Author Archives: thezman

Profile & Reality

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The great gaslighting operation called the Harris campaign is just the latest in this evolution of the public space away from practical reality toward a virtual reality that operates by a new set of rules. The old public space which was constrained by observable facts and agreed upon ends is giving way to a new public space that is controlled by narratives and characters.

This interview of Mike Cernovich by Tucker Carlson is a good example of how the public space has changed. Ten years ago, people would have roared with laughter at the suggestion that Cerno would warrant national attention. He was nothing more than a weird internet character. Of course, Tucker Carlson was not “Tucker” at the time either and no one imagined such a thing was possible.

The character that is now “Tucker” did not ask “Cernovich” about the many past characters he has played online. There were no questions about when Cerno was playing a transvestite-curious man in Southeast Asia. His time as various types of gurus never came up in the conversation. “Tucker” was happy to interview the character “Cernovich” that exists at this moment.

What we see happening is that people are now going back into Plato’s cave, demanding to be strapped to the rocks, so they can enjoy the life of the shadows, but play some part in creating the shadows. Public life is becoming an interactive fictional drama that is disconnected from tangible reality. It is not just a distraction from the reality of life but supplanting that reality.

That is the show this week. Before you strap in, you may want to double up on the brain oil as there are some big brain topics in the show. The links below are worth the time as the philosopher I reference does a good job explaining his take on this subject. He has coined the term “prolificity”, which I like, but I am not entirely sure if it captures the full nature of what is happening to the West.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Introduction
  • The End Of Authenticity
  • Prolificity (Link) (Link)
  • The Break With Reality
  • Emotivism
  • Symbolism
  • Reality Persists

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

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Baseball

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Watch an American baseball game and the thing you quickly notice, especially if it has been a while since you bothered, is that the game is riddled with interruptions to the point where it feels like more stoppage than gameplay. Baseball was always a leisurely game that evolved for a people who had long attention spans, so it is a poor fit for the modern American with their low IQ’s and high time preference, but it is also made unwatchable by the constant stoppages.

The league has tried to address the problem by speeding up the gameplay with a pitch clock that gives pitchers 30 seconds between at-bats, 15 seconds between pitches with no one on base, and 20 seconds between pitches with runners on base. According to major league baseball, this has resulted in a 24-minute decrease in the total length of the game compared to the 2022 season. The average length of a game is now two hours and 40 minutes.

That is fine, but it does not change the fact that the number of breaks in play has not changed much and is probably a little worse. The reason for the breaks is the specialization in the game. The days of nine guys playing nine guys are long gone, as now teams employ specialists who enter the game at various points, which slows the game play down. Specialization is the result of quantitative revolution that has happened in all sports, but especially baseball.

Baseball used to be a game run by men who wanted to put on a show for fans and build hometown pride. The owners of baseball teams were local rich guys who not only wanted to make money off the game but took some pride in their local community and wanted their team to win. They hired people to run their teams who had played the game and presumably knew what it took to win. Those guys found and developed players who had the skills to play the game.

That started to change with the growth of advanced statistics. Baseball was always a game of numbers, like batting average, earned run average and other measures of a player’s success in his role. Advanced statistics took that a step further and used quantitative measures to predict the impact of players on winning games, based on measures like on-base-percentage and wins above replacement. These new measures not only determine rosters, but they also determine gameplay.

That is why we get so many breaks in the game. After every at bat, both teams basically re-crunch the numbers to determine what they should do next. That may mean pulling the pitcher who has been on a roll to this point or pinch hitting for a guy who has had a monster game thus far. We now have scenarios in which a pitcher is pulled from a game while throwing a no-hitter. The numbers say he has reached his pitch limit, and the reliever has a better chance against the rest of the lineup.

You can see how this works by looking at the roster of the current best team in baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, and the roster of the 1970 Oriole team that went on to win the World Series that year. The first thing you will note is that the 1970 squad used a total of thirty-two players for the entire season. The current year Orioles have already used fifty-four players and will use many more once rosters expand in September. Baseball is now a game of roster rotisserie.

Another thing you will note is that the best starting pitchers on the current team will not reach 200-innings this year. Most likely, they will rest their best pitcher down the stretch so he will finish the regular season with around 175-innings. On the 1970s team, three pitchers pitched 300-innings. More shocking is the fact that the 1970 pitching staff had sixty complete games, while the current staff has none. Last year there were a total of 34 complete games in all of baseball.

