Look at him, thats my Qual. Your what? My Qualitative! My vibe specialist. Look at him, you notice anything different about him? Look at his face. I'll give you a hint, his name is Jayden. He won a local poetry competition in bushwick! Yeah I'm sure of the vibe.

Jacob Rees-Mogg has been talking about duty and upset people, quite rightly. If war comes, he says, people must join up. Some may have to die. That is how countries last. Rome fell when citizens paid others to fight. The line would be ordinary if it came from a man of the nation. It is damaging because it comes from a man who once seemed to stand with the nation against something else. A few years ago Michael Rainsborough and I argued that Western government had ceased to be national in the ordinary sense and become imperial: a system of management over peoples, not a home belonging to a people. Empires do not need citizens. They need subjects, communities, and a priesthood of progress. The nation state asks for loyalty among equals. The new arrangement asks for deference to a civilising mission aimed, more and more, at the historic population itself. Brexit was a sovereign native revolt against that. It was not a tantrum about trade. It was a people saying they would not be administered as a province of a postnational order. In 2016–19 Rees-Mogg looked as if he understood the distinction. He treated the referendum as a valid instruction. That put him on the national side of the only argument that mattered. The slouch in the Commons in September 2019 was easy to misread as mere insult. At the time it could be taken as something colder and, in its way, political: magisterial unconcern toward the people who thought the vote was an outrage to be managed away. He would not sit up for them. Many of us forgave the manners because the target of the manners seemed right. Turley was correct that the pose was ugly. She was wrong about what the fight was. The new interview wrecks the alibi. The same loucheness is still there. The object has changed. He is no longer declining to perform anxiety for the postnational court. He is reciting its war liturgy and calling it duty. The men who are to kill and die are not being asked to defend a bordered people. They are being invited to service an imperium that still cannot hold a coast, still treats national self-assertion as a public-order problem, and still speaks the language of progress when it means rule. That is why the sofa now looks different. In 2019 the sprawl could pass for aristocratic refusal. In 2026 it reads as arrogance, detachment, dishonesty and stupidity: the ease of a man who will not live the risk he names. On Russia the sermon moralises what does not need moral theatre. States act from interest. Russia has a historically intelligible one in its near abroad. Kennan and others said that driving a victorious alliance onto the ruins of Russian power would produce a collision. The collision came. One may dislike Moscow’s answer. Ascribing ‘brutality’ as if it were the point is a progressive habit: turn strategy into sin so that the only virtuous pose is imperial supervision of the sinner. As wars are fought, this one has not been the cartoon of indiscriminate slaughter the commentary requires. Whether one grants that or not is secondary. The primary fact is simpler. Russia is behaving like a nation. Britain’s elite is not. That is the disgrace in what Rees-Mogg said. He had the chance to remain what Brexit briefly suggested he was: a spokesman for a country that still existed as a country. Instead he talks now like a provincial officer of the progressive imperium, surprised that the natives might object to dying for a project that has spent a generation dissolving them. Duty, from that perspective, doesn’t come across honestly. It feels like the Union flag being draped deceitfully over the progressive imperial agenda. The slouch in 2019 was a tell. Then it said: I will not be hustled by the managerial elite. Now it says: I am comfortable among them. A foolish man, which I now think he is, can be right only sometimes. The blithe pose now grates heavily. I wouldn’t trust the lives of my son and daughter to this project and its exponents. Just back TF off.

Not really. Those of us who grew up before 9/11 remember what our country was like before our government responded to it by launching two of the dumbest wars in our history and then using the results of those wars to flood the West with the very kind of demonic inbred retards behind 9/11. You can’t understand the rage we feel because you have no concept of what we lost as a people. It wasn’t just the violence of that day, which was horrific in itself. It wasn’t just watching people hurl themselves off of buildings on live television just to avoid being burned alive. It wasn’t just hearing the phone calls and voicemails from people who knew they would be dead within minutes. That would be more than enough to scar a generation. But on top of that, we had to watch the best of us then get sent off to be blown up in wars our government had zero interest in winning. All while watching our country be flooded with people who were no different than the hijackers, and then being told we were racist for having a problem with that. We grew up at the peak of peace and prosperity and cultural cohesion in the greatest country on earth. And we saw all of it thrown away after 9/11 because the people in charge of our country thought never-ending wars, infinity immigration, and surveillance of its own people was better than being called mean by people who already wanted us dead.

