Author Archives: thezman

The Causes of the White Death

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A while back someone noticed that white people in American are dying off at record rates. Digging into the numbers reveals that middle-aged whites have seen a spike in suicide rates as well as a spike in death from substance abuse. It got a lot of attention because white liberals are pretty much organized around exterminating white people. It is a suicide cult based on race. The so-called conservatives hid under their beds, but hate thinkers out on the fringe jumped in with their explanations and data analysis.

My best posts seem to be those where I don’t make an argument, but instead describe a phenomenon or analyze something happening in the world. I know I enjoy writing those posts more than the standard arguments in favor of a particular point of view. With that in mind, I thought a useful post would be a roundup of the various theories about The White Death, including a little of my own opinion on the topic. It’s a big topic that will surely make a few books, but here’s a first blush of some of the theories.

The Steve Sailer Theory: Suicide and death from substance abuse often go hand in hand and they tend to work over time. Sailer took a look at the ages involved, did a little math and noticed that the cohort with the spike in suicide and substance abuse were the 70’s generation. These were the folks who missed the summer of love, but made up for it in the disco era. For whites, this was probably the worst decade for drug abuse, social pathology and cultural decay. It was a a tough decade to be a honky.

The argument here is that peak partying for whites took a toll on this generation. Higher alcoholism rates and the aftershocks of excessive drug taking in the younger years resulted in higher death rates in the late middle years. There’s also the fact that this generation was the first to experience economic malaise. If you came of age in the 70’s, you did not enter a world brimming with optimism. For working class whites, the malaise never really ended, thus a lifetime of substance abuse for many of them.

The John Derbyshire Theory: John made the observation back when Merkel’s Millions were first flooding into Europe that the invaders were all young males. Further, the people welcoming them were mostly women. In the US, the middle-age death spike is exclusively white and heavily male. In subsequent podcasts, John put the two trends together. The white male had suddenly fallen to the bottom of the sexual pecking order. White males are now low status males, while the young dusky fellows from over the horizon are the top dogs.

Human biology is immutable so of if there is no future for white males, that could explain the spike in substance abuse rates and suicide rates among white males. After all, we are biologically designed to seek out females. If I understand John’s angle correctly, his theory is that the general war on men, by white women, in white societies is leading to all sorts of bizarre outcomes, one of which is the climbing death rates among white men. Maybe we can call this death by angry snapper.

Manosphere Theory: I’m not entirely sure I fully grasp this explanation, given that I don’t haunt these sites all that often. The basic claim is that masculinity has been degraded to the point where men are just lesbians with a dick. Instead of engaging in masculine jobs, hobbies and social roles, men have been forced into an increasingly feminized role in society. This rewards submissive men, but heavily penalizes normal males. Turn on a television and you clearly see they have a point.

The result is a general sense of despondency and disconnectedness. This leads to high substance abuse rates and higher suicide rates as this is not a role most men are bred to accept. This is the genesis of the “cuckservative” epithet to describe the new submissive male that is held up as the example of modern masculinity. If your main role in life is to bring black guys home to the wife, you’re better off dead. Like I said, I may be missing something here, but those are the general outlines.

The Despair Theory: Here is a broader look at the trend lines to include other types of social dysfunction, like the spike in opiate use. Flat wages, declining mobility, increased inequality, the proliferation of drug therapy, social decay and the decline in religion have led to a widespread sense of despair. This is the Robert Putnam angle. The globalization of economics has left people less secure in their lives, adding anxiety to the despair. Everyone is a bad decision by management away from suffering a severe decline in living standards.

If you look at what has been happening with the white working class, the word “despair” is a good descriptor. The economy has been horrible for these people and the ruling elite has unleashed a cultural assault that has blown apart anything resembling social structure. A factory man in 1965 could live a nice lower middle-class life. Today, that guy is working at a Home Depot and his wife has to work to make ends meet. These trends are now seeping up into the middle class, as evidenced by the Trump candidacy.

My Theory: My hunch is the White Death is a downstream result of a much longer trend. Think of the West as an industry and each ethnic group as a business in that industry. It got going in the 15th century with the age of exploration. The competition between countries, as well as the massive growth of the business, allowed the West to rocket ahead of the world in culture, finance and technology. The West was Silicon Valley while the rest of the world was Pittsburgh.

This long expansion ran its course like every other industry in history. It is a mature industry now, where growth is small. The sort of people who thrive in a booming industry are the people who like risk and like breaking form to try new things. In a mature industry, the rewards are to the conservative and rule bound. There’s no benefit to risk taking so there’s no reason to take risks. Similarly, there’s nothing but risk in breaking from the rules, so the best people avoid coloring outside the lines.

Thinking of Europeans, in the broadest sense, as risk takers and adventurers, trapped in a world where risk is to be avoided and adventure means having ice cream for desert, would explain a few things. Inviting millions of Exploding Mohameds into Europe tickles that desire to take risks and take on new challenges that is baked into the Western psyche. If you think about it, all of the problems that plague the West today are self-inflicted. It’s as if we are keeping ourselves busy by inviting trouble to our door.

