I was reading this piece on Mary Mark Steyn’s site the other day and I could not help but wonder how these guys do it. Steyn had a prominent spot at National Review and a syndicated column. I think he had a contract with Rush Limbaugh as a guest host. I seem to recall him doing TV, but I don’t watch enough TV to be certain of it. The point being that he had a bunch of good revenue streams going until he took a stand against that odious con-man Michael Mann.

I may be reading it wrong, but it appears that Steyn has tossed a lot away in order to fight this lawsuit on principle. No matter how you feel about Steyn, you have to admire the guy for his guts. He’s not alone, of course. There’s a long list of guys who have refused to go along and found themselves exiled to the badlands. Steyn is an international character with a lot of revenue sources so I’m sure he is doing fine. Still, it is not easy to face the wife and tell her to stretch the budget until things blow over. It’s even harder when you have kids.

Steyn is the most famous case and probably the least harmed. I’m a fan of Steve Sailer and he’s a guy who appears to have paid a heavy price for sticking to his guns. I remember reading Sailer years ago in National Review. I guess that was the high point of his earning years as a writer. That was a long time ago. I don’t know if he makes much from his site or for his work for sites like Taki and VDare, but I’m guessing it is not much. Maybe there’s a rabbi somewhere making it all work. I don’t know.

Of course, all of the people writing for VDare and Taki are forever off-limits now for mainstream publications. That means the money will always be scarce. For guys like John Derbyshire, sent into exile last year, it probably does not matter much. He’s made his money and lived his life. In his dotage, he can afford to not care what the beautiful people think. The others have wives and families and that means bills to pay, appearances to keep up and all that comes with it. It’s tough to do that out there on the fringe.

Exile is a real fear amongst the chattering classes. Years ago I mentioned something from VDare in an exchange with Jonah Goldberg and he broke out in hives. He responded with a rant about how I should never even read that site, much less mention it. I still chuckle thinking about it. At the time Goldberg was trying to build up the National Review website, by being a little edgy and hip. It was a nice reminder that there’s edgy and hip in the buttoned down conformist sense of the phrase and then there’s jumping over the wall and running for freedom.

The fear is well founded. No one ever makes it back from exile. Joe Sobran and Sam Francis were great polemicists, yet they were never rehabilitated. They were the sort of gifted writers who made batshit crazy arguments fun to read. Maybe that’s what made them so dangerous, I don’t know, but if great writers never make it back from the gulag, the lesser talents have no chance. That’s what came to mind reading the latest from John Derbyshire, regarding the banished Richard Lynn. Maybe when you are no longer a threat, they bring you back.

Another side to this is what happens to former snitches who then find themselves in trouble for crime think. Dinesh D’Souza was the guy who put the shiv in the back of Sam Francis two decades ago. It was his report of Francis at American Renaissance that got Francis fired from the Washington Times. Now, D’Souza is facing jail time and reaching out to his friends on the right to save him. As a guy who hates rats like D’Souza, I’m taking a great deal of pleasure in seeing Team Obama put the screws to him. I’m also liking the fact Conservative Inc has turned their back on him. There’s something poetic about it.

I do wonder if Charles Murray is right and the ground is about to shift. There are so many people on the fringe now, it is getting crowded. Al Gore’s Contrivance makes it easier for these people to work together and build a new audience. We live in interesting times. No one seems to think the current arrangements hold much longer and no one can agree on what comes next, other than it won’t be more of the same. Maybe what comes next is the exiles come home. Smarter people than me will have to work that out.

All that said, dark travel is the best travel, at least for me. On the edge of the ghetto, life is more vibrant, even though it is more dangerous. Years back I was doing some business in DC and stopped for a coffee in Chevy Chase. All the women looked and dressed the same. They were all driving high end SUV’s. Standing in line for a five dollar coffee, seeing all the of the women with the same haircut was a bit unnerving. How could they not notice it?

