Note: The weekly Taki post is up. It ties in with the post this week. Sunday Thoughts, the weekly podcast for the elect, is up behind the green door. If for some reason you did not notice it, I was on with RamZPaul Saturday and you can listen that here.

A truth learned from the study of economics is that competition between suppliers tends to create better products and services. Better in the economic context does not always mean more innovative or better quality. Sometimes the better product is simply more cost effective than the alternatives. The Wintel computer was never the technologically superior option, but it was the most cost effective. Competition often arrives at the solution that is merely good enough.

On the other hand, when companies or industries are able to shield themselves from competition they tend to decline in quality. The prices creep up as the quality and selection declines. The domestic car makers in America experienced this in the middle of the last century. By the 1970’s, their cars were silly and unreliable. Competition from overseas forced them to compete and that made for better cars. Competition is the economic equivalent of accountability.

The time traveler in the H. G. Wells novel The Time Machine observed that “It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.” A corollary is that responsibility and a sense of duty is the compensation for accountability. A natural consequence of accountability is a duty and obligation to the rules under which you operate. When you are held accountable for your actions, you act in private as if the world is watching.

We see this in the whole “go woke, go broke” meme. The fact that none of these woke firms go broke is the important piece. That is the reason corporate America is rushing to embrace the most absurd things. They know they will never be held accountable for their actions, so they have no duty to the rest of us. The people who made the perverted Twix commercial did it because it costs them nothing. Mars is a massive global enterprise immune from the marketplace.

The tech sector is the most obvious example. They have spent decades colluding with one another to suppress wages and deny people their civil rights because they never have to worry about consequences. They may compete with one another at the fringes, but in essence they are a cartel with monopoly power. It is not as if you are going to build your own internet. The market forces we think should exits to hold these firms accountable no longer exists, so they do as they please.

This has been true of politics for a long time. The CIA put out a report in the late 1980’s claiming that the Soviet Union is getting stronger due to the massive success of the Gorbachev reforms. A few months later the Soviet empire collapsed. No one was ever held accountable. In fact, it is fair to say that the power of the Soviets had been overstated for generations. No one was ever held to account, so this was pushed aside with the other lies and blunders.

More recently, many of the same characters were involved in selling the world on the great Muslim threat. The West was turned into a police state because the Muslims wanted to impose Islam-o-fascisms on us. Trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives were spent on a problem that never existed. Since no one would ever be held accountable for the result, not one felt a duty to be right. They just made up whatever would benefit them at the moment.

Even closer to home, there was a local election last week that got national attention as a referendum on the parties. The Virginia governor race was a big success for the Republicans, who immediately used their new political capital to fink on their voters and support the other side. They did it because they know they will never be held accountable for it. Politics is now entirely immune from the marketplace of ideas, so there is no accountability and therefore no responsibility.

We see the same thing in the media. For half a decade they sold the Russian conspiracy hoax to the public. The recent indictments shows that they knew it was a lie when they were selling it. Everyone involved knew it was fake. No one will resign in disgrace or offer a tearful apology. They simply laugh and move onto the next hoax they are told to peddle. There is no shame because there is no accountability. What are you going to do, build your own mass media?

The lack of shame is perhaps the final stage. A reckless disregard for duty can still elicit shame, even if the person knows they will never be held accountable. Once this lack of accountability is normalized, morality collapses. Without morality, there can be no shame, which is what we see with the media. They are shameless because the people in the media no longer possess the normal moral coding. If they have a moral code at all, it is based in a disdain for the rest of us.

The central question posed by The Time Machine is whether life can go on without struggle and if so, should it? The two halves of future humanity, the Elois and Morlocks were scarcely human. They had reached a point where they had conquered the necessary conditions of human civilization. Once struggle had been eliminated, the skills to win the struggle atrophied. What the time traveler observed was not the apex of humanity, but the end of it.

A similar question can be asked about the collapse of accountability. Can a society survive when the people in charge of it are no longer responsible for it? The climax of the Enlightenment project appears to be a world in which the people at the top have finally been insulated from all accountabilities. Oddly, they are the Eloi ruling over the Morlocks, feckless children oppressing what they view as the lesser beasts. Is this the apex of Western civilization or the end of it?

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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***@*********************ns.com.

Anyone who has done any hunting or fishing knows that unless you are being chased by a bear, speed is not a great asset. Hunters rely on a deep knowledge of their game and their territory. You pick a place to wait for deer because you have determined that deer walk through that area. Fishermen get good at reading the river so they can find the spots with fish. Like the hunter, the skilled angler has taken the time to learn about his quarry and its habitat. This takes patience and focus.

