Duned

Yesterday we hit the treadmill and did a nice easy hour in which we didn't check the time till the 59th minute. As we suspected running through the soreness cleared out the knee. Some residual soreness remains. We did some good book thinkin' too. Things are coming together, mentally speaking, for the Australian scene. 

We haven't talked about our QAnon contacts lately because they've demanded silence from this blog. However, Qbi Wan has given us permission to break our  silence. He says the parents vs school board conflict was partially stoked by QAnon assets and observers should expect to see more direct actions. Qbi Wan also claims that the Justice Department is designating parents as domestic terrorists so they can redirect Federal resources against Q. Qbi Wan says, 'The plan unfolds'.

Reviews  of Dune are coming in. The Critical Drinker says Dune is (mostly) brilliant. The Critical Drinker is mostly right. Ben Shapiro reviews Dune here and agrees with Will. Ben's 'biggest issue' is the musical score. The brilliant Steve Sailer notices something we noticed: 'Spaniard Javier Bardem (best known as Anton Chigurh) is amusing as Fremen chieftain Stilgar, doing a grumpy riff on Mexican Anthony Quinn’s wonderful Auda Abu Tayi in Lawrence of Arabia.' Does this mean we are also brilliant? It does.

We've been unable to watch Dune, and we've watched it twice now, without thinking of the previous two versions. We just know all the rhythms and beats. It's like we're listening to another version of a song we love. Shapiro says one hasn't seen Dune till one has seen Dune in the theatre. That's our plan. 

A lot of people talk about author Frank Herbert's amazing world building. But is the world really all that amazing? The Dune universe is eerily familiar to those of us who lived in the 20th century. Herbert wrote about a great-power conflict over a must have natural resource found only in the desert. The Atriedes are the west. The Harkonnen are the Ruskis. The Fremin are the Arabs from Lawrence of Arabia. This template also works for Medieval and Renaissance Europe. That said, Herbert's work on Fremin culture is impressive.

Sell This

Steve Sailer has another long post about advertising data and a hunch he's had since the 1980s that advertising really doesn't work. Those interested in selling books, or anything else should grab a coffee and read, What if Advertising on Google and Facebook (or TV) Doesn't Much Work? We agree. We're thinking one day we'll write a Substack piece on everything we've learned about advertising. But for now here's our experience. 

You can advertise all you want, but it won't matter if people just aren't interested. This was our experience with A Line Through the Desert. Advertising worked with later books. We found ad effectiveness reduced by 50% with each run. By 2017 we had a hunch that we didn't need to run advertisements anymore. We were right, and haven't since. The most effective form of advertisement available to us is getting mentioned by Instapundit. This is a well known thing. It's called an Instalanche. 

Speaking of selling books, Kurt Schlichter, who is always right, released his latest, The Split. He reports  855 sales in 12 hours. That's really interesting. We wonder if he's including presales. We guestimate that his KU page reads amount to tens of thousands in that time span.

Yet more advertising...watching broadcast TV in the New York metro area means getting bombardment with 'get vaccinated!' ads. It's total saturation and it isn't working. These ads talk to citizens like they're children.  Because we're a normal human with interests, things to do, etc, we haven't been paying attention to the national vax rate and are stunned to learn it stands at 56%. In New Jersey the rate is, 64%, because Governor Murphy isn't a condescending A-hole. No wonder Biden and left are furious. That is a complete total failure for an admin that promised a 70% vaccination rate by July. 

Will Goes the Full Prague

Liz Cheney (R-Haliburton) is in trouble. Hot Air reports half the GOP House Caucus has signed a petition to remove the war profiteer's daughter from her leadership post. Back home in America, state senator Anthony Bouchard is challenging Cheney in the Wyoming GOP primary.  Never trust Wyoming establishment GOP. Twenty years ago, our own cousin, Ambassador Thomas F. Stroock, didn't lift a finger to help us get a job in W's White House.  This blog doesn't know what will happen with Cheney or with the GOP in the next few years. We do know there's no point in winning a great big victory in 2022 with the likes of Liz Cheney running things. We've seen that show, so no thanks. Liz Cheney should be defenestrated...metaphorically speaking, from her leadership post.

