Helsinki is roughly the size of Baltimore, in terms of population and it is also a major seaport, but it may as well be another planet. I arrived from London in the afternoon and breezed through passport control. The young woman who checked my passport asked me the normal questions then asked me where I was staying. I could not remember the name of the place, so I said it was the former prison. She laughed and said, “That’s Katajanokka!” I was sent on through and headed down to baggage claim.

The Finns must have the best run airport on earth. I’ve been in a lot of airports and the wait for luggage is a minimum of thirty minutes in most of them. By the time I got to the carousel, my bag was there waiting for me. I collected it and went outside to see a taxi stand right by the door. The trip from the plane to the taxi was maybe ten minutes. Of course, the taxi was a Mercedes Benz, which always makes me laugh. In America, the Mercedes is the symbol of suburban affluence. In Europe, it is the most common taxi.

Of course, you soon understand why Helsinki is a clean, efficient city, as the taxi driver is a white guy, who speaks good English in addition to Finnish. Most everywhere now, the taxi business is run by Muslims from the Middle East or North Africa. In Finland, you just don’t see many non-Finns, other than some Chinese tourists and white Europeans here on business. I asked my taxi driver where I could find a ghetto to visit. He laughed and said there are no ghettos in Helsinki. Everywhere was safe.

After I told him where I was from, he then understood my question better. He had been to the Imperial Capital in the 1980’s and still remembered the squalor. He asked how it was now and I gave him the truth about our multicultural experience. He figured out my politics, because he then told me how important it was for Finns to keep the Muslims and blacks out of the country. He also said their rulers were trying to change Finland by importing diversity, but he was confident the Finns would not lose their country…

The sun was close to setting, so after I checked into the hotel I took a quick stroll around the area where I was staying. Katajanokka prison, which is now a hotel, is actually on an island named Katajanokka. It’s just over a short footbridge from the mainland, but it is still technically an island. There’s a utilitarian vibe here. The Finns must think form follows function, as the building style is not intended to impress anyone. There’s a humbleness about it that can be mistaken for plain, but it quite beautiful.

Katajanokka is a very nice neighborhood, where local big shots live, so its lack of gaudiness is not due to a lack of wealth. It’s just that Finns are never garish. There is a park named after Tove Jansson, the famous creator of the Moomin books. These are a collection of somewhat disturbing children’s books, popular in Finland since the middle of the last century. There is the Uspenski Cathedral, which is an old largest Orthodox cathedral. The waterfront is full of shops, food stands and tourist stuff…

The next day, after my early morning walk, I found a nice little place, in the side of an old building, selling coffee and baked goods. The proprietor was Italian, an older man, who somehow ended up in Finland. In his youth he had a spirit for adventure and enjoyed drug taking, so one thing led to another and he wound up in Finland. He now has a pleasant life playing music, when not selling coffee and biscuits to people in his shop. I get the sense that many of the foreigners living here have a similar story. They just ended up here…

I sought out where the Finnish rulers hold court and asked for an audience with their ruler, but I was told that it was not possible. I presented a letter of introduction, passed on to me by John Derbyshire, from the honorable Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, exulted leader of Turkmenistan. Unknown to me, Sauli Niinistö, the ruler of Finland, is in a quarrel with Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow. After some very tense moments, in which flogging was discussed as an option, I was released and told to report back before my departure…

The women of Finland come in two main types. There are the somewhat cherubic type, with a hint of north Asia to them. They do not have an eye fold, but they have the facial structure of Asians. These are robust women, who get more robust as they hit their middle years. It’s not hard to imagine them hauling firewood or a reindeer carcass into the cabin during the dead of winter. All of the old women in my family have this build. Facially, they really do all look the same, which suggests a narrowness to their family tree.

The other type is at the other end of the morphological scale for females. Unlike the more robust variety, these women usually have blonde hair and they are athletic. Their faces are round, but lack the cherubic quality of the former type. As they age, they maintain the athletic build, but their faces show wrinkles along the jaw line, which is actually quite attractive. It make them look wizened, at least to me. Finnish women of all types seem to view men with good humor, as if we are clowns sent here for their amusement…

You know you are in a different land the first time you use the toilet. I realized this for the first time while in Mexico. The public toilet was a hole in the floor and it was very public, in that there was now stall. In nicer facilities, a man would be in the toilet handing out squares of paper and offering to wash your hands. In a rich country like America, solving the bathroom problem is not something we have faced for a very long time, so we take this stuff for granted. We don’t think about toilets and showers very much. At least I don’t.

Something I’ve noticed in Europe is the lack of water pressure in the shower. I’m in a nice place in Helsinki and the water pressure is not much above a trickle, relative to what I’m used to in America. My shower at home can remove paint if you get aggressive with the settings. I’ve never experienced anything like that in Europe. It’s always the opposite, which is probably due to a need to conserve. America has plenty of water and it is cheap, relative to most things, so we use as much as we like. That’s not true in Europe.

That’s something we Americans don’t appreciate. In North America, we have plenty of every natural resource. We could be energy independent if we simply stopped selling oil and gas to foreigners. We have plenty of water, plenty of places to throw away trash and so on. Buy gas for the car in Europe and you quickly appreciate why we love our trucks and SUV’s. Gasoline here is a little under $6 per gallon. The rental car I will be driving to Turku this week is the size of one of the tires on my truck….

Waste and water are two things that have popped into my head several times during my short time in Helsinki. Everywhere here offers water, even the coffee shop. I bought a couple of beers at the front desk and they offered me a glass of water. On the other hand, the Finns seem obsessed with wasting anything, especially water. In a few places, I’ve seen signs that describe how much was wasted the previous day. I’m a thrifty guy, so this appeals to me for obvious reasons, but it is a strange thing nonetheless…

The Finns also obsess about energy usage. In the hotel, you have to insert your key card into a slot near the door to turn on the electric. Even the sockets power off when you remove the card. The point is to prevent guests from leaving the lights on when they leave. A local told me the Finns are very energy conscious. As someone who hates it when people leave lights on in an empty room, I’m thinking this will be a good policy to institute at my office. Maybe I’ll install thermal sensors in every room…

Helsinki is one of the least diverse places you can visit, so those who enjoy vibrancy, as much as I do, will be disappointed to find zero vibrancy here. I mean zero. I walked about for most of the day and saw zero familiar faces. The closest thing to vibrant, other than the Chinese tourists, were some Indonesian businessmen. That said, you do manage to get used to the sameness. I know, it seems impossible, as diversity is our strength, but being in a place where everyone looks sort of like you is relaxing after a while…

There is a Chabad outpost in Helsinki. I wandered past it on my walk. For those unfamiliar, Chabad is a Jewish cult that started in Russia, moved to Poland and then moved to America before the war. They have “centers” in every country. President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is in the cult. One thing they believe is that this is a messianic era and that Jews must prepare for the end times. That means their movement must bring Jews back into the faith, similar to some Evangelical Christian movements.

One big difference is they think Jews should revolt against secular governments. They are a little vague about this, but the main point is that Jews should have no loyalty to any secular government. Funny how no one thinks this is a problem. If some white guys get together to talk about white identity politics, the full force of the custodial state swings into action. A worldwide cult preaching the end times, with recruiting centers in every capital of the West, including a man inside the White House, is no big deal…

Finland is a country of roughly five million people. According the most recent crime reports I can find on-line, they had 63 homicides in 2017. Half of those involved men of marginalized groups where heavy drinking was involved. That’s a nice way of saying losers who got drunk and took their disagreement to the next level. Baltimore, a city with ten percent of the population of Finland, had 342 murders in 2017. Roughly 95% of those murders were committed by marginalized men, by which we mean blacks…

Before going to bed, I turned on the television. I speak no Finnish, so the local shows are a mystery of white people speaking what sounds like Klingon. The local shows have zero non-whites on them. Even in Copenhagen, I saw they decorated their shows with some diversity. The Finns have not done this, as far as I can tell. I watched something that looked like a game show. The only thing diverse about it is one guy had neck tattoos and ear gauges. Otherwise, Finnish TV is what our ruling classes hate the most.

The exceptions are the American and British channels. The BBC is a carnival of cloud people diversity. Imagine CNN with British accents and British condescension. That’s the Beeb. The American station is a Fox affiliate, playing the Simpsons and Family Guy. They also have National Geographic for some reason. The commercials on these channels are full of vibrancy and diversity. I saw an ad for razors featuring a black guy. There was an ad for something featuring race mixers. We are ruled by monsters…

The first leg of my journey was a stop in London. When booking the trip, the cheapest flight took me through Heathrow, with a half day layover. I hate having to run to make connections, as that often ends in me missing my connection, so I don’t mind a few hour gap between flights. Having almost a full day between flights was not ideal, but it beat the alternatives when I was booking the flight. My plan was to leave the airport and do a quick tour of London, but that plan got scuttled by British security.

When leaving the airport’s secure area, I was pulled aside for the rubber glove treatment by whatever they call their security forces. I was taken to a room and asked the usual questions. Then they asked to examine my phone, which got them upset, as there is nothing on it other than some classical music I loaded for the trip. I keep nothing on my phone as a rule. This one is brand new, so the browser does not even have some history on it. That lack of a information seemed to upset them.

That led them to ask to look at my laptop. I use a travel laptop, so if something happens, I’m not missing important parts of my life. This one I just setup with Linux and a new solid state drive. This only increased their anxiety, so we spent an hour or so playing Petrovich and Raskolnikov. My Russian visa did not help matters. I’ve gone through this a couple of times in American airports, but this seemed different. Maybe I’m imagining things, but I got the strong sense of being on a list. Maybe it was just the culture gap.

You see, that’s the other thing. The British Starsky and Hutch were Apu and Mustafa, two brown guys from over the rainbow. Their English was fine, but it had the hint of the exotic, suggesting they grew up speaking something other than English at home. They also had the narrowness that is typical of the South Asian. There’s always a barrier that exists between the Occidental and the Oriental, despite the degree of shared experience. There is an inscrutableness there that always leaves a degree of uncertainty between us…

After getting sprung from gaol, I was free to explore the giant shopping mall that is the Heathrow airport. The best I could tell, all of the employees were either brown people from over the horizon or Eastern Europeans. I got something to eat and all of the wait staff was not British. Given the international flavor of the passengers, you would be hard pressed to know you were in the heart of Britain. They don’t even have televisions playing the BBC or local sporting events. Heathrow is a foreign country disguised as an airport…

I’ve been in a great many airports in my life and I have a weird fascination for them. Most airports serving big cities are really just complex systems that have evolved over many years to solve evolving problems of air travel. An airport is a solution for a problem of modern life. As a result, you can learn a lot about the evolution of human organization by observing what happens at the big airports. Their design is similar everywhere, but everywhere is not the same, so the airport says something about the local culture.

If you are going to make a list of the worst airports on earth, it’s hard to imagine how Heathrow would not make the cut. It is a big hub for international travel, so it is a lot like the bar in Star Wars. They have turned the thing into a giant shopping with an airport attached to it. To do that, it meant connections require train rides and shuttle buses to get to your connection. There’s no way to make a connection there without allowing a few hours in between. Otherwise, you watch your flight take off from the shuttle bus…

On the fight from Lagos to London, a couple of Africans were across the aisle, one row up, from where I was sitting. Both were dressed up in what Hollywood tells us is traditional African dress for African royalty. Their accents suggested Ghana to me. At some point, the male got very agitated at the person in front of him, who had reclined her chair. He started violently shaking her chair-back and hollering something. Two stewards came over and gave him a lecture about his behavior and airplane etiquette.

Watching the two of them struggle to understand how to be passengers on an airplane, I realized what it would be like to bring Stone Age people into this age. The two of them were just too dumb to navigate plane transport. They were frustrated by the food service process. They struggled to understand simple directions. When the plane landed, they got up and started walking down the aisle, while the plane was still taxiing to the gate. They are primitives incapable of existing in a modern society, without constant supervision…

Walking around Heathrow, it is easy to see why our rulers love multiculturalism. They look at the diversity you see at a big intentional airport and they think of it as the Casablanca of this age. It makes them feel worldly and sophisticated. That brown guy in their department with the perfect continental English is not just a colleague. He is a symbol of what makes them special. They are not provincials. They are worldly cosmopolitans. They never see the other side of it. They just see the good part of the transaction.

Frankly, I don’t blame them. I could not help but be a bit impressed with myself, as I mingled with my fellow globetrotters. If I spent my days looking out at a polyglot, multiracial sea of people getting on well with one another, I might start thinking we have transcended something more than the Malthusian limit. Mankind is about to cross over into being a single race, a global race. It’s an illusion, but one that is reinforced every day, so for them it is reality. The trouble is, their reality is not our reality or even reality…

I spent many hears in Boston and I come back regularly. Even so, I am always surprised to see some unexpected change. Even in a sclerotic culture like New England, life does not stand still. New buildings are built to replace old ones. Roads get redesigned. The general look and feel of the place changes over time. To paraphrase Heraclitus, you never visit the same city twice. Perhaps it is just a function of age, but when I travel now, I am much more aware of what has changed, rather than what is familiar.

The biggest thing that has changed since my last trip here is me. There used to be a time when Boston was famous for the worst drivers in America. Tourists would bring back their rental cars and take cabs, because after a short dose of Boston drivers, they were too afraid to be on the road here. Now, Boston drivers are nothing special. Having spent the last decade driving the Imperial Capital, my standards have adjusted. Nowhere has traffic like Washington. Los Angeles is a motoring paradise by comparison….

At the airport in Lagos, I saw what I thought was the ugliest women I had seen to this point in my life. I mean so hideous my instinct was to look away. Then as it approached where I was sitting, I realized it was a tranny. Everyone else had the same reaction. Of course, the tranny was on my plane, but luckily, I boarded in the early group so it was sent to the back of the plane. But as luck would have it, the tranny was on the same shuttle to the rental car facility. The looks from the counter agents were priceless.

Driving out of Logan, I could not help but think about what Theodore Dalrymple said about communist societies. Perhaps these efforts to force the rest of us to accept cross-dressing loonies as normal is a push to turn us into emasculated liars. Maybe that’s part of it, but my sense watching the tranny parade around the airport is that this is just wanton decadence. You see this on campus with the vulgar displays of every conceivable sexual prediction. I think we are ruled by a class of Caligula’s now, for now…

I had an interesting conversation with friends at dinner on Thursday night. One friend I would describe as between CivNat and Dissident Right. A year ago, he was listening to Ben Shapiro, thinking he was radical. Today, he listens to me. It is a trip the ferryman has seen many times. His sister, the other person at dinner, is a lifelong feminist Progressive, but having doubts as she reaches her middle years. Over dinner, we talked about race, sex, ethnicity, quirks of evolutionary biology. All the stuff popular on the Dissident Right.

I have gotten better at talking about these things with normies and reality-curious Progressives. I have a library of pithy stories and examples to make it easy for them to accept biological reality on their terms. In the case of reality-curious Progressives, I frame things in moral terms. It does not always work, but it keeps them from shrieking “Witch! Witch!” and notifying the authorities. Her brother thinks I red-pilled her, but we will see. It is a long road from there to the water’s edge. Still, it is another green shoot…

Boston did not fare the previous Progressive Awakening very well. The cultural upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s broke the working class structure of most American cities and Boston was not an exception. As a result, the city was in decline into the 80’s, but then it righted itself in the late 80’s and 90’s. Like New York, rich people started demanding better policing and better schools. The city started knocking down slums and opening up the housing market to developers. By the late-90’s, Boston was in a renaissance.

When the ululating started again in the late Clinton years, the city was not destroyed by Progressive wreckers seeking to make a point, Instead, it was filled with neo-liberal globalists, investing in the city. The colleges exploded with money, as college kids poured in toting government loans and financial aid packages. Boston became a technology hub, with great tech firms ringing the city and biotech startups growing like warts on the college campuses. Eastern Mass as a whole is nothing like it was at its nadir…

Locals here are gearing up for another Super Bowl. I moved here the year the Patriots made their first big game, where they were destroyed by the Bears. I was here when they won their first one back in 2002. That would have been the 2001 season. The difference in atmosphere between now and then is stark. The Patriots have been great for close to two decades now. Winning is not as fun for the fans. There is also the melancholy of knowing that the great run is nearing an end. Both Belichick and Brady are close to done…

Something I forget about until I get here is just how crappy the service is in Boston. In Lagos, the retail shops are run by Koreans and South Asians, so they are super polite to honkies. The businesses staffed with blacks are a riot of inefficiency, but they are polite about it. Here, lots of white people work retail and they act like they are doing you a favor by waiting on you. At the Dunkin Donuts the other morning, the pram-face who served me coffee had a look on her face like she was thinking about sticking a shiv in my ribs…

There were three reasons I decided to attend Mencken. One was just curiosity. I have been a reader of Paul Gottfried since I was a kid, so I was curious about the sort of people who follow his work. I also wanted to meet Derb again. I have been a big fan of his for decades now. I also wanted to hear his views on the alt-right. He was part of a panel devoted to that topic on Saturday. Of course, the normal social stuff was a motivation, as well. You always end up meeting fellow travelers at these sorts of things.

The session on the alt-right is what I was most interested in seeing. John Derbyshire is one of the few in the older generation who seem to get that the alt-right is not a club or even a defined movement. At this point, it is mostly a collection of aspirations, observations and critiques. The second speaker was Keith Preston, who was unknown to me. I was interested in what Professor Gottfried had to say about the alt-right. He has spent his life in right-wing politics and philosophy so his opinion is important.

John was first up and he used The Dork Tard’s 16-points blog post as the framework for his talk. He made the point that Dork is by no means the leader of the alt-right or the voice of it, but a representative sample that is useful for analyzing the movement. His comments about item number eight were laugh aloud funny, to the empirically minded. What John was doing was introducing the general ideas of the alt-right to a crowd that is not spending their evenings in the meme war. He did a good job presenting the broad strokes.

The next guy up was Keith Preston and I think it is fair to say he is not a fan of the alt-right, but he is not dismissing it either. He took some shots at some of the crazier elements flying the flag, but he gave a good long overview of all the different groups that get lumped into the category alt-right. Preston reminds me of Fred Reed, before Fred went crazy. There is an almost forgotten tradition of Southern populist skepticism that works very well when critiquing political ideologies. As a result, his review of the alt-right was well done.

The final speaker was Professor Gottfried. His talk was interesting for a number of reasons. One is he does not like Richard Spencer very much. He thinks Spencer is just playing make believe and is a bundle of unforced errors. He also said Spencer hates working class people. This is not the first time I have heard someone say some version of this. Gottfried did not say it, but the accusation is that Spencer is a dilettante. Having been around enough trust fund guys, I get why people think that, but I do not share that opinion.

Gottfried’s main theme about the alt-right is that they are not well run and not good at presenting themselves on mainstream media outlets. He used, as an example, someone who either writes for Spencer now or used to write for him. Gottfried said the guy was a racist and therefore an embarrassment. He got quite worked up over this point and said you cannot have a political movement without moral standards. Purging racists should be the absolute minimum standard for any political movement.

Gottfried is trying to replay the purges that landed him and the rest of the paleocons outside the institutions. He wants a do over. That is something you hear from the older crowd a lot and I understand it. There is a lot of bitterness as to how things played out in conservative politics over the last half century. I do not blame a guy like Gottfried for looking at a guy like Jonah Goldberg with contempt. Gottfried wrote the book on fascism, but Goldberg got rich off the crackpot idea that Progressives are the real Nazis.

The truth of the matter though, is mainstream conservatism failed to conserve anything, other than the some well paid positions in Progressive media. The reason is they lost the culture war. In the 1960’s, when the Progressives decided to finish what they started in the 1860’s, the Official Right buckled. Instead of fighting to the last man, they agreed to the new moral paradigm, with regards to human relations, that the Left wanted to impose on the rest of the country. When racism became a sin, conservatism became one two.

That is what the paleos do not get. There is no stopping the white replacement project and the systematic erasure of our culture, until the Progressive moral framework is brought crashing down. I am no spring chicken, but I fully endorse the youthful antics employed by the alt-right. Putting up posters like Identity Europa does on college campuses, helps build a counterculture and draw in young people. The ad hoc guerrilla marketing campaign of placing “It’s OK To Be White” signs is lethal to the people in charge.

Sure, some of it backfires. Despite what anyone says, Charlottesville was a clusterfuck for all involved. In this sort of movement though, you have to take risks and accept some losses. Let us also not forget that Charlottesville is why the Hispanic KKK ran that hilariously stupid ad in the Virginia governor’s race. It is not always easy to know if an action worked. Going off the hot takes of Sean Hannity is a good way to keep losing, like the generation of paleos now carping about the alt-right.

One of the crazier things Gottfried said, is that the alt-right is creating a war between whites, when it is claiming to defend whites. He then went onto say that the reason things are such a mess in America is that Christians did it to themselves. I am a heretic on the JQ issue, but man, that was hard to take. Anyone vaguely familiar with the arguments of the alt-right would know exactly what the response would be to that. I will just say it is an example of the vast cultural divide between the Old Right and the alt-right upstarts.

I have a lot of respect for guys like Paul Gottfried, so this should not be read as a condemnation of him or the paleocons. I think in the fullness of time, they will be remembered fondly for having kept the fires burning, despite having been un-personed by the Buckleyites and neocons. The alt-right owes everything to these old guys, even though many of them made the trip from libertarianism. Richard Spencer got his start because of guys like Gottfried and Taki Theodoropoulos,

The difference is the new guys categorically reject the current moral order. If that upsets the Fox New types, so be it. Politics is a pointless enterprise, if rooting for your own team is expressly forbidden. Taking over institutions does nothing, if the price is embracing the morality of the Left. The Old Right always defined itself as defending the existing culture and institutions. That made sense when those things were worth defending. Today, those things are a cancer on our people. They must be replaced or we will be replaced.

I got to the hotel hosting the Mencken event a little early, so I went to the bar to have a beer and kill some time. This was my first Mencken event and I was having second thoughts about the whole thing. I figured it would be an older crowd, which is fine, but I suspected it would a very libertarian crowd too. I do not have a lot of patience for libertarians, under the best of circumstances. It had been a busy week for me so I was especially cranky and I feared I would be something less than my charming self.

As I had my second beer, I was thinking about how best to say, “the non-aggression principle is for pussies.” I noticed a middle-aged woman at the other end of the bar. She had been at a table, tapping away on her tablet. She relocated to the bar and was trying to get my attention. She was sporting a Mao cap, which is popular with cat ladies, so I ignored her, had another beer and played with my phone. Maybe if she had been better looking or I had a few more drinks in me, I would have done her the favor.

The reception was a little like God’s waiting room, assuming the Jews really are the chosen people. The room was old and very Jewish. There was a youngish guy over in the corner, who looked relieved to see me walk in, as that meant there were two people in the room paying FICA taxes. We chatted for a wile and I learned he is a devout libertarian and came to the Mencken event primarily to see Tom Woods. He seemed earnest, so I resisted the temptation to tell him about my plan to send libertarians to work camps.

The formal reception was a sit-down affair with a dinner and drinks. I was relieved to meet some younger people, who share my politics. They were mostly millennials, but one guy was gen X. We were the kiddie table. Keith Preston was at our table and he is an interesting guy. I do not share his politics, but he is not one of those doctrinaire ideologues, who thinks he has figured it all out and now has to spread the gospel. He is genuinely curious about what is going on in the dissident right. He is a good dinner companion.

That is the value of these events. Going back and forth with strangers using fake names on-line has its value, but meeting and talking in real life has value too. I only had some vague notion about Preston, based entirely on his site. Chatting over dinner and then hearing him speak, I now have a new appreciation for what he is doing. At the same time, I saw him nodding more than a few times as I was making my case for the new counterculture. If not for sitting at the same table, we would remain strangers to one another.

