January Grab Bag

Posted on January 24, 2020 by thezman

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Because I’m so pressed for time these days, back during the holidays I sat down and wrote out a podcast schedule for the month. I figured impeachment would be a hot topic this week, so I assumed I’d have plenty of impeachment related news items to talk about this week. Instead, everything about this farce is a snoozer. Even the lefty news outlets are struggling to pretend they are enjoying it. Adam Schiff’s big show is a good reason why the Finns have the word myötähäpeä.

The only angle to this thing of any interest to me is the bizarre circling back to the Russian collusion hoax. I think most of us thought the fakers knew the story was fake, but they were hoping to fool people with it. That may be true with some of them, but it seems clear that people like Adam Schiff really do believe this stuff. He thinks the Cossacks are warming up, waiting for Trump to give the signal. He is a deranged lunatic, who belongs in an asylum.

A long time ago I tried to think of a metric one could use to measure the general lunacy of the ruling class of a society. For instance, measure the distance between official truths from actual truths. The greater the distance, the nuttier the people in charge of the society. Think about some of the things that come out of North Korea about the Dear Leader or whatever they are calling the guy now. Compare that to what the Swiss say about their president, for example.

Another possible measure is the amount of propaganda expelled by the ruling class either in volume or intensity. The more they harangue their subjects, the greater the distance between them and reality. The trouble with this approach is we are swimming in made-up nonsense. Spend a little time watching television. The North Koreans install loudspeakers in the town square to blast propaganda. Americans install flat screens in their homes to receive the official truth.

Conceptually, it works, but measuring official insanity is probably best left to general instinct, rather than some money ball approach. Five minutes watching the bug-eyed lunatic on the Senate floor is all you need to know about a significant portion of the American political class. Further, the tolerance of a mentally unstable person in the Congress, tells us the whole lot are beyond saving. In Washington, a kook like Adam Schiff is not out of the ordinary. He is the norm.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Link)
02:00: Maybe No Reason At All
22:00: Numbers
42:00: No Privacy (Link)
47:00: Erasing Your Past (Link)
52:00: Clown Versus Clown (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Mediocrity Chic: Party At Bari’s

Posted on January 23, 2020 by thezman

196

Contrary to most opinion, a society’s ruling class attains its position by being cleverer and more determined than the rest of society. The first generation to rise to the top of society and establish itself as a ruling class, or at least an important faction of the ruling class, earned their way to the position. They may not be smarter or more virtuous, but their combination of talents is what put them at the top. Luck played a role, but otherwise, they earned their way into the position.

Decay is a feature of the universe. Even black holes lose mass over time, a process known as “Hawking Radiation.” The first generation to set themselves up at the top of a new order are more ruthless and intelligent than the rest of society. The generations that come after them are another matter. Decay sets in with the subsequent generations, as positions of power are taken up by people who did nothing to attain their position, other than have the right parents.

An example of this process is in this story about a Manhattan book party for the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. According to the Jerusalem Post, Weiss is one of the 50 most influential Jews. In fact, they have her listed as number seven, which would qualifier as being something of a super Jew. The veracity of such a claim is disputable, but Mx. Weiss is no doubt an influential person among the ruling elite. She is treated as an opinion setter and spokesman for her generation of elites.

Mx. Weiss is also remarkably mediocre. In fact, mediocre in this case is probably a slander against the honestly mediocre. She was famously outfoxed by YouTube personality Joe Rogan, a man who spends his free time smoking weed, taking blows to the head and watching cartoons. She went on his show repeating Zionist talking points, but proved incapable of explaining any of what she was saying. She was revealed to be a dingbat with no grasp of the basics.

The fact that this was not disqualifying is a sign that the Jewish ruling elite of today is a significant downgrade from those who made the last century the Jewish century. Further proof of this is the fact that people still pretend she is an intellectual. Her participation in the entirely synthetic Intellectual Dark Web is a sad commentary on the decline of Jewish intellectuals in America. If the Tribe is counting on people like Weiss to lead them, they best have the bug-out bags ready.

The career path of Mx. Weiss is what you see in a decaying ruling class. Her reason to have an exalted position in the media is she was willing to slander BDS activists while a college student at Columbia. Her hard work as a skirmisher in that never-ending Bronze Age conflict landed her a spot at the Jewish Forward. Two years later she is at the Wall Street Journal and then a few years later the New York Times. That’s quite remarkable for someone who cannot outwit Joe Rogan.

Of course, Mx. Weiss is not where she is because of her intellect. She is where she is because she can be relied upon to repeat the talking points popular with an ossified ruling elite. She has been assigned to the department charged with repeating the blood libel against white Americans with regards to Jews. Her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, is a collection of talking points Max Boot threw away, because he thought they would make him look deranged.

Mx. Weiss is not an outlier. She is just an amusing example of the low-quality harpy that is taking up positions in the ruling class. Her robotic recitation of Zionist talking points makes for good parody, but her lack of intelligence is emblematic of the emergent woke intellectual class. As Steve Sailer recently noted, it is impossible to find a bright and curious person in the woke intellectual class. They are not even clever in how they present the tired dogmas of multiculturalism and intersectionality.

