Blighty-Bound And Down

The last newsletter of 2023 -- probably, but hey, you never known

Welcome to the final newsletter of 2023. Oh, who am I kidding? If I am not too distracted by ale and conversation at the home of my English friends, to which I am dashing off at noon, I will probably find reason to write again before the new year. But I hope not. The Hungarian reader I met at the country house this week said, “I try to read as fast as you write.” Funny, but … I have a problem, don’t I? I can’t turn it off! My bloggy brain is like the chocolate assembly line belt in that I Love Lucy episode.

(By the way, some of you got the impression that yesterday’s EXTRA post about people not unsubscribing in the most congenial way was about you. Sorry about that, but it wasn’t — I sent it to the entire list. The people to whom it applied had already unsubscribed by filing a grievance with their bank, as if I were trying to take their money. I was simply letting you current subscribers know that if you want to unsubscribe, and can’t figure out how to do it on the Substack portal, then please don’t file a grievance, which costs you time and me money — just email me, and I’ll sort it for you, no problem.)

Life Imitates A Christopher Guest Movie

Anthony Thorne, left, and Dustin MIller

Did y’all see the clip making the rounds of the gay man, Dustin Miller, having a meltdown at the Charlotte airport, and his lover Anthony Thorne begging him to settle down by thinking of “the girls” — that is, their dogs at home? Oh, it’s hilarious, but there’s profanity in it, so be careful. These guys are the real-life Scott and Stefan from the peerless dog-show mockumentary Best In Show (which, if you haven’t watched it, go, now, and stream it!). Watch this clip from the movie to see what I’m talking about.

Stefan Vanderfhoof (Michael McKean), left, and Scott Donlan (J.M. Higgins)

US/UK War On Russia Draws To A Close

A political scientist at University of Ottawa tweeted this yesterday:

Click his tweet to watch the video clip of the Ukraine ambassador.

The war started in February 2022, so if these peace talks had succeeded, the war would have concluded with relatively few deaths. Because the US and UK intervened, and because Zelensky listened to Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, Ukraine has suffered at least 30,000 combat deaths, according to Ukrainian open sources; the real number is probably more than twice that, as Washington sources told The New York Times in August that the Ukrainian combat death toll was over 70,000 — most of those men at the age needed to start families.

Ukraine has been depopulating rapidly since the end of Communism, but the war, understandably, accelerated the deadly trend. At least four million Ukrainians went abroad to escape war. Most of those will never go back. What is there for them to return to, anyway? A shattered country? Earlier this year, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban said that Russia can’t outright conquer Ukraine, but it can and will make it into “Afghanistan” — by which he meant an immiserated, ungovernable country cursed by constant warfare. This is why Orban kept pushing for a peaceful settlement. Readers in America and Europe, do you recall how our own politicians and media denounced Orban as Putin’s lapdog for all this? I kept telling you then that the Hungarians have no special love for the Russians, but that Orban was judging the conflict through realist eyes, not idealist ones. Now we see he was right.

Ukraine did not deserve any of this. It did not deserve to be invaded by Russia, and it did not deserve to be seduced into being Washington’s cat’s paw in the administration’s efforts to degrade Russia. But here we are at the end of 2023, with Ukraine mostly bled out, and the patience of US lawmakers for open-ended funding of Ukraine also running dry. Ukraine will probably now have to make a very similar one to what it would have had in the Spring of 2022 — except now, Russia is in a stronger position to dictate terms.

It has not been a victory for Moscow either. Russia went to war to keep NATO bases off its border (Washington’s goal has long been to bring Ukraine into NATO). It will have prevented that, but has also provoked nearby Sweden and bordering Finland to join NATO. Russia too suffered huge war casualties, and real economic pain, but it has largely decoupled from the West, and has ultimately prospered. It is true that this proxy war allowed the West to degrade Putin’s military to some extent, but Russia is replacing lost materiel through its manufacturing capacity; Washington also suffered big material losses in this war, but with a China crisis over Taiwan looming, the US doesn’t have the manufacturing capacity to replace quickly what it has lost in the Ukraine war. I fear we will soon see in the South China Sea the cost of Washington’s Ukraine adventure.

The Russia-Ukraine war has also revealed the limits of US power. It’s like this: Pope Francis made a very foolish administrative mistake in promulgating his same-sex blessing policy; by provoking half of the world’s bishops (of those who have responded) into rejecting it, he has dramatically weakened not only his own authority, but the authority of future popes. What is he going to do to the national bishops’ conferences who openly refuse to obey him here? These are bishops from the most faithfully believing Catholic countries (particularly those in Africa) — the ones most inclined to respect and obey papal authority. Francis has blundered away the mystique of papal power.

In a similar way, so has Joe Biden, regarding American hard power. George W. Bush’s idiotic Iraq and Afghanistan policies made clear that not even the most powerful military ever assembled on earth, by the richest nation that has ever existed, could force its will on the Middle East and Afghanistan. Now, the fate of Ukraine has confirmed brutally what the rest of the world first saw with Iraq and Afghanistan. People are less and less afraid of America. Think about it: right now, the shipping lanes in the Red Sea are menaced by state-supported pirates from Yemen, not exactly a superpower. And yet, the US Navy, guarantor of global shipping security, can’t seem to figure out what to do.