At the more granular level, and this is probably truer of Americans than Europeans, is that there’s not a lot of fun stuff for men to do anymore. A century ago, a man with modest skills could do well by being physically courageous. Maybe that meant military service or striking out for the hinterlands to start a new life. Tough guys and bad asses were still getting the girls in movies up until fairly recent. Now the leading men are homosexuals, who share their feelings and cry a lot. Or, they are cartoons.

This is one of those topics that is open to all sorts of crackpot theories. It’s also one that will probably solve itself. In a healthy society, old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. That’s not the West today. Whatever is at the root of the White Death will give way to something more hostile than white guys hanging themselves or overdosing on horse. To use another hoary chestnut, no tree grows to the sky. The White Death will give way to something else. It will probably be worse.

The End of Mass Democracy

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In modern America, it is impossible to know if what appears in the press is real news or some made-up nonsense intended to trick the public. The increasingly important site Conservative Tree House posted up a sampling of entire fake media people and operations the other day. When you are paid to write on behalf of a party, you’re not a journalist. You are an advocate. When you are an advocate posing as an independent media, you are a fraud.

Even though much of what is in the press is agit-prop, there’s information to be gleaned from it. This story in Bloomberg the other day about how the GOP is preparing to end popular selection of their nominees is a good example. Ostensibly, the “report” is about how they will navigate a brokered convention. What they really want to do is introduce the idea of ending the primary system or at least severely curtailing it.

The Democrats have largely made their primary system a beauty contest. The super delegate system lets party officials put their thumb on the scale to the point where Clinton could lose the rest of the primaries and still win the nomination. Of the 2382 delegates at the Democrat convention, 712 will be controlled by the party. In other words, Sanders will have to have own 71% of the delegates in the primaries to win the nomination.

An important thing to remember about America politics in the technocratic era is that there is only one party. The Bipartisan Fusion Party comprises the elites from technology, politics, culture and finance.  Republican and Democrat are just the two faces of the party so that we can keep up the appearance of being a popular republic. It’s not a lot different than what Augustus did in Rome when pretending to include the Senate in decisions.

Unlike Rome, this system evolved organically. The parties have become play things for the mega-donors, like sponsoring champions in tournaments. Team Red is paid to beat Team Blue. It’s their reason to exist. It’s why public policy never changes, regardless of which team wins. They are no longer competing for the right to set policy. They are competing for the right to hire their friends and relatives. Washington DC is a global Tammanay Hall.

The lesson Team Red drew from the 2008 and 2012 election is that white people are their biggest liability. They have to shed the image of being the party of white people. That’s why they tried every trick in the book to get Marco Rubio the nomination. He was going to be their Obama. It’s also why they appear poised to blow up their own party to stop Trump. In their view, destroying the “white party” may be the only way to save their party.

This bit from the story is a good indication of what’s coming:

“Donald Trump may well end up having the most votes anyone has ever gotten in a Republican primary this time. That was true for Mrs. Clinton and she didn’t get the nomination,” in 2008, said Ron Kaufman, a member of the RNC’s rules committee. “The thing that the party has to do is to make sure the voters believe their votes matter to keep them in the party for November.”

That’s a a classic bit of double-speak. On the one hand, the guy who gets the most votes is not going to be the nominee. On the other hand, they are trying to figure out how to convince the rubes that their votes matter. They don’t have to con all the rubes, just enough to keep up appearances, which is what we are seeing in the Democratic primaries. Low turnout, but enough to keep up appearances.

My bet all along has been that the GOP will eventually allow Trump to have the nomination, but only when they know they can undermine his campaign enough to keep him from winning the general. If they believe they can hold the House and Senate, but starve Trump out in the general, they will let him win the nomination at a contested convention. It’s the intermediate game.

If they cannot be sure of that, and Trump’s political savvy so far makes this a tough sell, then they have to go all in on the long game. That means dumping Trump and Cruz and going with a party man. Karl Rove is out trying to work this angle now by claiming that Trump and Cruz have no chance to beat Clinton in the fall, as if she is this wildly popular rock star in the view of the public.

The short term is getting a nominee, but the long game here is to avoid this ever happening again. Both parties face the same dilemma. They represent the interests of about 20% of the public. They augment this with lip-service to various ideological groups, but that’s wearing thin. If you are a pro-life Christian, for example, you have to know the GOP thinks you’re an idiot. If you are a union guy, you know the Democrats don’t care about you in the least.

The way around it is what we see with the Democrats. They have conditioned their suckers to accept the primary as a beauty contest. The GOP will follow the same path. There will be new ballot rules to keep trouble makers out of early primaries and a super delegate system to let the party pick the nominee from a slate of pre-approved options. The primaries will just be proof of concept exercises. Your vote will no longer count much at all.

The Korean Anomaly

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In the love-think community, it is generally accepted that East Asians are near the top of the IQ pyramid. James Watson, the man who discovered DNA and is largely responsible for modern genetics said it best:

“Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70. One IQ table shows 113 in Hong Kong, 110 in Japan, and 100 in Britain. White populations in Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States score closer to one another than to the worldwide black average. It’s been that way for at least a century.”

