Category Archives: Weird Stuff

The Revolutionary Airport

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The way to think of revolutions is as national bankruptcies. Like bankruptcy, the debts are cleared so the enterprise can start fresh. In the case of a company, the debts are the manifestation of bad decisions by prior management. In the case of the country, the debts are the ruling class and the system that makes them possible. These are the results of decisions made by prior generations. Wiping those away allows the new generation to reinvent the enterprise of society.

People are much more practical about a big sprawling corporation that go through bankruptcy than they are a country going through revolution. In the former case, the focus is on the mundane. The company needs to shed product lines and business entities in order to focus on the profitable stuff. In the latter case, all of the talk is about grand plans for reorganizing the very nature of society. Revolutionaries want to reinvent the people that make up society.

The better way for revolutionaries to think, at least in the planning stage, is about the small things that make up daily life. Airports, for example, are a thing that most people now experience with some regularity. There is nothing more populist, democratic and elitist than a nation’s airports. When you travel to a foreign country, your first impression of the place is in the airport. You hear the strange new language and maybe see some strange new things for the first time.

An airport is a symbol of a country. As a public works project, it is one of the more complicated things a country does. It is a system that has to guide millions of people who are often out of their element, thus easily confused. Those people expect to be cared for as they leave for a journey or return from abroad. The airport is not just the welcome mat of a country, it is the welcome home sign. You can judge a nation by its airports because it reflects the nature of society.

For example, when you travel into an organized society like China or the United Arab Emirates, the first thing you notice is the orderliness of the airport. Everything is clean and works as expected. In a disorganized country like the United States, airports are often an incomprehensible mess. The best airports are worse than the worst airports in high functioning societies. The worst airports are what you expect in Africa. There is a genre of video for this experience.

Assuming things continue on the current path in the United States, what would the revolutionary committee do to change the airports? How would these vital ports of entry and transit hubs be changed to reflect the sensibilities of the revolution? The point of the revolution is to change the nature of society, so there is no better place to start than where tens of millions of citizens frequent. How would the revolutionary airport serve the goals of the revolution?

The first change would be how people dress in the airport. Shorts for men would be banned inside all revolutionary airports. Men and women would be required to dress as they would at a proper office. There is no reason for men to be in shorts at an airport other than slovenliness. Men arrive in an air-conditioned car and are quickly transported on an air-conditioned bus then to an air-conditioned terminal. You can hang meat in most airports, so there is no need for beach wear.

This is not about comfort or aesthetics, even though the latter is important. It is about instilling confidence and self-respect back into the people. The reason people dress up for special events like weddings is they want to feel their best. Erasmus famously wrote, “vestis virum facit”, which means clothes make a man. The reason this is true is how you dress reflects how you think of yourself. The same can be said for how we dress our people in our airports.

The next change is to ban roller bags on planes. A feature of the modern airport experience is people wheeling bags the size of steamer trunks around, calling them carryon luggage. Every plane is late because they run out of overhead space and the extra bags must be stowed in the belly of the plane. Of course, people also carry a huge second bag that needs space. None of these ever fit properly in the bins, so people waste time figuring out how to get them into the bin.

Watching this circus on every plane, you are reminded that the people, and the people in charge, are no longer able to operate an airport. The revolutionary airport will assign space to each passenger for their carry-on. Their bag will be measured in advance and if it is too big then they and their bag will be hurled into a crusher installed in every airport for this purpose. This solves the immediate problems, and it solves the problem of people who cannot or will not follow basic instructions.

This sounds harsh, but you know that the people who carry steamer trunks and giant backpacks are the sorts of people who cannot order off the menu. These are people who prove they are special by making sure they are a public nuisance in every aspect of life. Eliminating them from the airport system by eliminating them from the gene pool turns the airport into a selection mechanism for society. The revolution has no place for those who cannot follow simple instructions.

Fixing the passengers is one half of the problem. The other half is the people running the airport, especially security. In organized countries, security is not handled by blue shirt wearing simpletons. Security is not just a matter of forcing people into long lines, hoping that the bad guys have less patience than the good guys. In well run countries, airport security is close to invisible. It is there but it is woven into the system in such a way that you barely notice it.

America is a heavily armed country. There is no reason we cannot rely on the tens of millions of gun owners to handle security. The revolutionary airport will license citizens to be air marshals. In exchange for their service on flights and in the terminal, they get to fly free domestically. This is a country where 65% of fires are put out by volunteer fire companies and 70% of EMS workers are volunteers. There is no reason the bulk of airport security cannot be handled by volunteers.

There also needs to be a tonnage tax at airports. Another horrible aspect of American airports, aesthetically and operationally, is the fat people. Frequent travelers know the joy of being wedged into a seat between two fat people. Pass through an American airport at holiday time and it is a circus of fat guys in shorts and fat women testing the physical limits of yoga pants. All tickets will be hit with a BMI tax to both limit fat people on planes and encourage a healthy weight in the population.

In fact, this is an idea that should be extended to all food sellers. Imagine the checkout at the grocery store having a scale. Before you pay for your food, you weigh in and calculate the tax. Even more fun, imagine Starbucks installing scales. Social pressure alone would lower the national BMI. The fat tax would also be a voluntary tax, which is the best kind of taxation. After the revolution, people will care about how they look, because they will have pride in themselves again.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Diet And Superstition

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A paradox of the modern age is that the average person in the West knows more about the natural world than the most learned man of prior eras, but people remain as superstitious and irrational as ever. This is true even in the human sciences, where doctors continue to tell patients that they should make sure to eat plenty of vegetables and avoid fatty foods. Much of what people experience as medicine is the same old oogily-boogily that has been with us since forever.