Ace tells us that Trump is considering forming a third party. Reader(s) don't need this blog to tell them it's a mistake. We're not going to lecture about the need for unity and loyalty to the party apparatus. In a word or two, fuck them. The GOP-e has never been weaker (see above) and rather than forming a third party, patriots would do better to take over the GOP infrastructure. This is not that hard to do. Example- back in 2010 the party wanted Charlie Crist in Florida, but the base said no thanks and nominated Marco Rubio. So what to do? We had this brainstorm, just now, like 2 minutes ago taking Youngest Daughter to the bus stop. If/when you get GOP fundraising mail, send the envelope back with a protest note. We will today. It's a start. 

Midnight's Edge has a short video describing the long civil war at Disney's Lucasfilm between the John Favreau faction and the Kathleen Kennedy faction. Basically, the Favreau faction is loyal to George Lucas' Star Wars vision while the Kennedy faction hates Lucas and Luke Skywalker and sought to use Star Wars as a canvass upon which to project their feminism. The force is female, after all. Giving Star Wars to people who don't like Star Wars was a terrible mistake. Hence the sequels. Midnight's Edge is always right. 

Steve Sailer writes about the Wilson Administration's war on German Americans. About half of white America traces its heritage back to Germany and a hundred years ago German was as ubiquitous on American streets as Spanish is today. When the AEF occupied the Rhineland after the war, thousands of German speaking Doughboys looked up relatives. Quote Sailer, 'Although we are constantly lectured on the crucial role of immigrants in American history, the vast contributions of Germans to American culture have been vanishingly hard to notice for the last century due to the anti-German craze unleashed during the Great War, which shoved German-Americans into becoming the least assertive of our ethnicities.' The Stroocks thought we were Dutch till our sister's research found that Samuel Stroock, who arrived in America in the 1850s, was born in Germany. Why did our grandfather, born 1922, think he was Dutch? Our best theory remains that given anti-Kraut sentiment, the family decided being Dutch was a better idea than being one of those sinister Germans. 

Friday Follies

We submitted a column to our KGB handler last night, but really weren't sure he would publish it. The piece is about China's espionage in the United States, and the Ruski's can be sensitive about China stuff as they're friends. Anyway we got an email this morning asking for clarification on something so it looks like it's going up. When writing about China issues we try to avoid terms like 'Chinese spying' and instead say 'China's spying'. We know a lot of Chinese-Americans, of course. Just replace 'Chinese' with 'Jewish and reader(s) will see what we mean. We use 'Beijing' as much as possible.

And....the article is up: Beijing has established a presence on American college campuses through various means, including the Confucian Institute. This is a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education, which seeks to promote ideas, culture and news from China. While Confucian Institutes engage in much useful dialogue, they have been designated a foreign mission by the U.S. State Department which says they spread Chinese government propaganda. At the start of 2020 there were 86 Confucian Institutes on American college campuses and another 500 in K-12 schools. As Confucian Institutes have become controversial, many have shut down.

The Times of Israel reports the United States fucking Government has been hacked: 'US officials suspect a massive hacking operation that hit numerous government agencies and has been linked to Russia breached networks tied to the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile, Politico reported Thursday.' They got the nukes. We assume 'Russia' is Deep State for 'China'. These are the Feds, people. These are the guys who want to tell you wearing masks will stop the Wuhan Virus from Wuhan China.

Ben Shapiro tells us that San Francisco is renaming Abraham Lincoln High School. You know, during the Tobacco wars of the 90's, we tried to tell people that the health-Nazis wouldn't stop with cigarettes. And they didn't. We tried to tell people that the left wouldn't stop with Confederates, and so they haven't. Oh, and when someone criticizes Lincoln, Washington, or anyone else for making war upon the Sioux or whomever, just reply, 'You're goddamn right he did.' Concede nothing.