The stat guys will tell you that the use of advanced statistics makes for a more competitive game by removing chance from the equation. People with a soul will tell you that the stat guys should be sent to a labor camp. No one watches any sporting event to see the stat guys show off their latest number crunching. Sport is human drama with all of the flaws that come with it. Removing the flaws inevitably removes the humanity from it and you are left with robots playing robots

The reason everyone who was aware in 1988 remembers Kirk Gibson hitting the homerun off Dennis Eckersley in the World Series is because it is the thing every kid who played baseball dreamed of doing. It is a scene every father taking his son to a game hopes they will see.  The aging slugger called in to face off against the game’s best closer in the deciding moment. The old man mustering what little he has left to stroke one last home run to win the game.

If the modern stat head had been in charge, that moment never would have happened because Gibson would not be on the team, much less sent up to bat. Tommy Lasorda would not have been in the dugout to make the call. Instead, the robot manager would have sent up a specialist whose only role was to face Eckersley. Maybe the Dodgers win anyway, but no one would remember it because there would be no reason to remember what in the end was a statistical anomaly.

The reason that any of this matters is that baseball is a microcosm of American life in that society, like baseball, is now run by people who have no appreciation for the things that make life worth living. Instead, they view people as mere economic units or perhaps items to manipulate in the transactional world of managerialism. Society has been drained of its authenticity and in its place is the drab materialism in the meat space and the superficial drama of the virtual space.

The answer to fixing baseball and other sports is to open the windows of the skyboxes where the stat guys run the game and throw them out of those windows. Let the players play the fans enjoy the human drama. Similarly, the answer to what ails the modern world is to throw the managers off the roof of their offices and let people go back to figuring out how to live. The results may not make for an impressive pivot table, but no one should live inside a pivot table anyway.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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

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

An Old Story

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For a little over a year, it has been clear to people who have followed the war in Ukraine that there is no winning scenario for Ukraine. The sanctions on Russia failed to change the Russian approach to the war. The hundreds of billions in NATO weapons, planning and support were not enough to beat back the Russian army. The great Ukraine offensive of 2023 was a stunning failure that eliminated any possibility of the Ukraine army holding the line in the Donbass.

The question has been how does the war end. For Ukraine, the best outcome is a negotiated settlement that includes a change in Ukrainian attitudes. Maybe NATO abandons the project and the Russians install new leaders. Maybe Zelensky figures out that he is about to be cut loose and cuts a deal with the Russians. Maybe Washington, hoping to save face, backs Zelensky in making a deal with the Russians. No matter how, the best option for Ukraine was a negotiated settlement.

That appears to be off the table now that the Ukrainians have launched this crazy incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. It appears that the plan was to reach the nuclear power plant in Kursk and then use it as blackmail. The Ukrainians would not just demand negotiations but require a Russian withdrawal as a condition for negotiations or they would blow up the nuclear power plant. As ridiculous as that sounds, the other explanations for this gambit are even nuttier.

Of course, this plan sounds like it is from a poorly made Hollywood action thriller, rather than a sober-minded military operation. The reason for that is the people running Ukraine are actors. For going on three years now they have spent far more time crafting creative narratives about the war than thinking soberly about how they can avoid being wiped off the map. For people who imagine reality is just a clever written story, this operation sounded brilliant.

The supreme role of narrative for Western political elites is evident in how they have reacted to this new production. It seems they had no part in its construction, or at least they were not told about it in advance, so they were unprepared to play their role in selling this as the next great event in the drama. Western media was not provided with a script, so they had no idea what to say. Eventually they settled on this being bad for Putin’s narrative, a thing that does not exist.

It is another example of the total lack of realism in our political class. The Ukraine war is an unnecessary venture for everyone involved except the Russians. A thousand years of history says they will not allow Ukraine to fall into the Western orbit. Otherwise, everyone else involved has practical reasons for not having this war, but the good feelings that come from good narratives have been too much to resist. The result is an unfolding catastrophe for the West.

This total lack of realism in the West seems to have finally reached an end point with the Russians after this latest caper. In a recent press conference, Putin said that it is now impossible to deal with Ukrainian leadership. While not closing the door to negotiations completely, he has now ruled out dealing with Zelensky. Other Russian officials are floating the idea of regime change in Kiev as a necessary precondition for any negotiated settlement to the war.

What that means is that the eventual collapse of the Ukrainian army, which is now accelerating due to the nutty decisions made by Kiev, will be followed by a political collapse, by force if necessary. In other words, if the West deciders it is time to make a deal with the Russians, that deal starts by cutting Zelensky loose, which in the context of Ukrainian politics means the whole crew must go. They will not go voluntarily, so it means the end game includes a civil war in Western Ukraine.

