Category Archives: Culture

The Race Drama

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One of the features of modern liberal democracy is that everyone is trapped in a constant present, unaware of both the past and future. The current black riots, for example, are being described as unprecedented, when in fact they are a regular feature of American life. Birds fly, fish swim and blacks riot. Amusingly, the man allegedly responsible for these riots, President Trump, you know, because of the low black unemployment, is in office because of the last round of black riots.

In fact, black rioting is one of the regular features of the ongoing morality play that is modern liberal democracy. The usual suspects, looking for a reason to get white people to the theater, start scanning about for some case where a black was harmed by an unsympathetic white. They create a narrative around the incident, have the stories placed in the media and then encourage the black “activist groups” to start making an issue of it. From there, the story writes itself.

The regularization of this is clear when you look up from this incident and recall that just a few weeks ago we had Jogger. This was an off-Broadway effort to angry-up the blacks, but it failed to catch on. Blacks were sort of ready to play their role, but only the dumbest white people fell for it. Those would be the type who declare their pronouns on social media. Normal white people saw through the plot like a bad movie and failed to show up at the theater. Jogger never made it to Broadway.

As an aside, you’ll note something about the Jogger that goes unremarked. American blacks are not all that sympathetic to imported blacks. When some guy with a weird African name gets jammed up, regular blacks just shrug. The reason is their identity starts with them being near whites against their will. Despite their relentless demands for access to white people, black identity starts with the belief that they are around whites by force. African man violates that narrative.

The general framework of this particular morality tale follows the approved script of all morality tales in modern America. First, the usual suspects, or their puppets, announce there is a great danger to the community. Alternatively, there is some group being harmed and the community must rally to their defense. Sometimes the two are combined in a Godzilla attacks Tokyo scenario. The people are then supposed to flood the theater to be properly scared or angered.

You see this with these Cop-Black tales. The black is always cast as an innocent victim in the trailer for the show. They find pictures from his high school yearbook to hand out in the press kits when promoting the story. We saw that with Trayvon Martin. The media used pics of him as a child, rather than as a hulking teenager. Jogger was shown in his cap and gown seven years prior. The cop, in contrast, is never really filled out as a character, because he is a catspaw for the real villain.

The paradox of these cops versus blacks riot-dramas is that we live in a country that worships cops. There are dozens of TV shows and movies on all the time celebrating the cop as the guy guarding the wall between civilization and barbarity. Usually, the hero cop is required to break the rules to exact justice. On the one hand, white people are supposed to see cops as rule breaking moral agents, while blacks are required to see cops as immoral agents of a system of oppression.

The second act of the morality tale always brings the so-called conservatives onto the stage to play their part. Normally, they are required to dismiss the danger or the victim, in order to appear unfeeling or callous. In this case, the role is changed up. They are first required to worship a special character created just for these shows. This is the Magic Negro, who is black, but a conservative! He is brought on to confirm the wishy-washy civic nationalism stuff popular with old people.

After the required doses the negrophilia, the conservatives in the crowd are ready for the usual performance. The conservative character can either be shocked at the hypocrisy of the Left or outraged by the civil unrest. In both cases, the underlying assumptions are the same. Racism is the worst sin, but a sin, ironically, that can only be committed by white people. As such, the whole point of the citizen’s life must be to eradicate this sin from their heart and from their community.

Like the Dionysia in ancient Athens, these morality plays are intended to reinforce the larger moral framework of society. If you step back from the particulars and look at these race dramas, they are not all that different from a fire breathing minister telling his flock that they are all sinners and must redouble their efforts. Instead of pleasing God, it is the god of democracy. These dramas are a lecture to whites that they will only be saved when all people are welcomed into their community.

Of course, that is one of the many paradoxes of modernity. In order for the morality plays to work there has to be real victims and real villains. This is why everyone is a racist Nazi now. The supply of genuine racists and Nazis has evaporated. The only actual racists in America are not white, which will not do, so the play makers expand the definition for racist to fit their needs. It also means they deliberately create villains by manufacturing them when the supply is low.

In theory, the way out of this endless drama is to simply ignore it. Get enough white people to stop showing up or even acknowledging these dramas and the theater runs out of audience members. In reality, this can never happen, at least not to the extent it changes public morality. The people running the theater will just force people inside, as we see with the schools, corporate diversity training and the like. In a libel democracy, society itself becomes the theater and life is the morality play.

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The Good White Bible

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A strange thing that used to be more common a decade ago, but still persists to this day is the use of the book Guns, Germs and Steel as an escape hatch. That is, when a conversation with good whites turns to biology, they will at some point attempt to change the subject by bringing up this book. Always, it is in the form of “A great book on this is Guns, Germs and Steal. Have you read it?” After all these years, it remains the one acceptably dangerous book they have read on the subject.

In this context, dangerous means that the book sort of accepts the fact that human populations are not exactly the same everywhere. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have defined the story of man, while arguing against biological reality. For good whites, merely acknowledging that sub-Saharan Africans have little to show for their time on earth is scary. Even though Diamond is a biological denialist, the book is still a dangerous read.

Of course, it is acceptable because of that denialism. The thesis of the book is that serendipity and ecology explain why some human populations have advanced beyond simple farming, while others have not. Diamond makes many claims about different food stuffs, weather and pathogens to explain why Europeans, in particular, have risen to the top of the human hierarchy. The basic claim, in a nutshell, is they got lucky and really don’t deserve their spot at the top of the hierarchy.

This is a familiar theme for those who have read the writings of Ben Shapiro and Yoram Hazony, both of whom make similar claims. In the case of Shapiro, he argues that Europe was the creation of Hellenize Jews, who arrived with the Romans. He is not that honest or explicit, but that is his claim. Hazony takes a similar approach, but credits the Romans for imposing culture on the people of Europe. He also credits dumb luck in explaining why Europe is not the Levant or Mesopotamia.

