Category Archives: Weird Stuff

Escape From Reality

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The great fear as the internet spread across American society was that things in this virtual world would somehow cross over into the real world. Usually this meant that the machines would get super intelligent and take over society. This is the underlying theme of movies like The Terminator. Alternatively, a being from inside the internet would make the jump into the meat space. This is the plot for the film Virtuosity. A virtual serial killer gets loose in the real world and does his worst.

Nothing like that has come to pass, but something worse may be happening and that is reality is being sucked into the virtual world. More accurately, people are spending so much time online that the virtual world is supplanting reality for them. We are seeing this with the Harris campaign, which is probably the most intensely online political program we have every experienced. Everything about it is based on winning the internet that day, which means it operates by the rules of the internet.

The most obvious example is how the Kamala Harris character has been reimagined by her developers into something disconnected from reality. From the presentation, one would never know she has been Vice President for the last four years or that she has spent those years arguing for the administration’s positions. Like a discarded scene from a video game, all of that is gone now. In its place is the new character whose only connection to the prior character is the name.

The disconnectedness extends to her campaign and its supporters. Trump has been stumping on the idea of exempting tips from income taxes. Whatever the merits of the idea, it is a clever way to appeal to young people. The other day, the Harris character announced its plan to not tax tips, as if it were something totally new that had never been mentioned by anyone. Miraculously, the people playing the Harris character online responded as if it was a total novel idea.

Of course, this being the age of mendacity, the new Harris gameplay comes with manufactured crowds online that cheer for it. There are fake polls that claim this character is now the most popular character in the game. It is destroying all of the orange baddies in this expansion pack. We know this because every day the lie machine we call mass media fills the game space with stories about how Trump is raging in his bunker about the greatness of the Harris character.

This upgraded version of Kamala Harris is now equipment with a lacky to do the things lackies do for the hero. Like the new Kamala Harris, the character called Tim Walz bears little resemblance to the old version. Instead of being a bloviating windbag who bores people with his imaginary tales of heroism in the military, this version is a folksy good old boy who just happens to hold all of the same opinions as the developers who created his character for the game.

What we are experiencing right now is a political campaign that exists only in the virtual world of the highly online. If you are not playing in this part of the game or you live in reality, you may not know about any of this. Maybe one of your favorite “influencers” has gone into panic mode for some reason and that got your attention. Otherwise, if you are not in this part of the game, none of this is real to you. The main reason for that is that nothing about this campaign is real thus far.

This is why the people most affected by this new release are the self-styled influencers who live entirely online. These people spend all day, every day, looking for something they can front-run in order to maintain the illusion that they are not just playing the game, but they are controlling it. The reason they are called influencers is not that they influence anyone, but that they are the most easily influenced. The right-wing influencer crowd cannot stop playing the new Harris character.

The highly online, of course, will argue that this is reality, and it is now changing the meat space, but how would they know? One of the weird aspects of virtual reality is that it is self-affirming to the people who have been sucked into it. For many of them, Twitter is reality and people outside of it do not exist. This is why influencers banned from Twitter were so desperate to get back on the platform. Having your account suspended is what passes for Hell in the virtual world.

That still leaves the question as to whether this is working. More people get their news from online sources than from legacy sources, so if you win the internet then it suggests you can influence people. On the other hand, the internet is a big place and people gravitate to that which confirms the opinions. One reason the undecided voter is a thing of the past is everyone now has an online tribe. Alternatively, they have a cable chat show they watch every night for their opinions.

The highly online like saying that arguing with a boomer is arguing with the television because all of their opinions come from television. Ironically, arguing with the highly online is arguing with the internet. The people playing the Nick Fuentes character right now have no ideas of their own. They have the ideas of the other players in the Nick Fuentes game space. It turns out that right-wing zoomers are just like the right-wing boomers they criticize. They just have a different god.

That is what will be the interesting thing about the Harris game. Eventually, the Harris character will have to step outside the curated world of gameplay and talk to flesh and blood humans, as well as debate Trump. As much as the developers would like to believe the reality they have created has supplanted the old reality, the test of this will be their character leaving the game space for the meat space. The same holds for the lackey with his Elmer Fudd costume and reimagined backstory.