But, they do notice such stuff. They notice when you don’t drive the same car or wear the same clothes or think the same thoughts. That’s how you get sent to the fringe. The pod-people running this country are a herd animal. Maybe on their home planet they graze like cattle. I don’t know. I do know the action is all out on the fringe these days. Maybe that has always been the case;  it is certainly true today. Life amongst the exiles is not remunerative, but it is rewarding.

Reading reports about Iraq like this one, I can’t help but return to the old formulation I liked to use back in the Bush days. “The trouble with Afghanistan is it is full Afghans. The trouble with Iraq is there are not enough Iraqis.” Even at the height of the Iraq war, you never could find many people who identified as Iraqi first and all the other stuff second. They were always Sunni, Shia, Christian, Kurds, etc. An accident of history had them born on the lands we call Iraq.

Men will fight and die for their brothers. That’s why armies are built on small units. Successful street gangs and terror groups also rely on small units. Small units mean the members have emotional bonds to one another.In our urban reservations, street gangs are made of young men who grew up together. More sophisticated gangs like motorcycle clubs have very elaborate bonding rituals to make sure the clubs are cohesive.

Of course, the natural formation of small units is through blood. Early man existed in groups of 150 or so people. Everyone was related by blood. Once a group grew so large that blood relations stretched beyond second cousins, they split up into two units. In the Arab world, this still holds sway over the people. Talk to any Arab and before long they will have mentioned many “cousins” that are members of their extended family.

That’s what comes to mind when seeing stories like this one. We have a small force of mercenaries knocking off a professionally trained (allegedly) military, equipped with modern weaponry. Even if the numbers are exaggerated in that Vox story, you’re still seeing a 10-to-1 advantage having no value on the battlefield. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is wining both the moral war as well as the tactical war, despite their lack of equipment and people.

The historian John Keegan argued that wars are determined by culture. Arab culture is not like Western culture so their way of making war is different from that of the West. “War without battle” is the preferred mode in the Arab world. That means insurgencies, terrorism and social disruption are where Arabs excel. This makes perfect sense for a culture where blood relations trump all else. Kin based societies are low-trust societies. It is trust and altruism that enable societies to engage in large scale projects like fielding large armies.

Arab societies are low trust societies, which is why they have never been good at the civilization stuff that requires large scale organization. If you can only truly count on blood relatives, scaling beyond 100 or so hands is nearly impossible. Even when you expand the circle of trust beyond second cousins, you limit the number of people capable of working as a unit to a few hundred.

It is why Arab countries are authoritarian. The people will never willingly go along with the leader, if he is not at least from their tribe. That means coercion is the only way to rule. You never hear Arab leaders talking about “their people” with any degree of pride, like you hear in the West. They don’t even have the concept down. Instead, “us” is almost always defined by blood.

This what you see going on with the Iraqi army. None of them have loyalty to Iraq. Their first loyalty is to their family, followed by the extended family of the village and tribe. Sectarian loyalty is as far as it goes and even there it is frayed. Followers of one Imam may detest the followers of another, despite both being in the same sect. The Iraqi soldiers are not going to fight and die for something that does not exist, unless they have a bayonet in their back, as was the case under Saddam.

The other interesting thing is all of this was predictable. The American military spent billions designing and training a military for Iraq along western lines. The trouble is they left an Arab culture that is still an Arab culture. Eventually you end up with the same old half-assed Arab army with a bunch of American gear they can barely operate. A guy named Norvell B. De Atkine wrote about this 15 years ago in a paper called Why Arabs Lose Wars. While he tried hard to inoculate himself, the author can’t help but notice the reason Arab countries are as we find them is they are full of Arabs.

The one potential upside to the break up of Iraq is the Kurds may finally get their own place in the world, at least officially. The Syrians are too weak to do much about the Kurds and the Turks are too disorganized now. Iraq falling apart opens the door for the Kurds to press their claims. Interestingly, the Kurds may be the one group in the region the West could do something with besides sell arms. Genetically, they are more like Jews than Arabs, according the genetics. Culturally, they are very different from their Arab neighbors. They eschew fanatical Islam and they have a national identity that goes beyond blood.

