I had to put the cat down on Saturday afternoon. It was a sad thing, of course, as it always is when you have to say goodbye to a pet. The cat was diagnosed as a diabetic a few weeks back, which is not unusual with dogs and cats these days. It is a treatable condition, that is easier to manage in animals than humans. Your animal is not going to cheat on its diet or forget to take its insulin. With a little discipline and the willingness to master a few medical skills, you can manage a diabetic pet with little trouble.

On Friday night, the cat took a turn for the worse, so I went into the vet not entirely sure what to expect. They took blood and sent me home with some instructions. I figured they were humoring me, so I spent the night making my peace with what I expected was coming. The next day I learned, after further examination, that the cat had a rare type of cancer that was the real cause of the diabetes. They found tumors on his pancreas, which is not treatable, so I made the decision to put the poor thing out of his suffering.

While waiting to see the vet on Saturday, a woman I know came into the office. She was there to say goodbye to her dog. Apparently they called her with the bad news and she came into to complete the process. That was my guess anyway. The girl at the desk seemed to know what to do, despite the fact the woman was sobbing uncontrollably. She sat down on the bench next to me. Out of instinct, I guess, I don’t know, I slid over and put my arm around her. She collapsed against me into a mess of tears and wailing.

I don’t know what it is, but the sound of a woman crying touches some unexamined part of my being. It’s crazy, I’m sure, but that sound reminds me why a man is willing to fight another man to the death or leave his lands to sack the city of some bastard who insulted his people. My grandfather always said that a man protects those who need protection and defends those who need defending. Maybe that’s all there is to it and the sound of a woman crying just triggers those lessons I heard a million times as a kid.

There was nothing I could do for her, obviously, other than to be a shoulder to cry on, as she waited to say goodbye to her dog. Sitting there, being kind to a neighbor, my burden felt a bit lighter. There are always others worse off than you. That’s something I always try to keep in the front of mind. My life is not a walk in the park, but it is not an endless stream of misery either. Most people, it seems, carry around a lot more baggage than me, or they are less able to carry the load than me. Either way, I’m a pretty lucky guy.

Coming home, alone with my thoughts, I thought about how serendipity had intervened to make a tough situation a bit less difficult. My first pet, as an adult, was a cat. Growing up, we had dogs, so I had a bias against cats. The women I was dating at the time thought I needed a pet and she suggested a cat. I was skeptical about the whole thing, but a man does what he must at that age, so I got a cat. It turned out that cats are just like dogs, in that they are what you make of them. Me and the cat went on great adventures together.

At the end of his time, he got sick and I did the back and forth with the vet as you do with pets. It was new to me as an adult, so I got caught up in the process, thinking that there was a potentially good result. When it was time to put an end to it all, I struggled with the decision. I just couldn’t bring myself to say goodbye. Then one night the cat staggered down the hall with his old toy in his mouth. He could barely walk, but to the very end he was going to be all the cat he was ever going to be. I was quite touching.

That night, I could not help but think that maybe I just learned a great truth. That cat was just a cat, but he was never cheated. Who knows what goes on in the head of a pet, but they are here to be our pets. It is literally what they are made for and they are that fully and completely. We lose sight of that as people. Our point in life is to use all of our time completely. There are no do overs or restarts. You just have the time you have and you better use all of it being all the you possible. Life is for living. Don’t cheat yourself.

Perhaps that’s why we keep pets. Long ago, domesticating dogs for work or allowing cats to live among us to keep down the rodent population made practical sense. Keeping animals solely as pets has no obvious purpose, other than to make the time we have more enjoyable. Maybe seeing these little critters come into the world and become their purpose fully and completely makes understanding our own purpose easier. It’s a lot easier to grasp the purpose of a dog or cat than the purpose of that crazy relative in the family.

I will say, that this time was a bit more difficult than other last trips to the vet. I’ve had a lot of animals over the years. Some were better than others. This was a good one. Just about every post I’ve written was done with him lying behind the keyboard. Every podcast was done with him lying next to the microphone. For over a dozen years he was a comforting fixture in my life. He was there at the door when I got home and at the door when I went off to work every day. As pets go, he was a good one and I will miss him.

I left the hotel in the morning for a walk and maybe some coffee. On the way out I spotted the taxi driver from the previous episode and he spotted me. After some small talk, he agreed to take me to see the Grand Mosque of Copenhagen. The actual name of the place is the Hamad Bin Khalifa Civilisation Center, but I doubt anyone calls it that. My new Afghan friend was thrilled that I was interested in seeing the mosque. Muslims really do think they will conquer the world, so any little sign of advance is exciting to them.