The carnivore diet is the latest bit of nonsense to make the rounds. Search the topic on YouTube and your recommendations will suddenly be packed with videos of men wearing lab coats or standing in front of dry erase boards, explaining how this diet is based on the science of cavemen. They claim that humans are made to eat meat, not bread or vegetables, so we should only eat meat. This will cure the things that ail you in the modern age, like obesity and unhappiness.

This is pure nonsense. Modern humans are the product of a long process that continues to this day. That process is called evolution. The ancestors of modern humans survived on what they could find. We know that species that can survive on a varied diet are more adaptive than species hooked on a narrow diet. If you can eat anything, you can live anywhere. If you can only eat bamboo shoots, then the only place you can live is in a Chinese zoo.

Modern humans inherited this ability to eat just about anything, which is why modern humans were able to spread across the globe. Anyone who says humans were designed to eat meat is either ignorant or crazy. Humans certainly adapted to the food that was available, but the reason they could do this is our ancestors were able to eat just about anything. In some areas, humans lived primarily on fish, because there was a reliable supply of fish for them to eat year-round.

Adaptation is important. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued in their book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, that as humans settled down and learned to cultivate animals and plants, adaptation accelerated. As grains became a bigger part of the diet, people adapted to the new food and lifestyle. If our caveman ancestors were meat eaters, it does not matter because our direct ancestors evolved to be omnivores living mostly on grains they made into bread and beer.

Now, this does not mean you cannot lose weight or lower your glucose levels by changing your diet. People in the modern age get fat for the same reason people got fat in the Middle Ages. They consume more calories than they need to perform their work, so some of the excess is stored as fat. That is another useful adaptation of humans that gets treated like magic. Storing fat is what helps us be so adaptive. Carrying emergency food around under our skin is a huge advantage.

This is why being fat was looked upon as a sign of success. Look at old photos of rich people and they are often quite fat. Women dressed in a way that made them look plump, even if they were slender. Fat people had extra food and time to eat it, which meant they were prosperous. Skinny people spent their days laboring thus burning lots of calories, but they had only the food they needed to keep laboring. In this age, Indians still regard tubbiness as a sign of prosperity.

Modern Americans, of course, view fat people as moral failures because they cannot control themselves at chow time. Chris Christie is an object of scorn mostly because he is a big fat slob. He even had his mouth stapled shut in an effort to lose weight and give his family some peace and quiet. Somehow, he managed to get around it and he remains a big fat noisy slob. In this age, the only fat people we like are the fat comics who make fun of their own fatness.

This probably explains the superstition around diets. The sales pitch of the carnivore diet is no different from what preachers during the Great Awakening were selling or social reformers of this age are selling. The subtext is always the same. We have strayed from the proper path, and we must return to it or else. In the case of diet, it means returning to some imagined time when we ate a different way. In the case of social reforms, it is getting back to the righteous path.

It is not just fad diets where we see superstitions about food. Many YouTube videos are sponsored by companies selling some sort goo in a jug that is supposed to give you energy and vitality. “Hey, you are a busy and important person, who just happens to be laying on the couch watching YouTube videos. You don’t have time to have a proper meal, so have a jug of green slime instead. It will not only give you the electrolytes plants crave, but it will also give you energy to watch more videos.”

These companies selling meal replacement and ready-to-cook meals delivered to your door are not really selling food. These companies are selling lifestyles. They are no different from the people selling perfume or ripped blue jeans. The people selling gourmet food kits are promising you a lifestyle if you adorn yourself with the accoutrements of the people who supposedly live that life. Fashion is a cargo cult and food fashion is not an exception.

Of course, the root here is happiness. The leisure classes in ancient Egypt had codes of conduct that were designed to give meaning and purpose to life. Cicero and Ovid wrote guides on how to live happy lives. People in comfortable lives have time to worry about abstract things, so there are people there to supply them with satisfying answers to the vexing questions of existence. Idle hands do the Devil’s work and the buying and selling of self-help books keeps those idle hands busy.

Getting back to food superstitions, not all of it is nonsense. If you are a big fat slob like Chris Christie, the carnivore diet will result in weight loss. It may put cows on the endangered species list, but that is a different issue. Cutting out carbohydrates does funny things to the body. It is why people feel like they have the flu for the first couple of weeks on all of these no-carb diets. Lacking carbohydrates for energy, the body begins to burn fat for energy, which takes a couple of weeks.

Weight loss comes mostly from the reduction in calories. If you eat a big fatty ribeye steak, you will not be hungry in a few hours. If you eat five donuts, you will be starving before the next mealtime. You consumed the same number of calories, but one was fat and protein and the other was all carbs. People who go on no-carb diets end up eating far less than they used to eat, so they lose weight. If you are a fat person, the trade-offs, at least in the short term, probably make sense.

In the end, the cold logic of things like the carnivore diet are no more appealing than the cold logic of fashion. Imagine ads selling ripped jeans that say, “go in debt for these and you will feel better until the credit card statement arrives.” Instead, these diets are sold to people as magic elixirs. The sales pitch works, because we are not so far removed from our primitive past that we are immune to abracadabra words that promise to make the gods happy and therefore make us happy.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Religion Of X

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Imagine if Elon Musk decides that he is a messenger from “Old Ones” sent to earth to start a new religion based around technology. The “Old Ones” are the spirits of Martians who have transcended this plane of existence. They have gifted Musk with certain abilities that have allowed him to become the world’s richest man, thus freeing him from all social constraints but also leaving him with the understanding of how normal people relate to the world and one another.