Another big benefit to these things is that you find out that there are more of us out there than is reported. Two of the guys at the kiddie table are college professors. Another is an attorney at a big firm. I know from the comments here, and the e-mails I receive, that a lot men in the professional ranks are “our guys” but they keep quiet about it. That is a necessary thing, but it also means it is easy to feel like a stranger in the world. Having dinner with a gang of smart, like minded professionals is an antidote to the sense of doom.

At the same time, spending time with a bunch of old guys is a revelation. Most of us experience our politics on-line, through blogs, social media and videos. The people at the Mencken event experience their politics from network news, the cable chat shows and paper magazines. A lot of what we take for granted, they do not know exists. What they do know about the emerging counterculture, they do not fully understand. It is not simply an age thing. Its that there is a necessary bit of self-ghettoization on outside.

Age is a part of though. Paul Gottfried kicked off the evening with a speech about the state of the Right. He made the point that the average age of Fox News viewers is 60-something and National Reviews readership is around seventy. Then he made the error of assuming that reflects the demographics of the Right. The fact is, Stefan Molyneux has vastly more resonance with people under the age of fifty than a Sean Hannity. Sites like 4chan and Reddit have greater political reach than all of the cable shows combined.

Tom Woods, the featured speaker of the night, actually tried to make that point. He talked about how he has built a business on new media, but I do not think he won any of them over. He also spent a lot of time trying to differentiate between left-libertarianism and right-libertarianism. There have always been warm relations between paleos and Rand Paul style libertarians and he was well received by the Mencken folks. He is a good speaker, so I did not run out of the room screaming, even though the whole thing had a 1980’s vibe to it.

Finally, the most important benefit to attending these real life gatherings is that you get to socialize with other like minded people. The kiddie table ended up in the bar, drinking and telling stories. I learned that one of the college professors is connected with a bunch of people in this thing. I also learned that a couple of the others are readers. That is always an interesting experience for me. I often forget that real people read this stuff. For me at least, the camaraderie and brotherhood are motivating. It gives purpose to my efforts.

I will get into the event itself in another post, but people in dissident politics should begin to embrace these events. Co-opting existing institutions is how the New Left won the culture war 50 years ago. It is a good model to follow. If alt-right people start populating local clubs and organizations, even If it is in a low-key way, it helps build the movement. The first step is meeting people at events like Mencken. Two of the guys at my table are local to me, so now we can socialize and conspire locally. That is how movements grow.

I’ve spent a lot of time in airports. I’ve slept in them, hung out in them and I even worked in one for a while. I was not an airport employee, but my company rented an office at the airport for some reason. As a frequent traveler, I’ve had the pleasure of being in a lot of airports in various places. I don’t really know a lot about them, but I have noticed a lot about them.

What interests me is not the airports themselves as they are mostly the same as far as the bigger concepts. When you think about it, an airport is just a big bus stop. No, what I find interesting in airports and the air travel system is it is a great example of how societies evolve solutions to near term problems. Those solutions often turn out to be long term liabilities and you clearly see that with our air travel system. In some cases, they are crippling malinvestments.

If you were going to design an air travel system for North America, you would not replicate what’s in place. It does not make any sense and it is expensive. Instead you would look to maximize geography and technology. For instance, there’s no great technological hurdles to super sonic passenger planes. The Concorde started flying in the 70’s. The issue has always been that airports can’t handle it. The noise and the runways were the problem, not the plane.

Imagine a few large airports on the East Coast built for massive super sonic passenger planes that could ferry 500 or more people to Europe in three hours. If you are in Kansas, you would take a domestic flight to the nearest international airport. But, when we started designing and building airports and the air traffic system, no one imagined super sonic air travel or the volume of air travel we now have.

That’s the thing you see all over the air travel system. We have layer upon layer of solutions to old problems that often make solving new problems more difficult or even impossible. It’s not that the people of 1950 were morons and designed bad airports. They just saw what they could see and did the best they could to unriddle those problems they knew about and could imagine. Within living memory, the idea of a Muslim from Saudi Arabia boarding a plane in the US was laughable.

Security is where you see the cul-de-sac. American airports were never designed to filter out Muslim lunatics, luggage bombs and other Muslim problems. When I left the Imperial Capital, I had a 5:00 AM flight, but I still needed 40 minutes to pass through security. Leaving America to return back home, security took over an hour, even though there were few people in line.

It’s why I like airports as an example to explain the impossibility of public policy in our current age. We have this massive overhang of evolved solutions that are largely useless for the current age. Food stamp programs are an obvious example. Even poor countries are full of fat people. There’s no need to be handing out food to the poor. But like all those zany rules at the airport, everything has a constituency, even if it has no purpose.

Compared to the labyrinth of rules in the welfare system, airports are simple. Yet, we cannot make small changes at airports to eliminate the cost of old solutions so that we can efficiently add new technology and solutions. Instead, it is just more and more layers. To solve the problem of Muslim fanatics, they bolted on new layers of stuff between you and the point the airport, which is to get on an airplane.