This makes sense from the perspective of Zionist Jews. They view life as a great struggle between people, particularly their people, the Chosen People, and the rest of the people of the world. They don’t have to think too hard about why they are superior to Arabs, but Europeans are another matter. The Jewish people don’t have a big trophy case like the people of the Occident. They credit this to dumb luck in order to maintain the fiction that they are still God’s favorite people.

Now, it is important to note that the Diamond book is riddled with errors of fact and logic that undermine the central premise. In fact, there are so many of these errors it has to be assumed the author knew he was making false claims. For those with some time to kill, Ryan Faulk made a two hour video going into the details of Diamond’s claims about agriculture and animal husbandry. The best you can say about Guns, Germs and Steel is it is a masterful display of modern sophistry.

Now, ecology did play a defining role in shaping the people of Europe, just as it did the people everywhere on earth. Fundamental to the human sciences and dissident politics is that people are different. The people of Europe are different because they had to be in order to survive and thrive in their environment, which is radically different from the environment of Africa. They also mixed with archaic people, just as East Asians mixed with a different archaic people. Human biodiversity is real.

The appeal of the Diamond book, the intent of it actually, is to turn this reality on its head in order to supplant biological reality with the egalitarian fantasy. The impression Diamond tries to leave on the reader is that he is accepting the premises of the realists, while coming to a more parsimonious explanation. This is a similar approach taken by Nathan Cofnas in his critique of Kevin McDonald’s book. It is a form of abductive reasoning meant to persuade, not explain.

Similarly, a book popular with the same crowd twenty years ago was Why Nations Fail, which attempted to solve the same problem. It makes the claim that the reason the West has raced ahead to lead the world is that they have inclusive institutions and that economic prosperity depends above all on the inclusiveness of economic and political institutions. This magical inclusiveness just fell from the sky and landed in the West, explaining why the Occident has dominated.

The popularity of these books, and in the case of the Diamond book its enduring popularity, speaks to the power of the egalitarian faith. People in modern democracies, particularly bourgeois people, need to believe that all people are born with the same innate talents and abilities. The belief is so powerful it can overcome the absurd circular reasoning in a book like Why Nations Fail and raise Guns, Germs and Steel into the gospel of modern liberal democracy.

There is another element to this. The premise is that the “superficial” differences in people are due to environment, but the people themselves are all the same, once those environmental issues are removed. This sort of thinking allows the believer to feel shame for his privilege, while lamenting the fact the poor browns were not blessed with better stuff or the divine magic of liberal democracy. The good white can indulge his natural self-loathing and proselytize for his way of life.

This is a very Christian dynamic. The good white, like the good Christian, embraces the fallen state of mankind. For Christians, it is man’s obvious sinful nature. For the good white, it is white privilege, the undeserved blessings of serendipity. Like the believing Christian, the good white sees the path to salvation in spreading the faith. Instead of observable reality leading to an acceptance of the human condition, it drives a desire to rectify it and overcome the forces that have shaped it.

This is probably why a book like Guns, Germs and Steel remains a popular text with the good whites. It is literally written to flatter the reader and offer an alternative narrative to explain observable reality. White people are not evil because of their nature, but because of their failure to acknowledge their privilege and put it to good use in saving the rest of mankind from his plight. To be a good white means embracing one’s undeserved place in the world as fuel to reform the world.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Digital Opiate

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Imagine a science fiction scenario in which you and your crew discover a planet inhabited by intelligent beings that possess no written or spoken language. This strange species communicates entirely with facial movements, eye contact, and other non-verbal gestures. Perhaps in addition to an astonishingly complex set of facial muscles, they have additional limbs used for signaling complex ideas. Whatever sounds they make are more like mood music than spoken language.

It is a crazy image, but it is a useful way of thinking about language. While it is possible such a communication could work, the one obvious problem is that initially all knowledge would have to be communicated in person. If you wanted to pass on information to the guy in the next village, you would either have to go to his village or have someone do it for you. It would also mean information could die with the holder, so the culture would need lots of redundancy to retain its knowledge.

Most likely, such a communication system would be so costly, whole categories of information would be eliminated. History would have to be truncated. Imagine the effort required to pantomime the history of the Peloponnesian War. Communicating advanced math would be impossible. Imagine describing a Lorentzian manifold with hand gestures and facial movements. Even a highly advanced visual communication system would rule out large swaths of information.

It’s not just that the categories would be constrained. The concept of history, for example, may not exist at all. If it did, it would be highly personalized, since all communication would be personal. Without a writing system or some other way to record information that is independent of the sender, the concept of a fact-based history would be improbable. This species could conceive of the past, but only in the most personal sense of it and as related to the present.

There would be something else about such a communication system. Because the lack of efficiency, time would have to be compressed. That is, the highest priority would be on the events of the present time, then those in the very near future and then the immediate past. The further events, ideas or concepts got from the present in either direction, the less important they would be to the society. The species with only a visual communication system would live almost entirely in the moment.

In the 1984 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, Neil Postman argued that a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. The written word requires the intellectual involvement of the reader. The information presented can be tested and contemplated as it is consumed. Oral communication is more immediate, as the listener cannot playback what was just said, unless it is recorded. Video is the most superficial, as the viewer is a passive participant.

The thesis was that the superficial nature of video communication was removing facts and reason from public discourse and replacing them with emotion. People will take one side or another of an issue, because they favor the people making the argument, not because they think about the facts. Politics ceases to be about facts and arguments and becomes a sales pitch, like an ad for a product. No one thinks about the claims made in the presentation, just how they feel about the presenter.

Postman was writing before the internet. He could not contemplate how that would change public communication. The internet has immediacy. In addition to the superficiality of visual communication, it now comes as a steady stream through the wide array of screens in our lives. Even if you are not on social media, you will still absorb a steady stream of small bits of information. These are intended to elicit an emotional response regarding some pubic issue.

For older people, the legacy mediums still play a large role. Old people still read physical newspapers. Radio talk shows and television still have an audience, but the audience is generally those who came of age before the internet. Old people are on-line, but they experience it as a digital form of the legacy media. At the other end of the age curve, kids get all of the information on-line. Social media, YouTube and live streams are their exclusive sources of information.

