Narcissistic Altruism

One of the great unanswered questions of our age is why Western rulers are obsessed with importing tens of millions of unassimilable foreigners into their lands. In the US, the conventional wisdom among immigration patriots is that one side of the political class wants cheap votes, while the other side wants cheap labor. In Europe, the theories range from female hysteria to poorly conceived economics. The one common thread is that across the West, the ruling elites appear to be trying to crash their cultures.

The trouble with these reductionist theories is they do not make much sense at the individual level, so they cannot very well scale up. For example, the cheap labor argument does not hold up very well when you examine it. Helot labor is great for the business owner, just as long as he is the only guy doing it. When every landscaper is using Aztec workers, there’s little benefit to the landscaping companies. That is not to say there is no benefit, but does it warrant the suicidal drive to import Mexico into the US?

In Europe, the cheap labor argument makes less sense. Depending upon who is counting, between 80% and 90% of migrants are on public assistance. Even if these migrants wanted to work, there is little demand for low-IQ unskilled workers. Even if there was some demand, the labor laws in Europe would make it impossible to hire them. One of the vexing problems the Euros have are restricted labor markets, which prevent the sort of labor mobility we have in the US. There’s just little demand for cheap foreign labor.

The cheap voter argument is a better one, but even so, the returns are spotty. In the US, Latin voters have been unreliable. They have low turnout numbers, relative to other groups. Unlike blacks, they are not easily agitated into rushing out to stage big protests or shoot white people. There is also the fact that they tend to cause the white vote to coalesce around white candidates regardless of party. That or it results in white flight, as we see in California. So far, open borders have been a disaster for white Democrats.

A similar result has been seen in Europe. The Brits are the example closest to the US for obvious reasons. Open borders have destroyed the party that advocated for it. On the continent, the anti-Euro movements are entirely driven by the immigration waves triggered by Merkel. Even docile countries run by cat ladies and cucks are starting to see the rise of nationalism and anti-immigrant parties. Exactly no where is immigration helping the political class. Yet, the ruling class is universally in favor of open borders.

The fact is, there are no good political or economic arguments in favor of mass immigration. In some places, the arguments have some plausibility, but even the best nuts and bolts arguments in favor of elevated immigration levels do not justify the high political and cultural costs. Yet, our political classes have an unshakable loyalty to foreign migrants. In every Western nation, the smart political play is to oppose high immigration levels. In many countries, banning all immigration is overwhelmingly popular.

There must be something else at work, beyond money and power. Even if we extend the bounds of the ruling class beyond the elected class and their attendants, there is no upside for the elites. Why is Mark Zuckerberg berserk for high immigration? He is even in favor of importing Muslims. The same is true for Hollywood people. They get nothing from open borders, other than fewer job opportunities. Ditto the mass media. About the only thing the self-actualizing classes get from open borders is domestic labor.

That may be the key to it. I’ve pointed out before that the self-actualizing class may prefer Spanish landscapers, as it avoids them having to see blacks raking leaves, while singing old fashioned negro work songs. It also avoids seeing downscale whites, who remind them of the tenuousness of their position. Asian and Caribbean domestics not only avoid those problems, but everyone can pretend they make better workers in those roles. The Korean nanny is like a tiger mom for hire. It makes the deception more palatable.

The underlying cause here may be narcissistic altruism. It is generally assumed that altruism is selfless, while narcissism is selfish. That may not be the correct framing, as lots of people do charity work because it makes them feel good. Similarly, lots of self-absorbed people commit public acts of piety because it makes them look good and elevates their status. The guy funding the museum and demanding his name be over the front door is not acting from pure selflessness. He wants glory too.

It has always been known that men often become more religious as they grow older, often returning to the religion of their youth in a serious way. The pattern is not as obvious with women as they are much more likely to stay in their church as young adults. Young mothers will often get involved with their church for family services and socializing with other mothers. Men, on the other hand, often have a religious awakening in their middle years and not only return to their religion but do so with vigor.

George Vaillant was a researcher at Harvard and did a 50 year study on men, tracking them from their teens to old age. One of the areas he studied was altruism and he found that as the men aged, their altruism increased significantly. This was not simply due to selflessness. Helping others becomes increasing rewarding as we age. Neuroimaging has revealed that helping others brings pleasure to the person providing the help. Altruism activates brain centers that are associated with selfish pleasures like sex.

Organized religion, obviously, provides a ready made structure into which this selfish desire to help others can flow. Not only does organized religion have structured charity, but it also comes with a spiritually rewarding purpose and generations of others who have followed the same path. The female desire to provide charity is funneled into activities that support the community the church serves. The late onset male altruism follows on providing money and intellectual capital to society-strengthening altruism.

Again, this is not pure selflessness. When you volunteer at your church, you feel good about it, because the pleasure centers of your brain are stimulated. It could simply be that as we age, the vanity of youth is no longer effective. To get the same pleasure from life, that desire for selfish pleasure (sex, wealth, status), is redirected into other areas like church participation and charitable giving. Doing good makes the person feel good for having voluntarily done a good work on behalf of their fellows.