The Ukraine war is a microcosm of what is happening in the West. Every decision is based only in the moment without any thought of what comes next. Things are done voluntarily that should have been avoided, not because they are part of a larger strategy but because they fit the current narrative. It is as if once the story is created, the writers are sucked into it, losing all control of the plot. All they can do is respond as if they are now unwitting characters in the story.

This is harmless in the low-stakes world of parlor games in which members of the political class evolve, but in the practical world, it is a disaster. It leads to a scenario in which no one knows if the current president is alive or dead. No one seems to care because his character has been written out of the story. Who is actually making decisions is a mystery. It is the dynamic that created the condition for war in Ukraine and is now pushing it towards catastrophe.

On the one hand, it certainly seems like the West is now governed by emotion and symbolism, rather than practical considerations. The Kamala Harris campaign can be boiled down to a promise of feel goods. The entire production is a collection of symbolic shapes and sounds to transmit the simple idea that it feels good or that the alternative will make you feel bad. To his credit, Trump is offering tangible things that have some connection to practical reality.

The lesson of the Ukraine war, however, is that reality still matters. All the feel-good stories and symbols has not changed the fact that the Russian army is chewing up the Ukrainian army. The clever narratives cannot conceal the massive cemeteries full of dead Ukrainian soldiers. The question that arises from this war is whether Western elites will learn that the clever stories by the managerial class will not keep them from the gallows if things start to crumble.

The great lesson of history is that there is always a price to be paid for failed leadership and that price is paid by the people, then their rulers. Joseph de Maistre famously said that the people get the government they deserve. He was wrong. The lesson of the French Revolution is that the ruling elite gets the people they deserve. A ruling class that is concerned more with clever narratives than practical reality will face a people, who out of practical necessity, decide they must get a new ruling elite.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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

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

Escape From Reality

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The great fear as the internet spread across American society was that things in this virtual world would somehow cross over into the real world. Usually this meant that the machines would get super intelligent and take over society. This is the underlying theme of movies like The Terminator. Alternatively, a being from inside the internet would make the jump into the meat space. This is the plot for the film Virtuosity. A virtual serial killer gets loose in the real world and does his worst.

Nothing like that has come to pass, but something worse may be happening and that is reality is being sucked into the virtual world. More accurately, people are spending so much time online that the virtual world is supplanting reality for them. We are seeing this with the Harris campaign, which is probably the most intensely online political program we have every experienced. Everything about it is based on winning the internet that day, which means it operates by the rules of the internet.

The most obvious example is how the Kamala Harris character has been reimagined by her developers into something disconnected from reality. From the presentation, one would never know she has been Vice President for the last four years or that she has spent those years arguing for the administration’s positions. Like a discarded scene from a video game, all of that is gone now. In its place is the new character whose only connection to the prior character is the name.

The disconnectedness extends to her campaign and its supporters. Trump has been stumping on the idea of exempting tips from income taxes. Whatever the merits of the idea, it is a clever way to appeal to young people. The other day, the Harris character announced its plan to not tax tips, as if it were something totally new that had never been mentioned by anyone. Miraculously, the people playing the Harris character online responded as if it was a total novel idea.

Of course, this being the age of mendacity, the new Harris gameplay comes with manufactured crowds online that cheer for it. There are fake polls that claim this character is now the most popular character in the game. It is destroying all of the orange baddies in this expansion pack. We know this because every day the lie machine we call mass media fills the game space with stories about how Trump is raging in his bunker about the greatness of the Harris character.

This upgraded version of Kamala Harris is now equipment with a lacky to do the things lackies do for the hero. Like the new Kamala Harris, the character called Tim Walz bears little resemblance to the old version. Instead of being a bloviating windbag who bores people with his imaginary tales of heroism in the military, this version is a folksy good old boy who just happens to hold all of the same opinions as the developers who created his character for the game.

What we are experiencing right now is a political campaign that exists only in the virtual world of the highly online. If you are not playing in this part of the game or you live in reality, you may not know about any of this. Maybe one of your favorite “influencers” has gone into panic mode for some reason and that got your attention. Otherwise, if you are not in this part of the game, none of this is real to you. The main reason for that is that nothing about this campaign is real thus far.

This is why the people most affected by this new release are the self-styled influencers who live entirely online. These people spend all day, every day, looking for something they can front-run in order to maintain the illusion that they are not just playing the game, but they are controlling it. The reason they are called influencers is not that they influence anyone, but that they are the most easily influenced. The right-wing influencer crowd cannot stop playing the new Harris character.

