Author Archives: thezman

Pot Heads

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One of the stranger developments in the last twenty years has been the slow semi-legalization of marijuana. Some states have gone down the “medical marijuana” road while others have legalized it. Federal law has not changed, with regards to marijuana, but the enforcement has changed. In theory this should result in an irreconcilable conflict, but so far, the Feds have cooperated with the states to avoid problems. Jeff Sessions has indicated that is about to change, but a year in and there has been no change.

One interesting side effect of legalization is there are now for-profit businesses catering to potheads. That means there is a lobbying group representing their interests in state capitals and in Washington. The Sessions move to re-impose Federal law on states that have legalized weed, may mean Congress moves to fix the law. Regardless of how you feel about legalizing drugs, these sorts of conflicts are intolerable. The most likely solution is to get the Feds out of the retail side of drugs and leave them to do interdiction.

A consequence of this process that no one has considered is the precedent. Usually, Federal law forces changes in state laws. That has been the way Progressives have undermined personal liberty and imposed all sorts of madness on the people. The most recent example is homosexual marriage. In this case, states have eroded the legitimacy of the Federal government and may force the Feds to follow the lead of states. The Left is trying something similar with immigration. It is a defense in depth strategy.

There has been enough time to evaluate the claims from libertarians about crime and drug prohibition. Initially, Colorado experienced a slight drop in crime, but then they experienced a sharp uptick in crime. As is always the case, the potheads will say the rise in crime is unrelated, but the prohibitionists will counter with the same point about the initial drop in crime. The reality is drug prohibition was never a factor in street crime. A drug taker is not going to alter his behavior, just because he can buy his drugs from a legal retailer.

Similarly, the administrative costs of prohibition will never change, even with legalization, for the simple reason government never shrinks. We could wipe all of the laws off the books tomorrow, meaning nothing is illegal, and we would still have the same number of cops, judges, lawyers, a prison guards. It is one of the many things libertarians do not understand about society. Government does not grow because it is attempting to meet a need. Government grows because it can. Government never needs a reason.

The movement to legalize marijuana is providing a real world test of claims about habitual use of cannabis. We now have lots of people consuming THC through a range of methods. Smoking anything will have deleterious effects on cardiovascular health, but what about eating THC-lace gummy bears? Of course, legalization means a much wider range of users too. While getting weed has not been difficult for a long time, it still meant dealing with criminals and some people fear that more than effects of drug taking.

This large genetic study links habitual marijuana use with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. A study in New Zealand a few years ago showed that people who started smoking marijuana heavily in their teens and had an ongoing marijuana use disorder lost an average of 8 IQ points between ages 13 and 38. The National Institutes of Health are doing a major longitudinal study, tracking a large sample of young Americans from late childhood to early adulthood to track the effects of long term marijuana use.

We could very well discover that drug legalization is a disaster for public health. People have instinctively believed that taking mind altering drugs is bad for a person in the long run. There is a reason that every culture has had rules about things like alcohol. People may not have understood the biology of these substances, but they assumed that anything that alters perception should be used in moderation. As we know with alcohol, legalization means moderation is impossible to enforce. We have a lot of drunks.

We also have a lot of ways of dealing with drunks. Where the written law ends, the unwritten laws begin. American society has lots of unwritten rules for mitigating the effects of legal alcohol. Those unwritten rules have not yet materialized with regards to legalized weed. Can an employer refuse to hire someone who is a casual user of cannabis? Can we develop a test to know if someone is too impaired to operate a motor vehicle? If marijuana legalization is going to go forward, the culture will change in response.

Another wrinkle is that no society has ever had to confront the immediate, widespread distribution of mind altering drugs. Imagine lots of smart chemists getting into the synthetic drug business and Amazon taking over the logistics from the ghetto rats. That has been the result in Colorado, where clever marketers and creative inventors have produced a wide range of THC delivery vehicles. Imagine what happens when Big Pharma gets into the business. We could quickly be swamped with drugs and drug takers.

None of this argues for or against legalization. At present time, there is no right answer on that question. It is a question of trade-offs. Societies normally have work through these by trial and error. It is what federalism is supposed to do in America. Fifty states can sort through the issues, learning from one another until arriving at a regime that works for their particular situation. Right now, the public strongly favors legalization, so that’s the way to bet. For Washington, this is an easy one. It means doing less to get more votes.

Don’t Epidermalize The Eschaton

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I have a fancy new graphic for these posts. I hated the way my posts look on Gab, so I’ve been fiddling around with Adobe to create some graphics that look decent on social media, but don’t clutter up the site. I’m a minimalist, as should be obvious. I think too much is too much. My friends tell me I should have been Amish. I don’t disagree. Even so, a good blog should feature good content, not endless scripts and overly produced graphics. Blogs are for reading.

