Helsinki is roughly the size of Baltimore, in terms of population and it is also a major seaport, but it may as well be another planet. I arrived from London in the afternoon and breezed through passport control. The young woman who checked my passport asked me the normal questions then asked me where I was staying. I could not remember the name of the place, so I said it was the former prison. She laughed and said, “That’s Katajanokka!” I was sent on through and headed down to baggage claim.

The Finns must have the best run airport on earth. I’ve been in a lot of airports and the wait for luggage is a minimum of thirty minutes in most of them. By the time I got to the carousel, my bag was there waiting for me. I collected it and went outside to see a taxi stand right by the door. The trip from the plane to the taxi was maybe ten minutes. Of course, the taxi was a Mercedes Benz, which always makes me laugh. In America, the Mercedes is the symbol of suburban affluence. In Europe, it is the most common taxi.

Of course, you soon understand why Helsinki is a clean, efficient city, as the taxi driver is a white guy, who speaks good English in addition to Finnish. Most everywhere now, the taxi business is run by Muslims from the Middle East or North Africa. In Finland, you just don’t see many non-Finns, other than some Chinese tourists and white Europeans here on business. I asked my taxi driver where I could find a ghetto to visit. He laughed and said there are no ghettos in Helsinki. Everywhere was safe.

After I told him where I was from, he then understood my question better. He had been to the Imperial Capital in the 1980’s and still remembered the squalor. He asked how it was now and I gave him the truth about our multicultural experience. He figured out my politics, because he then told me how important it was for Finns to keep the Muslims and blacks out of the country. He also said their rulers were trying to change Finland by importing diversity, but he was confident the Finns would not lose their country…

The sun was close to setting, so after I checked into the hotel I took a quick stroll around the area where I was staying. Katajanokka prison, which is now a hotel, is actually on an island named Katajanokka. It’s just over a short footbridge from the mainland, but it is still technically an island. There’s a utilitarian vibe here. The Finns must think form follows function, as the building style is not intended to impress anyone. There’s a humbleness about it that can be mistaken for plain, but it quite beautiful.

Katajanokka is a very nice neighborhood, where local big shots live, so its lack of gaudiness is not due to a lack of wealth. It’s just that Finns are never garish. There is a park named after Tove Jansson, the famous creator of the Moomin books. These are a collection of somewhat disturbing children’s books, popular in Finland since the middle of the last century. There is the Uspenski Cathedral, which is an old largest Orthodox cathedral. The waterfront is full of shops, food stands and tourist stuff…

The next day, after my early morning walk, I found a nice little place, in the side of an old building, selling coffee and baked goods. The proprietor was Italian, an older man, who somehow ended up in Finland. In his youth he had a spirit for adventure and enjoyed drug taking, so one thing led to another and he wound up in Finland. He now has a pleasant life playing music, when not selling coffee and biscuits to people in his shop. I get the sense that many of the foreigners living here have a similar story. They just ended up here…

I sought out where the Finnish rulers hold court and asked for an audience with their ruler, but I was told that it was not possible. I presented a letter of introduction, passed on to me by John Derbyshire, from the honorable Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, exulted leader of Turkmenistan. Unknown to me, Sauli Niinistö, the ruler of Finland, is in a quarrel with Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow. After some very tense moments, in which flogging was discussed as an option, I was released and told to report back before my departure…

The women of Finland come in two main types. There are the somewhat cherubic type, with a hint of north Asia to them. They do not have an eye fold, but they have the facial structure of Asians. These are robust women, who get more robust as they hit their middle years. It’s not hard to imagine them hauling firewood or a reindeer carcass into the cabin during the dead of winter. All of the old women in my family have this build. Facially, they really do all look the same, which suggests a narrowness to their family tree.

The other type is at the other end of the morphological scale for females. Unlike the more robust variety, these women usually have blonde hair and they are athletic. Their faces are round, but lack the cherubic quality of the former type. As they age, they maintain the athletic build, but their faces show wrinkles along the jaw line, which is actually quite attractive. It make them look wizened, at least to me. Finnish women of all types seem to view men with good humor, as if we are clowns sent here for their amusement…

You know you are in a different land the first time you use the toilet. I realized this for the first time while in Mexico. The public toilet was a hole in the floor and it was very public, in that there was now stall. In nicer facilities, a man would be in the toilet handing out squares of paper and offering to wash your hands. In a rich country like America, solving the bathroom problem is not something we have faced for a very long time, so we take this stuff for granted. We don’t think about toilets and showers very much. At least I don’t.

Something I’ve noticed in Europe is the lack of water pressure in the shower. I’m in a nice place in Helsinki and the water pressure is not much above a trickle, relative to what I’m used to in America. My shower at home can remove paint if you get aggressive with the settings. I’ve never experienced anything like that in Europe. It’s always the opposite, which is probably due to a need to conserve. America has plenty of water and it is cheap, relative to most things, so we use as much as we like. That’s not true in Europe.

That’s something we Americans don’t appreciate. In North America, we have plenty of every natural resource. We could be energy independent if we simply stopped selling oil and gas to foreigners. We have plenty of water, plenty of places to throw away trash and so on. Buy gas for the car in Europe and you quickly appreciate why we love our trucks and SUV’s. Gasoline here is a little under $6 per gallon. The rental car I will be driving to Turku this week is the size of one of the tires on my truck….

