nazis

Follow the Money, Not Bathroom Laws or Nazi Captain America
Captain America: Hail Hydra! - Marvel Comics

Captain America: Hail Hydra! – Marvel Comics

We’ve had seven years of the Obama administration’s orchestrated distractions. The President gained the office promising a new era, supported by “Baptists” (in this case, idealistic Progressives and voters hopeful he would bridge party and racial gaps — see Bootleggers and Baptists) and “bootleggers” (crony capitalists and the finance industry, which placed their sympathizers in Treasury and Justice to make sure no true reprisals or reform would occur and that TARP and subsidy money would finance their ventures.) The complicit media help promote whatever story the administration is selling each week — independent reporting is expensive while rewritten PR releases from government press offices and video of staged news events fills TV news time and newspaper column inches cheaply.

The United States has a wide variety of special interests whose contention prevents a single coalition from taking over and doing too much damage. The effect over time, though, has been to expand government and its regulation of private businesses to increase the rewards of buying political favors. The Obama administration’s record of boondoggles and project failures is clear, but by dominating news coverage with their talking points, they have distracted citizens who haven’t directly suffered job loss, lost their home, or had their daughter murdered by a criminal immigrant released in a “sanctuary city.”

Gender Free Bathroom

Gender Free Bathroom

The latest non-problem designed to distract is the “bathroom wars.” For decades, transgendered people have used the bathroom they were “dressed for” in relative safety and obscurity, since civilized people don’t expose their genitalia or accost others for looking unusual while relieving themselves. Good manners suggest intentionally not noticing superficial factors of others when forced into the intimacy of the bathroom or locker room, and most people have the good manners and good sense not to react to such things. Similarly, while not completely unheard of, it’s very rare (and illegal) for men to accost women in restrooms or locker rooms.

So there’s no information other than anecdotal suggesting trans people are being harassed in large numbers, or that women or girls are being harassed. And there’s certainly no legal authority under Title IX for Federal-level regulation of bathroom use. There’s really no reason for any regulation of bathroom use, given that such rules are not enforceable or even reasonable when there are many common situations where labels are ignored, as when women duck into the men’s room because the line at “their” bathroom is too long. This is a fine example of customary usage that ain’t broke, so don’t fix it — all fixes are more trouble than leaving it up to custom and common sense.

But much of the media attention not spent following Trump’s latest comments is going to bathroom laws and public posturing related to the issue, like the latest stars to boycott North Carolina while still planning concerts in countries where gays are beaten and jailed. The President and his minions get to appear to be protectors of the weak while their outraged opponents waste effort on an issue that distracts from removing them and their kind from power.

Meanwhile, much social network and news chatter in recent weeks centers around Captain America and the recent decision by the current Marvel comic book writers to rewrite him as an agent of Hydra all these years — a hero originated to stand for American values in opposition to the then-current Third Reich has been revealed to be a Nazi himself, or close enough. The outrage mills are keeping this one going, giving free publicity to the comic book writers and taking up residence in people’s heads.

In both cases, behind-the-scenes interests are jockeying for influence to continue to steal your money and divert it to their ends — their own power and wealth. By keeping the issues of subsidies and crony capitalism too complex for mass understanding and sending up clouds of disinformational chaff like these symbolic, emotional issues, much of the voting population has been bamboozled into fighting each other over symbolic issues while the bootleggers loot the Treasury.

And in that confusion, men like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders who offer simple, authoritarian solutions to the problems of the status quo corporatist government appear to offer a way out. Neither had the support of the big money interests, but if either won the presidency you can be sure they will attract the same corrupt interests to support and control them.

So spend less time getting outraged about relatively unimportant issues, and more time following the money. Notice how anti-Trump protestors are organized and funded by unions like the SEIU and racist organizations like La Raza, while those same organizations are core Democratic supporters and have been funded illegally by diverting Justice Department settlement funds from the victims of mortgage companies to Democrat-supporting agencies.

