Author Archives: thezman

Radio Derb April 11 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 01m51s VDARE fights on
  • 07m04s Lydia’s appeal
  • 17m50s Tariffs, uh
  • 23m25s Atheism news
  • 24m38s Fascists suppress voters
  • 26m32s Wonders of Nature
  • 27m30s Signoff with The Four Lads

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! That was a snippet from Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 played on the organ at Derby cathedral, and this is your combatively genial host John Derbyshire with some comments on the passing scene.

The format this week is somewhat different, the first two segments dominant.

I can already hear the grumbling. “Hey, Derb, you’re supposed to be a conservative. Why do you go messing up your format like this?”

To make a point, that’s why. The particular point I want to make is the sinister wickedness of state lawfare against private individuals and associations.

Sure, that point has been made often, including by me. It can’t be made often enough, though. Even with an enlightened administration in Washington, D.C. those individuals and those associations still face massed legions of left-wing and corrupt judges and state officials striving to extinguish our liberties. Fight! Fight! Continue reading →

Me And Ideology

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I thought I would take a break from the money game this week to address an issue that comes up in the email from time to time. That issue is my ideology. Whenever I comment upon ideology, almost always in a negative way, I get comments suggesting I should explain my ideology, rather than just criticize others. Certain nationalists take issue with being called ideologues for some reason.

The trouble with this is I am not an ideologue, but I thought that might make for a good show, so that was the plan this week. Then as I was recording it, I started having issues with my voice, like I am getting a cold. That threw me off my game and the show wandered around a bit. I would have scrapped it and started over, but I was not sure if the pipes would make it, so I stuck with the first pass.

Realism and pragmatism are much abused terms in American politics. The people we call the right often claim to be on the side of realism, but that is not so. They are just a slower version of those they claim to oppose. The people we call the left used to love the term pragmatism, despite being fanatics. There is a good chance they dust off that language in time for the next election.

Realism and pragmatism are not the opposite of ideology. Ideology does not have an opposite unless you consider the absence of ideology as the opposite. No society is devoid of a moral framework, which either turns up in the dominant religion of the people or as a set of customs and traditions. Ideology is an attempt to replace both religion and tradition with a new moral framework.

The realist understands that ideology is a shabby replacement for religion and tradition, no matter how muted the goals. Pragmatism demands that any political program operate within the limits of the organic moral order of the people. The realist sees things as they are and wonders why, while ideologues dream of things that can never be and demands we explain why not. He never accepts the answer.

That is the show this week. The first half is the problem with ideology, but specifically the American ideology. I even talk about the L. Ron Hubbard of the American ideology, Leo Strauss a bit. One of these days I will do a show on Strauss, but I do not find him as interesting as his followers find him. The rest of the show is why I think I naturally reject ideology. Not a great show, but you get what you pay for.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Intro
  • Ideology
  • Why I am not an ideologue
  • Realism

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Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Back To Work

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Warren Buffet famously said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” The point of this metaphor is that in economic downturns you learn who has been taking excessive risks. Another way of putting it is that in easy times, everyone can be a hero or a genius. This has been the case for the American financial system for over thirty years. As long as credit money kept expanding, everyone had a chance to look like a financial genius.

This explains the prevalence of people in the financial media who somehow get everything wrong but maintain their status as experts. The most notable of this sort is Jim Cramer who has made a career out of being outlandishly wrong. Paul Krugman wrote a column for years about the economy, despite never being right about it. These are two famous examples, but the commentariat is littered with these types. As long as the arrow kept going up, being wrong was good money.

The trouble is that the entire financial industry is built on this premise. Being wrong comes with no penalty, because wrongness rarely comes with a cost. Sure, the MegaBrain Capital Fund might not perform as well as random guessing, but because the arrow always goes up, even the bad bets pay off. This also means anyone spouting random gibberish can present himself as an expert. Tens of thousands of mortgage payments, maybe hundreds of thousands, rest on this assumption.

The main reason for this, of course, is the United States has been both the global mint and the global bank since the 1980’s. You can see it in the markets. From 1985 to the present, the DJIA has increased by about nine percent per year. That includes the many busts that were backstopped by the global bank. From 1965 to 1985 the markets suffered a long bear market, after the long twenty-year bull market that kicked off after the end of the Second World War.