On the home front Oldest Daughter has decided she's a leftist and has decorated her room with leftwing slogans, 'black lives matter' and such a Bernie Sanders flag, etc etc. Our own Soviet flag hangs from her ceiling. 'Wait, you have a Soviet flag?' reader(s) may be asking. Heh, reader(s) should see our current FB pic. Anyway, this is fine. This blog has a certain respect for Mr. Sanders. Even if he gets the solution wrong, he understands the problem perfectly.

This blog tries to stick with what it knows, which is why we haven't blogged much about vaccines, quarantines, masks etc. As far as lockdowns go we think it's obvious they don't work. We also think it obvious we're seeing a surge in cases because it's flu season. Steve Sailer, who we say without irony is the smartest man on the internet, has some hard numbers for Covid and vaccine skeptics. Our own thought is that one of two things will happen to all of us. Either you get the vaccine or you get Covid. We are biased, though.

So I Checked with Jewish Frat

This is a couple of weeks old now, but still delicious: 

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has sparked a firestorm of criticism after he appeared to argue that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically predisposed to have a higher IQ than non-Jews. In a column published in the paper’s Friday edition titled “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,” Stephens asks, “how is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?” Stephens wrote that the “common answer” was that “Jews are, or tend to be, smart,” and claimed that “when it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true.” He quoted as evidence a 2005 academic paper that argued “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data.”

We love a Timesman taking flak for racism, bigotry and generally thinking the wrong thing.

Steve Sailer, social scientist, statistician and accused Jew Hater** has argued the same for a long time.

Look, you people all know the Animal House joke, 'I checked with the Jewish frat...' Oppenheimer, Fermi and Szilard were Jews. The Israelis built a dynamic, hightech economy in under a century and develop laser death rays. When was the last time anyone in the Gulf States invented something? Westerners found and developed their oil and Saudi Arabia's other main export is Wahabis.

Still, there are exceptions to Jewish general smartness. We graduated high school with a 1.7 GPA and a combined 850 SAT score. Combined. 

*OMG! OMG! He's liked a few of our responses to his tweets.
**Judge the man by his enemies, which include the ADL, so....
***Pretty sure we used that headline before.

What Will's Watching (Steve Edition)

Steve Sailer reviews Midway: Midway is a surprisingly accurate and competent WWII movie about the most thrilling naval battle in American history. While only 38 percent of film critics gave the film a thumbs-up, 92 percent of its audience approved. It doesn’t rank with the best films of 2019, but gay German blockbuster director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) and screenwriter Wes Tooke wrestle a huge amount of history into a lucid and moving tale.

The Bellicose Israeli Nation

When Israel was founded in 1948 it was a leftist state. Prime Minister David Ben Gurion led the Labour Party, which ruled uninterrupted until unseated by Menachim Begin's Likud in 1977. Labour was very much a mid-century democratic socialist party, it's ideology compatible with Clement Atlee's British Labour, and beloved by FDR New Deal Democrats. 

Socialist Kibbutzs were instrumental in the early history of Israel. 

What is Israel is a question as intriguing as what is Judaism? Are Jews a religious or an ethnic group?

With it's new Nation State Law Israel defines itself as the home of the Jewish people. Israel is not just a religious state or an ethnic state, but a nation-state.

The indefatigable Steve Sailer points out that the new nationalist Israel makes old fashioned Democrats uncomfortable.

Israel is now a center-right state. The old Labour party is a husk, and the main opposition to Netanyahu's right-wing Likud comes from Tzipi Livni's centrist party. The left is dead, its reputation impaled on the Oslo so called 'Peace Process'. The last Labour PM was Ehud Barak, who Aerial Sharon* wiped out in the election of 2001 after the failure of said Peace Process.