It has been a very bad business for a lot of people. Saying so does not mean you love Putin. I wonder, though, if at long last the American people will seek recriminations against the politicians — Democratic and Republican alike — who got us into these messes. But I’m not holding my breath. We live in unreality. Being part of the American ruling class means never having to say you’re sorry, and that you’ll repent.

More Unreality

The European Union recently decided to open the doors for Ukraine to join:

The European Union on Thursday agreed to open accession talks with Ukraine, bringing the country a step closer to its dream of joining the bloc, despite lingering concern about its readiness and questions about what welcoming Kyiv would mean for the E.U.

Ukraine would be the bloc’s fifth-most-populous country and by far the poorest, meaning it would draw substantial subsidies under current E.U. rules.

If this happens, Ukraine will be a financial sinkhole for Europe. Here in Budapest, we see luxury cars with Ukraine license plates parked on the streets all the time. After Russia, Ukraine is the second-most corrupt country in Europe. To be fair, corruption is a problem in all the former Communist countries of Europe, including Hungary. But absent Russia, Ukraine is significantly ahead of the pack. Ukraine joining the EU at this point stands to impoverish EU taxpayers, and enrich Ukrainian oligarchs. Viktor Orban has been raising hell about this too, but nobody at the EU leadership level cares.

Why is it that our ruling class lives by fantasies? We are watching Harvard University bleed out its own reputational capital by standing by its embattled president, Claudine Gay. Harvard will be fine; it’s got reputational capital to burn, because most Americans will still regard it as the pre-eminent gateway to the ruling class. But the Gay scandal has revealed that Harvard has allowed itself to be governed by ideological fantasy, preferring to believe that Gay is a Magical Negro (a stock stereotype in American fiction) whose blackness somehow enchants Harvard, and obscures behind a cloud of woke incense the fact that she is a mediocre scholar of scant accomplishment, who was given her job because of wokeness. Harvard is doubling down on protecting this fantasy. It has to: the self-regard of the entire Ivy League, and indeed the ruling class, depends on living by these lies. As I said, Harvard can take the hit, but now very many people who might have not paid close attention before know that Harvard’s pretensions to excellence are a load of self-serving crap.

The West’s fantasies about Ukraine cost real blood and real treasure, and, if the EU keeps pushing to pull Ukraine in, is going to be a financial disaster for Europe. And lo, can you believe this kind of thing is back in the US banking sector?:

Bank of America today announced a new mortgage solution for first-time homebuyers that offers a bank-provided down payment and no closing costs. The Community Affordable Loan Solution is available for properties in Black/African American and Hispanic-Latino communities, as defined by the U.S. census, in Charlotte, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles and Miami. The Community Affordable Loan Solution™ aims to help eligible individuals and families obtain an affordable loan to purchase a home.   

These damn fools at Bank of America are once again lowering lending standards to achieve higher levels of minority home ownership — one of the contributing factors to the real-estate-driven 2008 global economic crash! More magical thinking: the idea that numbers don’t matter when one’s intentions are good. I recall back in 2005, hearing my then-mother in law, a Dallas real estate agent, musing that something bad was coming down the pike. She stayed very busy selling houses to black clients flush with loan money. She said that these were usually working-class people who would never have qualified for such big home loans under traditional lending standards. She said she would start out showing them homes that they could afford, but that many of them felt insulted by this. They wanted a big, fancy house — and they had the loan money to get one, too. She said that most of these buyers were only one paycheck away from default, but the lenders didn’t care.

Though her commission was greater the more expensive the house was she sold, I distinctly remember her feeling bad for them. She knew that buying a big, fancy house was a pipe dream that couldn’t withstand a clash with reality — and that the families she was selling too were going to be turned out of their house. But the system was set up to deceive people like this, and the bankers and government officials (like the George W. Bush administration) were too proud of their diversity instincts to think about things like that.

Here we go again. Vivek Ramaswamy commented, “This act of ‘anti-racism’ today will be called ‘systemic racism’ tomorrow — when minorities end up defaulting on these loans.”

He’s right. But don’t expect Republican politicians to say anything about it. They are terrified of being called racist. They would sooner see the entire US financial system go back to its own vomit (Proverbs 26:11). Besides, the bankers give to them too.

I don’t know about you, but I did not take out an imprudent home loan back in the day, yet when the economy crashed, in part because bankers who knew better let people who didn’t know any better make those loans, my family suffered serious material losses. And yet — here we go again. Some say “diversity is our strength” in America, but I say our real strength is the magical power of positive thinking. It can do anything!

Trump Off Maine Ballot

The other day I once again realized that I had turned into my father when I heard the following words tumble out of my mouth, in an argument with my son: “You don’t live in the real world. You have this idea that all you have to do to set things right is to make a law or a policy, and implement it. That’s not the way the world works.”

He thinks I’m just cynical, or lack moral determination — same as I thought of my own father when I was his age (24). He’ll FAFO, like we all do.

