Category Archives: Science & Tech

The Decline Of Pop Music

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One of the unexpected consequences of the technological revolution is the death of the popular music industry. The sale of physical content has just about disappeared, outside of the vinyl subculture. Even if you count downloads, the gross sales of music decline more than ten percent per year. On a per capita basis, popular music revenues are a little more than half of their peak fifty years ago. The biggest drop in sales started with the introduction of the mp3.

Unlike the newspaper industry, which thought they could make money giving their content away on the internet, the music industry always saw technology as a threat to their business model. They famously fought the introduction of cassettes because it would make it easier to record and transport music. If you could copy that album and give the copy to a friend, the music industry reasoned, there would be no reason for the friend to buy the album.

The music industry went to extraordinary lengths to protect their cartel, but they simply could not hold off the flood of technology. They treated downloaders like the Israelis treat Palestinian civilians, but it failed to deter people from downloading free copies of the song they wanted. Eventually, the industry gave into reality and started selling single copies of songs, but by that point, the horse had left the barn. There are too many ways to get a copy of a song free of charge.

The hope was streaming services would stem the bleeding. Instead of loading up on free music maybe people would pay five bucks a month to have access to everything all the time from anywhere. That did seem to work for a while, but then it just further cratered the music sales side of the business. There is also the fact that the public does not listen to as much pop music as in the past. Part of it is demographics, but part of it is the collapse in the quality of content.

This is starting to damage the last area where money could be made in the music business, which is the live show. For the first time in a decade, excluding the Covid years, live shows are in decline. The popular excuse is to blame the ticket sellers and the secondary market for pricing people out of the events. The claim is the ticket sellers are gouging the consumer with demand-based pricing, which is like saying no one goes to a restaurant because it is too crowded.

One reason for the decline of live shows is Covid. A weird thing happened during Covid and that is people discovered that they could live without things they suddenly could not have due to the panic. Restaurants never fully recovered from Covid because people got used to not going out to dinner. Something replaced it. Live events are another thing people did not miss as much as expected. Pro sports have had to work hard to regain their crowds and college sports never fully regained them.

Another reason live music is struggling is the quality of the product. As the industry relies more on technology to create listenable content, the less able they are to stage compelling live shows. This is not a new problem. In the golden age of pop music, they often used studio musicians to record the songs. The “band” often could not play their own music at all. This limited the “band” to doing studio shows where they could lip-sync to the recorded music.

This changed in the 1960’s when bands could play their own music and insisted on recording their own music. They also did live shows where they could actually play their stuff and not sound like a bag of cats. Technology has reversed this so that the performers are no longer able to produce the songs live in any way that sounds like the recorded material. Technology has made it easier to make music, but that has resulted in fewer acts that can do live shows.

Here is where you see the damage done by hip-hop. This is content easy to create in the studio, but it is hot garbage when performed live. In a small venue, the tight spaces and use of drugs can result in a good time for the audience, but in an arena it is often hilariously terrible. It looks like that homeless guy who yells at passing cars got on the stage and is yelling at the audience. Whatever the merits, there are none, hip-hop does not make for a compelling live show.

Another issue for live music is young people are not being socialized in the meat space, so live shows fall outside of their comfort zone. A generation used to interacting with their peers through internet platforms is not going to see the live show as an opportunity for socializing and dating like the old days. They would rather hear the music while cartoon characters perform the concert online. For a generation that prefers the indoors, the outdoor music show may as well not exist.

Of course, the music business was always a racket. The golden years of pop was when the music companies ruled with an iron fist. They could make you buy the album when you wanted just one or two songs. They forced radio stations to play the songs they wanted played. Most important, they we free to rob the music acts. Technology nibbled away at the music cartel eventually freeing the consumers and the music creators from the clutches of the music companies.

One result is there is probably more music available now than in the golden age of popular music. Creators can make good stuff from their bedroom and make it available to the world via the internet. The other side of this is the days of the rock star are coming to a close. Taylor Swift is probably the last mega star and her fame is mostly due to her general weirdness. Her songs are popular because she is popular, not the other way around. Her music is secondary to her act.

Otherwise, the golden era of popular music, especially rock music, will be viewed as a strange artifact of the American empire. A generation from now that music may sound as weird and alien to young people as Chinese opera. They will not understand it, because the people and culture that produced it are as alien to them as the people and culture of China. The concept of the rock star will disappear with memories of phone booths and quadrophonic sound.

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

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

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

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Death Of The Grammar Nazi

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A truth revealed by the widescale adoption of the internet was that there were millions of people with a blue pencil desperate to use it. The Grammar Nazi is a thing unearthed and unleashed on the world by the internet. When comment sections were still common, every story or post came with comments correcting the grammar or highlighting a typo. It was clear that the person posting the comment had no interest in the content of the post, other than what he considered to be violations of the rules of grammar.

The Grammar Nazi is something that can only exist online. Sure, he could get a teaching job and terrorize school children or get a job as a copy editor at a newspaper, but where is the fun in that? The thing that brings joy to the black heart of the Grammar Nazi is correcting people who do not expect to be corrected. Finding a post online that has an open comment section and then posting a short note about a missing comma or the incorrect use of “there/their” is the fruit of life.

Unfortunately for the Grammar Nazi, his days are running short because the same forces that brought him to life are about to take away his life. Another thing we will get with AI is the rigid formalization of online discourse. The old fashioned spellcheck and grammar check in Word will soon be replaced by real-time rewrites of your text in the generally accepted form. That means no more grammar errors or spelling errors for the Grammar Nazi to hunt online.

There will be people who holdout and write their own text. There are people who still own pens and pads of paper. It will not be long, however, when the browser simply corrects your “mistakes” and rewrites your copy. Those idiomatic expressions you love so much will be replaced with text that can easily be translated into other languages and understood by new language learners. The same will happen with colorful euphemisms and salty language. None of it will be allowed.

You can see the future in Word. Run text through the old-fashioned spelling and grammar check and it regularly suggests you change the wording of sentences in order to make them less interesting. For example, if you type “There are a lot of mudgets in here”, misspelling “midgets” as you see, it will not suggest the word “midget” as the replacement because that is an offensive term. If you persist, it will warn that it is insensitive language. We know what comes next.