In addition to the overall decline in intelligence of Western society, another factor plays a role in the rise of a dingbat class. The intellectual elite that won their positions in the last century selected proteges who supported their position. They were not selecting people who would challenge their newly won status. Instead, they selected people, who agreed with and extended their opinions and ideas. In short order, flattering the master became the fast track to fame and fortune in the intellectual set.

Half a century ago, Tom Wolfe described the Manhattan intellectual set as bourgeois urbanite poseurs, who decorated their language with radical language in order to affect worldliness and prestige. These were the sorts of people who liked being seen with radicals and terrorists, but lived in safe comfortable neighborhoods, made possible by the sorts of people, who made sure the radicals never won. It was a contrived radicalism to disguise a timid adherence to conventional bourgeois norms.

Today, the heirs of those radicals, lampooned by Wolfe, are bourgeois urbanite poseurs spending their time pretending to be free thinkers and skeptics. They decorate their language with words and phrases borrowed from books they never read, in order to affect erudition and sophistication. Instead of posing as radicals, they pretend to be thoughtful intellectuals questioning elite opinion. It is a contrived intellectualism to decorate banal recitations of managerial class dogma.

The Plague

Posted on January 22, 2020 by thezman

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The zombie apocalypse is upon us. It is time to load up on ammunition, potable water and the dehydrated food they say will last generations. Of course, it also means cutting yourself off from the rest of humanity, as you can’t be sure when they will catch the virus and turn into a zombie. You might have to use the ax on the guy next door, who just moved in, so there’s no point in getting know him. It also ensures that whatever is turning people into zombies will not get to you.

We may not be on the verge of a zombie apocalypse, but there is a cornavirus outbreak in China that has spread to several other countries. The Chinese are taking it very seriously, warning people to limit travel and avoid the outbreak zone. They are saying the virus has mutated, but what exactly that means is unclear. There has been at least one case in the United States. The infected person had recently traveled to the outbreak region of China and developed the symptoms.

Now, it is highly unlikely that this will turn into a pandemic that wipes out a large swath of humanity, like the Black Death. It’s not impossible, but the odds are low because of modern technology. One reason the plague spread so easily is the poor sanitation in urban areas. People were exposed to all sorts of unhealthy things. They also lacked the medical care we take for granted. Mortality rates for plague today are about 10%, while they were as high as 60% in the Middle Ages.

Even as recent as a century ago, doctors were still blaming miasmas, bad odors, for various diseases. One reason the Spanish Flu spread so far is the general understanding of germ theory was in its infancy. Rather than isolating infected people and quarantining infected areas, people traveled as normal, spreading the virus all over the world in a short period. The Great War had millions of people moving from their homelands to foreign areas and the virus went with them.

That is the one connection between the last great pandemic and this new coronavirus outbreak in China. Every day millions of people leave their home area and travel to some new area for business, crime, tourism and so on. Humanity is probably more mobile today than at any time in history. Maybe there was more net mobility in the great industrial wars of the last century, but it is close call. The possibility of something really bad being spread by people is therefore at a peak.

Modernity may be the reason we are much more vulnerable to a civilization-wrecking pandemic than at any time in the past. A century ago, most humans lived in rural areas and farming was the number one employer in most of the world. Even industrialized nations still had close to half the workforce engaged in agriculture. Most men still had the wherewithal to maintain themselves in a pinch. The cities would be crippled by a plague, but the rural areas could carry on,

Today, 90% of western populations are dependent on the system to provide the basics of life, like food, water and heat. If enough people die from plague or even get really sick, the supply chain will break down. Given how near run all modern business is these days, the margin for failure is pretty low. A few weeks of failed logistics in the food business would leave whole communities starving. One water main break could cut off water to an entire city, if the work force has fallen ill.

Modern society could be like Jenga, the kid’s game where players take turns removing one block at a time from a tower of blocks. When everything is running as designed, removing one item does not cause collapse. If a few items stop working, then maybe it just takes one wrong failure for the whole thing to come down. For example, a pandemic plus a series of bad weather events leads to widespread food shortages, which in turn lead to civil unrest in major cities.

There’s also another angle to the risk analysis of modern society. Much of the infrastructure in America has been neglected for generations. Drive around an East Coast city and the roads are like the surface of the moon. Under those roads lie generations-old sewer, gas and water pipes that have been neglected. It takes a lot of manpower to keep them running. The same applies to lots of other basic infrastructure around the country. Manpower is needed to keep it functioning.

One reason for this is simple corruption. The ruling class no longer feels a duty to the societies over which they rule. They are extractive in nature, seeking only to skim and pilfer what they can from the people they rule. Another reason though is the collapse of social capital from mass migration and financialization. Most of the public stuff we rely upon is maintained by local communities. The obliteration of those over the last few generations is showing up in the infrastructure.

In a serious crisis, like a deadly pandemic, survival will depend upon communities voluntarily working together to provide the basics and care for the weak. For much of America, this is now impossible. In Europe, where 80-90% of people live in urban areas now dominated by foreigners, it would also be impossible. The point being, the cost of responding to a serious pandemic like the Spanish Flu is now much higher. In fact, we may not be able to react to such a threat.