Think about the last two months of virus panic. First the stream was intended to frighten everyone with images of overwhelmed hospitals and morgues. The factual content of the presentation was nonsensical. We did not see actual hospitals or people staggering around suffering from the virus. Instead it was models and people pitching the panic, like salesman in an infomercial. Postman’s framing of television news as infotainment has now been supercharged in the internet age.

We have moved beyond the three mediums of written, oral and visual, by adding the element of time. The rapid stream of information coming to us in mostly visual formats, or at least as superficial as the visual, amplifies the emotional aspect that was always central to visual presentations. People are bombarded with inputs that are evaluated in the moment and the appropriate emotion is generated. It is why people get so angry at contradiction on-line. That’s the point of the experience.

Our modern media environment is now something like “the feelies” in Huxley’s Brave New World. This was a popular form of entertainment that combined the senses of smell and touch in a movie format. The “movie” lacks the normal content of a movie, but instead stimulates the viewer into certain emotional states. The responses created in the viewer, combine with images, reinforce the social order. It is a form of propaganda that circumvents the rational mind and appeals to the emotions.

The live stream phenomenon is similar. These are often ad hoc, with the streamer starting his stream when the spirit moves. Some are more regimented in their schedule, but they rarely start on time and they go as long as they like. The people tuning in are not looking for facts and reasoned arguments. Instead they want reassurance and confirmation. These streams have communities that exist around the live streamer. It’s virtual information and a virtual community.

This brings us back to that civilization of aliens. They would inevitably be trapped in the present, because of the limitations of their communications medium. Their information would also be highly personal, as there would be no way to communicate without the idiosyncrasies of the sender getting tangled in the message. Part of the information the receiver would get is the particulars of the sender. Information could no longer stand outside the person. It would be defined by the sender and receiver.

We are seeing this today. Live streamers are making a living by talking and playing games as a type of performance. Their community sends them money in order to get mentioned or have their comment mentioned. In fact, the community becomes a part of the performance, a sort of codependency. The streamer interacts with the community in order to move the show along, but the community interacts with the streamer in order to tailor the experience to their desires in the moment.

Of course, it also means our public discourse must be even more shallow and superficial than what existed in the peak of the television era. It also must be even more intensely present tense. The old written information stream was an interconnected collection of facts and logic. The new information stream is a constant series of highly personalized, but disconnected bits of data intended to elicit an emotion. The digital opiate keeps the sender and receiver in a constant present.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Petty Tyranny

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One of the stranger things about the current age is that very few people talk about the Cold War or the events that drove it. For people living from the 1950’s through the 1980’s, it was the central topic of politics. When the Soviet Empire collapsed, it was if everyone decided to forget about the whole thing. If it is mentioned at all it is usually a conservative trying to remind people that socialism does not produce high quality consumer goods or not enough choices in the cereal aisle.

The great ideological battle between socialism and liberalism has been reduced to a battle between market economics versus command economics. The winner was the one that made better home electronics. Yet, right up to the end of the Cold War, the battle was not about economics. Sure, the lack of blue jeans and rock music was a popular way to mock the Soviet system, but even there it was not about the products, but the reason why they existed in the West and not the East.

The West opposed communism not because of GDP numbers or cheap consumer goods, but because communism was not just immoral, but evil. Controlling the granular details of people’s lives was monstrous. Communist countries did not allow their people to voice their opinions or choose how they lived. They could not even choose where they lived, as the government assigned apartments. The image of the “iron curtain” was to compare the Soviet system to a penal colony.

On the other side, the Soviets were fond of pointing out how blacks in America were treated poorly. There was also the urban squalor and poverty. Some Americans might enjoy blue jeans and rock music, but millions lived in squalor. Of course, the existence of super rich living in mansions was immoral on its face, given that so many people were living in poverty. The communist could privately concede that their system was not making equal consumer goods, but it was still morally superior.

It’s strange how the great ideological struggle of the last century is largely forgotten or reduced to a contest over breakfast cereal selections at the market, while the short fight between liberalism and fascism is cast entirely in moral terms. The West won the fight with fascism on material grounds. America could make more planes, guns and tanks than the fascists. There was the normal wartime propaganda about the evilness of the fascist, but it was never an ideological struggle.

The battle with communism, on the other hand, was always a about the basic moral difference between the two systems. There was never any doubt that the communist could match the west militarily. In fact, a frequent theme of American politics in the Cold War was how we had to rededicate ourselves to liberty in order to keep pace with the Soviets in missiles, the space race and technology. Again, the material aspect was just a part of the much larger moral argument against communism.

Higher morality has largely disappeared from modern political discourse. There is the superficial and often nonsensical moralizing about individual dignity and inclusiveness, but that is just crude factionalism. The relationship between the citizen and the state or the relations between different groups of citizens no longer a topic. In the Cold War, this was a central topic, as it highlighted the difference between the systems. Even hack politicians could wax poetic about liberty or freedom.

Notice how the debate about the virus has been reduced to economics. One camp is minimizing the health risk because they want the economy open. The other side is wildly exaggerating the health risk to keep the economy closed, not because they care about public health, but because they hate modern economics. Amusingly, they don’t even understand what it is they hate about global capitalism. It’s often just a crude jealousy of those who enjoy the fruits of modernity.

If anyone cared to notice, this pandemic has proven that there is no hint of republicanism left in modern America. There are no protests against the impositions on our liberty, just protests about restaurants being closed. No politician is giving speeches against the tyranny of these restrictions. Instead it is either about the most primitive sense of safety or about the right to consume product. To speak of personal liberty is as anachronistic as speaking in favor of free silver.

The great conservative polemicist Joe Sobran pointed out decades ago that the colonists revolted against a king, who was a very mild tyrant compared to the American government at the time. The founders would have been horrified to see what their creation became in the 20th century. Something similar can be said about the men who set out to oppose communism. If they could see what has become of the West, they would probably rethink their opposition to communism.

