I’m shamelessly ripping off John Derbyshire here with a monthly diary feature. I’ve been doing semi-regular updates on readership and so forth, but a monthly diary type post seems to make more sense. I can then cover blog related stuff and retread any old ground that needs retreading. With apologies to Derb and anyone else doing the monthly diary bit, I will be doing a monthly diary post going forward…
Like many Americans, I have been doing some traveling. Around here, the schools are done by mid-June so it is the start of vacation season. When I was a kid, Memorial Day was the start of summer. School ended that week and you had the three day holiday. For reasons I have no interest in knowing, schools now stay in session longer and they start earlier. As a result, summer holiday time is packed into the period between mid-June and the end of July. Independence Day is becoming the start of summer.
I’m sure there are statistics available somewhere to test if the result of this creeping school calendar has had some impact on travel in the high season. My experience is that even mid-week travel in July feels like the rush before Thanksgiving or Christmas. I was in Logan Airport and I stood for 90 minutes in line waiting for a rental car. They had plenty of cars, just not enough terminals to process everyone in a timely fashion and their customer service staff is clearly coming from the Epsilon Minus sub-class.
As is often the case, travel provides lessons about our current age. The fellow who waited on me at the Avis counter, for example, was either suffering from a mental illness or he was on drugs. He was in need of a bath and his clothes needed laundering. The other agents were in various states of disrepair. Most were foreigners, judging by the names I could read. My guess, given the ages, is that Avis is gaming the J1 visa program to fill the jobs the unemployed locals refuse to take, at the wages Avis wants to pay.
The argument from libertarian guy is that this results in cheaper stuff. After all, if Avis has to pay higher wages to their people and train them to treat the customers in a decent fashion, they would have to charge more for rental cars. Left out of the discussion is the ever growing tax burden needed to pay for the unemployed locals, as well the social cost of lots of people not working. What’s also left out is the cost of me standing in line for 90 minutes and having to deal with a dirty lunatic. Quality of life counts too…
Another lesson of travel comes from airports. I’ve been in a lot of airports and I have posted about them a bunch of times. Airports are a good way to explain to normal people how central planning must always fail. These schemes always succumb to the limitations of the planners. Airports are a good example of it. Similarly, the airport is a good place to explain why libertarianism can never scale up, unless you plan to genocide the unreliable elements. Otherwise, the stupid, lazy and selfish will collapse a libertarian system…
Of course, travel is about seeing different places and people. One of the more bizarre contradictions of the blank slate types is they will celebrate the crap out of human diversity, when it comes to travel. They make no effort to hide the fact that people in different places have very different ideas about how to organize themselves. Yet, this reality never occurs to them when the topic is immigration. That’s because they never really experience diversity. They are insulated from it so they know it only superficially.
Anyway, human variety is something you can see within our own lands. It has been a while since I was in New England. As a result, I forgot that the women are crazy and the men are mostly pussies. Not everyone, but the ratio of crazy cat ladies to normal women is jarring. I listened to two women coo over a handful of savages being led through the airport, by their minders from a church group. My bet is it was a church like this one, that is run by feminist nutters and useless homosexuals.
The two cat ladies were carrying on like a couple teenage girls, who just saw members of the current boy band. That’s the thing about feminism. It infantilizes the adherent. Modern feminists have the maturity of teenagers. Feminism is just a way for homely girls to get the attention of boys, so I guess it makes sense at some level. Regardless, it should never be tolerated so I leaned over and said to the two hens, “One day, their kids will be throwing your kids off a roof.” They were poleaxed. I went to get a drink…
As far as plans for the site and other ventures, I’m plotting a refresh of the site for a weekend in July. Nothing crazy, just a little sprucing up to keep things current. Summer is the slowest time, traffic-wise for the site. This is something I’ve actually measured in other areas of the internet. Like with TV viewing, summer drops web traffic to these sorts of sites by up to 25%. That means if I break something while fiddling with the site, fewer people will give me crap about it…
I am working on doing a weekly podcast. Often, the best way to learn new things is to jump right into them and start figuring it out. If you go back to the first few months of this blog, you’ll see it was not very good and nothing like what I’m doing today. I just tried a bunch of stuff until I figured out what worked for me. I’m not doing that with the podcast venture, because I really don’t know anything about the audio stuff, so I need to get a baseline of technical knowledge before jumping into it.