The collapse of organized religion, particularly among the Cloud People, is leaving them with no structured outlet for this normal human impulse. The reason a Lyndsay Graham cares more about Dreamers, than his fellow South Carolinians is he feels like he is helping those who need help. It is why John McCain spent the last three decades chanting about “causes greater than yourself.” Without a structure into which his narcissistic altruism could flow, he searched around for causes and purposes, most of which were destructive.

Now We Know

One of the mysteries of the election campaign has been the ongoing Russian hacking conspiracy nonsense that was forced on us by the Democrats after the election. The absurdity of it should have been enough to get the story laughed off the stage. Even if the Russians had meddled in the election, which happens all the time. The Chinese invested heavily in the Clintons during the 1996 election. Israeli maintains massive lobbying efforts in the US, including campaign operations. It is the nature of empires.

Even if it was just a distraction to shift the focus from the problems of the Democrats, it is a one week story at best. Yet, it went on and on, forcing Trump to appoint a special prosecutor to chase ghosts and phantoms that could not possibly exist. My hunch was that maybe some FBI insiders were simply using the fake scandal as a pretext to circle the wagons and protect their own. Former director Comey seems to be exposed six ways to Sunday for the way he handled himself in the job.

Well, we may now have an answer. It may simply have been the old Progressive tactic of preemptively accusing others of something they are doing. The Hill is reporting that the FBI had stumbled onto a plot that looks a lot like bribery by the Russians to get the Clinton’s support in their efforts to grow their nuclear business inside the US. This goes back to when Cankles was working for Obama as Secretary of State and had the authority to approve foreign energy deals, like selling uranium to Russia.

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

The racketeering scheme was conducted “with the consent of higher level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, one agent declared in an affidavit years later.

Assuming the evidence presented is accurate, it looks a lot like the sort of frauds the Clinton crime family has been running since their days in Arkansas. Hillary has always had a thing for the old fashioned graft rackets. This is where the Clintons grant favors from the government in exchange for cash. In order to avoid bribery charges, they always use a cutout of some sort. In Arkansas, it was campaign contributors who laundered the cash for them. In the 90’s, Chinese money flowed into the campaign.

The Clinton Foundation has always looked like a money laundering operation. The whole point of money laundering is to make the transactions seem legitimate. The smarter drug dealers in Baltimore will have a cash business they move their drug proceeds through in an effort to hide the source of their income. Famous people have foundations so they can use it to hire friends, family and supporters, but get a tax break. Politicians put their family on the campaign payroll at inflated salaries so they can keep some of the cash.

That is what the Clinton Foundation was for initially. The millions Bubba was getting from speeches and back dated transactions would go tax free into the charity. The Clintons would take a salary, but the foundation would pick up a lot of their expenses, like travel and security. It would also be a nice patronage system for future campaign workers and contributors. The Foundation was always a front operation. It was never intended to do any charitable work, which is why it has done no charitable work.

The thing with Hillary Clinton is that all of her scandals are about money. Going back to Arkansas, everything she was mixed up in was a money scheme of some sort. Bill was always getting jammed up with sex. It is reasonable to think he got into politics for the easy access to women. Hillary, on the other hand, has always been about the cash. That is why the Russians were willing to bribe her. They knew she would play ball if the price was right. That is what this looks like. Old fashioned pay for play.

This brings as back to the Russia probe.

In evidentiary affidavits signed in 2014 and 2015, an Energy Department agent assigned to assist the FBI in the case testified that Mikerin supervised a “racketeering scheme” that involved extortion, bribery, money laundering and kickbacks that were both directed by and provided benefit to more senior officials back in Russia.

“As part of the scheme, Mikerin, with the consent of higher level officials at TENEX and Rosatom (both Russian state-owned entities) would offer no-bid contracts to US businesses in exchange for kickbacks in the form of money payments made to some offshore banks accounts,” Agent David Gadren testified.

“Mikerin apparently then shared the proceeds with other co-conspirators associated with TENEX in Russia and elsewhere,” the agent added.

The investigation was ultimately supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, an Obama appointee who now serves as President Trump’s deputy attorney general, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, now the deputy FBI director under Trump, Justice Department documents show.

Both men now play a key role in the current investigation into possible, but still unproven, collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. McCabe is under congressional and Justice Department inspector general investigation in connection with money his wife’s Virginia state Senate campaign accepted in 2015 from now-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe at a time when McAuliffe was reportedly under investigation by the FBI. The probe is not focused on McAuliffe’s conduct but rather on whether McCabe’s attendance violated the Hatch Act or other FBI conflict rules.

The connections to the current Russia case are many. The Mikerin probe began in 2009 when Robert Mueller, now the special counsel in charge of the Trump case, was still FBI director. And it ended in late 2015 under the direction of then-FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired earlier this year.