In the decades since the end of the Cold War, the West has lost any sense of a higher morality. There was a time when religion would fill that role. It provided a transcendent purpose to life. In other times, the secular rulers would provide the purpose. Maybe it was modernization or public works projects. In the case of the 20th century, the fight against communism was the higher purpose. Today that is all gone and we’re left to squabble over the crudest of desires like safety and food.

Perhaps the reason for all of this is that liberal democracy was never a rational and complete political philosophy. Rather, like libertarian, it was always an ad hoc reaction to and critique of socialism. It first replaced republicanism in the economic crisis of the early 20th century, then it blossomed in the fight against fascism. Finally, it evolved into a containment vessel in the Cold War. Once that purpose was lost, what was a left was a massive economic and cultural machine with no reason to exist.

As a result, liberal democracy is devolving into petty authoritarianism. The people, stripped of their republican virtue, no longer have the means to resist. The ruling class, armed with a monopoly of force and need to legitimize themselves, is taking on the habits of the deranged tyrant. They push people around not because they want to, but because they need to in order to feel their own existence. What defines them is pushing people around, so they seek out reasons to push people around.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Minority State

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Thirty years ago, as the Cold War was ending, the big question for the West was what was going to come next? The great struggle between liberal democracy and communism was over and the clear winner was liberal democracy. The only real question, in terms of politics, was just how quickly the rest of the world embraced what was clearly the only rational politics. The question political theorists will be pondering in the future, is what went horribly wrong with liberal democracy?

There really is no other way to frame things at this point. In 1990, there was a long list of things that no one thought would ever happen in the West. Most of things on that list were things assumed to be common in the Soviet Empire. The police arresting someone for holding the wrong opinion was the symbol of everything that was wrong in the communist system and everything right about liberal democracy. Yet, thirty years on and this is exactly what we see happening all over the West.

This story from Kentucky, of all places, is a good example. Two children and two adults have been arrested for racism. That’s not the specific charge. Instead the state has invented a novel new crime called “harassing communication” which means it is against the law to upset the wrong people with your public utterances. Since there’s not official list of people one must avoid upsetting, the state is free to arrest anyone for their speech on the claim that someone may be upset by it.

At this point, it is tempting to make a comparison to the Stasi or maybe Stalin’s KGB, but that would be a slander against the communists. They were always quite clear about who you could never criticize and what you must never dispute. When Stalin’s boys dragged you from your home, you knew exactly why you were being hauled away by the police. Every man in the gulag knew why he was there. The novelty of liberal democracy is in keeping everyone in the dark about these things.

Another novelty is that in communism, everyone also knew to avoid taking the side of the accused and they knew why to avoid it. That was another thing Westerners would brag about during the Cold War. In America, when someone was bullied by the state, lawyers would volunteer to defend the accused. A common phrase used by Progressive civil and political rights activists back then was “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it.”

It turns out to have been a complete lie. Not only will no one fight to the death to defend speech, the great and the good line up to condemn anyone for speaking out. Where is the ACLU in these cases? Certainly not rushing to defend children against the crime of saying mean things. No, the ACLU is too busy ratting out heretics and blasphemers, who dare question the liberal democratic ideology. In one of life’s great ironies, all of the civil rights groups now work to limit your civil rights.

Notice also how the concept of rights has changed. Thirty years ago, even left-wing political actors accepted the old definition of rights, as limits on the state. Your right to speak out against the government was really a hard limit on the state to police the speech of the citizens. Today, rights are just demands from an increasingly minoritized population for things to which no one can have a right. In this Kentucky case, they demand the community celebrate their mating decisions.

That should be the story here. This family moves to the community and begins making demands on the community. The white mother and her mulatto daughter start harassing the school about the racial complexion of the curriculum. The father demands the teachers change their classrooms to satisfy the demands of his children. This mixed-race family instantly became a cancer on the community, by making an increasingly narrow set of demands in the name of their rights.

This is one of the new realities of liberal democracy. Instead of people fearing the secret police and their many spies, the people fear the civil rights activists and their auxiliary army of novel weirdos. A mixed-race couple of trannies moves into the neighborhood and everyone is gripped with fear. It not only means everyone has to play make-believe with the lunatics, but must live in fear of upsetting them in some way. The agent of terror is the bespoke weirdo and its crazy demands for acceptance.

As an aside, this may explain the popularity of movies and television shows based on Stephen King books. One of his formulas is the nice, quiet small town that is suddenly beset by a demon that exploits the innocence of the locals, often the children. Everything is just right until the monster arrives. Further, the real terror in this formula is that there is no reason behind the demon. It’s just evil for the sake of being evil. That’s what the people in the Kentucky story are experiencing right now.

It is tempting to think that the people will tire of this terrorism by weirdo phenomenon, but the lesson of communism is that people will tolerate pretty much anything in an ideological state. The old rule about people revolting unless they are well fed and entertained turned out to be untrue in the Soviet Empire. The people often lacked the basics and the pleasures of life were highly rationed. Communism was not overthrown by an unhappy people. It just ran out of social capital to burn.

That is the secret sauce of popular government, whether it is some form of communism or some form liberalism. Both rest on the concept of the general will. The ideology of the state and the actions of the state are in the name of the general will. Everything that is done is done in the name of the people, as if fifty percent plus one is a god that must always be pleased. People will revolt against a king or despot. They will revolt against an aristocracy. People will not revolt against themselves.

That really is the paradox of liberal democracy. In the name of the people, the will of the people must be thwarted in the name of minority interests. We saw this with homosexual marriage. The champions swore they were fighting for the people, even when the people kept rejecting these proposals. It is why increasingly narrow minority groups are so popular with the ruling elite. If they can find just one weirdo to champion, they have a license to do as they please.

This fetishization of obscure minorities is leading inevitably to the West being dominated by minorities to the point where there is no majority. America will be non-white in two decades and Europe will be swamped with Africans by mid-century. Not only is there no effort to prevent this, all efforts are made to accelerate it. Paradoxically, the end point of majority rule is minority rule. Mature liberal democracy is a collection of minority groups demanding stuff from the state, like children at a candy store.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Creedal Insult

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One of the side effects of the bizarre creedal nation theology is that what claims to create unanimity ends up creating friction and hostility. The most obvious and predictable way it does this is the debate over the creed itself. What it means to be an American, for example, will change over time under normal circumstances. Attitudes change, circumstances change, the culture evolves, so inevitably what defines the people will change with it. Everything evolves over time.