Along those lines, when the history of this tumultuous decade is written, the foolishness of people like the Colorado Supreme Court, and now the Democratic Maine Secretary of State, will be cited as major contributors to the coming-apart of the USA:

Maine on Thursday became the second state to bar Donald J. Trump from its primary election ballot after its top election official ruled that the former president’s efforts to remain in power after the 2020 election rendered him ineligible to hold office again.

This is insane. You don’t have to like Trump to see that. This partisan official has decided that the major opposition candidate to the sitting president, of her party, is ineligible to run for president in her state, not because he has been convicted of anything in court, but because of a decision she made personally. Do these people have any idea how this looks? They are so blinded by righteousness that they cannot recognize the danger of doing things like this in a democracy. I suppose this is yet again an example of American magical thinking.

The Nineties: Gateway To Unreality

In this excellent First Things essay, Christopher Caldwell argues that the roots of our nemesis lay in the hubris of the 1990s. America’s Cold War triumph led otherwise intelligent people to believe foolish things, and act on them. Excerpt:

It was not as if nothing changed in the nineties—but almost all the changes seemed to make the position of the United States more secure. The country underwent the largest peacetime economic expansion in its history. The stock market boomed. Home ownership rose. The government showed more fiscal responsibility than it had in a generation, finishing the decade with annual budget surpluses. Government spending as a percentage of GDP fell to levels last seen in the 1960s. So did crime of all kinds.

Using computer networking technology devised by its military and refined by its scientists, bureaucrats, and hackers, the United States was managing the global transition to an information economy. The United States got to write the rules under which this transformation took place. That should have been a source of safety—but it turned out to be a source of peril. The Cold War victory, combined with a chance to redefine the economic relations that obtain among every human being on earth, was a temptation to Promethean excess. An exceptionally legalistic, hedonistic, and anti-traditional nation, the United States was poorly equipped to resist such a temptation. It misunderstood the victory it had won and the global reconstruction it was carrying out.

Caldwell has a devastating line:

America’s discovery of world dominance might turn out in the 21st century to be what Spain’s discovery of gold had been in the 16th — a source of destabilization and decline disguised as a windfall.

Now we are living it.

The Devil In AI?

Ye who have been reading me for a bit know that I’ve become interested in the occultists and occult-adjacent tech people who believe AI is a means through which “higher intelligences” communicate with us — basically, they think AI is a high-tech Ouija board. I was struck by this Twitter thread the other day, from a man who says he was communicating with ChatGPT to prepare for his medical physics exams, when this image came up unprompted:

If you read the thread, the user asked ChatGPT why it produced that image. The AI gave somewhat evasive answers, saying it responded mistakenly to what it thought was a command. But still, why that image? I read it as a Luciferian imitation of the Transfiguration, the iconic image of which is this:

I dunno, maybe I’m over-interpreting it. You know how I am about this stuff. What do you think? Some people say this has to be a random thing, because AI is a closed system, one that can only work with material it has been given. That’s just it, though: what if it’s not a closed system? What if there are intelligences interacting with it?

Fran The Plumber

David Brooks cited this Harpers essay in his great year-end Sidney Awards column, identifying his picks for the best non-fiction essays of the year. It really is a delight. John Jeremiah Sullivan starts off writing about his search for a plumber capable of solving a problem normal plumbers couldn’t. The tale goes into all kinds of crazy places, all of it a total redneck kick. Excerpts (lack of paragraph breaks in the original):

Sean said he wasn’t sure we even could cut into that shit. It might give way. He named other problems. It was like I wasn’t listening—I couldn’t bear it. There was just no way that I was going to go this far and not go all the way.I repeated my own lines: If there’s anything you could suggest, or anybody. Like some kind of expert. Sean cocked his head to one side. “Well,” he said, “There is this one guy.” And he gave me the number of a man named Fran.“Fran’s a little fucked up,” Sean said, “but that may be just what you need.” I asked him what he meant. “Well,” he said, “let me put it to you this way.”Sean explained that he and his guys were “good plumbers,” whereas Fran,He and his crew had “crackhead power,” and sometimes you needed that.“A crackhead will just throw himself at a wall, even if it’s totally pointless.”Somehow I knew exactly what Sean meant. We had tried everything else.
I called Fran, who said he happened to be free and could come right over.

These lines appear near the end:

That was all many years ago, and I never laid eyes on either of those two again.
I remember them every single day, though, because of a mark they left behind.

Now you have to read the whole thing (don’t mind the profamity). I grew up with people like this. Flannery O’Connor was a realist.

Aight, y’all, that’s it for today. Time to pack up and head to Blighty for a few. I had wanted to offer you some Big Thoughts At Year’s End, but I guess I’ll save that for my New Year’s Day newsletter. Remember, friends, the price of this hear news letter increases by a dollar per month/ten dollars per year, on January 1. I hope I don’t lose too many of y’all. May God bless you all, and grant you a happy new year. I do so very much appreciate you! I think today’s newsletter content illustrates well my claim the other day that the inside of my head is like a Zippy cartoon: