A Lack Of Imagination

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For people with an interest in history, the best part of travel is seeing the things that you recall from your history books. To stand on the grounds of some historic battle, imagining what it was like for the people involved, makes history come alive. Usually, the thing that surprises people is the smallness. You see the place where some great conflict was resolved and you’re suddenly struck by just how human it is in terms of scale. That’s when it hits you that it was real people engaged in real human activity.

That was my experience at Turku castle when I was in Finland. I’ve been in a lot of very old buildings, so I am used to the closeness of these places, but the smallness of the castle was impressive. From the outside, it has the desired effect. It is towering as you approach it on foot, which was surely the idea of the people who built it. It was supposed to be an intimidating fortification. The guys in side, after all, were the people in charge and they wanted everyone within eye-shot to know it and respect it.

Once you enter, perspective begins to change. In the late 13th century when the castle was built, Europeans had not caught up to the Romans, in terms of engineering and architecture. The arch was still a struggle, for example. As a result, in order to build up, it still meant starting wide. If you wanted a high wall, it had to have a very wide base. To have multiple floors, meant thick ceilings, tiny windows and narrow passageways. The effect, once inside, is almost claustrophobic. It was like living in a cave.

One of the stranger things you will see when you tour the place is young people constantly looking at their phones. At first I thought they were just texting friends or simply unable to pay attention. Instead, what I learned is they were looking at pictures on-line of where they were in the castle. In other words, reality was now their virtual reality and virtual reality was their reality. They could better relate to the images on their phones and the descriptions, than the actual place with the plaques describing the rooms.

In this story about the opening of Nero’s palace, there is a bit toward the bottom where they describe how you can experience the place with virtual reality goggles. There is a picture of people looking rather silly with the things strapped onto their faces. They look like prisoners in some sort of dystopian prison facility. As absurd as it seems, the people who created the exhibit think it is a winning idea. They are probably right. Young people will prefer to sit in the darkness wearing a headset than trying to use their imagination.

When I was a kid, people used to fret about young people watching television, rather than using their imaginations playing games. Most of these concerns were dismissed, as television was rather crude. I grew up with a black and white television until we got the fancy color model that was rather cartoonish in retrospect. No child was ever going to mistake the flickering images on the TV screen for reality or even a plausible replacement for what they could imagine. Television was just fancy cartoons at that stage.

We have come a long way and more important, the internet is far more immersive than television, because it is interactive. About a quarter of adult Americans are on-line constantly. Some of it is the requirement of work, but most of it is simply the fact that on-line is now as much a part of real life as real life. It’s no surprise that those young people in Turku would be confused by the inside of that castle and decide to use their phones to reorient themselves. They lack the imagination to do otherwise.

That’s the thing about imagination. It is a form of getting lost. To imagine things you have to wander off from what you know, using bits and pieces of what you do know to infer things about someplace you have never seen or create a place that does not exist. To imagine what it was like for people 500 years ago, you have to leave this world and wander off to a place you can never truly know. It’s like wandering off in a strange city. There is a risk involved, as you could imagine things that you don’t like all that much.

That’s another thing you see while traveling. Of course, we all see young people walking about with their phone right in front of their face. It’s easy to make sport of, because it is ridiculous to anyone over the age of 40, but it says something about the age. You’ll also notice fewer tourists just wandering around a city. They use their GPS to go from point to point, as if the in-between bits are static. Just wandering around is not only scary to modern people, it is pointless. They can’t imagine the purpose of it.

As the doors of the custodial state slowly close on us, you have to wonder if one of the consequences is a loss of imagination. Maybe that is just a function of us getting dumber, but the immersion in virtual reality may play a part as well. In fact, that may be why people are so sanguine about their infantilization. Their minds are so busy in the virtual world, they are oblivious to what’s happening in the real world. Notice the concern for on-line censorship, but the indifference to an oligopoly controlling the financial system.

On the other hand, maybe the apparent lack of imagination is simply an end point, in the Spenglarian sense of history. The escape into the virtual world is not an escape at all, but rather a new way to experience the same old thing. Virtual reality is like a rebooting of an old movie or TV series. The person’s on-line life is the same character they play in real life, just on a different set. Like old people reminiscing about the old days, we’re simply busying ourselves as we wait to be washed away by whatever comes next.

The Lie Machine

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On an August night in 2016, Russell Orlando Courtier got into a dispute with Larnell Bruce Jr. in the parking lot of a convenience store in Oregon. Authorities are unsure what caused the dispute or why it escalated into a physical escalation. All they know is it ended when Courtier drove over a machete wielding Bruce with his Jeep. Courtier was eventually arrested and convicted of first degree murder. He was just sentenced to life in prison, which in Oregon means he gets out in 30 years, assuming good behavior.

Now, according to the media, the attack was a hate crime. Russell Orlando Courtier is a 40-year old white man and Larnell Bruce Jr. was a 19-year old black man, who is dutifully described by the media as a teenager. They want you to get the impression that he was an innocent 13-year old out riding his bike when he was viciously attacked by this white supremacist. Larnell Bruce Jr. is Emmett Till, another unfortunate black body destroyed by a society that was built on and continues to promote white supremacy.

In realty Larnell Bruce Jr. was a hyper-violent serial criminal, with 16 convictions, including one for beating a child with a skateboard. At just 19-years old, Larnell Bruce Jr. was well on his way to either life in a cage or the local cemetery. In fairness, none of his crimes warranted him getting killed by another lunatic in a parking lot, but the arc of his life was leading to this end from the day he was born. The fact is, some people are born bad and they come to bad ends. That was the case for Larnell Bruce Jr.

For his part, Russell Orlando Courtier was not quite the public menace as Mr. Bruce, but he has been convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors. One of his convictions was for beating the mother of his child. Another was for attacking a man with a knife and another was for attacking a man with broken glass. During his time in the prison system, he joined a white prison gang. When he confronted Mr. Bruce, he was sporting prison ink from that gang and reportedly a hat with a white supremacist logo.

In other words, the real story here is that one of them miraculously made it to 40 without killing someone and the other managed to make it to adulthood. In a better managed society, the parents of Mr. Courtier would have been sterilized before reproducing and the parents of Mr. Bruce would not have been here. Eugenics gets a bad name, but it would have prevented these two lunatics from terrorizing society. In the case of Mr. Courtier, it would have prevented him from making another copy of himself.

According to the media, this is another example of white supremacists murdering innocent black people. The story will be entered into the various databases kept by groups that the lie machine relies upon to testify about these things. In ten years, no one will bother to look up the facts of cases like this. Instead, a ridiculous looking representative of an anti-white terror group will be allowed to include it in their libel against whites. Your children will be guilty, because two violent felons got into a beef in Oregon that ended in murder.

That’s how the lie machine works. The mass media contorts and manipulates events to fit into the narrative. The anti-white hate groups, like the ADL, then cherry pick their best work to include in their libel against white people. They are then invited by the media onto the various platforms to repeat their libel against white people. Other media platforms are assigned to cover these modern minstrel shows, so the lies go through the megaphones once more. Like an echo, the lie is repeated over and over and over.

This is highly orchestrated and coordinated propaganda by people who know exactly what they are doing. At the bottom of that news story is a video the news site put together. It has some clips of the family of the slain man talking about how much they miss the victim. There are images of the victim as a boy. The point of the video is to make you think the convicted man killed a innocent little child, rather than another hyper violent serial felon. Goebbels could not have imagined propaganda of this scale.

This is not simply bias. The mass media is a highly coordinated lie machine, purpose built to promote a blood libel against white people. Russell Orlando Courtier is a monster who should be in a cage, but people like Larnell Bruce Jr. are, according to the Obama administration, three percent of the population, but responsible for 30% of the homicides in this country. Yet, according to the lie machine, outliers like Courtier are the great threat to democracy, while the far more common and lethal people like Bruce are the victims.

It is a bit of trope now to point out that the anti-white bias in the media. It is so pervasive and common, it is now the soundtrack of our lives. That really does not get to the nature of the hatred these people have for us. A dinky little publication like the Oregonian invested hundreds of hours in order to promote this fake hate crime. You don’t do that unless the hatred is so consuming that it is the focus of your life. The fact is, these people are now defined by their hatred of white America. It’s who they are. It’s all they are.

The Burning Of Notre Dame

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As news spread of the fire consuming the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the first reaction of most people was shock and sadness. You don’t have to be Catholic or French to feel as if some part of you has been lost. That was not just an old building or a historically important place. It was a symbol of Western civilization. Stand inside a great church and you feel the awe and power that inspired the builders. That cathedral was the primal roar of a people celebrating their creator and the essence of who they were as a people.

Of course, it did not take long for people to notice that its burning was a metaphor for the current crisis in the West. As Europe is swamped by Muslims, promising to replace Europeans in their own lands, it is only a matter of time before the great churches are turned into mosques or destroyed. Despite the endless propaganda from our rulers, most people here and there, are well aware of what’s happening. They don’t know how to articulate it or react to it, but they know. Watching the fire, they knew what it meant.

Not everyone had this reaction. The first reaction of Ben Shapiro was to make jokes about the fire and mock Trump’s tweet about it. This makes perfect sense. He hates Trump and what he represents, so his natural instinct, regardless of the mood of the room, is to attack him. Despite his ridiculous claptrap about Judeo-Christianity, to Ben Shapiro, that cathedral was just a funny looking old building. It meant nothing to him. That fire meant no more to him than seeing an apartment block burn somewhere in Los Angeles.

In the fullness of time, that inability to pipe down and shut up while his target audience mourns the passing of their heritage, will be a turning point in the Potemkin cult of Ben Shapiro. Even the most blinkered of normies was taken aback by such a crude and malicious statement. He was not the only one to slither out of the shadows and reveal his nature in the light of the flames. Those strangers invited in by our rulers were quick to remind us why they should never have been allowed to come to our lands.

That anger people feel is not the sort of barbaric rage our rulers assume is in the heart of every white man. There will be no occidental riots or calls for pogroms against the invaders. It’s a slow buzz as the batteries charge up, waiting for the moment somewhere down the line when the circuit is finally closed. That’s how these things go. Decent people are willing to tolerate what seems like an unlimited amount of deprivation from their rulers, but it reaches a point when the batteries are charged and the circuit is closed.

That’s why it is good to watch the footage and follow the coverage of this thing. Many of us have disconnected from the news, because it’s just propaganda. You can be sure the media will first try to wave it all away as an accident, but we know how they would be reacting if it was a dumpy old mosque or a synagogue that burned, rather than a masterpiece of Western civilization. We know. Everyone knows. Watching it will make you a little angry, but that’s a good thing. We need to charge those batteries.

Obviously, we’ll never know what really caused the fire. A black church burns and the usual suspects tell us there is a rash of hate crimes against black churches. Catholic churches all over France have been burning for years and we’re told it is a racist conspiracy theory to see a pattern. The same will happen here to people who wonder how an unoccupied building that withstood air raids suddenly caught fire in two places. It will be infuriating, but it just charges those batteries a little more each time you hear it.

Even if the cause was recklessness by some workers, that’s probably worse. Like America, this kind of work in Paris is done by foreigners now. The work crews are no doubt Algerians, Tunisians and maybe some Africans. The few French involved spend their time keeping these tribes from murdering one another. To these strangers, that cathedral was as meaningless to them as the fire. There, as here, the cost of cheap labor is the loss of your heritage. Is cheap stuff really worth feeling like this every day?

Of course, the other charging source that comes from consuming the news coverage of this event is the reminder that we cannot believe anything we are told now. Before the roof collapsed, the authorities were telling us it was not arson and not terrorism. In other words, they were more concerned about the feelings of the foreigners than what this event was doing to their own people. These events are a reminder that the West is ruled by strangers, who see no difference between a Tunisian goatherd and patriot from Lyon.

It’s a sad thing and you should be angry. Even though that anger is more like a building charge, it can still be put to good use. When your normie friend brings up Ben Shapiro or his nonsense about Judeo-Christianity, give him a little shot of that charge. When you are preparing for a day of box wine auntie and her nutty talk about the glories of diversity, give yourself a little shot of that charge, so you can be prepared to make her miserable with your mocking of her piety. Put that anger to good use in your daily life.

To borrow a turn of phrase, the burning of Notre Dame is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. These events open eyes and make the minds of our fellows receptive to the arguments we make. The subversive seeks to convince you to look away from the fire, so you don’t see what is happening. The revolutionary wants his people to look into the fire, so they can see what he sees. We’re all revolutionaries now. Our job is to take events like burning of Notre Dame and make more revolutionaries.

Too Dumb To Make It

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In dissident circles, it is generally accepted that the West has lost its way due to two main problems. One is that the ruling class has embraced a set of ideas about human organization that are at odds with biological reality. Either from a desire to feel righteous or just from reckless disregard for their duties, they have embraced a set of beliefs about humanity we loosely call multiculturalism. The two roots of this belief set are the blank slate and egalitarianism. We are amorphous blobs with equal potential.

The other problem is that this desire to include everyone has allowed all sorts of barking at the moon crazies to gain positions of influence in the culture. These are the people who show up in the corporate human resource department chanting about the need make sure everyone holds the exact same opinions, all in the name of diversity. These are the people running around attacking statuary on the college campus. Fear of these crazies has damaged our normal mechanism for defending society from external threats.

At Our Wit’s End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for Our Future, by Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie, offers an alternative explanation for why we are seeing the West in crisis. Ed Dutton is an English anthropologist who teaches at the University of Oulu in Finland. Michael A. Woodley is a British ecologist and intelligence researcher with the Center Leo Apostel at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Both have written extensively about human intelligence.

Their book is an effort to track general intelligence in the West, against the backdrop of human accomplishment in the West. More specifically, they make the case that the West is getting dumber, even when adjusting for immigration, and the process has been going on for a long time. As a result, the West is following in the same path as prior civilizations that experienced a similar decline in general intelligence. Stupid people do stupid things and cumulatively, they eventually bring the whole thing down.

The book starts with one of those obvious examples that is so obvious, you wonder why you did not notice it. Fifty years ago this July, humans landed on the moon. The lunar program was started roughly a decade before and NASA went from having crude rockets unable to put satellites into space to sending people to the moon and bringing them back safely. To people alive in that time, it was an incredible moment, and one they assumed was the dawn of the space age, when man would traverse the stars.

Today, we cannot reach the moon. In fact, we struggle to hurl a probe to the moon. The Israelis are celebrating because their probe managed to actually hit the moon, rather than miss it entirely. NASA is no longer able to do much of anything and instead spends its time celebrating diversity. Whatever the reason, in this one area, the West is clearly not where it was fifty years ago. Instead of the moon landing being a launching point for the exploration of space, it was the peak of human ability to explore the stars.

Another obvious example they begin with, one that should hit home for men in their middle years, is the Concorde. If you were a kid in the 1970’s, the Concorde was the shape of things to come. Instead of six and seven hour flights across the continent or the Atlantic Ocean, flight time would be a few hours. Everyone was sure we would soon be hopping on super-fast planes to be halfway around the globe in a few hours. Instead, we stand in line for hours at the airport to get on planes no faster than fifty years ago.

These two great examples are the jumping off point to explain that we are not only getting dumber, but the biological process causing it. The book itself is actually a series of essays, grouped together into topics related to the main theme. It is written for a general audience, so even if the reader has little exposure to cognitive studies, the material is easy to follow. In fact, the book also works a great introduction for those curious about IQ and the ways in which science has for studying human cognitive ability.

For those with an interest in Roman history, the discussions of intelligence in the Republic, as well as the Empire, are very interesting. There are a great many theories as to why the Republic collapsed into autocracy and why the Western Empire collapsed. In fact, that’s the fun part of studying the Romans. Why they suddenly, so it seems, veered from consensual government to military dictatorship and empire is one of the great stories of Western history. It’s a great story full of amazing characters, both good and bad.

What the authors suggest is that a biological process was the root of the rise of Rome, it’s flourishing as a republic and then it’s decent into autocracy and eventually collapse. Their theory is a great addition to Joseph Tainter’s ideas about the collapse of complex civilizations. Taken together, it suggests Spengler’s observation about civilization is the result of people building social organizations that eventually become too complex for them to manage. Or, they simply become too dumb to operate what their ancestors left them.

Perhaps the most compelling example is their look at the golden age of Islam. Maybe it is because it is unfamiliar to Westerners, so we have no emotional bias, but the math presented to explain the rise and fall is revelatory. Not only does it explain the collapse of “high Islam” but it explains the rise of modern Islam. It opens the door to understanding this strange, esoteric civic cult that has taken up residence among the ruling elites in the West. It is a short essay, but very powerful in explaining their argument.

Now, the one complaint about the book is it really could have gone into great depth about some of the examples used to make their points. The section on Islam would make for a great 10,000 word essay. They only brush up against the phenomenon of religion rising, falling and then rising again in the late stages of civilization. It is a great example of a short book that the reader will wish was much longer. Usually, the opposite is true. Most books are too long and in need of a ruthless editor. This is not one of those books.

Finally, for dissidents, this book is a black pill. Most of us hang onto the hope that we can find a way to argue and organize our way out of this decline. The truth is, the West may simply lack the human capital to keep the plates spinning much longer. In other words, the die may have been cast a dozen generations ago when smart people started limiting their fertility and helping the poor make it too adulthood. The result being a steady decline in our IQ to the point where we are no longer fit to carry on as a civilization.

The Civil War

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America is a land that bans books, has political prisoners and condemns people to a form of internal exile where they cannot have a job or maintain a normal life. Ten years ago, if someone said Americans would lose their jobs because they liked something on social media, only the aluminum foil hat types would have believed it. Such things were considered impossible just a decade ago. In the 1980’s, these were the sorts of things that happened in the Soviet Union, which was why communism was considered evil.

Yet, here we are, seeing things we thought impossible not so long ago. This is a clip from a television show aired on one of the legacy networks. The video is a naked call for violence against whites. Even after all of the outrageous behavior we have seen from the ruling class the last few years, no reasonable person would have thought this was possible even a year ago. Even the Soviets at the worst were not exhorting people to commit acts of violence against enemies of the revolution.

Up until now, it was reasonable to think that the paleocons were right. The Left was using excited language in an effort to keep their coalition of non-white tribes focused on white men, rather than their many grievances with one another. That sounded logical and let’s face it, it is what most normal white people want to believe. After all, the implication of this line of reasoning is that the Left is struggling to keep it together. We don’t have to worry about facing them in a fight, as they will splinter and abandon the field.

The travelling partner to this line of thought comes from the principled conservatives, who are always ready to create a new set of conservative principles to excuse the excesses of the Left. Without acknowledging the paleocons, they implicitly accept the argument, but add on that the more sober minded on the Left will see the folly of their actions and begin to rein in their crazies, before anything serious happens. This is when they accuse the dissident right of harming civility and appeal to the Left for bipartisanship.

It’s not hard to see why normal middle-class white people find this appealing. They live ordered lives and just want to be left to live those ordered lives in peace. What they don’t want to see is violence in the streets and they certainly don’t want to be asked to confront those violent crazies on their streets. The Danegeld gets a bad reputation, but it is easy to understand the appeal in the moment. The current version is the Prog-geld, where the civilized concede a little bit of civilization, in order to avoid fighting the Prog.

This cycle where the Left commits outrages against civility and the white middle-class accommodates it, has led to where we are now. The people calling themselves the defenders of democracy tried to subvert the last Presidential election. The so-called social justice warriors celebrate a black movie star walking free after perpetrating a blood libel against white people. The defenders of open debate on the college campus, rush to suppress any opinion not on the increasingly narrow list of approved opinions.

That is an important clue. Spend time on social media and you see the people claiming to be the vanguard of the proletariat celebrating trillion dollar corporations stomping on poor guys holding the wrong opinions. The pampered Progressives in the ruling class imagine themselves to be the resistance against oppression. This justifies them using any means necessary to defeat their enemy. That video is a justification of preemptive violence, because they believe people like you are a threat to their well-being.

It’s why it is time think about what is impossible today, in terms of social breakdown, as it will most likely happen tomorrow. The blood lust of the ruling class for whites not obediently walking into the void, is now undeniable. Their response to the 2016 election was to declare war on white America. In their minds, it is a defensive war and they are fully justified to use any means necessary to win. There will be no point where they pull back, fearing they have gone too far. Instead they will always seek to go further.

Again, America is a land where books are banned, people are given long prison terms for holding unpopular opinions and the livelihoods of contrarians are destroyed. This is a land where gangs of roving mobs, financed by billionaires, commit violence against citizens without consequence. Now we have a major television network calling for violence against whites and celebrating violent acts against a specific person. All of this was thought to be impossible ten years ago. What impossible thing will tomorrow bring?