The mosque is located in Outer Nørrebro, which is what Americans would call a suburb, but it is more densely populated. Europeans cities tend to put their undesirable populations in apartment blocks outside the city center. In America we have tended in the other direction, building urban reservations for blacks. My guess is Outer Nørrebro used to be a working class Danish area so the rulers dumped the Muslims there. That seems to be the popular thing for rulers everywhere. They dump their problems in the poor areas.

I’ve been through the Muslim areas of Detroit so Outer Nørrebro had a similar vibe, more white faces than I expected, but the same feel. You get the sense that there are many more eyes on you than there are people on the street. The mosque itself is not much to look at, to be fair. Maybe they should not have used the word “grand” this time. Perhaps in a generation, when they can build something like the Islamic Center of America, they can then use the word “grand” to describe it. Right now, the mosque is quite modest…

After what proved to be a boring adventure into a notorious Muslim stronghold, I took to the streets for a walk. I was hungry so I found a place selling pizza and burgers. I had to laugh. The menu looked like every pizza shop menu you see in America. The proprietor spoke only Danish and Arabic, so ordering was more of an adventure that my trip to the mosque, but in the end I had what looked like pizza. Actually, it looked like the stuff I recall as a kid getting at the summer fair. It had that weird orange oil slick on it.

Copenhagen is considered one of the most livable cities in the world and it does not take long to see why this is the case. For starters, it is extremely white. It’s also very middle class. It is the ideal that American Progressives imagine for their enclaves, even though they never put it that way. A city full of smart, middle-class white people, with just the smallest dash of diversity, is a great place to live. It’s certainly why Copenhagen is always high on the list of the happiest places on earth, along with other white cities.

Walking around the city, the peacefulness of the place is striking. In ghettos, of course, the noise and the throbbing tension of vibrancy makes it impossible to relax. But even in tourist areas of nice America cities like Boston and New York, there is an energy to the place. Copenhagen is like a dark version of San Diego. It’s strangely quiet for a city, other than those damned bicycle bells. The city is ruled by cyclists, which is fine, but the ringing of bicycle bells does start to grate on your nerves after a while…

I decided to make the walk over to Christiania Freetown, which is a bohemian village of sorts, founded by drug addicts and bums in the 1970’s. They squatted on government property that had been a military base. Over time it became a sort of Hamsterdam for the Danish drug culture. For reasons I cannot quite fathom, the Danes seem a bit scandalized by the place. I walked over the bridge and followed the line of people. It’s a beautiful walk and the surrounding area is very quaint. I recommend the walk along the canal.

Freetown is pretty much a dud. One of the things that has always been true about weed culture is its falseness. They have spent decades trying to conjure a culture around smoking weed. It’s all fake and stupid, ripped off from various bohemian cultures, by people all but yelling, “Look at me! I smoke weed as a lifestyle choice!” How barren is the soul when the point of life is getting high, eating salty snacks and watching cartoons all day? Freetown is a Potemkin village for Potemkin bohemians….

Walking around the city, I could not help but notice that the Danes apparently cannot regulate their body temperature. It was in the mid-60’s today with a gentle breeze. I was in jeans and a long sleeve t-shirt. The locals were in winter coats and scarves. I saw a girl wearing gloves. I suspect they simply like their ‘hygge’- mode more than they let on. The first signs of fall mean the party will be moving indoors. It’s the reverse of what we see in the early spring, when everyone is quick to tear off their clothes as soon as it hits 50…

I noticed a curious thing while hiking around the city. I wanted to buy some things to bring home and maybe a cap or sweatshirt as a reminder of the trip. Nowhere did I see the sorts of shops you tend to see in tourist areas. This is a difference between Europeans and Americans. We go on vacation so we can feed our faces and buy stuff to take back to our overstuffed houses. Europeans go on vacation to see things and enjoy themselves with friends in strange places. For them it is about the living, rather than the acquiring.

This is something I did not appreciate well into adulthood. Having fun stories to tell about your adventures is the best part of travel. It’s the best part of living. I lived an unusual young life so I took it for granted, perhaps, but it was only into my thirties when I figured out that life is for living, not ticking boxes. I guess that is why I find the minimalist style of Scandinavia, so appealing. There’s an uncluttered quality to life here that makes it easier, at least for me, to enjoy the experience. Bring on the Law of Jante…

Having been somewhat disappointed by the lack of vibrancy in Copenhagen, I took a trip to the official mall, figuring I would get a look at the dark underbelly of Denmark. For some reason, shopping malls are the canary in the coal mine. As soon as diversity appears in a community, the nearest mall becomes a no-go zone. It’s not just an issue of imported diversity, as in the over the horizon type. If an apartment complex goes Section 8, within a year the local mall is thumping with ghetto tunes and young vibrants.

