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It’s Frack Baby Frack, Part 2
Well, I just signed up with Rod Martin’s Substack, after he posted an article on Fracking Part 2.
See, Exxon — you know, the creation of Robber Baron John D. Rockefeller — has just come up with a new way to kill the climate.
It’s an improvement in fracking technology. Fracking’s the deal where you drill horizontal oil wells and the pressurize the well so that it opens cracks in the well walls and oils seeps into the cracks and gets pumped out and oil flows out to power fossil fueled cars that will kill the climate. All over the world.
A big part of fracking technology is pumping sand into the cracks so the cracks stay propped open when you stop pressurizing the well. They call the sand proppant.
But eevil Exxon came up with a new twist on the proppant front.
Now ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others have opened a new chapter: lightweight, synthetic proppant made from petroleum coke, a refinery by-product that used to be treated as waste.
Because it is lightweight it gets further into the cracks that sand can’t get into, and because it’s lighter than sand it flows along easier, and because it’s stronger than sand it keeps the cracks open.
Here’s a map of frack-ology research in North America being conducted by the nation’s credentialed frack-ologists. There’s a lot more than I thought.
Guess what happens next. Exactly, Uncle Sam gets to rule the world and nobody cares a wink about the Strait of Hormuz.
And mental health professionals will also benefit from treating the mental health crises of our environmentalist friends.
It’s interesting. President Trump has been boasting about a new Golden Age of America. Naturally, as a credentialed expert, I wasn’t at all sure that I believed him.
But here we are. Fracking as far as the eye can see.
And the latest information I learned is that Texas has 335 data centers in operation and 248 under construction. I think that’s important because I don’t think we can really get the Golden Age of America going until we have bombed the entire government education system to rubble and replaced it with mom-friendly homeschooling AI.
But that is another story.
| Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:47:16 GMT |
Merker: Marx Stole His Ideas From Stein
In the last episode of Bjorn Merker’s Perishing Promise, we learned how Marx & Co. brilliantly assembled a secular ideology that copied all the facets of Christianity, but without God.
But guess what. Marx stole the ideas for proletarian revolution without attribution from a guy called Lorenz Stein, who wrote a book in German published in 1842, titled Socialism and Communism in today’s France. A contribution to contemporary history. Today we would regard Stein’s analysis as economically flawed. But Marx just took it and made it the foundation of Marxism.
In the first chapter, Das Proletariat, Stein describes the new working class as a threat to society
through its numbers and its frequently demonstrated courage… through its consciousness of its unity… finally through its feeling that it can arrive at the realization of its plans only through revolution… Because all that the proletarian wants can in the end by achieved only through the toppling of two of the absolute pillars of all societal life, through the destruction of the sacredness of law and that of property.
Why is the proletariat going to topple the world? It’s complicated, but Stein argues that the proletarian has only one resource, his labor.
[U]nder modern conditions of industrial production… the interaction of labor and property in the production of wealth is said to permanently debar proletarians from raising themselves into the ranks of the propertied.
“The absolute victory of capital over labor power” presented the proletarians with no hope of rising into the ranks of the propertied, except by revolution. The classes were bound “to confront one another in enmity” and this provided the ground for a solution in socialism and communism.
In theory and history, it turned out that Stein was wrong. But in 1840, who knew? Meanwhile the coffee-house intellectuals in Berlin had developed a way for activists to help the poor to make “things by right how they ought to be.”
Marx had left Berlin in 1841 because he had to get a job — ending up as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne in 1842 — and had not kept up with the intellectual fashion of coffee-house intellectuals and the moral argument for socialism, and rejected their articles.
He stole Stein’s analysis and used it as the basis of his prophecy of revolution. He rejected the intellectuals’ “class-less ‘True socialism’ in favor of Stein’s ‘proletarian’ socialism-communism” that prophesied revolution on the basis of “‘objective’ economic mechanisms” taken from Stein’s book.
But the one central theme was “the necessity of societal overthrow.” As Engels said at Marx’s grave,
Marx was before else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society[.]
But when it came to Russia, a pre-industrial society, Marx imagined that revolution could skip the capitalist phase.
By 1872 the economic progress in America and England suggested that the proletariat could thrive through “peaceful progress”, and Marx admitted it in a speech in Amsterdam. But for the rest of the Continent “the lever of our revolution must be force.” Never mind peaceful progress: revolution forever!
Could it be that Marx, after carousing at the university on an allowance from his father, couldn’t deal with the removal of support after his father died and he had to get a job? Yet, as a journalist he felt that journalism degraded itself by being a trade.
The fact is that Marx resented having to earn a living. Thus the slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”, the “decoupling of productive endeavor from consumption”. We can see that this resentment continues to our own day with resentful college graduates, condemned to lower status than they surely deserve, the backbone of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Marx’s revolution fitted “with the myth of the ‘unfinished revolution’” in France. The revolution could not be complete until a proletarian revolution completed the “final revolutionary transition to communism… and a world of prosperity in which all would be equal, happy, and free”.
There has been no shortage of withering economic critique of Marxism, starting with Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk in 1896, an economist of the Austrian school who critiqued Marx on the ground of his own theory after the publication of Volume 3 of Das Kapital. But Bohm-Bawerk understood that Marxism owed its strength not in its argument, but in the hearts of its disciples, “in their hearts, their wishes and their desires.”
Merker summarizes the commanding heights of Marxism. It
(a) enthrones the destruction of the prevailing order as the necessary prerequisite for human felicity, (b) buttresses activist hope and patience by a teleological construal of history, (c) absolves its believers of personal responsibility for both the condition they find themselves in and their acts, (d) receives unearned moral credit from a culture wedded to other-regarding ethics, and (e) appears to stake out a path to what is but an unspoken promise implicit in the ambience of modernity, namely a condition in which everyone is equal, happy, and free.
A vital point is that the secularization of the world has created a demand to fill the religious space with something, and Marxism is “religion in the guise of politics.”
And it matters not that events have denied the assertion of the immiseration of the workers. People, especially educated people, need a saving faith, and Marxism has delivered, especially for the secularized that still resonate to an “other-regarding” morality.
More to come.
| Thu, 20 Aug 2026 03:43:50 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
The world is full of opposing forces... International life, like life in general, is a battle — Charles de Gaulle
Socialism promises belonging but delivers isolation.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: How The Dutch Taught Us about Government Finance