There are a number of possibilities here. One is incompetence. Her team may have started the “Russian hacking” chant without realizing that it would lead back to this deal. That is another trait of Hillary Clinton. She screws up everything she touches. Going back to her days on the Watergate committee as an entry level staffer, her career is one foul up after another. The only thing she has done well is stay married to Bill. That is how she stays out of jail and how she keeps getting shot to run another fraud.

The more likely answer, though, is the old Progressive habit of accusing others of the very thing they are doing. In this case, she was willing to do business with the Russians, so she just assumed the other side was too. Perhaps it is evidence of a guilty mind or maybe it is something else, but Progressives have a habit, an instinct, for accusing their enemies of crimes committed by Progressives. It muddies the waters and that may be the sole purpose. It is another way of shifting the focus.

The other possibility is what we see with corrupt police precincts. The dirty cops know that cops do not like ratting on one another. They also assume that everyone has something they would not like to see exposed to the public. The result is everyone keeps their mouth shut until something goes very wrong. Washington is a sea of corruption, much of it dealing with foreign money. The Democrats may be working on the assumption that no one in the political class wants this investigation to go anywhere.

Of course, if you want to go super 4-D chess, deep state conspiracy mongering, then maybe this was the target all along. Rosenstein knew all about this old case and maybe he wanted another bite at the apple. That is far fetched, but not outside the realm of the possible. Team Trump has a funny habit of being a few steps ahead of everyone on the controversial stuff. It would certainly be poetic if this is how Clinton ends up in an orange jumpsuit, waddling around a federal prison.

The Proposition

The other day, a long time reader and frequent commenter made the argument that America is a “propositional nation.” This is a popular assertion, one that has no basis in American history, but popular nonetheless. Its popularity on the Right is largely due to neocons peddling it as a part of their efforts to redefine and co-opt the Right. It has also been useful in justifying open borders and endless military adventures. These days, the biggest fans of this idea are the Civic Nationalists.

The argument is that America is an exception among nations because it is organized around a set of ideas and principles, rather than blood and soil. The foundation of the proposition comes from the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To be an American means accepting those claims.

Over the years, lots of smart people have pointed out the errors in the propositional nation argument. The fact that the Declaration has no legal standing and that it is full of obvious contradictions should be enough to kill the idea. The Founders had plenty of time to figure out how to bake the argument into the founding documents but were never inclined to do so. The “proposition” is nowhere in the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The proposition is nowhere in their deliberations or commentary on them.

There is, of course, the fact that America was a Christian nation at the time of the Founding. The men who wrote and signed off on “all men are created equal” rather obviously did not believe it in the modern, secular sense. They were Christians so they believed that only two people were ever created, everyone else was born. They certainly did not think people were born equal. To believe that all people are equal in the corporal sense or the political sense is to believe that reality is a social construct.

The Founders were not academics in a gender studies department. They were practical men of their age. They crafted practical legal documents, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to establish the political order of the new country. The men who wrote the Constitution did not craft a metaphysical framework, so the people would behave in a virtuous manner. They assumed a certain type of people with a common morality and common culture. They accepted reality and built a political order to reflect it.

Even so, nations create their own myths and legends in order to bind themselves together emotionally, as well as practically. Rather than dismiss the “propositional nation” idea, let us take it at face value and say we accept that whatever the origins, America of today is a nation of ideas. The glue that binds one American to another is a common belief in that mythological founding creed. Regardless of race, religion or national original, you can be an America as long as you accept and believe in the civic religion that defines America.

The implication is that no one is born an American. You cannot be born in agreement with a proposition. At some point, you reach an age and level of understanding that allows you to accept the deal on offer. This assumes that the deal is offered, and that is the underlying assumption of the propositional nation. It is available to anyone. You get to be an American as long as you accept the organizational ideas that make up the civic religion of America. That is not the law or present reality, but that is the theory.

The other side of this coin is that you can stop being an America as soon as you no longer accept the national creed. For example, if you do not accept that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” then you are not an American. If the propositional nation is going to be anything more than lip service, the proposition better have some teeth. That means someone like former President Obama, who is an atheist and rejects the idea of natural rights, is not an American and he never was.

The bigger implication of the propositional nation is that it argues against having a country at all, at least in the physical sense. Rejecting the blood and soil definition of a nation does not stop at the blood. If America is just a collection of people, who agree on the same set of principles about the nature of man and his political relationship to other men, what is the reason to maintain a physical space? The clear implication of the propositional nation is that the physical aspects of the nation are, so to speak, immaterial.

Finally, the nation of ideas cannot be a nation of permanent ideas, unless the Founders were gods, who handed these ideas down to us. Agreements among men, even deeply principled agreements, are open to revisions over time. That is central to the propositional nation argument. It is how the promoters get around things like slavery, limited suffrage and indentured servitude. If the propositional nation evolved, it means it will keep evolving into the future. That is the Progressive argument in favor of a living Constitution.

To return to where we started with this post, the commenter stated that you cannot have a nation without a common set of organizing principles. This is obviously false but let us assume nation in this context is limited to those with a consensual government. If those principles are arrived at by consensus, it means they were arrived at by men. The nature of that consensus and therefore the resulting principles must spring from the nature of the men who forged them. In other words, we are back to a nation of men, not ideas.