April Grab Bag

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One of the things I don’t like about taking time away is that it seems to take me almost as long to get back into the swing of things. I get back from vacation with things stacked up from before I left and I’m not in the right frame of mind yet to get anything done. By the end of that first week back, I feel like I need another vacation, because I’m working twice as hard to get half the stuff done. I’m really looking forward to the weekend so I can get caught up on everything and get back to my normal schedule and routine.

When you travel, you learn things, but not always what you expect. For example, I got to spend time with Ed Dutton, the English anthropologist who teaches at the University of Oulu in Finland. He mentioned in passing that I have an odd voice, by which he meant different from most Americans. Some others said the same thing, which still puzzles me a bit, but I suspect it is just a European thing. They have certain expectations for how Americans should sound and I fall outside of that set of expectations.

I must admit though, it is a strange thing to be halfway around the world and have someone comes up to you and say they recognize your voice. We live in amazing age in many respects. People in our thing all over the world can communicate with one another over the internet to such an extent we don’t think much about it. I have listeners in Estonia, which is amazing when you stop and think about it. To think this connectedness is not having profound changes on human society is a major mistake.

Another bad thing about the first week back is spring time has hit Lagos, which means tons of pollen in the air. I’ve never had allergies, but when I moved here some local shrub must not sit well with me, as I have a week every year where my throat feels like sandpaper and my eyes are irritated. This is that week, so I may sound ever odder than normal. I tried to tinker with the audio to clean it up, but that never turns out well, so there are a few stretched where the audio is not as good as it should be.

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. I have been de-platformed by Spotify, because they feared I was poisoning the minds of their Millennial customers.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The Banality of Ben (Link) (Link)
  • 12:00: Get Whitey (Link)
  • 22:00: Soulless Monsters (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: Honk Honk (Link)
  • 42:00: Seditious Coup Update (Link)
  • 47:00: Diversity Is Our Strength (Link)
  • 52:00: Tribal Loyalty (Link) (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes Page, Google Play Link, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

A New Ape In The Tree

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It appears there is another ape in the neighborhood. Well, there was another ape and the neighborhood is the human family tree. Researchers have found parts of what they think is another species of human that lived roughly 50,000 years ago. The discovery was made in a cave on the island of Luzon, which is in the Philippines, a dozen years ago, but the announcement has just been made after years of research. There’s a lot of work to be done to figure out where this new species fits, but they seem sure it is a new species.

This is not the first time a new species has been found in the South Pacific. In 2004, Homo floresiensis was found on the island of Flores in Indonesia. They actually found quite a few skeletons, so they were able to more quickly figure out that it was a new species and not just some odd bits of an existing species. This was the one they nicknamed the hobbit, because the species stood about 4-feet tall as adults. Finding a second species of short people on another island adds another mystery to the human origin story.

That’s the real back story to these finds. For a very long time, the generally accepted narrative had modern Neanderthals leaving Africa first, followed by modern humans, who either out-competed or replaced Neanderthals. The out-of-Africa story not only fit the fossil record, but it fit the popular narratives of the modern West. The argument that people are all the same, except for the trivial differences in appearance, works a lot better when everyone has the same origin story. Recent data is calling that into question.

One important thing that these two discoveries confirm is something some have been denying for a long time. That is, evolution is recent and local. An important part of the important narrative has been that no real important changes in humans happened after our ancestors left Africa. These two finds make clear that evolution never stops and will accelerate when a species enters a new environment. In other words, humans not only kept evolving, they evolved to adapt to local conditions and local challenges.

Another issue raised by these finds is that there may have been many human species in Africa at the same time. It’s possible these bones are from another type of human that also made it out of Africa, settled on these islands and was cut-off. Genetics has found evidence of a “ghost” population in sub-Saharan Africans that does not exist in other humans. Just as Neanderthal DNA is found in Eurasians, but not Africans, this ghost population does not appear anywhere else. We may not all have the same ancestors.

The significant physical differences found in these skeletons confirms something else that has not always been popular. That is, small difference can have big differences downstream. In other words, having 99% of the same DNA may not mean the final product is 99% alike. These two species are dated to around the same time and most likely share a common recent ancestor, but small differences in their evolutionary history resulted in big differences in their appearance and big differences from their mainland relatives.

Of course, there is another aspect to a find like this. Any time new information undermines old assumptions, it calls into question other old assumptions. If the out-of-Africa narrative has been mostly wrong for decades, maybe it is just wrong. Maybe humans did not first appear in Africa, but maybe started to appear in several places. The evidence does not point this way, but maybe science has been looking in the wrong places for the wrong things, based on the old theory. Maybe there is many new chapters to the story.

More important, the evidence is mounting that a major claim of the ruling orthodoxy is flat out wrong. Science does not support their claims. Human evolution is real, it is recent and it is local. However humans got to Eurasia, whatever common ancestors they have with humans around the world, they started to change as soon as they settled in their new lands, in order to thrive in those new lands. The question is not how much are we the same, but rather how much are we different and how important is that now.

That’s what makes this an interesting age. Just as heliocentrism was seen as a threat to the prevailing orthodoxy, ancient DNA and the archaeological record is quickly becoming a challenge to the orthodoxy of this age. In fact, the current orthodoxy may be much more fragile than what Galileo faced 500 years ago. The organization of Europe did not depend on the sun revolving around the earth. Even the authority of the Church was not dependent on that model. Christian Europe was not invalidated by the telescope.