The new Israel has little to recommend it to the Israel of Shimon Peres**, four time failed Israeli politician. Bibi's Israel is not inclined to 'restraint' as the old Clinton-Albright cliché went. In fact Israel is hyper-bellicose toward terror, Syria and Iran. 

Jews aren't supposed to do that sort of thing.

*Greatest Jew since Moses, or Charleton Heston
**Quisling

A national army liberates a religious structure

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg: the Left kind of Jew

Yesterday Jeffrey Goldberg fired The Atlantic's new columnist, Kevin Williamson. Williamson had earned some ire on the right for writing not very complimentary things about poor white people, a caste from which he hails. We always took his writings on the matter as self-criticism. It never bothered us. After all we bash our fellow Jews here, both secular and Hasidic and are about to do so now.

Williamson supports the death penalty for abortion. Take it away Ben Shapiro!

So, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic has now fired former National Review columnist Kevin Williamson. The reason, supposedly, was that Williamson had written a tweet years ago suggesting the death penalty as a punishment for abortion; he also appeared on a podcast wherein he discussed the idea. But Williamson’s tweet was widely distributed on Twitter for years. In other words, this wasn’t anything new. Goldberg merely caved to public pressure from the Left.

So holding certain opinions is now grounds for termination? Have fun with that, HR. We'll leave others to hash that out. 

Shapiro points out that The Atlantic employs Ta-Nehisi Coats, (we have no thoughts on pronunciation) who thinks the white man casts bad ju-ju against the black man. The Atlantic also employs Andrew Sullivan, the world's premier homosexual gynecological expert. Sorry folks, you're just going to have to google that one.

But let's get back to Goldberg. Shapiro notes Goldberg was 'a pawn of the Obama administration who acted as their front man for selling a series of egregious lies to the American public about the Iran deal...'

Lord, we loath Jews like Goldberg. He loves Israel, so long as the nation is run by Globalists* like the Quisling Shimon Peres and failed Prime Minister Ehud Barak.** Warriors like Begin, Sharon and Netanyahu are just so...so...low-brow. They kill Israel's enemies and keep the Sabbath holy. One has to be loyal to one's class, after all, and Bibi makes it difficult to defend the Jewish State when amongst the Smart Set. Jews aren't supposed to fight back, don't you know.

Goldberg certainly didn't fight back against Media Matters. So the Atlantic loses a talented, and more importantly, interesting writer becuase Jeffrey Goldberg has no spine.

Via

Laugh it up, fuzz-ball

*No 'Globalist' is not code for 'The Jews'
**Great General and Defence Minister, though

Southern Jews

Steve Sailer's article on the American South hyperlinks to an old article of his about the Jew's place in same:

Weren’t Jews in the South more victimized by all the bigoted Southern anti-Semites? No. Actually, the slaveholding states were far ahead of the northern states in electing Jews to high office, such as Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin. 

In general, Jews were more welcomed by Southern elites. Much as in medieval Poland, where the nobles invited in Jewish merchants to provide them the financial services that their own people were too innumerate to undertake, rich Southern Protestants generally saw themselves as an agrarian warrior class. So Jewish commercial facilitators, such as the slave-owning Lehman Brothers, who founded the future investment bank in Alabama in 1855, tended to be welcomed as complementary to the landowners.

We can attest to this in our own family. Our grandmother was born in Nachez (pronounced Naches) Mississippi and raised in Waterproof, Louisiana. Her father, William Eisman for whom we are named, settled there after leaving Germany in 1919. He married Rose Marx. Hannah Marx Eisman followed in 1926 (she would kill us for revealing her year of birth). William and Rose Eisman are buried in a cemetery overlooking the Mississippi called 'Jews Hill'. It was commonly understood that Jews or 'Hebrews' were 'people of the book' and to be respected as such. 

In 1944 Hannah Marx Eisman met a nice Yankee Sergeant who was stationed at Ft. Polk...

Our grandmother was very much a woman of the South in form and manner and possessed something of a smooth, molasses accent.

She was buried in 2003 with Louisiana soil.