There’s a technical aspect to producing audio that you have to get close to right or the product is worthless. This podcast with Greg Cochran is a good example. Greg sounds like he is on the wrong side of the room from the mic. He is a brilliant and interesting guy, but straining to hear him ruins the whole thing. I have ruined enough lives with the very rare typo in my posts, I don’t need to destroy the audiophile community by posting crappy audio of myself.
To that end I purchased a modestly priced microphone off Amazon. That’s right, I used Amazon and not the local microphone dealer. Actually, I went to the local music instrument store and they only deal in the stuff used on stage. The guy told me to buy a cheap one on Amazon. I’m using Audacity for recording myself, which is easy to use at first, but I have to fiddle with the tuning. The trial run was a bit weird sounding so I have to figure out how to clean that up. With a little luck, version 1.0 will be out next week.
As far as content, I’m going to start with a week in review sort of format. Lots of comments to posts warrant a fuller response than I tend to give so that’s a good place to start. There are tangentially related news items that would not make for a full post, but worth a few minutes discussion. Since I don’t do a lot of political posting, I thought maybe a podcast would be a good place to run my yap about what the pols are doing in the Imperial Capital. That’s enough to start and we’ll see how it goes from there.
I’m not sure I have the voice and speaking style to make it work, but I’m a terrible judge of these things. Mark Levin and Michael Savage have millions of listeners, despite their endless shrieking and yelling. Levin’s voice can break glass when he gets himself wound up. The whole radio guy voice stuff could just be nonsense. Alternatively, the break down of control may have changed public standards. With so many different voices now doing audio and video, the range of acceptable now covers just about everyone…
As far as numbers, the traffic has declined, as it always does this time of year. The estimate on unique monthly visitors is at 90K now, about 10% off the peak. It will drop a further in July and then slowly tick back up as we head into fall. Strangely, March has always been the highest traffic month. I have no explanation for it. It could be a coincidence or maybe humans become more active in the late winter and early spring in anticipation of the arrival of spring.
The number one post in terms of traffic is the page My Theory of Everything. In fact, I still get comments on those posts. Number two is this one. I have no answer for why, but it still gets passed around quite a bit. Another top-10 favorite this one. I should probably compile a greatest hits page or maybe put together an ebook of them. I’m also informed that I’m closing in on one million Google referrals, which means one million times Google as sent someone to this site. I have no idea if that is a lot, but I’ll put on my goriller mindset and say it is yuuuggggge! In all seriousness, for a one man blog it probably is a lot…
I’m a little late to the thread but funny you should mention car rental at Logan Airport as I rented a car there just three weeks ago. Maybe five years ago they consolidated all the separate companies into one facility. As I breezed through my check-in at Alamo with a black American woman CS agent who was perfectly fine, I noticed that Avis had a horrifically long line. This was on a Monday evening.
I’m all blacked out too:
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-cost-of-black-america.html Over the course of an average 79-year lifespan, a white individual contributes a net $220,805 to the system, whereas over the course of an average 75-year lifespan, a black individual receives a net $751,200. However, since there are 4.6 times more whites than blacks in the USA, the black share has to be divided among the various contributors to sort out a one-to-one comparison. So, the net cost to the average White American of the average Black American is $384,109.
Wow, that’s one super-converged Congregational Church they’ve got there in Ipswich MA. Not even the form of an actual Christian assembly much less the substance.
The answer to the immigration issue is simple. All the countries of the West should afford all immigrants the same welfare/education/healthcare etc benefits that their native lands offer
Great idea, if we could actually trace their country of origin. That’s (one of) the main reasons behind the (hopefully not) temporary immigration ban: They could actually be from anywhere.
Of course, the obvious answer to my objection is, “OK you can’t document your country of origin. So you get the default, namely nothing.” Can you imagine how fast the Prog spenders-of-other-peoples’-money would be in front of a 9th US Circuit judge_?
Lots of prep work needs to be done.
Ancestry.com and 23 & Me only charge like $100-$199 for DNA testing. Seems cheap to me. Line ’em up, let’s start cheek swabbin’ and suitcase packin’.
Z man, I’m looking forward to next January’s podcast for your discussion about the African America problem and the overdue correction to the reputations of Dr. King and everyone who helped him.
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=8635#comment-37042
schools now stay in session longer and they start earlier…
Even after cutting back on the real education there wasn’t enough time for all the mandated propaganda.
I like to absorb my information by reading rather than listening, however, I drive about an hour a day and usually listen to Podcasts I’ve recorded to CD’s.
I’m sure I’m not alone.