I’ll just note that Watson was forced into exile after saying this, but no one has yet to show he was wrong. Even outside the love community, people generally accept this biological reality. American colleges are not discriminating against Asians and Jews because they have nothing better to do. Colleges are discriminating against males in the STEM fields for the same reason. At American universities, Harrison Bergeron is a how-to manual, not satire.

If you are going to make some sort of case against IQ, a good place to start would be Korea. South Korea is generally thought of as a first world country. They have a per capita GDP similar to Italy and France. They also have a Gini Coefficient similar to Canada. They are part of the great global trade network of the West, sending sophisticated electronics and manufactured goods all over the world.

This sounds good, but it is a recent development. Into the 1980’s, South Korea was similar to a banana republic with military coups and martial law. In the 1970’s, South Korea was poor by the standards of a third world country. Things took off in the 80’s when the new global currency arrangement made South Korea a good investment. For a smart people, it took a long time and lots of help from the round-eye to figure out how to run a country.

Then we have North Korea. It has been a repressive prison state for three generations and there are no signs that it is about to change. The new leader, Kim Jung-un, is sort of a millennial version of the insane despot. He has the love of irony we see with millennials, so he goes in for novel ways of killing his enemies. Executing people with RPG’s is the sort of the thing a video game playing millennial d-bag would find amusing.

The result of three generations of lunacy is a country that is essentially a giant concentration camp. Nighttime satellite images reveal just how backward the place is, relative to the rest of Asia. Even African countries can keep the lights on these days. Of course, North Korea is famous for not being able to feed itself. The last famine was in the 90’s and killed 300,000. Malnutrition has reduced North Korea to a nation of racist dwarfs.

The news out of the hermit kingdom is that another famine is on the way. The spate of purges, and the general incompetence of Kim Jung-un, suggest this one could be horrific. When authoritarian regimes purge enemies of the state, they inevitably purge their best talent. The people left are toadies and rump-swabs with no ability to do much of anything, other than grovel to the boss. In this case, the boss is most likely an idiot.

Both Koreas are a good examples of how IQ is just one part of the puzzle. Ted Kaczynski had a genius level IQ, but he also liked sending letter bombs to people. Ted Bundy was another guy with a high IQ, but he also liked killing young women. At the less violent end of the scale, lots of brilliant people live otherwise anonymous lives because they lack the social skills to succeed in business. Most actors are as dumb as goldfish, but they score high on extraversion.

The two Koreas also serve a good example of how small cultural changes, even those forced upon a people, can have huge changes in outcome. The South was a part of the American Empire and as a result could evolve into a first world country. The North has remained isolated, boiling off the talent it would need to advance beyond its medieval conditions. The result is a dystopian prison state in the north and a sprawling technology state in the south.

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Exploding Mohameds

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The other day HBD Chick posted this link on twitter. It is an article about how the Exploding Mohameds (henceforth referred to as EM’s) in Brussels had detailed floor plans to the Belgian Prime Minister’s residence and his offices. The implication is that the EM’s were at least considering an attack on the head of government. We will never know as the EM’s are dead and the security state will never tell us anyway.

My thought when reading it is that I am a bit disappointed, but I am mildly hopeful. It is too bad that the EM’s did not go ahead and blow up the official offices of the Belgian government, rather than an airport. The people at the airport are mostly innocent. The people in the Belgian government are the ones responsible for the Muslim invasion so they should be the ones paying the price for it.

It will only take one EM to go off and kill a politician, I suspect, for opinions to change. The EM’s in Paris went off near the place where French President Francois Hollande was watching a soccer match. He suddenly got religion, so to speak, about cracking down on the Muzzies, at least for a little while. Have a few pols actually blown to bits and my hunch is we see official attitudes change. It is easy to preach sacrifice when someone else is picking up the tab.

The window for putting a halt to the invasion and driving the Muslims out of the West is closing. A committed minority population goes from too small to worry about to too large to do anything about in the blink of an eye. Just look at America. About 20% of the population belongs to the Cult of Modern Liberalism, but they run the country and have done so for a few generations now. They have a veto over what can be said in public, which grants them total control of society.

Let us look at Germany as an example of the Islamification of Europe. It is a population of eighty million with a fertility rate of 1.47. To understand how this works, let us pretend that in 2010 the whole population was of childbearing age. Their fertility rate means the eighty people produce fifty-six million children. That population will produce thirty-nine million children. One more turn of the wheel and you are down to twenty-seven million children. The point here is that once fertility rates drop below replacement, the population drops quickly.

Now, the population of Germany is not all of childbearing years. The median age is forty-seven and that includes the five million non-Germans Muslims who are in their 20’s with fertility rates over 4.0. The number of actual Germans under the age of twenty-five is twenty million. Throw in those who will possibly have children into their 30’s and you have roughly twenty-five million Germans with a chance to make new Germans. That 1.47 fertility rate looks pretty grim all of a sudden.

On the other hand, those five million Muslims are all young, median age of thirty now. The million or so who have poured in recently are in their 20’s. The history of migration tells us that first the men arrive, then they bring in their wives and children. With a 4.0 fertility rate, those five million Muslims can produce ten million children, which leads to twenty million grandchildren. That fertility rate of 4.0 suddenly looks like a very powerful weapon.