LA Confidential

A popular topic of conversation on the Dissident Right is the imagined future the Cloud People have planned for us. The word “Brazilification” gets thrown around a lot. Going by mass media, the future will be populated by hairless, caramel colored mulattoes and Asians. That’s unlikely, but the majority-minority future is inevitable. That means America will be a very different place in another generation. Just look how fast Los Angeles went from being surf city to a sprawling version of Tijuana.

Digging around in Baltimore City arrest data last week, I got curious about what other cities had exposed their arrests data to public download. There’s not a lot of consistency, as this appears to be a new project. My guess is some company has figured out how to game the Federal grant system and they are helping cities upgrade their IT systems with Federal dollars. Anyway, I found a data set from the Los Angeles police department that is pretty big. It is their arrest data going back to 2010.

Los Angeles is a city of 3,884,307 people. Since the start of 2010, the LAPD has made 1,146,393 arrests, which is roughly 450 arrests per day. That’s an interesting figure, given that LA has a relatively low homicide rate of 6.7. Baltimore has a murder rate nine times higher, but an arrest rate just 10% higher than Los Angeles, when adjusting for differences in population. Maybe it is just the nice weather that makes people less inclined to homicide one another. Or, it could be the population mix. Here are the demographics of LA.

Los Angeles not only has a relatively small black population, it has a much larger Asian population than you see in most cities. In fact, Los Angeles is an interesting mix, because it is one of the few majority-minority cities. It’s also a large city so the sample size is very big. A boutique college town with lots of diversity is not going to tell us much about our multicultural future, despite what the Cloud People may think. Here’s the break down of arrest per population group.

The law abiding Asians make up for a lot of black crime when you look at the data. The cool thing about the Los Angeles arrest data is they go further than most cities in identifying the ethnicity of the offender. That’s probably something we will see everywhere as America gets less white. The old way of counting white and non-white only made sense when America was mostly white. In the Cloud People paradise, every group gets a classification in the system. Here’s a break down of Asians into their known groups.

Of course, the fun begins when we start to look at homicide numbers. Here’s the break out of murder related offenses by race

What’s interesting is that Hispanics are not over represented in overall arrest data, compared to their share of the population, but they are over performing in the violent crime area. That’s probably due to the drug trade, but that is a guess. The arrest breakout also helps when trying to parse Hispanic whites from non-Hispanic whites in national crime figures. Of course, the old familiar pattern of black violent crime is present in the LA numbers. Blacks are 10% of the population and 36% of murder related arrests.

Here’s the break out by age.

Here’s the arrest by day. It seems that warmer areas have a flatter curve on this for some reason. Maybe cold weather alters police behavior in some way or maybe criminals prefer mild weather. At some point, once I have a enough data from different regions, I’ll do a degree day calculation on arrests to see if there is a correlation. That would maybe say something about police habits.. Doing the same day for day of the crime would maybe say something about the behavior of criminals. Or maybe not.

One interesting thing in the LA data is the number of old people in the arrest data. There are 48 arrest records for nonagenarians. Two were homicides, which is incredible. Even more amazing is 15 arrests were for drunkenness. Maybe this is not so odd, as alcohol related offenses are the third most common arrest code in the system. Drugs are number two with Miscellaneous being the top reason to arrest someone. This is a pattern I saw in the Baltimore data. The arrests codes are not well maintained or enforced.

Here is a break down of arrest codes.

What becomes clear when looking at the Los Angeles crime data is that de facto segregation is a fact of life in a majority minority city. When you break it out by race and area, you don’t have to know a thing about LA to see the pattern. The other thing is Hispanics bring elevated levels of crime, but not the rates you see with black. It’s one reason the Cloud People like Hispanic migration. They get all the benefit of a servant population, without the headaches that come with Africans.

The other interesting thing about Los Angeles is that it is majority-minority, but whites control the political system. Look at the city council. It’s mighty white for a place with just a 30% white population. The truth is, Hispanics are not a group with a real identity. That’s just a made up thing by Progs. Mexicans from the north have little in common with Guatemalans or even Mexicans from the south. This makes forming a unified coalition that can punch commensurate with its weight nearly impossible.

That’s another reason the Cloud People have no fear of migration. So far, it has not cut into their authority. If anything, it makes it easier for them to deal with blacks and troublesome whites. Progs are diluting black influence in their coalition with Hispanics and they are replacing the white working class with them. The Hispanic laboring class makes fewer demands and is far less organized. They may not be reliable voters, but they are cheap voters, relative to working class whites. That’s the way it works for now.

End of the Gatekeepers

The manufactured outrage over Harvey Weinstein has been entertaining, mostly because a lot of Hollywood blowhards have taken it in the shorts. Watching guys like Ben Affleck and Jimmy Kimmel suffer is enjoyable because they are horrible people fond of self-righteously lecturing the rest of us. The schadenfreude is all good fun, but it misses a bigger story. The reason Hollywood is imploding in scandals, over what has been the norm for generations, is that the smart money has left the business.