From the outside, the mall  looks a lot like every US mall. Inside, it looks like the closet of a goth girl exploded and they built a mall around it. It’s a series of clothing stores selling black pants, black shirts and black coats. The radical store sells gray. The sports shops sell the same official team crap you see in America. I looked everywhere but I was unable to find caps, shorts of jerseys for the local teams. It was all American sports teams and American sports apparel brands. That and hip-hop music. Every store, hip-hop music.

That’s the thing. Inside the mall is wigger culture from top to bottom. Every store is playing some sort of American black music. I walked the entire mall, all floors, and as I toured the place I was increasingly aware of my American identity. I kept thinking that the locals would figure out that I was American and then decide to string me up for my country’s rulers imposing the poz on them. This is one of those things that only an American can truly appreciate. The reddest red pill is seeing Danes listening to rap music at the mall…

Finally, the Danes seem to have developed an obsession for the cheeseburger. It seems like every restaurant has their version of the perfect burger. I take a back seat to no man in my appreciation of the cheeseburger. I had some fantastic examples in Copenhagen. I also enjoyed some great fries. They put a vinegar sauce on their fries and they serve them with mayonnaise. These people clearly live in the favor of Odin. Even putting aside the other wonderfulness of the city, the burgers and fries will bring me back soon…

I’ve always thought you can tell a lot about a people by their airport. I’ve been in a lot of airports and while they all of them follow a similar design, form follows function, no two are the same. For example, the Reykjavik airport reflects the utilitarian sensibilities of the people, but it also has the funky charm of a people who spend a lot of time in the winter darkness. That’s what probably explains the weirdness of Iceland. They are way out their where the winter nights are long and the people have lots of time kill. The results follow.

Copenhagen airport is the most trusting place on earth, I think. I saw little in the way of security and the staff is extremely nice. For example, I did not have to go through customs despite coming through Iceland, which never checked my passport either. I did get checked at BWI before getting on the plane, but the basics of security say you first eliminate single points of failure. It appears the Danes trust their brothers in Iceland who in turn still trust the world is a sane place. There is something appealing about it…

My first day in Copenhagen was uneventful. I don’t speak Denmarkian, as our former president would say, but I sense the language is easier to acquire than Icelandic, which is close to impossible, unless you have some foundation in Old English or Norwegian. It does not matter as English seems as common as the native tongue. In fact, the buses have advertisements in English on the sides of them. Even commercial companies use English on their business signage. English is the lingua franca now.

At the airport, I bumped into an old acquaintance. Another reminder that it is not a small world, It is a claustrophobic one. A half dozen years ago we worked a job together. At the time, I was working with a client and I noticed something unusual about their exchange accounts. By unusual I mean they did not add up. It turned out that the CFO was running a scam on the owners using the foreign exchange accounts. It was the old game of stealing a penny from a million different places a thousand times a year on a regular basis.

It was enough money involved that they called in guy who did corporate security. He had worked for a government for a dozen years and figured out that companies would pay much better for the sort of things he enjoyed doing. With corporate fraud, the companies often prefer to settle things privately, rather than bring in the government. This guy’s service was to put together the information so the other party in the situation was willing to make a deal. That meant he spent his days spying on the servants of rich people.

We hit it off while working together, mostly due to our shared realism about the modern age. It’s been a year since we spoke, so it was good to see a familiar face and to have a drinking companion. There really is nothing better, in my opinion, than drinking beer and talking shop. It’s like a poetry slam for people with a purpose in this world. My advice to those thinking they can steal from their corporate masters is to stay off of social media and never discuss your dealings in public places. The walls have ears…

When you live in Lagos, you get used to the urban landscape. No matter how hard you try to keep your mind right, your mind becomes habituated to the day to day. For example, I’m jotting this down at midnight and it is stone silent here in Copenhagen. In Lagos, it is never quiet. On a Friday night the sound of sirens are the lullaby of the just. When I was in Newark over the summer, the people I was with struggled with the cacophony of the ghetto. They were all suburbanites, so they were not used to vibrancy of the ghetto.