Over the last 15 years, they have weathered the unrest better than anyone in the region. They seem to possess the ability to self-organize beyond the small unit. They have a national identity in that the Kurd living in Turkey sees himself part of Kurdistan in the same way as the Kurd living in Iraq, Syria or driving a cab in New York. Why we have ignored these people is a mystery, but maybe they have been better off as a result. Our results elsewhere are not encouraging.

Way back when the World Cup was in the States, I went to a bunch of the games. I even got to hang out with the Italian team for a short while when they got State-side. The first thing they did was stock up on Marlboros. Seeing a bunch of short swarthy guys chain smoking remains my main image of international soccer. That and how all of them were glaring at every piece of tail in sight. Little dogs and little men have no control of their sex drive.

That said, it was a good time and I had fun at the games. Soccer is a boring, dull and tedious sport on TV. The fake injuries are so absurd and embarrassing it is hard to tolerate. In person, the game is much better. When Raul collapses in a heap acting like he took a cannon ball to the knee, the crowd roars in unison, thus making it more like a play than a sporting event. You lose that interplay on TV and it comes off as absurd.

There are other aspects that make it better. You get to see the players not doing anything chat with one another like they are old friends bumping into one another on a stroll. On TV, the camera follows the ball and the players all look busy. Live, you get a better sense of what’s really happening. Since most of the games are fixed, it all makes more sense when you get to see all of the action and not just the group around the ball.

None of that turns me off of soccer. I just find it boring for the most part. World Cup soccer and Olympic soccer is fun because so much is at stake. The Little League World Series gets big TV rating for the same reason. People don’t watch little kids playing baseball, unless they are your children. Put the same kids in an international tournament and suddenly people get interested.

What turns me off of soccer is the cultural angle. When I was a boy, our betters were trying to force soccer and the metric system on us. The people doing it were all dickheads. Not a single one was anything but a loathsome snob. Worse yet, all of them were the children of working class people who knew better. But, Johnny and Betty went off to the state college and came back thinking they were better than everyone else.

Over time, those people have remained with us. When I think of soccer, I think of those smug assholes of my youth. I’ve probably heard “it is the most popular sport in the world” a million times in my life. That is the sort of thing stupid say when they want to sound sophisticated. In most of the world, soccer is the sport of the lower classes. That means out bourgeois bohemians are aping the mores of chavs. Good job.

A recent development, one that I find most irritating, is the fake passion of cosmopolitan men for Premiere League teams in Europe. They saw Bend It Like Beckham and now ape those characters, pretending to have had a lifelong passion for one soccer club or another. I have a friend who used to call soccer “fag ball” until about a decade ago. He became a vegan and started following soccer. He wears a Man U jersey and carries on about matches like the world depends on the outcome.

It is all a pose, of course. What’s odious about the poseur is he turns his self-loathing into your problem. The poseur apes the styles and attitude of others because he hates himself and cannot stand the sight of himself. His comical pretensions force the rest of us to be polite and accommodating to a fool, something no one enjoys. Unfair as it may seem, these people turn me off to soccer. Whatever those metrosexual fools are for, I’m against.

One other thing that turns me off is the “you just understand the complexity of the sport” line from people who probably don’t understand the sport at all. The reason people say this is to shift the focus from their misplaced and irrational love for a foreign sport, onto their critics. In other words, they don’t really like soccer, they just want to signal their membership in a group they believe is superior. It is Star Bellied Sneetch-ism.

Anyway, that’s my problem with soccer.

Spend time in or near the ghetto, and you can’t help but notice some things. When you live and work across the social spectrum, as I do, you get a daily dose of comparisons. That makes noticing things easy, which is a dangerous game these days. On the other hand, people get in trouble in the ghetto when they don’t notice things. Modern times is full of these weird, inexplicable juxtapositions.