Waste and water are two things that have popped into my head several times during my short time in Helsinki. Everywhere here offers water, even the coffee shop. I bought a couple of beers at the front desk and they offered me a glass of water. On the other hand, the Finns seem obsessed with wasting anything, especially water. In a few places, I’ve seen signs that describe how much was wasted the previous day. I’m a thrifty guy, so this appeals to me for obvious reasons, but it is a strange thing nonetheless…

The Finns also obsess about energy usage. In the hotel, you have to insert your key card into a slot near the door to turn on the electric. Even the sockets power off when you remove the card. The point is to prevent guests from leaving the lights on when they leave. A local told me the Finns are very energy conscious. As someone who hates it when people leave lights on in an empty room, I’m thinking this will be a good policy to institute at my office. Maybe I’ll install thermal sensors in every room…

Helsinki is one of the least diverse places you can visit, so those who enjoy vibrancy, as much as I do, will be disappointed to find zero vibrancy here. I mean zero. I walked about for most of the day and saw zero familiar faces. The closest thing to vibrant, other than the Chinese tourists, were some Indonesian businessmen. That said, you do manage to get used to the sameness. I know, it seems impossible, as diversity is our strength, but being in a place where everyone looks sort of like you is relaxing after a while…

There is a Chabad outpost in Helsinki. I wandered past it on my walk. For those unfamiliar, Chabad is a Jewish cult that started in Russia, moved to Poland and then moved to America before the war. They have “centers” in every country. President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is in the cult. One thing they believe is that this is a messianic era and that Jews must prepare for the end times. That means their movement must bring Jews back into the faith, similar to some Evangelical Christian movements.

One big difference is they think Jews should revolt against secular governments. They are a little vague about this, but the main point is that Jews should have no loyalty to any secular government. Funny how no one thinks this is a problem. If some white guys get together to talk about white identity politics, the full force of the custodial state swings into action. A worldwide cult preaching the end times, with recruiting centers in every capital of the West, including a man inside the White House, is no big deal…

Finland is a country of roughly five million people. According the most recent crime reports I can find on-line, they had 63 homicides in 2017. Half of those involved men of marginalized groups where heavy drinking was involved. That’s a nice way of saying losers who got drunk and took their disagreement to the next level. Baltimore, a city with ten percent of the population of Finland, had 342 murders in 2017. Roughly 95% of those murders were committed by marginalized men, by which we mean blacks…

Before going to bed, I turned on the television. I speak no Finnish, so the local shows are a mystery of white people speaking what sounds like Klingon. The local shows have zero non-whites on them. Even in Copenhagen, I saw they decorated their shows with some diversity. The Finns have not done this, as far as I can tell. I watched something that looked like a game show. The only thing diverse about it is one guy had neck tattoos and ear gauges. Otherwise, Finnish TV is what our ruling classes hate the most.

The exceptions are the American and British channels. The BBC is a carnival of cloud people diversity. Imagine CNN with British accents and British condescension. That’s the Beeb. The American station is a Fox affiliate, playing the Simpsons and Family Guy. They also have National Geographic for some reason. The commercials on these channels are full of vibrancy and diversity. I saw an ad for razors featuring a black guy. There was an ad for something featuring race mixers. We are ruled by monsters…

The first leg of my journey was a stop in London. When booking the trip, the cheapest flight took me through Heathrow, with a half day layover. I hate having to run to make connections, as that often ends in me missing my connection, so I don’t mind a few hour gap between flights. Having almost a full day between flights was not ideal, but it beat the alternatives when I was booking the flight. My plan was to leave the airport and do a quick tour of London, but that plan got scuttled by British security.

When leaving the airport’s secure area, I was pulled aside for the rubber glove treatment by whatever they call their security forces. I was taken to a room and asked the usual questions. Then they asked to examine my phone, which got them upset, as there is nothing on it other than some classical music I loaded for the trip. I keep nothing on my phone as a rule. This one is brand new, so the browser does not even have some history on it. That lack of a information seemed to upset them.

That led them to ask to look at my laptop. I use a travel laptop, so if something happens, I’m not missing important parts of my life. This one I just setup with Linux and a new solid state drive. This only increased their anxiety, so we spent an hour or so playing Petrovich and Raskolnikov. My Russian visa did not help matters. I’ve gone through this a couple of times in American airports, but this seemed different. Maybe I’m imagining things, but I got the strong sense of being on a list. Maybe it was just the culture gap.

You see, that’s the other thing. The British Starsky and Hutch were Apu and Mustafa, two brown guys from over the rainbow. Their English was fine, but it had the hint of the exotic, suggesting they grew up speaking something other than English at home. They also had the narrowness that is typical of the South Asian. There’s always a barrier that exists between the Occidental and the Oriental, despite the degree of shared experience. There is an inscrutableness there that always leaves a degree of uncertainty between us…

After getting sprung from gaol, I was free to explore the giant shopping mall that is the Heathrow airport. The best I could tell, all of the employees were either brown people from over the horizon or Eastern Europeans. I got something to eat and all of the wait staff was not British. Given the international flavor of the passengers, you would be hard pressed to know you were in the heart of Britain. They don’t even have televisions playing the BBC or local sporting events. Heathrow is a foreign country disguised as an airport…

I’ve been in a great many airports in my life and I have a weird fascination for them. Most airports serving big cities are really just complex systems that have evolved over many years to solve evolving problems of air travel. An airport is a solution for a problem of modern life. As a result, you can learn a lot about the evolution of human organization by observing what happens at the big airports. Their design is similar everywhere, but everywhere is not the same, so the airport says something about the local culture.

If you are going to make a list of the worst airports on earth, it’s hard to imagine how Heathrow would not make the cut. It is a big hub for international travel, so it is a lot like the bar in Star Wars. They have turned the thing into a giant shopping with an airport attached to it. To do that, it meant connections require train rides and shuttle buses to get to your connection. There’s no way to make a connection there without allowing a few hours in between. Otherwise, you watch your flight take off from the shuttle bus…

On the fight from Lagos to London, a couple of Africans were across the aisle, one row up, from where I was sitting. Both were dressed up in what Hollywood tells us is traditional African dress for African royalty. Their accents suggested Ghana to me. At some point, the male got very agitated at the person in front of him, who had reclined her chair. He started violently shaking her chair-back and hollering something. Two stewards came over and gave him a lecture about his behavior and airplane etiquette.