Anyway, a couple of administrative notes. I will be traveling next week, so I don’t know if I will have time for a podcast. We’ll see. I may do something in advance that is not topical so I can put it up on the fly. I have signed up American Renaissance again this year. Registration is here. If you are interested in meeting fellow hate thinkers, I highly recommend it. Jared Taylor puts together an excellent event with interesting speakers.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I’ll be posting clips on Gab for the ADD listeners. 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. Of course, the Hitler Phones are so slow now, you may never finish.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The Hi-Tech Coup (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 12:00: Don’t Epidermalize The Eschaton (Link)(Link)(Link)
  • 22:00: The Anarcho-State (Link)
  • 32:00: Libertarians (Link) (Link)
  • 42:00: Aztecs (Link)
  • 47:00: Three Identical Strangers (Link)
  • 52:00: Race Realism (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

President Coach

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When I was a kid, I played a lot of sports. The one coach I hated was my freshman football coach, whose name I no longer remember. He was the classic Type-A personality, at least what popular culture has come to think of it. The guy was always on edge, ready to explode into a purple faced rage, which meant everyone around him was always on edge too. The guy found a way to get under everyone’s skin. He had some way to needle every player on the roster, often with some sort of nickname.

The thing is though, the guy managed to squeeze out more from the roster than logic said was possible. In my case, I was always just at the point of wanting to bash his skull in with my helmet, but I channeled those pleasant thoughts into execution. I was not giving that prick the satisfaction of making a mistake. Even though I hated the guy, he did make me and my teammates better players. I still recall the joy of winning with my teammates, but I don’t remember the coach’s name.

My guess is everyone who played sports growing up had at least one of these types of coaches. Bill Parcels was famous for playing head games with his players. He was big on keeping every player on edge, even his stars. At the NFL level, the psychological aspects of coaching are more complex, but the underlying strategy is the same. You make the players doubt themselves in a way that results in their natural hyper-competitiveness kicking in, so they push themselves to the edge of their potential.

I’ve been thinking about this watching Trump torment Congress, especially the Democrats, over immigration. He’s not just making the open borders people nervous with his rhetoric. He is getting under the skin of his allies and his own staff. The blockheads in the gentry media are calling it the Jell-O strategy, but it is a safe bet that none of them ever went outside as kids, much less played competitive contact sports. In the world of high-pay, low-work professions, the hard driving boss does not exist.

What Trump is doing with his comments about DACA, in particular, but immigration in general, is keeping the issue boiling. That is Trump’s natural style of negotiating, but it has the benefit of keeping immigration patriots slightly ticked off and highly engaged in every aspect of the process. Congress has seen their e-mail flooded with messages opposing amnesty. Their voicemail boxes are constantly full. This puts pressure on Congress to do a deal and get the issue off the agenda for the midterms in ten months.

Steve Sailer compares Trump to George Steinbrenner. It is a good comparison as they both have a similar style. Both men understood that pressure reveals character. The great players, the great deal makers, rise to the occasion when under pressure. On the other hand, the fakers and losers crack under pressure. If you read Trump’s book or listen to people with whom he has done deals, you see that he is always looking to bring things to a boiling point, where everyone is under the gun to get something done.

That’s what Trump is doing with DACA. He’s cleverly made this the goal of the Democrats, thinking they will push themselves to the breaking point to get it. At the same time, the laundry list of immigration reforms has become the all or nothing end game for immigration patriots. Trump’s public statements are keeping the good guys fired up and willing to hammer Congress on the finer points of immigration. Every time Trump says something positive about DACA, the phone lines melt in Washington.

There is no question that this style of managing people does get the most from those willing to give their all. It also boils off the people who like to talk about maximizing their opportunities, but unwilling to do what it takes to accomplish it. In the realm of sports, this result in better teams. Bill Parcells was a wildly successful coach because his style gets the maximum from the roster. Trump’s success as a businessman and media personality is largely built on getting the most from top people in their respective fields.

Whether this will translate to politics is hard to know. One constant that comes through from people who have done business with Trump is that he is exhausting. The never ending competition and wrangling over details wears people down. In business, you can always get new people when the old ones wear out. In politics, you can’t easily get new supporters. His style could end up exhausting his base. How many times can someone call their Congressman, enraged about immigration or trade policy?