The point here is the math is now working against the German people. They have about a decade or so to figure out how to end the Muslim invasion and de-Islamify their current foreign population. Given that the German political class is emotionally committed to the destruction of the German people, there is no reasoning with them. No reasonable people would invite these problems so it is irrational to think reason will have effect on them.

On the other hand, if Exploding Mohameds start going off in swank ruling class areas like restaurants, offices and government buildings, which could change some minds. Have a few high level pols feel the full force of a nail bomb like those poor folks at the airport in Brussels and suddenly the people in charge will have to re-evaluate their situation. As is the case with all aspects of multiculturalism, it looks great from a distance, but when it explodes in your office or at your kid’s school, it is not so much fun.

This will not end well.

Richard Milhouse Cruz

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One of the strange parts of the modern mass media age is that the mainstream is vastly more rigid and doctrinaire than in the prior age. Everyone assumed that the burst of new media platforms would broaden the scope of what is acceptable discourse. In the 90’s we were endlessly hearing about how “new voices” and “new perspectives” would change the conversation. Instead, it was one purging after another as the Overton Window swung left and became increasingly narrow.

The most obvious example that comes to mind is the treatment of Mark Steyn by the Conservative Industrial Complex. He made some glib comments about how homosexuals were discussed in the old days and was pilloried by the hysterical homosexual activist editor of National Review. Eventually, he was driven off the site as a heretic. His crime was being funny and interesting, which is always a problem for the ideologues.

Anyway, one result of this weird narrowing of the range of acceptable opinion is that decent writers have to figure out how to take the fringe ideas and make them respectable. It is often an impossible job as so much has been deemed unacceptable. We live in a land where you can be fired from your job because you noticed that guys named Mohamed have a habit of exploding in public.

Still, the fringe is the incubator of interesting thought these days. A theme with the Red Pill Right, for example, is that we are in a similar phase as we were in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The Left is running out of steam as its ideas become increasing absurd and dangerous. Disorder and malaise are causing the silent majority to look around for someone to restore sanity to government and put things back into their proper order.

That’s what bleeds through here in this Ross Douthat column about Ted Cruz. It is against the law now to mention Nixon as anything other than the Hitler of the 1970’s so comparing Cruz to Tricky Dick is, as they say, problematic. Instead, Douthat has to rely on a reference to a fictional character most of his readers have to pretend to know. It is not a great way to get into the essential character of Ted Cruz, but it opens the door a bit to historical comparison at the root of it.

I wrote the other day about Cruz being a sigma male and that is not a terrible framing, but a more useful one is to look at Cruz as the modern incarnation of Dick Nixon. Cruz, like Nixon, is a guy you instinctively want to avoid. There was an alien aspect to Nixon that even his friends found to be off-putting. His enemies, of course, pounced on these things, hence the name “Tricky Dick.” Cruz has this same problem. His friends are not enthusiastic about him, but his enemies are very enthusiastic.

Nixon, like Cruz, was never embraced by the GOP. Eisenhower picked him as his VP but treated him like bad odor. Ike was universally revered, but Nixon, despite his talents, was despised by the WASP elite of both parties. Democrats hated him for Alger Hiss and Republicans hated him for being low-class. The fact that Nixon was smarter and more knowledgeable about international affairs made things worse as he could not be dismissed as a rube.

That seems to be a similar issue with Cruz. He had few friends in the Bush administration, despite checking all the boxes and being super smart. Of all the candidates running, on paper he should have been the first choice of the GOP elite. Instead, he was the last choice. Even now, he is not really an option, just a useful weapon against Trump. It is quite remarkable how much the party establishment hates the guy.

Of course, like Nixon, Cruz hates the establishment just as much as they hate him. A big part of Nixon’s ambition seems to have been driven by his rejection by the elites. We are seeing that with Ted Cruz. He got the senate seat and they treated him like a hired man so he went rogue, calling out the leadership. He even accused McConnell of lying to the caucus, which is unheard of in Washington. His entire campaign is built on his personal animus to his party’s leaders.

Historical analogies are never perfect. Cruz will never be the GOP nominee. He is just being used right now as a vehicle for the Stop Trump folks. They hope Cruz can prevent Trump from getting 1237 delegates. If that happens, the convention goes to a second ballot, at which point the party leaders step in and dump Cruz and Trump for one of their own. If they cannot pull that off then they will make a deal with Trump, maybe having one of their guys as his VP. Either way, Cruz will never be the nominee.

That is another point of comparison with Nixon. Ted Cruz is a very smart guy. He is also a very clever guy. Nixon was one of our smarter presidents, but he had a huge blind spot at times when it came to his enemies. He never fully appreciated just how much they hated him. That seems to be the defect of Ted Cruz. He thinks he can win and there is no way in Hell the GOP will let him win. He is failing to appreciate just how much they hate him.

The Entirely Worthless Catholic Church

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There Catholic Church is now a disgrace. The images of the toe-sucking Pope over the weekend should have been enough to empty the pews for good, assuming anyone was left after the pedophile priest scandals. Now we see that Catholic universities are going full moonbat, censuring people for expressing what is still Catholic dogma.

