Author Archives: thezman

The Mysteries Of The Collapse

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While I was in Europe, the world celebrated the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the financial house at the center of the mortgage meltdown. Like everyone, the fact that it has been ten years since the world teetered on the edge of the abyss slipped my mind. It is important though, to think back on the last decade, since many economists and analysts still think it was a near-death experience for the world. Danish television was playing the movie The Big Short, which was based on the great Michael Lewis book.

As to the crisis itself, a few things remain remarkably obscure. One is that the best minds on this stuff still cannot bring themselves to notice the biological element. Blacks and Hispanics were wildly over-represented in the default numbers. The only analysts and commentators, outside of those on this side of the divide, to notice this fact, do so in order to “debunk” it. These are the folks who run around making sure everyone in the human sciences says “race is a social construct” five times a day while facing Frankfurt.

The other mystery is that the so-called experts still have not explained how the sub-prime mortgage bubble formed, why it went unnoticed and what happened in the after math. Even a decade on, it is hard to get reliable numbers on the quantity of mortgages that constituted the bad paper. The only thing that the experts agree upon is that the lowering of lending standards created a speculative bubble. The result was a wave of over-lending and over-building, that led to the great mortgage bubble which burst a decade ago.

Currently, the druids from the grand economic council claim that eight million people lost their jobs as a result of the recession that followed the collapse. That seems small, given that the labor force is roughly 160 million. That means unemployment would have gone from about four percent to just under ten percent. That’s the official line from the druids in the academy, but it certainly does not fit with the narrative about this being a near-death experience for the economy. Those numbers suggest a fairly common recession.

Another part of the official narrative is that super-smart druids from the academy rushed in and saved the world from ruin. That’s an interesting aspect of this story. Economists all believe that the Great Depression could have been thwarted, and as a result the events that followed could have been avoided, if central banks had expanded the money supply in response to the crash of ’29. Therefore, the reason this crash did not result in world war and the rise of you-know-who was the central banks expanded the money supply.

Another number that was presented at the end of the film was that the collapse resulted in six million foreclosures. This number is hard to judge, other than the presence of the mystical number six. There’s no question that lots of people lost their homes. It’s also true that lots of connected people cashed in on this by quietly investing in house flipping operations that preyed on the vulnerable. I recall being in Las Vegas sometime after the crash and thinking that the only guy getting rich was the guy selling “For Sale” signs.

Of course, the inability to figure out the details of what was billed as the greatest economic event in world history since the crash of 1929, may have something to do with who was responsible. In a world run by bankers of a certain sort, it is probably a bad idea to point out that the bankers were responsible for destroying the economy. The economists start from the assumption that the failure was not systemic and not deliberate. They seem to view it as a weird accident like leaving the coffee pot on before leaving for work.

It’s like the bias toward normal distributions that Nicholas Taleb discusses in his book, The Black Swan. This blind spot for various aspects of the crash is not the result of some complex conspiracy. Economists are not sitting around plotting to obscure the facts from the public. They simply start from a set of assumptions that rule out things like a cultural bias that manifests as a systemic bias. They can only think systemically within the accepted parameters of the system itself. That means ignoring lots of possible answers.

Like the Great Depression, the mortgage collapse of 2008 has created a specialty of study within the field of economics. PhD’s in economics will be based in this event for generations, assuming the we make it that long. Each book and paper will fill in a bit of the official narrative until the only people questioning it will be cranks and oddballs. This is how religions evolve. As long as the disaster is not repeated again in the near term, the ambitious will be happy to go along with the conventional wisdom.

Another part of the official narrative is what is assiduously excluded from the official narrative. For example, the fact that no one was held accountable for the disaster. Take, for example, Franklin Raines, the head of Fannie Mae. He walked away with millions, never having to answer for his crimes. Angelo Mozilo, the guy in charge of Countrywide Financial, was allowed to avoid acknowledgment of wrongdoing and criminal charges, by paying a relatively small fine to the SEC. He retired a gazillionaire.