Now, it is possible that like scarcity, humanity has overcome the threat of pandemic, through medicine and technology. The SARS outbreak killed 800 people, but in a world of billions of people, that is a trivial event. It’s three airliners crashing in a year. Just as we no longer prepare for famines in the West, we may no longer need to plan for another round of the Black Death or similar. Of course, people had similar thoughts before the outbreak of the Spanish Flu a century ago.

Progressive Whites

Posted on January 21, 2020 by thezman

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Yesterday’s gun rally in Richmond Virginia was a great success, at least as a public relations item. You can tell that by the relative lack of interest by the Left. Nothing about the event fit into their narratives, so it had to be ignored. Fanatics see only that which confirms their fanaticism. In this case, they wanted to see white supremacists dressed in Klan robes and Nazi regalia, terrorizing poor black bodies, while Antifa battled them in the streets. None of that happened.

The question that never gets mentioned in all of this is exactly why the newly ascendant radicals in Richmond are attacking gun owners. If you look at what they are proposing, none of it has much practical value. All the talk of confiscation is belied by the actual bills they are producing. One limits handgun purchases to one per month. Another bans private sales of regulated firearms. One vindictively targets the NRA shooting range in Northern Virginia. These have no practical purpose.

The answer here lies in understanding how American Progressive’s view society and their role in it. Contrary to popular opinion, the people behind this stuff are not communist, motivated by Karl Marx. They are not controlled by hand-rubbing lizard people living in a secret volcano. They are not triumphant browns. The people pushing this stuff are white people. There are a few Jews and browns tossed in, but the main body of the Left is still white and formerly Protestant.

The white American Progressive has always imagined society as a fully enclosed community, that is judged as a whole. A popular slogan among them is that “society is judged by how it treats it weakest members.” This is an explicit expression of communal judgement, which is the traveling partner of communal salvation. The white Progressive looks at society as an organism that moves forward as a whole. If some parts lag behind, the whole thing slows to a halt.

Further, the white Progressive believes in the unitary reformer. That is, the reformer is not just focused on one area of society, but the whole of society. Even if their efforts are in one area, those efforts support the whole community. A reform effort that does not promise to move the whole of society forward is of no interest. For white Progressive reformers, society is the flock and they are the shepherds. Anything that threatens their effort to guard and guide the flock must be eliminated.

It is this spatial understanding of the world that helps explain these largely symbolic attacks on the Second Amendment. In the hive mind of the white Progressive, people who own guns are outside the domain of the righteous. Therefore, they must be marginalized from society. Much in the same way they anathematized smoking, white Progressives seek to make owning a gun disqualifying. Symbolically, these measures are aimed at putting gun rights outside the whole of society.

This territorial thinking is why Charlottesville remains an important symbol for white Progressives and why Richmond will be erased from their memory. In the former, the righteous chased the threat to the flock from the field. The physical place of society was literally reclaimed by the good guys. Richmond, in contrast, was when the dark forces of society were permitted to operated unmolested. The bad guys did not win. The shepherds were forced to hide their flocks.

There is another aspect to this. White Progressives are aroused by the thought of the Charlottesville riots, because the radical mind needs violence in the same way the body needs food. While many white Progressives reformers are sincere, if deranged, others are in it for the blood. They need to terrorize and attack the enemy. In the same way the bully needs to terrorize the nerd in order to be a bully, the white radical needs the enemy of the cause in order to maintain his identity.

Therein lies the other reason why Richmond will be forgotten, while Charlottesville will be a regular story in the 2020 election. It was there that the need to terrorize the enemy of the flock was fully actualized. They not only chased the evil doers from the field; they drew blood and they had a sacrifice. Notice they always remember the fat women, who died, but not the cops. That’s because she was a blood sacrifice to the cause, while the cops that died were just collateral damage.

This is how to understand these pointless gun grabbing efforts, as well as many other Progressive fads we see today. In Virginia, these proposals are like the winning side erecting a trophy on the field of battle. The good whites have recaptured the heart of the Confederacy, the home of the bad whites. They did not eliminate the enemy, however, as they are still out there in the counties that refused to support the Progressive reformers. The fight must continue.

This is why facts and reason have no effect on white Progressives. They see themselves as defenders of the innocent against the attacks of those who seek to destroy the whole by corrupting the weak. Against such delusions, facts and reason are wholly ineffectual. Appeals to their humanity, on the other hand, are infuriating, as it calls into the question the point of their existence. It is why they are most vulnerable to moral arguments. It cuts to their sense of identity.

Of course, the Left is not just white Progressives. There are other parts, but their motivations are different and mostly modifiers to the whole. These other groups operate from ethnocentric motives. Blacks want free stuff and easy access to white people, while Jews want what is best for Jews. The newly arrived non-whites want a short path to the material assets of the white majority. The bulk of the Left, however, are white Progressives, who provide the power and authority.