In SWPL-ville, everyone knows to avoid certain areas, even certain streets. Give someone from SWPL-ville directions that include Martin Luther King Boulevard or Malcom X Avenue and they ask someone else for directions. They know those names are never in places they like. On the other hand, make a comment about it around them and they will harangue you about your racism and narrow mindedness.

I do not suffer from this malady, despite spending a fair amount of time in SWPL-ville. I’ve learned to speak three languages: SWPL, normal and ghetto. I’m most fluent at normal because I try to hang around normals as much as possible. I’ve jettisoned quite a few liberal friends simply because the cost of communicating with them is too high. On the other hand, living on the edge of the ghetto, I have picked up the tongue, which is mostly what normal people said before the lunatics took over. Watch any old 1970′s TV show and you get my meaning.

The other day I was on the way home and remembered I needed cat food. On the edge of the ghetto is a Food Lion, which seems to target the lower classes as a business strategy. They have a big sign announcing they accept EBT and WIC. I’ve stopped there many times, but rarely after work. In my work clothes, I stand out like a sore thumb. Social class is one of those things people notice instinctively, even though we pretend it does not exist. In jeans and a tee-shirt, it is not so obvious.

I get my cat food and get in line. I was in a hurry, being the end of the day, but I should have known better. In the ghetto, time works differently than everywhere else. The employees of the Food Lion are mostly black. They work on CPT. That’s Colored People Time. Start talking about CPT at your place of work and they fire you. Mention it around black people and they laugh, surprised that a white person would know the term. Again, another one of those things everyone knows, but no one says. Mokita.

What CPT means is not just slowness. It is also a certain deliberate tardiness. Black people will tell you that black people are always late. That’s when you’re most likely to hear them break out the term CPT. In the ghetto, it also means slow and distracted.

The two cashiers working that evening were chatting with one another, hardly paying attention to their work, which they were doing at a snail’s pace. The customer in front of me had a mislabeled product so the girl just stopped working and waited for a manager. It’s not laziness or attitude. The two girls were just working at a pace based on their own weird internal metronome.

That’s CPT. Even the most mundane tasks will take twice the time they do in SWPL-ville and no one thinks much of it.

For reasons I’ve never understood, the deli counter at this Food Lion is manned by Latino males. They are a beehive of activity, but you still wait in line for an hour to get even the smallest thing. Standing there in line, I watched four or five Latinos buzzing around in a flurry of activity, with one lonely customer waiting for whatever he ordered. He was still there when I left, which is not surprising. It is the Latin Way.

The Latin Way is a term you hear from Latinos. Like CPT, they are surprised to hear a blanco say it. Unlike blacks, Latinos are oddly proud of it and quite open to talking about it if you ask them. They fully admit that the disorganized chaos is just the way they do things, even though it makes no sense.

It’s like how the Irish are proud of being alcoholics. Unlike CPT, I find the Latin Way to be rather amusing. I guess it pleases my Anglo-Saxon sensibilities to see people rushing about trying to get their work done, even if they are mostly spinning their wheels.

While I’m cataloging the denizens of the ghetto in this way, Hindus are an interesting case. We have a lot of them around here for some reason. My guess is they work at the engineering firms located in SWPL-ville. I’ve had some Hindus work for me over the years and they move at their own pace.

Judging from what I see around town, I’m thinking it is cultural. In the Food Lion, I always see the old women wandering around in their brightly colored saris. They never seem to buy anything, but they are fat as hell so I know they’re not skipping any meals.

Anyway, the whites are not models of Anglo-Saxon efficiency and alacrity. The difference is when motivated, they move as fast and efficiently as anyone else. It’s just that they never seem to be motivated. On summer afternoons they sit on their front step or loiter in the parking lots.

Smoking is still popular in the great white ghetto, along with Oxycontin. You see the fat girls waddling behind strollers, while the males sit around shirtless. The idea is to show off the collection of ridiculous tattoos they love so much. Nothing tells the world you are a violent felon like a neck tattoo. In all of the retail stores on the edge of the ghetto, you never see whites working.