Just as important, as Steve Sailer likes to point out, no one even mentions that the Bush Crime Family was largely responsible for the sub-prime loan disaster. It was the Bush administration that pushed banks to drop their lending standards as a part of the “ownership society” campaign and the desire to buy votes from migrants. In fact, the political class emerged unscathed from the disaster. If anything, the catastrophe that was the Bush administration strengthened the managerial state’s stranglehold on society.

Here’s where you see the race obscurantism warp official reality. To focus on the wrongdoings of the Bush people, would require acknowledging some unpleasant realities about diversity. For example, default rates for blacks and Hispanics were three and four times the rate for whites. Similarly, the people targeting these groups with bogus loans were doing so because they knew they were not savvy enough to understand what was happening to them. That opens doors that must remain bolted closed in this age.

My own view on this, to wrap up the post, is that the financial system is built on the biases of the people who control it. A system designed by people who keep a bug-out bag next to their desk, and leave their car running in the parking lot, is never going to incorporate long term risk. Ours is a parasitic system that is designed to drain the blood from the American middle-class. The patches and remedies to keep it going are just that, quick fixes to keep the blood flowing. Eventually, the host will die and the bankers will move on.

The College Collapse

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Back when National Review first allowed comments on their posts, they would post all sorts of things in their group blog. Readers would respond to all of it. For example, when they were looking for a receptionist, they posted the job on the blog. Hilariously, one of the requirements was a four-year degree. Why anyone with a college degree would take a receptionist job was a mystery, but an even bigger mystery was why National Review would require it. The comments on it were the best things posted that week.

Of course, Rich Lowry was not really thinking about the requirements of the job when he posted it. What he wanted was someone from his world, the world where everyone goes off to college and sends their kids off to college. In other words, he was signalling to potential applicants that he did not want Rosie from the neighborhood, who likes to file her nails while on the phone. Instead, he wanted a young white girl fresh out of college, who just needed a job while she sorted out what she was going to do with her life.

That is, in many ways, what a college degree has become since the 60’s. It tells potential employers things about yourself that they could never ask and that would never show up on the CV. For example, if you went to a private college, it means you most likely were raised in an upper middle-class family. If you went to the satellite campus of the state university, it probably means you came from the lower ranks and you were not a great student. These are the sort of subtle clues that are reflected in the education section.

Of course, attending an elite university is the big flashing neon sign on a person’s resume, which is why entrance is super-competitive. It’s also why it is not difficult to graduate from one of these colleges. The graduation rates at these colleges are near 100%, even for athletes. Compare that to Ranger School, where 60% fail the first time. Yet, if you have the former on your CV, it counts for more than if you have the latter. The people hiring for elite positions care much more about what the former says about the applicant.

This is why a few years ago the elites started to panic over the influx of foreign students into elite colleges. The competition for these slots was already tough. Having to compete with the children of foreign ruling classes would make the process even more difficult for the children of Cloud People. Of course, this is why Harvard, and most likely the other elite colleges, discriminate against Asians. The elite is for whites and Jews, with a sprinkling of diversity to spice it up to allow the elite to pretend they like diversity.

This “problem” with the elite colleges has been an excuse for the ConservoCons to shriek “hypocrite” at their Progressive masters, but it is actually a good thing that the people in charge are fine with racial discrimination. At the minimum, it suggests they still have the will to survive. It also reminds us that they are not bound by their own rules when defending their privileges. No ruling class in human history has peacefully agreed to step aside based on the logic of their own rules. They always have to be removed by force.

At the other end of the spectrum, colleges that serve the hoi polloi have been struggling with a different set of problems. A diploma from State U is about practical things like getting a job and bargaining for a salary. In fact, it really only matters for the first decade after graduation. After that, the work history is what counts. The great bust-out that is the American public college system has reached a terminus and enrollments are now starting to drop, as people figure out the return is not always worth the investment.

As a result, the public universities in America are slowly beginning to change. One remedy has been to import foreign students, who will pay full rate. This actually started with small private colleges like Boston University in the 1980’s. They figured out that Japanese kids would come to Boston, pay tuition in cash, as long as they were not required to study too hard. For state colleges, there is the added benefit of being able to charge full rate, rather than the discounted rate for in-state students. That and it counts for diversity points.