In the fall of 2014, junior faculty member Cheryl Abbate told a student, who secretly recorded the exchange, that his defense of man-woman marriage was an unacceptable topic in her ethics class and compared his views to racism. She said, “You can have whatever opinions you want but I can tell you right now, in this class homophobic comments, racist comments, and sexist comments will not be tolerated.” And then she told the student he should drop the class.

On this very popular blog, Professor McAdams outed the incident and charged the teaching assistant with “using a tactic typical among liberals now. Opinions with which they disagree are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.”

A firestorm ensued that pitted the academic freedom of McAdams against the leftist pieties of the officially “Catholic” institution.

The teaching assistant is said to have gotten mean emails, though she was hailed as a liberal hero and went on to a tenure track position at another university. McAdams was brought up on charges.

It was announced this week that a “diverse” faculty committee recommended to the university president that McAdams be suspended without pay from April 1 through the fall of 2016 and that he lose his job unless he admits “guilt” and apologized “within the next two weeks.” Specifically, the demand is “Your acknowledgement that your November 9, 2014, blog post was reckless and incompatible with the mission and values of Marquette University and you express deep regret for the harm suffered by our former graduate student and instructor, Ms. Abbate.”

The ever quotable and crusty McAdams compared the demand to the “Inquisition, in which victims who ‘confessed’ they had been consorting with Satan and spreading heresy would be spared execution.” He called the demand a violation of “black letter guarantees of academic freedom embodied in University statutes.”

He also charges the university president with dishonesty since the faculty panel did not require such an admission of guilt or an apology. McAdams said such a statement from him would amount to a “loyalty oath” and he says he will not submit.

It’s perfectly reasonable for a religious institution to require its employees to be members of the religion. Similarly, a Catholic entity can demand that its employees support the positions of the Catholic Church. This is the basics of a civil sane society. If you don’t agree with the Catholic Church, don’t go to work for the Church or affiliated institutions. If I went to work for some devout Muslims, I would not bring a ham sandwich to work for lunch. It’s just common decency.

Marquette is allegedly a Catholic institution. The last time I checked, the Church still rejects the fruitless arrangement of gay marriage. Yet, here they are allowing Social Justice Warriors to fire a professor for upholding the Catholic position on marriage. What sort of church allows enemies of its existence take over its institutions like this? Why would anyone want to be a part of such a spineless, gutless hypocritical enterprise?

This is really not much a surprise. The Catholic Church is following the same path as the main Protestant sects. The Episcopal Church is a carnival of perversion with gay bishops and homicidal lesbians. It’s why their pews are empty. Who wants to celebrate that? The answer, of course, is no one and that’s why the Catholic Church is becoming a sad joke. Even with fair warning, they are heading down the same rat hole.

Sigma Male Versus Alpha Male

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Out on the fringes, far away from polite company, exists a place called the manosphere or androsphere. This is place where somewhat normal men, unconstrained by PC thought police and buttressed by behavioral science, write and talk about how to score chicks. They write about other topics, but it is mostly about manly stuff, which biology dictates must revolve around scoring chicks. That is biological reality.

Anyway, most of this stuff is not new or even very creative. Men have been making money “teaching” other men how to get laid for a long time, probably since the first settlement. Skin magazines like Playboy used to have regular features on how to succeed with the ladies. What is somewhat new and useful is the borrowing of behavior science, particularly of primates, and applying it to modern social dynamics.

Of particular use are the terms to describe male status within a group. Researchers who study behavior of social animals often refer to the most dominant individual as the “alpha” male. The second most dominant is the “beta,” the third is the “gamma”, and finally the “omega” is at the bottom of the male hierarchy. The manosphere has taken these terms and created a useful set of sketches to describe modern western males.

It is why Donald Trump is so often referred to as the alpha male in the debates or even in the campaign. Trump has all the features one would associate with the top dog in a social group. He is loud, brash, confident and he attracts the best women. By best here I mean sexually attractive, not the ugly feminists majoring in penis chopping at Oberlin. Trump walks into a room and he is the boss. Everyone knows it, especially the women.

Jeb Bush was quickly called a beta male by people who do not understand the lingo, but he was probably a gamma, as he had no willingness to take on the big dog. Jeb was happiest in the submissive role. That is the thing people fail to grasp about this stuff. Beta males are not necessarily losers. They just happen to have been beaten by the winner. In a different setting, Rubio could be the top dog, but Jeb is always submissive.

Way back when the Republican primary started, it feels like years ago now, the conventional wisdom was that the Republicans needed their Obama. They needed a magical minority to bring them grace which in turn would bring them electoral success. ¡Jeb! Bush changed his nationality to Mexican, hoping to be the first trans-national president. Marco Rubio jumped in, figuring he ticked all the boxes to become the Republican Obama.

It did not turn out that way. The Alpha Male started talking about things of interest to the voters and he jumped up in the polls. Then he laid waste to the Bush campaign and then put down the Rubio campaign, thus leaving the hated Ted Cruz as the only alternative around which the party bosses could rally. As it stands, the only guy with a shot to stop Trump is Cruz. Instead of getting their Obama, they are now hoping to get their Clinton.