That’s a question often asked of sportsball coaches. How long before they wear out their players? How long before the team stops responding? The great ones seem to get that and they make sure to reward their players so they keep wanting more. Trump’s zingers on twitter or when speaking in front of a crowd may serve that function. He has an uncanny way to saying the obvious in a way that outrages the enemy and amuses his supporters. Perhaps that’s enough for President Coach to get us over the goal line.

Class War As Race War

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There is an interesting post up this week over at the American Renaissance¹ website, that I have been puzzling over a bit. What struck me initially about it is the opening line, “Why we must unite across class lines.” That’s not a phrase you hear much these days from politicians, activists or certainly polemicists. In fact, class does not get much of a discussion at all in polite circles. The closest we get to a class debate is snide remarks from cosmopolitans about the people shopping at Walmart.

On the Right, discussion of class has long been forbidden. This was mostly due to the fact that conventional conservatism in America is really just right-wing Progressivism. The official Right and Left agree on the big philosophical items. Their quarrels are mostly about tactics and rhetoric. In the latter, the so-called Right carried the day, so discussion of social class is mostly forbidden. We are an egalitarian society where your status is determined by how well you serve the state.

The author of the AmRen piece then goes on to explore the gap between official rhetoric on racial diversity and objective reality. Our ruling elites systematically arrange their lives so they have the least amount of diversity as possible. Whole sections of cities have been ethnically cleansed so young white hipsters can have cool places to live. Meanwhile, urban blacks, with the miracle of Section 8, are dumped into lower class white suburbs, where they set about recreating their normal chaos in otherwise stable white areas.

This compulsory diversity is not just destroying the white working class, it is hollowing out the white middle-class. Urban female hipsters are free to sing the glories of miscegenation, while they send their super white kids to the private day school, and socialize with people who look like them, think like them and live like them. As we hate-thinkers would put it, we are seeing the systematic Brazil-ification of America, where the white urban elite is turning Middle-American is to caramel colored favelas.

This is familiar ground to readers here, but it is the proposed solution that does not get much attention.

So does our hope lie with the proles? The big difference between Orwell’s 1984 and 2018 is that Orwell’s elites did not bother to indoctrinate the masses, on the ground that the proles’ fidelity to Big Brother was considered irrelevant. By contrast, in our diversity dystopia the masses are at the core of the Left’s indoctrination project. Our “proles” are the ones forced to suffer a bad education in integrated schools. They are the ones subjected to violence, harassment, and intimidation. And they are the ones told, again and again, that any resistance to this makes them betrayers of who we are as Americans, deplorable traitors in need of ever-more reformation.

Leadership may not come from the proles, but good sense and votes will. Those who bear the burdens of diversity see its damage most clearly. It is no accident that Donald Trump swept the white working-class vote.

Whatever our own particular economic station, we all have a role to play in restoring working- and middle-class white America. We should be hiring our own people, tutoring our own people, supporting scholarships for our own people, and doing our best to build schools and cultural institutions that can be healthy environments for our own people.

Growing up in the underclass, my exposure to bourgeois sensibilities about class came mostly through the movies. Movies and TV shows featuring the white working class as protagonists, only did so as a canvas onto which the writers could paint pictures of the multicultural paradise. White union men learned they had to accept blacks into the union in order to succeed. Archie Bunker had to see George Jefferson as just a dark skinned version of himself, in order to rise above the limitations of his class.

The Left’s class warfare was always a hoax played on the white working and middle classes. The offer was better economic conditions, as long as blacks were allowed to have some too. It was always a bait and switch. Whites got high divorce rates, their daughters dating black guys, rocket high inequality and the looming threat of minority status. By any measure, the Left’s agenda for the white working classes has been a disaster. It’s why the great white die off is the shadow hanging over all of us.

We are  seeing a replay of this now with immigration. “Fellow white people! You’re gonna get lots of cool restaurants and cultural diversity, and a police state, well mostly a police state. Open Borders!” All the promises of open borders and globalism are a deliberate lie, using appeals to morality to overcome practical objections and economic arguments to overcome cultural objections. Just as accepting racial integration in exchange for economic prosperity was a disaster for whites, open borders will be too. That’s the goal.

Our side embracing the rhetoric of 1960’s Progressive class warfare seems a bit strange, but it is one entry point for introducing racial consciousness to the discussion. Every time someone sees a politician address the concerns of the white working class, the audience hears it is OK to be white. Whenever white people, even hipster college professors living in urban oases, engage in talk about the white working class or the white opioid epidemic, being white gets re-legitimized and re-normalized in the greater culture.