Watching the two of them struggle to understand how to be passengers on an airplane, I realized what it would be like to bring Stone Age people into this age. The two of them were just too dumb to navigate plane transport. They were frustrated by the food service process. They struggled to understand simple directions. When the plane landed, they got up and started walking down the aisle, while the plane was still taxiing to the gate. They are primitives incapable of existing in a modern society, without constant supervision…

Walking around Heathrow, it is easy to see why our rulers love multiculturalism. They look at the diversity you see at a big intentional airport and they think of it as the Casablanca of this age. It makes them feel worldly and sophisticated. That brown guy in their department with the perfect continental English is not just a colleague. He is a symbol of what makes them special. They are not provincials. They are worldly cosmopolitans. They never see the other side of it. They just see the good part of the transaction.

Frankly, I don’t blame them. I could not help but be a bit impressed with myself, as I mingled with my fellow globetrotters. If I spent my days looking out at a polyglot, multiracial sea of people getting on well with one another, I might start thinking we have transcended something more than the Malthusian limit. Mankind is about to cross over into being a single race, a global race. It’s an illusion, but one that is reinforced every day, so for them it is reality. The trouble is, their reality is not our reality or even reality…

I have been traveling this week to the lands where the great white normie is most common, which means the Midwest and Southwest. If you do not travel or your travel is limited to the coasts, it is easy to forget that America is a big country with a diverse culture. As I am fond of saying, it is a mansion with many rooms. Even though we have a lot in common, there are a lot of differences between the regions. Put another way, we already had all the diversity we needed. There was no reason to import more of it.

Unlike the coasts, the Midwest and southwest is where you can still find lots of heritage America and lots of heritage Americans. In the upper Midwest, there is an early 1960’s vibe to things that you do not get on the coast. I am speaking culturally, not technologically or materially. They have all the same stuff everyone else has. The Southwest has the old Mex-American – Western culture, but layered over it is the Midwest culture that reflects the people who moved there by the millions the last few decades.

The result for me this week was like stepping back in time. That is not to say these people are throwbacks. It is just that the echoes of old America can still be heard when socializing and even doing business. They still trade business cards at conferences and enjoy wearing name tags. They will walk right up to you and start using your name, having read it off your name tag. There is a genuineness about the people of the Midwest you rarely see on the coasts these days. It is all very wholesome and normal…

I did a little drinking with a guy from Minnesota, who spent a considerable amount of time telling me about the softball team he sponsors. His daughter used to play on the team, but he continued to sponsor the team after she moved on. He sounded like a character from the movie Fargo, so it added to the old-world charm. I could not help but wonder why anyone thought this sort of community spirit needed to be replaced with the crude transactionalism of cosmopolitan globalism, but then I remembered who was behind it…

I was amused in the airport over the weekend by the people watching the Kavanaugh vote on the big television screens. The airport is a good reminder that very few people watch CNN and that most people ignore politics. The big screen had a few young single women watching the vote, one was in tears. A smaller screen had the Texas – Oklahoma football game on and it was surrounded by people cheering the game. It is a nice reminder that to most people, these events are not all that important or emotional…

The funny thing that I learned is that the rank-and-file liberal male really does think Kavanaugh is a serial rapist. I ran into a group of guys from Northern California who described themselves as liberal Republicans. They really wanted me to know they were sick to their stomach about what was happening in Washington, especially with what Trump is doing to the Republicans party. They really seemed to be convinced that Kavanaugh spends his nights stalking and raping middle-aged white women

It is an odd form of virtue signaling, because it has no audience. I asked one of them why he bothers being in a party that opposes everything he supports, when he could join the other party. California is a one-party state now, for the most part. It is an obvious question that they apparently did not consider, but they did not like me asking it. I suspect this type has been doing the concern troll act for so long it is as much a part of who they are as breathing and walking upright. They no longer realize it is a pose…

At dinner one night I was seated next to a young guy, and he revealed that he had an interest in the human sciences. We talked a bit, and he was floored to hear that I did not think environment has much to do with how you turn out. I was surprised at first, given that he is bright and has an interest in the subject, but then I remembered that he is of a generation that has been immersed in the blank slate theology. I did my best to red pill him on some things, but the presence of heresy vexed him greatly. I felt like Lucifer…

For a long time, I resisted going to things like AmRen or Mencken because I imagined them to be academic conferences full of old racists. It was not the latter that worried me, but the former. I do not like conferences. There is something old fashioned and dated about how they are organized. I have been in the workplace for three decades now and the business conference has not changed much, in terms of organization. The same is true of the academic conference. It is still 1950’s America with these things.

That said, there is no replacing in-person interaction. You inevitably learn things about people that makes it possible to see them in three dimensions. The internet and telephone do not allow for that. One event I attended seemed to get that aspect and built the thing around the socializing, rather than building the social elements around the event. It was quite effective as it not only felt more modern but allowed to people to customize the event to their tastes. The result was a much more relaxed and enjoyable experience.