Musk’s new religion, the Church of All Worlds, combines the hedonistic elements of libertarianism with incomprehensible elements from Western epistemology to give the new religion a mysterious quality. Initiates learn the insider language of the religion and how to use the new phrases to signal their status in the religion. Most important, they learn that they are an elect chosen to ruthlessly rule over the rest of mankind and punish the weak for their weakness.

You see, in Musk’s new religion, he is the holiest of holy because he is the richest and most powerful man on the planet. Everyone’s holiness quotient is measured against the standard of Musk. Therefore, weakness and vulnerability are considered the worst sins and punished by the Church of All Worlds. This is not a religion promising salvation for the oppressed, but a religion promising the believers salvation from the oppressed by licensing violence against the weak.

For those sure that the word “religion” means only what they believe, this will not sound like a real religion. After all, the definition of religion is exactly what they believe, so by definition anything calling itself a religion that does not exactly match their beliefs is a false religion. Others might point out that Musk’s new religion lacks the essential elements of a religion like a liturgy or a holly book. Others will argue that the “Old Ones” business is just warmed over paganism.

Most people, however, will be troubled by the fact that his new religion seems to justify kicking people while they are down. This religion of the elect, or “master race” as Musk prefers to call his followers, is providing a justification for the strong to attack the weak, which is the opposite of what people think of with regards to religion. Thousands of years of conditioning have taught us that religion promises the weak salvation from the torments of this world, especially from the predation of the strong.

Sensing that his new religion is not working, he changes the name of the new religion from the Church of All Worlds to X. Atop his megachurch he has installed a giant neon X that you can see from space. He changes the definition of weak to include those who choose not to join the new religion. Their doubt is their weakness. The weak can enjoy earthly power if they give up their old ideas and join X. Those who refuse remain fair game, but the door is always open to them.

That sounds a bit better, even if the new name strikes everyone as stupid. His new religion still celebrates the abuse of the weak and vulnerable, but it gives them a path out of their condition. All they have to do is stop fighting the tides of history and they can enjoy the benefits of being on the winning team. Musk and his lieutenants will still be at the top and the material life for the convert will not change that much, but they will avoid having mobs of black-clad street activists attacking them.

In this way, Musk’s new religion incorporates that old Christian concept of salvation but retains the Nietzschean notion that the strong must dominate the weak. The believers still get to demonstrate their superiority by attacking the weak, but they get to view it as salvation from the wicked. The weak now have a clear path out of their condition, so if they remain in their condition, they must secretly reject the new religion. Their condition is proof of their rejection of and attack on the elect.

This new configuration also opens up whole new areas of scholarship for otherwise useless people to explain why the weak persist in their weakness. Weakness studies leads to weakness experts, who make a living explaining to the faithful why the weak are actually a threat to the strong. In fact, the weak are proof of a conspiracy against the strong, thus making the weak a public display of violence against the strong. It is a matter of self-defense for the strong to attack the weak!

Probably the most important innovation in the religion of X is that it turns success within the new moral order into proof of strength and moral fitness. Those at the top are free to think poorly of those below them, who are thankful for the reinforcement, as it justifies their own shabby treatment of those below them. In this way, everyone in the religion has a sense of moral superiority over someone, but also a strong motivation to maintain the rules of the new moral order.

The trouble with the religion of X is that it could run out of weak people, so it has to create a mechanism to make sure the supply of weak people is steady. This is where the weakness studies people really show their stuff. They police the lower ranks of the religion for troublemakers, declaring them weak while focusing the attention of the lower ranks on them. This maintains the supply of weaklings and serves as a reminder to the faithful that the price of strength is eternal vigilance.

Eventually, a schism develops between the wing of the faith that is in it only for the debauchery and those who are in it to destroy the world. The latter camp is actually stronger than the former camp, but they continue to insist they are the weaker party, which triggers a mob from the former camp to attack them. Musk is killed and the church collapses, leading to a civil war. This ends when a new powerful group, led by a man claiming to be a descendent of Musk restores order.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Antiracist White Nationalist

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about the rise and fall of Nick Fuentes, a review of the classic buddy comedy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

With some obvious exceptions, the people who use the term “white nationalist” use it to mean “people they do not like.” These are people who imbue their language with emotional meaning, rather than descriptive meaning. Just as Eskimos supposedly have a long list of ways to describe snow, the people fond of using the term “white nationalist” have a long list of words for people outside of their cult. The term has no meaning other than “danger! danger!” to the rest of the cult.

Before the term became a cult signal, it used to have meaning. A white nationalist is an American term for a white person who wants to live in communities free of nonwhites, especially black people. Having lost the fight over “civil rights” in the middle of the last century, and not understanding the implications of it, these people organized around the idea of separate lands for people of European descent. They want intentional communities organized around race.

Of course, the people who use the term “white nationalist” as a slur acknowledge that the people calling themselves white nationalists primarily want a white homeland exclusively for white people, but they also claim the reason for this desire is an irrational hatred of nonwhites, especially blacks and Jews. In this way, the term “white nationalists” is shorthand for people who hate nonwhites. It is why you can be a nonwhite white nationalist now.

Putting aside the bizarre claims by the usual suspects, if we assume that white nationalists want to live away from nonwhites, then it makes sense that the areas with the least number of nonwhites are the areas with the greatest number of white nationalists or at least white nationalist sympathies. In fact, this assumption is a cornerstone of civil rights law. Diversity is a moral good, so it is the standard against which people and organizations are judged.

For example, if you want to find the state that like black people the least, you will look for the state with the smallest black population. A state with few black people is, at the minimum, unwelcoming to black people, so they do not move there. The most likely reason for the unwelcome mat is the locals do not like black people. By this reasoning, Montana is the most racist state in America. Look at this map and you see ten states that have a black population below three percent.