What it will ultimately come down to is whether the voters will prefer the game space reality to the meat space reality. Will they believe the upgraded Harris character is preferable to the meat space Harris and continue to play the game character as a form of escapism or will they experience the meat space version and get turned off by the game itself? That is the central question of this election. This is the first election where people are asked to choose reality versus escapism.

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

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

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

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

Our Code Death

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Simulation theory is the hypothesis that says what people perceive as reality is actually an advanced, hyper-realistic computer simulation. It sounds like the basis for a cheesy science fiction story, but serious people think seriously about it. This post in Scientific American covers the basics. The very short version is something similar to what was presented in The Matrix series of films, just without the killer computer programs hunting humans who have managed to escape the simulation.

This idea is not new. In fact, it may be one of our oldest weird ideas, if you think of Plato’s allegory of the cave as a stab at simulation theory. It seems that humans have always known that at the minimum we are of two minds. There is the mind that attempts to comprehend objective reality and the other mind that contextualizes reality into things like social order, culture, history, and tradition. Culture is an artificial reality of sorts, but it is often more real to us than objective reality.

The obvious question is how could we tell if we are in a simulation? If the beings running the simulation have fooled us for this long, then surely, they have the ability to hide evidence of their handiwork. On the other hand, maybe there is evidence all around us, but we were initially coded to not be good at noticing it. As we have evolved, we have gotten better at noticing, so perhaps our evolutionary arc is that we finally reach the point where we notice the simulation.

Some people suggest that the drive toward creating artificial intelligence and virtual reality is evidence that we live in a simulation. If humans can create a reality with conscious beings inside of it, then it stands to reason that other intelligence species have reached the same point and we are their creation. That would mean they are a creation of some other species and so on and so on. In other words, “reality” is simulations all the way down.

That still leaves us with the problem of knowing we live in a simulation. One bit of evidence would be limits or shortcuts in the universe. There is some process, for example, that works, despite violating the laws of physics that prevent other similar processes from working. Maybe we find some part of the universe that seems to be off-limits to our observations. We build a super powerful telescope and finally see that door with the sign on it that reads, “No Entry.”

The thing is though, this approach assumes we have correctly noticed everything to this point and have not yet found the evidence we seek. Another way of looking at it is that maybe we have not reached the level of noticing to see the evidence that is all around us in our daily lives. The Mandela Effect is the observed phenomena where large numbers of people believe something false to be true. There are dozens of examples where lots of people collectively share a false memory.

Maybe our brains have been coded to contextualize reality in such a way that anomalies are filtered out along with other useless junk. For example, millions of Trump haters are slowly coming around to the idea that the Trump assassination attempt is a false memory. Facebook is removing the iconic images of Trump raising his fist on stage with blood running down his face. It will not be long before these people are sure it never happened and call it a conspiracy theory.

Along the same lines, we have the Russia Collusion Hoax, which these same people swore was real, but now they swear it never happened at all. The same people who made up that hoax have convinced most of the world that Hunter Biden never owned a laptop and if he did, it was planted in that computer shop by the same people who rigged the 2016 election for Trump. Remember Covid? Of course not, as it never happened, and only crazy people think otherwise.

The Covid event is rather good evidence of one of those systemic shortcuts that point to this being a simulation. For months much of the world literally stopped going to work and yet the economy did not collapse. Everything we thought we knew about the workings of a modern economy said such a thing would plunge the world into a dark age, yet nothing changed all that much. Food got more expensive, but it somehow managed to get on the shelves.

Probably the biggest anomaly that has been at the center of politics for twenty years is the election of Barak Obama. To this day no one can say with confidence that he was born in the United States. In addition to his murky backstory, his total lack of qualifications to do anything, much less be president, should have relegated him to obscurity, but in violation of two hundred years of past practice, it was an asset in his campaign for the White House.

We are seeing another one of these political paradoxes. In 2020 Kamala Harris was as popular as rectal cancer. Despite having more money than any other candidate, she was never able to get any interest. Now, all of a sudden, she is anointed as the favorite to win the November election. As with Obama, we are seeing a violation of rules that have been predictive for many generations. Perhaps what we are really seeing is one of those shortcuts used by the programmers.

The larger point here is that what we are seeing makes no sense in the context of the rules we think govern human society. The reason no one talks about the economy anymore is it no longer makes any sense. The lunacy of the political media that has become the norm is not an effort to warp our sense of reality, but a reflection of the spaghetti code that is generating political media. The simulation is shaking itself to bits because of an accumulation of bugs and bug fixes.

Of course, we know what happens when a software system becomes so buggy that it can no longer be trusted. At least we think we know. You wipe the system and begin with a new code base. When a business reaches a point where it can no longer be reorganized, it is wiped out in what we call bankruptcy. A human society that reaches the point where the bugs are too numerous to fix, like the bad software, it is wiped out in what we call a revolution. We may be at that point.

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

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

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

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

Ending Strength

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One of the consequences of youth culture is that there is not a lot of thought put into the fitness of old people. What little there is on the subject is either aimed at peddling drugs or peddling the crackpot idea that you are as young as you feel. The former looks at the swelling population of geezers the same way they looked at Covid. They are just looking for a way to steal more money. The latter tends to promote activities that have dubious fitness benefits and mostly sell good vibes.

The main reason for this is Americans are terrible at being old. The obsession with youth is a core part of the culture. Every political cycle, billions of words are wasted on what the youth have to say about things, as if being young makes you wise and smart, when in reality you are at your dumbest when young. Of course, young people are encouraged to set new trends and then old people are encouraged to adopt those trends so they can pretend to be young.

This was not always the way. For most of human history, youth was a thing humans were quickly ushered through so that they could become productive members of the family and community. Once children could do useful things, they were put on a course to learn to be an adult. In the modern age, it is the reverse. Once someone hits the age of majority, they are put on a course to maintain the illusion of perpetual youth in order to avoid thinking much about what comes after youth.

The thing is though, you will spend most of your life living outside of your physical prime, so preparing for it and maximizing that time should be important. The old Mickey Mantle joke about how if he knew he would live as long as he did, he would have taken better care of himself was funny because it is true. Good fitness habits in the twenties and thirties are what make for good health in the middle years possible. Good habits in the middle years are what set up productive later years.

Instead of a fitness culture aimed at maximizing fitness over the long arc of your life, the focus is on unrealistically preserving youth. Gyms profit from people hoping to attain a physique that they never had in their youth and probably never would have attained in their youth if they tried their best. In their post-youth they are struggling and failing to attain a goal that makes no sense. Worst of all are the weight trainers who strive to look like Greek statues, so they can post shirtless pics on Twitter.

Years ago, a smart guy named Mark Rippetoe wrote a book titled Starting Strength, in which he laid out his scheme for basic weight training. It remains a classic in the weight training world as it explains all of the important exercises and how they strengthen specific muscle groups. It made a lot of money for him, but it would have been better if it were called Ending Strength. The reason is the point of exercise in general is to extend the useful years of your body to the furthers possible limit.

The proposition with regards to fitness is quite simple. If you are thirty years old, would you trade a few years of looking buff right now for not being able to climb stairs in the final ten years of your life. Sadly, most thirty-year-olds would go with looking buff, but no fifty-year-old worried about such an outcome would take that deal. Yet, that is the way fitness culture is structured and the thumb is on the scale to encourage people to take the buff option, long after buff is plausible.

You can probably blame this on the boomers as the obsession with perpetual youth started with that generation. Prior to the post-war years, youth culture was limited to jazz clubs and the degenerates who frequented them. In fairness, boomers did not invent youth culture, but they embraced it, and they still embrace it. Every potion, product and promotion are sold to them as the fountain of youth. It will not be long before lifestyle companies are claiming eighty is the new thirty.

The thing is though, eighty can be a better eighty, if all along the arc of life the person is encouraged to do the things that pay those dividends in old age. Regular weight training in the middle years with the goal of maintaining muscle mass will mean climbing the stairs when you are eighty rather than buying a stair lift. Functional exercise aimed at maintaining cardiovascular capacity in your thirties will mean being able to walk the museum with your grandchildren.

Of course, the reason no one tries to sell a program like this to middle aged people is the target audience fears old age more than death, so anything that reminds them that they will one day be old is a no sale. Still, it seems like there could be some audience for a program that focuses on extended quality years. The typical white person in American is in his fifties. This is a guy thinking about how many quality years he has left and what he can do with them.

That is the warping power of youth culture and a good example of what happens when the wrong people gain cultural power. Peddling potions and programs that promise to make you look young and buff is good for the sort of people who work at card tables in temporary offices where all the cars in the parking lot are left running in case they have to make a quick escape. They do not care about the long-term health of the population, just the short-term profit to be gained from them.

In a way, fitness is a microcosm for the current crisis in that it focuses all of the attention on the here and now, usually on unattainable or pointless goals, without thinking about what comes around the next bend. Most of what ails present day America is the result of not thinking at all about the second order effects of present actions. Youth culture has created a population with no sense of time. Instead of building something to last, it aims for living fast and leaving behind a good-looking corpse.

What this suggests is that the antidote to what ails us in this age is the rejection of youth culture and the short-term thinking that comes with it. Instead of maximizing the moment, the focus must be on ending strength. The long arc of life, politics and the culture is to be the best at the end rather than the beginning. People who live with the end in mind have full lives and a culture full of such people is one that avoids the present troubles and endeavors to sustain itself for the long haul.

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

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

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

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

The Diversity Cult

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The 2023 Irish action thriller, In the Land of Saints and Sinners, is one of those films that offers some insight into the machinations of our cultural overlords. It is one of those small budget adult dramas that does not get a ton of attention but does well on the streaming services after its initial release. It is not that these are bad films, but they are not expected to pack the theaters. These are the new version of the B-Movie that fill up the spaces between the heavily hyped, big budget films.

Anyway, the film is set in Ireland during the Troubles because every movie about Ireland is set during the Troubles. It stars Liam Neeson, who plays Finbar Murphy, a hired assassin who lives in a quiet coastal town. It is not all that clear who is assigning the hits, but they come through a local businessman who gets the assignments and hands them out to men like Finbar. This local businessman is not connected to the Troubles and makes sure to not get involved in politics.

The story arc for Finbar starts during his final assignment when the guy he is about to kill gives him some advice rather than beg for his life. Finbar’s habit is to grab his target off the street and take him out to the woods, where he makes the guy dig his own grave before shooting him with a shotgun. He then plants a tree on the grave. This target is a former contract killer, who urges Finbar to make something of the rest of his life before he ends up in the same place as him.

This leads Finbar to have a crisis of conscience and he decides to retire. Meanwhile, some IRA terrorists have come into town to hide out after having set off a bomb in Belfast that killed some children. They are staying with a relative who lives in the town and that relative just happens to have a run in with Finbar. Of course, Finbar solves the problem by taking the guy out to his favorite killing field. Thus, we have the central conflict of the film as the terrorists face off against Finbar.

This all sounds like the basis for a good old-fashioned thriller. You get some Irish history as a backdrop, and you get to see Liam Neeson use his “particular set of skills” to slowly take care of the bad guys. Neeson has been playing this role since he got super famous for doing it in the movie Taken. He is in his seventies now, but he still manages to make it work, just as long as he does not have to move around too much. In this film he is the wise old version of the lethal weapon.

Somewhere in the middle of the film, there is a black guy. Finbar is in a pub and there is a black guy playing Irish tunes on a fiddle. He is not a black leprechaun, but he is a short guy so that would have made some sense. Instead, he is a refugee from Africa who somehow settled into this tiny coastal town in rural Ireland. He tells Finbar that the reason he picked the town is he wanted to escape the violence of his home country and he once heard Irish music as a kid.

It gets more absurd. Later in the film there is the big show down between Finbar and the terrorists at the pub. The terrorists are shooting the place up and Finbar sees the sacred African hiding under a table, so he rushes over to save him. In other words, the wandering African is not just a ridiculous addition to a film set in 1970’s Ireland, he is now a sacred symbol of the film. In that scene you expect the people to scream, “leave the women and children but save our sacred African!”

Clearly, the quality control committee realized that their film did not have the required amount of diversity, so the script was sent back for a rewrite. The writers probably thought they were okay because they made the head terrorist a sassy girl boss with two thick headed male henchmen. That was not enough so they needed to figure out a way to add some color to story set in rural 1970’s Ireland and they settled on having a peripatetic African midget playing the fiddle in the pub.

We have all become used to the black washing and race swapping that goes on in the culture, but in a film like this you see how mechanical it has become. Somewhere in the process there is a crew of shrews and scolds who make sure there is a girls boss and the proper amount of color. They do not care if it makes any sense. Like people with rubber stamps in a bureaucracy, their job is to make sure the film has enough diversity points before it goes into production.

Eric Hoffer famously said, “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” In fact, it often becomes all three and you see it with the diversity rackets that now infest every institution. It is a lucrative racket for those who master the arcana, but it has been embedded in the economy. Like the green rackets, the diversity rackets are now part of the fabric of corporate life. It is assumed to be an essential part of every large enterprise.

The thing that holds it in place, however, is that it is a cult. There is little doubt that many of the people in that film thought it was stunning and brave that they had a little African guy skittering around the set. Those who thought it was a ridiculous addition to the film kept their head down because they did not want the lunatics from the cult of diversity hounding them over it. The result is we now have diversity everywhere when what we need is to have it nowhere.

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

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

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

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

The New Jew Thing

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The one thing the critics of Elon Musk have right is that after his takeover of Twitter, now stupidly called X, the amount of anti-Jewish material has increased. Not all of it should be called antisemitic, as much of it is anti-Israel and anti-Zionist, but the antisemites have been given far more room to operate. Musk restored the man who has to be the current frontrunner for the Jerusalem Post’s antisemite of the year award, Nick Fuentes, to the platform recently, which has had the predictable results.

No doubt, Elon Musk simply thinks these things will sort themselves over time and there is no reason to stifle speech in the name of guarding the feelings of those who are always on alert for a discouraging word, but it is also true that it has resulted in far more genuinely antisemitic content on the platform. The question is whether this is just a burst of energy due to newfound freedom or does it reflect a change in attitude regarding Jews and their place in American society.

The place to start is this post by someone calling himself Will Chamberlain and the response from someone calling himself Aaron Renn. The former is a Jewish political activist, and the latter is a Protestant involved in religious activism. The topic of the exchange is something the great John Derbyshire observed a million years ago when he wrote a review of Kevin MacDonald’s infamous book. Derb introduced the idea of the “Jew Thing”, which afflicts right-wing people.

It is true that for some reason a certain segment of the right is susceptible to the Jew Thing and when exposed to it they go crazy with it. For most it is a short fever that eventually breaks leaving them with an additional set of tools to help understand what is happening in the world. For others it becomes a lifelong obsession that takes over their life in the same way that drug dependency can take over a life. They wake up thinking about Jews and go to bed thinking about Jews.

That may be what is happening with the volume of anti-Jewish material we see on Twitter, now stupidly called X. This subculture has some room to breathe on a big public platform, so it is party time. This happened in the olden times when social media was called Usenet and there was little moderation. In fact, this subculture was a pioneer in building online communities. Don Black built one of the first genuine online communities back in the early 1990’s and it is still going.

What happened in the old days is self-segregation. People with narrow interests, built communities around those interests because they did not want to interact with people who did not share their interests. It also meant that people dedicated to opposing certain topics, built walls and fences around their communities to keep out the people they claimed to oppose. That is probably what will happen with Twitter, now stupidly called X, once the harpies discover the block option.

There is another option. One obvious difference between this wave of the Jew Thing and prior waves is this one is much younger and simplistic. In the old days, people afflicted with the Jew Thing would spend much of their time working out the details of the Jew Thing, often by reading books written by fellow sufferers or by interacting inside those narrow online communities. They spent only a small portion of their time proselytizing to the masses about the Jew Thing.

This new wave is the opposite. It is not an intellectual movement. These are not people reading and discussing Kevin MacDonald. They are not writing long rebuttals to Nathan Cofnas, as they have never heard of him. Instead, they spend their time posting the early life of everyone they think may be Jewish in the timeline of everyone they think needs to hear the news about the Jew Thing. In other words, this wave may not be bigger, but it may be much louder.

Again, most people who catch the Jew Thing recover and simply come away with an understanding of how group loyalty works inside a pluralistic society. In a way, the Jew Thing is like Covid, in that those who recover, and most do, come away knowing that it will not kill you but the people warning about it certainly will, so it is best to be on your guard at all times. This may be what happens with the people currently caught up in the current epidemic of the Jew Thing.

Of course, this could be another symptom of late phase empire. The most famous outbreak of the Jew Thing was in the last century when the old imperial order in Europe collapsed in the wake of the Great War. Once the old mental frameworks collapsed, people could look around and see things they never saw in the past. This stunning emergence of reality and the chaos brought about by the collapse of the old order led people to embrace new narratives.