Given the history of man, it is safe to assume that nature has rewarded those who gain a deep knowledge of their environment. That means nature has rewarded the skill needed to gain that deep knowledge. Of course, in an environment with lots of game and lots of predators, humans were probably rewarded for their speed and reflexes, both of which are needed to avoid being eaten. When food is plentiful, it is simply a matter of catching it when you see it.

Some humans are better equipped for obtaining a deep understanding of the environment and others are best as operating with just a cursory knowledge of the world around them. This aligns pretty well with the old r/K selection theory developed back in the 1960’s. Slow organisms will have a higher investment in fewer offspring and fast organisms will have a lower investment in a greater number of offspring. This also matches pretty well with fertility in humans.

There has been a lot of analysis about what happens to humans made to live quickly in a fast environment. The human biodiversity subculture has produced libraries full of observations and theories on this. The police blotter in a typical American city offers plenty of insight into how this works. People with low impulse control and a high time preference tend to show up in the arrest records, while people built to play the long game of life tend to avoid breaking the law or being victims.

The modern age may be presenting a study of the opposite case. The explosion of technology and media turned up the speed on daily life. Half a century ago the people of Europe would get some news from America a week after it happened. It took that long for the story to get into the American newspapers and then it took a few days to get to the newsrooms of Europe. Obviously, a major event would move along the wires faster, but most newsworthy items took a week or so.

Today, a man living in Yorkshire England can keep up with what is happening in York Pennsylvania at close to the same pace as the man in York PA. One of the odd things about this age is that the British tabloids do a better job covering local news in America than the American media. It is not unusual to find out about a local event from the Guardian UK or the Telegraph. We live in an age in which news travels so quickly that it is impossible to measure. Information is real-time.

One result of this is that the people built for low time preference and focused action are in a world that rewards high time preference and poor impulse control. Look at the billionaire class and many of them got rich from things that no longer exist. Mark Cuban, who is not Cuban, got rich selling his company to Yahoo. The company and the technology it created no longer exist. He is a super-rich man who will leave no footprints behind when his time is done.

Another result is that people no longer feel like they have any control over their lives, because they are being swept along by events. Mark Twain famously said that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed. Today, everything, truth, and falsehood, is halfway around the world by the time anyone knows it exists. Modern man is now being swept along in a current of information that seems to be accelerating so that all he can do is keep his head above the water line.

For people built to live slow, living fast is as alien as it is for the people made to live fast being thrust into a slow world. Part of the growing agitation that is a feature of the current moment may simply be the inability for anyone to keep pace with the deluge of information that comes at them every day. It is not just politics. The workplace has become a land of reaction as well. The cubicle farms are something like a hamster wheel now, but you never get a break.

Fighting Mother Nature is always a losing game. This is the lesson of communism in the 20th century. They simply could not kill enough people to cause Mother Nature to yield to the theory. The technological age may be experiencing the same thing, with a lower body count. Instead, people are slowly beginning to adapt to the reality of their environment by reorganizing it. Cord-cutting is a way to slow down your environment, thus making it more habitable.

Social media seems to be suffering a similar trend. They lie about their membership and activity, but it is pretty clear that we are past the peak of these big platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The former is the domain of old people keeping touch with friends and family, while the latter is a holding pen for the mentally ill. A devolution to smaller, more focused on-line communities is under way. People are unplugging from the system to slow down their life.

There is also a trend where people are moving from the big sprawling suburbs to smaller more rural communities. Some of this was triggered by the Covid panic, where people found themselves at home all day. If you work at home, then your home does not need to be near the big company campus in the big sprawling suburb. Another part is people simply opting out of the fast-paced jungle to something for which they are better adapted and where they can be around similar humans.

Even so, most people remain trapped in a world that is operating at a speed that most people find hostile. At the same time the system needs those people to make it operate as the fast living people lack the other skills to operate it. This conflict in the current age may be why it feels like the system is about to shake itself to pieces. Modernity has become a doomsday device. It is killing the population that created it, but it cannot carry on without the people who created it.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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***@*********************ns.com.

There are many theories as to why the managerial class of America enthusiastically embraces the nutty social fads. California now has a law requiring “gender neutral” toy aisles in stores, for example. One crazy putting this into a bill is understandable, but why did everyone else go along with it? Why does anyone go along with the loopy idea of gender at all? It is not a real thing. Humans are male and female. Everyone has known this for thousands of years.

