cubicle-dwelling underlings after “SOMEBODY took my Pad Thai leftovers from the fridge…I don’t know who it is, but I have suspicions!”

“The United States is disgusted that  a couple of members of this Council continue to prevent  us from fulfilling our sole purpose,” U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said. “For months this Council has been held hostage by a couple of members,” she said, referring to Russia and China, who she said had been “delaying and stripping bare any text to force Assad to stop his actions.”

Without referring to Russia by name, she said the vetoes were “even more shameful” given that Russia has continued to sell weapons to to Syria.  She called the vetoes “unforgivable” and said “any further blood that flows will be on their hands.”

ABC News

Interest in AltRight's official podcast, Vanguard, has exploded! This is mostly due to the fact that Jonathan Bowden has become a frequent guest.

I'm happy to announce that Jonathan will continue to appear regularly; indeed, we are planning on featuring a weekly conversation between the two of us for the foreseeable future.  

Bandwidth and server space cost money, and to accomodate Vanguard's expanded listerner base, I've recently had to move to a podcast-hosting service that runs around $200 per month. I hesitate to rattle the cup so soon after our Radix fundraiser...but if you appreciate the fact that you can now drive to work, take a stroll, or exercise with Jonathan Bowden on your iPod, then I hope you might support our efforts by making a tax-deductible donation. 

Thanks! 

The following is an installment in AltRight's ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence and degeneration so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.

"Booty Wave," sung by the fictional artist "K'ronica," is a satirical take on contemporary pop music, a genre which, The Onion reports--channelling STIHIE, no doubt!--likely signals the downfall of civilization.  

The following is an actual, non-parodic product of America's popular music industry--"Stupid Hoe," sung by Trinidadian immigrant Nicki Minaj.  

We seem to have passed some kind of Rubicon, when "Booty Wave" has more redeemable qualities--and is far closer to something one might call "music"--than the creations it is meant to lampoon.       

If Der Stürmer were still around today, and it held a contest for the funniest, most outlandish parody of Jewish paranoia, the paper's readers would, no doubt, blush at the idea of writing something that resembles Lee Siegel's deconstruction of Mitt Romney's "meticulously cultivated whiteness."  

January 14, 2012

What’s Race Got to Do With It?

By LEE SIEGEL

Jon Moe/Associated PressMitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, with his extended family in 2007.

He is nearly always in immaculate white shirt sleeves. He is implacably polite, tossing off phrases like “oh gosh” with Stepford bonhomie. He has mastered Benjamin Franklin’s honesty as the “best policy”: a practiced insincerity, an instant sunniness that, though evidently inauthentic, provides a bland bass note that keeps everyone calm. This is the bygone world of Babbitt, of small-town Rotarians. [ . . . ] 

He knows that he offers to these people the white solution to the problem of a black president. I am sure that Mr. Romney is not a racist. But I am also sure that, for the many Americans who find the thought of a black president unbearable, he is an ideal candidate. For these sudden outsiders, Mitt Romney is the conventional man with the outsider faith — an apocalyptic pragmatist — who will wrest the country back from the unconventional man with the intolerable outsider color.

Note that the Romney family photo is included to evoke horror and loathing amongst New York Times readers. Displaying remarkable restrainght, Siegel refrained from associating Romney with the John Birch Society and George Wallace until paragraph seven. Subtle.         

It's worth pointing out that Romney "got jiggy with it" back in 2007, to no effect. It seems that in 2012, he's just going to be himself.

Not to sound paranoid . . .  but do you ever get the sense that there are people out there who despise all forms of White identity, even the most benign, Romney-ish variety?

On this, the holiest day of modern America’s liturgical calendar, we should revisit Samuel Francis’s writing on the significance of Martin Luther King Jr.

Yet, incredibly — even after thorough documentation of King’s affiliations with communists, after the revelations about his personal moral flaws, and after proof of his brazen dishonesty in plagiarizing his dissertation and several other published writings — incredibly there is no proposal to rescind the holiday that honors him. Indeed, states like Arizona and New Hampshire that did not rush to adopt their own holidays in honor of King have been vilified and threatened with systematic boycotts. The continuing indulgence of King is in part due to simple political cowardice — fear of being denounced as a “racist” — but due also to the political utility of the King holiday for those who seek to advance their own political agenda. Almost immediately upon the enactment of the holiday bill, the King holiday came to serve as a kind of charter for the radical regime of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism” that now prevails at many of the nation’s major universities and in many areas of public and private life…

To those of King’s own political views, then, the true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions — not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality — racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and social — must be overcome and discarded.

By placing King — and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and reconstruction — into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a defining — perhaps the defining — icon of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.

Sam is all too correct that “MLK writ large” has become the foundation of American identity; and in many ways, the situation is far worse than he depicted it in this 1998 article (which appeared in American Renaissance).

At the time, Sam described a pitched battle between MLK’s egalitarian “Dream” and “traditional American social and cultural institutions,” which he describes, in Cold War language, as “anti-Communist foreign policy” and Constitutional liberty.

As the years go by, news of the world throwing billions at Africans with nothing to show for it no longer shocks me. (Plus ça change… In our the egalitarian age, who knows how many trillions have been wasted attempting to equalize the races?)

What I find, in a way, more disturbing is that ostensibly intelligent grown men will still sit around a table telling one another fairy tales about why, after all that money, Haiti still looks like...Haiti.

Can someone get these poor fools some Richard Lynn!

I don't recomend you turn to Cracked.com for investment adivce. Nonetheless, the site has offered a useful and entertaining introduction to "Socionomics," which is worth a read:  

You could say that "Freakonomics" (numbers 7, 6, 4) is the use of micro-economic reasoning to offer nifty explanations for a social trends in a way that makes you seem smart.