What occurred to me though is the old-style business or academic conference was built on the assumption that you had a social life outside of your professional life. Men had families. Women had kids. People gained their social happiness outside of their work life, so at a conference, it needed to be all business. Today, people work longer, travel more and have disorderly personal lives. Work events are often the times when they get to socialize and relax. Old world America would not recognize us now…

Phoenix Arizona is the least authentic place on earth, I think. In fact, most of the Southwest, including California, feels like the QVC of cultures. Everything is new and everything is clean, relative to the east coast. That said, there is something to say for everything being new and in good working g order. Streets without craters is something we do not have here in Lagos. You cannot beat the weather, which is why so many Boomers moved there, but I like four seasons, so I will stay on the coast I think…

I talked to a guy about California. I mentioned that half the state does not speak English, and he responded by claiming the economy depends on Mexican immigrants. I did not challenge him on it, as there would have been no point. I mention it as a reminder that lots of white people still believe the open borders mythology, because they still think the point of life is increasing the GDP. They will literally sacrifice themselves and their posterity to the economy god. A lifetime of worship is hard to overcome…

I was drinking with some guys who were very nice and very Midwestern. I noticed that they went to great pains to correct me when I said “black” instead of “African American”, which I found rather annoying. No black people use that ridiculous phrase, unless they are around whites. Eventually they stopped and after a few drinks one asked me why I used the term black. He asked in a hushed voice like he was asking me for drugs. I told him that black people prefer black, so I use black. He was quite shocked to hear it.

I have run into this a lot, and it is a good reminder that most white and especially liberal white people, have no clue about how black people live and think. Blacks have become objects of worship or objects of fear. Even in the South, this cultural distance is starting to creep in as they are whipped into conformity by the dominant culture. The people who talk the most about race relations, know the least about it and they have the least humanity toward black people. In the future, old racists will be the last friend of the black man…

I left the hotel in the morning for a walk and maybe some coffee. On the way out I spotted the taxi driver from the previous episode, and he spotted me. After some small talk, he agreed to take me to see the Grand Mosque of Copenhagen. The actual name of the place is the Hamad Bin Khalifa Civilization Center, but I doubt anyone calls it that. My new Afghan friend was thrilled that I was interested in seeing the mosque. Muslims really do think they will conquer the world, so any little sign of advance is exciting to them.

The mosque is in Outer Nørrebro, which is what Americans would call a suburb, but it is more densely populated. European cities tend to put their undesirable populations in apartment blocks outside the city center. In America we have tended in the other direction, building urban reservations for blacks. My guess is Outer Nørrebro used to be a working-class Danish area, so the rulers dumped the Muslims there. That seems to be the popular thing for rulers everywhere. They dump their problems in the poor areas.

I have been through the Muslim areas of Detroit so Outer Nørrebro had a similar vibe, more white faces than I expected, but the same feel. You get the sense that there are many more eyes on you than there are people on the street. The mosque itself is not much to look at, to be fair. Maybe they should not have used the word “grand” this time. Perhaps in a generation, when they can build something like the Islamic Center of America, they can then use the word “grand” to describe it. Right now, the mosque is quite modest…

After what proved to be a boring adventure into a notorious Muslim stronghold, I took to the streets for a walk. I was hungry so I found a place selling pizza and burgers. I had to laugh. The menu looked like every pizza shop menu you see in America. The proprietor spoke only Danish and Arabic, so ordering was more of an adventure that my trip to the mosque, but in the end, I had what looked like pizza. It looked like the stuff I recall as a kid getting at the summer fair. It had that weird orange oil slick on it.

Copenhagen is considered one of the most livable cities in the world and it does not take long to see why this is the case. For starters, it is extremely white. It is also very middle class. It is the ideal that American Progressives imagine for their enclaves, even though they never put it that way. A city full of smart, middle-class white people, with just the smallest dash of diversity, is a great place to live. It’s certainly why Copenhagen is always high on the list of the happiest places on earth, along with other white cities.

Walking around the city, the peacefulness of the place is striking. In ghettos, of course, the noise and the throbbing tension of vibrancy makes it impossible to relax. But even in tourist areas of nice America cities like Boston and New York, there is an energy to the place. Copenhagen is like a dark version of San Diego. It is strangely quiet for a city, other than those damned bicycle bells. The city is ruled by cyclists, which is fine, but the ringing of bicycle bells does start to grate on your nerves after a while…

I decided to make the walk over to Christiania Freetown, which is a bohemian village of sorts, founded by drug addicts and bums in the 1970’s. They squatted on government property that had been a military base. Over time it became a sort of Hamsterdam for the Danish drug culture. For reasons I cannot quite fathom, the Danes seem a bit scandalized by the place. I walked over the bridge and followed the line of people. It is a beautiful walk, and the surrounding area is very quaint. I recommend the walk along the canal.

Freetown is pretty much a dud. One of the things that has always been true about weed culture is its falseness. They have spent decades trying to conjure a culture around smoking weed. It is all fake and stupid, ripped off from various bohemian cultures, by people all but yelling, “Look at me! I smoke weed as a lifestyle choice!” How barren is the soul when the point of life is getting high, eating salty snacks, and watching cartoons all day? Freetown is a Potemkin village for Potemkin bohemians….

Walking around the city, I could not help but notice that the Danes apparently cannot regulate their body temperature. It was in the mid-60’s today with a gentle breeze. I was in jeans and a long sleeve t-shirt. The locals were in winter coats and scarves. I saw a girl wearing gloves. I suspect they simply like their ‘hygge’- mode more than they let on. The first signs of fall mean the party will be moving indoors. It is the reverse of what we see in the early spring, when everyone is quick to tear off their clothes as soon as it hits 50…

I noticed a curious thing while hiking around the city. I wanted to buy some things to bring home and maybe a cap or sweatshirt as a reminder of the trip. Nowhere did I see the sorts of shops you tend to see in tourist areas. This is a difference between Europeans and Americans. We go on vacation so we can feed our faces and buy stuff to take back to our overstuffed houses. Europeans go on vacation to see things and enjoy themselves with friends in strange places. For them it is about the living, rather than the acquiring.