That does not mean Copenhagen is not without its vibrancy. Most of their vibrant are North Africans, with some blacks. I had a great cheeseburger from a place called Bash that was run by Moroccans. The cook was Danish, so maybe it does not count, but the staff was all Moroccan. One of the bartenders we experienced was from Bangladesh. He was glib in both English and Danish and said he had married a Danish women, which is why he lived in Denmark. Everywhere, the door to vibrancy is opened by women…

Tomorrow I meet the secret handshake society. I have no idea what to expect. Frankly, I doubt I will meet any of them. It is a mysterious lot. Of course, this is a necessity of nationalists everywhere. The hotel where I am staying is hosting a Muslim wedding tomorrow, but people who think Denmark should be a country for Danes has to meet under a bridge in the middle of nowhere, lest they be accused of being un-Danish. I don’t speak the language, but I’m sure the rulers here have a phrase for “it’s not who we are.”

The TDS guys did a show with someone calling himself Ryan Dawson, who is something of a conspiracy theorist. That’s not entirely fair as he does not seem to be pushing a theory, as such, but more of a systematic skepticism of the prevailing narrative on issues like the Iraq War and 9/11. Questioning the official narrative is often lumped in with the conspiracy stuff, because all conspiracy theories start with the argument that the official truth is, in fact, a well orchestrated lie to cover up the real truth behind whatever.

Conspiracy theories, of course, are wildly popular, despite the fact most people swear they don’t believe in them. There’s a reason the people who make movies often use the conspiracy as a plot devise. Even the most skeptical people enjoy following the plot as the real power behind the scenes is revealed. Still, most people have been programmed to say they don’t believe in this stuff. You’re cast as a weirdo or a nutjob if you think the CIA killed JFK, for example. Yet, most people believe JFK was the victim of a conspiracy.

The funny thing about the conspiracy theory stuff is that the official narrative that spawns the conspiracy theory always relies on the same probabilistic flaws as the conspiracy that seeks to discredit it. For example, the official JFK story strikes most people as laughably implausible. Basically Oswald pulled off a one in a billion effort and then was killed by Jack Ruby, who also pulled of a one in a billion long shot. The theory the JFK was killed by Joe DiMaggio, who was a CIA sleeper agent, is really not that crazy in comparison.

Similarly, both halves of a conspiracy theory follow the same set of rhetorical rules, in that they don’t make the affirmative case. Instead, they rely on all other explanations being seen as less plausible. The people who think Mr. Coffee killed JFK and RFK don’t have a lot of evidence, but they can explain in detail why the official story is bogus. Of course, the people who think Oswald was the lone gunman don’t have a great argument either, so they rely on the fact that no one saw Joe DiMaggio in Dallas with Ted Cruz’s father.

The thing that makes conspiracy theories popular is not their amusing leaps of faith and logic, but that they satisfy our need to know. JFK was most likely not killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, at least Oswald did not act alone. Whoever helped him either got very lucky, which is always a possibility, or they were very good at covering their connections with Oswald. Either way, we’ll never know, because the people who investigated it were never able to solve the riddle. Some crimes go unsolved and as humans, we truly hate that.

Something similar will probably happen in time with 9/11. The neocons expertly used the event as a propaganda tool to get their war plans passed. We know guys like Richard Perle were scheming about remaking Mesopotamia for a long time. That does not mean, however, that the neocons pulled the 9/11 job. It means that the official story is mostly bullshit to cover-up gross incompetence and to promote the forever war. In time, people will stop believing the official story and most people will think 9/11 was a conspiracy.

Of course, just because the official version of events is nonsense, it does not mean there is a conspiracy. In the case of 9/11, gross incompetence is the most likely issue being covered up by the government. We see how this works with the current FBI scandal, where the DOJ and FBI are feverishly trying to hide the fact that senior people in both agencies were ham-handedly running a domestic spying ring. The same clowns running the Trump spying operation were the ones who bungled 9/11 and the aftermath.

There are actual conspiracies, of course. Just type the word “Itanimulli” into your favorite search engine. Then read the word backward. On a more serious side, the FBI was running a spying operation on the Trump campaign. The IRS did conspire to keep conservative groups from participating in the 2012 election.The Gulf of Tonkin incident was faked. Gamblers did fix the 1919 World Series. Whoever plotted the 9/11 terrorist attacks obviously pulled off one of the great conspiracies in modern history.