That could be what is happening now. The American empire is in decline and people feel that things are no longer in good order. Young people, as is always the case in societal decline, feel the tremors of collapse first. That could explain why this new epidemic of the Jew Thing is hitting the Zoomers. The world is not as they were trained up to expect and this disconfirmation is resulting in a disassociation with the old ways, opening the mind to the Jew Thing as an alternative framework.

Another thing that supports that last possibility is that the regime seems to be struggling to contain this outbreak. In the past, they would have pressured Musk into cracking down on this material and we would have seen a coordinated campaign to purge the afflicted from the public square. The ADL forced Musk to visit the pile of shoes, but it did not take, which suggests something has changed. Maybe this epidemic is more than just a replay of the past and something new is happening.

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

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

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

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

Dr. Strangelove

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Note: I have something to attend to this morning, so what follows is a post from behind the green door that everyone hated. In this review of what many consider the greatest cinematic satire ever, I reveal that I have no sense of humor.

Human communication rests upon a vast set of shared assumptions about the world that are just assumed by speaker and receiver. When the speaker says, “I am low on gas”, the receiver responds with, “There is a gas station at the next exit” because he assumes that the driver mentioned the gas level because he will soon need to gas up the car, so he is asking for the location of the next gas station. In that simple exchange lies a lot of shared assumptions.

This is why comedy does not travel very well. In the old days, comics would do bits on how they travelled to other countries to do their act only to confuse the audience with jokes that made no sense to them. Bob Newhart did a bit on how Germans could not understand why a bald man was called “Curly” and a fat man was called Tiny”, which played on the idea of shared assumptions. The joke itself relied on the American audience’s shared concept of the German personality.

Today, jokes about the Germans being exacting fanatics would not make much sense to young people as Germany has no meaning to them. If they have ever met a German, it was online, and he spoke perfect internet gibberish. The shared assumptions about the cultural differences between Germans and Americans has been lost over time, so jokes based on those assumptions stop being funny for the same reason jokes about phonebooths make little sense to a Zoomer.

That came to mind while watching Dr. Strangelove, a film many critics claim is the greatest comedy in the history of film. It was released at the height of the Cold War and is a satire on the fears and assumptions about the Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis was still on the minds of people, so a satire on nuclear war would have relied upon the shared assumptions regarding the issue at the time. For someone not alive when this was made, those assumptions are a mystery.

I did not laugh a single time during the whole film. I was never hostile to it, but I could not get any of the jokes, no matter how hard I tried. I even stopped the film and read the wiki page hoping for some clues. I wound up reading a number of old reviews that did not provide much help. They just assume you get the jokes and never bother to explain any of them. The closest you get are mentions of Sellers making sport of Adlai Stevenson in his role as President.

For those who have not seen the film, it is about a rogue general in the 1960’s who launches a wave of B-52 bombers armed with nukes at the Soviets. He does it in such a way that no one can recall them without his code. The rest of the film is about the President and his advisers debating about how to stop Armageddon. Peter Sellers plays three roles in the film. He is the aide to the crazy general, the President and a weird Nazi scientist who is the President’s science advisor.

The central conflict in the film is how to stop the bombers. The plan is to tell the Soviets so they can shoot down the bombers, but we learn that the Soviets built a doomsday device that will go off if even one bomb lands. I would like to say at this point hijinks ensue, but there are no hijinks. The closest we get is when the crazy general tells his aide Mandrake (Sellers) that he believes the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans.

Again, the film did not make me angry. It is just that the things being mocked are outside my frame of reference. Making sport of the nuclear protocols of the 1960’s may have been outlandishly funny in 1964, but not now. I am not even sure that was what was being mocked. I did pick up that they were mocking country people, as Slim Pickens plays the role of the main bomber pilot, and he plays it like he played the role of overseer in Blazing Saddles.

That brought to mind something else. Jewish comedy falls into two broad categories, mockery of majority social norms and self-defeat. The comedy here was of the first type, but those majority social norms were killed off a long time ago. That is why this film no longer works as a comedy, unless you were alive at this time. The one bit that you can still pickup is the mockery of normal white people like the character of Major Kong (Pickens) or General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott).

Otherwise, the jokes not only fail to land, but they fail to register as jokes. Even Peter Sellers comes off as if he is playing it straight, despite the fact he is best remembered for his over-the-top performances as Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films. I did sort of get that he was making fun of Nazis in the role of Dr. Strangelove, the crazy German scientist who is the President’s science advisor. As President and aide to the crazy general, he comes off perfectly normal.

In the end, it is a well-made film. This may be why it is ranked so high. Kubrick managed to get three great performances from Sellers, who was known for being a bit unstable and an alcoholic. He tricked George C. Scott into playing his role in a way that Scott never would have done otherwise. Reportedly, he did this by first having Scott ham it up as practice, then film it the way Scott wanted it done. Kubrick then used the film from the hammy practice sessions.

Interestingly, Sellers was slated to play four roles. The studio only agreed to back the film if Sellers was in all the major roles, which is crazy. Sellers got hurt so he could not get into the bomber to play Major T. J. “King” Kong. The role was initially offered to John Wayne who ignored the offer. Then Kubrick got Slim Pickens to do it, but without telling him the point of the film or giving him the script. He wanted Pickens to be Pickens from the many Westerns for which he was known best.

The film is made in black and white. Even though the satire does not work on me, I can see why they did not do it in color. It would have come off as farce rather than satire if it were in color. That may be why it does not hold up. The jokes were probably subtle for the time, so after sixty years they are impossible to spot, especially being shot in black and white, which has the effect on a modern audience of projecting seriousness, rather than lightheartedness or silliness.

In the end, I did not hate it. Frankly, I am not sure what to make of it. It is well put together and the acting is first rate. If there was a bit more character development, it would be a solid drama. It was intended to be satire, so the characters are intentionally two-dimensional, but they are well-written and performed by great actors. Otherwise, there is nothing here to love or hate. It is one of those films you probably love if you are a film historian, but as a regular viewer is nothing special.

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

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

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

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

The Floor Is Yours

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Note: Tuesday I was on the Killstream with Ethan Ralph. It was a fun conversation about a bunch of different things. Here is the link. I arrive at about the three hour mark, so fast forward to 3:37:45.

One of the projects that has been on the drawing board for far too long is to upgrade this site and add some additional features. One reason for this is simply to freshen things up a bit, as the site design is over a decade old. There is something to say for tradition, but people expect websites to freshen up their style every so often. A site that sticks with an old look and feel is often assumed to be abandoned or poorly maintained, so giving this site a refresh is something that is long overdue.

Another motivation behind a refresh is to add some features. The problem with using WordPress is most of the plugins do not work. I am not on the WordPress server so do not mention that for the sixth million time. I host my own site, but I use the open-source WordPress software that anyone can download. Even the plugins you can buy are a roll of the dice in terms of functionality. The people behind them often have names that look like an eye chart and the support is what you would expect.

Moving off of WordPress opens the door for other options that are more professional and have real people supporting the product. One option is Locals, which is connected to Rumble in some way. This is becoming popular with the livestreaming crowd as it offers a paywall service, credit card processing and additional features to go along with the normal livestream chat services. The trouble is that it is intended for video creators, so it lacks the features a writer expects.

Substack is slowly building out its services. They can host audio and video, which people with a green door subs already know. They started out as a writing platform, so they have a lot of useful features for writers. More than a few “magazines” now run on Substack using their custom design features. The risk here is being on a platform that could easily be taken over by lunatics. There is already a war against the site by lunatics, so it is not hard to see where that is headed.

The final service that people use is Gumroad. Paul Ramsey and Keith Woods have been on this platform for a long time. This is a small platform, so they are not throwing people off for heresy. This is a familiar pattern now. The video site D-Live did this until the hammer came down and they lost most of their user base, because they were forced to ban the blasphemers. Given the site is owned by a very strange little man from over the rainbow, one should not be optimistic about its future.

The alternative to using a service is to roll my own site, which avoids many of the problems of using a service and opens the door to customization. I could also keep the Substack and SubscribeStar platforms and allow those users to access pay-per-view content on the main site. Both have API’s for this, which means this site would talk to those sites to see if a user here is a user there. If so, then the user here would be treated as a paid customer here.

This would mean that users can get behind the green door two additional ways, as I can set up crypto and cash payments here. For those too paranoid to use a credit card online, you could send cash, checks, gold doubloons or whatever you have through the mail and get a green door account. The crypto users could also send their favorite form of digital money. I could also integrate GabPay, which I am told works pretty well now, even though they could not service VDare.