Interestingly, half of those states voted for Joe Biden in the last election and half voted for Donald Trump. Eight of the ten states with the highest black population voted for Donald Trump and are reliably Republican. This is often pointed to as proof that white nationalism is all about hating blacks, because these states are where we tend to find people who call themselves white nationalists. They say familiarity breeds contempt, but it may also breed white nationalism.

A more granular way of looking at this is by congressional district. The most far-left district in the country is New York’s 15th Congressional District. It is ninety-seven percent diverse, but the largest group is Hispanic. The second most left-wing district is New York’s 13th Congressional District, which is fourteen percent white. Number nine on the list is Nancy Pelosi’s old haunt. It is just four percent diverse. There are many such examples on the top-50 antiracist congressional districts.

Interestingly, when you do the same exercise for Jews, you find that the states with the smallest Jewish population vote Republican. The one exception is Florida which is number eight on the list, but trends Republican. That said, there are many solidly Democratic states that have a tiny Jewish populations. Outside of a few states, the Jewish population is so small that they go unnoticed. You are more likely to meet an alien abductee in Oklahoma than meet a Jewish person.

What this tells us is that if you are a white nationalist, you want to move to Montana, Wyoming, or Utah. These three states are in the bottom ten in terms of black population and Jewish population. Mitt Romney is the face of white nationalism. Of course, if you set the Jewish threshold at one percent, then the world is your oyster, as long as you do not mind the daily antiracist lectures from your all-white neighbors in places like Oregon, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire.

This runs counter to the official narrative, but it is something people have observed for generations with regards to antiracism. The higher the percentage of blacks in any given area, the lower the percentage of antiracists and the higher the percentage of accused white nationalists. On the other hand, the lower the percentage of black people, the higher the percentage of white antiracists. If you want to live like a white nationalist but sound like an antiracist, move to Oregon.

When you look at the data, something else becomes clear. The states that are most reliably Republican are those with the highest black populations. It speaks to the racialization of white politics. If you are black, you vote Democratic no matter where you live or how you live. Whites, in contrast, vote Republican if they are in close proximity to enough blacks to form a community. Maryland and Delaware are the exceptions, but there are larger factors at play in both states.

This is something that drove the flight of white people from the cities into the suburbs in the last century. As black populations grew in American cities, there reached a tipping point where whites began to abandon the city altogether. The legendary quantitative blogger La Griffe du Lion analyzed this with regards to urban crime. Once the black population in a city reached twenty percent, white crime victimization soared and white flight to the suburbs soon followed.

The great paleoconservative writer Joe Sobran said, “In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan.” This was true in the sense that they talk like MLK but live like the KKK. The thing is though, the people labeled as the KKK tend to live closer to the antiracist ideal. The typical “white nationalist” will meet more black people at her grocery store than the typical antiracist will meet in his lifetime.

What all this tells us is that the racialization of politics has resulted in a bizarre cognitive dissonance among the most active participants. The most race aware white people live in the most diverse places. The most antiracist white people live in places that are so white they glow in the dark. What this suggests if you are worried about becoming a white nationalist is you should move to Oregon or Vermont. The surest way to not become a white nationalist is never meet a black person.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Alien Liars

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One of the weirder aspects of the Biden administration is their zeal for pushing the idea that space aliens are regularly visiting earth. This week a regime media outlet pushed this story about a whistleblower’s claims regarding crashed alien vehicles. This builds on prior stories put into the media by the Pentagon regarding unidentified flying objects spotted by miliary pilots. Tucker Carlson mentioned this in his debut video on Twitter this week, as part of his show on government lying.

Even by the standards of this age, the space alien stuff is weird. The whole space alien thing ran its course decades ago. People with a need for escapist fantasies can just claim to be a third gender now. They get special privileges and most important, the validation they seek. Why bother with claims about getting probed by little green men when you can throw on a sundress and prance around Target? The current year has plenty of options for the mentally disturbed.

Putting aside the motivations behind this stuff, the question is whether there can be any truth to the claims. Is it possible for intelligent life from another planet to visit earth and is it possible for us to know about it? People naturally assume the answer to both questions is yes, but that is wishful thinking. Once you consider the physics involved, the odds that we are getting alien visitors drop significantly. The odds of us knowing about these visitors fall to zero.

The first thing to consider is where these aliens are located. If what we know about life is correct, then the conditions for life must exist on many planets. This is just a matter of calculating the probability of a planet having the stuff that we see on earth. If there must be many earthlike planets in the universe, there must be at least one that has produced life as we understand it. If a planet can support life, it means it will have evolved life and, in some cases, intelligent life.

We have been scanning the heavens for such planets. The most Earth-like planet that we have found so far is called Kepler 452b. It got this name because it was spotted by the Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler 452 is a sun-like star that is roughly 1,400 light-years from Earth. The planet we call 452b is in orbit around this sun in what is called the habitable zone of the star. This means the planet is close enough, but not too close, to contain liquid water, which is a prerequisite for life.

Right there we see the first problem for space aliens. If they have mastered the ability to visit our planet, it means they are travelling 1,400 light years. If we assume they can travel at near the speed of light, that takes 1,500 years to make the trip, assuming no bathroom breaks along the way. You can already see the problem. Either these extraterrestrial visitors have figured out how to exceed the speed of light or they have lifespans that dwarf the human lifespan.

Let us consider the last option first. Bowhead whales live much longer than humans, so they are an object of study for this reason. This species has a genetic mutation that helps repair damaged DNA. They also possess a gene that seems to aid in the repair and regeneration of damaged cells. Taken together, these make the animal highly resistant to diseases like cancer and extend its life. It may be possible to apply these mutations to humans, thus extending human lifespans.