Logic suggests that there is a correlation between the public’s willingness to indulge in conspiracy theories and the degree of trust in the society. People in a high trust society that thinks their government is generally honest should be less inclined toward conspiracy theories than people in a low trust, high corruption society. On the other hand, there is some evidence that the more confident you are in your understanding of politics, the more likely you are to believe in conspiracy theories. Dunning-Kruger strikes again.

The funny thing about America, versus other countries, is our conspiracy theories always sound like a Hollywood script, thus they tend to the ridiculous. Americans are strangely naive about the reality of government power, for example, but willing to indulge is crackpot beliefs about corporations plotting to spike the water supply. Yet, the story of civilization is the story of people conspiring together to seize power, overthrow the king and advance their political agenda through stealth. Government is nothing but a conspiracy.

Finally, even the smartest people can be let down by their own bias. Greg Cochran is pretty sure the Soviets weaponized small pox against the German Army in the war, but this has been covered up for decades. His evidence is not conclusive, but he makes a pretty good case. The events during the war suggest something very strange happened and his answer would explain the data. It also means there has been a multi-generational conspiracy, involving multiple countries, to conceal this truth from the public.

On the other hand, he thinks the official Holocaust narrative is a precise telling of history and that the skeptics are succumbing to insane conspiracy theories. This despite the fact there are a lot of problems with the official narrative. It’s pretty reasonable to think that maybe there has been some exaggerations. If it is is possible to conceal the use of germ warfare, exaggerating the details of German war crimes as a propaganda weapon should be easy to accept. Social pressure and belief are powerful motivators.

That’s the thing with conspiracy theories. There really is no definition of what separates the conspiracy from the skeptical analysis or even genuine speculation. Wondering why the 9/11 hijackers went undetected, despite multiple warnings to the FBI containing very specific information is often called a conspiracy theory. On the other hand, Progressives are still certain that Bush lied about chemical weapons so that Dick Cheney’s friends at Haliburton could make tens of billions rebuilding Iraq after the war.

People will believe anything and doubt everything.

Since I am about to slide into an extra long weekend and this is the unofficial end of summer, I thought a little housekeeping was in order. I get questions and suggestions on a regular basis via the various ways to reach me. Time is the one thing I do not have in abundance, so responding to queries is something I do when time permits. I’ll go through e-mail once a week or so, for example. I also accumulate questions and suggestions that I get frequently. Individually they may not be worth a post, but cumulatively they will.

Question: How come you don’t take donations?

Answer: I get some version of this regularly. It has become normal for bloggers, podcasters and social media characters to solicit donations, so it is weird when someone does not solicit donations. There’s also the fact that people in our thing understand there is no billionaire support for our people. A guy like Steve Sailer needs the generosity of readers to keep doing what he is doing. It’s fairly obvious that if /ourguys/ had the same access to media as the Left, a lot of our guys would be wealthy media stars.

In my case, it is mostly sloth. All of this is the result of accident, so I never thought about making a business of it or doing it full-time. I have been approached by some people about doing exactly that, but it has not gone beyond the discussion stage. I am starting to think about making this my job, so figuring out how to make money at it is something I’ll need to do. There are examples to follow. Some people sell stuff, like mugs and t-shirts. Others do the crowdfunding route. Sailer, of course, does the quarterly fundraisers.

I’m not sure what would be best for me. I’m not even sure if it is possible to make a living as a gadfly. It is one of those things that I simply have not thought about much, so I don’t know much about it. People manage to do it, but that does not mean I can do it, so there’s that aspect. I’ve been a micro-business man for long enough to know how hard it is to keep the lights on in any business. That means it is hard being a professional internet solo act and there are a lot of tricks to the trade. I need to learn some of those first.

Question: Why do you live in Baltimore?

Answer: Serendipity, for the most part. A dozen years ago it was convenient for work, because I could get to Philly and DC via highway and I was close to one of the better airports. I never expected to be here more than a few years, but one thing led to another and moving was just not in the cards. That and moving is a huge hassle. When you’re young, it is not that big of a deal, because you don’t have much stuff and moving is just a thing young people do. That and helping friends move. When you’re old, moving sucks.

That said, I’m growing increasingly disillusioned by diversity. It turns out that vibrancy is not as vibrant as the Cloud People in the all-white areas say. The other day, I saw a local had been evicted. One of the males was guarding the furniture on the sidewalk. That night, a brawl broke out as other natives tried to haul off the furniture. I decided that I’ve had enough vibrancy, so my time here will be coming to an end. I’m too busy this fall to make moving plans, but spring is a good time, so I’ll start looking for a new house soon.