This is something I did not appreciate well into adulthood. Having fun stories to tell about your adventures is the best part of travel. It is the best part of living. I lived an unusual young life, so I took it for granted, perhaps, but it was only into my thirties when I figured out that life is for living, not ticking boxes. I guess that is why I find the minimalist style of Scandinavia, so appealing. There is an uncluttered quality to life here that makes it easier, at least for me, to enjoy the experience. Bring on the Law of Jante…

Having been somewhat disappointed by the lack of vibrancy in Copenhagen, I took a trip to the official mall, figuring I would get a look at the dark underbelly of Denmark. For some reason, shopping malls are the canary in the coal mine. As soon as diversity appears in a community, the nearest mall becomes a no-go zone. It is not just an issue of imported diversity, as in the over the horizon type. If an apartment complex goes Section 8, within a year the local mall is thumping with ghetto tunes and young vibrants.

From the outside, the mall looks a lot like every US mall. Inside, it looks like the closet of a goth girl exploded and they built a mall around it. It is a series of clothing stores selling black pants, black shirts, and black coats. The radical store sells gray. The sports shops sell the same official team crap you see in America. I looked everywhere but I was unable to find caps, shorts of jerseys for the local teams. It was all American sports teams and American sports apparel brands. That and hip-hop music. Every store, hip-hop music.

That is the thing. Inside the mall is wigger culture from top to bottom. Every store is playing some sort of American black music. I walked the entire mall, all floors, and as I toured the place, I was increasingly aware of my American identity. I kept thinking that the locals would figure out that I was American and then decide to string me up for my country’s rulers imposing the poz on them. This is one of those things that only an American can truly appreciate. The reddest red pill is seeing Danes listening to rap music at the mall…

Finally, the Danes seem to have developed an obsession for the cheeseburger. It seems like every restaurant has their version of the perfect burger. I take a back seat to no man in my appreciation of the cheeseburger. I had some fantastic examples in Copenhagen. I also enjoyed some great fries. They put a vinegar sauce on their fries, and they serve them with mayonnaise. These people clearly live in the favor of Odin. Even putting aside, the other wonderfulness of the city, the burgers and fries will bring me back soon…

I have always thought you can tell a lot about a people by their airport. I have been in a lot of airports and while they all of them follow a similar design, form follows function, no two are the same. For example, the Reykjavik airport reflects the utilitarian sensibilities of the people, but it also has the funky charm of a people who spend a lot of time in the winter darkness. That is what probably explains the weirdness of Iceland. They are way out there where the winter nights are long, and the people have lots of time kill. The results follow.

Copenhagen airport is the most trusting place on earth, I think. I saw little in the way of security and the staff is extremely nice. For example, I did not have to go through customs despite coming through Iceland, which never checked my passport either. I did get checked at BWI before getting on the plane, but the basics of security say you first eliminate single points of failure. It appears the Danes trust their brothers in Iceland who in turn still trust the world is a sane place. There is something appealing about it…

My first day in Copenhagen was uneventful. I do not speak Denmarkian, as our former president would say, but I sense the language is easier to acquire than Icelandic, which is close to impossible, unless you have some foundation in Old English or Norwegian. It does not matter as English seems as common as the native tongue. In fact, the buses have advertisements in English on the sides of them. Even commercial companies use English on their business signage. English is the lingua franca now.

At the airport, I bumped into an old acquaintance. Another reminder that it is not a small world, it is a claustrophobic one. A half dozen years ago we worked a job together. At the time, I was working with a client, and I noticed something unusual about their exchange accounts. By unusual I mean they did not add up. It turned out that the CFO was running a scam on the owners using the foreign exchange accounts. It was the old game of stealing a penny from a million different places a thousand times a year on a regular basis.

It was enough money involved that they called in guy who did corporate security. He had worked for a government for a dozen years and figured out that companies would pay much better for the sort of things he enjoyed doing. With corporate fraud, the companies often prefer to settle things privately, rather than bring in the government. This guy’s service was to put together the information so the other party in the situation was willing to make a deal. That meant he spent his days spying on the servants of rich people.

We hit it off while working together, mostly due to our shared realism about the modern age. It has been a year since we spoke, so it was good to see a familiar face and to have a drinking companion. There really is nothing better, in my opinion, than drinking beer and talking shop. It is like a poetry slam for people with a purpose in this world. My advice to those thinking they can steal from their corporate masters is to stay off social media and never discuss your dealings in public places. The walls have ears…

When you live in Lagos, you get used to the urban landscape. No matter how hard you try to keep your mind right, your mind becomes habituated to the day to day. For example, I am jotting this down at midnight and it is stone silent here in Copenhagen. In Lagos, it is never quiet. On a Friday night the sound of sirens is the lullaby of the just. When I was in Newark over the summer, the people I was with struggled with the cacophony of the ghetto. They were all suburbanites, so they were not used to vibrancy of the ghetto.

That does not mean Copenhagen is not without its vibrancy. Most of their vibrant are North Africans, with some blacks. I had a great cheeseburger from a place called Bash that was run by Moroccans. The cook was Danish, so maybe it does not count, but the staff was all Moroccan. One of the bartenders we experienced was from Bangladesh. He was glib in both English and Danish and said he had married a Danish woman, which is why he lived in Denmark. Everywhere, the door to vibrancy is opened by women…

Tomorrow, I meet the secret handshake society. I have no idea what to expect. Frankly, I doubt I will meet any of them. It is a mysterious lot. Of course, this is a necessity of nationalists everywhere. The hotel where I am staying is hosting a Muslim wedding tomorrow, but people who think Denmark should be a country for Danes has to meet under a bridge in the middle of nowhere, lest they be accused of being un-Danish. I do not speak the language, but I am sure the rulers here have a phrase for “it’s not who we are.”

I spent many hears in Boston and I come back regularly. Even so, I am always surprised to see some unexpected change. Even in a sclerotic culture like New England, life does not stand still. New buildings are built to replace old ones. Roads get redesigned. The general look and feel of the place changes over time. To paraphrase Heraclitus, you never visit the same city twice. Perhaps it is just a function of age, but when I travel now, I am much more aware of what has changed, rather than what is familiar.