This is just one example, but the pattern is always the same. Certainly, some do it out of fear of losing face. The oriental nature of the managerial class is easily missed, but the whole face saving thing is where you see it. That is not a normal quality of Northern European people. It is what you see in a small, tightly knit people, but it is a real thing in our managerial class. They fear being seen as outside the current cultural norms of their class, so everyone plays along.

You can really tell this when you run into someone who is in the habit of announcing her pronouns in her workplace. The low level people are most prone to peer pressure, so they jump on these fads with as much enthusiasm as they can muster. The trouble is she still interacts with normal people. When she breaks out the pronouns around a normal, she has the look you see with people struggling with mental illness. She is not sure if what she is saying is what she is thinking.

This is how a minority within the managerial class is able to exert so much power over the rest of the class. That California requirement on toy aisles is no doubt the product of a lone crazy, but fear of exclusion prevented everyone else from speaking out against an obviously insane idea. No one wants to be the one who is seen rejecting the morality of the whole. In a world where the most insane ideas get embraced, who wants to risk opposing this nutty idea?

Even so, the managerial system selects for conformity, but it also allows for the crazies who cook up these ideas. In other words, it selects for a conformity that makes exception for anti-social behavior and it selects for people who are always looking to undermine the dominant culture. Put another way, the personality type most prized is the sadistic subversive with a passion for enforcement. The most perverted people are the most highly regarded in our ruling class.

Another angle to this, perhaps, is that the general belief system of the managerial class is highly conformist. The reason is the people at the top have no natural authority to legitimize their positions. The result is a rigid culture that allows for very little creativity and originality. The exception is when it comes to offending the normal people of society, which is what separates the managerial class from everyone else. You can be weird as long as it offends the normals.

The resulting culture is one that is extremely intolerant of deviation, yet desperate for innovated ways to undermine tradition. The reason these cultural fads are increasingly ridiculous is they are running out of things to smash. When you have already put gay men in jock straps on parade floats and made everyone remain silent about it, finding something more offensively ridiculous is not easy. They jumped on drag queen story hour out of desperation for something new.

The austere conformity is not seen by those who operate outside the domains of the Cloud People, so the quiet desperation is not obvious. Venture inside and what will be most striking is the humorlessness. People smile and laugh a little, but there is an uncanny valley quality to it. They laugh like people who read about how humans laugh from time to time. Say something intended as a joke and they will look at one another for permission to laugh at what the alien said.

The state of fear within the managerial class cannot be underestimated. The ritualized sacrifice of that football coach over his heresy is not intended for the Dirt People the NFL preys upon. That was for the Cloud People. In a world where ritualized human sacrifice is accepted as normal, fear of violating the rules, even by accident, is a very real concern for these people. The threat of exile works the same as Stalin’s gulag worked in the Soviet Union.

This is why no one in the media ever asks the obvious questions when the various talking robots are put out for question and answer periods. A group of normal people in the White House press room would cause the face plate of Jen Psaki to fall off by coordinating their questions and tangling her up in her lies. This never happens because normals are never allowed inside. The people allowed inside know they can easily be replaced by actors if they get out of line.

That was the point of the Kamala Harris video. Not only did they use child actors, but Harris also clearly performed like a well-trained actress. To normal people it is just more evidence that these people are sociopaths and liars. Inside the world of politics, it is a message. There are plenty of unemployed actors willing to play politician, reporter and so on, so make sure you know your lines before filming. Democracy is just the theater portion of the managerial system that rules America.

A ruling class rooted in fear of deviation but permitted to undermine that which makes their existence possible is not one that can last. We are seeing this with the growing economic crises. No one dares suggest anything other than what is being done, so they are frozen in place, hoping for a miracle. The Afghanistan debacle is another example of how extreme conformity results in disaster. No one dared question the plan or adjust it on the fly, so the plan just slammed into the rocks of reality.

The is the crisis of today. The ossified geezer class at the top of the system have insulated themselves against all possible reform. They rule their system through fear and manufactured consent. The only relief for the people in it is the orchestrated subversions like gender neutral toy aisles. Like starving men fighting for crumbs, they jump at these opportunities at something resembling life. Subversion is the bit of sunlight that comes through their prison windows.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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***@*********************ns.com.

Note: The Monday Taki column is up. The topic this week is the increasingly familiar and obvious Jim Snow laws of America. Behind the green door we have the weekly Sunday podcast where I rant and rave about the world.