In this age, differences in origin stories and differences in evolutionary history will cripple our civic religion. You can’t claim people are amorphous blobs, if evolution is true, and you cannot claim all people are biologically equal if they are not. Further, the true believers cannot claim the mantle of science, if their beliefs are in conflict with science. The church of the secular Left is not just wrong about a few things, it turns out that its reason to exist is entirely false. That’s like discovering Christ never existed.

Ruling Class Rage

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One of the truths of life is that people tend to not notice what is happening outside of their cultural and social bubble. It’s hard to step outside of your daily life and see the big picture, as far as political and cultural stuff. We mostly surround ourselves with people who hold the same opinions and have the same interests. Those with whom we are at odds, we navigate around and they navigate around us. We avoid political talk with that left-wing friend, who still thinks Trump is hiding Boris and Natasha under his bed.

Everyone, to some degree, lives in their silo, not thinking all that much about what’s going on in the other silos, beyond how it effects their thing. It’s why most Trump supporters are not surprised to see Trump doing so well in the polls. They like their guy and his good poll numbers confirm it. On the other hand, the remnants of the alt-right, struggling with the passing of their moment, are still sure Trump is going to lose in 2020, because he has abandoned them. His strong polling does not register, as it is outside their silo.

This blinkered view of things is usually wrong, to some degree, which is why it is a good idea to take a step back when trying to understand something like the hearing on “white nationalism” in Congress yesterday. The House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism” was weird, even by the standards of current politics. Even the people doing clown world jokes could not have imagined a hearing where a black woman is made to be the face of white nationalism in America.

To make the thing even more bizarre, none of the people involved in this circus was actually white. There were Jews, blacks, mystery races, various sub-groups of the coalition of the ascendant, but no white guys. However you define white nationalism, the one thing everyone agrees upon is it is mostly white guys. What you are not going to see at a white nationalist gathering is a black women, who started her career as a race hustler, hoping to become the female Al Sharpton of her generation.

Of course, the people involved in the circus can be written off as not right in the head, but why would the Democratic leadership allow such a thing to happen? Regardless of what you think about the people running the Democrat party, you can’t say they are bad at the game of politics. They are very good at the game, which is how they ascended that greasy pole to leadership. Why would they allow their racial rage heads to run wild and draw attention to themselves this way? What could they gain from it?

The temptation is to answer these questions with your favorite gratuitous assertion about the official Left or the official Right. Steve Sailer has popularized the notion that these performances are part of a master strategy to keep the coalition of fringes good and angry at the dwindling white majority. White Nationalists see Candace Owens as part of larger plot to keep white Baby Boomer arfing like seals at the magic negro. Those things are plausible, but convenient answers tend to be the least likely in politics.

Another possibility is that our political class is simply consumed with rage to the point where they are defined by it. Who they are is entirely dependent upon how much they hate heritage America and native stock Americans. The circus yesterday was not the result of some clever plot, but the result of people who hate whites so much they can’t stand to be in the same room with them. Instead of actual white nationalists, they brought in a black grifter to operate as the spokesman for white nationalism.

Something Ed Dutton points out in his recent book is that in the later phases of social decline, the ruling elites will often indulge in various religious and cultural movements, hoping to restore the moral center of society. The mystery schools flourished in Late Antiquity, for example. Perhaps this weird anti-white rage we are seeing from our ruling classes is simply the public aspect of a modern mystery cult. They are play-acting at what it will be like when the prophesies come true and we are a post-white society.

It may strike the more practical minded on the Right as a bit ridiculous, but keep in mind that all rational explanations of left-wing behavior have been wrong for as long as anyone reading this has been a live. The conservative analysis of the post-war Left in America is known for its wrongness. The Buckleyites got everything about the Left wrong, which is why they failed so completely. Whatever motivates the Left to perform these morality plays, we know it is not what conservatives claim.

That’s the important take away from yesterday. It was a morality play performed for people inside the political bubble. For the same reason having a black guy play Henry V makes sense to the Left, having Candace Owens play Jared Taylor made sense. It’s not the person that matters to them. It is the role they play. Whatever practical considerations there are for staging the thing, the one big reason for it was to stoke the rage of the ruling class. It is their mystery cult and what now defines who they are as a class.

Travelogue: Journey’s End

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My journey home started at the Helsinki airport. I drove from Turku to catch a noon flight, so I left several hours for the usual nonsense at the airport. I had plenty of time as the process of going through security and passport control was fast and efficient. It’s not like the Finns take a bunch of shortcuts. It’s just that the Finns are smart and sensible, so the people staffing the various posts at the airport are smarter than you’re going to find at an American airport. There is a lightness to it that you don’t see in America.

I had read Ed Dutton’s latest book on the flight over and it occurred to me that a good example of his thesis is the airport comparison. The very basic argument he is making is that the West is getting dumber due to selection pressure working against the traits we associate with general intelligence. As a result, the West is getting less capable. If this process is not arrested, collapse is inevitable. We will not have enough smart people to run the systems of the West, so we will retreat into less complex societies.