You’re going to hear a lot about how my bathroom flooded because I left the taps running. That’s largely bullshit. The cause was the water level rising - not me forgetting to turn off the taps.

Germany should join the EU to solve all it’s problems Having access to the single market will help them sell more cars

lol @conksresearch

The UK is an “outsourced communist country” Government spending is around 44–45% of GDP and procurement from private contractors is about one third of that, so a large slice of “private-sector” activity is actually just state-funded outsourcing of public services. Capita, Serco, Mitie, G4S, Atos, Capgemini, Accenture ... these are the equivalent of Russian Oligarchs except instead of profiting from Oil and Mining they extract profit from immigration, crime, social care, facilities management, failed IT projects and consultancy.

lol that’s it then - they really are gonna have to start taxing wanks.

“Why are they always on speakerphone?”

The defining characteristic of American elites is spending hundreds thousands of dollars to learn the right opinions about the Civil Rights Act and then spending millions avoiding its consequences

how it feels to wake up each day and remember you’re a British taxpayer

I’ve already commented on this video below once, but some takes on it from ‘sophisticates’ demand another. Yes, it’s funny to quip, “Bomb bond holders?” I laughed. But the U.S. is slipping global hegemon because it won WW2 by force (yes: with others); then built a benign, inclusive world architecture for 1/3 of us when others might have nuked a few capital cities and taken over the world; then won the Cold War, via the threat, and use, of force (yes: with others); then lobbied for a utopian neoliberal world architecture that was never going to work, as I argued over two decades ago, which has weakened it. We didn’t get to where we were pre-Trump via neoliberalism; we got there via *power*: neoliberalism was a villa built on violently cleared ‘jungle’, as Polanyi put it decades ago - and one that didn’t learn anything about the dangerous climate, flora, nor fauna there. If you really think the market treats powerless pacifists and nuclear-armed states as true equals when push comes to shove, I have a bridge to sell you. (And it goes nowhere.) There are a staggering number of Schmitt’s “Sovereign is he who decides the exception” examples out there already on various scales in various geographies. (As well as central banks buying their own bonds and this being treated as “sensible centrist technocracy”.) And sovereignty starts with power: sorry those thinking it’s solely to do with paperwork and courts. When Trump implies the U.S. military effectively backs the bond market, he’s not wrong. If you think that military can OR can’t project U.S. power globally as it once did, that matters VASTLY for market dynamics. Just don’t ask bond analysts to have any idea about it; they have as much of a clue there as generals do about bonds. Which speaks to why the U.S. is openly —and as predicted— going back to the pursuit of *power*, and a new economic and financial architecture to match, via economic statecraft that can join those dots. That has already seen massive intervention in parts of the economy. That will logically see massive intervention in markets —as we saw from 2008 to no real end economically, or politically looking at the current U.S. Watch and see what happens to the Fed and the Treasury. That will logically include the U.S. physically threatening others via action or INaction (“Nice NATO you have there…pity if anything happened to it…”), If you can’t see this you are either very kind; and/or very ideological; and/or not very well read; and/or the kind of person who got their lunch money taken at school and who now lives in a nice area where that doesn’t happen - but where your kids might be learning things about liberalism and capitalism that echo Leninism’s view of the world. It’s a depressing world where Schmitt is relevant again. But he is. Separate but related point: as I said to @izakaminska re: our global system crumbling, an inverse 70s is the 007-ties: spies, guns, war, world-shattering plots. Yet ‘James Bond’s “next chapter” needs to make 007 “relevant” to modern audiences, says Amazon MGM Studios boss’. radiotimes.com/movies/james-… If you think that’s not seeing the forest (or box office) for the trees, neither is thinking bond markets just happen without tanks, bombs, and Bond.