I do not mean the lesbian grifter in the weird pantsuits. Not that Clinton. I mean Bill Clinton, the grifter from the Ozarks who enjoyed lying almost as much as he loved shagging interns. At least that is what the grandees of the GOP are hoping people believe. In reality, they detest Cruz and are just hoping he keeps Trump from hitting 1237 delegates. Then they can dump both men at the convention and nominate invertebrate like Paul Ryan or maybe Marco Rubio.

Meanwhile, we have a month or two to watch something interesting and that is a battle between a sigma male and an alpha male. Labeling Ted Cruz a sigma male works in the context of the managerial class. There, the normal masculine traits like physical courage, aggression and risk taking are off-limits. The managerial class is a highly feminized social structure, where females can compete with men for status.

Therefore, the dominant males display credentials and positions of authority in the bureaucracy, much like some birds display their plumage to warn off other males. Bill Clinton could be the “big dog” because he held the top job in Arkansas, thus making him the alpha in any political setting. It is why he had no interest in being a senator. Bubba always had to be the big dog in the room and you cannot do that when you are one of one hundred powerless jerk-offs in the Senate.

Cruz, in contrast, is aggressive and forceful. He likes to flash his credentials, but he has little interest into being the dominate figure. He has not problem locking horns with others, but he is not trying to climb to the top of the existing social order. Instead, his nature is to remain on the fringe, taking shots at the people in charge. He revels in being the rebellious bad boy, relative to the group, in this case it is official Washington.

This is why Trump is struggling to put Cruz away at the moment. Rubio was willing to concede defeat because he really wanted to win the top spot. Cruz instinctively does not want the top spot; therefore, he has nothing to lose. Instead, he can stand out on the fringe defining himself in opposition to Trump. The Cult of Never Trump is basically for Sigma males and the women who love them.

That does not mean Trump cannot eventually crush the Cruz campaign. It just means he will have to employ different tactics. Beating Bush was simply about dominating him physically. Trump seemed to be giving Bush a wedgie in every debate. With Rubio it was just a matter of confronting him. Like I said, Rubio wanted to win and was willing to accept defeat if he was beaten so Trump just had to win.

Cruz is a different problem. Trump will need to avoid responding to Cruz. That is the first rule of handling these guys. They want to be the guy instigating the fight on their terms. Instead, Trump should find a surrogate like Chris Christie to attack Cruz. That will let Trump focus on bigger topics that one would expect the top dog to be discussing. It also means Team Trump can focus on the weird ticks of Ted Cruz. This a proven way to unman a sigma male.

A Long Ramble On Time & Memory

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I was listening to something the other day and the guy talking made a point about public attitudes toward homosexuals. His point was that attitudes have changed quickly. He said something along the lines that just a few years ago homosexuals were treated as bad as blacks in the south during segregation. The implication being that just last week we maintained separate accommodations for the homos. I just laughed as I am used to the Progressive Timeline.

I was not fully engaged, but my recollection is that the person talking was young-ish, maybe 30’s. For a white male born in 1985, for example, the Civil Rights Movement is as real as the French Revolution. These events are just items from his history text in high school. His teacher probably had no firsthand recollections and no one he knows has an emotional connection to it. Therefore, he has no emotional connections to it. It is just something from long ago.

Gay rights, on the other hand, are in his timeline. Picking a side and defending it was a big part of how young white males defined themselves in the 2000’s. The fact that his parents most certainly laughed at comics like Paul Lynde or watched Liberace perform on TV is unknown to him. He does not even think about the implications of his belief that a generation ago homosexuals were kept on lavender plantations. That would mean his parents were monsters by today’s enlightened standards.

He does not think of those things and it is not unique. Steve Sailer likes to point out that people have trouble keeping relative numbers in their head, like the actual number of homosexuals they see in their day. I would point out that people struggle understanding time, beyond the present day. There is now, the past you experienced and the way way back, like when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. It is why people struggle to accept evolution. It takes too long.

When I was a boy, my grandfather would talk to me about Russia, the Bolsheviks and the Cold War. Having escaped the Bolsheviks, he had a keen interest in them and wanted me to know what he knew about communism. I will never forget one conversation I had with him when he said the Cold War is forever and there was no winning. The best we could do is keep them from conquering the world.

I was a kid, but the idea of anything lasting forever sounded a bit dodgy. More important, a society run by blood thirty fanatics trying to impose an illogical social order would run afoul of reality eventually. I was young so I could not see things through the eyes of my grandfather, but it always stuck with me. I thought of that day while watching the Berlin Wall topple over as Europe celebrated the end of the Cold War.

My grandfather’s tales are real to me. His father’s tales are unknown to me because I never knew him. I never heard him tell those stories. The result is my historical framework starts around the Great War. My sense of the past starts at that point and becomes increasingly clear and intense as we move closer to my age. I feel like I know the Reagan years completely, even though I have probably forgotten most of it, but I lived through it so it looms large in my mind.

This is why Hitler remains a specter that haunts the imaginations of the people of today. The average age of Americans is thirty-seven so that means most people know someone who knew someone that experienced Hitler. If you are thirty-seven your parents are probably in their 60’s and their parents, your grandparents, lived through Hitler. In 20 years, the number of people who knew someone who knew Hitler will be much smaller. In another generation, it will be no one and Hitler will be just another face in the history text.