Of course, like every business fighting a revenue drop, cost cutting is on the table. In America, much of college is just an extension of high school. Look at the requirements of college fifty years ago and compare them to now. Then there are the frivolous things like gender studies or communication arts. Pretty much everything in the core curriculum of a modern college should be tackled in high school. The rest should be discarded. That’s why we see colleges dropping large chunks of their current offerings.

There is something else going on that speaks to the larger issues looming over the North American Economic Zone. Members of the High Moral Council are starting to drop the college requirement for new hires. What this tells us is the elite are beginning to set fire to the bridges over the river that separates them from us. The positions in the Cloud will require passing through one of the monasteries to be properly vetted. In the future, the Dirt People will have to sort out their status system within their favelas.

It also opens the door to further polluting the standards that reflect biological reality. By dropping the college requirement, the companies are free to hire the black over the white, the female over the male. After all, without anything close to an objective standard, the latest moral fads handed down from on high are the default filter. It also makes the diversity tax explicit. Companies will be expected to hit their vibrancy quotas, because they will not have the excuse that they cannot find qualified non-white candidates.

Open the Door

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On the way back from Europe, there was a woman on the plane, who embodied pretty much all that had gone wrong with women in the West. She was 30-ish and as we were boarding, she found that the overhead bins were full in the front. She had no place to put her three carry-on items. Of course, if she had been more punctual, this would not have been a problem, but there she was in the aisle, throwing a tantrum, demanding the cabin crew rush to her aid. She managed to hold up the boarding process for ten minutes.

I was struck by the sense of entitlement. It was not because she was a beautiful women who knew all men desire her either. She was quite plain. Further, the women who work for Wow airlines are stunningly gorgeous. More important, they like being women that are stunningly gorgeous. To be blunt about it, the contrast between the beautiful Icelandic women and this American feminist underscored the fact that feminism is about dining out on appetizer looks. It’s bland women demanding unearned attention from men.

Watching this unfold in front of me, I started to think a big part of what makes American women so unpleasant now is that they are haunted by this reality. Not so much that they are average looking, but that they know the feminist lunacy in their heads is not true and that the old realities of sex roles are forever realities. If they were polite and decent, minding their own business as feminists, no one would pay any attention to them. The result would be a class of barren spinsters that live on the local university campus.

At least with nuns, they have their faith in God and whatever else happens in the nunnery, to give them purpose in their lives. There is an upfront acceptance of their separation from the normal life of mankind. The nun stops being a woman in the conventional sense, so she stops expecting to be treated as a woman. As a result, most nuns I have met are stern about their duties, but otherwise pleasant people. It is a role for them that has well defined rules that addresses the sexual, as well as the social dynamics of life.

Feminists are always in the center of a great mental conflict between what they wish were true about the world and the ongoing reality around them. The woman in the aisle, while surrounded by shield maidens of the first order, was a rage of internal conflict. Her eyes kept darting around the cabin, as she was clearly uncomfortable. The feminist sense of entitlement forced her to make demands on everyone, while her biological instinct was to look for a man to come her rescue. Instead, she was rescued by women from the past.

The irrationality of the feminist, the tantrum aspect to it, cannot be discussed in the mass media, but that is the weak point of it. Feminism is, in many ways, someone choosing to live in the backyard, rather than the house, because they are nursing a grudge against the person who made the house for them. Instead of being good at the thing they can be good at, like being a wife and mother, they choose to be terrible at something no one wants and no society has ever needed. Feminism is the wrath of the unloved and unwanted woman.

That really is the shame of it. I’ve trod this earth for a long time and I have yet to hear a man say, “The trouble is we have too many good women from which to choose.” No man thinks there is a glut of good mothers or women who make excellent wives. It is the complete opposite. Most men lament the dire shortage of women they would want to have as a wife or the mother of his children. This is something men of my generation have been discussing our entire adult lives. It’s why so many of us are unmarried or never married.

Men have adapted to this state of affairs, by developing a taste for Asian women. In my recent travels, I spotted probably a dozen American men with East Asian women. In baggage claim, the entitled feminist was standing across from such a couple. He was a millennial and his wife looked like the typical second generation East Asian female. Our feminist hero was glaring at them for the longest time. At the risk of being accused of sexual assault, I searched our feminist hero’s face, looking for the lights to come on.