FYI a CD contains 79 minutes of audio. If your material runs longer than that you might consider splitting it into two (or three).
You’re usually pretty interesting. I will definitely give your podcast a tryout.
Lawsuit!
“Our Sunday school is progressive politically…”
The unemployed American who didn’t serve you at Avis is sustained on welfare on borrowed money. When spent it raises the GDP. Muh economics!
“One day, their kids will be throwing your kids off a roof.” Classic and I’ll be looking for any opportunity to use this myself.
Enjoy the podcasts, and I hope people listening to it enjoy it as much as you anticipate doing them.
I won’t be one of them.
I read at nearly 600 wpm; highly trained speakers talk at about 280 wpm, untrained speakers at 180-200, plus the useless filler words, pauses, and re-hashes because they suddenly figured out a better way to say what they’ve been talking about for 10 minutes on a 2 minute topic.
I have neither the time nor the patience for that crap. Enough others do, which is probably what drives the burgeoning YouTube and podcast things.
Have fun, and I sincerely hope the Pleasures of Podcasting doesn’t prevent the info from appearing here in text.
I won’t call it crap, but I prefer reading, too. Thing is I have a wine that will say some brilliant and funny things in conversation that he would never think to write down, and by the time he did some of them wouldn’t even be relevant any more. If some of the people who do these podcasts are anything like him they need to be done.
Son, not wine. Damn autocorrect. The stupid thing even tried to change wine to some in this post!
Go 2X
I think Michael Savage offered Mark Levin $100,000 to never get on the radio again. He said his whiny voice sounds like an old Jewish woman having a hysterectomy with no anesthesia, and I personally think that’s being charitable.
I can listen to Rush for awhile in the car, but he is (as someone once called it) “B-word” fat. If he pronounces enough words that begin with “B” in sequence, you can hear his jowls banging against each other, which is unpleasant to listen to for too long.
Some podcast work better with two people, but I personally like how Derb never has guests on his show, and just does his own thing from his bunker.
Modern airport management: Jets hold ~130 passengers, jet-way waiting areas have seating for less than one hundred resulting in more than thirty people standing in the concourse aisle.
It’s hard to believe airport architects are this stupid so this third world chaos is an intentional design feature.
Somewhere we lost our way to Syd Mead’s world.
“….Epsilon Minus sub-class….”
Why I read The Z every day. The perspective is heads and shoulders above just about anythng else out there, I always get an out-loud LOL or two, and I learn something. (I gathered what Z was driving at, but did NOT know Epsilon was a reference to Huxley’s BNW.) Of course I’ve never actually READ the darn thing…just skimmed the Cliff’s notes.
Read the fucking thing. Then Huxley. This is where we are
In my experience in the LA Basin and Imperial City, its the Asians who are pushing the shorter summers. The managerial class has gotten behind it since as little Johnny reverts to the mean, they see it as their last hope to get him into the right school.
Parents like to use the local public school as a taxpayer-subsidized daycare. Increasingly, parents put their kids in after-school care which is basically just daycare from 3-5. These same parents see summertime as a MAJOR INCONVENIENCE since they have to find alternative daycare for their children that they wish they hadn’t had. Shortening summers allows parents to use even more taxpayer subsidized daycare. It doesn’t surprise me Asians have figured out this white yuppie trick and are now doing it on steroids.
For the reasons you mentioned, I’ve started avoiding airline travel. Avis went downhill pretty quickly. I noticed the same thing and simply stopped using them. I take an airport bus to and from the airport now. I can do what I want on the bus and there’s WiFi.
I noticed the same thing at the United Counters. On the East Coast, the baggage handlers and ticket counter clerks are from some West African country.
You’d think Avis and United would find their hemorrhage of customers more expensive than paying better wages for Americans, but they don’t. Some white guy at the top of both organizations is getting stock options for making the numbers look good this quarter!
The Americans you see at airports are increasingly Baby Boomers who love diversity because they didn’t have to grow up with it and members of the managerial class. It’s hilarious how the managerial class aspirants from the third world (who also choke-up the Premier Silver boarding lines) mimic their American counterparts and snicker at the Boomers waddling up and down the terminal.
I should probably plan on vacationing in a tent during my Golden Years (if any).
GD MBAs.
Audio: Do your best Barry White imitation.
Have fun at AmRen.
re: redoing site
Fix the BUG when one clicks on “see more” and is rewarded with a font that is at least two sizes smaller. Keep the font readable, please.