The biggest thing that has changed since my last trip here is me. There used to be a time when Boston was famous for the worst drivers in America. Tourists would bring back their rental cars and take cabs, because after a short dose of Boston drivers, they were too afraid to be on the road here. Now, Boston drivers are nothing special. Having spent the last decade driving the Imperial Capital, my standards have adjusted. Nowhere has traffic like Washington. Los Angeles is a motoring paradise by comparison….

At the airport in Lagos, I saw what I thought was the ugliest women I had seen to this point in my life. I mean so hideous my instinct was to look away. Then as it approached where I was sitting, I realized it was a tranny. Everyone else had the same reaction. Of course, the tranny was on my plane, but luckily, I boarded in the early group so it was sent to the back of the plane. But as luck would have it, the tranny was on the same shuttle to the rental car facility. The looks from the counter agents were priceless.

Driving out of Logan, I could not help but think about what Theodore Dalrymple said about communist societies. Perhaps these efforts to force the rest of us to accept cross-dressing loonies as normal is a push to turn us into emasculated liars. Maybe that’s part of it, but my sense watching the tranny parade around the airport is that this is just wanton decadence. You see this on campus with the vulgar displays of every conceivable sexual prediction. I think we are ruled by a class of Caligula’s now, for now…

I had an interesting conversation with friends at dinner on Thursday night. One friend I would describe as between CivNat and Dissident Right. A year ago, he was listening to Ben Shapiro, thinking he was radical. Today, he listens to me. It is a trip the ferryman has seen many times. His sister, the other person at dinner, is a lifelong feminist Progressive, but having doubts as she reaches her middle years. Over dinner, we talked about race, sex, ethnicity, quirks of evolutionary biology. All the stuff popular on the Dissident Right.

I have gotten better at talking about these things with normies and reality-curious Progressives. I have a library of pithy stories and examples to make it easy for them to accept biological reality on their terms. In the case of reality-curious Progressives, I frame things in moral terms. It does not always work, but it keeps them from shrieking “Witch! Witch!” and notifying the authorities. Her brother thinks I red-pilled her, but we will see. It is a long road from there to the water’s edge. Still, it is another green shoot…

Boston did not fare the previous Progressive Awakening very well. The cultural upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s broke the working class structure of most American cities and Boston was not an exception. As a result, the city was in decline into the 80’s, but then it righted itself in the late 80’s and 90’s. Like New York, rich people started demanding better policing and better schools. The city started knocking down slums and opening up the housing market to developers. By the late-90’s, Boston was in a renaissance.

When the ululating started again in the late Clinton years, the city was not destroyed by Progressive wreckers seeking to make a point, Instead, it was filled with neo-liberal globalists, investing in the city. The colleges exploded with money, as college kids poured in toting government loans and financial aid packages. Boston became a technology hub, with great tech firms ringing the city and biotech startups growing like warts on the college campuses. Eastern Mass as a whole is nothing like it was at its nadir…

Locals here are gearing up for another Super Bowl. I moved here the year the Patriots made their first big game, where they were destroyed by the Bears. I was here when they won their first one back in 2002. That would have been the 2001 season. The difference in atmosphere between now and then is stark. The Patriots have been great for close to two decades now. Winning is not as fun for the fans. There is also the melancholy of knowing that the great run is nearing an end. Both Belichick and Brady are close to done…

Something I forget about until I get here is just how crappy the service is in Boston. In Lagos, the retail shops are run by Koreans and South Asians, so they are super polite to honkies. The businesses staffed with blacks are a riot of inefficiency, but they are polite about it. Here, lots of white people work retail and they act like they are doing you a favor by waiting on you. At the Dunkin Donuts the other morning, the pram-face who served me coffee had a look on her face like she was thinking about sticking a shiv in my ribs…

There were three reasons I decided to attend Mencken. One was just curiosity. I have been a reader of Paul Gottfried since I was a kid, so I was curious about the sort of people who follow his work. I also wanted to meet Derb again. I have been a big fan of his for decades now. I also wanted to hear his views on the alt-right. He was part of a panel devoted to that topic on Saturday. Of course, the normal social stuff was a motivation, as well. You always end up meeting fellow travelers at these sorts of things.

The session on the alt-right is what I was most interested in seeing. John Derbyshire is one of the few in the older generation who seem to get that the alt-right is not a club or even a defined movement. At this point, it is mostly a collection of aspirations, observations and critiques. The second speaker was Keith Preston, who was unknown to me. I was interested in what Professor Gottfried had to say about the alt-right. He has spent his life in right-wing politics and philosophy so his opinion is important.

John was first up and he used The Dork Tard’s 16-points blog post as the framework for his talk. He made the point that Dork is by no means the leader of the alt-right or the voice of it, but a representative sample that is useful for analyzing the movement. His comments about item number eight were laugh aloud funny, to the empirically minded. What John was doing was introducing the general ideas of the alt-right to a crowd that is not spending their evenings in the meme war. He did a good job presenting the broad strokes.

The next guy up was Keith Preston and I think it is fair to say he is not a fan of the alt-right, but he is not dismissing it either. He took some shots at some of the crazier elements flying the flag, but he gave a good long overview of all the different groups that get lumped into the category alt-right. Preston reminds me of Fred Reed, before Fred went crazy. There is an almost forgotten tradition of Southern populist skepticism that works very well when critiquing political ideologies. As a result, his review of the alt-right was well done.