The second line of that AmRen post is a line from Orwell, “If there is hope,” wrote Winston, “it lies in the proles.” Orwell wrote in a time when it was assumed that Africa was for Africans, Asia for Asians and the West was for white people. The olden thymes were an argument between whites about how whites would deal with one another. Our age will be an argument between whites about how we defend ourselves, our lands and our posterity from the rest of the world. That starts with defending the white working class.

¹I will be attending the American Renaissance conference this spring. if you are interested in attending, sign up is here.

The Marie Antoinettes

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I was watching the sports ball games over the weekend and this ad for the US Marine Corps kept popping up during the broadcast. I do not watch a lot of television so I am late to the party on this. It appears the ad was cut last spring. My first reaction was, “Why would anyone send soccer moms into combat?” That is what it looks like in the video. The actress looks like she is an office clerk playing paintball at the company retreat. My second thought was, “Who do they think is watching this stuff?”

The answer to the last question is they simply do not know who is watching this stuff. They just imagine who they hope is watching it. The fact is the people who rule over us no longer know much about us. The Marines are not as bad as the other branches, but they too are staggering around in the thick fog of the estrogen laced miasma known as multiculturalism. That means they are slowly detaching from reality, confusing the much dreamed for future with present reality. They think G.I. Jane is real.

This confusion between what they wish for and what is present reality is all over the mass media. Most TV ads now have race mixing, despite the fact it remains relatively rare in American society. According to TV, the average American family is a black guy with a white wife and two Asian kids. Because Progressives are so fixated on whatever they currently imagine as Utopia, they inevitably begin to confuse their dreamed for world with the real world. You can see that in this Washington Post infographic story.

The short setup tells you right away that the people who put this together are not living in the same America as the rest of us. “We asked people to contemplate what it means to be American in this time of upheaval and rapid change” is not a statement about present reality. The last eight years were a period of turmoil and upheaval. What is going on now is a return to something close to normalcy, but to the cult of rage heads determined to smash up American society, order and normalcy is what they imagine to be Hell.

Notice how they say that 102 randomly selected people speak for the rest of us. That is because they look at people as talking meat sticks. For all their talk of diversity, they think there is no difference between a Yankee plumber and Arab goatherd. We are all just talking monkeys to them. Worse yet, they are so arrogant that they think they can round up a hundred or so opinions and figure out what the rest of us are thinking from that random sample. These people look at us as zoo animals and they are our keepers.

The real tell is the complexion of the images in the graphic. They think the great brown future is already here. I went through the pictures and did a rough, back of the envelope census. The break down: 42% white, 8% Jewish, 21% black, 6% Asian, 11% Hispanic and 12% other, which is Muslims, Indians and Amerinds. What this reveals is just how much the typical Washington Post employee hates white people. They can barely stand to look at us, much less ask our opinion. Of course, they really hate white men.

Also note the obsession with people being united. This is the hallmark of the religious fanatic. The fanatic sees any deviation from the permissible as an assault on the order they imagine as perfection. The popular conception of fascists is they were people who violently oppose coloring outside the lines. It is once again an example of how the Left conjures demons that reflect its true soul. For Lefty, the dream is a world where everyone thinks and acts exactly as there are required, to serve the Great Hive.

What this post story and the tidal wave of idiotic media ads reveals, though, is what the people in charge currently imagine as the glorious future. The utopian minded are sure that the promised land is just over the next hill. In the case of the lunatics ruling over us, they believe the future is a land full of mulattoes, who have internalized the lessons of the one true faith to the point where they no longer possess an individual self. America is just one big petting zoo designed so corpulent cosmopolitans can have a variety of restaurants.

The old paleocons like Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, were heavily influenced by James Burnham. They looked at American elites as an emerging managerial class. They were mostly right about the contours of the new ruling class, but the one thing they could not get right is the sharp disconnect between the current ruling elite and the public. The managerial state cannot withstand contact with reality, so it seeks to insulate itself from it. Walk onto a college campus or government compound and you are no longer in America.

That is because the people who rule over us are no longer Americans. You see that in the reactions to Trump and the new populism. The elites of both parties are so sure Trump is backed by foreigners, because the things Trump says and does are completely alien to the elites of both parties. Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi would be more comfortable around Trump is he was a talking lizard man. A space alien would make more sense to them than a white person expecting his government to look out for his interests.

Circling back to those ads we see on mass media and stories like the one I linked, it is not as much about proselytizing with these people as it is about make believe. The all white ad companies making these ads are not promoting miscegenation. They imagine that as the future and they want so deeply to believe that the masses want that future, they are incapable of portraying reality. With few exceptions, we are ruled over by a class of people with the same grasp of reality as Marie Antoinette.