The Helsinki airport runs like other airports, but it is run by a people with an average IQ over 100. The Baltimore airport, in contrast, uses the same systems, but it is run by people with an 85-IQ. Now, in fairness, the typical Finn is not working security at their airport, so the average IQ of the staff is certainly below the national average. On the other hand, the management layer at the Helsinki airport is probably a full SD smarter than what you’ll find at a typical American airport, with lots of diversity hires at every level.

In other words, the Helsinki airport is like 1950’s America when all of the important positions were manned by people from the majority population and that majority population was smarter than today. Meanwhile, the BWI airport is future America, maybe not too distant future America, where the important positions are staffed by a hodgepodge of whoever washed up here, managed by a significantly dumber white population, with the help of loads of diversity. The future of the West is the TSA on a bad day…

Leaving Russia by train, you pass through a town called Vyborg. It is an old city, probably founded in the 11th century, but no one knows. It has changed hands many times over the centuries. The Finns, Swedes and Russians have taken turns controlling it. Today it belongs to the Russians and is a craphole. The population has rocket high drug and alcohol abuse, along with the social dysfunction to go with it. The point is the same problems ailing the West are showing up in even the remote parts of the world…

On the train from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, a Finnish passenger pointed out the window at an old dilapidated building just outside the city. He said, “That’s where they held Finns who were being sent to Siberia.” By “they” he meant the Bolsheviks. You get the sense that there remains a strong underlying suspicion and hatred of the Russians….

Watching Russian TV, I saw ads for Kazakhstan. They were hilarious. It was like Borat was hired by their chamber of commerce to create the ads…

Riding the train between Finland and Russia, you get to see the border control of both counties in close comparison. The Finns are professional and clearly trained to evaluate each passenger based on their experience. The Russians are just following a procedure, without putting a ton of thought into it. More important, the Russians operate under much tighter rules. Their superiors don’t trust them to do too much thinking on their own, so they have a rule for every condition. Low trust societies need lots of rules…

The collapse of the Russian collusion myth was hilarious, but the aftermath concealed the real damage that has been done. The Europeans follow the lead of the American media, which means they now have the Russian collusion virus. I saw this show on the BBC, which is supposedly about how the Russians secretly influence European elections through control of dissident politics. It’s every bit as nuts as the Russian collusion nonsense and every bit as damaging to the political culture of the continent…

The scars of socialism can still be seen outside Saint Petersburg. The run down housing blocks and abandoned concrete buildings are a reminder of the failure of greatest and most monstrous social engineering experiments in history. Mixed in with those ugly reminders of the past, there are new housing blocks that look like they are built by people, rather than prison guards. There are even housing tracts that are rather stylish, like an eastern version of an American suburb. Russia is still poor, but it is getting better…

I had the pleasure of spending time with Ed Dutton. He is even more eccentric in real life than you see in his video. He is also razor sharp and very witty. He translated a Finnish speech for me in real time, which was like having Rowan Atkinson explain a speech by elves to the denizens of Middle Earth. Of course, we both had been drinking, so that certainly had something to do with it. You learn a lot about an Englishmen after he has had a few drinks. We are very lucky to have Ed Dutton on our team…

The one thing Europeans struggle understanding is what it is like to live in a city like Baltimore. I was chatting with some people, trying to explain to them how Baltimore can have a crime rate 200 times higher than Finland. They were baffled as to why blacks shoot one another over sneakers. I felt like Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Patrol cars on fire off the shoulder of North Avenue. I watched hoppers glitter in the dark near the Hampsterdam Gate…..”

I’ve always been skeptical of the global white nationalist movement, for the simple reason that what ultimately has defined the West is competition between people. The Chinese are smart, smarter than Europeans, but they could not make the great leap out of the Malthusian trap that happened in Europe. The reason is the Han came to dominate their region long ago, so they put their smarts to work concentrating their domain. The Europeans used their smarts competing against one another to dominate Europe.

You see the residue of the competition everywhere you go in Europe, even in the Nordic countries, which are very close ethnically and culturally. There can be cooperation on a range of interests, but ultimately, that cooperation has to be based on ethnic nationalism, not racial solidarity. The Finns have to want to keep their own lands, before they can cooperate with Italians, who want not keep their own lands. Europeans need to love themselves again, before they can come together to defend Europe…

Travelogue: Awakening

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The morning of the conference, the weather in Turku was perfect for a nice long walk around the city. It’s still winter, but the signs of spring are appearing, so in the morning it is cold, but too cold. I was waiting for the secret message telling me where the secret meeting would be held in the afternoon. I had decoded the message from the previous day, which gave me the location of the dead drop, so I had a few hours to kill. My first stop was the big old Lutheran church, that was a few blocks from where I staying.

Turku Cathedral was originally a catholic cathedral of Finland, but today it is the Mother Church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. It is the central church of the Lutheran Archdiocese of Turku. It was originally built out of wood in the late 13th century, but was expanded in the 14th and 15th centuries, using stone and brick as the construction material. In person, it is impressive mostly due to its age. It was not hard to imagine people walking to mass 500 years ago on the same spot I standing.

The cathedral is located next to the river that runs through the city. There is a little park there where you sit and watch joggers and bikers on the path along the river. In the early morning, it is very peaceful. As I walked along the path, I suddenly remembered how much I miss being on the water. It has been a few years since I’ve done any fishing, so I made to myself to pick up that hobby again. That is one of the great benefits of travel. It gives you time to think about what is important and remember to get back to doing that.