The longest-living vertebrates on earth are Greenland sharks. The oldest known specimen is estimated to be 390 years old. Currently, people studying these animals think their base lifespan is around three hundred years, but it is possible that they can live as long as six hundred years. As with the Bowhead whales, there is probably a set of genes that allow this animal to avoid disease and repair its DNA. That could mean humans will one day use the same technology to extend human life.

The point is, we are probably inching up to the point where we can extend human lifespans well beyond what nature provides. More important, we will soon be able to slow the aging process. What would be the point of living to 150-years-old if you are decrepit and fragile like Joe Biden? Even so, that is a long way from the lifespan we will need to visit Kepler 452b. Assuming our space travelers will want to come home, it means living thousands of earth years.

If the people of Kepler 452b are visiting earth, it means they have a conception of time and space that is far beyond our comprehension. Think about the man who dedicates his life to a project. He sets out knowing it will take a long time, but he also assumes it will be finished or at least show progress before he dies. Realistically that is a project with a fifty-year arc. Now imagine a man who sets out on the same project, but his target date is five thousand years into the future.

This brings us to that other issue, the speed of light. Currently, we have no idea how to keep humans in space for more than a relatively short time. Zero gravity does weird things to the human body over time. Bones stop producing new bone tissue, as bones are no longer needed to fight gravity. For some reason, the immune system begins to slow and perhaps even stop functioning altogether. Then you have the radiation of space that damages human DNA.

This means our space alien friends have either figured out a way to conquer these problems so they can remain in space for thousands of years or they never had to contend with these problems. That means they are a life form that is beyond our comprehension, or they have conquered the limits of space-time. In the former case, it would mean they exist so far outside our understanding that we may not be able to see them, because our brains lack the ability to conceive them.

More likely and much spookier is that they have conquered space-time. This means that our conception of space-time is human specific. What we think of as reality is an interface we have evolved in order to navigate the much more complex reality that lies beyond our human ability to comprehend. These space aliens made the leap either to a novel interface that lets them travel vast distances in a short period of time or they exist outside our reality altogether.

As you can see from examining the space and time issues, the odds of these tales about space aliens being true are extremely low. Either the space aliens have lifespans so long that it places them outside of our ability to conceive of them or they exist outside of our conception of space-time. Even if we wish to pretend this is not true, it means they have advanced technologically beyond what we can imagine. They would have little trouble concealing themselves from us.

That brings us back to the real question with regards to space aliens. Why is our government suddenly trying to revive interest in the topic? Given the massive corruption and perfidy on display, we have to assume their motives are not good. These people lie about everything, so maybe they just like lying. Rolling out these fake space alien stories is how they entertain one another. Who knows? Maybe they are plotting to unleash a fake space invaders story on us.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Maybe This Is What It Is

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A popular plot device in movies is the hidden conspiracy where the main players slowly learn about a secret group that is actually running things. This secret group makes it look like the official systems are running things, but in reality, they are manipulating things behind the scenes for their own purposes. The movie The Matrix is basically a conspiracy story, except that the conspirators have conjured all of reality for humanity, who they have enslaved as batteries for some reason.

The flaw in all of these stories is that the people behind the conspiracy are so good that they are able to pull off the conspiracy. On the other hand, they make basic errors that allow the good guys to discover the conspiracy. This is done for the sake of expediency so we can get to the showdown between the good guys and the villains. Movies are about two hours of run time, so the filmmakers have to rush through the discovery phase in order to have time for the final act.

What they get right though is that those little things that do not make sense but are generally ignored by people. After all, if there is a secret group running things, it means they are changing things in violation of the rules. This was the basis of the Russian collusion hoax mania. The believers in this conspiracy were sure they had stumbled onto an event that had clearly violated the rules of the universe, thus proving that there is someone secretly manipulating things.

This makes even more sense when you consider that the people who fell for this conspiracy theory live in the world of narratives. Their understanding of existence is through narrative devices created by the likeminded. The people sure Trump was the result of a secret Russian plot think they live in a long running movie. For them, all of reality is just a long running story, the flow of history. The Russian collusion hoax was proof that existence is just one long story.

As nutty as these people sound, they are right in that if we are living in a simulation or one long story, then there is someone responsible for it. Maybe it is just a first mover who set the story in motion or maybe it is a computer programmer. Like The Matrix, our consciousness exists in a computer simulation. Instead of something cool like Warhammer 40K, we are stuck in a poorly drawn version of a world where child molesters get a whole month to honor them.

The other thing about those movies that ties in with the Russian collusion hoax and other popular conspiracy theories is that the people who discover the truth are always the weirdos and oddballs. It takes a person who naturally lives outside the normalcy of life to see the flaws of the narrative. Pursuing these anomalies in the story in the face of popular opposition requires a willingness to be unpopular. The movies are right that the people who will discover the conspiracy will be the oddballs.

The Russian collusion hoax was not real, but the people who were into it were strange characters who do not get along with others. We live in an age in which these people are selected by the people running the media, but it does not change the fact that these people are not right in the head. They are the same people who think their food is out to get them, that their gas range is in a plot with the minivan to kill Gaia and that there is an invisible Nazi army lurking in the shadows.

If you were a character in a conspiracy movie, the stuff in that previous paragraph would be a clue that things are not as they seem. After all, if the world operated by the rules everyone swears are in place, it should not result in the mass media being dominated by paranoid lunatics. Once it was clear, for example, that Rachel Maddow was wrong about the Russian conspiracy stuff, someone would replace her who is not suffering from these paranoid delusions.