Not everything evolves at the same rate, so that definition of the unifying creed quickly becomes many versions of the creed. In a liberal democracy, where radicals are encouraged to dream up novel new social fads, this quickly gets out of hand. We now live in a land where the “unifying creed” of the people in Pennsylvania includes making a mentally unstable Jewish man the head of their public health. In a creedal nation, everyone is encouraged to have their own reality.

There may be a bigger problem with the liberal democratic notion that a nation just needs a unifying set of principles. That is, the implementation of that system cheapens it and eventually mocks it. The simplest way to think of it is this. If everyone can easily become an American, then being an America is not all that special. After all, what makes Harvard the most prestigious college on earth, aside from the human sacrifices and satanic rituals, is that it is difficult to gain admittance.

Liberal democracy flips this on its head and claims that something that is easy to attain is somehow special and unique. If Pablo can just float on over in his inner tube and become an American, then what’s the point of being an American? There is none and we see that in current year America. In fact, citizenship is now a burden. The McMichael case in Georgia is an obvious example. Following the law and being a good citizen is for suckers. It’s why people are abandoning their citizenship.

Putting aside the material aspects of the creedal nation theology, there is another aspect that makes it a lethal poison for a human society. People are tribal, having a natural affinity for their kind. Despite the massive agitation efforts to deny this reality, it remains a reality nonetheless. For example, real estate brokers will now be mentioning the local jogger scene, or lack thereof, when showing houses. The reason is we all know the correlation between joggers and quality of life.

No one wants to think their tribe is a bunch of losers. Another aspect of our tribal nature is to think our tribe has some unique quality that is unique to us. Those stereotypes did not spring from nothing. Blacks think they invented basketball, because they dominate the sport at every level. Italians assume they have a superior sense of style. The French think they are the intellectual masters of the West. Every tribe has cultural items they believe to be unique to them.

This is where the creedal nation theology creates conflict. This piece in Counter-Currents on great Jewish violinists makes the point that Jews dominate the list of great violin players. If Jews had invented the violin or invented the music best performed with the instrument, it would be a great cultural achievement of their people. Instead, it is outsiders mastering the cultural achievements of others. It’s no different than a group of genetically engineered Asians dominating basketball.

That is the unintended insult. The musician that masters the instruments and music of another people to the point where he is superior to their best is committing a great insult to those people. It is a demonstration that their cultural achievements are so little that an outsider can master them better than the natives. This does not necessarily have to be intentional. The virtuoso could sincerely love the instrument or music he is mastering, but the result is still the same.

This is most obvious in popular culture. Movie makers inserting Africans, for example, into movies about the middle ages has become a running joke on-line, because it has become so common. The zeal to prove that people don’t matter has the rulers of popular culture feverishly rewriting popular history to include everyone. The result is the past, our past, is no longer our past. Even if the intent is to be “inclusive” of the new Americans, the result is an insult to white people.

Guarding the culture from outsiders is the natural response to efforts at cultural appropriation, something we see on the college campus. If the kids want to have a party on Cinco de Mayo, they better not wear culturally appropriate costumes. Even if the kids make every effort to avoid mockery or snark, it is still forbidden. The guardians of political correctness will have none of that, as to appropriate the symbols and images of another culture is assumed to be an insult.

Jews, of course, are the most ethnocentric people on earth. They have survived as a guest people for thousands of years. One reason for that is they guard their culture, forbidding outsiders to access it. For example, teaching the Torah to non-Jews is forbidden, unless it is part of a conversion, which is not encouraged. In Israel, religious Jews send their kids to separate schools to avoid being mixed in with Arabs, but also to provide their children with training in their culture.

Even in modern America, where Jews operate at the top of society and dominate the popular culture, few non-Jews know much about Jews or Judaism. Part of it is genuine fear of being called a blasphemer, but a big part of it is that Jews are not all that forthcoming about what goes on inside their culture. By guarding large swaths of their culture and not permitting outsiders to imitate it in anyway, Jews have been able to preserve themselves as distinct people.

The creedal nation theology is the exact opposite of what has worked for Jews and other people. Instead of preserving and protecting the culture of the people, it cheapens it and commodifies it. To be an American, for example, now means occupying some space in North America and having a Netflix account and the newest iPhone. The solution in which a people are naturally suspended dissipated and we are left with a collection of strangers agreeing only on our insults.

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A Very Jewish Movie

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The Adam Sandler movie Uncut Gems is maybe the most explicitly Jewish movie since the 2002 movie The Pianist. That is a difficult to define category, as there are loads of small independent films never intended for a wide audience. Movies like Uncut Gems and The Pianist are commercial films intended for a general audience, but also intended to reveal things about Jewish life to that general audience. These movies offer a window into the collective psyche of diaspora Jews.

That is the main layer with Uncut gems. The film tells the story of Howard Ratner, who runs a sleazy jewelry store in New York City. Howard is a degenerate gambler, always dreaming of the big score, as he is always in debt to loan sharks and bookies, due to his gambling. That means he is constantly hustling to come up with cash through his jewelry hustle and other means. Superficially, the movie is about his quest to get and sell an uncut rock full of Ethiopian gems.

The story takes us through Howard’s life and by extension through the inner life of New York City Jews. Howard is a sleazy pervert, the anti-Semite’s caricature of the typical Jewish man. His father in-law, in contrast, is a stable, hardworking guy, who has enjoyed a successful life. His wife is the typical Long island Jewish housewife, which means Howard has a gentile mistress. That is permanent dynamic that seems to define the sex roles among Jews, just as it does Italians.