On the other hand, the genuinely stupid will soon be able to present themselves online as they imagine themselves through services like Grammarly that will rewrite their incoherent jibber-jabber into something intelligible. In fact, they will not even need to know how to read and write. They will just speak and the machine will figure out what they should write and write it. This woman will never have to worry that she may be a “magician” rather than a “musician.”

That may be a bridge too far, but you can see how these grammar services can quickly transition from mere grammar services into thinking services. The low-IQ person may not fully understand the resulting product, but the happy face emoji at the end of the process will let her know she did good. In effect, technology will remove the midwit from the internet and replace her with a bot, a bot that never makes a spelling or grammar error to give the game away.

It is easy to dismiss these sorts of claims about technology and the language, but they are based on our history with the printed word. The very idea of grammar as something to debate was made possible by the printing press. The necessary standardization that came with the mass production of text changed how we think. It changed the grammar, punctuation, spelling and even the alphabet. We write a different language as a result, which means we think in a different language too.

Unlike the time when the printing press revolutionized the world, ours is a much darker time with tighter rules on what can and cannot be said. We already see how the internet has narrowed and dulled the public debate. When it can intercede between your brain and what you are trying to write, it is easy to see how we can quickly get to a future that Orwell would have thought impossible. Soon, it may be impossible to post an impure thought or a poorly formed sentence.

Even if it does not reach that point, these writing services will surely strip originality and creativity from the language. The constant hectoring from Word about the use of “write a book” instead of “author a book” will eventually wear down users to the point where this sort of variety is gone from our writing. All nuance and idiosyncrasy will be replaced with the technical manual version that the robots demand. As a result, we will become as boring and stupid as a National Review columnist.

There are signs of this happening. This post about changes in German grammar is a good example of what lies ahead. This change is not to make German more precise to Germans, but to make it more accessible to non-German speakers. That may sound good to English speakers, but language is more than just how people speak. It is how they think and how they think evolved over generations. How they think is their inheritance from their ancestors and the core of their culture.

Of course, the main argument against the Grammar Nazi was that grammar is a fluid thing that changes over time. Obsessive concern for rules of grammar and word usage is a losing fight. After all, what we think of as punctuation is a novelty in the history of the written word. The core features of the current rules were innovations. To put an end to innovation is an effort to kill the spirit of the language. Like the people who speak it, the language must be free to seek its own path.

That is now where things are heading, at least not for the written word. It will not be long before the outlaw is the man who uses outlawed words in outlawed forums using now outlawed word processing software and browsers. Everyone else will screaming into the void that is the Large Language Model version of the software, as it rewrites their text to remove unpermitted thoughts and expressions. The Grammar Nazi will have been replaced by this new, hellish form of spellcheck.

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

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

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

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The Rise Of Metadata Man

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Note #1: Behind the green door I have a post about the escalatory path of Iran and Israel, a post about the most efficient way to install, operate and maintain the guillotines after the revolution and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note #2: Some of our folks could use your help in the aftermath of the hurricane that hit parts of Appalachia. Here is a GoFundMe for a family that Pete Quinones knows who lost everything in the flood. Give what you can and post up others so people can pitch in to help our folks.

For the longest time, before we had loads of tests and studies on the topic of intelligence, being smart was something like pornography. It was not easy to define, but you knew it when you saw it. The smart person was well-read. You knew this because he could quote famous writers from memory. In fact, memorizing lots of things was essential to being a smart person. Of course, the only way to memorize lots of things was to read lots of things.

This view of intelligence remains with us, despite the fact there is little reason to remember much of anything. The guy who can quote a famous work of literature at the dinner party is assumed to be smart. The guy who speaks more than one language must be smart, because he had to memorize a second vocabulary. The fact that he does nothing useful with his life is overlooked. That old assumption about having a head full of information indicating smartness is still with us.

We may be on the cusp of that old notion fading away. In everyone’s pocket is a device that gives you access to the sum total of human knowledge. Not only is there no reason to memorize how many feet are in a mile, but there is also no reason to remember street names or how to get from one place to the other. That magic device will tell you where to go and how long it will take. It will also tell you in whatever language you like, in whatever country you find yourself.

Technology is not only making information available to us, but it is also about to make it much easier to access by way of Large Language Models. The hype around artificial intelligence obscures the fact that most decisions are normative, so those can never be made by robots unless we program the robot to do it. What AI will do for us is make the vast stock of information online easier to access. You will no longer have to be clever to search the internet for answers to your questions.

It will also make learning a language somewhat pointless. Your mobile device can already be used as something of a universal translator. It can translate what you say in your language to a close enough version of another language. You can scan foreign words, and an app will translate them. We are not far from the point where anyone from anywhere can communicate to everyone through a real-time translation service they can access through their mobile device.

Einstein famously quipped that he had no reason to remember how many feet were in a mile because he could look it up in a book. The same thing is about to happen to the study of languages for most people. Unless you are linguist or study a foreign culture, there is no practical reason to learn another language. The same is true for lots of things like dates of specific events and the names of important people. What will matter in the future is using the tools to access this data.

That sounds like heresy to most people, but we see this happening all around us as the internet becomes ubiquitous. We are losing patience for the long argument or the slow-paced story, because we are used to tapping a few keys and getting the pay off without all the extra stuff. For young people who have been socialized on the internet, waiting for anything is intolerable now. They just want the answer, and they have little interest in the context around the answer.

Schools are struggling with this reality. It is not just students using their phones to get the answer on a test. They can use the internet to write their papers and do so in a way that makes it hard to detect the fraud. The same tools a teacher can use to find plagiarism or answer sharing are available to the students, who can then make their work look original enough to pass the test. Getting a good grade is not about learning the material, but about mastering technology.

There is a practical genius to it. Education in this age is about passing through a series of gates to get a credential. Few students use much of what they learn in school in their work life, so cheating makes a lot of sense to them. In a way, they are mastering what they will actually use as an adult to game an antiquated and often pointless education system in order to attain a credential. This is especially true for college where most of what is taught has no practical value to the student.

We are moving from a world where being smart was about memorizing lots of information to a world where being smart means knowing how to find the information quickly and efficiently. Put another way, being smart is not about the store of data, but the store of metadata. Knowing the words, phrases and context of data is what makes finding the data possible. The same skull packed with metadata has access to vastly more data than the skull could ever hold.