The final speaker was Professor Gottfried. His talk was interesting for a number of reasons. One is he does not like Richard Spencer very much. He thinks Spencer is just playing make believe and is a bundle of unforced errors. He also said Spencer hates working class people. This is not the first time I have heard someone say some version of this. Gottfried did not say it, but the accusation is that Spencer is a dilettante. Having been around enough trust fund guys, I get why people think that, but I do not share that opinion.

Gottfried’s main theme about the alt-right is that they are not well run and not good at presenting themselves on mainstream media outlets. He used, as an example, someone who either writes for Spencer now or used to write for him. Gottfried said the guy was a racist and therefore an embarrassment. He got quite worked up over this point and said you cannot have a political movement without moral standards. Purging racists should be the absolute minimum standard for any political movement.

Gottfried is trying to replay the purges that landed him and the rest of the paleocons outside the institutions. He wants a do over. That is something you hear from the older crowd a lot and I understand it. There is a lot of bitterness as to how things played out in conservative politics over the last half century. I do not blame a guy like Gottfried for looking at a guy like Jonah Goldberg with contempt. Gottfried wrote the book on fascism, but Goldberg got rich off the crackpot idea that Progressives are the real Nazis.

The truth of the matter though, is mainstream conservatism failed to conserve anything, other than the some well paid positions in Progressive media. The reason is they lost the culture war. In the 1960’s, when the Progressives decided to finish what they started in the 1860’s, the Official Right buckled. Instead of fighting to the last man, they agreed to the new moral paradigm, with regards to human relations, that the Left wanted to impose on the rest of the country. When racism became a sin, conservatism became one two.

That is what the paleos do not get. There is no stopping the white replacement project and the systematic erasure of our culture, until the Progressive moral framework is brought crashing down. I am no spring chicken, but I fully endorse the youthful antics employed by the alt-right. Putting up posters like Identity Europa does on college campuses, helps build a counterculture and draw in young people. The ad hoc guerrilla marketing campaign of placing “It’s OK To Be White” signs is lethal to the people in charge.

Sure, some of it backfires. Despite what anyone says, Charlottesville was a clusterfuck for all involved. In this sort of movement though, you have to take risks and accept some losses. Let us also not forget that Charlottesville is why the Hispanic KKK ran that hilariously stupid ad in the Virginia governor’s race. It is not always easy to know if an action worked. Going off the hot takes of Sean Hannity is a good way to keep losing, like the generation of paleos now carping about the alt-right.

One of the crazier things Gottfried said, is that the alt-right is creating a war between whites, when it is claiming to defend whites. He then went onto say that the reason things are such a mess in America is that Christians did it to themselves. I am a heretic on the JQ issue, but man, that was hard to take. Anyone vaguely familiar with the arguments of the alt-right would know exactly what the response would be to that. I will just say it is an example of the vast cultural divide between the Old Right and the alt-right upstarts.

I have a lot of respect for guys like Paul Gottfried, so this should not be read as a condemnation of him or the paleocons. I think in the fullness of time, they will be remembered fondly for having kept the fires burning, despite having been un-personed by the Buckleyites and neocons. The alt-right owes everything to these old guys, even though many of them made the trip from libertarianism. Richard Spencer got his start because of guys like Gottfried and Taki Theodoropoulos,

The difference is the new guys categorically reject the current moral order. If that upsets the Fox New types, so be it. Politics is a pointless enterprise, if rooting for your own team is expressly forbidden. Taking over institutions does nothing, if the price is embracing the morality of the Left. The Old Right always defined itself as defending the existing culture and institutions. That made sense when those things were worth defending. Today, those things are a cancer on our people. They must be replaced or we will be replaced.

I got to the hotel hosting the Mencken event a little early, so I went to the bar to have a beer and kill some time. This was my first Mencken event and I was having second thoughts about the whole thing. I figured it would be an older crowd, which is fine, but I suspected it would a very libertarian crowd too. I do not have a lot of patience for libertarians, under the best of circumstances. It had been a busy week for me so I was especially cranky and I feared I would be something less than my charming self.

As I had my second beer, I was thinking about how best to say, “the non-aggression principle is for pussies.” I noticed a middle-aged woman at the other end of the bar. She had been at a table, tapping away on her tablet. She relocated to the bar and was trying to get my attention. She was sporting a Mao cap, which is popular with cat ladies, so I ignored her, had another beer and played with my phone. Maybe if she had been better looking or I had a few more drinks in me, I would have done her the favor.

The reception was a little like God’s waiting room, assuming the Jews really are the chosen people. The room was old and very Jewish. There was a youngish guy over in the corner, who looked relieved to see me walk in, as that meant there were two people in the room paying FICA taxes. We chatted for a wile and I learned he is a devout libertarian and came to the Mencken event primarily to see Tom Woods. He seemed earnest, so I resisted the temptation to tell him about my plan to send libertarians to work camps.

The formal reception was a sit-down affair with a dinner and drinks. I was relieved to meet some younger people, who share my politics. They were mostly millennials, but one guy was gen X. We were the kiddie table. Keith Preston was at our table and he is an interesting guy. I do not share his politics, but he is not one of those doctrinaire ideologues, who thinks he has figured it all out and now has to spread the gospel. He is genuinely curious about what is going on in the dissident right. He is a good dinner companion.

That is the value of these events. Going back and forth with strangers using fake names on-line has its value, but meeting and talking in real life has value too. I only had some vague notion about Preston, based entirely on his site. Chatting over dinner and then hearing him speak, I now have a new appreciation for what he is doing. At the same time, I saw him nodding more than a few times as I was making my case for the new counterculture. If not for sitting at the same table, we would remain strangers to one another.

Another big benefit to these things is that you find out that there are more of us out there than is reported. Two of the guys at the kiddie table are college professors. Another is an attorney at a big firm. I know from the comments here, and the e-mails I receive, that a lot men in the professional ranks are “our guys” but they keep quiet about it. That is a necessary thing, but it also means it is easy to feel like a stranger in the world. Having dinner with a gang of smart, like minded professionals is an antidote to the sense of doom.