We follow Howard as he interacts with the world in his bid to get the Ethiopian gemstone sold at auction for what he thinks will be his big score. Meanwhile he tries to hustle basketball star Kevin Garnett, places bets on basketball games, hassles with his flaky mistress and gets beat up by his loan shark, who happens to be his brother-in-law by marriage. Eventually, all of his schemes collapse and his entire life rides on a complicated bet on a basketball game in order to clear his debts.

Interestingly, the loan shark is Armenian, having married into the family. Armenians are known for being as aggressively ethnocentric as Jews, so having an Armenian loan shark, especially one that married into the family, as the main antagonist of Howard’s life offers a glimpse into the Jewish worldview. In a world of ethnic rivalry, the life of the individual will be shaped by those ethnic rivalries. In other words, for members of the Tribe, life is a lifelong struggle between ethnic groups.

Another interesting aspect about the non-Jews in the film is how Howard relates to the blacks in his life. On the one hand, he treats them like furniture. They have no connection to him, other than as opportunities for profit. He tries to hustle the basketball star Kevin Garnett. His primary clientele at his jewelry store is inner city blacks, who wish to look like extras from a hip-hop video. It’s clear throughout the film that the blacks in his life have no real meaning to him as individuals.

Despite this, he has an all too familiar deep affection for black culture that even the blacks notice. In one scene, Keven Garnett ask him why Jews have such a love for basketball, which is one of those jokes that only Jews and people who notice things would appreciate. He also has a thing for hip-hop and its culture. He has a deep fear that his mistress will go off with some local rapper, which becomes the source of a rift between the two of them. He fears being cuckolded.

Another aspect of Jewish life on display in the movie is the cultural and ethnic pressure on Jewish men to succeed. Howard is a bum, but what prevents him from embracing that aspect of his life is the need to be seen as successful within his family and within Jewish society. He is a man torn between his desire to live his life as he would prefer to live it and the ethnic duties that largely define who he is as a man. One theme in the film is his possible divorce from his wife after Passover.

This is something that Jewish novelists like Phillip Roth have tackled. On the one hand, Jewish males are driven to succeed. On the other hand, what defines Jews is their permanent outsider status. Therefore, achieving success and status in the larger society in which they live is not an option, as that’s assimilation. That means the dilemma for the ambitious Jewish man is finding the balance between success in the greater culture, while remaining outside of it.

Of course, in this age, maintaining the outsider identity is impossible for a people who are now the ultimate insiders. It’s why Jews are becoming increasingly schizophrenic in modern America. One face is that of Michelle Goldberg, the shrill anti-white columnist at the New York Times. Another is the patronizing Ben Shapiro, who steadily re-writes the origin story of the West to begin with his family tree. Another is the Jew stripped of all but his superficial identity as a Jew, consumed by modernity.

That is what ultimately makes Howard a sympathetic character. Like the Jewish people, he is not built for modernity and is ultimately destroyed by it. This is proving to be true for Jews in modern America, despite the fact they played a key role in developing the modern American culture. Howard meets his demise at the point of his greatest triumph, when everything he sought is within reach. Fittingly, his demise comes at the hands of the other ethnocentric tribe in the film.

That is the ultimate lesson of the film. Just as Howard is not built to survive in the modern world, the Jewish people are not built for it either. This is a topic within Jewish intellectual circles. A highly ethnocentric people evolved to compete as numerical underdogs need the outsider status to maintain group cohesion. Just as Howard needs some hard limitations on his behavior, Jews need that outsider status to maintain their sense of identity and ultimately their existence.

As far a film goes, and ultimately movies are about entertainment, Uncut Gems is an ugly, difficult to watch story at times. Because everyone in the film is described by their failings, you cannot root for any of them. Unless you’re black or Jewish, you cannot identity with them. At the same time, it is like getting a glimpse into a culture that is systematically hidden from view, despite being in plain sight. Unless you are an anti-Semite, it is an interesting cultural exploration.

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A Racket, A Cult And A Corporation

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In the fullness of time, future historians will write books on their theories about why liberal democracy came to behave so much like Soviet communism. The hallmark of Bolshevism was its intolerance of dissent. It was willing to sacrifice everything in order to prevent individuals or groups from questioning orthodoxy. This is becoming the defining feature of liberal democracy. In the name of individual rights and dignity, western governments are methodically turning into police states.

Take for example this story out of Germany. State media, with a reassuring confidence, has reported that a citizen is under surveillance by the state for holding unapproved ideas and positions. Götz Kubitschek has been labeled “the whisperer of AfD right wing Björn Höcke” so he is officially on a list of people good citizens should avoid. The point of the story and the government action is to anathematize the man in such a way that regular Germans will be afraid to be in his presence.

Notice the language. “The Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified him and his institute as extremists.” If anyone’s is curious, here is the German constitution. It is 74 pages long. Article five reads in part, “Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources.” As is true all over the West, this part of the constitution was destroyed to “save” the rest.

Of course, harassing citizens is not about protecting anything. The Right often makes the mistake conservatives have made for generations in assuming the Left has a practical reason behind their actions. Ideologues do not need a practical motive like money or power. In fact, worldly goods are not motives for ideologues. Rather, they are means to an end. The ideologue seeks power and influence in order to advance his agenda, which often just means crushing his opponents.

That was a feature of communist societies. The people at the top of the party apparatus could count on fanatics and zealots down the ranks to enforce party discipline. It’s why the military had ideological officers in the ranks. this was an innovation discovered by the radicals in the French Revolution. One fanatic willing to report a close friend for unapproved thoughts is worth ten thousand police. Once no one could be sure of even their closest relationships, no one dares speak out.

This is what we see with the West. When the state, in the case of Europe, or Big Tech, in the case of America, declares someone a heretic, it is with the assumption that the auxiliary volunteer army of fanatics will take over the policing. You can be sure that Götz Kubitschek will get the treatment. Germany’s version of Antifa will stalk him, his family and acquaintances. Radical media will use him as an example for endless scare stories about extreme right-wing extremist. AfD will be expected to purge him.