Notice that the Clinton Foundation targets its grants to gain good PR or influence while collecting tax-free “donations” from shady and even criminal overseas governments and companies. It’s part of the Clintons’ global influence-peddling machine, built up over decades to allow legal bribery of the former President Bill and Secretary of State and now President-in-Waiting Hillary.

The book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer documents these indirect bribery schemes:

In 2000, Bill and Hillary Clinton owed millions of dollars in legal debt. Since then, they’ve earned over $130 million. Where did the money come from? Most people assume that the Clintons amassed their wealth through lucrative book deals and high-six-figure fees for speaking gigs. Now, Peter Schweizer shows who is really behind those enormous payments.

In his New York Times bestselling books Extortion and Throw Them All Out, Schweizer detailed patterns of official corruption in Washington that led to congressional resignations and new ethics laws. In Clinton Cash, he follows the Clinton money trail, revealing the connection between their personal fortune, their “close personal friends,” the Clinton Foundation, foreign nations, and some of the highest ranks of government.

Schweizer reveals the Clinton’s troubling dealings in Kazakhstan, Colombia, Haiti, and other places at the “wild west” fringe of the global economy. In this blockbuster exposé, Schweizer merely presents the troubling facts he’s uncovered. Meticulously researched and scrupulously sourced, filled with headline-making revelations, Clinton Cash raises serious questions of judgment, of possible indebtedness to an array of foreign interests, and ultimately, of fitness for high public office.

Some of their schemes — like the Haitian telecomm contracts they wangled for supporter’s companies that skimmed fees from every telephone call between Haitians and their US relatives — are infuriating in that they stole from people least able to afford padded bills. Haitians have correctly figured out that the Clintons only pretend to care about them.

Jonathan Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster about Haitian relief efforts of the past two decades, had this to say about Clinton’s influence in Haiti:

There’s nowhere Clinton had more influence or respect when she became Secretary of State than in Haiti, and it was clear that she planned to use that to make Haiti the proving ground for her vision of American power. By now I’d imagine she was expecting to constantly be pointing to Haiti on the campaign trail as one of the great successes of her diplomatic career. Instead it’s one of her biggest disappointments by nearly any measure, with the wreckage of the Martelly administration she played a larger role than anyone in installing being the biggest and latest example.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 

“The Man in the High Castle” – Pilot Episode
The Man in the High Castle - Amazon Studios

The Man in the High Castle – Amazon Studios

Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle is one of his best books, apparently having been written in less haste and under fewer drugs than some of his others. It’s an alternative history set in the US of a 1962 where the Axis powers won WWII and the pacifist US succumbed and is partitioned, with the West Coast ruled by the Japanese Empire and the East Coast under a Nazi puppet state a la Vichy France. But like all his books, much more is going on here than just an alternative history story; reality is slippery and no one is quite what they seem, and this history may not be real, either.

It is not really science fiction — there’s no scientific explanation for what is going on, or portals between multiverses, although some characters can “see” other realities in foggy San Francisco. The delicacy and ferocity of Japanese culture is examined, the I Ching functions as a kind of Greek chorus pronouncing on the plot, and there’s a shadowy author who has written a book describing a world where Roosevelt wasn’t assassinated and the Allies win the war. The author points out what all historians know — the conquerors are affected by the conquered and absorb some of their culture.

Most of Dick’s novels and stories have been made into movies by now:

Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty,[6] eleven popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, The Adjustment Bureau and Impostor. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923.[7] In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.

He is now seen as marketable by Hollywood financiers. His estate’s commercial success is a bit tragic, since he died largely unrecognized in 1982.

Now we have a miniseries of Man in the High Castle, partly produced by Ridley Scott (another magic name in Hollywood) and financed by Amazon Studios. I watched the pilot and highly recommend it for its high production values and good acting. Because the complexity of the novel would be hard for film viewers to follow, it’s been simplified a bit, but the essence of the novel appears intact. This is the kind of production SyFy would mount if it weren’t run by science fiction illiterates.