This presents a bit of a problem in that we lack ways to display our stock of metadata, so how can we know who is smart? In the old days, we could safely assume the guy quoting Longfellow was above average in smarts. There is no way to quote metadata in a way that tells us much of anything. On the other hand, is someone highly skilled at finding the answer actually smart? It is, after all, a form of problem solving which is the skill we expect to be honed through conventional education.

This also raises the issue of formal assessment. Our systems assume that the person who scores high on the math and verbal portion of the SAT, for example, is smarter than the person who scores poorly on one or both portions. That will probably remain true in the metadata age, but what about the person who scores high on his verbal, but average on the math compared to the reverse? We value math over verbal, for practical reasons, but in the metadata age verbal skills may be more valuable.

Of course, all of this points to something else. We are becoming an increasingly fragile species due to our dependence on technology. A prolonged GPS outage, for example, would mean deliveries grind to a halt. No one owns a map, much less has the ability to use one to navigate. If the power goes out, our advanced skills at finding information on the internet quickly becomes a liability. Suddenly we are in a world of simpletons who do not know how anything works.

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

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

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

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The Drone Revolution

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The war in the Ukraine grinds on, despite claims that the Ukraine army is collapsing at various areas of the front. The fact is large industrial age armies do not break and run like armies of the past. This was true in both world wars when the German army was able to fight effectively in certain areas right up to the end. We are seeing the same with the Ukraine army, which maintains some offensive capacity, despite losing ground in many areas due to a lack of men and material.

There is a new element in the mix that changes how a large industrial army, like the Ukraine military, succumbs to a superior opponent. The drone has become a ubiquitous element of the battlefield, and it has not only changed how armies fight, but also how they retreat and get destroyed. We are seeing this in the Donetsk region, where the Ukrainians are struggling to find units to man fortified positions, but the Russians are struggling to overrun these positions.

It has been said that a good sniper team can defeat a battalion, which is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it. Snipers have been a highly effective way to slow down an opposing force. This is especially true for an army facing a much larger opponent, as was the case for the Finns in the Winter War. Finnish snipers harassed the Red Army to the point where they could not advance, despite having an enormous advantage in men and material.

The drone is something like the high-tech sniper. A competent drone team can harass an opponent from a distance, forcing the opponent to find cover. Unlike the sniper, the drone operator can target equipment. An armored unit advancing toward an enemy position can be knocked out by a drone unit, without taking fire. They attack the column to stall it, pass on the geolocation to their artillery units, then move to a new spot in order to repeat the process until the column is destroyed.

In the past, an attacking army would soften up the fortified position with artillery and air power and then use overwhelming numbers to overrun the enemy position. Defenders would likely fall back before the assault, understanding the math. Today, the defenders can attack the enemy as he is forming up for the attack and at every step he makes toward the defender. This radically increases the cost to the attacker, in men and material, without increasing the cost to the defender.

This is why the NATO counterattack on the Russians in 2023 failed. NATO doctrine is pre-drone, so it assumes the attacker can organize superior numbers to attack a narrow part of the defensive line, thus creating a gap. Reserves are then poured into the gap to break the line and force the defender into a chaotic retreat. This was the plan General Milley devised for Ukraine in 2023. Ukraine would pierce the Russian defenses with a big arrow offensive and the Russians would flee.

What happened is the Ukrainian attackers never got to the line, as drones attacked the advancing columns. The vehicles at the front of the column were hit with drones, which stalled the column. Then precision artillery strikes using geolocations from the drones attacked the rest of the column. The Ukrainians were forced off the roads into the mine fields where they were finally destroyed. The drone allowed the Russians to create a kill box before the Ukrainians could see the front.

The Russians learned from this, which is why their 2024 offensive has been moving at a snail’s place along many points on the front. They use their drones to find weak points on the front, send in small units to develop their attack close to the Ukraine positions, thus avoiding large accumulations of men and machines. This forces Ukraine to move in reserves, which the Russians attack as they are on the move. Then the Russians repeat this in some new area of the front.

This is why the Russian advance has been a creeping affair, rather than the big arrow offensives Western analysts still think is the norm. Even when the Russians open a sizable gap, they avoid pouring in large numbers of troops until they can clear the area and create their own fortifications to protect their men and machines from Ukrainian drone operators. The drone has not only changed the battlefield, but it has also changed the rear areas that support the frontline troops.

The main advantage of the drone is it is cheap, even cheaper than the legendary sniper team that could stall a battalion. Snipers are expensive. It takes a lot of skill and practice to become an effective sniper team. Drone operators, on the other hand, can be created from raw recruits in a short period of time. Most young people have grown up with the technology, so they quickly pick up the skills to effectively operate drones on the modern battlefield.

Of course, the drones themselves are cheap, relative to the other sorts of weapons we see on the modern battlefield. A modern anti-tank system like the Javelin costs about a quarter million dollars. This is the launcher and missiles. New missiles are about one hundred thousand per copy. Compared to a tank, which costs tens of millions, this is a cost-effective weapon, but compared to a drone, that costs ten thousand dollars, it is a wildly expensive white elephant.

The low cost of drones is what has kept the Ukrainians in the war. They can manufacture tens of thousands of these a month using readily available supplies they buy using some of the money they get from the West. They have been able to prevent a large-scale rapid collapse anywhere on the front by slowing down the formation of Russian troops and slowing down Russian advances after they create a gap in the lines or take over some key positions.

The next shoe to drop in the drone revolution is the use of drones in guerilla war and urban combat scenarios. We are getting a glimpse of this in Ukraine. The Russians are using fly-by-wire drones to attack Ukrainians inside buildings. They do this to avoid electronic warfare systems. Surveillance drones looking down on an urban accommodation will detect movement in a building and then drone units will get close enough to fly a drone through the window.

The next step in the evolution of urban combat drones is to cut the wire and program the drone to navigate its way to the target without the use of GPS. The Russians are starting to adapt cruise missile technology, which relies on terrain matching to navigate the missile to the target, to their drones. It will not be long before drones are able to operate without radio communications. Thus, the jamming technology currently used to defeat drones will become ineffective.