The other side of this is how the Cult of Modern Liberalism shuffles the past so easily to fit their current agenda. Utopian cults are obsessed with the future as it is the locus of their belief system. The promise land is just over the horizon so all effort must be made for the final push to reach it. This obsession with the future not only prevents seeing the world as it is but forces the believer to rearrange the past to fit the narrative. This is easily done when the past feels like a foreign country.

At the dawn of this current period in the West, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This was from his book, The End of History and the Last Man.

Looking back at this, it seems laughable, but smart people really thought the long twilight struggle was over and the folks from the Mayflower had finally won. After all, their entire intellectual life was organized around the struggle for liberal democracy against the great enemy of totalitarianism. In fact, it was this struggle that defined western liberal intellectual life. Once the struggle was over, then it only made sense that history was now over.

This historical amnesia is a not permanent feature of man. Bronze Age people knew they were an old people. So much so, in fact, many Bronze Age rulers would commission research on how their ancestors dressed and decorated their palaces. The idea was to not forget the past. Egyptian rulers dressed the same way for 1500 years for a reason. The past was what you were so to forget it was to die, in a way, by killing those who came before you and made you.

We are in a strange age in that respect. Mass media has some role in it. Huge news today is forgotten tomorrow, because we are buffeted on all sides from media bullhorns demanding our immediate attention. It is not that people can no longer remember the past; it is that they do not have time to remember it. Instead of fitting the present into the timeline, it is tossed over our shoulder so we can rush off to the next thing.

Where this all leads is hard to know. There’s some data to suggest we have become increasingly dumber since the 1800’s. This could simply be demographics. In 1800 the population of England was roughly ten million, while all of Africa was ninety million. Britain now has sixty-five million people while Africa 1.2 billion. The population of the lowest IQ population has grown at twice the rate of one of the brightest. This trend is accelerating so the average IQ will drop with it.

But the mass culture has something to with it too. There is really no reason to remember a lot of things when they are easily looked up on-line or off your phone. Being smart today is about knowing where the information is located or how it is associated with other known information. Remembering stuff is just not very useful. History, after all, is just formal remembering so it makes sense that history is dying as any sort of remembering is giving way to technology.

Then there is the fact we are on the verge of a great automation of work that will make remembering the past even more pointless as the life of man becomes pointless. Children have no reason to dwell on the past or think of the future. Instead, they enjoy the day playing with their toys. Perhaps the growing amnesia in the West is just part of the slow infantilization of man. One day people will loom at their surroundings and wonder how they got there and who made them. Perhaps even imagine the machines were made by gods.

Killing the King

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In the olden thymes, a mad king presented the elite with a dilemma. Violating the system for naming a king by, say, voting to remove the king, would introduce dangerous ideas into the system. At the same time, willy-nilly removing the king undermines the whole point of having a king and a line of succession. It was always the critical flaw in hereditary monarchy. What do you do when the king is a liability?

For the benignly mad king, the answer was to work around him until he went to meet his maker. His counselors, maybe his wife or even his mother would make the decisions while the mad king was maintained for ceremonial reasons. Once a suitable replacement was available, like a son or a brother, then the mad king would choke on his dinner or fall of a horse. Everyone could pretend it was a natural transition and there was no need to question anything.

At the other end, the malignant king, the tyrant who was sane enough to to perform his duties, but mad enough to cause great harm, was a serious problem. Often, the tyrant is smart enough and paranoid enough to eliminate obvious replacements, thus buying himself some life insurance. Eventually, the risk of keeping the tyrant in power is greater than the leap into the unknown and the mad king falls of his horse or eats a bad apple and he is dead.

The take away here is two-fold. One is the madness of the ruler or the ruling class is only important if it puts the ruling class interests at risk and it has to be a critical mass of them at risk. Killing one noble is tolerable. Threaten 25% of them and you have a revolt brewing. Caligula did not get himself in trouble merely because he started killing the beautiful people in Rome. His mismanagement threatened the general welfare and risked a general revolt. The financial crisis of 38 AD resulted in a famine, which was a direct threat to the system.

Pandora John William Waterhouse

Pandora John William Waterhouse

The other takeaway is that when left with a choice between near certain death or ruin and some unknown outcome, people will choose the latter, even people with a lot to lose. It’s the only rational choice. If the status quo means a 99% chance of destruction and killing the king opens a range of possible outcomes, some good and some terrible, the numbers favor killing the king. In fact, they make regicide a moral duty.

Killing the king, however, is really not a solution. The leap into the unknown is opening Pandora’s box. It has often led to the demise of the ruling class. The assassination of Caesar was arguably the great mistake of Roman history. Waiting the guy out probably would have turned out better for the Roman elite, but they could not see what was over the horizon.

In theory, representative democracy was supposed to solve this problem. If David Cameron starts doing things that make him a liability, his own party will abandon him, because they know they will face the voters eventually. If one party goes bonkers, like the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, then the party collapses. The ruling class competes with one another and the audience votes on who wins each little skirmish.