Black Nixon

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If you read the Articles of Impeachment against Richard Nixon, what jumps out to a modern reader is just how weak the case was against the President. Impeachment is a political action, so the rules of evidence we see in a courtroom don’t apply, but even so, the allegations seem weak in comparison to those against Bill Clinton. The case against Nixon was what we would now call a corrupt enterprise, like a mobster. Bill Clinton, in contrast, was accused of specific crimes that he committed while in office.

In both cases, the key question to be decided by the political class was what was best for the political system. The guilt or innocence of either man was a secondary consideration, outside of the impact on the political system. In the case of Nixon, his decision to resign, rather than fight impeachment, was all about defending the political order. Whether or not it was proper to run Nixon out of town or allow Clinton to remain in office is debatable, but the calculus at the time was about the best interests of the political order.

In fact, it was the political nature of both cases that led to vastly different results. In the case of Nixon, the move to impeach him was the denouement to a long war between Nixon and the Washington establishment. They wanted him impeached because they hated him. On the other hand, the impeachment of Clinton was unsuccessful because the ruling elite decided to defend him. There was no doubt that he was guilty of perjury and he brought dishonor to the office, but Washington insiders were willing to give him a pass.

These two events are relevant to our age, especially the case of Nixon, as evidence emerges of serious corruption at the end of the Obama years. It has been clear for a while that the ridiculous Russian hacking stuff and the special prosecutor were a smokescreen to conceal something else. Months ago, I made the point that the most likely thing being concealed was corruption within the FBI. It was the most obvious answer, as Mueller, Rosenstein and Comey were the guys leading the charge on it.

What we are learning now is the Department of Justice was most likely compromised by the same people corrupting the FBI. This story from The Hill reveals that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch was coordinating with FBI Director Comey on the Clinton e-mail scandal. Given the relationship between Lynch and the Clintons, it is safe to assume she was keeping them up to speed on the process. It is also possible that Lynch never stopped working for the Clintons and was steering the investigation.

The link between Peter Strzok, the Chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section, and the Clinton operation is important, because of what is being learned about what the FBI was doing during the election. This detailed write up from Conservative Treehouse is impressive, but quite long. It pulls together all of the public information related to the top-secret memo floating around Washington. Serious people are talking about what is in that memo, characterizing it as the worst scandal in American history. That’s not nothin’.

The narrative that explains all of this is that high ranking people in the FBI, maybe even Director Comey, were working with the Justice Department to help Hillary Clinton in the election. That has seemed clear for a while now. What is becoming clear now is Fusion GPS, the political dirty tricks operation, functioned as a cutout for the FBI and the Clinton campaign. The FBI shared secret intel with Fusion, who then sold it to the Clinton campaign or distributed to the media at the direction of the campaign.

There is a word for all of this and it is called treason. It is one thing for a career intelligence officer to go bad and start selling intelligence to a foreign government. That just a part of the life of a nation state. It is an entirely different thing when senior members of the political class are working to undermine the fundamentals of the political system. It is the sort of thing that results in hangings or civil wars. It’s why the infamous memo has not been released, despite the fact it could be leaked or declassified by the White House.

That is what brings us back to Dick Nixon. The mere hint of abuse of the FBI and CIA by the political side of the White House was considered enough of a threat to warrant impeachment. What we have here is worse than anything Nixon was accused of doing, even by his fiercest critics. Stuff that is orders of magnitude worse went on in the Obama White House. Imagine senior FBI men, faced with federal prison, agreeing to rat out major political actors. Imagine them pointing the finger at Obama or his top aides.

Again, this is fundamentally a political problem, but it cannot be ignored. That is probably why no one is in a hurry to release that memo. It is not just about partisan politics. Imagine how blacks would react if we had a full blown political crisis that paints Obama as worse than Nixon. That is looking increasingly possible. People have forgotten about the systematic abuse of the IRS, using it against conservative activists in the run-up to the 2012 election. There is only so much that can be swept under the rug to protect Obama.

This will not end well.

The Answer Is Always More

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One of the more entertaining bits of black humor on Steve Sailer’s blog are the stories he posts about how every problem can be solved with more immigration. No matter the problem, someone will have a reason why the solution to it is more immigration. It’s as if our elites have a bizarre form of Tourette’s, where any stimulation causes them to blurt out lines from Emma Lazarus. When the lunacy of their claims is pointed out, the response is usually just a blank stare, suggesting their enthusiasm for open borders is involuntary.