That’s the thing about poverty and the underclass. SWPL types think it is education, but it is time that keeps people in the ghetto. They have no sense of it. Middle and upper class people are obsessed with time. Being on time is an essential part of being a respectable person. The efficient use of time is how one is measured in their job. If you’re good at what you do, you get an assistant at work to help you make the most of your time. The rich have personal assistants to make sure no one wastes their time.

Like father’s day, I doubt watches are of much use in the ghetto. When you have no place to go and no reason to get there, knowing the time is pointless. People I know who hire entry level labor tell me the biggest challenge they have is figuring out how to tell ghetto types how to show up on time and work at a decent pace. That’s why they hire Latinos. They may be monkeys fucking a football without supervision, but they show up on time and at least look like they are in a hurry.

Anyway, I think that’s the dividing line in modern life. The great class line is is time preference. Conventional wisdom says the poor lack impulse control. They buy cheap crap now rather than save for better things later. They don’t understand the value of putting off today’s pleasure for something better tomorrow.

I don’t think that’s right. I think it is the lack of time preference. The middle class person understands how to comprehend the discount function, at least conceptually. The poor have no idea about any of this. A bag of weed today is just a bag of weed today. Saving for a bigger bag of weed tomorrow is inconceivable because tomorrow may as well be next century.

I’ve always thought that the Clintons would be viewed as an inflection point in the history of the nation. These vulgarians lowered the standards for just about everything in civic life. So much so that we are no longer outraged by even the most egregious acts. Obama is violating the law on an hourly basis and no one seems to care. What we ran Nixon out of office for forty years ago is now considered admirable.

This is a good example of how rot takes hold of a people.

Chelsea Clinton earned an annual salary of $600,000 at NBC News before switching to a month-to-month contract earlier this year, sources with knowledge of the agreement told POLITICO.

Clinton, who joined NBC News as a “special correspondent” in November 2011, was up for renewal or non-renewal this year. Instead, the sources said, the network decided to keep her on the payroll on a month-to-month basis so that the two parties could sever ties if Clinton’s mother, Hillary, runs for president.

Chelsea Clinton has no skills, other than a famous name and a twat. The latter is a dime a dozen in infotainment. That leaves the former and makes this nothing more than bribery. NBC gets access to Cankles as long as they pay her daughter 600 large every year.

Well, maybe not evil, but apparently they are exceptionally unpleasant. So much so their ad agency gave up the account saying “no amount of money is worth it.”

Panera Bread Co.’s lead ad agency, Cramer-Krasselt, has resigned its account after two years with Panera, saying it was “much too much even in this crazy business.”

An internal memo issued this morning by Chicago-based Cramer-Krasselt Chairman and CEO Peter Krivkovich and obtained by Advertising Age portrays a relationship between the agency and Panera that was fraught with tension.

The memo cites as reasons for ending the relationship the “constant last-minute shifts in direction, the behind-the-scenes politics, the enormous level of subjectivity that disregards proof of performance.”

Cramer-Krasselt said that “in the end, no amount of money makes it worthwhile.” However, the memo added that the agency still believes that Panera Bread is a “wonderful brand” that delivers on its food sourcing and quality promises.

“Many of us will continue to eat there. Because it’s that good,” the memo said. “But enough is enough.”

My goodness. I did not think it was possible to offend the sensibilities of ad men.

I’ve run into companies like this. They make it so hard to do business with them you eventually walk away from the account. I’ve never actually fired a customer, but I have systematically ignored them so they will go away on their own. Another trick is to raise rates so high they go looking for some other source. If they stay around you at least have the margin to make the account profitable.

I bet a whole lot of sales guys, attorneys and service providers look at this and smile a little. You dream of sticking it to that client from hell and these guys at Cramer-Krasselt got to do it in a glorious way.

A long time ago a man named Samuel T. Francis was writing for various conservative publications about Middle American Radicals. The essay in which he laid out his ideas can be found here. I don’t use Google Books much so you may have to navigate around a bit to get to the top of the essay. Sam Francis was a great thinker who has been flushed down the memory hole by the Conventional Right. Even the neo-reactionaries of the Dark Enlightenment seem to have forgotten about him, if they ever heard of him.