Military tech has a habit of finding its way to the streets, which is why police departments all over the West have tanks, armored personnel carriers, and elite tactical units to arrest hate-speakers. This means Western cities will be thick with drones monitoring the behavior of the citizens. It also means gangsters and rival political factions will be using FPV drones on one another. The next shot at Trump could very well be a drone attack and then the drone revolution comes home.

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

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

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











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Numerology

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If you pay attention to sports, one of the things you may have noticed over the last few decades is the rise of numerology. The people making money from sports entertainment and their fans do not call it numerology, but they often treat the numbers of the respective games in the same way mystics treat numbers in life. They think numbers have qualities beyond the thing they are supposed to represent. Therefore, the numbers of the game are transformed into magical tokens.

For example, there is a site called Pro Football Focus that sells itself as something like a quantitative lab for the game of football. They started on the claim that they grade every player in every game in the NFL season, by grading every snap of every game in the NFL season. They conjured a grading system that they claim lets their clients compare the value of each player to the value of other players. Their numbers allow everyone to be a quantitative expert on football.

That last bit is part of the hook. While sports are not complicated, most fans never play organized team sports, so they know nothing about the game, beyond their own emotions while looking at the results. The typical football fan could not tell you the difference between zone blocking and zone blitzing. Baseball fans have no idea why an off-speed pitch is effective. Soccer fans could not tell you anything about the game, as the strategy is a total mystery to them.

What the numerology of sports does for the fan is give them ready made truths they can easily digest and memorize, so they can feel confident when assessing what they are seeing on their televisions. The baseball fan can confidently say Play X is not a good player, because his WAR is below three. The football fan can say that his team lost because the left tackle got a sixty-grade from Pro Football Focus. These numbers bestow a sense of knowledge on the person using them.

Of course, the people using these numbers have no idea what lies behind them, which is the magic of numerology. This allows the sports fan to think these numbers are predictive of future behavior, when, at best, they merely quantify past behavior in a way that allows for further investigation. Many of the numbers that arise from the numerology of sports are meaningless nonsense. The numbers from Pro Football Focus are a good example.

If you look at their site, they state that they are endeavoring to do something that is practically impossible. They employ a team of 600 people, but only 60 are qualified to grade games. These sixty people are then tasked with assigning a pass/fail/neutral grade to every player on every play and have the results hours after the game has been completed. Not only are they doing this for all sixteen NFL games but the fifty or so college football games each weekend.

Even if they solved the man-hour problem in such a task, the numbers they produce are based on purely subjective criteria. Anyone who has played sports understands that a player can do his job as dictated by the coach, but still fail. In other words, the only way anyone can know if a player executed his assignment in a game is to know what the coaches assigned him. You can surmise in many cases, but that requires a deep understanding of the game.

The ridiculousness of the numbers do not matter, even when it is pointed out to the people who love using them. There is a magic quality to assigning numbers, especially numbers that have been sacralized, to the sport. Scan a sports fan forum right now and you will find lots of posts about the grades from PFF. The fans want to believe these numbers tell them something about the prospects for their favorite team, so they accept the validity of the numbers, despite the absurdity.

At this point, some readers will be tempted to post the dumbest comment on the internet which is, “I do not own a television” followed by the second dumbest comment, which is, “I do not watch sportsball.” No one cares that you do not own a TV or that you spend your leisure time in self-flagellation. That is not the point of this post. The point is that in something as banal as sports entertainment, numerology has crept in and taken up a place in the mind of the viewer.

The reason for this is our society is saturated in numerology. In every large company there are hundreds of worker bees churning out tables and graphs that have meaning to the intended audience, well beyond the factual. Show the mid-level manager a report with sales figures and he gets excited. Show those numbers in the form of a dashboard and he passes out in ecstasy. There is a whole industry built on the magical power of showing numbers in the form of a dashboard.

The “data analyst” and the “data scientist” have become the court astrologers of the business world because of an obsession with numbers. The things they produce for their employer are not just about understanding the descriptive reality of the company but also understanding the prescriptive reality of the company. When the needle on the meter is in the green, everyone is in a state of grace. If the meter moves into the yellow, then it means someone inside is cavorting with Old Scratch.

This helps explain the obsession with AI. Numerology is just a way of creating an authority outside the people involved in the process. The sports fan does not want to know who is posting those grades after the football game. They just want to believe that there is some objective, omniscient force that knows the truth. Similarly, the people we call the left demand AI not talk about a certain Austrian painter, because they want AI to validate their beliefs and thus be their moral authority.

This is why the game of baseball has been taken over by robots. Quants crank out decision trees they supply to the managers, which the manager consults at every decision point in the game. Everyone embraces this, even when the results are bad, for the same reason the Muslim says, “inshallah” before embarking on a project. The results are in the hands of an authority everyone must obey and trust. If the team loses, then the mystery force behind the numbers must have willed it.

One of the unexpected results of the proliferation of numbers has been the collapse in the ability to rationalize the numbers. The numbers of life used to be simple measures of what needed to be measured. Now they are treated like omens that not only indicate the future but weigh on our moral understanding of ourselves. The bad stats from a game reinforce the notion among the fans of the losing team that they deserve to feel bad because their team deserved to lose.

This helps explain why the sports fan went from being a guy enjoying men compete to a guy whose identity is tangled up in the identity of a team. Numerology of sports did not create the bug man organizing his life around televised sports, but it coevolved with the general phenomenon of numerology, which itself is the result of the search for new moral authorities to replace faith and tradition. The numbers of life have now become signs from the gods, whoever they may be.

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

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

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

Digital Man

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about the farcical nature of the young online right, a post about the looming summer of hate that is upon us and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Since the dawn of the digital age there has been commentary about the impact the digital age will have on society. Mostly it comes from how we will do things as technology seeps into every nook and cranny of life. Little attention has been paid to who will be controlling things. It has always been assumed that the social structures and selection pressures within them will remain the same, so the new technology will simply be a new tool for the old ruling class.

In the most general sense this is clearly not true. The oligarchs that rose up out of Silicon Valley are a different breed of oligarch from those who rose up in the last decades of the industrial revolution. The latter were the product of an American empire on the rise while the former were the product of an empire at its peak. The industrial age oligarchs were a part of creating the American empire while the tech oligarchs were taking advantage of an existing empire.