In every form of human organization there are layers of responsibility. The simplest way of expressing it is that at the top there is always the boss who is the guy making the important decisions for the organization. Everyone else, in one fashion or another, takes orders from the boss and carries out the orders.  Always at the bottom are people who just do what they are told. The vertical arrangements are one of the truths of work life that everyone just accepts without much thought.

More formally, at the top layer of an organization, like a business, are the big decision makers for the organization. Below them are the policy makers. They take the big initiative and turn it into rules and plans. Below them are the people who make those rules and plans into reality. This is the layer most people inside and outside the organization see. They instruct the bottom layer of the organization, train them and making sure they follow through on their orders.

The important part of this arrangement is that everyone in the organization understands their role within the organization. The private in a rifle platoon has to understand that his role is to follow the orders given him by is squad leader or platoon leader. His job is not to determine strategy or decide on objectives. Similarly, the guy on the shop floor has to know his duty is to perform the role he is assigned at a workstation. Otherwise, the organization breaks down and fails to operate as intended.

At the bottom this is rarely a problem, as the people at the bottom are well aware of their status in the hierarchy. The people at the top, of course, know they are at the top of the hierarchy and what that means. The trouble comes in the middle layers where the people tend to be the most ambitious and most prone to overstepping their bounds, hoping to impress the boss. They can also be overly cautious, fearful of getting blamed for doing something wrong and losing status in the organization.

This is where the culture of the organization plays a decisive role. A company with a good corporate culture will have a management layer full of people who not only know their roles but embrace them in the context of the larger organization. A good military culture is one where the officers respect the chain of command, but also understand mission priorities and the need to improvise when necessary. Good organizational culture is what makes or breaks an organization.

This is also where we see the inherent problem of democracy. The basic premise of democratic systems is one man one vote. That means every vote is equal, which is another way of saying that every opinion is equally valid. In the political sense, it means the opinion of the bum counts the same as the opinion of the businessman who volunteers at the church on weekends. The bum’s vote counts for the same as the vote of the man committed to his community.

Democracy flies in the face of everything we know about human organization, because it rejects the natural hierarchy we see everywhere. Worse yet, it gnaws away at the basic understanding of human relations. Those middle-managers in a well-run company are happy to be in their roles. They may have ambition, but they also accept reality and know that their ambitions are linked to that reality. The morality of democracy undermines the very basis of their relationship to the whole.

This is why modern democracies are full of people confused about their place in society as well as the role others play. There is a whole genre of videos on-line where people confront store managers about things no reasonable person should expect them to know or control. We have the opposite, as well, where people at the lowest ranks of management carry on like they are shot callers, pushing people around and going well beyond the limits of their role.

Imagine a factory where everyone thinks they should have a say in what the factory makes and how much they make of it. The guy who cleans the workstations gets the same vote as the sales manager and the plant manager. Imagine a platoon where the men vote on their missions and collectively decide on their targets. It sounds like madness because it is madness. That factory would go out of business in a hurry and that military unit would quickly become a criminal gang.

This is, however, how the West has decided to run their societies. Now, it is true that the real shot callers hide in the shadows, using the institutions to manipulate public opinion and coerce people into their positions. They do so, however, while promoting the idea that everyone’s opinion is the same and every opinion counts. On the one hand they promote chaos, while on the other they try to maintain order. It is no wonder that the liberal democracies are shaking themselves to pieces.

The temptation is to blame the internet for allowing the stupid to have easy access to the public square, but in reality, the internet is just a facilitator. According to the tenets of democracy, Twitter is the goal, not a terrible accident. Imagine the town square full of howling lunatics and you get the prefect image of democracy. Social media made real is a public riot but is also exactly what you get when everyone stops accepting their role in the hierarchy and thinks they are a king.

Fundamentally, all forms of democracy are as hostile and contrary to the nature of man as all forms of communism. Both communism and democracy assume something about people that can never be true. That is, all men are equal. This is obviously false in the simplest organization and even more so in the most complex. Just as communism has always ended in disaster, democracy has always ended in murder. Both delusions are the fruit of the same poison tree named equality.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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***@*********************ns.com.

One of the weird aspects of this age is how important people appropriate the emotions and feeling of others and make them their own. They will make statements about their feelings on a subject, but those feelings are not really their feelings because they cannot actually be experiencing the feelings in questions. Our Cloud People have normalized emotional appropriation as a way of projecting to the Dirt People that they have genuine human emotions.