As Steve Sailer noted, degenerates like Harvey Weinstein have always been a fixture in the movie business. Smart Jewish men were drawn to the business, because success meant they got to be gatekeepers in a high demand business. That meant they could charge large tolls for the right to pass through the gates. Anyone who wanted to be in movies had to make it in Hollywood. Actresses and actors that wanted to be stars had to do what was required to make it past the gatekeeper. Everyone paid the toll.

Unsurprisingly, Hollywood has always been the land of horny men and slutty women, willing to trade sex for success. To some degree, that was always the attraction. In what other business could a golem like Weinstein have easy access to hot sleazy women, as a part of his daily work? For that matter, in what other business could hot sleazy women get rich and famous just for having the right look? Other than the smart guys who ran the place, Hollywood was for carny folk hoping they would find the golden ticket.

It all worked as long as Hollywood was the choke point of the entertainment business in America. For the longest time, that was the case. All movies were made in Hollywood and almost all TV shows. Some television work was done in New York City, but even that was controlled by the big studios. That meant smart men looking to make big money in movies went to Hollywood to make their money. They had no choice. Even if they wanted to go around the studios, the studio men controlled the distribution networks too.

Most everyone gets that technology is changing how people consume entertainments like movies and TV shows. Instead of a cable sub and trips to the theater, it is the internet and viewing on a variety of devices from anywhere with wireless access. That is why cord cutting is gaining steam. There is no reason to have a cable deal when you can get all the same stuff, on demand, from your internet provider. With gizmos like Kodi, you can get any video in the world, free of charge, as long as you have the technical savvy.

The other side of this coin is that technology has broken up the bottleneck that is Hollywood. Services like Amazon are greedy for content and they have the money to go around the gate keepers. Hollywood is no match when facing off with the giant tech companies and their control of the internet. Then there is the fact that making movies does not require prohibitively expensive video equipment and facilities. This guy made a very slick drama in Scotland for £3000. It is as good as anything Hollywood produces.

Then there is the fact that social media is making it easier for these independent content creators to get attention. PewDiePie has over fifty million subscribers to his YouTube channel. Mike Cernovich has proved that you can gain national attention, despite having no obvious talent, if you figure out how to work social media. Donald Trump is in the White House, because he figured out that old media is no longer valuable. He spent his time and money on other forms of marketing and won the election as a result.

The days of Hollywood being a choke point for video entertainment is over. The new players in the content business are the services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. They are becoming the new choke points for TV and movies so the smart guys are moving to those rackets. They do not have to be in Los Angeles or even in America. These services are so desperate for content, they will even go to Iceland for it. Like the big record labels of the prior age, Hollywood is on its way to becoming a legacy business.

As an aside, the foreshadowing of this was the pornography business. Twenty years ago, porn producers in the San Fernando Valley made big money producing porno films for home video rental. Bus loads of girls would come to Hollywood to become stars, only to end up in the valley making porn. Then, the internet and inexpensive video gear made it possible for anyone to put porn on-line. Before long, the internet was awash in free porn of every imaginable variety. The porn industry collapsed.

An axiom of modern, life is that the arrival of social justice warriors is a sign that a business or industry has entered a death spiral. It may not be dead, but its days of making big money have ended. The smart-money men, interested only in making money, have left the scene, leaving the people with other agendas to take over and impose those agendas. That is when the gals start running off the guys for being male and cook up schemes to help under-represented minorities realize their potential.

That is what is happening with Hollywood. The girls are taking over, which means they will be producing content that no one watches, as they burn through the assets of the movies business infrastructure. Soon, the oppressed people of color will be accusing the remaining studio men of being insufficiently remorseful about their ancestors owning slaves. Unlike colleges and corporations that go through this, the film business has an ample supply of degenerates like Harvey Weinstein. This is just getting started.

Racist Pumpkins

This week I had some trouble with my studio setup. By “studio” I mean my bedroom. The sound quality was all over the map for some reason. I did the best I could to clean it up using the software available to me. That means my beautiful voice will sound a bit less beautiful than normal. It was actually a bit distracting, which probably caused more trouble for me than the actual technical issues. Such is life in the podcast biz.

Anyway, this week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. The feedback thus far suggests the four 10-minute segments followed by some short segments is the sweet spot. This week I have a bonus track on Gab, where I address one of your comments on civic nationalism. If you are not on Gab, you should be. Despite their flaws, they are the good guys fighting to keep the lamps from going out in the West.