Question: What will you be doing in Copenhagen?

Answer: I made mention of my trip to the land of the midnight sun in the last podcast and to my surprise, I got a bunch of e-mails from Scandinavian listeners and readers. I’m always surprised by having an international audience. I guess that makes me a cosmopolitan globalist. Most of my audience is in the US, with the UK number two. Interestingly, I get more readers from northern Europe than from Canada. It turns out that Justin from Canada is the typical Canadian male. All Canadian men are like Justin from Canada.

Anyway, it turns out I have an audience in the Nordic lands. I will be in Denmark for a secret handshake society meeting. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say about it at this time, but I will report on it after the fact. That will take up most of my time, but I will, I hope, have a chance to get out and enjoy the city a bit. I’ll visit their ghetto and maybe head over to Malmö to see their version of a no-go zone. I don’t want to sound boastful, but I’m guessing it cannot hold a candle to what Lagos on the Chesapeake offers.

Question: What is your opinion of Jordan Peterson?

Answer: I get this one a lot. I did a post about him six months ago, but I don’t find Peterson all that interesting. Frankly, his Kermit the Frog voice is unbearable. Otherwise, he strikes me as just another edgytarian. Strip away all the hand waving and prestidigitation and he is just another guy who accepts the Progressive moral framework. He’s a good example of a certain type we see, in that when he gets to the water’s edge, his instinct is to find a reason to retreat, rather than keep going. You see that in this clip a reader sent me.

Question: What is your view on White Nationalism?

Answer: This is another popular question. The other day, a reader sent me this video, which argues against white nationalism. Firstly, I don’t care for the term, as it conjures an image of toothless hillbillies bitching about the darkies. I’m just not a fan of rehabilitating words and terms that the Left has successfully demonized. As I’m fond of pointing out, even if you manage to rehabilitate Hitler and the Nazis, all you end up with is an airport named after him. You will still be living as a minority in your own country.

On the other hand, I had the opportunity to read a draft of Greg Johnson’s new book, which will release next month. It is titled, The White Nationalist Manifesto. I will post a full review of it once it is released, probably around the time of my trip to Denmark. Greg does an excellent job explaining what he means by white nationalism. It’s one of those things where my own bias toward the term may be misplaced and it is a useful shorthand to cover a lot of what gets discussed on our side of the great divide.

Now, as far as the concept of a white ethno-state that Richard Spencer promotes, well, I’m skeptical. There is a reason Europeans fought thousands of wars. Historically, race is not a great unifier. It is useful as a short hand when starting to sort human populations geographically. It’s not the primary identity people have, even in America which has a small former slave population that is entirely of African origin. Caribbean and African immigrants refuse to see themselves as in the same tribe as the former slave population.

Ethnicity is a much stronger bond, especially when it is combined with geography. It’s why, despite the efforts of successive conquerors, Europe is a land of many people with many identities. Even America, a land of white mutts, breaks down regionally. Southern whites see themselves as distinct from the Northern whites. That said, the rest of the world sees American whites as a unique ethnicity. It’s also becoming clear to whites all over America that we are a new identity group within America.

In summary, I think what will happen in Europe is the evolution of a national populism that is rooted in local ethnicity. Poles will work with Italians to oppose globalist and Eurocrats, but will see themselves as primarily Poles and Italians. Localism will make a comeback in a big way in Europe. In the US, the Cold Civil War will eventually give way to an acceptance of demographic reality. America will become a majority-minority country and stop being America, at least the version sold to us at patriotic events.

Question: How is the site doing?

Answer: Because I have not done a site update in months, I’ve gotten some form of this question recently, which is the genesis of this post. Traffic took a slight dip in the spring, more like a flattening of growth, but then it has taken off over the summer. July was up over 10% year-to-year and August is looking about the same. Comments have also gone up considerably. As I mentioned at the start, I’m seeing more European traffic now, so I suspect that someone has discovered me and has promoted the site to his readers.

The podcast has seen a steady increase in listenership. That’s much harder to track, because I can only see the Spreaker and YouTube numbers. I have no idea how many people listen on other formats like Spotify and Google. Using what the alleged experts say about popular podcasts as a guide, I’m doing better than most. Lacking a media megaphone means growth is organic. That and my unwillingness to promote the thing means a slow growth curve. Still, the numbers are way ahead of what I expected.