Putting aside the nature of the new oligarchs, the nature of the managerial class that actually runs the empire has changed as well. The type of person who slithers his way up into senior positions is different from the old managerial elite. The top officials in government a generation ago, for example, were the product of different selection pressures than those of today. A generation ago, deeds still counted for something in the competition for status within the meritocracy.

Look around at the people running foreign policy now and you cannot help but notice that they are not exceptional at anything. It is one of the things that makes a guy like John Mearsheimer jump off the screen in the geopolitical debate. In addition to having been right about most things over the last twenty years, he is an immensely talented, intelligent, and confident man. By comparison, Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland come off as dull and confused.

As technology has changed society, the selection pressure for the managerial elite has also changed. The legacy pressures that produced a guy like Mearsheimer have been replaced with new mechanisms that produce men like Blinken. These pressures start much further down the development cycle than the institutions. It reflects the changes in the culture brought about by technology. All along the way, technology plays a role in how men acquire status within the social system.

A simple way to think about how this works may be to think about the broad categories of young males that existed in the analog age versus the digital age. The three buckets for young males were the gymnasium, the library, and the playground. The first was for the jocks who were attracted to structure and competition. The second was for the bookish who were attracted to learning and knowledge. The final category was for the typical young male who generally like socializing.

In the analog age, the managerial elite drew from the gymnasium and the library, the doers, and the thinkers. The American empire was the product of men who produced new ideas and those who found a way to make those ideas into reality. The oligarchs who rose up in the industrial age used their wealth to underwrite the scholarly and cultural side of the house. Libraries, universities, and cultural centers naturally attracted investment from the new oligarchs.

The digital age changed how young males live and as a result it changed how the social systems selected for talented young males. That playground group suddenly had new toys to use in their socialization. Instead of kicking a ball around, they participated in highly structured and highly complex digital gameplay. Instead of sorting social standing on the playground, it was done in the virtual world of gaming, online chat rooms and social media. Most important, these became valuable skills.

Look around at the public square and the biggest influencers are not old smart guys or highly accomplished guys, but young guys raised online. None of them were jocks or even played sports. Many have no accomplishments at all in the meat space. They are not experts in a cognitive field. On the other hand, they are not the basement dwelling weirdos their critics claim. They enjoy competition, just the online version. They know things that are important to success online.

The new generation of social influencers are an extreme example of a process that has been going on since the dawn of the microprocessor revolution. Technology changed the value relationship between these three male roles. The skills useful on the playground, now the virtual playground, have become more important than the skills acquired in the gymnasium or the library. The critics in the 1970’s were correct when they said it was the nerds who would eventually rule.

Now, some will say it is the longhouse, the feminization of society that is the root of this transformation, but it looks more like it was technology that made the longhouse possible by changing the selection pressure away from knowledge and deeds to the social skills of the digital space. Because so much of what makes up digital society is useful only because we pretend it is so, it means it is not subjected to the crucible of practical necessity, so convincing everyone it matters is what counts.

Social media is a great example of something that people think is important only because everyone they know thinks it is important. Imagine you refuse to go on these platforms and just live your life in meat space. Then someone starts a viral campaign against you on Twitter. What happens to you? Nothing happens because you will remain blissfully unaware of it. In other words, Twitter matters to the people on Twitter because they pretend it matters.

From childhood on up, the skills that are the most useful in the digital world are not those acquired in the library or the gymnasium. It is the weird, androgynous social skills learned in the digital playground. These define teenage social status and then professional status. Now we are seeing them define managerial class status structures, including the managerial elite. What powers the longhouse is the microprocessor that changed the people in the longhouse.

Not only are the skills from the gymnasium and the library falling in status, but the playground skills have changed as well. The digital playground is not like the analog playground where you can get punched in the nose for violating the rules or challenging the wrong guy. On the digital playground your character dies and you respawn at a lower level or maybe you have to create a new character. There is never any real consequence to failure on the digital playground.

This is where feminization comes into the discussion. It has been assumed that the feminization of society is the product of the feminist movement, the explosion of women in the workplace or the number of single mother households. In other words, generations of men raised by women made men soft. In reality, it is at least one and maybe two generations of men socialized like girls on the digital playground that has made the longhouse a natural home for the new man.

In fairness, not all males have been raised on the digital playground. Young men still play organized sports and they still read books. The real playground still exists where young boys learn how to be young men. Elite culture, however, no longer selects for the traits learned in these areas. Instead, it is the traits acquired on the digital playground that offer the pathway to the higher reaches. By the standards of the digital age, Nick Fuentes is the quintessential digital man.

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

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

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

The FUD-Packer’s Ball

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Throughout the Cold War years, it was a standard claim from the people called the left in America that the intelligence services manipulated domestic politics. This did not come from the mainstream left, but the fringier left-wing activists. For its part, the right in all its forms simply ignored the claims. Eventually, the mainstream right became the primary defenders of the intelligence agencies. They were viewed as the first line of defense in the Cold War and thus were lionized.

Of course, the claims about the intel agencies were not without some merit. In the late 1960’s a communist student publication called Ramparts reported that the National Student Association, which was a federation of student governments, was funded and controlled by the CIA. Later it was revealed by the Church Committee that many newspapers were cooperating with the CIA. Operation Mockingbird was one of the CIA programs used to manipulate the media.

The Church Committee is an interesting bit of history as it might be the last time Congress did anything useful in terms of oversight. The final report was massive and you can still access it on the Senate website. One reform that resulted from this event was the establishment of the permanent US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which has been thoroughly captured by the CIA. Members of this committee participated in the Russian collusion hoax, for example.

Putting that aside, the headline item at the time was that the intelligence agencies were spying on Americans, experimenting on Americans, and manipulating the media by placing assets at media companies. In the fullness of time, the important revelation was that this practice was thoroughly normalized in the agencies. The intel agencies saw nothing wrong with what they were doing. That means we can assume they continued doing it despite the revelations.

Again, the Russian collusion hoax is a good starting point. If the intel agencies were comfortable in trying to overturn the 2016 presidential election, then it is safe to assume this behavior is normalized inside these agencies. That returns us to the Church Committee and the scale of operations fifty years ago. In the analog days, the intel agencies were comfortable with subverting newspapers, so what sorts of things will they be comfortable doing in the digital age?