The reason for this is the people championing open borders are not working from a set of facts, or arguments from those facts. Sure, the indentured servant lobbies are thinking in economic terms. The refugee lobbies want the money spigot to remain open, but these are relatively small influences on public debate. The vast majority of people championing open borders have no monetary incentives. They are doing it because they view the issue in purely moral terms. They are pro-immigrant in the same way normal people are pro-life.

Among the cognitive elites, there is a strong social incentive for embracing ever more extreme positions on the popular fads of the moment. It’s how we went so quickly from tolerating homosexuals to embracing mentally disturbed men in sundresses. Similarly, it is how miscegenation went from casual outlier to the only acceptable form of mating. When it comes to immigration, the furthest possible extreme is open borders, so the game is to come up with ever more creative ways of justifying it.

When looking at it in moral terms, it helps explain why both types of Progressive have gone berserk on the issue of immigration. Fundamentally, the so-called Left and the so-called Right share the same moral framework. Both sides of Progressivism embrace an intolerant, smothering set of universal principles rooted in the blank slate. All people everywhere are the same and interchangeable. As Senator Lindsey Graham would put it, people don’t exist as flesh and blood beings, but rather as ideals.

Anyway, it is good to keep that in mind when seeing so-called conservatives make their pitch for open borders. This piece in the hilariously misnamed American Conservative is a a rather bizarre attempt to justify redefining temporary to mean permanent.

That’s why this recent decision will be particularly advantageous for MS-13. Realistically, the federal government will be unable to enforce this immigration policy. Likewise, the vast majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans are unlikely to voluntarily leave. Instead, they’ll live in the shadows as prey for MS-13.

Trump has masterfully used MS-13 as a straw man in the immigration debate. The constant references to this glorified street gang leave the impression that most illegal immigrants are violent felons. It is a particularly artful tactic, given that 80 percent of voters believe that illegal immigrants convicted of a felony should be deported.

However, the vast majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans aren’t violent criminals. Although Hurricane Mitch is listed as their official reason for refugee status, the reality is that a high percentage of these people fled to the U.S. to escape violence in El Salvador.

Those who do return will be much more vulnerable back in El Salvador where MS-13 and their rival, Barrio 18, control large swaths of the country. In turn, assets these immigrants acquired while working in the U.S. will eventually be appropriated by these gangs.

There is a common misconception that a “weak immigration policy” led to the rise of MS-13. In fact, it was the aggressive deportation policy of the Clinton administration that transformed MS-13 into a transnational criminal organization.

You see how this works?

Enforcing the law creates more criminals. This sort of sophistry that has become common, because there is no rational argument in favor of open borders. As Americans have become familiar with the facts, the open borders people are left with mendacity as their only option. Coming up with the most extreme justifications inevitably leads to defending the indefensible, not on merit, but as a form of virtue signalling. Demanding easy access to Americans by bloodthirsty criminal gangs is extreme in the extreme.

This quest for the most virtuous position on the immigration topic answers the question posed in this post by Sailer. If all people are the same, that we’re just interchangeable meat sticks, there can be no moral justification for inequality and diversity. Our elites see diversity as the result of some evil force. Nothing can be too extreme when combating evil. More important, one cannot be seen by his coevals as beyond the pale when he is engaged in combating evil. The crazier the better when it comes fanatics.

It’s also why appeals to reason never work with these people. We are ruled over by fanatics, convinced that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. They are like addicts seeking a high more intense than the one before it. You don’t talk an addict out of his blind quest for the ultimate high. He has to find that limit on his own. That usually means dying in a pool of his own vomit. That’s most likely the fate of our rulers. They will realize they have gone too far just as the trap door snaps open and they begin the drop.

A Winter Mélange

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This week, putting the podcast together, was a bit of a scramble. Each Sunday, I sit down and clean up my notes for the blog and the podcast. I keep a running list of stories and ideas that pop into my head. The stuff I’ve done on the blog or in the podcast gets purged and then I organize the rest. Most weeks I know what I want to write about for the week, but I leave open the option to go where events take me.

For the podcast, since it takes some time to record and edit, I try to get a head start on Sunday and think about what I want to rant about the following week. I’ll put the Xirl science stuff together, for example, on Sunday. I may even record it if I’m practicing some editing stuff. This week, starting on Sunday, I was drawing a blank. Not too much jumped out to me as worthy topics. It finally came together as a mélange of items.