The thermal exhaust port of the Progressive death star is their sense of moral purpose, not factual accuracy or even the relationships between the tribes of the Left. The white Progressive sees contrary facts and internal divisions as challenges the righteous shepherd must overcome. Call into question the moral standing of the white Progressive and the very center of the Left begins to collapse. Self-righteous certainty of purpose is the main tent pole that holds Progressivism together.

The Guns Of Resistance

Posted on January 20, 2020 by thezman

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Today is the big pro-gun rally in Richmond Virginia. The rally is in response to the gun grabbing proposals by the newly ascendant Democrat party in the state. For the first time in a long time, Democrats gained control of all three branches of government in the last election and immediately set about implementing their fantasy agenda. Their first order of business was a series of vindictive, retributive proposals aimed at the normal population of the state, starting with guns and gun owners.

What’s going on in Virginia is a glimpse of what is coming for the country as a whole as we descend into the multicultural paradise. Virginia was a solidly normal state over the last seventy years. The politics were usually uneventful. Most issues were controlled at the local level. The state government was limited and usually run by the sorts of people, who thought that was a good thing. Once in a while a colorful governor would get his name in the paper, but otherwise politics was sober minded.

Decades of immigration have done to Virginia what it did to California, with the addition of massive Federal growth in Northern Virginia. Manufacturing and agricultural concerns have championed the importation of millions from Central America. Government has imported people from all over the country into Northern Virginia. The result has been the same sort of political shift we saw in California. The sprawling urban areas control state politics, which means the Left controls politics.

Like California, the normal population of the state did not think much about the massive influx of non-white immigrants. No one thought about the long-term impact of a million or so left-wing suburbanites from liberal strongholds moving into Washington suburbs for their government jobs. Anyone who mentioned it was hooted off the stage, if they were even allowed on the stage in the first place. It is only now that the link between demographics and politics is becoming obvious.

This dynamic where the newly arrived take over state politics will be something we see all over the South and Southwest in the coming decades. While whites will remain the majority in some cases or the largest minority in others, white solidarity remains forbidden, both practically and spiritually. As a result, the usual suspects will divide the white vote making whites the least powerful group in these states, even as the newly ascendant non-whites pass explicitly anti-white legislation.

You see some of that with the Virginia rally. The organizers are more concerned with looking good for the far-Left media covering the event. They have been telling participants to not bring things like Confederate flags to the rally. The 2A people still think abiding by liberal morality is paramount. Inevitably, the FBI will have some of their crisis actors at the event, so the media can get photos and video. The organizers will then invest their time apologizing for it.

This is a great example of the challenge dissidents face in dealing with the mass of white people in America. On the one hand, the civic nationalists make optics more important than the message. The racists and old school race-realists look at these events as a chance to reinforce the walls of their ghetto. They show up in their silly outfits waving flags in order to offend, rather than persuade. Both sides are simply acting out their Progressive conditioning.

That’s what makes effective activism difficult. These gun proposals by the Democrats are clearly aimed at spiting white people. There’s no practical point to these laws, other than to stick a finger in the eye of the sorts of people who don’t support the Left. The attacks on AR-15 ownership, for example, are about sticking it to white people, who are the people who own these sorts of sporting guns. That should be the salient point, but the emotional conditioning of whites makes that difficult.

You’ll note that there is no longer any discussion of crime on the Left with regards to gun grabbing. Even they have accepted the fact that gun crime is largely a black problem and now a Hispanic problem. Blacks and Hispanics shoot one another with handguns, not expensive sporting rifles. Despite this, the victims of these gun grabbing proposal would rather gnaw off their own arms than admit it. Generations of conditioning in anti-racism have had their desired effect.

Make no mistake about the intent. The newly formed ruling class of the multicultural South and Southwest will first disarm the white population. They don’t care about blacks and Hispanics shooting one another. They do hate white people. That’s why Virginia wants to forbid the private transfer of firearms. That’s the obnoxiously dishonest “gun show loophole” nonsense. It is the precursor to licensing and then confiscation. When every gun is accounted for, they can easily be confiscated.

Another thing you see in Virginia that will apply to the country at large is the stubborn refusal to accept reality. The people organizing resistance to these gun grabbing proposals still think America is a rule-based society. They think if they carefully abide by the rules and mobilize their supporters, they can win the political game. There’s that old civic nationalist blind-spot regarding their enemies. They think they can reason with the other side. The other side will be unmoved by all of this.

Another important angle to this is the silence from Conservative Inc. over what is happening in Virginia. Site like National Review and the Federalist have not talked about it much at all. That’s because Conservative Inc. is staffed by the urbanite bugmen that staff Progressive operations. They think guns are scary, so the issue is not relevant to their project. They are more concerned about getting Twitter followers. It’s another reminder of which side they will ultimately support.

In the end, the Virginia Democrats will pass what they like and most people will go along with it. The value to this side of the great divide is in opening up the 2A issue as another entry point to dissident politics. What’s going in Virginia would not happen in a homogeneous stable society. It is the inevitable result of cosmopolitan globalism and multiculturalism. White people don’t fear white people owning guns. It’s the people ruing over white people, who fear white people owning guns.