All that said, it seems that all dissident sites are experiencing a rise in traffic. Audacious Epigone has seen his numbers rise and his comment volume spike. Steve Sailer has had record traffic over the summer. Look around at Conservative Inc. sites and you see tumbleweeds in their comment sections. A rising tide lifts all boats and, to borrow a phrase from our enemies, history is on our side. That means the spike in activity here is most likely just the result of being on the side of Team Future, rather than Team Yesterday.

Have a great weekend. I shall return on Tuesday.

The world is probably overdue for a catastrophe. The last war in Europe was 73 years ago. There have been some minor skirmishes like Ukraine and the Balkans, but nothing to alter the political arrangements. It’s been an extraordinary run of peace. Despite the howling by the neocons, there’s little chance of a war breaking out. The rest of the world is unlikely to see a major war anytime soon. Asia is too busy selling stuff to wage war and the Middle East seems to have exhausted itself, at least for a little while.

As far as catastrophes, the best chance for something significant is a plague. The last good disease outbreak was the Spanish Flu, which gets overlooked because of the Great War. That killed three to five percent of the world population. Some would say HIV counts as a pandemic, but that’s a different thing than something like the Spanish Flu. Everyone knows how to not get HIV. There’s no defense against something like an airborne virus or something carried by insects. The normal activities of life spread the disease.

Researchers at John Hopkins University simulated the spread of a new deadly disease, a variant of the flu, using real politicians to “war game” the thing. A doomsday cult releases a genetically engineered virus and the politicians were asked to make decisions based on the rules of the simulation. The result was 150 million dead in less than two years and close a billion dead by the end of the simulation. They modeled the new disease on SARS, just made it more deadly, so the infection pattern was something familiar.

One of the researchers said, “I think we learned that even very knowledgeable, experienced, devoted senior public officials who have lived through many crises still have trouble dealing with something like this.” That’s a very nice way of saying that the people in charge are not very good at this sort of thing. When you dig into the story, the impression is that the result of this simulation was the worst case scenario. Maybe they had their thumb on the scale, hoping to use the result to get research money.

What I did not see in the descriptions of the simulation is the downstream results of a serious plague. For example, the infrastructure of modern life requires a lot of maintenance. Around here, crews are out everyday repairing power lines and communication equipment. If a plague starts, what percentage of that work force has to get sick, scared or die before maintenance falls behind? Just imagine what happens if your power goes out for an extended period. Then imagine it happening during a plague.

Then you have the interconnection of world populations. A serious plague is going to hit a place like India much harder than a country like Canada. The West has come to depend on India for all sorts of services. Imagine a world without Hindu telemarketers and the world’s call centers shut down. In all seriousness, the disruptions to the supply chain would be massive, because so much is outsourced to poor non-white countries with low standards for public health. All of a sudden, outsourcing becomes a liability.

Given the disease rates would inevitably be higher in non-white areas, white intolerance of non-whites would spike. We see signs of this already, as Amerindians bring forgotten diseases like TB and scarlet fever into the US. This would make it impossible for the politicians to continue the white replacement project, at least not without declaring martial law. That assumes the military could or would go along with martial law. A plague would probably hit the military hardest, because everyone is packed onto bases.

That’s another aspect of a plague. Trust in institutions is at an all-time low in the United States. We have a strong economy and the nation is at peace. If all of a sudden food gets scarce and civil unrest is a problem, trust in the state could very well collapse. Decades of stoking hatred among the populace by the current ruling class could easily boil over into chaos. Imagine a dozen Katrina scale breakdowns around the country. The people in charge could not respond sensibly to one city-wide catastrophe. Imagine a dozen of them.

There’s something else. The common argument you hear is that there is a shortage of qualified people in critical areas of the economy. This is the argument for importing slaves from Asia. If an airborne virus starts killing people, those who work in offices will be hit hardest. What if we start to really run out of people able to do important jobs. What if 20% of the medical staff drops dead in the first wave of the infection? The point is, it’s not hard to imagine that a serious plague could cripple some important aspect of the system.

In a lot of ways, the modern society is a house of cards. Everything is dependent on everything else. In the normal course of life, this works as defense in depth, with layers of dependency and redundancy. It’s easy to see how this could be turned into a weakness, due to severe shortages of manpower or one part of the system getting hit particularly hard. The modern economy assumes everything breaks, but only breaks a little and not all at one time. Again, just imagine what happens if the power grid fails for a month.

That’s why the Black Death was so significant. It fractured the feudal system in ways that could not be repaired. Some have argued that the plague made the Renaissance possible, by crippling the old feudal order. That certainly seems plausible. The feudal order was a pyramid scheme of sorts. It required a large peasant population. Once the peasants started dying off, the system became unstable, at least as an economic model. Of course, the plague killed a lot of high-born people too. That changed the ruling classes as well.