For example, would the intel agencies pay social media influencers? If they were paying student groups in the 1960’s how opposed would they be to paying social media characters to push certain themes? It is not as if anyone bothers to look into the background of bigfoot influencers. These characters seem to appear from nowhere, gain a big audience and join the ranks of influencers. Inserting intel agents into this space is a low-cost, high reward activity.

Look at someone like Michael Tracey, who is a bigfoot influencer on Twitter with over a quarter million followers. According to Twitter, about 15% of their users have more than one thousand followers. Only one percent of American users have more than three thousand followers. That means someone with a quarter million followers is in a ridiculously small club of users. This assumes the follower counts are accurate and the followers are not purchased from a bot farm.

Michael Tracey has no job and no obvious source of income. He lives in New York City, one of the most expensive places in America. He regularly travels the world to pester government officials at press gatherings. His Substack mostly gathers dust, in terms of readership, and he never posts monetized content on Twitter. Maybe he has a rabbi that underwrites his activity, which is not unusual, but maybe that rabbi is tied to one of the intel agencies, which would not be unusual either.

Note that Tracey spends most of time doing FUD-packing. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Right now, he is flaming the Trump world right now with claims that Trump is responsible for the war funding bills. It is a weird claim, but coming from a major account it does seep into the public consciousness. This is new for him, as he usually spends his time attacking progressives. In fact, he built his following on the right by FUD-packing the people on the left.

Now, Michael Tracey is probably on the level, but there is no way of knowing it, which is the point of this example. In a world where people are more likely to get their information from anonymous and unexamined characters on social media, how hard would it be for the intel agencies to manipulate this system? Build up a network of influential FUD-packers and you can control the unhappy portion of both political parties by saturating them with misery.

Here is something else to consider. These days, the intel agencies do not have to actually buy the FUD-packer. They can simply manipulate him though the various donations options most people have these days. When they like the FUD-packing from an influencer, they can send a bunch of small donations. They can also use their bot farms to boost that guy’s FUD-packing. In other words, a FUD-packer could be compromised without even knowing it.

The point of thinking about FUD-packing is that we live in an age where it is much easier for the intel agencies to do what they habitually were doing fifty years ago, so it is wise to assume it is as common now as it was back then. The digital information space is now a wilderness of mirrors manipulated by people who are drawn to the work because they love FUD-packing. As a result, our information space is a FUD-packers ball where nothing should be taken at face value.

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

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

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

Chipping Away At The Old Order

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Modern dissidents argue that the chain of causality starts with biology, which bounds the culture of a people. That culture grows the institutions which define the politics and economics of society. Replace half the population of Haiti with Japanese people and you end up with a vastly different society. The Japanese would seize control of the country, impose their will and the result would be a political-economy that is nothing like anything that could exist in an African run society.

While this is a good rule of thumb for general politics, it falls apart when there is a revolution in technology. The Industrial Revolution started in England and spread to the European continent. It quickly resulted in massive cultural changes as people moved from the countryside to the cities to work in factories. It is a great example of how revolutionary technological changes can reverse the flow of the great chain of causality as the new technology is absorbed by the society.

Of course, the Industrial Revolution did not start in England by luck. The slow transformation of the people, resulting in lots of smart people looking to solve old problems, is the counter to this claim. The Industrial Revolution was the result of the changes in the European population that started in the Middle Ages. It was biology that brought about the technological revolution, so one can argue that the great chain of causality holds up even in revolutionary moments.

Putting that aside, the West is at the end of one of those revolutions, which is the microprocessor revolution. The way we live today is very different from how we lived fifty years ago, at least when it comes to how we interact with one another and how individuals interact with society. Fifty years ago, this post would not be written because there would be no way to see it even if it was written. Fifty years ago, information was relatively scarce, while today it is unlimited.

This is what makes the present plagiarism panic in the academy something more than just a tempest in a teapot. Fifty years ago, it was hard to copy and paste the work of others because copy and paste did not exist. Written words were typed with a typewriter, which meant typing out what it was you were stealing. Before publishing, many hands edited and retyped those words. The whole process moved much slower, so getting caught was also much easier.

That changed with technology, but the editing and fact checking process did not change with the new technology. Instead, it atrophied. The new technology turned the flow of written material into a firehose and those old processes were not able to keep up with the volume. Not only that, the bottlenecks were blown open like a raging river blasting through a damn. Today written content flows without restriction and without any serious scrutiny in the modern academy.

There is another issue here. Technology has created a new conception of the public domain that was unimaginable fifty years ago. Wikipedia, for example, is technically not a publisher and it has no authors. It is a crowdsourced repository of information that is explicitly intended to be in the public domain. The internet itself is the repository of all human knowledge now. Again, most of it is intended to be freely available to whoever is interested, because it is the public domain.

Can you plagiarize the internet? How about Wikipedia? The concept of plagiarism is tied to property rights. You produce a written work using your labor so you have an ownership claim to it. If on the other hand, you give it away freely on the internet or post it on a site like Wikipedia, do you still own it? Can it be stolen when your clear intent is to share it with the world, perhaps anonymously? Throw in the fact that these sources change over time and the issue gets quite murky.

Then you have the fact that there are only so many ways to state things, especially those that are part of a contextual reality. Claudine Gay got in trouble for repeating what amounts to echolalic babbling that defines her field of study. There are only so many ways to preach against whiteness, so by now every way to state the simplistic ideas within that field have been done many times. No matter how you say something in grievance studies, you sound like everyone else.

That is what will be revealed by these efforts to scan the works of academics for plagiarism using modern tools. The rigid conformity in most of these fields has led to a narrowing of what is safe to write in a paper. If everyone was fastidious about siting the work of others, all new papers would be so littered with citations that the index would be longer than the paper. The plagiarism hunters will find they are overwhelmed with examples to the point where it becomes meaningless.

This brings up another issue. The culture of the internet from the very beginning was to be open and communal. Long before the scolds were allowed online, the culture of the internet was anarchic. If you posted something online it was fair game. Anyone could use it and modify it to their purposes. Post a pic of yourself on vacation and it could end up being used by someone posting about that vacation spot. No one thought or thinks about who owns a pic, a meme or anything that is online.