Talking To Normie

Posted on January 17, 2020 by thezman

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Continuing my experimental phase, the show this week is about ways to talk to our normie friends and family, in a way that leads them our way. I’ve been around civic nationalists recently and I was reminded of conversations I’ve had with others about how tough it is sometimes for dissidents to address the civic nationalist arguments in a way that brings them our way. This week I thought a show on how to talk to normie in a positive way would be interesting.

I was not sure how I wanted to structure it, so I took some of the things that have come up recently in my normie interactions and made those segment topics. Then I just turned the mic on and started talking about each one, as if I was giving a short lecture to a classroom full of civic nationalist. I was thinking of it like a class on dissident politics for freshmen level students. I wanted it to be accessible to the sorts of people who don’t spend any time on this side of the great divide.

The key thing with talking to our normie friends, family and acquaintances is to not become adversarial. The huge blunder our side makes on social media is to mock these people as if they are enemies. A little bit of that is fine, but fifty people blasting a civic nationalist on Twitter is not winning him over. It’s only hardening his position and making it easier for the gatekeepers to keep him inside. These people are future allies and compatriots, not forever enemies of the cause.

Effective organizing is building lots of on-ramps to this side of the great divide, to make it easier for all sorts of people to come this way. Language that will work on the 2A civic nationalist will not necessarily work on the spergy libertarian. The Sean Hannity watching patriot is going to respond to different rhetoric than the Tucker watching Donald Trump supporter. Dissident politics needs to be like a department store, with something for all the types of white people out there.

This inability to build on ramps is why prior race realists have always failed to gain any traction. They struck people as lunatics. They had one on ramp. You had to pay the lunatic a toll in order to cross over. The now defunct alt-right suffered from the same defect, as it became loaded down with insider jargon and factionalism. All the ways into it were narrow and went passed people that most people would find odd. It’s why they could never break out of their subculture.

It is the heart of the optics debate. If dissident ideas are to gain traction with typical white people, it has to creep up on them like the fog. One day, they just find themselves on this side of the divide, without realizing they made the journey. That happens by having lots of ways here and lots of pleasant sounding people they can trust, subtly pointing them in this direction. That can only work if there are lots of doors through which they can pass into this type of politics.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
05:00: Hate Speech
15:00: Public – Private Tyranny
25:00: Who Owns You?
35:00: Peaceful Separation
45:00: The Value Of Citizenship

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

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Full Show On YouTube

The UFO Problem

Posted on January 16, 2020 by thezman

223

Tucker Carlson has a UFO problem. Going back to the start of his Fox show, he has done segments on various claims about space aliens visiting earth. These are not claims by people, who swear they have been probed by big gray men, but the claims of people who worked in government at one time or another. He has even interviewed people, who worked on government UFO programs. Recently he had former Pentagon people on to talk about this story of a secret UFO file.

People like these sorts of stories, even if they don’t believe in little green men secretly visiting our planet. It’s fun to think about what it would be like if we did verify such visitations from another world. Tucker is not a kook, so his interest in this topic should not be dismissed out of hand. The American government has taken the issue seriously, at least according to that recent story. So much so they have had top men working on it for a very long time. They think it could be true.

The crux of the matter is that pilots have, on multiple occasions, recorded objects buzzing around in ways that cannot be explained. At least they look like objects in the videos released to the public. In these videos, pilots and crew can be heard asking questions about what they are seeing. No official explanation has been offered, so we are left to assume they don’t know either. It seems that on many occasions, American fighter pilots have spotted UFO’s.

Now, it has to be said that many of these could simply be clever pranks by servicemen with too much free time. Every year someone gets busted for making a contrail penis in the sky, so these guys like pranks. Others could simply be anomalies that have a boring technical explanation, so no one bothers with them. Maybe this is just another part of how the government keeps people distracted. The secret UFO files are just part of the ongoing psyops to distract the public from noticing too much.

The trouble with the various ways of dismissing the UFO stuff is it often sounds as conspiratorial as the theories explaining why these are visiting aliens. Repeatedly, we see that the people running the American government are too dumb to execute the basic functions of the state. It’s unlikely they are working a complex, multi-generational deception involving fake UFO video. The people who use text messages to plot sedition are not going to be working such a complicated scheme.

What the facts tell us about this stuff is the American government has recorded lots of these events and they remain unexplained. There is a good chance other militarizes have had similar experiences. The Russians and Chinese probably have divisions that collect up and examine unexplained phenomenon. It’s not out of the question that there is some contact between these government agencies, at least an acknowledgement that they exist for the same reasons.

The two possible explanations for the evidence are that it is the result of some completely unknown natural phenomenon or it is space aliens. Both answers would mean large gaps in our understanding of the natural world. Theoretical physicists have been at a dead end for a long time. Space exploration has been stalled for generations. Our understanding of our natural world is at its infancy. These phenomena could simply be more proof that we don’t know a whole lot.

Of course, if these are space aliens, it means some species well beyond our understanding has solved problems we cannot contemplate. For example, our best science is not all that sure humans can live in space long enough to travel beyond Mars and back, without dangerous physical consequences. If we are being visited by aliens, it means they solved the problem of carbon based life forms living in space for long periods without being destroyed by radiation.