The highly online, of course, will argue that this is reality, and it is now changing the meat space, but how would they know? One of the weird aspects of virtual reality is that it is self-affirming to the people who have been sucked into it. For many of them, Twitter is reality and people outside of it do not exist. This is why influencers banned from Twitter were so desperate to get back on the platform. Having your account suspended is what passes for Hell in the virtual world.

That still leaves the question as to whether this is working. More people get their news from online sources than from legacy sources, so if you win the internet then it suggests you can influence people. On the other hand, the internet is a big place and people gravitate to that which confirms the opinions. One reason the undecided voter is a thing of the past is everyone now has an online tribe. Alternatively, they have a cable chat show they watch every night for their opinions.

The highly online like saying that arguing with a boomer is arguing with the television because all of their opinions come from television. Ironically, arguing with the highly online is arguing with the internet. The people playing the Nick Fuentes character right now have no ideas of their own. They have the ideas of the other players in the Nick Fuentes game space. It turns out that right-wing zoomers are just like the right-wing boomers they criticize. They just have a different god.

That is what will be the interesting thing about the Harris game. Eventually, the Harris character will have to step outside the curated world of gameplay and talk to flesh and blood humans, as well as debate Trump. As much as the developers would like to believe the reality they have created has supplanted the old reality, the test of this will be their character leaving the game space for the meat space. The same holds for the lackey with his Elmer Fudd costume and reimagined backstory.

What it will ultimately come down to is whether the voters will prefer the game space reality to the meat space reality. Will they believe the upgraded Harris character is preferable to the meat space Harris and continue to play the game character as a form of escapism or will they experience the meat space version and get turned off by the game itself? That is the central question of this election. This is the first election where people are asked to choose reality versus escapism.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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

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

The Haunted Present

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Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about land management in Sweden, a post about the drama within the macramé community and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

At the dawn of the information age, it was assumed that everyone having the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips would unleash human potential in ways that had never been imagined. Instead of vast swaths of information being cloistered in the books of specialists, it would be available to everyone. The democratization of information would not only raise all of humanity but unleash the potential of people who would otherwise be denied access to the information.

A couple generations into it and this has clearly not been the case. Creative output, for example, has grounded to a halt. New movies and television shows are, at best, technically superior, but creatively inferior, remakes of past works. The traditional arts, like painting and sculpture, have been made ridiculous in an attempt to find novelty rather than genuine cultural expression. The creative side of Western culture has reached a nadir as technology has reached its zenith.

The public space, of course, has become so narrow that comparisons to the Soviet era are becoming trite. In the UK, men are being sent to dungeons for the crime of mentioning that foreigners are murdering British school children. In the United States, the secret police is everywhere looking for dissidents to harass. The great democratization of information and the public square has led to a dark age of authoritarian violence and suppression.

Alexander Duggan once said that the end of the Cold War was a catastrophe for the world, by which everyone assumed he meant the Russian world. That was certainly true, as the Russian world had evolved to depend on the Cold War as both a justification for the Soviet system but also the framework in which people lived. Once the Cold War ended, the moral framework collapsed along with the political system, and the result was a generation of chaos.

Something similar may be happening with the flood of data that has washed over the Western world via the internet. We now live in a world where it is plain to see that every creative thing one can imagine has been done and most likely done better than anything that could be done today. Why paint portraits when the greatest portrait painters who ever lived, have already lived? Why sculpt when a machine with unlimited information can produce better results?

No one thinks too much about how the technological revolution must change the way we organize ourselves, because we are awash in the history of the twentieth century where all of the political ideologies were resolved, and liberal democracy was declared the winner. The end of history has left us with nothing but history. The information age has not just made the past accessible, but it has also tuned the past into a great flood that washes over every aspect of the modern age.

The curse of information is most evident in the public square where it is easy to see, or at least it seems that way, that every idea worth discussing has been raised, debated, and judged in the past? More important, every idea that is viewed as dangerous can be compared to something from that past that has been condemned. The reason that everyone with questions is called Hitler and even the slightest push back is fascism is that the information age makes such comparison simple.

Why would a young political activist spend time thinking critically about the world as it is when he can more easily look up ideas from the past and then repackage them for the present age? The reason our politics feels like a technically superior reboot of prior politics is that all of the participants are rooting around in the past for inspiration, rather than thinking of something new. Instead of standing on the shoulders of the past, everyone now trembles in its shadow.

The promise of the internet was that it would unlock the doors to the future, but instead it has walled them off by opening every door to the past. It is simply too easy to find what you need from the stock of existing knowledge than to take a step back and think about what you are seeing. The information age has turned the intellectual space into an endless museum in which we are all trapped, forced into playing roles from the past, regardless of their applicability to the present.