All of this reminds me of something I’ve noticed when dealing with feminist women. The best thing is to dominate them. It is not only the best approach in the moment, but it opens a door for them to escape the torment of modernity. In the company of feminists, I often begin talking about repealing the 19th Amendment. I’m polite, but firm. The results are always positive. The reason is, modern women, like our feminist hero, are living lives of bitter isolation, an isolation from who they are as women. They are looking to escape it.

That’s why men should always open the door for women.

Denmark Diary III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denmark Diary II

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The whole point of this trip was to attend the Scandza Forum, which is a series of conferences organized by someone calling himself Frodi Midjord. He is originally from the Faroe Islands, but he now lives in Norway. Greg Johnson spoke at the previous events and he suggested I should attend if possible. For those interested in knowing more about Frodi, should listen to this excellent interview he did with Counter-Currents. He is an interesting guy and I’ll have more on him later, but the interview is a good start.

The event started around noon. The location was near to where I was staying, so I grabbed a taxi from the hotel for the short trip. I recognized that the driver was Afghani right away. He was listening to a sermon in Pashto. He was surprised I knew he was from Afghanistan so we struck up a conversation. His first question was about Trump and the Middle East. Having been around these guys enough, I pivoted on that to talk about how Trump needs to get the troops out of the “graveyard of empires.”

He was pleased that I knew this about his country. Everyone loves flattery, even when it comes from the infidel. He then wanted to know if the Jews would force Trump to go to war with Russia. I got the sense he was very interested in the end times. He said that in the end, Jesus and Mohamed would return together. Admittedly, I’m not up on all the strains of Islam, so that puzzled me, but his obsession with the end times was what concentrated my mind. Our rulers don’t have a clue about who they are importing…

The event was like the others I have attended over the last couple of years. The crowd was young. The median age was around 30. There were some grey beards in the audience, but there were a surprising number of students. Frodi Midjord, the guy who organizes these things, is very charismatic. He’s a working class guy, at least in his sensibilities, but he is well read and has an appreciation for learning. I think that is why he is building up a following. He’s easy to like and even easier to respect.

During the Q&A, Frodi took the opportunity to make a point that I don’t think gets made enough. What he said was that one crazy person in your movement can chase off hundreds of normal people. Therefore, the top duty of any political or cultural movement is to guard against being associated with crazies. This seems obvious to me, but our side of the great divide has struggled to get this right. The endless purges from the Buckley Right has somehow made policing the ranks, at least on our side, a taboos subject…

Tiina Wiik is even more beautiful in person than on YouTube…

A funny thing that struck me is just how far ahead the Euros we are with regards to identity politics. Jared Taylor made the point that normally, the more you do something, the better you are at it. Americans have been dealing with a multi-racial society since the beginning and we just seem to get dumber at it. The Euros got a good look at multiculturalism and immediately started forming a political opposition. We’re not even allowed to talk in public about these issues, much less campaign on immigration moratoriums and repatriation.

I think one reason for this is that Europeans have been dealing with tribalism for a very long time. Just because the tribes are all white does not change the fact that the history of Europe is the history of tribes jostling for space. There’s also the fact that the space in which European national identities developed was a finite space. America was founded with a frontier culture. If you don’t like things where you are, just move. This mobile character of Americans means we feel like we have less skin in the local game.

There’s also the fact that tribalism among whites in America has always been spiritual, rather than ethnic. Northern whites come from a public Protestant tradition, the Southern whites come from a private Protestant tradition. Then you have the old Roundhead versus Cavalier issue that has defined our white identity. Compounding it, of course, has been the moral dimension of black-white relations since the middle of last century. The Europeans don’t have the sack cloth and ashes of slavery draped over ever public discussion…

In his talk, Greg Johnson made a subtle but important point that really needs to be used more often on our side. That is, the Holocaust is a great example of where diversity and multiculturalism can lead. When a majority population feels threatened, it can and will turn on minority populations. Put another way, the Holocaust could not have happened without a foreign population living in the heart of Europe. It could not have happened if there had been a country, or even a province, the Jews could call their homeland…