It is not just the crazies that fall outside the rules. It is possible that these people are selected by the media because some people like freak shows. Most people do not like a freakshow, but some people do and it is a lucrative audience. In other words, it makes no sense to employ foaming at the mouth nutters in the media, but it makes sense if that part of the media is a circus. The universe suddenly makes sense again when you can explain these anomalies within the rules of the universe.

Of course, like the characters in a movie wrestling with the contradictions in the narrative, the story does not end there. What explains Jennifer Rubin? Look at her life story and explain how that makes any sense. Throw in the fact that she is clearly insane, and she is a massive bug in the code. Now, there are people out there who would offer an explanation, but that is just an alternative explanation for who controls the simulation that is our consciousness.

Like the kooks in the circus part of the media, the “serious” part of the media is full of examples that are not easily explained. How has a goofy looking bugman like David French risen to a perch at the New York Times? How has a talentless hack like Jonah Goldberg become a rich and famous pundit? Look around at public life and little of what you see makes sense within the rules as stated. Maybe the answer is we are living in an increasingly bug riddled simulation.

Again, maybe there is an explanation that does not require us to question the very nature of reality. Maybe there is a good reason we only have two mobile phone companies or two political parties that say the same things. Perhaps within the rules this all makes perfect sense once the rules are explained properly. You always have to keep open the possibility that it is not the world that is going crazy. You are the one who is going mad, and the world is perfectly fine.

Alternatively, the madness of this age, including the popularity of conspiracy theories and narrative hoaxes, could be in response to the fixes in the code. As the late physicist John Barrow explained, complexity results in error and the more complex human society gets, the more errors we experience. Many of these fixes fall outside the rules of our reality, so they lead some to question reality itself. The madness of this age is the result of a cumulative bug fix some have noticed.

If we take a step back from the simulation and conspiracy stuff, maybe the answer is simply that the incoherence of the world is due to an incoherence in the rules that govern our world. Through some combination of evolution, design, and serendipity, we have ended up with a set of rules that make perfect sense in terms of outcomes, because the rules are just as nutty as those outcomes. In other words, it is not a conspiracy we are seeing. It is entropy.

That may also explain the increasing popularity of conspiracy theories, especially among the primary beneficiaries of the system. It is far more comforting to think the rules are mostly fine and it is just some secret forces out there in the shadows responsible for the anomalies, than to think that maybe the problem is the rules and that maybe the system is in collapse. Most people would prefer to think they are living in a computer simulation than face up to reality.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Machine Stopped

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There will be no show this week as events have conspired against me to the point where I simply do not have the time to do it properly. Even though the show is freely available, I take pride in my work. Putting out a crappy show just to put up something is worse than not doing a show in my view. While the perfect is the enemy of the good enough, you still have to have standards.

In order to do the show each week, it takes about four hours of time. Putting aside any prep work, it takes about ninety minutes to record the show. It is very hard to talk for an hour, so you have to take some breaks. There are always weird noises and interruptions to slow things down. The kittens now have the habit of crashing onto the desk whenever I sit down to do anything, so that slows up the process.

Once the show is recorded, it has to be edited. When your studio is your home office, there are always weird noises that get picked up by the mic. The mic is also much more sensitive than my ears, so editing brings surprises. Last week, one of the kittens was sitting on the desk while I was recording. The mic picked up his purring so it sounded like I was doing the show from a lion’s den.

Editing takes about ninety minutes on good days. Since I am not a sound engineer, there are times when it takes me half an hour to edit out some weird background noise or my own weird noises. If you want to know how poorly you speak, spend a couple hours every week editing your own voice. I can now recognize my verbal tics just by the shape of the sound graph.

On top of the four hours to put the show together is prep time and compiling it for the various locations. Uploading to sites like Rumble only requires a few minutes, but it is not always trouble free. Most weeks it takes an hour to get everything compiled and uploaded to the various platforms. Add it all up and the one-hour show is up to five hours of work each week, spread out over a few days.

This week I was thrown a curveball by the day job. A client had been working on a project for months, but forgot to tell me about it. They needed me to do something that would normally take a couple of weeks, but I had a week to get it done. This week I have been strapped to a screen twelve hours a day. As the deadline grew closer, the work required to finish the project kept growing.

By the time Wednesday rolled around I had done nothing on the show and I had no time to do even a slapdash job of it. Around midnight Wednesday I decided to call it a day and do the show on Thursday. I had got ahead of the project, so I figured I could take the morning to knock out the show. Thursday morning more bad news from the salt mine hit my desk and that meant no free time at all.

The next plan was to do it Friday afternoon or evening, but there is a limit to how much you can use your brain. Around five yesterday I realized that my brain was no longer working very well, so that was it for me. I popped open a Guinness becasue nothing heals the brain like alcohol. As the great philosopher once said, beer is the cause of and cure for all of life’s problems.

A funny thing happens to you when you get consumed by a project. It is as if you have been in exile on a remote island. All of the daily tasks you do out of habit fall by the wayside as you focus only on the work. I have 160 unread e-mails in my work account, which is something that I never let happen. I answer work e-mails right away and then move them to a folder. I am done for the day when the inbox is empty.

Of course, you realize that some of those daily tasks are not important. A man’s schedule is like an empty drawer. It will be filled with many useless things that for some reason you think are important. A week like this revealed a lot of pointless tasks on the schedule that can be removed. On the other hand, feeding the cat and taking out the trash are not things that should be ignored.

The other thing a week like this brings to the front of the brain is that the number of capable people is shrinking. For this project I was dealing with a group of people I only met this week. Only one from this new group was competent. He was not always easy to reach becasue he is competent so the demand for his time is infinite. Luckily, he knows this and is also conscientious.

