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Paris is Burning
I read somewhere that the French establishment is pretty relaxed about the protesters — mostly white — and the rioters — mostly immigrant — that are occurring in France. Can’t find it. But the point of the article was that the establishment was pretty relaxed about lefty leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon calling the kids into the street.
I suppose it’s always like this. Lefty insurrections are just “mostly peaceful protests” but righty demonstrations are Literally Hitler and racist-sexist-homophobic to boot.
Then there’s all the noise about the Democrats mobilizing to change the rules if they win the midterms, and that, per DataRepublican, it’s not just a few DSA crazies but an organized establishment operation.
The mysterious group who’s been coordinating 50501, Indivisible, and coordinating the NoKings protests is called “United Democracy Alliance”[.]
And if the Democrats win the midterms then all the Democrats from Washington DC to the states will be coordinating to shut the Trump administration down.
Maybe Sen. Slotkin is saying the quiet part out loud when she says that she
hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics.
It’s distressing to me, because I see all this as the regime of the last century or so realizing that they are running out of options. They have spent all the money, marched through all the institutions, flooded the borders with migrants, shoveled trillions of money at their supporters, politicized everything and yet, somehow, everything seems to be slipping away.
And so they are going to suspend the rules. As Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt wrote,
Sovereign is he who decides on the exception[.]
Meaning that, when there’s a crisis, and normal law breaks down, then the sovereign acts, extralegally, to end the chaos. And I’d say that our liberal friends are trying to work up an exception, so they can change the rules.
If they don’t, you see, their regime ends and they are out of power.
It all makes me wonder what the rulers think they are doing. I know, they don’t think; they just play the game of power as they have learned it, and they accept the various beliefs that have found their way into the ruling class narrative over the years.
Maybe the reason they don’t change anything and won’t reform is that any reform, any change, is going to hurt them and their supporters.
I mean, think of the French. Their government spends about 57 percent of GDP. So that means that 57 percent of the French economy is rigidified and doesn’t really deliver what the French people want. To change it means that all kinds of people with comfortable government sinecures and checks are going to be hurt. In the economy outside the government sector people understand that they must adapt to changes in prices and supply and demand. But people in the government sector do not react to change that way. In government everything is done by meetings and regulations and bureaucratic procedure. I was reading about a NASA engineer that went to work at SpaceX. He was amazed that, when he came up with an idea, it got implemented in the hardware in days. At NASA no change could happen without months of meetings and bureaucratic shuffling.
I was reading Ruy Teixeira today about “middle suburbs”, the “collection of blue-collar counties heavily concentrated in the Industrial Midwest” that have suffered from de-industrialization as the union jobs faded away over the decades. That’s what Make America Great Again is all about: reversing the decline in union-centered industry, and getting the “middle suburbs” to vote Republican.
If only. The fact is that blue-collar unionized manufacturing has had its day. In fact, the unionization of manufacturing probably made things worse, because it hindered the manufacturing employers from adapting to market and technological change and raised workers’ wages — and their expectations — above the market.
No doubt the “middle suburbs” will end up disappointed in Trump and the Republicans and then… Yes, and then the Democrats will save them?
Technological revolutions come and go. Just make sure that your kids are primed to get with the program on the latest revolution.
And the real way to Make America Great Again is to dial down government spending from 40 percent of GDP to 15-20 percent. That would mean transforming Social Security into IRA accounts, Medicare into HSA accounts, welfare into charity, and education into homeschooling. It would work!
But it would also mean blood in the streets, and not merely the performative burning of the occasional historic hôtel de ville in France.
| Tue, 20 Oct 2026 22:17:41 GMT |
Is AI The End of the World?
Over at Compact John D. Judis, he of The Emerging Democratic Majority, is worrying about AI using a Marxist economics analysis developed by a chap called Martin J. Sklar.
For Marx, the central engine of growth is the accumulation of capital, which he regards as equivalent to the accumulation of labor time.
That comes from the labor theory of value that Marx got from Adam Smith. Never mind that it was exploded by the marginal revolution of 1870, just four years after Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital. Lefties like Marxist economics, because it allows them to prophesy.
And so, the prophets say, all went well with accumulation until the 1920s.
[D]uring the 1920s, the output of goods soared but the hours spent producing them, and the number of workers engaged in producing them, stopped increasing. What he called the “disaccumulation of capital” began.
Well yes. What with steam power and gasoline power and electric power, labor was reduced to flipping switches and watching giant steel presses bash out car doors.
I must say that I enjoyed watching the workers install consoles into trucks on the Ford assembly line in Detroit a while back. The guy installing them would check a computer screen to see which console belonged in each truck as it came to his position. And then he’d put it in.
So instead of everyone hammering away at stuff on an anvil, lots of people got white-collar jobs designing and planning the automated production processes. And it got worse with computers.
And now with AI the white-collar workforce is worried. Here’s Peter McCrory, Anthropic’s head of economics, discussing the white collar angst.
As one software engineer put it: “Like anyone who has a white-collar job these days, I’m 100 percent concerned, pretty much 24/7 concerned, about losing my job eventually to AI.”
You know what? When I got my first job after graduating college with an engineering degree nearly 60 years ago, my employer set me to learn FORTRAN, and I spent the next decades programming or designing software for computer control systems. I’d attended a programming class on ALGOL at school, but never written a program in my life.
That’s how education works. The kiddies spend their first ten to twenty years twiddling their thumbs in class listening to a teacher. And then they get their first job and the education really doesn’t matter that much. Apart from the three Rs. And it sure helps to have mucked around with Algebra so you know how to set out a technical problem.
But yes. Automation really transformed manufacturing. And I am sure that AI is going to transform the whole white-collar world, from teaching to administration to lawyering to writing.
But there is opportunity. Richard Hanania, who started out life as right-wing nutcase Richard Hoste, is now writing a Substack series on quantum mechanics. Because you know what? He can use AI to guide him. I wonder if AI can help people understand advanced physics, from relativity to quantum mechanics. I don’t see why not. Here’s Google AI on Bell’s Theorem.
Bell’s Theorem proves that the physical world cannot be both local (no signal or influence can travel faster than light) and real (particles have definite, pre-existing properties before they are measured).
So what’s it all about, Alfie?
My approach is that I don’t mind that I don’t have a clue what reality really is. We humans have adapted our Theory of Everything over the years as we have understood more and more about our world. The interesting thing, to me, is that it doesn’t matter that we living things don’t know how the universe was created and what the fundamental nature of things is. We living things are born and live and die and we are composed of incredibly complex materials and codings.
But all it takes to get started is for a male and a female to copulate, and then sit back and watch. Do you realize how crazy that is?
And yet, not knowing the meaning of Life, the Universe, Everything, we still keep on trucking. And so does all the life here on Earth, and probably elsewhere as well.
That, if you ask me, is what is really weird.
| Mon, 19 Oct 2026 22:45:56 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
Soft power is gifting friends; hard power is fighting enemies.
Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe — external or internal enemy — in the present emergency.
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: The Reality of Policing