It would also mean these aliens conquered the physical problem of traveling between galaxies. That means they either live long enough to go light years into space or they have invented propulsion devices that allow for speeds beyond anything we think is possible with what we know of physics. Alternatively, they have found a way to fold space in order to move from one location to another. Instead of physically traveling through space, they make space travel for them.

All of the possible explanations for how visitors from another world raise the age-old science fiction movie paradox. How could a race so advanced be so easily caught on our primitive video? If they have the ability to bend space, they will have the ability to bend light or at least have really good camouflage. They would see our primitive airships long before we were able to see them. These videos contradict the one possible answer for why they exist in the first place.

The answer to that could simply be that they are observing us and part of it is to see how humans react to limited exposure to the possibility of aliens. This could be nothing more than part of the simulation that is our existence. You can come up with all sorts of entirely unprovable explanations for why super intelligent space aliens are getting caught on video. If you want to believe in UFO’s, there’s always a way to maintain the belief in the face of this type of skepticism.

There is one other angle to the UFO stuff. It feeds the need to believe that our governments have super-secret stuff hidden away in super-secret government agencies run by X-Files types. For some reason, people need to believe this. It’s probably because deep down, people won’t except that their government is staffed by stupid people who got lucky. The fate of the world depends on a series or average people guessing the right way or making the right mistakes.

That could be the real psyop. The people in charge know that the rest of us need to think they have things under control. The fake UFO footage is intended to promote the idea that our government has these super-secret programs. If people believe that, they will believe the government screw-ups over foreign policy or economic affairs are really part of some super-secret scheme involving deep state actors. The real psyop is covering up the fact that we are ruled by lucky dimwits.

Litigating the Blood Libel

Posted on January 15, 2020 by thezman

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Is the term “white nationalist” a slur? How about “white supremacist?” The general definition of a slur is “an insinuation or allegation about someone that is likely to insult them or damage their reputation.” For “white nationalist” to be a slur, the term itself would have to be generally accepted as immoral or derogatory. It would also have to be used in a way that incorrectly labels one a white nationalist. Calling Greg Johnson, a white nationalist, for example, is not a slur. He embraces the label.

The interpretation of the term white nationalist is just one interesting aspect of the lawsuit brought by Peter Brimelow, editor of VDare. He is suing the New York Times, according to Brimelow, for falsely labeling him a white nationalist. He not only denies being a white nationalist, he claims the company deliberately labeled him as such in an effort to damage his reputation, even after he made many good faith attempts to point out the error to them. He is seeking $5 million in damages.

That is the first interesting angle to this case. Intent is always a central part of defamation cases. The defendant must be shown to have intentionally libeled or slandered the other party. The statement must have been made with knowledge that it was untrue or with reckless disregard for the truth. Simply making an honest error is not defamation, which is why newspapers have always posted corrections. It allows them to show the false claim was an honest error.

Another interesting bit of this is the unspoken dispute over what exactly makes someone a white nationalist. Greg Johnson, for example, has written a book describing white nationalism. He calls himself a white nationalist. Peter Brimelow, in contrast, has never used to term to describe himself and has been generally negative toward the use of it as a label. No doubt both men share similar opinions on many matters, but they have many important differences as well.

Yoram Hazony has written a book promoting nationalism. He is a proud Zionist and an ethno-nationalist. Large swaths of his book match up well with the arguments made by Greg Johnson in favor of white nationalism. In fact, strip away the references to Israel and the Jews and Hazony’s book is the same argument made by Johnson. Does that make Hazony a white nationalist? Is white nationalism just another manifestation of nationalism, like Zionism or black nationalism?

If this case ever makes it to court, it would be an easy task to show a jury that the term white nationalist is undefined. Its meaning is entirely controlled by the intent of the person using it. When used by the New York Times, the intent is purely negative, perhaps even a synonym for evil. When used by normal people, it is more benign, maybe even positive. In other words, the definition is entirely one of context, which is the heart of the lawsuit against the Times.

That would be an amusing part of this case if it gets to the deposition phase, as everyone involved would have to define white nationalism. Brimelow would have no trouble giving an objective definition. The Times writers and editors would have to figure out a way to craft a definition that puts someone like Peter Brimelow at the same table as Johnson. That’s a circle that cannot be squared, without first asserting the promotion of white interests is negative.

That really is the secret that lies beneath all of this. The underlying assumption of the beautiful people at the New York Times is that white people have no right to promote their interests. Jews, blacks, one-legged trans-lesbians of color, all of these groups have interests and a right to promote them openly. Whites, according to the sorts working for the Times, have no group interests. Therefore, white nationalism is the assertion of something false, for malign purposes.

Now, there is yet another twist to this. From the perspective of someone like Greg Johnson, Brimelow’s suit against the Times can be seen as damaging the cause of white nationalism. The basis of the suit is that the Times deliberately libeled Brimelow by applying a derogatory term to him and his work. In other words, a putative ally is agreeing with the enemy that white nationalism is immoral. That further anathematizes the term and the issues associated with it.