Another way to think about it is the American stock market boomed by about ten percent per year when the rest of the world was in rubble. Europe was literally in rubble after the war. Much of it was controlled by communists. China was a feudal, agrarian society trying to implement Marxist-Leninism. Japan only stopped glowing after that long bull market ended. In other words, the American economy and the equities markets had a great run when there was no global competition.

Somehow, as if by magic, equities had a run like the post war decades, despite the hollowing out of the economy. The run has also been longer. The twenty-year post-war boom ran out of steam even though Asia was not online yet, just because Europe was starting to recover. We have experienced a forty-year run while at the same time the American economy transitioned from inventing things and making them to driving each other around in Ubers.

It turns out that if the mint can make as much money as it likes, being the only mint on earth anyone values, and they give what they mint to the only banking system anyone values, the people in this system can do no wrong. For decades it has been like being at a casino with an endless line of credit. Not only that, but the dealers would also occasionally give you some insider information on the decks. It is not hard to look like a genius when you are playing with house money.

That world is coming to an end. The shock therapy we are seeing is not just a bluff to get better tariff deals. It is in anticipation of the fact that the world is shifting from where the dollar dominates all global trade to one where local currency arrangements will often be preferred over the dollar. If you want to buy from China, it will mean doing so in their currency, not dollars. The same is true for other major trading countries. The Russians have been the proof of concept for this approach.

This does not mean the dollar collapses or people revert to carrying sacks of gold while riding to town on their donkey. The primitive use of shiny bits of metal as currency only comes back if we enter a dark age. What is happening instead is a change in how the world views dollars and more importantly, dollar denominated debt. That means the days of unlimited credit money is coming to a close. The dollar and dollar denominated debt will reconnect with the American economy.

This is all bad news for the flim-flam men who dominate the financial services industry as it means being wrong once again comes with risk. The bad bets from MegaBrain Capital Fund no longer just mean a lower return. Those bad bets now put the firm in jeopardy and get the smart guys fired for making those bad bets. Swimming naked will now come with the risk of the tide going out and staying out. Like the fox in the hen house, risk is returning to the money game.

What is about to happen to the financial sector is like what we see happening with the government sector. The tens of thousands of people who do not do anything necessary will be let go, and that includes the experts in the media. In a world where risk is real, no one will tolerate a television clown dispensing bad advice, unless he is in a fright wig and wearing floppy red shoes. The clowns will back in the circus while the serious men do the serious work.

This is the end of America’s long holiday from reality. Playing make believe in government, finance or the media is no longer possible. Making money will not be about finding clever ways to get that sweet sweet credit money, but about inventing things, improving things and making things. That will not leave a lot of room for diversity experts or chattering skulls. Those people can be put to work in the new factories and repair shops, perhaps sweeping the floors.

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

The Wilderness Of Lies

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One of the many things to spring forth from the political froth over the last decade is the level of coordination in the mass media. It was often clear that media activists were coordinating to create their preferred spin, but only with the help of conservative chattering skulls like Rush Limbaugh, who would create montages of media outlets repeating the same catch phrases. Social media now provides this service as the algorithms aggregate the stories and the repetition is too obvious to ignore.

Another thing that was not obvious is that many of the opinion makers, now called influencers, are in on the scam too. Often, they are paid by marketing companies to promote a viewpoint. The recent “soda money” scam where the soda industry paid a bunch of Twitter influencers to promote the health benefits of carbonated sugar drinks is an egregious, but typical example. The truth is, much of what the influencers do is paid for by marketing companies.

This is not just about moving product. The Israel lobby tried to secretly assemble a collection of right-wing influencers for a session with Bibi Netanyahu. Guys like Tim Pool were brought in so they could ask questions and be given instructions. Instead of paying them with cash, they get rewarded with access. This is an old trick that has worked on the media since forever. Look for Tim Pool and other famous influencers to sound remarkably like the ADL.

Payola is nothing new. In the golden age of popular music, record companies sent bagmen to big radio stations so the disc jockeys would play their songs. In the golden age of conservative politics, pens for hire were everywhere. Ben Domenech, one of the founders of The Federalist and RedState, was caught taking money from Malaysia to promote the interests of that country in his columns. Many other conservative pundits were caught up in that scandal.