"Socionomics" (numbers 5, 3, 2, 1), on the other hand, is something quite different. The discipline was developed by Robert Prechter, the legendary financial analyst and, currently, an über-bear on every asset but cash. In Prechter’s mind, your average trader and CNBC analyst makes his decisions and opinions based on “news”; Prechter flips this on its head, claiming that “news”—along with fractal moves in market indices—is an effect, not a cause, of deeper waves of social mood and outlooks toward the future. Such waves are repetitive and cyclical—and thus predictable; in themselves, they are inexplicable...

I’ve read rumors of it for a couple of days; it now appears to be quasi-official—Patrick Buchanan is out at MSNBC . . . or at least his future is decidedly “murky” at the network.

Sarah, Maid of Albion, writes: 

It appears that the new policy of US Cable News channel MSNBC is to punish, and where possible suppress, free speech.¹ Regular conservative contributor, ex adviser to three American presidents and two time presidential election candidate, Pat Buchanan has been permanently suspended and may not be allowed back on air.  MSNBC have taken this action because they do not like what he said in his new book “The Suicide of a Superpower” which analyses and explains the reasons behind the decline of the once great nation of America.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin is quoted as saying : “I don’t think the ideas that Buchanan put forth are appropriate for national dialogue on MSNBC. He won’t be coming back during the book tour.” Asked if Buchanan would be be back at all, Griffin replied “I have not made my decision.” 

The Liberal elite in America is outraged that Buchanan's brilliantly researched book directly links the decline in America's power, the dire state of her economy and near collapse of social cohesion on multiculturalism, mass non-European immigration and shrinking of the white majority. These are views which are an anathema to those who currently have their jackboots on the throats of the Western media, and views which they will go to any length to prevent being expressed, especially by individuals with the profile of Pat Buchanan.

To paraphrase George Orwell, we have reached a point within our society where to speak the truth is an act of revolution, it is an act which puts you and your livelihood at significant risk, because, if you speak the truth the liars and the tyrants will try to crush you. It is no longer just the little man, or woman, who speaks out of turn on a tram or a football terrace who they seek to destroy, they are now going after the titans.

However, we have seen it all before, in the last century and further east, in cultures which were our current leaders spiritual homes, where the truth became a crime, as it is now becoming throughout the west.

It seems easy and trite to say that the Soviet Union did not die, it just moved west, but in fact, in many of the ways that matter, that is the truth.  It is the same beast, it wears a different mask, but the same snarling jaws lurk behind it.

But before we relegate Pat to the history books, it’s worth remembering that he’s weathered countless attempts to to derail his career for the past 20 years—all of which have failed. These include a press-release-per-month issued from the ADL, as well as William F. Buckley’s more equivocal purge (if that’s the right word) in his “search” for anti-Semitism in the early '90s.² Buckley, in one of his many efforts to ingratiate neocons and placate organizations like the ADL, ended up declaring that Pat was not quite an anti-Semite, simply “iconoclastic” . . .  Even this description reveals much about the Conservative Movement’s twin shibboleths of Majority advocacy and Israel, as well as Buckley’s own jealousy. Whatever the case, at the end of the day, Pat was simply too much of a good guy, to much of a friend to Washington insiders, and too much of a serious writer to be purged. So, I wouldn’t bet against Pat overcoming this latest turn of events.

If the Beltway and New York media do succeed in collectively shunning Pat, however, we will have entered a new phase of PC (and Majority dispossession.)

From a cynical standpoint, one might say that Pat wasn’t just tolerated by the mainline media for his experience and political acumen; he was kept on board as one of the last avatars of a traditional, Christian, and European America—if only to capture a particular viewing demographic and give Rachel Maddow something to express righteous liberal outrage over.

The absence of Pat would mean that the mainline media no longer tolerate a single voice that projects traditionalism and Majority nationalism. Not a hint. Nothing. Nada. (In such a case, we’re lucky that Pat’s book and writings remain.) 

Thinking about Pat’s significance in the mainstream, I’m left with this thought. In 2001, Pat warned White Americans about demographic displacement and a general cultural decline. In 2011, Pat sounded the same themes; in many ways, Suicide of a Superpower was a sequel or reworking of the earlier volume.

In the decade that separates the two books, NOTHING WAS DONE.

The self-styled “Conservative Movement,” with which Pat identified throughout his early years, engaged in Middle East war-mongering for democracy and other pointless pursuits. No serious pro-White movement arose in response to Buchanan’s dire warnings—or at least none was successful.

A third “Death/Suicide” volume in 2021 probably would be greeted with less outrage than confused contempt. The Brazil-America of the foreseeable future—one with a large-and-growing African and Hispanic underclasses, an egalitarian civic creed, and an increasingly totalitarian state—will, no doubt, exist under dramatically reduced economic circumstances. But there’s no reason to believe that it would be any less self-confident and nationalistic than the country is today. Such a nation would view Pat’s defense of a paleo-America not as "conservative" and "right-wing"—but as heretical and absurd. At some point, Barack Obama and Rihanna will replace Davy Crocket and Vince Lombardi as representatives of the real America.  

______ 

1 — I don’t want to quibble with dear Sarah, but it’s not really an issue of “free speech.” MSNBC is a private entity that can air what it pleases. Certainly, if we were in charge of major media outlets, we’d be “suppressing free speech” left and right—and featuring programming like Jonathan Bowden on Everything, The James Edwards Channel, and our daily soap opera, As the World Eternally Recurs. The issue is political correctness.

2 — Clearly, Buckley wanted to re-orient National Review towards the neocons and their patrons. The magazine did, however, endorse Pat in '92, no doubt, at the behest of then-editor John O'Sullivan.