On Jewish Privilege

The estimable Steve Sailer writes about the notion of 'Jewish Privilege':

Of course, “white privilege” is a Thing. In contrast, there is no such Thing as “Jewish privilege.” It’s just not a concept that Americans can begin to process in their brains, even when discussing the history of The New Republic under Peretz and Wieseltier.

He writes ironically, of course.

Jewish privilege exits. We know, we see it all the time. We even use it.

Jewish privilege means the rest of the country isn't supposed to notice that an awful lot of Jews seem to be in finance, law and media.

Jewish privilege means there's a Holocaust Museum in Washington, for some reason.

Jewish privilege means being able to posture about said Holocaust, 'It could happen here!' No it Can't, Schlomo.

Jewish privilege means one gets to be ethnically cute, 'Oyyyyy look at how Jewish I am while I get a bagel and schmeeeeerr!'

On a daily basis Jewish privilege means getting to joke about 'the goys'. It means one can crack Christmas jokes. It means gentiles are afraid to wish one a 'Merry Christmas' and even wonder if saying 'Happy Holidays' is OK. It means one can mock the New Testament.

Jewish privilege means being immune from criticism.

Try getting away with that, you goy

Just a reminder...

More le Affair de David

We've come to think of Steve Sailer as the smartest man on the internet and strongly recommend checking him out over at Unz.

Anyway, in Takimag here's what Sailer has to say about Le Affair de David:

Seinfeld co-creator Larry David did something during his Saturday Night Live monologue this weekend that is almost unknown in 21st-century America: He engaged in Jewish self-criticism in front of gentiles.

We criticize Jews all the time. We do so here, but we really let our semi-coreligionists have it in our novels.

[You wrote two novels about the Israelis bombing the fuck out of the Middle East. How is that critical?-Ed]

Ahhhh....to the untrained eye, perhaps. After all, as the Imams say, the Jew is clever.

Sailer really nails it with this one:

Similarly, much of the current mania over Russia is due to Putin’s role as the Neo-Czar of Russia, automatically triggering American Jews raised on Fiddler on the Roof to assume that the pogroms will begin at any moment. That would be funny…except that it could lead to WWIII.

In A Line Through the Desert young Jake Bloom deals with things about Judaism he hates. For example, Jake has wimpy cousins who wanted to play Fiddler on the Roof. Jake wanted to play Raid on Entebbe. When the school bully called him a Kike, Jake punched his lights out.

In To Survive the Earth the bad guys in the winter-survival short story are Hasidic Jews.

This is also the case in Israel Strikes: War of the Red Sea.

[Why is the Hasidic Rabbi always named Rosenzweig? -Ed]

Cause we knew the man, that's why, Ed.

[Oh-Ed].

We hate Jake Bloom's cousins and their wimpiness and we really hate contemporary American Jewish paranoia. Donald Trump is not Hitler and the Cossacks are not waiting to ride into Scarsdale.

Anyway we loath the ADL, which was freaking out about Mel Gibson when thousands of radical Muslims were being admitted to the US. Next year America's Muslim population is expected to surpass us Hebrews. Nice work guys.

Jake Bloom would be sent to Auschwitz. By the Army. Riding in an M-1.

Still Glossy

Last week we discussed Steve Sailer's excellent Takimag article about advertising. He made a great point about print magazines:

Have you noticed that a remarkable number of print magazines are still around in 2017? After the crash of 2008, I expected magazine racks to be empty by now. But apparently, glossies remain a good way to make expensive stuff look glamorous.

Print magazines not only survived 2008, they multiplied. For example my old bosses at Decision Games, publishers of Strategy & Tactics,  have stubbornly expanded. In 2008 they launched World at War. They followed this up in 2010 with Modern War. Now they're launching Strategy & Tactics Quarterly.

Now Decision Games sells a war game with each magazine so their business model is slightly different than say, Cosmo's or Newsweek's.

But has the reader noticed that a copy of Newsweek looks awfully thin?