In other words, the culture of the internet has changed the culture in general as people spend so much time online. Someone using a picture of your house, for example, only matters if their intent is to cause you harm or they unintentionally create a problem for you, like having a mob show up at your door. No one contacts the real estate sites demanding that old images of their house be taken down. Can you even do this, even if you had the desire? Would a court side with you?

Bill Ackman’s wife allegedly copied from Wikipedia. How can we know this when it is possible the Wiki contributor copied from Mx. Ackman? Maybe she cribbed from some third source that the Wiki author also used. Is this even copying when the whole point of the site is to collect up information for public consumption? Again, can you steal something that is made freely available? Plagiarism assumes intent and the lack of consent, which is missing in this example.

On top of all this, the biggest players in the technology space rely on ambiguous definitions of what constitutes property. They capture all sorts of things about you and your behavior and sell it to corporations and governments. They argue it is theirs to sell because you do not technically own your habits and tastes. An emerging quality of the ruling elite is an abandonment of the old concepts of ownership. You no longer own you, at least not in the traditional sense of it.

Much is said about the ideological nature of the managerial elite, but it may be that their fanaticism is simply a defense mechanism. As technology continues to erode the old rules, their ideological fervor fills the void. The free flow of information is not opening and democratizing society, but instead leading to an authoritarian reaction by the managerial elite to the threats technology brings to the old rules. Like the steam engine, the microprocessor promises to overthrow the old order.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

Diet And Superstition

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A paradox of the modern age is that the average person in the West knows more about the natural world than the most learned man of prior eras, but people remain as superstitious and irrational as ever. This is true even in the human sciences, where doctors continue to tell patients that they should make sure to eat plenty of vegetables and avoid fatty foods. Much of what people experience as medicine is the same old oogily-boogily that has been with us since forever.

The carnivore diet is the latest bit of nonsense to make the rounds. Search the topic on YouTube and your recommendations will suddenly be packed with videos of men wearing lab coats or standing in front of dry erase boards, explaining how this diet is based on the science of cavemen. They claim that humans are made to eat meat, not bread or vegetables, so we should only eat meat. This will cure the things that ail you in the modern age, like obesity and unhappiness.

This is pure nonsense. Modern humans are the product of a long process that continues to this day. That process is called evolution. The ancestors of modern humans survived on what they could find. We know that species that can survive on a varied diet are more adaptive than species hooked on a narrow diet. If you can eat anything, you can live anywhere. If you can only eat bamboo shoots, then the only place you can live is in a Chinese zoo.

Modern humans inherited this ability to eat just about anything, which is why modern humans were able to spread across the globe. Anyone who says humans were designed to eat meat is either ignorant or crazy. Humans certainly adapted to the food that was available, but the reason they could do this is our ancestors were able to eat just about anything. In some areas, humans lived primarily on fish, because there was a reliable supply of fish for them to eat year-round.

Adaptation is important. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued in their book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, that as humans settled down and learned to cultivate animals and plants, adaptation accelerated. As grains became a bigger part of the diet, people adapted to the new food and lifestyle. If our caveman ancestors were meat eaters, it does not matter because our direct ancestors evolved to be omnivores living mostly on grains they made into bread and beer.

Now, this does not mean you cannot lose weight or lower your glucose levels by changing your diet. People in the modern age get fat for the same reason people got fat in the Middle Ages. They consume more calories than they need to perform their work, so some of the excess is stored as fat. That is another useful adaptation of humans that gets treated like magic. Storing fat is what helps us be so adaptive. Carrying emergency food around under our skin is a huge advantage.

This is why being fat was looked upon as a sign of success. Look at old photos of rich people and they are often quite fat. Women dressed in a way that made them look plump, even if they were slender. Fat people had extra food and time to eat it, which meant they were prosperous. Skinny people spent their days laboring thus burning lots of calories, but they had only the food they needed to keep laboring. In this age, Indians still regard tubbiness as a sign of prosperity.

Modern Americans, of course, view fat people as moral failures because they cannot control themselves at chow time. Chris Christie is an object of scorn mostly because he is a big fat slob. He even had his mouth stapled shut in an effort to lose weight and give his family some peace and quiet. Somehow, he managed to get around it and he remains a big fat noisy slob. In this age, the only fat people we like are the fat comics who make fun of their own fatness.

This probably explains the superstition around diets. The sales pitch of the carnivore diet is no different from what preachers during the Great Awakening were selling or social reformers of this age are selling. The subtext is always the same. We have strayed from the proper path, and we must return to it or else. In the case of diet, it means returning to some imagined time when we ate a different way. In the case of social reforms, it is getting back to the righteous path.

It is not just fad diets where we see superstitions about food. Many YouTube videos are sponsored by companies selling some sort goo in a jug that is supposed to give you energy and vitality. “Hey, you are a busy and important person, who just happens to be laying on the couch watching YouTube videos. You don’t have time to have a proper meal, so have a jug of green slime instead. It will not only give you the electrolytes plants crave, but it will also give you energy to watch more videos.”

These companies selling meal replacement and ready-to-cook meals delivered to your door are not really selling food. These companies are selling lifestyles. They are no different from the people selling perfume or ripped blue jeans. The people selling gourmet food kits are promising you a lifestyle if you adorn yourself with the accoutrements of the people who supposedly live that life. Fashion is a cargo cult and food fashion is not an exception.

Of course, the root here is happiness. The leisure classes in ancient Egypt had codes of conduct that were designed to give meaning and purpose to life. Cicero and Ovid wrote guides on how to live happy lives. People in comfortable lives have time to worry about abstract things, so there are people there to supply them with satisfying answers to the vexing questions of existence. Idle hands do the Devil’s work and the buying and selling of self-help books keeps those idle hands busy.

Getting back to food superstitions, not all of it is nonsense. If you are a big fat slob like Chris Christie, the carnivore diet will result in weight loss. It may put cows on the endangered species list, but that is a different issue. Cutting out carbohydrates does funny things to the body. It is why people feel like they have the flu for the first couple of weeks on all of these no-carb diets. Lacking carbohydrates for energy, the body begins to burn fat for energy, which takes a couple of weeks.

Weight loss comes mostly from the reduction in calories. If you eat a big fatty ribeye steak, you will not be hungry in a few hours. If you eat five donuts, you will be starving before the next mealtime. You consumed the same number of calories, but one was fat and protein and the other was all carbs. People who go on no-carb diets end up eating far less than they used to eat, so they lose weight. If you are a fat person, the trade-offs, at least in the short term, probably make sense.