In reality, that train has left the station. In fact, that is another important issue involved in this case and many others. The media is not simply an institution for disseminating factual information about people and events. No sane person would make such a claim, as the media repeatedly states otherwise. The mass media defines the public debate and largely defines public morality. When they pronounce something forbidden, like white nationalism, it usually becomes immoral and off-limits.

That brings us back to intent. There simply is no way the Times can claim they did not intend to libel Brimelow when they called him a white nationalist. There only hope is to conjure a definition of white nationalism that includes Brimelow along with other people, who sharply disagree with him. The only way to accomplish that is to broaden the term to mean any white person, who thinks white people have interests. In other words, merely being white makes you guilty enough in this case.

Finally, this case can be a useful on-ramp. These people are clever, in that they talk about whites in a negative way without directly addressing white people. In this case they have turned the phrase white nationalism into a purely negative term that they liberally apply to white people questioning orthodoxy. They don’t say whites are evil, but they regular claim “whiteness” is evil and that promoting it is immoral. They condemn the thing by condemning its nature.

In the end, this case can only be a net positive, assuming Brimelow and VDare don’t embarrass themselves in some unforeseen manner. Cases like this are a good way to raise this issue. The more people talk about how the Left systematically anathematizes the natural characteristics of white people, the more people will notice the blood libel at the heart of this case and the general war on white people. The reason the Times hates white nationalism is they hate white people.

The Virtue Of Impeachment

Posted on January 14, 2020 by thezman

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According to official media, the House Democrats are finally ready to send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate for a trial. Assuming it actually happens, the trial will be a circus to allow the various crackpots and show ponies to perform for the cable news audiences. Everyone will pretend it is serious until the ratings come in from the polling operations and then the show will close. The only people who think otherwise are the cranks and weirdos on the Left.

That said, the inner party has permitted this charade to happen for more than just theatrical reasons. They have an election show scheduled for this year and that will provide plenty of entertainment. The Iowa Caucuses are a little over two weeks away and the New Hampshire primary is three weeks away. That’s more than enough entertainment to keep people from noticing too much. The question then is why are they bothering with this straight-to-video impeachment show.

Every society has certain codes of conduct that may or may not be formalized in writing, but are accepted by everyone. These codes may be amplified or prioritized by personal codes of conduct, but the general morality is accepted as the public morality. In many cases, it is assumed the morality of one’s society is a universal morality that applies to all times and places, but that is a confusion in terms. Codes of conduct that apply in narrow conditions are different from general social codes.

In the West, public morality says the people should be sovereign and pick representatives the people occupying public offices. The will of the people should be expressed in the law. In the Arab world, public morality is defined by the Koran, not Enlightenment philosophy. Therefore, government should be run by righteous Muslims, according to the rules of Islam. These are different codes of conduct, not expressions of a universal morality, like the prohibition against murder.

In current year America, the ruling class is now fully detached from the society over which it rules, so it has begun to acquire its own moral code. You see this in the Democrat primary where candidates are running around preaching about the plight of transvestites or lecturing on white privilege. To normal people, these are bizarre fetishes that have to salience. Inside the ruling class they have become important moral signifiers, rooted in the common morality of the ruling class.

That brings us back to impeachment. The official narrative says he has been impeached because the political class thinks he violated his oath of office in his dealings with Ukraine. The official alternative narrative is the Democrats did this out of spite over losing the 2016 election. Those are the two sides of the official sandwich regarding impeachment. Within that framing, both sides are expected to scream at one another through the proxy of cable news programs.

Then there is the official outsider view that says this is part of some grand chess strategy over the seditious plot conducted by the security agencies. The inner party is using impeachment to stall the investigation into the that and the many other corrupt projects during the Obama years. While there may be some truth to this, it is clear that Bill Barr is willing and able to cover all of this up on his own. Still, there may be some people in the party who would like the assurance that the caper is properly buried.

There may be another reason why this impeachment thing will not die and that is the evolving morality of the ruling class. They hate Trump, not because of what he does or even what he says. They hate him for who he is and who he represents. He is the rejection of their morality. The Democrats could make a spending deal with him in a heartbeat, but they refuse because to do so would legitimize him and what he represents to them. They simply cannot do that.

If you think about the last four years, the main argument against Trump by all sides of the political class is that he is lacking in character. Maybe the point of entry is his womanizing or his crude statements. The neoconservatives have endlessly lectured on his moral failings. The Israeli first zealot, Ben Shapiro, has repeatedly said he opposes Trump on moral grounds, despite giving the Zionists everything they ask. It turns out that “who they are” is not Trump and what he represents.

The one thing the ruling class gets right is that the American experiment is unique in world history. No society has tried to combine extreme egalitarianism, the blank slate and democracy into a civic religion. Since two legs of that stool are in direct conflict with human nature, that leaves two choices. One is the traditional radical approach of exterminating everything that does not fit the new morality. The other is to redefine one of the legs of the stool to solve the conflict.

What impeachment suggests is the leg in for redefining will be democracy. The new definition of it will be something like Henry Ford’s choice of colors. The people can vote for whomever they like, as long as the candidate comports with the public morality of the ruling class. Rules will evolve to make sure no one like Trump can every gain access to official Washington. The political elite will become a closed system with a unique set of moral codes.