This feature of the media exploded with the proliferation of digital media and the dominance of social media. It is also much easier to spot. The other day, a company hired by Ukraine did the soda money gag. This time it was a bunch of paid Ukraine supporters on Twitter repeating word for word the same erroneous claims about Chinese soldiers fighting on the side of Russia. The campaign was quickly suspended when it was too obvious to ignore.

It is not just the new school internet chattering skulls taking what used to be called payola, but also the old school types. This post by Victor Davis Hanson regarding the war in Ukraine has all the marks of pay-for-post. It has the typical neocon claims about the Russian army on the brink of collapse and the Russian economy in tatters, two stock bits of the neocon marketing campaign since 2022. Anyone paying the least bit of attention can easily spot those lines as agitprop.

The big tell that this is possibly paid opinion making is the claim that the proposed peace plan will create a DMZ along the border and the Russians will be forced to retreat back to their old border. Not only is this a fabrication, it is total nonsense. There is no such peace proposal and the only people claiming so are the neocons. They have been floating this idea since their 2023 offensive ended in catastrophe. Rather than accept defeat, they want a break to rebuild and rearm.

There are other neocon talking points sprinkled around the text. The claims about Russian losses are the most obvious. There is the crazy claim that Putin is trying to reassemble the old Soviet Union. There is also the mandatory criticism of Trump “art of the deal” negotiating style. Imagine Bill Kristol as a pinata and once he is busted open, what tumbles out are the main neocon talking points. Kids then took those and assembled them into that post for Mr. Hanson.

The Ukraine war has been highly useful in understanding the manipulation that lies behind the opinion makers. Whenever you see the phrase “full scale invasion of Ukraine”, you know you are dealing with a pundit paid by neocons, who are convinced this is powerful rhetoric. “Putin’s invasion” is another example. Normal people working at honest analysis do not use that language. These phrases are emotive signals to the neocon cult indicating a fellow traveler.

In fairness to Hanson, he is getting up there in years and he probably relies on an assistant to write his posts. American Greatness does not pay its writers, so no one can blame any of them for doing the minimum. It is a common practice for bigshot writers to rely on staff. Many of their books are written and assembled by assistants. The bigshot writer acts as the supervising editor. This is how Doris Kearns Goodwin got in trouble over plagiarism claims in one of her books.

That may be the case here. The person tasked with writing these posts simply relied on the copy provided from the neocon email list. On the other hand, Hanson has always been tight with the neocons. He has parroted their propaganda for years, so he could simply be doing the same in that post. That is the point though. In this age of zero trust, no one can be sure if it is honest error, ideological derangement, payola, or sloppy work from an old man nearing the end.

That is the world created by decades of media mendacity. As citizens trying to be as informed as possible, we find ourselves in a wilderness of lies. The “objective reporting” is all narrative storytelling to promote an agenda or a set of moral claims. Much of it is invented out of whole cloth. Analysis is often just payola, but much of it is part of a hidden agenda or a conspiracy. In a world where you cannot accept a man’s opinion as his opinion, you cannot trust anything.

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

The Bell Ringing At The Top

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In the fullness of time, we may look at the sale of the NBA franchise, the Boston Celtics, as the bell that rang at the peak of the financialized economy. The team sold for a record-breaking $6.1 billion to a group led by billionaire William Chisholm, the managing partner of Symphony Technology Group. That firm has nothing to do with music or technology. It is a private equity firm. The deal still must be approved by the league and must go through the usual legal process.

The team is one of the crown jewels of the league, so it makes some sense that it commands the highest value. Since the beginning of the NBA, the Boston Celtics have been something like the New York Yankees—winning numerous titles and featuring some of the game’s greatest players. Wyc Grousbeck, whose family leads the ownership group that bought the team in 2002 for $360 million, made, on average, thirteen percent per year on his investment in the franchise.

By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about six percent a year on average, accounting for several crashes along the way. Median home prices in the United States have increased at about the same rate over that time. Some areas, like the Washington, D.C. area, have seen even larger jumps. Given that official inflation numbers are roughly half that figure, it shows that assets, even common ones like houses and equities, have experienced a steady increase.

Now, a golden rule of life is that a thing is worth what someone will pay for it, but value is supposed to be linked to reality. The value of a business, for example, is tied to the value of its assets, its cash flow, and future profitability. A buyer expects to recoup his investment over a specific period, which means the business either has profits or assets that can be sold for a profit. The Boston Celtics are a business, so does that mean the business is worth $6 billion?

The answer is no, not in the conventional sense. Most sports franchises are break-even businesses, with many losing money. They often have negative cash flow due to player salaries, which means they carry a lot of debt. The NBA is experiencing a sharp downturn in its popularity, with television ratings down 60% from the peak. The Celtics do not own their arena, so they lack that asset to supplement their business. Most likely, the franchise is a money-loser by conventional standards.

Of course, the new owners do not care about the business side. They are billionaires who want to be in the billionaire club. It is as much about status as it is about business, but the business side still matters. They no doubt look at the massive inflation in franchise values and think they will have no trouble flipping this property for a nice profit once they get bored with it. In other words, they assume the asset inflation we have seen since the 1980s will continue.

This makes sense in the context of the current American economic model, the one Donald Trump is determined to replace with a new model. The economy that emerged in the 1980s is based on unlimited, cheap credit money that gets plowed into assets like equities, startups, and frivolous things like modern art and sports franchises. William Chisholm is a billionaire, despite never having invented or built anything, because he is highly skilled in the legerdemain of modern finance.

Another aspect of the new economy explains why certain assets, like sports franchises and some tech sectors, have outperformed houses and stocks. The NBA is financed, in large part, by taxes it levies on every household. These taxes come in the form of cable and television bills. If you have a television service, you are paying for all those games you don’t watch. Channels like ESPN are bundled into the bill, and they are a significant part of it. That money subsidizes the NBA.

If, tomorrow, everyone could simply pay for what they watch, like software as a service, sports channels like ESPN would go bankrupt within a month. Right behind them would be all the sports leagues. The reason? Sports networks would lose about 80% of their revenue. That means ESPN could not spend billions on live sports content, and without that revenue, the leagues would collapse. That $6 billion sale of the Celtics would look like the worst bet in history.

The reason regular people feel so much economic angst, despite the appearance of material prosperity, is that we have reached the end of the line for this model, where costs are socialized but profits are privatized. The NBA is one example where the quality of the product has been disconnected from its financial success. In a true market economy, the owners of the Celtics would struggle to give it away, because the NBA, as an entertainment product, is in steep decline.

If you look closely, you will see this dynamic everywhere. The offset to those cheap products at big-box stores is the collapse of American manufacturing, and the social capital that came with it. The offset to cheap labor via immigration has been stagnant wages and emergency rooms that resemble Tijuana bus stops. The offset to a rising stock market is endless financial insecurity. The hidden costs have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.

The reason Trump is trying to usher in a new economic model is that the old one, the financialized economy, is running out of places to hide the costs of endless credit creation and the auctioning off of social capital. It is not just that we cannot borrow more money. It is that we cannot continue to socialize the costs of creating more credit money. Just as critically, we can no longer tolerate an oligarchy built on privatizing the profits of this system.

That is why the sale of the Celtics may be the bell ringing at the peak of the massive asset bubble that is the American economy. The absurdity of it should offend even the most zealous believer in the transactional economy. In a country with serious problems that require elite investment, watching rich parasites plow billions into a human flea circus brings revolutionary thoughts to mind. It may be the last grotesque gesture of an economic model that has run its course.

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

The Great Transition

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about an old post I did on Vladimir Putin as the antidote to Peter the Great, a post about the Amazon series The Bondsman, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, Trump stunned the world by following through on what he has been promising since he came down the escalator in 2015. He imposed across-the-board tariffs on every country in the world—except Russia. The reason Russia was excluded is that they are already sanctioned to the maximum. The tariff knob does not go past one hundred, so they were not on the list. Every other country was hit with a tariff, even Israel, which should cause some people to rethink things.

This set off the Great Trump Stock Market Crash, which promises to continue this week as the rest of the world responds to the new world order. The old trading models no longer work, so the default fallback in these conditions is cash. The quants were working feverishly last week to update their models in order to find the bargains that will inevitably be sitting there, waiting for the lucky. The smart money thinks the floor is a twenty percent correction, followed by stability.

The yesterday men and the crazies are sure this is the Great Depression, because their history of the world starts in the 1930s. It is a stylized history, such that every modern event can be jammed into the 1930s, the 1960s, or the 1980s. Since they are sure Trump is secretly Hitler, this must be the 1930s—even though we have witnessed many stock market corrections in the last thirty years. The COVID crash, the mortgage bubble, and the dot-com bubble are easy examples.

In reality, what we are seeing is the long-overdue return to normalcy, where American economic policy is aimed at benefiting the American people, rather than abstract concepts from economics departments. If Canada has tariffs on American goods, then the United States should have tariffs on Canadian goods—unless it can be shown that the American people benefit in some way from the imbalance. The same is true for every other country in the world.

One of the weird things about decades of American trade policy is that it has created the same sense of entitlement as government racial policy. Just as nonwhites think they are entitled to be near white people without conditions, the world thinks it has a right to access the American market without conditions. This is most obvious in Europe, which has taken this lopsided arrangement for granted. They have also assumed they are entitled to American defense, while doing nothing in return.

The logic behind this arrangement has always been nonsense—but people love to believe in nonsense, especially their own. We see this with the free trade crowd, who are claiming tariffs will only harm the American people. If that were true, then the rest of the world should have been miserable for the last thirty years. Further, if that were true, then the rest of the world now has a chance to usher in a golden age for their people by eliminating their tariffs instead of raising them.

The truth of the matter is that all economic policy is about trade-offs—especially in global trade. This is why it is called trade, rather than “free.” Having a tariff-free relationship with Canada could make sense if the Canadian government could be trusted, as the American and Canadian economies are so similar. The same is not true for Mexico or Bangladesh. Trade is never just about money—it is also about culture and the national interests of the trading countries.

Of course, what we are seeing is not really about trade so much as it is about getting the American financial house in order. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary and architect of the Trump economic policy, has made this clear. Normalizing American trade relations is just one arrow. Another is the mass reorganization of government that kicked off in January. For the first time in the life of anyone reading this, the size and scope of government will be reduced.

Another arrow is the changes in the tax code that are slowly working their way through both houses of Congress. The Senate passed its version of spending and tax cuts, so now it is on to the House. What is shaping up is a two-pronged approach: one is to put into law the cuts made by the DOGE boys, and the other is a radical revamping of the tax code to reflect the new economic approach. Removing taxes on tips and overtime, for example, is part of the Senate model.

What we are seeing is the most radical alteration to the American economic model since the 1980s. The reason for it is that the old model is unsustainable. As Bessent pointed out, there is a limit to borrowing. For a long time, the American model relied on creating unlimited credit money in the banking system and massive federal borrowing. We have reached the limits of this model. Now, that model threatens the integrity of the American economy, so changes must be made.

More important are the changes in how we think and talk about the economy. For the longest time, the economy has been treated as a god. Americans were expected to tolerate anything to please it. If the economy demanded Haitian cannibals in your town, you had to accept it. If the economy demanded that the quality of your hand tools decline, you just lived with it. If the economy required you to work two jobs to make ends meet, then you did it. The economy was a remorseless god.

This sort of thinking makes sense to an alien overclass that sees the United States as an opportunity to be exploited. It does not make sense if the ruling elite feels a connection and obligation to the people. Shifting from the old transactional model of economics to a nationalistic model requires a new language. Simply pointing at a graph that trends upward is no longer enough. The political class will now have to possess some economic literacy.

It is too soon to know if these changes can make it through Congress. The winners under the old exploitative model will not go quietly. No one knows if the American public will tolerate the pain that must come with the transition. It is not all bad news, though, so the pain may be limited. Energy costs are falling—crude is under sixty dollars a barrel. This could tame inflation enough for the Fed to cut rates. Low taxes and cheap energy will go a long way toward cushioning the transition.

In the end, Bessent is correct. America cannot continue to create credit in the financial system and borrow trillions to hire government workers. We either have an orderly transition back to a normal economy, or we have a disorderly transition. The name for that is collapse—and that is vastly worse than a stock market correction. This is the reason the economic elites are backing this move. They know that the people who suffer the most from failure are the elites.

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

Radio Derb April 04 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 01m04s Jared spreads terror
  • 06m04s Atheism goes woke
  • 16m53s Lawfare all over
  • 22m13s Human rights lunacy
  • 32m59s The Scopes centenary
  • 33m52s Civil war? Nah
  • 35m18s It is so flat!
  • 36m27s Signoff with Maria

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.    And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. That was a fragment of Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 in the big band version, and this is your sensitively genial host John Derbyshire with some commentary on the week’s news.

To begin with, a couple of segments on the culture.

Continue reading →

The Great Z Death

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One of the downsides of writing and talking about the current scene is that you often want to kill yourself or kill someone. There are only so many stories about a crazed judge issuing an equally crazed rulings you can read before you want to spit on your hands, raise the black flag and start slitting throats. To paraphrase the late comic George Carlin, there are a lot of people who need to be killed.

It is why it is a good idea to look away from the daily car wreck that is the public square from time to time. It is why I quit Twitter. I will post links to my work there, but otherwise it is on mute. The most popular figures on that platform exist to irritate everyone else, so being active on that site is like inviting people into your home so they can break things and urinate on your carpets.

It is also why this week’s show is deliberately lighthearted. I randomly selected questions from big book of questions and answered them without preparation. I am not sure how many I got through, but it is probably about twenty. The book has three hundred questions in it, so I will probably revisit this format in the future when I feel like raising the black flag and slitting throats.

I have not read all of the questions. For the show I started at the first one and kept going until I ran out of time. I skipped some of them because they were not interesting to me, but that still leaves plenty of material. The interesting thing about the ones I cover in the show is that they have no link to current events, but they relate to things far more important to daily life.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Intro
  • Anger Management
  • The Book Of Questions
  • The Questions

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Artificial Tay Tay

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Note: Last night, Paul and I did a whole show on AI and the possible consequences of humanity being enslaved by robots. You can watch the replay here and here.

An unresolved mystery in popular culture is why Taylor Swift has become a megastar on the level of Elvis and Michael Jackson. There are plenty of simple explanations like her songs resonate with young females or she is non-threatening, but those apply to many pop stars, yet none have reached the heights of Swift. There is an answer, and it lies in the fundamentals of human psychology, but that answer also suggests that Swift is the death of the pop star phenomenon.

The place to start is with the most popular answer to why Swift is the biggest pop star of the 21st century: her lyrics. The most popular explanation for Swift’s popularity with young females is her songs resonate with them. Yet when you look at her most popular songs, they predate her supposedly young female audience. Her biggest hit is from seventeen years ago. Her next biggest is from eleven years ago. Most of her big hits are from over a decade ago.

That is the strange thing about Taylor Swift. Everyone assumes that her core audience is young females, but in reality, it is middle-aged single white women. Taylor Swift is a middle-aged woman performing hits from over a decade ago. She is a strange mix of current fads and recent nostalgia. Look at her audience and it is the young-ish females you see kicking around the cubicle farms of corporate America, and thirsty males who think a Taylor Swift concert is an opportunity for them.

As to the lyrics of the songs, there is nothing to suggest they are the hook that reels in her core audience. They are echolalic babbling. Pop music at its best is doggerel set to a simple but catchy tune. Most pop songs, especially female power pop, have a simple chorus that expresses a simple emotion, while the rest is gibberish. That is what you see with Taylor Swift songs. Her music also comes with helpful expositions so the listener can contextualize the simple chorus.

The point here is that there is nothing unique about what Taylor Swift is doing to explain her massive popularity. Her formula is the same as every female pop star when it comes to the music itself. Watch a Swift concert, however, and it is clear that the audience is not there for the music. They are there to see Swift. Like Elvis seventy years ago, Swift is popular for being Taylor Swift now. Her popularity rests on being a social phenomenon to her audience.