Jared Taylor pointed out that whites must be gods, because we just have to think about non-whites and it causes non-whites to harm their own interests. When you think about it, that’s the argument behind the claims of “whiteness” being the cause of all social strife in America. Whites just need to show up and their whiteness radiates off them, causing non-whites to go bonkers and ruin themselves. Whitey shows up and blacks start committing crimes and destroying their neighborhoods. Mighty whitey indeed…

The thing you always see at fringe political events are books. In the old days when I had nothing to do I’d go to commie events at the local university. There were always people selling books. At lefty events today it is women sharing their lived experience as some bespoke weirdo or maybe talking about their autoethnographic research into how they felt sad over a TV show. At dissident events, the tables are full of books, old and new, on all sorts of topics. No tackle-faced harpies screeching about their feelings…

Scandinavian women are haunted by rape fantasies…

Finally, there is a great shadow that hangs over Europe. That shadow is the American colossus. Much of what bedevils Europe is lunacy hatched in America and exported to the Europeans. They certainly make it their own, as we see with the feminization of Scandinavia, but America is the creator of this great threat to the West and European people everywhere. Even though they know this, they still look to use for the tools and language to fight the plague. It makes our fight even more important…

Denmark Diary I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Social Contract

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This week I’m coming to you live from Copenhagen Denmark. Well, not live exactly. The show is recorded, as usual. I’m posting this from Denmark and as far as I know, I am very much alive. I’ve never been to Copenhagen, so I’m looking forward to some exploring, but I suspect I know the reason this is not a tourist hot spot. So far, the city seems rather plain, a lot like a Midwestern American city. There is nothing wrong with plain, but tourists want a hopping city center, real or manufactured, painted with the local culture.

The one thing I have noticed is that this is hipster hell. I feel like I’m in Portland. Every male has a skinny jeans, bespoke facial hair and noticeable ink. Now, this may be true everywhere young white males congregate. I live in Lagos, so I don’t see many hipsters or white people. Of course, I have yet to see a black person walking around here. I did see some Muslims and at the airport I swore they had Hispanics working the maintenance jobs. Maybe they import Spanish or Italians. Maybe Mexicans are great swimmers.

Since I’m here doing some big brain stuff, the show this week will be a big brained show, getting into political philosophy. For those with the small or medium brains, you may want to break out the brain oil before listening. One thing missing on our side of the great divide is anything resembling original thinking about politics. It’s either criticism of the mainstream options or romanticism for long gone models. That’s not going to cut it, so I’m going to be doing more stuff on alternative politics and alternative political philosophy.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android 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. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Socrates
  • 07:00: Hobbes & Locke
  • 17:00: Rousseau
  • 27:00: John Rawls
  • 37:00: The Sexual Contract
  • 47:00: The Biological Contract
  • 57:00: Closing

Direct Download

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Conspiracy Theories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People will believe anything and doubt everything.

The Knock At The Door

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I used to tell people all the time that if you have a chance to listen to Greg Cochran speak, you should take it, as he is probably the smartest person you will ever hear. Cochran has excelled in two fields, physics and anthropology. The former requires a very big brain in order to gain entry. In the case of anthropology, many of the people in the field are crazy or sociopaths. To be an exception and contribute to the stock of human knowledge, requires a rare combination of curiosity and blinkered indifference to social pressure.

Cochran has contributed three very important ideas that may not be correct, but they open up new avenues to understanding human evolution and biological diversity. In the book The 10,000 Year Explosion, he and his partner, the late Henry Harpending, explained how agriculture and human settlement accelerated human evolution. This explains local differences in skin color, eye color, hair texture disease resistance and other genetic differences in human populations. It also explains personality and cognitive differences.

Another idea, one that has received less positive press, is Cochran’s theory that homosexuality must be caused by something outside of evolution. For example, a pathogen that sets off a chain of events in the womb resulting in the child being a homosexual. Cochran points out that the observed level of exclusive homosexuality means genes cannot be the cause of homosexuality.The fitness cost of genes ‘for’ homosexuality being too great. Natural selection would have eliminated the gene.