That may be the real point of impeachment. People like Adam Schiff appear to be insane, but he is just one of the berserkers of the emerging new morality. The point is not to remove Trump, but to codify him in such a way that his presence reinforces the new morality. Inside Washington, impeachment is already a moral signifier. The looming impeachment show will give the faithful in the ruling elite a chance to publicly display their virtue to their coreligionists inside the ruling class.

Note: Some have asked why comments end up in moderation. This is the doings of the spam filter I’m using. It is often triggered by epithets, certain links and mysterious word combinations. These messages get flagged as possible spam. Now, in half a dozen years it has blocked over 3.5 million spam messages, so it is trade-off I accept. It means I check the moderation queue once an hour or so. I approve the real comments and trash the spam. Otherwise, there is no moderation.

Outsiders

Posted on January 13, 2020 by thezman

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In every human society, large or small, there are people who don’t fit in with the main of the society. At the extreme end, these are criminals and subversives. At the more benign end there are oddballs and eccentrics. In small numbers they are harmless, just as long as they don’t form up into an organized whole. A criminal organization is a collection of people, who are no threat as individuals, but as a group they become a threat to the society. They become an alien body.

Human society is an organism. Like any organism, it must always be aware of threats to its existence, internal and external. A group of people inside society that is either hostile to the whole or merely alien to the whole must be treated as a threat. Since self-preservation is the prime directive of any organism, the most prudent approach is to treat the alien as hostile. To do otherwise risks making an error and allowing a hostile alien inside the society. That is a pointless risk.

Societies, like all living organisms have two general approaches to the problem of alien bodies inside the society. One is to destroy the alien body and the other is to isolate it and render it harmless. In the human being, the immune system will attack the foreign entity in an effort to kill it. If the foreign body in not a living thing, then infection will set in until the foreign body is removed. In some cases, the body will surround the item in a cocoon of calcium to isolate it and render it harmless.

In the case of human societies, the alien body is going to be people, like the criminal gang or some group of foreigners. For most of human history, this meant rounding up the aliens and executing them. Hanging criminals was the surest way to deal with the threat of people hostile to the whole. In the case of the non-violent, people who were just irritants, they would be expelled, Banishment solved the problem. This form of elimination allows the aliens to find a more suitable home.

Banishment also allows for reinstatement. A person or group that is cast out can, in theory, earn their way back inside. That requires a commitment to fit into the society and proof of rehabilitation. Banishment and the threat of it was a way to force people to assimilate into the society. A group of dissenters, for example, could remain just as long as they respected the wishes of the whole. Maybe they would be compelled to recant and accept the rules to which they were dissenting.

Human societies, like other living organisms, can isolate the problem. Prisons are really just a way of isolating the hostile foreign body. Instead of surrounding the criminals in calcium, they are placed in concrete boxes. Obviously, they can be permitted back into society, so it is not a perfect analogy, but the underlying logic is the same. Since modern societies do not want to execute trouble makers or banish them to the wilderness, they isolate them from the whole with prisons.

Segregation, formal and informal, is another way the problem of aliens is addressed by societies. The majority group forces the alien minority into a certain area and does not permit them outside that area. Segregation can be physical or logical. In the American South, segregation was mostly logical, as blacks and whites shared the same physical public spaces. In the North, it was physical as blacks were herded into ghettos and physically isolated from whites.

The story of Europe is really the story of people trying to figure out how to deal with aliens in their midst. Slowly and violently Europe has self-segregated. Every ethnic group has a place, either as a country or as a cultural zone within a country. There are notable exceptions, like gypsies, who roam about in all of Europe, but remain culturally at odds with the host population everywhere they live. Gypsies are an implacably alien nation within every nation they reside.

America, which has been multi-racial and multicultural since the beginning, has had another way of dealing with outsiders on the inside. That is to pretend they are not really outsiders. Some form of the phrase, “despite our differences we’re all Americans” is the national motto. The American creed is, in fact, built on this bit of self-deception about our differences. The fact that this is a big country with a low population density makes it easier to perpetuate the charade.

In Europe, a similar experiment is underway with the great homogenization within the European project. National identity is to be replaced with a European one. While less common, you can hear people say, “despite our differences, we are still Europeans” when talking about the current cultural and social unrest. In other words, the differences at the root of the social unrest are waved away and therefore the frictions are waved away as well. Everyone just has to pretend harder.

This actually works in the short run. Initially, the first generation of aliens bumping into one another want the new arrangement to work. They are willing to overlook the differences in favor of the assumed benefits. It is subsequent generations that begin to question the arrangement. They were not around to enjoy the giddy promise of the multicultural paradise. The kabob stands and food trucks are just part of the scenery of their life. What they see are the aliens around them.

This is the heart of the crisis in the West. Man is a social animal, who naturally wants to live in a society of people who look like him, sound like him, love the things that he loves and hates the things that he hates. Those are the invisible bonds that commit him to the other members and the other members to him. A society of strangers is not a society, but an ad hoc collection of people living outside their natural society. There is a word for such an arrangement. It is called a prison.

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