This may explain the woke business. The reason people are creating these bizarre and logically impossible roles for themselves, things like transgenderism, for example, is as a way to escape the conformity of the present. On the one hand we live in a world where you are told to be an authentic individual, but the information age shows that every human character has already existed. The solution is to break free from reason itself in order to create new roles to play.

Another piece of this is the American civic religion of progressivism, which treats the past like an angry mob chasing after the righteous. The information age has turned the past into a deadly fog that has descended onto society. The only solution to this is to destroy reality itself since the past is what shapes present reality. The war on biology, reason, truth, and empiricism is a war on the fabric of reality that defines the present and that which makes the past possible, our minds.

In the final analysis, the information age, especially the internet, may turn out to be a terrible curse, rather than a liberating force. For most of human history, the past was of little use, other than the lessons of the past. These were contained in stories and songs, rather than in detailed accounts of the events and participants. The point of the past, in this context, was to inspire, rather than constrain. Our detailed knowledge of the past, in contrast, is a psychological prison.

Ironically, this is not new either. James Joyce wrote about how the Irish were prisoners of their own struggle. The fictional South created by William Faulkner was also haunted by the past. The solution in both cases was the abnegation of that present reality in order to close the door to what created it. The Ireland of Joyce no longer exists, and the South of Faulkner exists only as a bogeyman for the progressive. The solution to the past haunting the present was to abandon it entirely.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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

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

Radio Derb August 9 2024

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When VDare went down for good, I offered to host Radio Derb here and set it up on the various platforms where people listen to podcasts. Going forward you will find the legendary John Derbyshire’s weekly podcast posted here on Saturday, as well as on Rumble, Odysee and the various podcast networks. It will take a few days for them to approve the new host, so I will post links when it happens.

For now, if you want to get the show in your favorite podcast app, you can use the RSS feed I have set up off the Spreaker site. Link below. Just paste it into the app following their instructions and you are good to go. Probably by the end of the week it will be on all of the apps, and you can then find it through their search tool. It should also be on Amazon and Spotify by the end of the week.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00m46s: The Walz Conundrum: Woke, but not a China gull
  • 06m46s: Britain’s funeral pyre flares up: Disorders will get worse
  • 15m16s: Totalitarian Legalism: Gorsuch’s new book on our over-lawyered society
  • 21m18s: The Law’s Delay: The 9/11 plotters plea deal done, then undone
  • 26m30s: Lost in Space: Our two astronauts can’t get home
  • 28m22s: What’s Up in Bangladesh? Can we please mind our own business?
  • 30m55s: Watergate Plus 50: Remembering Nixon Derangement Syndrome
  • 32m58s: Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Gang Land

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Perhaps it is just a normal part of reaching geezerhood, but I am often surprised at how much has changed in my lifetime. I have often said that the past is a foreign country, but it does not seem like it was that long ago when it was normal. You see this with the things that used to be called vices. Gambling, pornography, drugs, and prostitution used to be things to avoid, but now they are celebrated lifestyles.

This came to mind while viewing a clip from one of the gangster shows where the principals were discussing their revenue streams. Just about every way the old gangsters made money has now been taken over by the state or by corporations, who are friends of the state. To a great degree, the decline of the mafia is due to them being muscled out by the government and its corporate pals.

That is the show this week. As a break from politics, I thought it would be fun to run through the various ways the old mobsters earned money and see who controls those rackets in this age. The only racket that is not run by government or corporations is prostitution, but that is debatable. Things like OnlyFans are a very small step removed from prostitution. How long before they take the next step?

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Introduction
  • Protection
  • Theft
  • Loan Sharking
  • Gambling
  • Drugs
  • Bribery
  • Extortion
  • Skimming
  • No Show Jobs
  • Tax Evasion

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Whither Managerial Polyarchy?

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One of the strange truths about democratic governments is that they can remain unpopular for much longer than other forms of government. This seems counterintuitive as the whole point of democratic government is to have public policy reflect the general will of the people. In theory any divergence should be rectified in subsequent elections so that over time, the majority support the policy. As we see in the modern West, this is not how things work in “our democracy.”

There is a great example of this in the UK. Immigrant crime has reached a point where even the most teary-eyed immigration romantic has had enough. All of the polling shows that the majority wants an end to immigration. The new Labour government won power largely by hinting they would be tough on immigration. They were lying, of course, and that is clear now. The government only had about thirty percent support at the election, and you can be sure it is lower now.