My mind naturally wants to have each podcast organized around a theme. Maybe not every segment, but the bulk of them. It’s an odd tick, but it is just how my brain is wired. I like order and symmetry. Sometimes that is not possible, so i just have to accept that the perfect is the enemy of the good enough. This week, a collection of unrelated items is good enough, at least I hope it is good enough. Time will tell.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I’ll be posting clips on Gab for the ADD listeners. 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. Of course, the Hitler Phones are so slow now, you may never finish.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: A Year of Trump (Link)
  • 12:00: Xirl Science (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 22:00: Race Hustling (Link)
  • 32:00: Peaceful Separation (Link)
  • 42:00: Talking Dogs (Link)
  • 47:00: Sportsball (Link)
  • 52:00: Green Shoots (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Remembering Futures Past

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A few times a year, I re-read some classic science fiction, just for some variety, but also to see if it still works. One of the funny things about our age is the past is increasingly more alien to us than any imagined future. Reading stories, written in the 1950’s, that depicted life in the far off future, you get some insights into the society that laid the groundwork for our age. Often times, though, it reveals the foolishness and, in retrospect, absurd optimism, about the future and technology common in the last century.

The old science fiction guys got some things right about the future. Jules Verne, who is the father of science fiction, had amazing insights into the future of technology. You can read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea today and it still holds up pretty well. On the other hand, a lot of science fiction turned out to be wildly wrong about the future, even by the standards of fiction. I recently re-read The Martian Chronicles and it is laugh out loud terrible in parts. It is corn-ball pulp fiction now.

Of course, people were much more optimistic about the future in the heyday of science fiction writing. If you would have told Ray Bradbury in the 1950’s that man would not be on Mars by 2018, he would have thought you were a ridiculous pessimist. Of course, man would be exploring the solar system in the 21st century. We would have conquered human suffering, united as one and be riding around in nuclear powered flying cars. Instead, the future is trans-gendered otherkins stalking your daughters in public toilets.

We cannot blame the people of the last century for not seeing this stuff coming. We are living it and it still seems impossibly insane. For Americans in the 1950’s, optimism about the future was natural. America had conquered the world, saving Western Civilization from itself. Technological progress was making life comfortable, even for the poorest. There was no reason to think we were heading for a bad turn. It is a good lesson that no matter how bad things are now, they can get worse. The future is not written.

Reading The Martian Chronicles, I was reminded of something that turns up in old black and white movies. That is the acceptance of casual violence. In the 1950’s, fictional characters would say things like, “You better give it to me straight or I’ll bash your teeth in” to some other character playing a store clerk. In one of the Bradbury stories, a man from earth arrives on Mars and starts talking with the Martians. The conversations are peppered with threats of personal violence, but in a casual, haphazard manner.

Imagine going into the local retail store and seeing one of the customers telling the clerk that he was going to bash in his skull if he did not hop to it. I doubt fist fights were a regular feature down at the piggly-wiggly, but the threat of personal violence was a common occurrence in movies and fiction. It is reasonable to think that the people in the audiences for this stuff found it perfectly normal that men talked to one another in this way, which suggests it was how people talked in their normal lives.

Similarly, most of the characters in Bradbury’s future smoked. In one story, the first thing the earth men do when they land on Mars is have a smoke. Maybe Bradbury was a smoker, but his best writing is when describing the joys of smoking on Mars. I guess it makes sense to think that the future will have better versions of the stuff you really enjoy today. Imagine going back in time and telling sci-fi writers that in the future, men would not only not be on Mars, but smoking would be a crime. They would think you were crazy.

The other thing about old sci-fi, and it jumps out in The Martian Chronicles, is the fascination people had back then with rockets and nuclear technology. It makes perfect sense. Both seemed impossibly amazing to the people of the time. The fascination with nuclear energy is amusing in hindsight. Science fiction writers 70 years ago thought it was perfectly logical that tiny nuclear reactors would replace all of our energy sources. Still, nuclear powered garments to keep you warm at night is laughably silly in hindsight.

Putting that aside, it is amusing to look back at these conceptions of the future. Many were wildly wrong, because they wanted to be wildly wrong. It is fiction, after all. It is easy to forget that writers in the first half of the last century were expecting their stuff to be read by men with high school level educations. Granted, a 1950’s high school education was much more than what we see today, but the audience was not a collection of literary sophisticates. The job of the writer was to entertain, not lecture, the reader.

Still, reading old science fiction has a utility to our age, which goes beyond mere amusement. The people of that era, producing this stuff, were optimistic about the future. They were committed to building a better world. Granted, it all went to shit in the 60’s and we have yet to pull out of the death spiral, but they did not know what they could not know. Our generations do not have that excuse. We have the hard lessons of failed social experimentation. We have no excuse for tolerating this stuff. We know better.