For this week, Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the four longer segments from the show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android phone commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The Blackety Black (Link)
  • 12:00: A Land of Cults (Link) (Link)
  • 22:00: Girls Science (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: Never Bet On Black (Link) (Link)
  • 42:00: Ad Scams (Link)
  • 47:00: A Legendary Drunk (Link)
  • 52:00: The Resistance (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download

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Google Play Link

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Full Show On Spreaker

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Myths Die Slowly

Back in the summer, I was talking with a friend and we were talking about Trump and the alt-right. My friend is not into my type of politics. He remains a generic conservative, the sort who thinks Ben Shapiro is great and Gavin McInnes is edgy. I do not fault him for it. Most white people are in that camp, unless they are a Progressive. The Dissident Right is still small and the alt-right is even smaller. The tide is running our way, but it has a long way to go before we have big numbers.

Anyway, one of the things we discussed was what Trump could or would do regarding the big issues. My friend honestly believes that all that needs doing is to cut taxes, cut spending and crack down on illegal immigration. Then America will begin to look like the 1980’s again. He was a bit surprised when I told him that I disagreed. I was a bit turned off by his optimism. The truth is these guys stubbornly cling to the old ideas and old politics. We need to turn them, but it will not be easy. They will not let go easily.

That is the biggest challenge facing the Dissident Right and it is a massive challenge for the alt-right. White people in America have been marinating, for their whole lives, in the stew of multiculturalism and the conventional conservative reaction. They still view the world through the lens of the Cold War. That means accepting the Left’s moral framework, while longing for the Right’s promised ends. The result is a collection of American myths that our people stubbornly embrace, despite the evidence.

The biggest one is the fetish over the Constitution. The people who love Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck are the best example. They talk about the Constitution like it is a holy relic. It is their magic talisman. They are sure that all we need is a majority of Constitutional Conservatives on the bench and more of them in Congress. When you point out that the Constitution currently requires Christian bakers to celebrate homosexual weddings, they dismiss this as if it is a lie. They just cannot let go of the dream.

These are usually the same people who go on about our Judeo-Christian principles. There is no such thing. It is just something nice white people thought was a good thing to say, so the Jews would feel included. Jews think the idea is ridiculous and very conservative Jews find it insulting. The formulation gained popularity in the Eisenhower years, probably in reaction to the Holocaust. Despite the ridiculousness of it, most constitutional conservatives are convinced America is built on Judeo-Christian values.

The great black hope is another one of those myths that whites cannot let go of, even after eight years of Obama. For example, the mulatto meathead, Dwayne Johnson, was saying nice things about generic conservatives for a while last spring. This set off a round of hero worship in Conservative Inc. National Review did a special issue on him. Most whites still believe the dream of racial harmony, so gaining the approval of a guy like Sheriff Clark or a Dwayne Johnson is like being blessed by the Pope.

This is because whites largely accept the blank slate egalitarianism the Progs have been preaching for the last half century. White people are so afraid of being condemned as racist; they will believe just about anything to avoid it. The hardest boiled right-winger will break out in hives when race is mentioned. The insist that all blacks need to do is act like middle-class white people. It is why they carry guys like Sheriff Clark and Allen West around as conquering heroes. Whites still cling to the myth of egalitarianism.

This spills over into the immigration debate. Listen to the garden variety talk radio conservative and they will fall all over themselves praising legal immigration. They completely buy in the myth of the propositional nation. They do not always use that language, but they accept it. Whites may not think all people are the same, but they think they can be the same. Therefore, the non-whites wishing to settle in America can prove this by following the rules, like a white person would. It is Magic Rule Theory.

Many alt-right people like to flatter themselves by insisting that the JQ is the hardest red pill to swallow, but in reality, patriotism is the toughest. People can accept that blacks are incapable of living with whites. People can even buy off on the idea that Jews have a disproportionate influence on society and maybe that is not a good thing. The one thing you cannot get anyone to accept is that patriotism is anything but an honorable quality. If you dare question the idea, whites will condemn you as some sort of commie.

That is the biggest challenge for the alt-right. They do not couch it in these terms, but theirs is a post-national movement. Their brand of identity politics puts racial identity ahead of all other group loyalties. That includes patriotism. If the black NFL players all stand this week, hands over hearts, singing the anthem, whites around America will be sobbing and hugging one another like it is the rapture. Talking Americans out of this sort of over the top love of country is the great challenge for the alt-right.

Beliefs and customs have a way of transforming into something different when they lose their salience. Many conservative whites have started to abandon their party loyalty, realizing it was a sham. Increasing numbers of whites are coming to terms with the realities of race. Still, they do so with the hope that, with some tweaking, the republic can be set right again. Maybe that is the process. We are now seeing more people talk openly about ending immigration entirely. That is a big step for white people.

The fact is, things like patriotism and a love for ordered liberty are features of white Americans, not bugs. Most whites get that and will stubbornly cling to those ideas, even when they are an impediment to preserving civilization. Sacred beliefs do not go away without a fight. The great challenge for the insurgency is to re-purpose these attributes toward better ends. Appeals to people’s better natures always works better than challenging their deeply held beliefs.

No Tomorrows

All human societies have some form of belief system, usually based in the supernatural or in unexplained mysteries. People who study these things think that belief is one of the earliest modern human traits. Language and religion, the formalization of belief, most likely evolved together. That certainly makes sense. Religion has always been a handy store of knowledge and language is the way in which it can be transported over time and place. They are complimentary.