It is a pity.

If Sam were alive today he would be chuckling at the results of last night’s election in Virginia. Official Washington is busy interpreting the results in a way that pleases them. That’s to be expected. Inside the halls of power, the managers and technocrats hate you. They hate everything about you. Middle America has been their enemy for so long they no longer recall why. They simply know their guy was thrown out of office by the voters in favor of a guy who sounds like Pat Buchanan with a PhD. There has to be a reason that does not indicate failure on their part.

They will tell themselves all sorts of stories rather than face the truth. The reason is they cannot face the truth. The managerial class exists solely to usurp the power and authority of Middle America and the tradition values they rely upon. To accommodate those ideas means denying their right to rule over all of us. By the weekend, they will be out blaming this on racists who oppose  immigration and Tea Party bogeymen. Some of the posts in this thread give a clue as to how the Cult will respond. We also see some hints of how suicidal libertarians will react.

There’s no escaping the fact that immigration and its impact on the middle-class was the key issue. The middle-class in America, by that I mean outside the coastal hipster enclaves, has endured a long hard slog since the crash. It was not exactly good times in the Bush years. The assault on decency and basic civilization that we see from the Obama administration is looking like the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The middle is now ready to throw off their technocratic managers, regardless of party.

What we see in this race is that an articulate and intelligent candidate picked up on the issues that have been out there for over a decade now. The Tea Party tapped into some of it, but it was unmanned by the establishment crooks that attached to it. As soon as I saw Dick Army involved, I knew it was doomed. It was also plagued by the problem all insurgent movements face. It attracted fringe nuts and weirdos. Too many of them carried the Tea Party banner to prominence, thus making it easy for the Cult to disparage the movement.

The issues remain. Middle class people don’t want to see the nation flooded with South American peasants. They don’t want their jobs sent to Pakistan because Mark Zuckerburg needs a new Ferrari. They don’t want to turn on their TV and see men dressed as girls openly talking about sodomy. What ever their reservations, they don’t want to see their old church bulldozed to make way for an abortion mill. Middle America is not ready to march off to the camps as the managerial class hopes.

Brat is a normal guy who tapped into these issues and won over the establishments top guy. Enterprising pols with similar skill will take note. Democrats may be cheering, but there’s an element in their own ranks that shares the same values as the voters who tossed out Cantor. It is why Hillary Clinton plans to run in 2016 as a populist. That’s the source of the “dead broke” comments the other day. She’s working on her shtick. They may be vulgarians, but the Clintons are not stupid.

It is too soon to know what this means, but it is always good to have a reason to reminisce about the great Sam Francis.

I don’t have a strong interest in education policy. I tend to agree with John Derbyshire’s analysis of American public education. The very short version is the schools are run by an unassailable cartel and no reform is possible. Critiques from the conventional Right all miss this point, which is why they go nowhere. Reform efforts from the Left are largely based in Rousseauist nonsense and therefore doomed from the start. That leaves it a pretty dry subject as far as I’m concerned.

That’s why I could not restrain myself from commenting on this post by Nick Steves at Handle’s Haus. Steves is a sharp guy with some interesting things to say. There’s too much Moldbuggery for my taste, but that’s a topic for another day. It’s a well reasoned technocratic reform plan that has no chance of adoption. I tried to point that out, but Steves is a prickly guy and there’s little point in engaging him. I bring it up only to point out that education policy seems to make people crazy. I don’t get it, but I don’t understand the fascination with a lot of things.

The people it makes most crazy seems to be teachers. It is the one thing about education I find fascinating. Teachers are some of the most deluded people you will find in modern America. Years back I had a conversation with a gal who was fresh out of college and in her first teaching job. She was bitching about the pay and the hours. She complained about taking work home. I tried to explain to her that lots of people take work home and they work in the summer too. I also pointed out that most college grads were not making $55K per year for eight months work. I got no where, but it was not the first time I’ve have that conversation nor the last.