Airports also make good examples for explaining the law of unintended consequences. In the 1950’s, you could walk on a plane with your sidearm. Then we started getting hijackings in the 60’s so the “solution” was to ban firearms from people and carry-on luggage. That meant metal detectors and guards to look for guns on passengers. Before long, anything that could be used as a weapon was prohibited.

The “solution” for the terrorists was to put bombs in the luggage. Then the “solution” was to smuggle knives on the plane, knowing that everyone was unarmed on the plane. Air travel is a big complicated system that few truly understand well. Make some small changes at one end and what pops out the other end is often a surprise. No one in the 70’s imagined the Lockerbie bombing or 9/11.

Finally, if you have libertarian tendencies, a trip to the airport should disabuse you of those ideas. people do not self-organize very well. You have to have someone in charge who can say “no” to the percentage of humans who do not naturally follow the rules. You need someone to tell the self-absorbed d-bag that he has to check his gigantic backpack. It’s “ordered liberty” not just “liberty” and that means someone has to be giving orders. Otherwise, airports would be impossible.

Sitting in the stands of a rodeo in Forth Worth is like going back in time. I’ve been to the rodeo and I’ve watched the event on TV so I understand the basics. In all honesty, I find it a bit dull so while I’m sitting there watching girls ride horses around barrels, I’m thinking of other things. My friends, who had never been to a rodeo, were captivated. To them, it was incredible watching humans ride animals with such skill.

Chit chatting about it after, I think the big attraction to rodeo for many folks is that it reminds them of a better age. The rodeo is wholesome family entertainment. There’s no sex or crude jokes. There’s no hip-hop music blasting from speakers. It’s just wholesome looking young people, corny jokes and a good time. Cheap too. Tickets to a rodeo are nothing compared to a football game.

That’s what makes it feel like a trip back in time. For most of human history, entertainments were relatively cheap. Entertainers lived on the fringes of society and made very modest livings. Maybe the showman who owned the circus or traveling act made a good living, but the performers did not. Running away to join the circus was not a move up, it was giving up. If you could not hack it in normal life you ended up as the bearded lady in the circus.

Contrast that to today where we venerate knuckleheads with the IQ of a goldfish and shower them with millions. In order to do that the cost of entertainment has skyrocketed. I was at the Dallas Cowboy game on Sunday and the prices are staggering. Cheap seats are $500 just to get in the door. The facility, which is incredible, is simply a massive platform from which to sell you stuff.

That’s what’s incredible to me. Everything has a sponsor. “This hot dog concession stand brought to you by AT&T” is the sort of thing that makes me think the Catholics were right about cupidity being a mortal sin. Every square inch of the Cowboy facility has a sponsor attached to it and almost every square inch is for the purpose of moving product of some sort. You keep wondering, “Don’t they have enough?’

That excess allows the Cowboys to pay their star defensive end millions of dollars, even though he spends his free time beating and strangling women. You only do that when you have so much, you feel you are immune from public opinion. Hearing the crowd cheer when that demented knucklehead made  big play, I’m going to assume the paying portion of the public is OK with wife beating.

I’m sure many rodeo entertainers are terrible people. That’s just a part of life. My guess is though, public knowledge of bad behavior ends your rodeo career unless you also get right with Jesus. The customers will look the other way if you are turning your life around after getting drunk and running naked through the streets. Otherwise, there’s probably not a lot of tolerance for it.

In a weird way, people enjoy things like the rodeo now because it lets them escape the wall of sound that is modern mass culture. The whole downtown Forth Worth area feels like it exist as an escape. People dress in their cowboy clothes and have an old fashioned good time. I was at a bar in Fort Worth and it was just cheap drinks and people dancing to country music, like they used to in the old days.

That’s the other thing that popped into my head comparing a night in Fort Worth to the day at Jerry World. In today’s mass media culture, everyone is assumed to be a child. At the football game, it is nonstop noise and video. Between plays they are hitting you with some ad or speech. In breaks for commercials, they hammer the audience with messages. You don’t have a minute to talk to the guy next to you. They assume you must be amused for every second like a toddler.

The infantilization at a modern ballpark extends everywhere. Buy a beer and they open the container and keep the cap. I guess they don’t want you to swallow it. The container is made from something that prevents it from being a projectile, in case you have a tantrum. Of course, they shut off beer sales half way through events so you don’t have too many. The modern sporting even is the nanny state taken to the logical conclusion.

All that said, Texas is a great place to visit. I’ll have more thoughts on it when I return back to the Imperial Capital.

Upon my arrival, I was told by a friend that one of the women at the Superbowl Party now had a lesbian daughter. The only reason to tell me this was to give me a heads up so I could avoid having to talk about it with the mother or daughter. This is one of those habits in modern times that I don’t think existed in a prior age. Some friend of family member gets caught up in a ridiculous fad and everyone has to pretend not to notice or pretend to support it. The easy path is to pretend not to notice. Otherwise you have to tiptoe through a minefield of nonsense.