That is speculative, but what is not speculative is that all known people have had something we would consider to be a faith system. Primitive people have primitive belief systems, usually based in natural phenomenon like the seasons and elements. American Indians have a whole collection of deities based in nature. More complex societies create more complex myths and belief structures. The Greeks and Romans had complex systems. Christianity is a rich and complex belief system.

We in the modern West tend to think we have moved past this stuff. The educated classes, while not willing to say they are atheists, scoff at the religious. The most you will get from the upper classes is the line about being spiritual, but not religious. The truth is, Western elites are believers like all people in all times, maybe more so. It is just that their beliefs are informal and ad hoc. The people toting canvas sacks to the market are doing so because our better say nature demands it of us.

Belief systems describe a people. The ancient Egyptians had a complex belief system like many ancient people. Their religion, however, was unique in that it was entirely focused on the afterlife. They did not make sacrifices and pray for the here and now. They built monuments, complex burial systems and temples in order to prepare the living for the after life. There is a good argument that this focus on the after life is what allowed the Egyptians to keep their culture going for 3,000 years.

On the other hand, the Greeks were not overly concerned about the after life. Their focus was on the here and now. The gods interfered in the lives of men, so it made sense to focus devotion on swaying the gods to act on your behalf or against the interests of your enemies. The Greeks did have the concept of an afterlife, but it was not the focus of their belief system. Immortality for man was possible by having sons, who would carry his name, or dying for his polis, which would live on and remember his name.

The Greeks may have been more concerned with the present, when it came time to worshipping the gods, but they had a nice long run. It was not as if they were hedonists, living only in the moment. Even so, this focus on the now had some odd results. For instance, we know just about every Egyptian ruler and his deeds. We even have some of their corpses. The Dorian Greeks, on the other hand, burned their kings, as well as any record of them. We know nothing about them as a result.

This brings up an important point about our present age. The cult of Gaia, for example, is long on rhetoric about the future, but its focus is on present virtue. The greens are not trying preserve the environment for future generations. They are hoping their efforts snuff out future generations. The same is true of anti-racism and multiculturalism. These are all about the present. Calling them suicide cults is useful rhetoric, but in fact our virtuous rulers do not think past tomorrow. it is all about grace today.

This is particularly true with regards to migration. Nationalists like to cook up complex theories as to why our rulers are wedded to the idea of mass immigration. Some say it is cheap labor. Other say it is cheap votes. Still others see it as spite. All of those things are true, but the real motivation is virtue. Instead of a public ceremony where they sacrifice a bull or consecrate a church, inviting in the poor and downtrodden is the big public act of virtue. The consequences are down the road. The grace is today.

It is not just vanity. We are the first people to have no conception of an afterlife. Even the Greeks believed in the after life and they believed there was judgement of souls. They may not have made that the focus of their faith, but they still believed there was something beyond this life. This spiritual hopelessness of Western elites may be why the Cloud People couch everything in terms of personal fulfillment and self-actualization. It is a way of crossing the river Styx without actually believing in it.

The nuttiness of modern elite culture may simply be a neurosis arising from the conflict between the natural desire of man to be remembered, colliding with the lack of any reason to be remembered. Even the humblest of men will carve his name into a tree or scratch his name on his prison wall. “I was here” is the primal scream. Today, that impulse has no outlet. The lonely barren spinster yells “I was here” and the only thing that happens is the cat stirs and then goes back to sleep.

Maybe this is it for us. Maybe there is no tomorrow for the West.

Crime City

Recently I was searching around for publicly available police data and found that a surprising amount of data is available to the public. Often it is very portable, letting the curious download raw data from government systems. Many cities have built out API’s so you can get live feeds from their systems. I found a treasure trove of raw arrest data from the City of Baltimore. Like a lot of cities, they have exposed their database of arrests to the public. The data only goes back to the beginning of 2013, but that’s a lot.

Since the first of day of 2013, Baltimore City police have made 152,103 arrests as of September 30th, 2017. That works out to an average of 87 arrests per day. That does not sound like a big number, but according to studies, the average time awaiting trial is close to 40 days. The number of people being held in the city awaiting trial is about 8,000, on average. Put another way, about 1.3% of the city’s population is held at any one time, awaiting their turn in the criminal justice system. That does not included convicts.

Just in case you are thinking about being arrested in Baltimore, here’s the daily breakout.

Of course, the break down by race is what you would expect in Baltimore.

Interestingly, there were only 1428 arrests for murder and attempted murder. They don’t code the crimes in an easily understood way. I simply searched for all arrests containing the word murder, which included attempted murder. Netting out the lesser charge and the total is just 252 arrests for the crime of murder. In the same period, 1382 homicides were committed in the city.  It appears arrests for attempted murder is where they start with murder cases. That or the murder total would be much higher if the locals had better aim.

Here’s the racial break down of murder related arrests.