I thought of that when reading this post at Sailer’s new shop. (The Unz Review has become a very nice site, by the way. The unconventional and heterodox need a sugar daddy and it looks like Unz is going to be it. ) The post was actually a post from Education Realist, someone I assumed was somewhat realistic about education. Again, we see the delusions about the realities of teaching. It is a really good gig compared to most jobs. The pay is good, the benefits are outstanding, the hours are excellent and you get summers off. Yet, teachers think they have it tough.

I pointed out that the retention rates for teachers are pretty high compared to most fields. If you look at this table from the DoE, teachers just about die in their jobs. The average age is 40 and the average tenure is 14 years. That number is only going up based on demographics. Over 40% of teachers have been on the job for more than 15 years. Generous pension plans means they are not walking away for late life career changes.

What I find very weird about teachers is they see to think they lack respect. You never hear this from people in the dreaded private sector. Lawyer take more abuse than almost any profession. You never hear them bitch about it. Car sales has to be at the bottom of legitimate work and they joke about that fact. Public sector employees always worry about status and no group frets over it more than teachers. Any criticism is treated like an assault.

All of this nuttiness is most likely due to an absolute avoidance of several truths about human biology. One is that not all people are equal in IQ. The goal of making everyone above average is madness. Then you have issues of race that were’ not a lot to talk about. Sex differences are another thing we are not supposed to notice. When you exclude large chunks of reality from your bound to end up in a very weird place.

The other day Tyler had a link up to this story. I don’t think the argument has much merit. I posted my opinion on the matter which was:

Americans no longer like male leads that are men of action. They prefer the soft, sexually ambiguous beta males. Look at the number of female action heroes. It is why every male under the age of 30 is trying to look like a young George Michael. The movies reflect the tastes of the customers.

This story on Drudge tells me the under-30 set are flocking to a movie about a beta male, rather than the sci-fi action flick. This is nothing new. Cruise has seen his fortunes decline over the last decade, but he is not alone. The traditional male lead has been fading for years. Movie tough guys are long gone. Instead we get cartoon characters like Batman or Spiderman. Then you have the cartoonish guys like Hugh Jackman. Otherwise, male leads are funny self-effacing lesbians with a dick.

I did not think this was a revelation. Mark Steyn has been writing about it for a decade. What was surprising to me was some of the reaction to my comment. Justin may still be sobbing over how the mean man basically called him a pussy. Julian chimed in with a crack about my age, which I found hilarious. Two guys named Justin and Julian defending beta-male culture is why we have the expression, “truth is greater than fiction.”

Trends and fads are what they are. People live in their time and young people lack the perspective to stand outside themselves and see their time in context. They think things are the way they are because they have always been the way they are. The past is stories told by old people about a country that no longer exists. That’s the benefit of youth, but also the curse of it. That means the trendy beta males of today are only just becoming aware of the fact they look a lot like the pussies and wimps of yesteryear.

It’s why I’m skeptical about Gavin McInnes. He is building a back story to all of those ridiculous tattoos he got as a young man. “I was drunk and I thought it was fun” sounds ridiculous when you’re 50. Vague references to drugs and the criminal underworld avoids that unpleasantness.

Of course, there’s something else going on beyond silly fads. Starting in the 80′s, there has been a  campaign against the traditional white male. Boys in school were loaded up with mind altering drugs so they would be more like little girls. Male characters on TV were portrayed as stupid, foolish, emotional and helpless. On the other hand, female action heroes (hilariously) were pushed on the culture in movies. The results are what we see today.

How all this plays out is open for debate. I used to think reality would beat this nonsense out of the boys, but I’m skeptical about that now. Maybe the next generation will revolt against their parents ideas, but that assumes these beta males are reproducing. The evidence suggests Panda Man is living up to his name.