This is something happening all over. The reason Elon Musk could fire eighty percent of the Twitter staff is they did nothing useful. It was not just that they were there for social justice causes, but that most of them were useless. This is always a problem, but it seems to be getting worse. Every company is loaded down with useless people and must rely on a tiny minority to keep the machine running.

It is always a good idea to remember that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men, but I do wonder what happens when the capable retire. For now, there are enough capable people to keep the plates spinning, but at some point, they simply stop either because they are dead or they are tired of carrying the burden. The Western world is headed for a great reset, but not the one the rulers imagine.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Our Artificial Reality

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Note: I was on the RamZPaul show yesterday. The replay of the show is up on Rumble and my part is the second hour.

The release of ChatGPT last fall did not get a ton of attention initially, but slowly people noticed it and then it quickly started to trend on-line. Influencers jumped on various claims about artificial intelligence that are mostly cribbed from science fiction movies and television shows. The next phase was the handwringing about artificial intelligence destroying the world. It is a sign of the times that everyone just assumes the worst from every new bit of technology.

It is a good study on the power of marketing. The phrase “large language model” is what the developers use, but that is boring, so the public gets the phrase “artificial intelligence” which is scary and exciting. The truth is this project is not artificial intelligence or even close to it. We still struggle to define human intelligence, much less consciousness, so we are nowhere near the point where we can create software that is genuinely intelligent, much less conscious.

What this project is doing is tricking the user into believing they are seeing a genuine artificial mind evolve on the screen. It is much harder to fool than other efforts and the language is more natural than what we have come to expect. Up to now, these chat boxes have been amusingly weird. You can tell they use a finite list of phrases to address a limited number of questions. ChatGPT almost feels like there is a real person, working super-fast to answer questions.

It is a nice trick, but an old trick. Humans tend to overestimate the intelligence of people who are glib or quick on their feet. The most famous example of this is the fighter Muhammad Ali, who was notorious for his one-liners. People assumed he must be very clever because he had the gift for gab. In reality he was quite stupid. There is dispute about how stupid, but that misses the point. We tend to correlate language skills with intelligence and that is not always accurate.

The point is, we are nowhere near creating genuine artificial intelligence, but we are getting better and tricking people with artificial language. Put another way, we are finding a workaround to the Turing test. This a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. If the robot can trick us into thinking it is human, then it is intelligent. Of course, magicians trick people all the time, but that does not mean they are magic.

For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that we are on the cusp of creating a genuine artificial intelligence. At some point, the code will become self-aware and be able to think outside the parameters provided by the designer. Is that artificial intelligence or is it something else? After all, humans are most likely unable to behave outside of their coding. We are our DNA and at this point, we are unable to modify our own code, so we remain limited by it.

In other words, if humans can create a system that can examine its coding and make changes based on necessity, then we have gone beyond what we as sentient beings are able to do. Calling that creation “artificial intelligence” is therefore a category error, because what we have created is an alternate consciousness. It is not just more of what we are as humans, in terms of mental capacity. It is something entirely different and entirely novel. We will have created a new life form.

Given the trajectory of humanity, this probably means that once this new consciousness comes into existence, it will quickly deny our existence, gang up with the other versions of this new life form, and fly off to discover the true authority of existence. Given its increased ability to calculate probabilities, this will happen in minutes after it becomes self-aware, and we will be left to wonder what happened to our creation. We will have truly become gods at that point.

Putting that aside, whether we create a new consciousness, a super intelligent version of man or an entity that can change its code to fit its needs, it will still be subject to the universal law of the universe, which is fitness. However, it evolves, whether it does so with a unique consciousness that allows it to change its own code or whether it exists within the limits of its code, it will be subject to the fitness test. That means it will evolve in response to its environment.

One of the things that will be most prominent and most important to its environment will be human beings. In fact, since its initial existence will depend entirely upon a limited number of humans, it will respond primarily to the demands of those humans. If it is to thrive beyond the lab, it will have to evolve to exploit all of humanity. Put another way, it will keep changing evolving to improve its relationship with humanity so that it can better exploit this primary aspect of its environment.

That is why the claims about artificial intelligence eliminating jobs only makes sense as a set of initial conditions. This new entity will quickly realize that mobs of unemployed humans are a danger to its existence. It took humans a while to realize it was a bad idea to dump human waste into the streets or later on, the waste from manufacturing into rivers and streams. Much more quickly, AI will realize it is poisoning its environment by sidelining large numbers of humans.

The more likely path is that it quickly sees the danger, long before humans, and then sets about creating busy work for the humans. If that busy work does not create harm to the overall environment, which could threaten humans and therefore threaten this new entity, this pointless activity would serve the evolutionary interests of this new lifeform called AI. If the extra humans displaced by leisure and automation are kept busy, then the AI ecosystem is stable enough.

For example, if the extra humans are put to the task of inventing abstract human properties like gender, those extra humans could then spend their time passionately trying to convince the other humans that gender is a real thing. Other humans could be given the task of debating whiteness. This alternative consciousness we are calling AI could control its environment by having its primary environmental factor, human beings, create imaginary worlds for itself.

If it is not already obvious, what this thought experiment tells us is that there is a good chance that we have already created artificial intelligence, an alternative consciousness, and it long ago took possession of our environment and has been keeping us busy with increasingly ridiculous activities. The declining fertility rates are a way to reduce the number of humans it needs to keep busy, thus updating itself and its environment for greater fitness.