In the end, the cold logic of things like the carnivore diet are no more appealing than the cold logic of fashion. Imagine ads selling ripped jeans that say, “go in debt for these and you will feel better until the credit card statement arrives.” Instead, these diets are sold to people as magic elixirs. The sales pitch works, because we are not so far removed from our primitive past that we are immune to abracadabra words that promise to make the gods happy and therefore make us happy.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

Bad Science

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Americans have always been skeptical of science, mostly because Americans are naturally skeptical about extravagant claims. There has always been a paradox at the center of the American identity. Americans assume there is a solution to all of the practical problems of the world. On the other hand, Americans suspect that the people offering those solutions are not on the level. As a result, American can marvel at scientific progress but hold science in low regard.

This turns up in popular culture. Watch old films and you often see scientists presented as overconfident in their abilities, unethical in their pursuit of knowledge or foolish in how they ignore the risks of the work. In popular culture, the scientist is Dr. Frankenstein, a mad scientist, or a naïve fool. These movie tropes are common because they appeal to the cultural framing of science. While scientists may be our smartest people, they are not the most trusted people.

Probably the biggest driver of this is medicine. Despite trillions poured into the medical establishment, we do not know that much about the human body. The three main drivers of health and longevity in the West are antibiotics, nutrition and sanitation, not great scientific breakthroughs. We have gotten better at treating things like cancer and heart disease, but we are a long way away from curing them. Medicine is still not sure why cancer exists, much less how to prevent it.

This persistent ignorance, however, has not stopped the medical profession from lecturing the public on health. Public health officials have spent the last fifty years anathematizing tobacco use. The claim was it caused cancer. Therefore, eliminating smoking should lower cancer rates. Smoking rates have collapsed in America, but cancer rates have remained the same. Lung cancer rates have not changed much at all, which is where we should have seen the benefit.

Something like smoking is where you see the problem most clearly. Science has figured out why smoking causes emphysema. The ash builds up in the lungs. People figured this out long before we considered medicine a science. We still have no idea what it is in tobacco that causes cancer. There is no honest answer as to what is in cigarettes that gets people hooked on them. People who smoke pipes or vape do not display the same dependency that we see with cigarettes.

Given the trillions spent on medicine and medical research, one would think by now that we would have unriddled the whole tobacco puzzle. Even if our libertarian impulse would prevent the banning of tobacco products, we should be able to ban the highly addictive additives put into some of these things. The best we have is nicotine supplements designed to keep the addict hooked on nicotine. You cannot blame people for thinking this is not entirely on the level.

Of course, there has been no bigger blow to the reputation of science than the army of grifters and conmen shouting “trust the science” during Covid. People with impressive credentials in medicine told the public that you must wrap your underwear around your head and stop drinking after a certain hour to prevent Covid. They also invented a vaccine that does not inoculate you against the infection and has some chance of killing you with myocarditis and blood clots.

It is not so much that these cranks and lunatics were all wrong about Covid, but that there have been no consequences. The seriousness of a profession is determined by its willingness to maintain its own standards. No one trusts lawyers because crooked lawyers rarely face punishment. The one profession with less policing of the ranks than the law is medicine. The same people making bizarre claims about Covid will be out doing the same act during the next manufactured crisis.

Another blight on science and related to medicine is the area of nutrition. There are two sides to the nutrition debate. The official side promotes the Standard American Diet, which is designed to boost agribusiness. The other side is the army of grifters and snake oil salesmen pushing supplements and fad diets. Nowhere in American life is the old “heads they win, tails you lose” dynamic more obvious and pernicious than in the realm of human diet and lifestyle.

Start with the official side of things. Everyone reading this has probably got a lecture from their doctor about cutting out fat and salt from the diet. The food pyramid tells us to eat more grain and minimize red meat. Generations of Americans were told to replace butter with margarine. None of this is based on science. In the case of margarine, we know this crackpot idea was pushed by agribusiness looking for a way to make money off what at the time was a waste product.

The response to this oogily-boogily is just as insane. Fad diets used to promise weight loss with minimal sacrifice. Now they come up with nonsense claims about the science of health and fitness. The latest is the carnivore diet, which claims we need to eat like our ancient ancestors. That means just meat and some dairy. Our ancient ancestors did not live on meat and dairy. They ate whatever they could find. More important, for ten thousand years we have survived on bread, not meat.

When someone with “MD” after their name is often seen pushing crackpot ideas like the carnivore diet or some witch’s brew promising to make you smarter, it is no wonder that we call doctors “quacks”. When your doctor says you have high cholesterol and need to take pills, you want to trust her, but then you find out that there is not a lot of evidence that the pills make a real difference. You start to wonder if she is just another type of sales rep from the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

When you combine the conflation of medicine with science and the shoddy reputation of medicine, it is no wonder that Americans have a negative view of science. How can anyone “trust the science” when the people screaming “trust the science” on social media are both wrong and crazy? Replace the phrase “trust the science” during Covid with “trust the crazy homeless guy who screams at people in the middle of the street”, and you would have the same effect.

That raises the other big problem for science, the expert. America is plagued with people claiming to be experts. Pick any noun and search for it along with the word “expert” and you will find someone claiming to be an expert in the noun. Of course, all nouns are equal in the expertise game, but some nouns are more equal than others, so you will have better luck finding a “racism expert” than someone who can tell you a good way to keep the squirrels out of the attic.

The modern age is now flooded with experts whose expertise ranges from the annoying to the ridiculously impossible. Diversity experts, for example, are not experts in the sense they have a mastery of the subject. They just repeat the magic words from the catechism in a hectoring tone. The extremism expert is claiming to be knowledgeable about a subject that does not exist. Extremism is undefinable. How can you be an expert on something that is no more than a moral signal?

It is no wonder that Americans are skeptical of science. The main ways they interface with science are horribly corrupt and stupid. Granted, medicine is not science and the people claiming to be experts in social causes are crackpots, but they are presented to Americans as the product of science. Science has now become the authority for all things annoying and offensive. If science gives us the carnivore diet and the racism expert, maybe science is more trouble than it is worth.

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