She is a social phenomenon because she brings other things to the female pop star formula that suggest she may be the last human pop star. The first thing to note is Swift is what young guys call “mid”. Now that she is pushing forty, she is getting a bit dumpy, but even in her prime she was a solid seven, the sort of girl old women would describe as pretty, which meant not homely but not sexy. In fact, her unique quality in the pop ranks is she lacks anything resembling sex appeal.

There is one caveat here: she has naturally unique eyes. This may be why she is so wildly popular with near-middle-age white women. White women put enormous importance on their eyes because it is hugely important to white people, who have a staggering variety of eye colors compared to nonwhites. A woman’s eyes are what will catch the attention of a male, which is why there is so much diversity in the eye color of people from Europe, especially northern Europe.

Women’s makeup puts the focus on the eyes. In some countries, like Iceland, women use makeup so you cannot help but focus on their eyes. In a land full of the most beautiful women on earth, the eyes are what matter. As women age, they tend to focus more on their hair and makeup, with the eyes being the focus. It is also why overweight women tend to wear a lot of makeup. The otherwise average-looking Taylor Swift is an appealing role model for her audience due to her eyes.

There is also the fact that Swift seems to be a boring person. There is no drama in her life or sex tapes leaked on the internet. The few interviews she gives are as compelling as watching paint dry. The closest she gets to drama is dating a football player who is not the quarterback or a superstar. For the women who could not land the star quarterback in high school, this makes Swift weirdly relatable. For her audience, Taylor Swift is the mirror who says they are the fairest of them all.

There are other things leading to Swift’s stardom, but the picture that emerges from these general observations is that it is a formula. Pop music has always relied on these formulas, but they were based on wisdom and experience. Now they can be based on massive data sets crunched by artificial intelligence. The data from who consumes different types of pop music can be combined with the human sciences, the history of pop music, and the software to create the music.

Soon, maybe even now, music executives can ask a couple of DOGE kids to create a pop star maker. They will be given access to the history of pop music, demographics of the current audience, and the quickly growing body of information from the human behavior sciences. They will then produce the attributes of stars in each music genre, their target audience, and expected revenue numbers. In other words, templates for every form of popular musical star.

Instead of hiring actors to play the part, like the boy band producers did in the last century, the music execs will ask their AI engineers to create them. The technology can already produce the audio, and the video will be here soon. That means in weeks an artificial Tay Tay can be beamed to the mobile devices of the target audience and through social media. Their reaction to the “new act” can be used to subtly tweak the “artist’s” algorithm based on those responses.

This may sound absurd but watch a Taylor Swift show and what you see are people holding up their mobile devices. People under the age of forty experience the world now through their mobile device. Theirs is already a meta-existence when it comes to experiencing things in the meatspace. This is accelerating with each wave of people entering adulthood. What matters to them most is not flesh and blood humans, but the avatars in the alternative reality of the internet.

Even if it does not reach the point of replacing humans entirely, it is easy to see why the pop star will not survive much longer. Taylor Swift is proof of concept. She is highly controllable, does not create drama, and ticks the necessary boxes that the formula says are required to be a star. Mass-producing many versions of this with cheaply acquired talent and software is the logical next step, maybe even allowing fans to create their own version of their favorite act.

That is the other thing AI will bring to music. Based on prompts and reactions from the target audience, the act can quickly evolve to their liking. The same process by which you prompt AI to create an image can be silently incorporated into the production of the next Taylor Swift. Not only can AI make the next Taylor Swift, but it will also allow the listener to create their own Taylor Swift. Artificial intelligence will allow everyone to have their own artificial reality in which their Taylor Swift speaks to them.

All of this assumes that some as yet unforeseen consequence to the rollout of AI does not bring the roof down on all of us. Even what we can contemplate opens the doors for life-altering consequences. Technology has destroyed the societal consensus. Just imagine what happens when we have our own popular reality stars. Even so, what Taylor Swift tells us is that the pop star as a human phenomenon is dead. She is the proof of concept that will lead to the Artificial Tay Tay.

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

Essential Violence

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Note: Paul is back from vacation, so that means we are back tonight for the Wednesday livestream, which you can find here and here. You can also watch on Twitter, but there is no link until it is live. Just go to Paul’s Twitter page. The show kicks off at 8:00 PM EDT and the topic tonight is AI.