In other words, the current rulers of the UK have less popular support than the current ruler of Venezuela. The UK is allegedly a democracy, while the democracies all claim Venezuela is a dictatorship. While technically correct, if we redefine democracy to mean having some sort of voting process, the undeniable fact is the ruling class of Venezuela has far more popular support than the ruling class of the UK. Yet, for now at least, the UK government does not fear being overthrown.

Immigration is a great example of how democracy can remain unpopular for much longer than other forms of government. There has never been a time when there was popular support for open borders and unfettered immigration. The issue may not have ranked high on the list of voter concerns, but there was never a clamoring for violent foreigners to be imported into the country. Now there is massive hostility to it, but the policies not only persist, but they get worse.

Immigration is just the latest example of this. The de-industrialization we saw in the 1970’s and 1980’s never had popular support. People in the emerging service industries or technology may have been indifferent, but there were no rallies in the streets demanding the government ship the car parts plant to Mexico. The people in the manufacturing sector certainly cared, but their interests were ignored because the oligarchs saw a quick buck in selling off the manufacturing base.

The point is the so-called democracies of the West have been unpopular for an exceedingly long time, but it persists due to two factors. One is the people assume they can eventually get what they want through the democratic process. The ballots at every election have two options, heads they win and tails you lose, but people insist on picking from those options. It takes a long while, as we are now seeing, for people to lose faith in the democratic system.

The other reason, and perhaps the main reason, why democratic governments can remain unpopular for so long is the people who run the democratic system grow increasingly convinced they can trick and cajole enough people to manufacture a majority in their favor. In fact, as we keep seeing, this becomes the primary focus of the people running the system. It is as if they seek to prove Lincoln wrong and find a way to fool all of the people all of the time.

The guy running Venezuela knows that a large swath of his population thinks the system is rigged. He certainly knows it is rigged. He also knows that unless he keeps that disgruntled portion of the population pacified, he will be swinging from a tree branch, so that is his primary focus. He needs to always be looking to expand popular support for his policies, while at the same time defusing the anger in the portion that is unhappy with him and his policies.

The glue that has held Western democracies together for so long, despite not being particularly popular, is managerialism. The vast administrative state controlled by a permanent ruling class of managers is an unprecedented defense against any threats to the democratic system. Internal opposition is assimilated into the system so quickly that it never has time to flower into a palace coup. External opposition is subverted through the complex network of government affiliated organizations.

If you look closely, for example, at the pro-government protests in response to the anti-immigration protests in the UK, you will see people wearing the colors of groups like Amnesty International, Hope Not Hate and various immigrant charities right next to the cops waiting to crack the skulls of native Brits. Much of the police action, in fact, is coordinated by these “private groups” who “defend our democracy.” All of them are client organizations of the managerial state.

For this reason, managerial polyarchy¹ is highly resistant to popular discontent, even when that discontent is near universal. The problem though is that it is top-heavy, which makes containing internal dissent increasingly difficult. With so many people inside the managerial system or dependent upon it, factionalism is inevitable. It is why the managerial class has its politicians chant about unifying the country. What they really mean is unifying the managerial elite and the oligarchs.

We see a glimpse of this with Elon Musk. When he bought Twitter and reopened it, the system quickly moved to suppress him. Ben Shapiro and the ADL made him pray at the pile of shoes. The trouble is, Musk is the world’s richest man and someone who does not like being pushed around, so Twitter remains largely open. Musk has now weighed in on the two-tiered justice system of the UK. Elon Musk is a serious problem for a system that thinks it needs complete unity.

Why is Elon Musk a serious problem? A society in which the majority is disgruntled but lacks a leader and a method to compel change is like dry leaves and wood in the underbrush of a forest. It is a forest fire waiting to happen. The disgruntled inside the managerial system may look at the disgruntled masses as an army in waiting and decide it is a good time to stage a palace coup. This is why the British government is one step away from declaring war on running dog deviationists.

In the end, government, regardless of form, must not only satisfy the majority, but pacify those unsatisfied so they will not revolt. The present systems in the West have proven quite resistant to this reality, but reality must always prevail. The crisis in the West is over the central question of managerial polyarchy. Can it adapt and reform itself to comport with the demands of the people over whom it rules? If not, then what happens when these long bottled-up forces finally explode?