The easy example here is the public person who has a rare moment of honesty and posts what they really think on Twitter. This sets off the familiar drama on-line in which people rush to their favorite platform to express their outrage. The fact that they have no reason to care, much less be outraged, goes unnoticed. Eventually, the director of this drama tells the star to waddle out on stage and issue an apology. In that apology, the star claims to feel things that cannot be felt.

For example, they always say something about feeling remorse for the pain they have caused, despite the fact this is impossible. You can feel remorse for causing harm to an actual human, but not for anonymous zombies on-line. Further, the people claiming to have been harmed were not harmed. In fact, the opportunity to play along in the drama was the highlight of their day, maybe their life. Like the famous people, they got to appropriate the feelings of others.

None of the emotions expressed in these offense-apology dramas can be real, because it does not involve real victims or real offenses. The star of these shows often says, “I apologize to those I have offended” but the statement itself says they are not sure who they could have offended. You can only apologize to real humans to whom you have committed real harm. An apology to imaginary people is an imaginary apology for an imaginary harm. It is all just emotional appropriation.

A recent example of this is the football coach caught dancing with a woman not his wife after a football game. For some reason, football fans were “outraged” as if we have suddenly been thrust into Victorian times. The owner of the team that employs the coach was scandalized, calling it “inexcusable”. The coach then apologized to imaginary people for something no one, other than maybe his wife, should have an interest, much less an emotional investment.

Another common example of emotional appropriation is the Cloud Person taking pride in something that does not exist. Politicians will talk about different communities, for example, as if they are rural villages with a well-defined character. The “trans community” is a current favorite. The politicians will claim to be proud of their support for the trans community. You cannot take pride in something you had no part in creating and you cannot be proud of something that does not exist.

Pride, ironically enough, is one of the most important emotions for our modern emotional appropriators. College presidents are always talking about how proud they are of their community. They are just hired fundraisers who drift from job to job, never creating anything but trouble. Yet, they will take pride in the work of others as if they had a hand in it. The fixation on the sin of pride by the Cloud People is one of those things that reveals much about our age.

The sin of pride, for those deprived of proper religious training, is considered a rebellion against God. The person committing this sin attributes to himself the honor and glory that is due to another, usually God. Since our Cloud People worship the arc of history, it sort of makes sense that they inappropriately take pride in that which is the product of generations of history. Pride has been called the cancer of the soul. It is considered the first and most serious of the deadly sins.

One reason for these weird public displays of emotion is that we have shifted from a male dominated culture to a female dominated one. Maintaining a stiff upper lip, especially in public, is a male attribute. Women, on the other hand, have always been encouraged to show emotion. This is why all public people feel a need to show emotion in public. It is how they project their piety. In order to gain status, you must show how much you care, which often means blubbering in public.

Another issue here, though, is the people who now dominate public life are not capable of real human emotion. They don’t do things, for example, for which they could take genuine pride. They don’t have a concern for the welfare of others. This is the age of the public sociopath. Caring about real people is a sucker’s play in this age, so the ambitious try to avoid it. The result is we get these weird dramas where the Cloud People appropriate the emotions of others.

In the novel Brave New World, humans in the imagined future went to something called the Feelies, which was a theater-like experience. They would be simulated to feel strong emotions via the use of various inputs. The people went to these things to feel things like grief and anger, because they had no way of experiencing these emotions in their regular lives. The combination of their genetic engineering and taking the happiness-producing drug called Soma blocked normal emotions.

Something similar happens today. The Cloud People are mostly sociopaths at this point, incapable of having normal human emotions. The general population, however, has been plucked from normal human community and thrust into a synthetic solution of consumerism that does not allow for the normal human experience. In order to keep the system running, the Cloud People are constantly creating synthetic emotions they can display and use to stimulate emotion in the Dirt People.

This is the appeal of mass media in general and social media in particular. Just look at the name “social media”. It is a replacement for the normal human socialization that would occur in natural human communities. The most emotionally unstable people are intensely on-line. They lack the normal structure of human community to keep them balanced so they seek an alternative on their phone. The result is a population on a roller-coaster of emotional appropriation.

Emotion is not much different from what comes from taking stimulants. The first hit is the best hit. The most intense emotions we feel in our lives are at the extremes, so the emotionalism of this age grows more intense. Public emotion in a liberal democracy is the opiate of the people. Therefore the emotional appropriation becomes more prolific and the drama more intense. We are shaking ourselves to pieces in an effort to feel that which has been normal for the life of man.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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In the West, the morality of the state has been determined by how much or how little it respects the basic rights of its citizens. During the Cold War this was a critical measure used to justify foreign policy. The American government claimed it was within its rights to overthrow South American governments that got too chummy with the Soviets because they would endanger the rights of their people. On the other hand, they would back anti-communist dictators because they were better than communists.