Dan Kurt
Endeavor to persevere
There is Iron in your words for all Indians to hear.
good luck with that.
I don’t know if ANY “libertarians” who would make the argument that we should just import more cheap labor – while leaving native born slackers sitting around receiving their government disbursement checks.
You seem to have a dyslexia problem and can’t discern the difference between the word “libertarian” and “liberal”.
Anxiously awaiting the podcast. Your interview on the Two Kevins was so interesting I have listened more than once.
Share a handy link to it, plz?
On diversity…
I have tried IRL Gavin Mcinnes technique of asking people to name one benefit of diversity/multiculturalism/immigration with one caveat: you cant use restaurants as your example.
So far, nobody has come up with anything.
That which you subsidize, you get more of.
Our affluence and politics is the core reason that we are creating and growing more dead-weight in our society than at any other time in human history. And there is a belief that this will either change magically at some point in the future, or alternately, that it can go on forever without consequence. The sad part is that people are actually happier when they live in a world that necessitates productivity in order to survive and thrive.
My favorite article is ‘The cult of magic.’ It perfectly describes the magical thinking syndrome that infects about 90% of canadians. You effectively described the attitude of every government worker i’ve ever talked to.
Almost like magic!
Shop assistants here in the UK are all Indians who can barely speak English, you usually have to point at things to show what you want.
As a devoted podcast enthusiast I find that personality and intelligence of the podcaster are the only things that make a podcast listenable. I will put up with poor quality of sound but never with poor quality of content.
“For reasons I have no interest in knowing, schools now stay in session longer and they start earlier.”
I’ll tell you anyway Zman. 🙂 Those poor, tired, over worked and underpaid public school teachers continue to negotiate more time off during the regular school year in their collective bargaining. Thanksgiving, for example, was always a 4 day weekend when I was a kid. In our district it has been a full week off for the entire duration of my older daughter’s schooling, so at least 10 years. Good Friday is now a “teacher institute day”, so the kids are off and the teachers go to the school for a half day of bitching about how tough they have it while eating doughnuts and drinking coffee paid for out of the school’s petty cash, which comes from my property taxes. These TID’s, and there are at least 7 or 8 of them throughout the year, always seem to happen on the other side of the weekend from some minor holiday that most people who work in the private sector don’t get off. So it’s a nice 3 1/2 day weekend for the teachers and an extra day of childcare regular two income families have to shell out for their younger children.
I’ve found my oldest’s public school teachers to be well-meaning and interested in doing a good job but – you’re right – they hardly ever work. In California the teacher’s union has a stranglehold on our democracy so I expect little to change unless we go bankrupt.
The kids, even in my UMC public school, are completely un-parented so I guess they’re getting the teaching they deserve.
I’m planning on private schooling or homeschooling.
Very wise, if you give a damn about your kids that’s the way to go.
My girlfriend is semi-retired as a substitute teacher. What she tells me about the impossibility of teaching a class, imparting knowledge, when the a class of twenty or thirty have two or three uncivilized thugs (90% of them are black) that prevent any education from happening.
And neither she or the school admin can do anything about it.
The teachers are forbidden from saying anything about this problem to the normal parents.
Airports have become staffed with people who, twenty years ago, couldn’t get a job and who now can’t be fired.
It’s all due to that nasty piece of shite George W Bush and the neocon filth he immersed himself in.
Onward. I look forward to the podcasts.
P.S. “Often, the best way to learn new things is to jump right into them and start figuring it out. ”
I am currently writing a screenplay. Have I ever written one? No. Did I think I could write one? Why not? I read one (Chinatown), bought software and jumped in. Will it get bought and made? Only God knows. Do I care? No. It was something new to do.
The best screenplays to use to learn the craft are in the book “Three by Richard Price.” Price used to be a great novelist, and he’s done some good work on HBO’s “The Wire” but his screenplays are also aces (“The Color of Money” “Sea of Love” “Mad Dog and Glory”).
Thanks, I’ll take a look. I know Price’s novels. I’m using Magic Movie Screenwriter and I highly recommend it.
I love the screenplay format so much that the last “decent length” piece I wrote is in it, but let me say, if you plan on “novelizing” it, be prepared to re-do the entire thing. (Or I pray you’re smarter – or more patient – than me, because I couldn’t figure how to put the 8.5×11 Word doc onto a 6×9, etc. paperback size!)
Plug for “An Election Carol: A Presidential Fairytale in Script Form”
https://housewife3-0.com/books-2/