¹Managerial Polyarchy refers to the fact that large complex society does not have central control. Instead it has nodes that control specific domains, like banking, the media, the academy, and so on. These are networked together by a common understand of their role in society. This polyarchy of institutions shares the ideology of managerialism, thus we get the term Managerial Polyarchy.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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

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

The End of Israel

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One of the myths of the 20th century that is slowly starting to wither away is the one about Israel just striving to exist. Since the wars of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the narrative has been that Israel is this plucky democracy fighting for its existence in the midst of savage not-democracies. The line, “Israel has a right to exist” has been the company slogan for Israel Inc. for close to fifty years now. Over the last year this official narrative, like so many others, has started to collapse.

It is clear at this point that Israel is not the victim of aggression, but the primary instigator of conflict in the region. The assassination of the Gaza leader in Tehran, on its face, is an unjustified act of war. Ismail Haniyeh was not just the lead negotiator for Gaza, but the most dovish of the Palestinian leaders with regards to making a deal with the Israeli government. The only reason to kill him was to foreclose further negotiations over Gaza and to bait the Iranians into war.

The Israelis, the Zionist and their supporters in the West will claim that there can be no peace as long as Hamas exists, so they are acting in self-defense when they assassinate the people on the other side of the peacemaking table. They also argue that there can be no peace as long as Iran exists as an Iranian state, so they are acting in self-defense when they attack Iran. Currently, they are arguing for Israel to pre-emptively attack Iran before Iran retaliates.

What we are seeing is an evolution of that myth from the 20th century. The original myth was that Israel just wanted to exist and it was the Arab world that refused to acknowledge Israeli’s right to exist. All the Arabs needed to do was not make war on Israel and there would be peace in the region. Now, the narrative is that Israel must make war on the region in order to secure peace. We have gone from supporting the plucky underdog to backing the savage master.

It is similar to an observation by Christopher Caldwell regarding the programs that sprouted from the civil rights revolution. It was first argued that these programs must be supported because their beneficiaries are too weak. Now it is argued that they must be supported because they are too strong. We see this with Israel. Fifty years ago, the Washington political class supported Israel because she was weak. Now they support Israel because the Israel lobby is too strong.

The thing is though, regimes in serious trouble often go on the offensive thinking it will lead to some breakthrough or change the situation in some way. Armies that are beaten will often stage one last great offensive. Ideological regimes will crack down on dissent, like we are seeing in the West. The Israel lobby is proudly intervening in American elections, because it fears support is faltering. Israel seeks war with Iran, because is it very unstable domestically.

There is no question that the ground has shifted over the last year with regards to support for Israel in the West, particularly America. In the United States, where it matters most, unconditional support for Israel is now limited to old white conservatives, primarily located in the Bible belt. Everyone else ranges from Israel fatigue to outright hostility to Israel. The actuarial tables tell us that support for Israel among American is in a death spiral that cannot be arrested.

This coincides with the decline of the American empire, especially in the Middle East, where decades of intervention have exhausted the military and exhausted the American people’s patience with the topic. The days of the American empire dictating policy to the region are drawing to a close. This is why Israel is desperate to start a regional war with the Iranians. They think it will bring their patron back into the region, even though it is clear that this is highly unrealistic.

On the domestic side, an area that gets little attention, Israel has some profoundly serious internal divisions. This post by Alastair Crooke describes some of it. The current Israeli government is caught in a vice. One jaw is the reality of the situation with regards to Israel and the Arabs and the other jaw is that “an eschatological Right-wing cult now holds the majority in cabinet – and wields a vigilante militia ready to attack the military establishment, and the Israeli state.”

The ideological cross currents within Israel reflect the demographic collapse that has been underway for a couple of generations. The once dominant Ashkenazi Jews, these are the Jews of the diaspora, are now in steep decline largely due to their low fertility rates and the relative high fertility rates of the other groups, particularly the ultra-orthodox and the Mizrahi Jews. These are the Jews who never left the Middle East, and who hold an expansive view of greater Israel.

The result of all of this is a hyper-aggressive Israel that is seeking a big war with all of its local enemies and a hyper-aggressive Israel lobby in the United States that is aggressively interfering in elections. One result is the collapse of the old narrative where Israel is the plucky democracy in a world of antagonistic not-democracies. In its place is a new narrative where Israel is instigating the final conflagration to settle all of these outstanding issues for good.

What all of this tells us is that Israel is in deep trouble. The underlying reason for it is the country was born in war. Countries that are the creation of war tend to end in war because they must always seek war. For Israel, “normal” is the endless state of emergency, the constant fear of another attack. This dovetailed well with the diaspora fear of you know who jumping out of the history books. It has evolved to the point where Project Israel cannot exist in peace, so it must seek war.