We can't speak for Cosmo. [Yeah...sure-Ed]

Other history magazines that don't offer games are still printing at the same rate with the same number of pages. Our current bosses at Sovereign Media crank out Military Heritage, Civil War, WWII, and several special issues a year.

Actually to say one outfit is a former boss and one a current boss is a bit misleading.

[You misleading? No-Ed]

All we really mean is we don't write for Decision Games anymore, don't ask [I wasn't going to -Ed] while we still write for Sovereign Media.

The economics of the business haven't changed much in the ten years since the crash. They still rely on a lot of freelancers [that's you, Will-Ed] and the rates for articles haven't changed much.

We advertise our books in those same magazines  and those rates haven't changed much either.

Actually, we thought the shuttering of Borders would strike a major blow to the print magazine business. Borders was where we discovered the above mentioned magazines, after all. Interestingly the publishers have just found other places to sell. Anyone else notice the great expansion of the magazine shelves at the supermarket?

So even after ten years the demand for print magazines seems stable. The question is why.

Sailer notices this:

Paper periodicals will likely take a huge hit in the next economic downturn when luxuries become unaffordable again, but their continued survival today suggests that, despite all the theoretical advantages of personalized onscreen advertising, there’s something still not quite right about online ads.

Perhaps the same is true for digital copy?

We wrote the lead and designed Green Hell

Advertise This

In Takimag, the great statistician and social scientist Steve Sailer notices something about advertising we've suspected for a few years now. Sailer tells us how he worked in marketing research in the 1980's. He says:

...in the second half of the 1980s, clients started to complain that very few of our tests showed that increasing TV advertising by 50 or 100 percent would move the needle on sales at all.

Sailer tells us that:

This is not to say that good advertising couldn’t help a new brand, but there tended to be diminishing returns once an identity was established.

We really agree with the above.

Sailer goes on to say how he encouraged companies to cut advertising to see what happened. The advertisers didn't want to, of course.

We've cut our advertising budget drastically over the years. Basically, we think we've established our brand, and our fans are going to buy our books regardless. Advertising does not seem very effective these days at bringing in new customers.

Our most successful book had the most advertising. We assumed  this was both correlation and causation. The book was Israel Strikes.  But what if the subject was just so interesting to readers and so timely that most of the advertising wasn't really necessary? Frankly, we wonder. Back then we kept meticulous daily data on sales and ad debuts, both print and digital. When new ads went up sales spiked.

But still.

Going back now, we ran plenty of print and digital ads for A Line Through the Desert. They didn't work and throughout the winter of 2009-2010 we wondered if we had made a bad career move.

Our next book was To Defend the Earth. Here we started digitally and moved on into print. Much to our surprise we moved product everyday. It was wonderful.

Then came Israel Strikes. When this book came out in early 2013 we bought digital ads and print ads in military history magazines. It occurred to us that they have military history magazines in Britain. So we went and bought a lot of ads over there. Voila! Where before we had few fans in the UK now we have thousands. In fact, per-capita we're more popular in the UK than in the USA. Thanks Limeys!

But here again we seem to have hit our ceiling and new ads just don't seem to be making much of an impression. To restate, saturation doesn't help. We've also tried running ads a few years after the last ad, thinking this would grab reader attention and gain new fans. Sorry, nope. There seems to be an absolute limit to an ads effectiveness regardless of time.

Our own rule now is one and done. One ad for a new book in a particular platform and then get out.

Actually, with World War 1990: ANZACs, we'll be running a little advertising experiment, so we'll see.

Ave! Ave Pournelle Imperator!

Over at Taki's, the indispensable Steve Sailer eulogizes the great Jerry Pournelle.

Pournelle, let us say, led an interesting life to say the least. Author, politico, philospher, Cold War strategist. We'll get to that in another post.

Sailer talks about my three favorite Pournelle novels: Lucifer's Hammer, Footfall, and The Mote in God's Eye.