Americans no longer like male leads that are men of action. They prefer the soft, sexually ambiguous beta males. Look at the number of female action heroes. It is why every male under the age of 30 is trying to look like a young George Michael. The movies reflect the tastes of the customers. – See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/assorted-links-1149.html#comments

Americans no longer like male leads that are men of action. They prefer the soft, sexually ambiguous beta males. Look at the number of female action heroes. It is why every male under the age of 30 is trying to look like a young George Michael. The movies reflect the tastes of the customers. – See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/assorted-links-1149.html#comments

I get home the other night and in the mail box was the latest Time magazine. I’m not a subscriber. The name on the front is unfamiliar and the address is not even close to mine. I did not think about it until throwing some crap away last night. Almost all of my mail is junk these days. My bills come via the miracle of the Internet. No one sends letters anymore. That leaves a few magazines and mountains of junk mail. I pile it up and when the spirit moves I sort through it.

The Time website is unnavigable so I can’t link the cover or even find it. This article from the LATimes has a pic of the cover. I would not have bothered to look at it if not the obvious fact the person on the cover is a tranny and the word “transgender” on the front. I no longer watch television so I’m going to guess that they are starting to fill up the roles with trannies, much like they filled up shows with flaming homosexual men a few years ago. One night of TV and you see more homosexual males than you meet in lifetime.

I’ve seen exactly three trannies in my life. One was a very tall and muscular black guy that frequented a coffee shop near my office. He was at least 6’5″ in heels and built like a linebacker. Everyone would freak out seeing this giant black dude in drag so that was always good for a few laughs. The other two were in Key West. I was walking around and passed by a tranny club of some sort. Two of them dressed as Marilyn Monroe were manning the door, so to speak. I’ve been on earth a long time and seen a lot of things. If I’ve met three trannies, I’m thinking the numbers are microscopic in terms of population.

That said, the tranny has become the dividing line between two groups of people. One the one hand we have liberal white people who engage in all sorts of magical thinking about the world, including things like biology and physics. They think someone can change their sex if they choose to do it. They think evolution stopped 50,000 years ago and that all humans are exactly the same. They think putting a dumb person in school long enough will make them smart. These things not only contradict accepted science, they contradict objective reality. They disbelieve and curse their lying eyes.

On the other side of the line is another group of believers. These folks believe in conventional religions, nationalism, fraternity and so forth. In the case of religion, they accept it may contradict science, but not in important ways that alter the functioning of society. In the case of nationalism, they know there’s no good reason to feel the way they do when the national anthem is played, but they accept it and relish it. In other words, these folks believe in things because they appear to make life more pleasant, their societies more successful and the future more palatable.

That would be the end of it if the first group of people did not hold the second group in such contempt that they wanted to kill them. The magical thinking crowd has not committed to the actual killing of the latter group, but they do want to kill all the stuff they believe. They want to stamp out Christianity, love of country and all of the things normal people think are important.

The great battle between these two camps of believers is what shapes our times. The fact that the fault line is the waist line will one day be great fodder for a wise cracking historian. The first group’s sudden embrace of deranged men in drag is based solely on the belief that the second group find this disgusting. If Evangelicals were to embrace homosexual marriage and drag queens, the first group of whites would make unholy war on gays and trannies.

The trouble for the “normals”, as I call the second group, is they keep hoping the fanatics, as I call the first group, will relent. They will never relent. The fanatics will continue to attack the normals until the normals are all dead. Then the fanatics will attack other groups of fanatics they deem insufficiently fanatical. This will repeat itself until the whole thing collapses on itself.

Maybe at some point normals will come to recognize this and join the fight. I don’t know. In my lifetime it has not happened or shown many signs of happening. In the 1980′s it looked like the nation finally snapped out of it and was ready to shrug off Cultural Marxism, but it was not the case. The fanatics were back in force by the 1990′s and every white guy was being marched off to diversity camp for re-education.

The smart bet in the Tranny Wars is on bearded weirdos demanding and winning the right to take your sons into the woods unsupervised as camp counselors.