His “gay germ” idea is controversial and it could be completely wrong, at least in the case of homosexuality. It’s utility is really in how it changes thinking about human disease and the treatment of those diseases. Take something like Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers have spent decades laboring under the assumption it is genetic, but have had little success in finding any proof. Well, what if the cause is something like a pathogen that sets of the process in the brain? What if cardiovascular disease is caused by pathogens?

That’s a huge and controversial idea, but it probably is not the one that most scandalizes the moral authorities. Cochran is most infamous for his work on Ashkenazi IQ. A dozen years ago, he and his partner Henry Harpending published The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence. In it they argue that Ashkenazi ████inherit higher verbal and mathematical intelligence than other ethnic groups, on the basis of inherited diseases and the peculiar economic situation of Ashkenazi ████in the Middle Ages.

The paper is controversial for three reasons. One is the heretical idea that IQ is a real thing that can be measured. Worse yet, they claim intelligence is heritable, which means it is largely immutable. Smart parents have smart kids. Both ideas are against everything we believe and probably a direct threat to our democracy. It’s not who we are. Only very bad people think that human diversity is the result of biology. Everyone knows that racism is the cause of all the bad differences, while diversity is the cause of the good differences.

That’s bad enough, but the most outrageous aspect of the paper is that it focuses on the special people and that’s not allowed. Even mentioning them in a direct way is justifiably forbidden now. After all, the Nazis started noticing these people, talking about their “group differences” and before long the Holocaust! The fact that racists and white supremacists often reference this paper is proof enough that it should be banned, the authors forced to confess and then they should be hurled into the void as a lesson to others.

If further proof is needed, this post on Greg Cochran’s blog should be enough. The post itself is just one sentence long, but in the nearly 200 comments, Cochran counter signals Holocaust skeptics so hard he probably sprained something while banging away at the keyboard. Clearly, it is the sign of a guilty conscience. At the minimum, it suggests he is worried that the morality police will be coming for him soon. He hopes that his outburst can be presented at his trial and he will be given a reprieve. Good luck with that pal.

All joking aside, the post and the comments are a hilarious bit of Boomer posting. Ron Unz is an eccentric guy and he is prone to conspiracy theories. It’s hard to know how much he believes them. He could just find them intellectually titillating, like reading a very clever crime novel.  I get the sense that he is fascinated by the fact there is an official narrative and it is ruthlessly enforced. Almost all Americans struggle with the bit of reality. Either way, the worst you should say about Ron Unz is that he is a harmless weirdo.

Casual indifference is never allowed in a theocracy, at least with regards to the moral codes. You are either enthusiastically on the right side of the question or you are an enemy of the faith. There can be no middle ground. Maybe Cochran is worried that the authorities will be coming for him soon, so he is hoping to inoculate himself against charge of insufficient signalling against antisemitism. Like a lot of Boomers, he still thinks we live in a rule based society and that you can appeal to reason when defending yourself.

He would deny this and probably threaten to punch me in the nose for suggesting it, but false consciousness is common with many old white men. Just look at the comment thread in that post. Why are people in 2018 so worked up about something that happened 80 years ago in a foreign country? The cultural and ideological processes of the neo-liberal age blind people to their own motivations. You can be sure that the people commenting on that post felt great about it, but they never bothered to wonder why.

All that aside, they will be coming for Greg Cochran soon enough. If he is lucky, the non-binary, gender non-specific persons of uterus from the campus committee on inclusion will only require him to wear a dunce cap on campus. Maybe they will make him recant what he said about Cordelia Fine, peace be upon her. It’s only a matter of time and appeals to reason will have no impact, because we live in an unreasonable age, ruled by ridiculous people. One day, there will be a knock on the door and they will have come for Cochran.

The Black Death

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Way back when I still had a cable sub and still watched television, I was watching an episode of Red Eye, the late night Fox News show, and the topic was crime. One of the guests was a black libertarian, who said something along the lines of, “In order to have a sensible discussion about crime, the first thing we have to do is put aside the issue of race.” All of the nice white people on the panel fell all over themselves agreeing with the black, of course, mostly because they were grateful that he let them off the hook.