After a walk along the river, I took a hike up the big hill that overlooks the whole city, on top of which is an old anti-aircraft gun from the Second World War. There’s also a bunker that looks like it is functional. a short walk down the hill is the Luostarinmäki Handicrafts Museum. It appears to be a replica of what I think is a original village. During normal hours, they have actors playing the various roles of villagers from the period. It’s like an open air, interactive museum, along with a craft museum and the requisite gift shops.

From there I walked to the art museum, which was closed, but alongside of it was an open air food market. On the street leading up to the museum, which is on a hill, is a bust of Lenin. The Finnish Bolsheviks were a nasty lot, ready to see out their brothers to a foreign power, all in the name of a madhouse dogma. The Finns experience with the communists is a good reminder that there is no dealing with lunatics. There are simply some people who are born to be traitors to their own side…

Having retrieved the location for the secret meeting from the dead drop, I headed off from the hotel a little before the start, as it was a short walk from home base. Of course, I took a circuitous route, doubling back a few times to make sure I was not being followed. Upon reaching the location, I immediately saw someone I knew. We exchanged the appropriate greetings, which of course is the secret handshake. The cloak and dagger aspect these things is serious business, but there’s nothing that says you can’t have some fun with it.

All of these security protocols are due entirely to the fact that even in Finland, lunatics from Antifa are allowed to roam the streets causing mayhem. In fact, it is fair to say they are the unofficial secret police of the global managerial state. They are allowed to commit crimes, intimidate people and harass businesses. The government could shut them down tomorrow, but they don’t, which is an endorsement of Antifa by the state. That’s where things are in the West. We’re ruled by gangsters that employ thugs…

Inside the event, I was struck by the professionalism of the organizers. They really have their act together in Finland. The event kicked off with a recorded video from Jared Taylor, who was supposed to be at the event. He is usually quite sunny, but he was still a bit angry over what has happened to him. I really can’t blame him. When our enemies do these things, it is intended to be an insult, a humiliation. There’s nothing wrong with getting mad in response, even if it will change nothing. We are human.

Most of the attendees were young, 20’s and 30’s, with some graybeards sprinkled into the mix. There was a good number of people in their 40’s and 50’s too, so it made for a lively crowd, but not too lively. Most were people who worked in companies and were comfortable in a professional setting. The event had the feel of a corporate retreat. Once again, it was a reminder of why our rulers fear us so much. If not for the thugs, this event could fill a large venue with the sorts of people that keep society functioning.

Millennial Woes filled in for Taylor and gave a nice talk about the usual things. I think if I were to list one complaint about these events it’s that the speakers tend to spend too much time rattling off the list of crimes committed by out rulers. If you are at one of these events, you know why you’re at the event. Being the rude obnoxious American, I eventually spoke up during the question and answer period, making the point that these events need practical stuff about organizing, rather than the listing of complaints.

Olena Semenyaka, the international secretary for a Ukrainian group that calls itself the National Corps, gave a talk that lasted longer than it should. That and she sounded a lot like the IRA thirty years ago. Kevin McDonald was on hand and gave the sort of speech you would see at the Mencken Club, except for some commendatory on the Jews. He really hated the fact that I recalled the headline of John Derbyshire’s review of Culture of Critique. He’s still sore about that, I guess. I don’t think he likes me very much.

The best talk was given by Mark Collett. In all honestly, I liked his speech because he repeated many of the things I write here on a regular basis. I don’t know if he reads me or not, but he made a point I have been making for years. That is, no authentic alternative movement is going to succeeded by being negative. Positive identity has staying power and it naturally attracts people to it. A movement that is nothing but a laundry list of grievances only attracts misfits and trouble makers. That cannot be said enough…

I did have readers and listeners there at the event. Some of them recognized my voice and came over to say hello. It’s not false modesty. I just struggle with the fact that lots of people read these posts and now lots of people listen to me. It’s an odd thing to hear someone say they recognized my voice or tell me they are a fan. It’s even stranger when it happens seven time zones from home. That said, it’s always good reminder that there is serious stuff going on here and I always need to keep that in mind…

The event was over around seven, so we adjourned to a nearby pub to drink beer and socialize. The Finnish police were on high alert, as the local lunatics were threatening to cause mayhem. I’m not sure what happened, but we were told to leave one bar and then another. I noticed someone, who looked like Ted Kaczynski just after they pulled him the cabin, following us around, screaming like a lunatic. My guess is he was the one getting the bars to throw us out. We managed to have a good time nonetheless.

The lesson I’ve drawn from attending events in the US and Europe is that dissident politics is woefully short on organizers. We really need to get better at organizing locally, building real life communities and working out how to get together without alerting the crazies. That means were have to stop thinking of ourselves as concerned citizens. Like it or not, we live in a lawless age where the rulers will lie, cheat and steal to undermine dissent. That means we have to stop trying to play by the rules when organizing and conspiring.

Dissident politics will have to be radical politics. That’s the real awakening this week. We are the new Jacobins. If this thing is to succeed where prior movements have failed, it is going to have start with that understanding. That means operating like radicals, rather than the local rotary club. It means throwing sand in the gears, making sure that the wheels of society don’t turn smoothly. That’s going to be hard for many to accept and it will be harder to sell, butt hat is the only way forward, if white identity politics is going the thrive…