There was a lot of lying and dissembling on this issue, but the principle was important to Western governments, so they made a big show of it. In America, for example, this meant protecting property rights from the excesses of the state. As a practical matter, it meant the state had to prove they had good reason for violating your rights before the court would permit them from doing it. They had to get a warrant, for example, before tapping your phone or riffling through your papers.

Government is always a blunt instrument and men are not angels so to avoid office holders and bureaucrats from abusing the rights of the people they first had to demonstrate there was a compelling government interest in declaring your backyard a wetland or banning a certain activity. Put another away, it was the duty of the government to make the affirmative argument. Citizens did not have to justify their rights to exercise them. They were assumed.

Property is a useful metric in this regard because it is simple and the economic basis of Western society. Even in feudalism property rights were respected, because ownership was what made the system possible. The right to speak out or organize are up for debate to some degree, but the right to own the fruits of your labor is the starting point for social organization in the West. It is what makes communism alien and why it has always been the domain of outsiders and subversives.

In the United States, property rights barely exist now. This story about the Feds smashing into a private business and taking their stuff sounds like something from North Korea or maybe Australia. For reasons they feel no need to explain, they broke into a private bank vault and stole the property of the customers using the service and refuse to return the property. By any reasonable moral standard, this is theft and worse, it is legal plunder. The state is plundering the citizens.

Like all criminals, conmen and sociopaths, the state is throwing up a dust storm of legal points to distract from the moral point at the center. In a just society, is it appropriate to take the goods of the people without first demonstrating that the state has a reason for seizing that property? The answer is obvious. By Western standards, this is immoral and the sort of thing that justifies revolution. In fact, it is this sort of behavior that justifies the very existence of the United States.

This is not an atypical story. The Federal government now routinely seizes the property of citizens without justification. Nick Fuentes, the young firebrand nationalist, had his bank accounts seized by the government. They have not explained why they took his money, and they refuse to even acknowledge it. One day he had money in his account and the next day it was cleaned out. The bank finally told him it was the government, but it took them weeks to get around to telling him.

The general violation of property rights is now the norm. The tech oligarchs, for example, strongly oppose private property. If they don’t like what you are saying on your website, they will steal your domain name. They will collude to limit your ability to hold a job or have a bank account. What used to be a sacred right of all people is now up for debate with an unelected oligarchical class as the judge and jury. What is yours is theirs and what is theirs is theirs and they own everything.

It is tempting to call this feudalism as people have a cartoonish understanding of the term and the times from which we get the term. The fact is the typical feudal lord had a greater respect for property rights than anyone in authority today. The authority of the lord was rooted in property rights. He respected the rights of small landowners, because he expected his lord to respect his rights the same way. The upper cast of modern society has no respect for the people in the least.

This is the critical thing to understand about the modern authoritarian. They no longer respect what used to be the common morality of the West. The ultimate constraint on feudal excess was that universally accepted morality with regards to property, the law and governance. Most people were illiterate, even the rulers, so the letter of the law was not paramount. It was the spirit of the law that mattered. In fact, it was this respect for the spirit of the law on which authority rested.

Today, the people in charge have no respect for the law or the concept of law, so their agents just do as they please. In fact, they take pride in trampling the rights of the people, because it pleases their masters. The goons prosecuting the January 6th protestors, for example, take a sadistic pleasure in the torment they are inflicting on the people caught in their trap. Their intentional cruelty has become a positional good, something that elevates them in the eyes of the oligarchs.

The Declaration of Independence is a remarkable document that is mostly remembered for the opening lines. Even though those lines have been abused by the very tyrants that now rule over us, the document is a remarkable expression of Western thought and Anglo-Saxon morality. After the long bill of indictment against the king, a list familiar today, there is this line. “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

The beauty of that line is that it qualifies the moral depravity of the tyrant by juxtaposing it against the nature of a free people. A people who sit idly by as their rulers trample their ancient rights are getting the government they deserve. A free people, in contrast,  must hold their prince to the highest moral standard. It is immoral for them to do otherwise, as it violates that which defines them as free people. Every tyrant issues his own death warrant to the free people he seeks to oppress.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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***@*********************ns.com.