My recollection of my own reaction was to wonder why they would bother talking about crime at all, if they are not going to consider the primary element. After all, net out black crime from the statistics and crime is not an issue we bother discussing. Sure, Hispanic crime rates are significantly higher than white crime rates, but they pale in comparison to black crime figures. The only people worried about white crime are white liberals, who like to tell each other scary stories around the fire pit about their trip to Walmart.

People on our side of the great divide tend to think the people in charge deliberately obfuscate on the race issue, because of nefarious motives. It’s tempting and there is no doubt that we are ruled by sociopaths, who enjoy lying to us about everything, not just crime. Still, a lot of people have simply lost the ability to talk about race. They have become so fearful of the issue that it has taken on magical qualities. Just as Jews are prohibited from speaking the name of God, most white people fear saying “black.”

This weird New York Times op-ed reminds me of that.

When they staged a “die-in” at Stroger Hospital in Chicago earlier this year, Delmonte Johnson and his friends — who together formed GoodKids MadCity, a group dedicated to ending violence in urban communities — had a straightforward request. They wanted what their wealthier, whiter, more suburban peers already seemed to have: freedom from the oppressive fear of being gunned down in their own neighborhoods.

Mr. Johnson, a 19-year-old who loved to sing and dance, who was an athlete and a budding social activist, will not get to see that vision realized. He was shot and killed Wednesday after playing basketball near his home.Mr. Johnson’s death was tragic and unnecessary and enraging. It was also the sort of death that’s become far too common in America, and in particular in Mr. Johnson’s hometown, where more than 2,000 people have been shot so far this year, nearly 400 of them fatally. While mass shootings involving high-powered guns and high death tolls have claimed an outsize portion of the nation’s collective grief — and its headlines — street shootings like the one that killed Delmonte Johnson are far more common.Mr. Johnson, who lost several of his own friends to gun violence, knew that fact all too well. His own advocacy emerged in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in February with the hope that some of the attention captured by that massacre might be cast toward communities like his — communities that are underserved, overlooked and routinely plagued by gun violence. “We have been screaming for gun control for the longest time,” says Carlil Pittman, a friend of Mr. Johnson’s who co-founded GoodKids MadCity. “But it’s not until it hits other communities that people pay attention. And then they respond with harsher laws that criminalize black and brown kids.”

As everyone knows, guns stalk the streets of our city. For some reason, the government just let guns walk in over the border, unmolested. In fact, they have programs to help guns come in to the country and gain residency. It’s as if the government wants guns to come here and kill people of color. If you did not know better, you would think that the people in charge of government care more about guns than American citizens. When will people wake up and realize that we need a big wall on the border to keep guns out of the country?

All kidding aside, you have to wonder how it is even possible to write about “gun violence” with a straight face. To a sober minded person, it seems impossible for anyone to believe such nonsense. That’s why so many in 2A community think it is deliberate and well considered lie. A multi-generational conspiracy sounds more plausible than people thinking guns magically cause black people to shoot one another. Sadly, that is what the people who write this stuff think. They think blacks are compelled to violence by guns.

The murder problem in Chicago is a problem easily understood with a bit of math and a little bit of race realism. Put a lot of black people in an area and they will start shooting at each other. Chicago has a lot of black people, so it has a lot of murders. The city is roughly 32% black, 32% white and the rest Hispanic, Asian and a mystery. Of the 405 homicides this year, as of this writing, 330 of the victims have been black. Just 26 have been white. Just 48 have been Hispanic, who are over 25% of the population.

Now, it is possible that there are gangs of white supremacists roaming the streets killing black people in all black neighborhoods. It’s possible that these white supremacists are so skilled that no one has ever seen them. It’s also possible that a gang of leprechauns are terrorizing the black neighborhoods. All things are possible if you wish hard enough, but the most probable answer here is that the victim rates reflect the crime rate. That is, 75% of the crime is being committed by 30% of the population, the black population.

Again, sober minded people understand this. The trouble is, we are not ruled by sober minded people, at least with regards to race. They really do believe that race is a social construct and that astronomical black crimes rates are a symptom of social inequality, racism and poverty. Rather than Old Scratch tempting the villagers into sin, there is now this mystery force called “whiteness” that is like swamp gas, rising from the America’s long racist past. In other words, black crime is a spiritual problem, not a practical one.