Manly Men

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The first time I ever had a reason to think that maybe the next generation of men coming along were a little light in the loafers, was when I hired a summer intern a dozen years ago. He was a college student hoping to become a lawyer or politician one day. He seemed like a bright and engaging kid, so we hired him. He was just going to be doing basic office stuff. Even if he was dumb as a dirt, it really did not matter. Just as long as he was not annoying or crazy, I figured I could get some use out of him.

Not long into his tenure, he came in late because he had a flat time and had to wait for someone. He did not know how to change a tire and he seemed somewhat amazed that people did know how to change tires. I began to notice that he did not do little things like hold the door for women or older people. He was unaware of things I just took for granted, like how to use a screwdriver. We had a small maintenance task on a piece of office gear and he watched me do it like I was conjuring spirits from the other world.

I have never wanted to be one of those old guys who complained about the younger generation. I think that is silly but talking with him and other people his age that summer, I started to wonder if maybe there was something to it. The main reason I started to change my opinion is he thought it was true. This is something I have bumped into a few times. It seems that many young men think previous generations of men were much more manly in some way. Apparently, it is not just a US thing. British boys think they are wimps too.

In fairness, it may be the fact that Millennials were raised in a culture that celebrated girls at the expense of boys. This stuff started in Gen-X, but it was not horrible for us. By the time the Millennials came along, schools and popular culture reeked of estrogen. It is perfectly reasonable for these males to assume that they were never trained to be proper men, even if they are proper men anyway. There’s also the fact that the boys today are told they are girls trapped in a man’s body and that boys should be wearing dresses.

Now, I certainly knew I had it soft compared to the old guys I remember as a kid. My grandfather’s one brother was at Guadalcanal. Another died in the Bataan. Just listening to the old timers talk about their youth made it clear that they were hard men produced in hard times. That is an extreme example. My generation did not have it hard, at least not that much tougher than the Millennials and now Gen-Z. It does not make a lot of sense for them to think they are a generation of pansies or for them to actually be pansies.

The flip side, assuming the young men today are wimps, is that this is the result of the feminization of society. That happened because the previous generations of men slowly ceded ground to the ladies. That process started in the 19th century when Protestant pastors teamed up with vinegar drinking lesbianism to get women the right to vote in Federal elections. Even today’s wimps know that was a terrible idea. How is it the tough guys of a century ago were so eager to hand the ballot to women?

The MGTOW¹/PUA² blogger Heartiste thinks it is soy in diets. The reliance on soy protein in modern Western diets is causing a drop in testosterone. I do not have low testosterone, even for a geezer, but I never eat soy. I do not eat processed foods, just meat and green vegetables. I have friends my age who do eat lots of prepared foods and they have gone on testosterone replacement therapy. It sounds implausible, but the European diet never included lots of soy, so maybe there is something to it.

There is some data showing that testosterone levels are falling in men. It is an age independent decline, which means levels are falling relative to the same age groups of previous generations. There is also the observed drop in sperm counts. One could be related to the other, but both could have some common root cause. The odds of that cause being blue-haired feminists screaming about their feelings is probably low, but culture cannot be ruled out entirely. Still, environment is the more likely cause.

There is also the modern habit of loading up young boys with psychoactive drugs so they do not act like young boys. This just started coming around when I was a kid, but we largely missed it. Millennials and Gen-Z boys were drugged as a matter of school policy. Giving young people these kinds of drugs is madness, but about 20% of males grew up munching on Ritalin and Adderall. It is reasonable to suspect that a youth spent high on stimulants is going to have a hangover effect into adulthood.

The diet and lifestyle explanation would cover the last few generations, but it does not explain why men a century ago started ceding ground to women. My grandfather’s generation had the very real fear of starvation. Men were still routinely killed on work sites and personal violence was a part of a normal man’s life. They never heard of soy or ADHD, but they were willing to open the door for women to take over the culture. For thousands of years men knew how to control their women. Then they did not.

Maybe there is some multi-generational cycle at work and the pendulum is about to swing the other way. It is hard to know as we struggle to understand trends that transcend generations. Maybe it is an evolutionary trigger built into humans. When times are good, the men get stupid, eventually bringing an end to the good times. Regardless, the fact is we have fewer manly men now. That is not a problem in a post-scarcity society, but if that changes, we may find a shortage of men to be a big problem.

¹ I am unreliably told that Heartiste may not be MGTOW. I am not all that clear on the definition in the man-o-verse, so apologies to Heartiste if I characterized him incorrectly.

² Hilariously, many men are upset at my calling Heartiste MGTOW, so I have amended the post.