In 19th century America, it was popular to argue that there are four boxes for maintaining political liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and cartridge. There is also a version that has just three boxes, which drops the jury box from the model. The soap box is public speech used to persuade the ruling class. The ballot box is the democratic process. The jury box is the legal process, and the cartridge box is violence. The order of the boxes is important as it is both a warning and a promise.

The warning here is directed toward the public. Skipping any of these steps will inevitably be self-defeating. The sorts of people who want to litigate everything, for example, are the sorts of people who will litigate away your liberty. We see this with the inferior court judges. They are like all self-defined underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people they opposed. These people are always more dangerous than present tyrants.

The other side of this is directed at the people in charge. Their status as a ruling elite depends on making sure that the traditional rights and protections of the people are maintained in those first two boxes. Once the people abandon the soap box and the ballot box for the jury box, it is not long before they reach for the cartridge box, and there is no turning back from that one. Of course, an elite that uses the jury box to undermine the ballot box is asking for the cartridge box.

That is what we see in the West: the use of lawfare by the managerial class to both circumvent the soap box and the ballot box. The latest example is in France, where the courts have willy-nilly decided that the most popular politician in the country is no longer allowed to participate in politics. Marine Le Pen was found guilty of trumped-up charges and sentenced to what amounts to internal banishment. Her punishment is like what happened to Khrushchev in the 1960s.

This is the pattern in the West. Romania arrested and then banned the most popular politician in the country for the crime of winning the election. Germany is planning to ban the AfD for the crime of being popular. The new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has publicly stated that one of his goals will be to work with the EU to overthrow the Hungarian government. Of course, the UK has declared itself an apartheid state by imposing a two-tiered legal regime aimed at the opposition.

The most famous example of the managerial class abuse of the jury box to circumvent the soap and ballot box is Donald Trump. They tried to remove him from office in his first term, then rigged the 2020 election to deny him a second term. When he did not get the message, they used lawfare against him in the same way we see in Europe, except that Trump managed to win at the jury box. Note they reached for the cartridge box when they failed at the jury box.

The assassination of Trump is a good reminder that it is almost always the case that once either side of the political system reaches the jury box, one side or the other will reach for the cartridge box. The jury box is where irreconcilable differences are confirmed to both sides, no matter the result. The reason there is always the smell of sulfur around attorneys is not only due to who they serve. It is also because sulfur is an essential element of gunpowder.

What we see happening in the West is a reminder that the last box in that formulation is essential to preserve the three other boxes. The 19th century French social thinker, Georges Sorel, explained that political violence is not a sign of chaos, but a healthy antidote to political oppression. It is often the creative destruction needed to free the political marketplace so it can produce healthy politics. Violence also has the effect of energizing the people to defend their ancient liberties.

Thomas Jefferson made a similar point in his famous letter to William Smith from which we get the famous quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Jefferson was not justifying political violence for its own sake. He pointed out that violent resistance is often a necessary reminder to the ruling class of what lies ahead if they ignore the soap box and the ballot box. Shays’ Rebellion was a warning and a promise.

It may be why American oligarchs joined the Trump team. When Luigi Mangione popped out from behind the car to gun down that insurance executive, it let every oligarch know the cartridge box remains an option. If French judges and politicians suddenly come down with lead poisoning, maybe the poseur class in Paris will suddenly rethink their position too. If not, then it guarantees the French end up at the cartridge box anyway.

This is the most likely end for the West as a whole. The Trump reforms will surely fail, as reform is almost always an effort to relieve the pressure of general discontent while maintaining the status quo. In Europe, the ruling class is nakedly hostile to the native population, hellbent on pulling the roof down to spite the people. They will not be talked out of their positions, and they will not be voted out of them. Since the courts are now owned by the managerial class, it leaves the last option.

The irony of all this is that the great lesson of Western history is that liberty only comes when the people join to spill blood. As the sun sets on Western man, this truth is becoming clearer with each outrage by the ruling class. The people endlessly yelping about “our democracy” are killing the West. It is only through the blood of these parasites and vermin that the new Western man will regain his lands and liberty. After the jury box comes the cartridge box.

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