At the same time, spending time with a bunch of old guys is a revelation. Most of us experience our politics on-line, through blogs, social media and videos. The people at the Mencken event experience their politics from network news, the cable chat shows and paper magazines. A lot of what we take for granted, they do not know exists. What they do know about the emerging counterculture, they do not fully understand. It is not simply an age thing. Its that there is a necessary bit of self-ghettoization on outside.

Age is a part of though. Paul Gottfried kicked off the evening with a speech about the state of the Right. He made the point that the average age of Fox News viewers is 60-something and National Reviews readership is around seventy. Then he made the error of assuming that reflects the demographics of the Right. The fact is, Stefan Molyneux has vastly more resonance with people under the age of fifty than a Sean Hannity. Sites like 4chan and Reddit have greater political reach than all of the cable shows combined.

Tom Woods, the featured speaker of the night, actually tried to make that point. He talked about how he has built a business on new media, but I do not think he won any of them over. He also spent a lot of time trying to differentiate between left-libertarianism and right-libertarianism. There have always been warm relations between paleos and Rand Paul style libertarians and he was well received by the Mencken folks. He is a good speaker, so I did not run out of the room screaming, even though the whole thing had a 1980’s vibe to it.

Finally, the most important benefit to attending these real life gatherings is that you get to socialize with other like minded people. The kiddie table ended up in the bar, drinking and telling stories. I learned that one of the college professors is connected with a bunch of people in this thing. I also learned that a couple of the others are readers. That is always an interesting experience for me. I often forget that real people read this stuff. For me at least, the camaraderie and brotherhood are motivating. It gives purpose to my efforts.

I will get into the event itself in another post, but people in dissident politics should begin to embrace these events. Co-opting existing institutions is how the New Left won the culture war 50 years ago. It is a good model to follow. If alt-right people start populating local clubs and organizations, even If it is in a low-key way, it helps build the movement. The first step is meeting people at events like Mencken. Two of the guys at my table are local to me, so now we can socialize and conspire locally. That is how movements grow.

I’ve spent a lot of time in airports. I’ve slept in them, hung out in them and I even worked in one for a while. I was not an airport employee, but my company rented an office at the airport for some reason. As a frequent traveler, I’ve had the pleasure of being in a lot of airports in various places. I don’t really know a lot about them, but I have noticed a lot about them.

What interests me is not the airports themselves as they are mostly the same as far as the bigger concepts. When you think about it, an airport is just a big bus stop. No, what I find interesting in airports and the air travel system is it is a great example of how societies evolve solutions to near term problems. Those solutions often turn out to be long term liabilities and you clearly see that with our air travel system. In some cases, they are crippling malinvestments.

If you were going to design an air travel system for North America, you would not replicate what’s in place. It does not make any sense and it is expensive. Instead you would look to maximize geography and technology. For instance, there’s no great technological hurdles to super sonic passenger planes. The Concorde started flying in the 70’s. The issue has always been that airports can’t handle it. The noise and the runways were the problem, not the plane.

Imagine a few large airports on the East Coast built for massive super sonic passenger planes that could ferry 500 or more people to Europe in three hours. If you are in Kansas, you would take a domestic flight to the nearest international airport. But, when we started designing and building airports and the air traffic system, no one imagined super sonic air travel or the volume of air travel we now have.

That’s the thing you see all over the air travel system. We have layer upon layer of solutions to old problems that often make solving new problems more difficult or even impossible. It’s not that the people of 1950 were morons and designed bad airports. They just saw what they could see and did the best they could to unriddle those problems they knew about and could imagine. Within living memory, the idea of a Muslim from Saudi Arabia boarding a plane in the US was laughable.

Security is where you see the cul-de-sac. American airports were never designed to filter out Muslim lunatics, luggage bombs and other Muslim problems. When I left the Imperial Capital, I had a 5:00 AM flight, but I still needed 40 minutes to pass through security. Leaving America to return back home, security took over an hour, even though there were few people in line.

It’s why I like airports as an example to explain the impossibility of public policy in our current age. We have this massive overhang of evolved solutions that are largely useless for the current age. Food stamp programs are an obvious example. Even poor countries are full of fat people. There’s no need to be handing out food to the poor. But like all those zany rules at the airport, everything has a constituency, even if it has no purpose.

Compared to the labyrinth of rules in the welfare system, airports are simple. Yet, we cannot make small changes at airports to eliminate the cost of old solutions so that we can efficiently add new technology and solutions. Instead, it is just more and more layers. To solve the problem of Muslim fanatics, they bolted on new layers of stuff between you and the point the airport, which is to get on an airplane.

Airports also make good examples for explaining the law of unintended consequences. In the 1950’s, you could walk on a plane with your sidearm. Then we started getting hijackings in the 60’s so the “solution” was to ban firearms from people and carry-on luggage. That meant metal detectors and guards to look for guns on passengers. Before long, anything that could be used as a weapon was prohibited.

The “solution” for the terrorists was to put bombs in the luggage. Then the “solution” was to smuggle knives on the plane, knowing that everyone was unarmed on the plane. Air travel is a big complicated system that few truly understand well. Make some small changes at one end and what pops out the other end is often a surprise. No one in the 70’s imagined the Lockerbie bombing or 9/11.

Finally, if you have libertarian tendencies, a trip to the airport should disabuse you of those ideas. people do not self-organize very well. You have to have someone in charge who can say “no” to the percentage of humans who do not naturally follow the rules. You need someone to tell the self-absorbed d-bag that he has to check his gigantic backpack. It’s “ordered liberty” not just “liberty” and that means someone has to be giving orders. Otherwise, airports would be impossible.