This is the UK right now.

“My Government once handed out posters to asylum seekers asking them not to rape girls just after I said that leafy villages should take more asylum seekers.”

“Let me get this straight, you’re lending billions with cheese as collateral?” “Not cheese. Parmesan. Parmigiano-Reggiano to be precise.“ “So, you finance this by packaging the Parmesan loans into Parmesan CDO A, which has part of Parmesan CDO B and both get put into Parmesan CDO C?” “Yeah. The original loans are backed by wheels of Parmesan. Minimum age of 12 months. Some are 24 months. 36 months. 48 month. Hell, up to 120 months. Delicious. Millions of wheels. But Parmesan CDO C is a synthetic Parmesan CDO. A CDO of Parmesan CDOs. Parmesan Squared if you will.” “What if it gets too hot in the summer and the wheels of Parmesan melt?” “We’ll sell Parmesan credit default swaps.” “C’mon! How much bigger is the market for Parmesan-backed sythentic loan and CDS products than actual edible real-life Parmesan that I can grate on top of my homemade spaghetti bolognese tonight?” “At least 10,000x.” “Ok, let’s say we have an underlying pool of $10 million in Parmesan wheels. How much money could be out there betting on your synthetic Parmesan financial products?” “Probably $100 billion.” “That is fucking crazy.” “No, it’s awesome.”

The white American middle class are literally the best people on the planet. All my life I grew up with people dunking on them for their cordial relations and stuffy mores and middlebrow taste but it turns out that everything runs on their largesse. When I was an immigrant kid growing up in Central Jersey much like Hasan Piker this was a nice country with a good standard of living and a decent intellectual discourse thanks to them. Anyone who talks down to them is moralscum.

If I hear another Boomer conservative bitching about Gen Z ordering DoorDash I’m going to become a communist. It’s true their grandparents always cooked homemade meals. But that’s because grandma stayed at home and grandpa had a union job and nobody could reach him after 5. They had a house with a full kitchen and 3 kids by 25. Meanwhile half of Gen Z men are forced to compete with the entire population of South America for some 12 hour long shift HVAC job that barely pays the rent. They’re 30 and nobody cooks for them because they can’t find any women who’ll marry them when they can’t even afford a starter home in the ghetto. The other half of Gen Z men are busting their ass competing with the entire populations of India and China for some 70 hour a week powerpoint job that asks them for updates on the slides at 3AM. They can’t find anyone to cook for them either, because every women around them is convinced that being a mother and cooking for a man is beneath them because they’re gonna save the world when they become VP of Marketing at MegaCorp in 20 years.

I grew up in a zone contaminated by Chernobyl. Because of that, foreign sponsors paid for children like me to spend one month by the sea each summer. On our own money, such a trip was unthinkable. So two summers in a row I found myself in Spain, living with a host family outside Córdoba, in Andalusia. The father was an electrician, like mine. His wife worked half-days at a furniture factory. They had a two-storey house, two cars and a motorcycle. In a single month they took me to a school where matadors are trained, and to a water park. To a boy from a family living on $250–300 a month, this was boundless luxury. The family was quite left-wing. They despised Generalissimo Franco and everything he had left behind. And yet on the wall of their daughter's bedroom hung a poster of a young, still unmarried Prince Felipe — today's King Felipe VI. Twenty-nine years have passed. I have gone back over those memories many times, and the older I get, the more often I set two things side by side: the poverty and humiliation the communists brought to my homeland, and the fact that and the fact that Franco — not with clean hands, but through a brutal civil war — saved his own country. The communists, incidentally, came to power in my country through a civil war as well. What we saw in Ceuta yesterday is the direct consequence of that extraordinary irrationality — the denial of Spanish identity, Spanish values and Spanish heroes that set in after 1975 and gradually swallowed the almost whole of Spanish society. I could descend into deep socio-economic analysis. Instead I will say one thing. This is what happens when a society denies that everything in life has to be paid for. Spain believed the socialist fairy tale about free cheese. Yesterday the mousetrap snapped shut.