Watch the Pilot Episode at Amazon Prime Streaming

Review by Jim Henley

For more on pop culture:

“Game of Thrones” and the Problem of PowerThe Lessons of Walter White
“Blue Valentine”
“Mad Men”
The Morality of Glamour
“Mockingjay” Propaganda Posters
“Big Bang Theory” — Aspergers and Emotional/Social Intelligence
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
Reading “50 Shades of Grey” Gives You Anorexia and an Abusive Partner!
YA Dystopias vs Heinlein et al: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
“Raising Arizona” — Dream of a Family
Coen Brothers: 30 Years of Great Movies

The Morality of Glamour

Karl May

I recently read and reviewed Virginia Postrel’s excellent The Power of Glamour, in which she touches on the issues of positive and negative uses of glamour in persuasion — advertising, propaganda, entertainment and branding. She is primarily interested in defining glamour and determining how it is produced by the careful editing of reality to cast a spell on susceptible audiences that has the power to motivate actions — from purchases, to career choices, and even emigration and warfare.

I recently wrote my own book, Bad Boyfriends, which addresses an analogous phenomenon — limerence, or being “in love,” a powerful neurochemical-emotional state that also casts a spell over the observer.

Of course the typical glamours of fashion photography, Hollywood star photographs, or cinema adventures are today so common that most observers are largely immune to their effects — while caught in the spell and enjoying temporary immersion in it, they know it is neither real nor readily attainable. But the effect of both glamour and limerence depends on the susceptibility of the observer, and the construction of a dream of the future self by either glamorous presentations or a few sightings and encounters with the object of limerence can become obsessive for the observer who is starving for that dream.

And as with glamour, age and experience reduce limerence’s power. While a young person might give up his home and job to pursue either a dream career or the fantasy mate, the older and wiser have seen this play before, and know how to enjoy the fantasy and pursue it a little while not irrationally sacrificing the advantages of their current life.

Postrel writes, “Glamour fuels dissatisfaction with the here and now, even as it makes present difficulties easier to endure by suggesting the existence of better alternatives…. By tendering the promise of escape and transformation, glamour feeds on both hope and hardship.” So one’s already drab, boring life looks even worse by comparison, if you are say a German young man around 1900 reading the then-popular Western pulp novels (like those of Karl May); but then you start to obsess over your plan to escape to the Klondike to strike it rich in the new gold rush, and you have goal to work toward and a plan that fills your heart with joy in anticipation. The writer Karl May had never visited the West or met a cowboy, but he still spun an illusion strong enough to motivate thousands.

Similarly, limerence has launched its victims toward both achievement and destruction, sometimes both. Postrel cites Helen of Troy as one of the earliest documented cases of glamour, and it could be said that her power was to induce limerence in nearly everyone who observed her, leading to her kidnapping, war, and the destruction of Troy.

So we come to the question that every sensitive person whose job is to persuade via glamour in advertising or marketing considers: is what I am doing moral? When I create a glamour, I am setting a trap for the susceptible members of my audience that will create inside their heads a persuasive and persistent model of a future they dream of being part of. As always in persuasion, to feel that it is moral one must have a sense that on the whole you are doing those who are persuaded a favor; that they will be better off having purchased that new BMW or party dress, or taking up a career in the Navy.

Critics of persuasion by glamour can cite many examples where slick advertising and presentations caused victims to do harm to themselves — as mild as buying something they did not need and did not use, in which case they traded some money for a brief sense of pleasure in the having of the object. Or as serious as the spell cast over many of the German people by the Nazis using filmed propaganda, with revived pseudoclassical symbols and theories of Aryan mysticism, to justify their expansion and the demonization of “subhumans.”

Similarly, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, the “father of PR,” (and father of my Harvard fiction writing teacher!), began the use of mass market persuasion techniques that included what today would be called “viral marketing,” by creating images and narratives designed to be picked up by the mass media and so persuade millions through a combination of advertising and free publicity. His “Torches of Freedom” campaign, which in hindsight seems evil, used a staged demonstration of actresses pretending to be freedom-fighting women demanding the freedom to smoke cigarettes. The National Post comments:

On Easter Sunday, 1929, about a dozen female socialites marched along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, ostentatiously smoking cigarettes. Their mission: to fight the stigma against public smoking for women. According to The New York Times, the women insisted that they weren’t holding mere cigarettes but “torches of freedom.”