The Late Bronze Age collapse is another example of a systemic failure brought on by exogenous forces. The reasons range from diseases, climate change to invasion, but probably a combination of them. The palace system for distributing goods and maintaining order was not able to hold up to these exogenous pressures. Since the relationships between the kingdoms were built around the palace system, one kingdom falling set off a domino effect. The result was a dark age that lasted about 300 years.

That does not mean a modern plague would result in a dark age or the zombie apocalypse, but major resets change the trajectory of human development. All of a sudden, the prevailing orthodoxy is not so strong that no one challenges it. The neo-liberal order of today is fragile and requires enormous resources to maintain. In fact, the cost of maintaining it probably exceeds the benefits. A plague would cause a major reset to the world order and probably force a retreat of the prevailing order, at the minimum.

There are few things worse than being stuck in a conversation with a boring person. I’m not talking about quiet people. A person who keeps his own confidence is often thought of as mysterious or complex. Their silence makes people curious about what they may be hiding. No, a boring person is almost always someone who talks a lot, revealing that they are not very interesting. Boring people are such a menace, that there is a whole area of etiquette about politely getting away from the boring guy at a social event.

So, what makes a person boring?

More important, how can you avoid being seen as a boring person?

The first thing you notice about boring people is they never seem to have a point to their stories and anecdotes. When telling a story in a social setting, you should always have a point. No one cares about what you had for lunch, unless it was something bizarre or unusual. If you had a delicious turkey club for lunch, that’s not something anyone wants to know. Now, if the waiter stripped naked and ran screaming into the street after serving you that delicious turkey club, then you have a story with a point. That’s an amusing tale.

Your stories and anecdotes don’t have to be amusing. Not everyone is a comedian. What’s important is you have some reason for telling the story. This is a courtesy to the listener. By having a point, you are showing respect to the listener, whether it it by sharing information with them or making them laugh with an amusing story. When your stories are pointless recitations of mundane events, you are, whether you realize it or not, insulting the audience. At the minimum, you are wasting their time, which is just as bad.

You should also avoid unnecessary details. That story about the waiter stripping down and running into the street is a good example. If you spend five minutes describing the menu and the turkey sandwich, then thirty seconds on the naked man, you made an amusing tale into misery for your listeners. Sure, a little setup to the big reveal is a good way to create tension, but a little goes a long way. In a social setting, a good story is one that avoids extraneous details and never lasts more that three or four minutes.

The easiest way to avoid loading up your sixty second story with ten minutes of tedium is to never explain the obvious. This is the most common error boring people make when telling a story. For some reason, they think they need to explain what everyone on earth has known since childhood. In the case of our turkey club, the boring person will actually explain what he means by turkey club or maybe even talk about the history of the turkey club. When in doubt, skip it. If people need more detail, they will ask.

Another way to avoid being the boring guy everyone avoids is to never tell a story that requires a back story. Boring people often start a story that should last three minutes, then veer into a long back story that they think is necessary to appreciate the tale. For example, the they will veer into a story about how they met their lunch companion in the turkey club story. The result is a dull story about the lunch companion, plus a dull description of lunch and the details of a turkey club. This is misery for listeners.

The boring also have a funny habit of talking over people. They ignore the little things others do to signal to the the boring that they need to stop talking. The boring are strangely competitive in their dullness. If you notice people starting to speak as soon as you take a breath, that they start looking at their phones or start looking around the room for familiar faces, you are the boring guy. You are not going to improve this situation by talking louder or talking over any interruptions. Take the hint and wrap up your story.

A good way to stop yourself from being that guy is to always invite others to tell their story or comment on the topic of conversation. People will find your turkey club story more interesting if you showed interest in their lunch story. A little active listening goes a long way. It not only keeps you from droning on about the delicious turkey club you had the other day, it makes you seem more interesting to others. Boring people are selfish people, in that they are only interested in their point of view, in far too much detail.

Finally, if it is a story you tell often and the listener is someone you know well, assume you told them the story, because you almost certainly did. Start with “If I told this before, stop me” or maybe, “I probably told this story before…” This gives them the right to stop you from boring them with the 80th retelling. This is not just a courtesy to the listener. It actually makes you seem more interesting, because you are not focused on yourself, but on the listener. This is flattering to the listener and and they will think better of you for it.