We loved the universe Pournelle created with Larry Niven in Mote. It is a universe a thousand years in the future where man still hasn't found intelligent alien life. It is a world of the Second Empire of Man, of King and Parliament, kilted soldiers, dominion planets...That world is turned upside down when space-faring aliens are discovered. The aliens, or Moties as they're called, are brilliantly conceived as is the problem with their civilization and why man wants to keep them locked up in their star system.

Via Chronology.orghttp://www.chronology.org/grafix/jp-emblem2.gif here's the flag of Pournelle's Empire of man.

Le Merde Le Elite Internationale

While we don't believe the polls showing an epic wipe out in France, I mean after Trump and Brexit who believes those, we don't see how a pretty boy centrist with a senior citizen wife can loose the French election.

That said,the crackup of the Consensus Internationale continues apace. As the great M Steyn points out, Marine will double the vote total her father got in the accidental election of 2002. With Macron in office there is no reason to think Le Pen won't finally slip into power in 2023.

Sarkozy-Hollande, Blair-Cameron, Clinton-Bush, what's the difference? They are all part of the same Consensus Internationale whose foreign policy favors super-national entities and what Steve Sailor calls 'invade the world/invite the world'.

Had one told us we would write that in 2000, when we felt the future of the Republic hung in the balance, well, we would have punched you in the face and given you some American Enterprise lit to read.

We can't speak for Macron, Hollande, Sarkozy, Chirac et all, but since the end of the Cold War this country has been run by elites with elite educations, a never ending cavalcade of degrees from Yale and Harvard, Harvard and Yale. How they doing?

Since 2000 we've had a series of foreign and economic crisis, the continued collapse of the American family, crumbling infrastructure, etc etc. Can't these people do anything right?

We were thinking about this yesterday, look at the Cold War presidents vs the modern elite.

Harry Truman went to 'commercial' college for a year before dropping out. Ike of course went to West Point. Kennedy went to Harvard, but his bootlegging father bought his way in. Johnson went to a teacher's college. Nixon attended Whittier. Ford starred at Michigan, Carter attended Annapolis, Reagan went to Eureka. Not until we get to Bush the Elder do we have a real scion of the elite.

Pretty pedestrian education there.

In 2008 the elite mocked Sarah Palin because she attended a vast array of small and state schools. Which batch of presidents do you think she fits in with? Of course the elites came up with the idea of giving unsecured, variable rate loans to bad credit risks. You think Sarah Palin would've thought of that? Think she would have said, 'You know guys, we have this Muslim terror problem, let's invite a lot of Muslim immigrants.' Also, she never drove a car off a bridge like certain scions of the elite.

The End of Conservative Wonkery

The indispensable Steve Sailer wants to know what all the think tanks are for.

Good question. Watching the failure of Rynacare Sailer has had the same thought as we. That is, what's the point of all this conservative policy wonkery? Since the 1980s conservative think tanks have been cranking out ideas in the form of papers and books on everything from schools to tax reform to healthcare and on and on.

As mentioned in this space before, we're roughly the same age as Speaker (dead man walking) Ryan and we both came of age politically exposed to NR and the Weekly Standard and George Will. Ryan first served under the ultimate conservative policy wonk, New Gingrich, another failed speaker. When I was a young CR in the early 90's they passed out free copies of Jack Kemp's Liberal Cliches and Conservative Solutions.

We are wracking our brains here trying to think of a time when one of these ideas took hold and worked, or even was signed into law.

Remember President Bush's Office of Faith Based Charities? Neither does anyone else.
We know how No Child Left Behind has transformed education.
Hey, how did Bush's planned Social Security Reform work out?
Who can forget the success of President Bush's 2006 comprehensive immigration reform?

Look guys, I say this as unrepentant Neocon, this is the end. There will be no more conservative wonkery and ideas. We've failed. Our man is running the show and he's failed miserably. He should resign now and get a gig running a think tank..

Paul Ryan deserves no better.