The march was choreographed by Vienna-born PR pioneer Edward Bernays, then on retainer with the American Tobacco Company. The story is vintage Bernays: a quintessential example of his knack for manipulating public opinion with evocative images and phrases. Bernays had learned from his uncle, Sigmund Freud, that people were basically irrational, driven by instincts. The enterprising nephew unabashedly exploited this insight, appealing to emotions and not intellect whether he was selling Ivory Soap or Calvin Coolidge. The approach revolutionized consumer culture.

Bernays influenced political communication, too. He was dismayed to learn that his 1923 book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, was in Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ bookcase. Still, in another context, Bernays would likely have approved of Goebbels’ claim, that “in the long run basic results in influencing public opinion will be achieved only by the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form, despite the objections of the intellectuals.” Both men knew well: The public opinion battlefield is the heart, not the head.

believe_woman_smoking

If we are thinking morally, this is usually where we get off the persuasion bus. Let’s suppose that we believe what we want to persuade the public to do will be good for them, on the whole; but we are going to elide the details that might “complicate” their evaluation of our proposals, leaving out the real-life problems that may come up, and make simplified assertions that anyone who understands the situation well will know cannot possibly be the whole truth.

And, voilà! Obamacare!

By a series of steps it is possible to convince an otherwise well-meaning and honest person (or entire political party) that lying over and over again to persuade people to give you permission to spend a trillion dollars on a complex program (too complex, it turns out, to actually be executed well or as planned) that benefits a few people a lot, somewhat more people a little, and harms the balance, sometimes significantly. A billion dollars was spent on duplicative software, mostly wasted; hundreds of millions more on advertising which also left out any significant problems the plan might create for some; and hundreds of millions of dollars more on foot soldiers to promote and assist (and remind the beneficiaries who gave them the gift.) The President was an unusually glamourous figure and supported by both Hollywood and the glamour of rhetoric and dream-spinning. But alas, behind the glamour there was a lack of competence in execution, despite good intentions.

Destruction comes to those who believe the glamour they have spun around themselves. To make this a nonpartisan roasting, note the Bush administration in Iraq, who very successfully used the US’ competent and overwhelming military to bring down Saddam Hussein in only a few days with the least loss of life and property of any major war in history. Hubris was achieved shortly thereafter, when the occupation dismantled existing police and government functions to (they thought) create a brand new government and society based on US models of representative government and modern freedoms. The resulting chaos and civil war more than wiped out any advantage gained for either the US or the Iraqi people. Good intentions did not magically create good results.

The greater the risk being taken with the audience’s lives or fortunes, the less justifiable is any misleading persuasive technique, including glamour. We should always be asking, “What if I am wrong? What is the downside of what I want them to do if they are not successful? How painful and destructive is disillusionment from the illusion I am trying to create?”

This article from MarketingProfs discusses the new world of marketing where there are so many sources of information and eager writers among the public that creation of lying spin is much harder (despite the example of Obamacare, which was enabled by a certain uniformity of background — and lack of economic knowledge — of most media reporters.) To quote:

Today, people who want to make great stories can use technology to influence public perception, rather than shape public perception around a lie. Think of it like this: Consumers no longer buy out of a fear of not having something; they buy because the product has the potential to enhance their personal story. Progressive marketing companies such as SHIFT Communications and TGPR talk more about how we make and share real stories—rather than “tell” them.