In this case, the lesbian daughter was not actually a lesbian. The fashion these days is for girls to declare themselves lesbian or transgendered and then dress up to play the role for attention. The mother went bonkers in college and joined the cult of feminism so it makes perfect sense for the daughter to go in for the latest female fad. The result is a teenager with blue hair, weird makeup and wearing boys jeans.

I’m indifferent to these things simply because there’s nothing to be said about it. Teens often look for ways to drive their parents crazy. There’s not a lot left for kids to do so it is not surprising they are picking up on the sexual confusion stuff. Even that is not terribly original. In the 1970’s, hipster men would put on makeup and wear sexually ambiguous clothes to the disco. David Bowie looked like an aging lesbian for much of the 70’s.

I was telling this to someone today while waiting for an elevator. A nice African fellow overheard and chimed in with his opinion. Africans – the real ones not the ones from Detroit – have a very low opinion of homosexuality. This fellow was polite, but it was clear he was not down with the new trend. He mentioned that it was very popular with girls in the local high schools. He found it troubling. His question, a fair one for sure, is where will the babies come from if the girls are lesbians?

That’s a reasonable question. Vermont, which appears to have based its future on middle-aged homosexual men with a thing for antiquing, has seen its school enrollments decline, along with its general population. The grammar school population has seen the biggest drop, which means things will get worse, not better. I don’t think their problems are due to everyone turning gay in Vermont. I’m just making the point that you have to have babies in order to keep things going and there’s only one way to do that. Homosexuality, therefore, is irrational, biologically speaking.

If you are an American and you are curious about what it would be like to live in a world run entirely by aging hippies, a good place to go is the Whole Foods Market in Cambridge Massachusetts. On the way visiting friends, I stopped into the one in Central Square, which is the heart of MIT. Cambridge is basically a city owned and managed by two elite universities, Harvard and MIT. Lagos to Cambridge is like a guy from Detroit getting dropped into Reykjavik.

That’s the thing about New England and cities like Cambridge in particular. It’s the stunning whiteness. Not wholesome Midwestern white or Scots-Irish white like West Virginia. It is a creepy Potemkin white. Central Square is now populated with fashionable young people sporting well cultivated beards. The older people all have the aging hippie vibe. The near total lack of diversity is what’s unsettling. Cambridge would make the Klan blush.

According to the census, Cambridge is a city of 105,000 people, with 12,000 of them black. Where they stash those black people is a mystery to me. Even in the old days before MIT and Harvard bought the city, it was hard to find a black guy. Central Square was the exception. Drug dealers, pimps and hustlers would hang around the banks of pay phones at night. All of that is gone now and the black people with it, but to where I cannot say. According to the census data, the percentage of blacks dropped by a third in the last twenty years so that may be it.

Today, Central Square looks like every other hipster-ville. There are loads of little retail stores servicing the college community. Housing is stuffed in where space allows. MIT has built infrastructure on just about every block. It’s impossible to know the lines between the city and the school. For all practical purposes, that part of Cambridge is owned and operated by the school. The same is true of Harvard down Mass Ave from MIT. The school has gobbled up every bit of land not gobbled up by school employees.

Whole Foods is another example of why libertarian economics is utter nonsense. If humans were transactional, value seeking machines, they would not be squandering money on sustainably grown fair trade instant coffee, processed by one-legged transgendered midgets. I picked up a jar about the size of a grenade for $10. I also got some organic antibiotic free milk and a tray of cinnamon buns (preservative free). As I picked up my products I listened to two middle-aged homosexual males bicker over what I think was quinoa.

Like Apple, Whole Foods is about signalling. An iPhone is just a more expensive version of every other phone, but you have one to let people know you are the sort of person who has an iPhone. You’re not like everybody else. Something similar is going on with Whole Foods. Everything they sell can be found at a normal grocery store at a fraction of the price. But, regular stores are utilitarian and transactional. The stores are just selling stuff for a profit. Whole Foods is conformational and affirming.

That’s the thing that jumps out to me when I visit college towns like Cambridge, Boulder, New Haven etc. They are cultivated little utopias based on the ideological inclinations of the modern college faculty. Unlike normal-ville, they are very white and very Asian. There’s little in the way of crime or social pathology. There are no poor people. There’s also scads of money flowing in to support these little utopias, most from the taxes of normal people. MIT and Harvard, for example, get billions in research money. The students are all on some sort of federal aid program. Pull away the government crutch and these little hot houses collapse.

That’s why the politics of these places gets so crazy. Most of the people wandering around Cambridge are not worried about their company laying them off if the new product does not sell. The money spigot is never shut off so most of the people attached to these schools can indulge whatever strikes their fancy. These elite academies operate like a cultural and political black hole sucking the rest of the areas politics and culture into the void. Massachusetts is a different sort of Utah and Cambridge is Salt Lake with better bars and looser women.