The black share of arrests for murder related offenses should be viewed in addition to two other statistics. Baltimore is 63% black according to the last census and 29% white. This means that blacks are over represented in the arrest data for murder related crime. Whites are under represented. It should be noted that Hispanics are counted as white, but the city has a small Hispanic population. Even so, whites are significantly under represented. This is a pattern that turns up in all homicide studies, even in majority black cities.

The other factor is the victimization data. Murder is almost always a personal crime so the murderer usually knows the victim or they live in the same area. Even in a city like Baltimore, where one block can seem like a different country from the next block, most violent crime is personal. That means most times, the murderer is of the same race as the murdered. Looking at the victimization data, the number of black murder victims over the same period tracks the arrest pattern, as far as the racial breakdown.

Here is the racial break down of the murder victims.

The victim numbers let us net out the Hispanics from the white total, but Baltimore does not have a big Latino population, so the numbers don’t change much. Given the white flight to the suburbs, the city’s white population is probably closer to 25% in this time period, but the white crime share is around 5%. On the other hand, Blacks are 65% of the city’s population and 90% of homicide related crime and over 80% of all arrests. Put another way, if you removed the black population, Baltimore would resemble Salt Lake City.

Finally, here are the arrests by age.

Here’s the arrests by interesting cohort.

Doctor Robot

One of the popular topics among the curious minded is the coming robot revolution where, presumably, all work will be done by robots. A regular feature of the news is the story of how some function previously done by people is now being done by smart machines. The prevailing assumption is that the sort of manual labor jobs done by the working class will disappear over the next generations. That may be true, but it will not be the working man losing out initially. It is going to be the office people who feel the pinch first.

One of the things everyone sort of knows is that a whole lot of what passes for office work is not particularly important. Government is the most obvious example. Everyone is familiar with the image of the road crew standing around watching one guy work, but that pales in comparison to the government agency. Thousands hiding cubicles watching porn or gambling. The paleocons used to make the point that the expansion of government at all levels is primarily a jobs program. It keeps the troublesome busy.

Anyone who has worked in big corporations or large law firms knows there is plenty of busy work going on in those cubicles too. Some of it is defensive, like human resource departments and safety managers, but a lot of it just sort of happens. Make-work jobs grow on an organization like a fungus. The hospitality industry has always suffered from this more than most. In good times, they hire up, even though the need is not there, but then come the lean times, the extra is cut loose and no one really notices.

The robot came to mind when booking my last physical. I have been saying for years that a good chunk of health care could be automated today. Yet, the only growing segment of the labor market, outside of government, is health care. At my doctor’s office, I interact with probably a dozen people during a physical. I know what two of them do and one of them could be replaced by a kiosk. The rest are just women in purple scrubs milling around doing nothing I can identify as medical work or even clerical work.

What has always been puzzling to me is that I never actually see a doctor. In fact, I have yet to meet my doctor in person. We have communicated by e-mail once or twice. Instead, I deal with a nurse practitioner. Once a year, she asks me the same questions and then types my answers into a laptop. She then gives me a physical examination, sticks her finger in my arse and that is the end of it. If I were allowed to answer the questions in advance, the whole thing could be done as a drive-thru service.

I noticed when booking the last visit, on-line of course, that the time slot was now 30 minutes. In the past, I was told to be there for an hour. Some of that time was waiting for my turn, but most of the face time with the nurse was the question and answer stuff. The new on-line appointment process had me answering the questions during the booking, rather than in person. I even did the insurance work in advance. I just show up, get naked, get violated, give a blood sample and go on my way.

The truth of it is most people could get along simply fine with Doctor Google and a routing service to guide people in need of services to the correct providers. When I hurt my knee a while back, I met with a dozen people I had no reason to meet, just to get to the correct person. Frustratingly, I knew the service I needed because I knew the injury. I even looked up the possible ways to address the injury. But I was forced by humans to see a dozen of them first. The robot doctor would never do this to me.

This is just one example of the millions of daily tasks now done by humans in offices that can easily be eliminated with current automation. The fact that it is happening so slowly speaks to how resistant work life is to change. Medical service providers are now being squeezed by insurance companies so the medical providers are looking for savings via automation. One day, reality will come crushing in on the insurance firms and most of those jobs will be automated in the blink of an eye.

The medical services business is a massive racket, which exists as it does primarily due to government. I have made the point for years that it would look something like veterinary medicine if not for government. As such, it should be more resistant to the robots than other fields. The fact that it is showing signs of disruption due to automation suggests we will get our first glimpse of the robot revolution in a white collar field, rather than a blue collar one. The robots are coming for the office workers first.

That will be bring some interesting socio-political ramifications that our rulers seem incapable of pondering. Just look at how they struggle to make sense of the public reaction to wholesale migration. Democrats abandoned working class whites in favor or cheap foreign labor and they remained poleaxed over why these voters abandoned Team Clinton for Team Trump. Imagine what happens when suburban unemployment doubles due to automation. Signaling over trannies is probably not going to work too well.

In case anyone is wondering, Doctor Robot gave me a clean bill of health.