For the most part, this has worked out well for the English speaking world. In these countries, the ruling elite has supported the system where the general population gets a say in the management of the country. Europe is another matter. The ruling classes of the Continent have never bought into the concept. The European Union, after all, is mostly a way around the local legislatures and the will of the people.

Europe operating as a market-state without external threats and a pacified population gave the ruling class of Europe the sense that this arrangement would work long term. Then the king went crazy and flung open the doors to Muslim invaders. Initially, this was not a problem as the ruling class lives in bunkered enclaves, removed from the consequences of their polices. They have no reason to care if the train stations are carnivals and rape and assault by the dusky sons of Mohamed.

**Note: There was a pic I grabbed on-line but the person who took the pic and some other members of the OCD community took issue with my use of it. These are folks who can’t see the forest through the trees and want to spend all day haggling over meaningless details. I have no time for this so I removed the pic. My apologies to the OCD community. I will forever avoid noticing them so this sort of mistake does not happen again**

But, the people have noticed that their liberties are slowly and methodically being curtailed in the name of public safety. When you can only enjoy a traditional parade from behind barricades and armed soldiers, you’re going to start having dark thoughts about the people who caused it

When you have to start putting your wife and daughter on a segregated train car, for fear the Muslims may rape them or simply go crazy seeing an uncovered female head, the mad king is no longer a man for whom you will pledge allegiance. When the king cancels the “March Against Fear” out of fear of offending the invaders, it’s hard to love the king. Instead, you start thinking it is time to kill the king. It’s either him, or you, no matter what comes next.

Language Wars

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I’m fond of pointing out that language is the currency of a culture. Charlemagne figured out that if you can control the currency, you can turn your economy into a weapon against rivals. Seigniorage had the benefit of making the crown wealthy, but control of the mint allowed the King to stabilize the economic life of his kingdom, thus attracting foreign investment. King Offa of Mercia figured this out around the same time.

Similarly, radicals figured out that if you control the language, you can control the politics of a society. This can be as simple as picking an appealing name for a cause or as complicated as reframing an issue so that their preferred option appears to be the default, thus putting traditionalists on their heels. The use of rhetorical sleight of hand allows the radicals to set the terms of public debate, thus giving themselves an enormous edge.

The Vox story from the other day I used as a jumping off point for some good old fashioned Merkel bashing is a good example. By focusing on the fact that the exploding jihadist are technically citizens of their host countries, the radical can both muddy the waters and shift the focus. Instead of talking about the guys named Mohamed suddenly exploding in public places, the debate can be shifted to other topics like racism and xenophobia.

Open borders, which is a central part of the new radical ideology that is replacing old fashioned Progressive ideology, is relying on the same old tricks to warp the language. Illegal invaders are called “refugees” and helot labor is re-branded as “guest workers” to make it sound better. The point is to give them a pleasing name. After all, only Hitler would be hostile to refugees and guests.

Of course, there are two big problems with selling the New Religion of a borderless world to the citizens of the western countries. One is that many of the people on the other side of the border are savages. There’s no hiding the daily atrocities that are just a normal part of Muslim life.The other problem is that Muslims have a habit of exploding in public places, like airports and train stations.

People tend to notice these things. When you are walking to the train station, you may not notice the Hungarians or Ukrainians. The Greek or Italian will stand out in Sweden, but are otherwise of no interest. The guy screaming “Allahu Akbar!” before he explodes is going to leave impression, assuming you live through it. People have figured out the the Mohamed-to-Suicide Bomber Index.

What to do?

The solution is to re-brand the exploding Mohamed as a citizen. This NY Magazine article is a pretty good example of how the radical utopians are trying the muddy the waters to obscure reality. Instead of asking why Mohamed keeps exploding, the story  is “why are so many citizens of Western countries going on jihad?” We’re supposed to believe that ISIS is now loaded with gingers from Ireland, I guess.

The associated chart is here:

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The article does not bother to look into these numbers. The Russians on the list, for example, are Chechen warriors, who have a long history of being a sort of Varangian Guard for Arab potentates. The French are almost certainly Algerians. The Germans are Turks and Moroccans. The Canadians are the little mushroom people of Nova Scotia, known for their tunneling skills.

The point here is that instead of looking at the data with clarity, the effort is to obscure. Let’s not notice that second and third generations Muslims are prone to Sudden Jihad Syndrome. That’s an argument against the importation of Muslims. Instead, the effort is to pretend that these are nice boys who become disaffected and go off in search of belonging and purpose.

This is why guys like Trump and Geert Wilders are so horrifying to the globalist fanatics. They make observations and statements that are clarifying. When they point out that Muslims do poorly in the West and are a massive burden on their host countries, it makes the arguments for open borders sound ridiculous. How can anyone justify importing people who peak at being welfare spongers? Why risk the two or three percent that suddenly explode?

The flip side of this is that it is crucial to never surrender the language to the radicals. They are extremely good at this game so it is hard to win these battles, but they must be won. As soon as we stop talking about the ethnic and religious aspects to terrorism, we have accepted it as a part of our daily life. This is an unnecessary elective cost no society should incur just so managerial elites can get some grace.