Dreams of being beautiful and admired (fashion, cosmetics, jewelry…) or powerful, wealthy, and admired (luxury cars, watches, ski houses in Aspen…), competent and skilled and admired (Olympic athletes, dancers, musicians…) are all worthy. One question to ask when you are spinning up a glamour aimed at young people is: how many of them can actually achieve it? Say you have written a script about a ghetto kid who takes up basketball and makes it to the big leagues, suffers one crisis when he takes his new position and love interest for granted, and (heartwarmingly) learns to wisely value those who care for him. What happens to the kids who focus on basketball and neglect other things? While we know most will be disappointed, we also know any kind of focus on achievement is better than no focus. What are the offramps along the way for those who fail to get the brass ring? Going to a good school on a scholarship gives the kid a chance to pick up other skills and find other dreams. Being on a team and showing up regularly for practice teaches the most important skills of holding any job.

It’s clear that people need their dreams, and glamour can lead them in directions they did not expect or know of, but were ready for. The mass marketing of glamour has accelerated the dissatisfaction with what is, and the motivation to create the “what ifs” we call progress. The increasing availability of information uncontrolled by one or a few sources means the future is being created by a glamour with more realism, tucked just out of sight but known to be there. But it can still excite the mind and make the heart beat faster, and move the dreamer to take the chance on the dream.

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples OrganizationsDeath by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 

For more on pop culture:

The Lessons of Walter White
“Blue Valentine”
“Mad Men”
“Mockingjay” Propaganda Posters
“Big Bang Theory” — Aspergers and Emotional/Social Intelligence
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
Reading “50 Shades of Grey” Gives You Anorexia and an Abusive Partner!
YA Dystopias vs Heinlein et al: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
“Raising Arizona” — Dream of a Family

Bolo Ties and Railguns (and Nazis)

railgun

This from 2004:

I’ve been buying up vintage bolo ties on EBay. The cohort that liked them is dying and there’s very little interest in them since they’re so out now, so you can get nice ones in silver and stone for $15 or so.

In 1982 I did a series of short-term jobs to fill time before returning to school. One of them was at an odd little company near MIT called Electromagnetic Launch Research, where I was in charge of their little CP/M network.

The company’s emeritus intellect was Henry Kolm, in his 60s at the time, an old coot of the best kind. Henry had done a lot of work on electromagnetic propulsion — rail guns, mass drivers, maglev trains. He dressed in western shirts and bolo ties — very much a character out of middle Heinlein. Among the many stories I heard from Henry were his demonstration of the safety of the Xerox toner he had helped invent — he ate quite a bit in front of some fearful secretaries. Which is of course no guarantee it’s safe to breathe, which was the real concern, but he was so annoyed at the FUD of the time about it that he felt a public display was necessary.

[Ed: I did not realize at the time I wrote this that Henry had been the American intelligence officer in charge of Operation Paperclip, which secretly resettled Nazi scientists in the US to take advantage of their brainpower in the coming struggle with the USSR. At the time I knew him, of course, these were still Top Secrets.]

I probably got that job because I had lots of connections to railguns. A railgun is a device to rapidly accelerate a projectile via magnetic force; the projectile is on a rail or magnetically suspended, and coils along the line of propulsion are pulsed to accelerate the projectile as it travels along until it is released at terminal speed. In high school I had built a cheesy version which launched nails a few yards — the “control system” was a progressively-spaced set of electrical contacts on a board. You launched the nail by stroking the power wire across the contacts at a steady rate! Not the most reliable system, but it usually worked. This was inspired entirely by Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where lunar rebels use linear induction railguns to bombard the Earth in their effort to rebel against UN authority. Today’s systems, of course, use sophisticated sensors and computer control.

At MIT I had taken a seminar in space colonization with Gerard K. O’Neill, the L5 Society saint. My project was a study of gentle redirection of Oort cloud comets for terraforming purposes. Railguns were one of the means suggested for nudging the comets, and millions of them would have to be redirected to deliver enough volatiles to, say, Mars. Henry loved that idea.

None of the space colonization ideas were ever funded — though we do have an albatross of a space station which is next to useless, leaking, and cost upwards of $100 billion. Henry is gone now, but at least lived to see a few Maglev trains built and railguns incorporated into US military plans. They are being installed on Navy ships in large numbers now.