Another feature of the modern liberal democracy and the communist states is in the role of official media. Let’s assume Herr Kubitschek is a potentially bad guy and the state has a legitimate interest in him. Why would they inform the media? They would not do this if he was smuggling women or running a heroin ring. They would do the opposite and not say a word to the media. In the case of ideological offenses, however, the media and the state become partners in policing.

This was a feature of communist societies that has been forgotten. What little is remembered about the Soviet Union, is jammed into the Orwellian narrative of the police state. In reality, the communists figured out that it was cheaper to use soft power than hard power. Sure, they still arrested people and sent them off to camps, but their most effective weapon was the control of official truth. Fear of falling outside of official truth was more than enough to control most people.

As an aside, notice how that whole period is now officially forgotten? Even people offended by the sorts of things happening to Herr Kubitschek will not make a reference to the communist systems? Instead, they may reference you know who, but never the people who perfected the use of terror in an ideological state. The official narrative has slowly removed all references to the Cold War and the role of ideological fanatics from the collective consciousness of the West.

Something that ties the amnesia about communism and the increasing emulation of it by liberal democracy is something Eric Hoffer observed. Ideologies can get along just fine without a Utopian vision, but they must always have an opponent. In the Cold War, liberal democracy could justify its many compromises by pointing to communism. Once communism died, it served no purpose. The new devil is populism and nationalism, so liberal democrats are willing to ape the communist to beat them.

Hoffer also observed, “Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” That was in 1967, so he can be forgiven for not imagining something that was all three of those things. That is what we see in America. Liberal democracy is a racket, a cult and a corporation. The political class operates a racket, the media runs a cult and woke capital systematizes the whole thing.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Loss Of Dignity

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If you step back and think about it, the normal man can probably list a dozen things he cannot say in public that he grew up hearing on television, usually as jokes. Then the jokes were no longer welcome in polite company and soon they were deemed “not funny” by the sorts of people who worry about such things. The same was true of simple observations about the world. Somehow noticing the obvious became impolite, then it became taboo and finally prohibited.

The reverse is true as well. Middle-aged men can probably think of a dozen things that were unimaginable or unheard of, which are now fully normal. Of course, normal is one of those things that is now prohibited. It implies that something can be abnormal or weird and that itself is forbidden. The proliferation of novel identities and activities that demand to be treated with dignity and respect is a function of the old restraints having been eliminated. When everything is possible you get everything.

The strange thing about all of this is there is seemingly no point to it. The proliferation of new taboos was not in response to some harm being done. In most cases, the taboos are about observable reality. The people turning up in the public square with novel identities or activities demanding respect did not exist very long ago. If they did, not one was curious enough to look into it. The public was happy to ignore people into unusual activities, as long as they kept it to themselves.

Of course, none of what we generally call political correctness is intended to be uplifting or inspirational. The commissars of public morality like to pretend it is inspiring, but that’s just a way to entertain themselves. These new identity groups are not demanding the rest of us seek some higher plane of existence or challenge our limitations. In fact, it is always in the opposite directions. It’s a demand to lower standards and give up on our quaint notions of self-respect and human dignity.

In the Demon In Democracy, Polish academic Ryszard Legutko observed that liberal democracy had abandoned the concept of dignity. This is the obligation to behave in a certain way, as determined by your position in society. Dignity was earned by acting in accordance with the high standards of the community. In turn, this behavior was rewarded with greater privilege and responsibility. Failure to live up to one’s duties would result in the loss of dignity, along with the status it conferred.

Instead, modern liberal democracy awards dignity by default. We are supposed to respect all choices and all behaviors as being equal. There are no standards against which to measure human behavior, other than the standard of absolute, unconditional acceptance. As a result, the most inventively degenerate and base activities spring from the culture, almost like a test of the community’s tolerance. Instead of looking up to the heavens for inspiration, liberal democracies look down in the gutter.

Dignity comes from maintaining one’s obligations to his position in the social order, but that requires a fidelity to a social order. It also requires a connection to the rest of the people in the society. In a world of deracinated individuals focused solely on getting as much as they can in order to maximize pleasure, a sense of commitment to the community is not possible. Democracy assumes we are all equal, therefore we have no duty to one another as duty requires a hierarchical relationship.

In the absence of a vertical set of reciprocal relationships, we get this weird lattice work of horizontal relationships, elevating the profane and vulgar, while pulling down the noble and honorable. The public culture is about minimizing and degrading those who participate in the public culture. In turn, the public culture attracts only those who cannot be shamed or embarrassed. The great joy of public culture is to see those who aspire to more get torn down as the crowd roars at their demise.

The puzzle is why this is a feature of liberal democracy. Ryszard Legutko places the blame on Protestantism. Their emphasis on original sin and man’s natural limitations minimized man’s role in the world. This focus on man’s wretchedness was useful in channeling our urge to labor and create into useful activities, thus generating great prosperity, but it left us with a minimalist view of human accomplishment. We are not worthy to aspire to anything more than the base and degraded.

It is certainly true that the restraints of Christianity limited the sorts of behavior that are common today, but he may be putting the cart before the horse. The emergence of Protestantism in northern Europe was as much a result of the people and their nature as anything else. Put more simply, the Protestant work ethic existed before there was such a thing as a Protestant. The desire to work and delay gratification evolved over many generations out of environmental necessity.

Still, culture is an important part of man’s environment and environmental factors shape our evolution. It is not unreasonable to say that the evolution of Protestant ethics magnified and structured naturally occurring instincts among the people. With the collapse of Christianity as a social force in the West, the natural defense to degeneracy and vulgarity has collapsed with it. As a result, great plenty is the fuel for a small cohort of deviants to overrun the culture of liberal democracies.

Even so, there does seem to be something else. Liberal democracy has not produced great art or great architecture. The Greeks and Romans left us great things that still inspire the imagination of the man who happens to gaze upon them. The castles and cathedrals of the medieval period still awe us. The great flourishing of liberal democracy in the 20th century gave us Brutalism and dribbles of pain on canvas. The new century promises us primitives exposing themselves on the internet.