How this ends is not clear. The geezers currently running Israel must eventually give way to a new generation, but that new generation is more war-like and vastly less sophisticated about global matters. On the other hand, the Arab world is young and increasingly sophisticated about how the world is changing. Can the Israelis figure out how to live in the new world or will they seek to take the rest of the world with them into the abyss of the dying old world?

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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

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

Regime Games

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Today is supposed to be the big day when the world learns who the regime has selected to be the running mate of kamala Harris. Last week, the Mayor of Philadelphia tweeted out that it was to be Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, but regime media ignored it. In fact, they continue to ignore the story. As of now they are “reporting” that the choice is down to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

Harris is scheduled to be cackling in Philadelphia today, so would make sense if it were Shapiro, but regime media says the plan is to do the reveal game show style like they did when Biden “picked” Harris. They will stage a video of Harris calling the condemned man over Zoom, because you know strong diverse female loves to use the latest technology like a big girl. She will cackle, he will make the soy face and accept his role as the loyal aid to girl boss.

One clue is this item posted on Twitter, now stupidly called X, showing a fleet of black SUV’s at the home of the Minnesota governor. A similar thing happened at the home of J.D. Vance once he was notified. Once the pick is made, the Secret Service is dispatched to explain how things will work as far as security. It is possible that this is some sort of ruse, but that would be dumb even by Harris standards. On the other hand, she is a remarkably stupid woman.

Regardless, you can get a sense of how the regime really thinks about the race by the final three contestants. The fact that two are white men and one is a Jewish man is what everyone will notice. More important is that all three look old and therefore can be passed off as a steadying force. They did this with Obama when they picked Biden to be his running mate. The claim was that Biden was a longtime Washington insider and he would help steady the Obama ship.

Of course, Biden was both an olive branch and an insurance policy. Team Obama ruffled a lot of feathers in official Washington during the primary and they made enemies of the Clinton crime family. Adding Biden was a signal to permanent Washington that Obama was a team player. For similar reasons he made Clinton Secretary of State and turned a blind eye to her selling access. Biden was also an insurance policy, as no one could imagine him being president.

Harris is completely controlled by the regime, as they selected her for Biden and now have selected her to replace Biden. Her only base of support is the regime, so there is no need to pick a running mate for her that is regime friendly. Instead, they need someone that can make her more plausible as a candidate. That is why they obviously cast around for an old white guy. It is an admission that Harris comes off as a bumbling simpleton that could frighten many white voters.

The fact that they have settled on three unknowns is also telling. Shapiro is the only name with any recognition and that is only regional. Walz and Kelly are complete unknowns outside their respective states. Presumably all three can help win their respective states, which is interesting given that Walz is the governor of Minnesota, a state everyone thinks is safe. Trump lost there by 200,000 votes in 2020, but only by 50,000 in 2016, so maybe it is not that safe.

Another thing about these three options is that none of them have been mentioned as serious 2028 candidates. The big names like Gavin Newsom and Karen Whitmer were not interested, as they probably think they can win the nomination in 2028, even if the regime finagles Harris to a general election win. Despite the regime media campaign the last two weeks, the general consensus is that Harris is so terrible that once the action starts her balloon deflates quickly.

Of the three, Shapiro is the best option, as he brings the massive vote rigging machine to deliver the state to Harris. There are basically five states that decide the presidency at the moment. Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. There is some possibility that Minnesota adds itself to the list. If we take Pennsylvania off the board that leaves the four states and a 251-to-245 electoral college score in favor of Trump, so Harris is within striking distance.

The problem with Shapiro is his biography makes clear that his primary loyalty is to his people and his people are not Americans. He volunteered to serve in the IDF, rather than the American military. Imagine him explaining this while on stage with Vance, who served his people in the Marines. A Harris – Shapiro ticket is so alien and weird that even the dullest normie will notice it. A ticket that looks like every television ad, rather than America is not a good look right now.

Kelly is probably the second-best option, mostly because he has a good biography, but otherwise he adds nothing to the ticket. He is not the most likable guy, which is not a great thing for a ticket already short on charisma. Walz is the safest choice as he has carefully cultivated the “aw shucks” hick-lib act and he is a true believer. Walz is Bernie Sanders without the grating New York personality. He is Trotsky reimagined as a character from the television series Fargo.

What all of this tells us is the regime continues to struggle keeping all of the plates spinning, so they keep dashing about creating new narratives. Week one was the “weird” nonsense and now they are going with the claim that Trump is in a panic over Harris having such a good honeymoon. Like everything else we are seeing with the regime, there is no thinking past the first move. As a result, they rush from one fire to the next, claiming victory after avoiding disaster.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

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

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