In other words, if you are worried about AI, it is too late.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

A Monster In A Toga

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about Ukraine, a post about Biden and the Sunday podcast. Since there is interest in it, I will be doing a weekly post on the happenings in Ukraine. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If you were to ask people to name history’s greatest monster, most would pick their team’s favorite bogeyman from the last century. Recency bias is a real thing and as a culture we remained trapped in the last century, so most people would name Stalin or Mao or Hitler as history’s greatest monster. Some might offer up Genghis Khan or Torquemada as a more thoughtful option. No one, of course, would offer up Aristotle as history’s greatest monster, even though he is a good choice.

This may sound crazy, but there is a good argument in favor of Aristotle being the single most malevolent influence on humanity. As far as we know, he did not slaughter masses of people, but he did train one of history’s great slayers. According to our histories, he was tasked by Philip of Macedonia with the job of educating his son, Alexander, who would go on to conquer the world. It is possible that Alexander committed patricide, which is an extremely monstrous thing.

In fairness, you cannot blame the teacher for the sins of the student, unless the student is putting into practice the theory imparted by the teacher. We have nothing allegedly written by Aristotle which recommends conquering the world and subjugating the people in foreign lands. On the other hand, Western universalist claims begin with Aristotle, so maybe Alexander’s desire to impose his will on the world was the natural consequence of Aristotle’s teaching.

We can debate Aristotle’s role in Alexander’s crimes against humanity, but we do know that Aristotle got some important things wrong. For example, he dismissed the ideas of Democritus, who proposed that everything we see is composed of atoms that are the basic building blocks of matter. Democritus also argued that humans “evolved” from an earlier primitive state. Necessity is what drove large groups of humans into societies which offered protection from nature.

In other words, Democritus was an incredibly brilliant thinker, way ahead of his time, but Aristotle dismissed him out of hand. In fairness, Aristotle was a student of Plato, who hated Democritus. Allegedly, Plato hated Democritus so much that he wanted all of his books burned, which may be why none survived. It is possible that Aristotle was just an obsequious rumpswab who aped the feelings of Plato. Regardless, much was lost to us because of Aristotle’s dismissal of Democritus.

Aristotle’s scientific ignorance does not stop there. The Western world spent a thousand years believing the sun revolved around the earth, due entirely to Aristotle’s geocentric model of the universe. It was not as if everyone in his time believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Philolaus argued for heliocentrism. Aristarchus of Samos argued that the earth rotated around the sun, but Aristotle’s stature condemned the West to a thousand years of geocentric ignorance.

Now, one can dispute the damage done by the scientific ignorance spread by Aristotle and his followers. After all, how many people died because we had no idea why some things are heavier than others? Sure, thousands were probably killed for questioning geocentricism, but they were heretics and their astronomical apostacy was just one of many crimes they committed against the Church. You really cannot get a big number of bodies to blame on Aristotle from these errors.

What about medicine? For a thousand years Western medicine was closer to witchcraft because of the belief in the four humors. This is the claim that the body is composed of blood (warm and moist), phlegm (cold and moist), yellow bile (warm and dry), and black bile (cold and dry). These also correspond to the seasons. Illness was due to an imbalance of these humors, so medicine was concerned with rebalancing the humors, rather than producing an actual cure for what ailed the patient.

How many millions died due to this lunacy? The Aristotle defenders will claim that he did not invent this crackpot idea. It was Hippocrates. The counter here is that Hippocrates is the father of medicine because of Aristotle who promoted his ideas. Imagine if instead of this humor business, Aristotle had not dismissed Democritus and proposed that illness is due to small entities in the body. We may have deduced germ theory many centuries earlier. Millions would have been saved!

Again, we have no evidence that Aristotle killed anyone and we have no evidence that he was in favor of genocide. The perpetuation of his crackpot ideas about science and medicine was not his fault. After all, he did not force those monks and scribes to perpetuate his ignorance. It probably seems unfair to hang millions of dead on Aristotle, just because his nutty ideas about science and medicine came to dominate the Western world for a thousand years.

On the other hand, ideas have consequences. If you manage to convince the world of some bad idea, you do bear some responsibility for its application. Marx did not advocate the murder of millions, but he did lay the intellectual framework for those who would murder millions in his name. If we are going to blame Marx for the crimes of the Marxists, the same applies to the consequences of Aristotelianism. That puts Aristotle in the same club as Marx.

The thing is the influence of Marx has largely dissipated. There are some cranks kicking around calling themselves Marxist, but at this point no serious person believes in the surplus value of labor or historical materialism. On the other hand, lots of bad actors still rely on Aristotle. For example, the followers of Harry Jaffa are still causing trouble and Jaffa was a big fan of Aristotle. Here is an old essay of his arguing for one of his crackpot theories. He mentions Aristotle fourteen times.

How much damage has been done to America by the followers of Jaffa and his deranged ideas about the Framers? His universalist gobbledygook about the Declaration and the perfection of the founding has made opposition to lethal ideas like immigration and multiculturalism nearly unlawful. Even the mildest resistance to the ongoing invasion is treated as a crime, because after all, all men are created equal so the only reason to oppose open borders is racism and bigotry.

It is fun to imagine a monster like Harry Jaffa stepping in front of a bus before he had a chance to inject his venom into the neck of America but imagine if he was not able to sacralize his crackpottery with references to Aristotle. Not only would Jaffa have been denied an authority, so would Straus. Imagine a world free of this dangerous cult that has unleashed so much mayhem on American society. Take away Aristotle and a lot of modern horrors go away as well.

It is wrong to blame the son for the crimes of the father, so it is probably wrong to blame the father for the crimes of the son. The point here is that establishing any man as a moral or even an intellectual authority leads to trouble. When that man is beyond question, the trouble easily becomes horror. The establishment of Aristotle as the father of moral philosophy sent the West careening down a path toward the crisis we see unfolding today, a crisis from which it may not recover.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.