There is something about the liberal democratic order that seeks to strip us of our dignity and self-respect. Look at what happened in the former Eastern Bloc countries after communism. Exposed to the narcotic of liberalism they immediately acquired the same cultural patterns. Fertility collapsed. Religion collapsed. Marriage and family formation collapsed. These suddenly free societies got the Western disease as soon as they were exposed to western liberal democracy.

The reaction we see today is not due to these societies being behind the times, but due to seeing the ugly face of liberal democracy. It is much like the reaction to the proliferation of recreational drugs in the 1970’s. At first, it seemed harmless, but then people realized the horror of unrestrained self-indulgence. That’s what we see in the former Eastern Bloc. Their leaders still retain some of the old sense of things and are trying to save their people from the dungeon of modernity.

That still leaves us with the unanswered question. What is it about liberal democracy that seems to lead to this loss of dignity? It is possible that such a fabulously efficient system for producing wealth is a tool mankind is not yet equipped to handle without killing ourselves. Maybe we are just not built for anything but scarcity. Want gives us purpose and without it, we lose our reason to exist. Either way, without dignity, we cannot defend ourselves and the results are inevitable.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Human Progress

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One of the most remarkable and perhaps most relevant aspects of communism is how it regressed from an idealistic and inspirational world view to nothing more than a deeply flawed engineering project. Communism started out as a set of beliefs about liberating mankind to reach its full potential. It was not about material goods or political power, but human accomplishment. By the time the Soviet empire collapsed at the end of the 20th century, it was about making enough toilet paper and boots.

The early communists, including Marx, looked at work and the pursuit of material goods as a burden on mankind. Capitalism turned men into slaves to their own desires for wealth and property. This crude desire for material goods made them easy to exploit by the capital class. The point of overthrowing the capitalist system and replacing it with communism was to free man from that burden. The resulting material prosperity of communism would allow mankind to reach its full creative potential.

The Soviet empire that emerged from the Second World War was noticeably short on talk about mankind reaching its full potential. The practical necessity of feeding, housing and clothing its people consumed the regime. The great dream of a post-scarcity world of mankind united in brotherhood had given way to figuring out how to produce enough necessities to prevent rebellion. The last half of the 20th century was communism trying to keep pace with capitalism in the production of consumer goods.

In contrast, what we call western liberalism or liberal democracy started from the opposite end. Dating and locating the origin of what we call liberalism is a topic for endless debate, but it is reasonable to say it is an English thing. The rise of parliament in England as the counter to aristocratic rule followed by the Industrial Revolution is as good an origin story as any for liberal democracy. Its purpose was to increase individual liberty so men could pursue their own material interests.

Similarly, the American revolution was about government control of economic activity and tax policy. There was plenty of grandiose language in the Declaration of Independence about the human condition, but the founding generation had no dreams of a post-scarcity world or the universal brotherhood of man. The end game for liberalism was to leave people to live their lives in peace. Liberalism was about freeing men from their duties to grandiose schemes of other men.

The Jacobins, of course, had grand notions about the universal rights of man, but that was all about the individual. Sure, a political system that respects the natural rights of man would be fairer and more equal than monarchy, but that does not necessarily lead to some great advancement in the human condition. A free society of equals would be free to just live mundane lives as farmers and merchants. More important, they have no duty to advance mankind past his present condition.

That’s the funny thing about the last half of the 20th century. The progress of the two great competing ideological systems was in the opposite direction. The idealistic communists gave up their big dreams and focused on the basics of providing material goods for their societies. The practical minded liberals slowly abandoned the simple goals of individual liberty and started to dream of spreading democracy to every corner of the globe. Liberalism emerged as the great dram of mankind.

At the end of the Cold War, it was largely understood that central planning and communism were unworkable as economic policies. Only a fool would compare the material results of communism to capitalism and think the former had any hope of competing with the latter. As Fukuyama explained, the West has reached the end point of its intellectual development. Liberal democracy had triumphed over all competing ideologies and was now the only moral option.

You can probably write a very long book on how liberalism evolved, developed and matured in its struggles from the Magna Carta to the end of the Cold War. Maybe the starting date would be the English Civil War. It first triumphed over aristocracy, then fascism and finally communism. In the end it matured from a simple desire to set men free to pursue their own interests and individual potential into a fully developed dream of setting mankind free from his natural condition.

That would be a great book if it were written in the first years after the Cold War, but the decades since have revealed something else about liberal democracy. That is those grand dreams are nothing more than decorations. Having reached the post-scarcity world dreamed of by the communists, western liberals look around and see that there is nothing to inspire them. There is no moving past the human condition into some next phase of man. There’s just work and consumption.

The last few decades can best be described as a thrashing about by the American ruling class and to a lesser degree the minor ruling classes of Europe, looking for a reason to exist. Having conquered nature and want, defeated all ideological challengers, liberal democracy looks around asking what was the point? If the end of the long cycle of history was simply work and consumption, why did mankind make the journey and struggle to get to this point in its development?

Of course, it must be noted that the high point of communism was citizens lining up at stores only to find the shelves mostly bare. It was order being imposed by neighbors spying on neighbors. The great triumph of liberal democracy is now people lined up outside stores that are increasingly short of product. Like the communists, the liberals now rely in neighbors to spy on neighbors and the fearful to bully the skeptical. There’s no getting around the fact that America is no longer a free society.

Maybe in the end this is the fate of all ideology. The communists started with lofty goals and dreams of transcending the human condition. They descended to the greatly reduced goal of making enough stuff to survive. Liberal democracy starting with the practical goal of individual liberty, got the ideology bug and began to dream of a world beyond the human condition. It too is now collapsing into less lofty goals, like maintaining the basics of civil society and material existence.

Perhaps the great lesson of the long intellectual development known as the Enlightenment will be that the danger to humanity is the ideologue. Genuine human progress is the systematic removal of those who dream of something beyond the human condition. True enlightenment is the embrace of man’s humanity and his innate desire to work, enjoy the fruits of his labor and spend his short existence with friends and family. Human progress is simply the embrace of humanity.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!