If you start with a clean sheet of paper, then it is the time to rethink how something works or does not work. It may be time to rethink some features or add new features, like a better comment section or even a group messaging system. Comment sections have been killed off mostly due to the fact that site owners get the sads when they see the comments, but this site has a lively comment section, so making it better by adding additional features sounds like a good idea.

Right away, I think a better editing system is in order. I have tried a million different plugins for this and all of them are terrible. I tried one that I paid for but I suspect the publisher sabotaged it, as it stopped working for some mysterious reason and they stopped responding to my inquiries. Creating a comment system that works as intended from the start would solve this. That means the ability to format comments and edit them as long as you are a registered user.

Along the same lines, I think green door users should blow past the spam filters, so they never have to wait for moderation. I have to check the moderation queue a dozen times a day, and it is always regular users in there. Not only is that annoying to the user, but it is very annoying to me. It would also be useful for green door users to have the ability to limit the visibility of their posts to other green door users. This is a common feature on sports sites that looks like a good idea.

The final novelty I have in mind is to let green door users create their own page and post their own material. The kook sites like Daily Kos pioneered this years ago and it would add a nice wrinkle to the site. There are commenters who put a lot of time and effort into their commentary, so if they had a way to do long form commentary within the context of the comment stream, it might make for a more dynamic site. Who knows, maybe it would attract other writers.

The point of this post is to solicit ideas and demands. Next month I want to flesh out the basic design and then get to work building it before summer. With the economy slowing down I will have some free time from the day job, so I may as well put the time to good use and upgrade the site. Feel free to send e-mails or comment here about what you would like to see or not like to see. The point of the upgrade is to make the site better for the readers and users, so the floor is yours.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

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

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

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

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

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

Missing Lagos

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Edit: A friend of ours, Judd Blevins, is under attack by the usual suspects and could use some help in his fight. He is a good man trying to serve his community, but the freaks and weirdos are trying to ruin it. Here is his story and a way to send him a few bucks.

This week was the final escape from Lagos, which had been in the works for a few years but took off toward the end of last year. I am not a young man anymore, so I cannot just pack up and leave when the spirit moves me. Not only do I have commitments to fulfill, but I also have stuff. When your stuff fits comfortably inside the trunk of your car, moving is about waiting until the sun goes down. When you need a truck for your stuff then you have to put some thought into it.

Baltimore has been my home for twenty years. I lived there longer than anywhere else so despite the harms of Charm City, there are some things I will miss. The thing I will miss the most is the look when I say I am from Baltimore. One time in Ireland I told some locals I was from Baltimore, and they did not believe me. They had seen the series The Wire and could not accept that I lived in what they saw. I showed them my license and some photos. They were terrified of me.

There are other things I will miss, like the constant sound of basketballs striking the sidewalk at all hours of the day and night. I exaggerate a bit here, but the thud of a ball hitting the sidewalk is like a weird metronome to the place. So much so that I created a special filter for my podcasts to remove the sound. No matter when I record, there is, now was, that sound of a ball striking cement. Oddly, Baltimore produces few college basketball players, despite it all.

Another thing I will miss is the shouting. The first time I was in Copenhagen, I experienced an eerie feeling the first day walking around the city. It struck me that the reason for this is the relative quiet. No one was shouting. The Danes quietly go about their business on the streets. If they need to speak to someone, they go up close to them so they can talk without shouting. Even on public transport the Danes are quiet, not Japanese quiet, but never shouting or blaring music.

Baltimore is the other end of the spectrum. It is perfectly normal for a man to stop on one side of the street and scream at the top of his lungs at another man on the other side of the street. At first it is to get his attention, but after that they will hold forth like it is perfectly normal for two men to be screaming at one another on the street, because in Baltimore it is normal. People also scream at each other from their house windows, open car windows and even rooftops.

One reason for the shouting, but certainly not the only reason, is the constant sound of alarms from emergency equipment. This is another filter I have created for recording podcasts that I may never need again. It is not just the police sirens, which are common, but other sorts of emergency vehicles. Often, I would see the local fire department take their trucks out and blast the sirens for no reason, other than to make a racket and drive the things around the block a few times.

Probably the hardest thing to get used to will be locks. In a place like Lagos, anything not locked up or locked down will be stolen. Even if it is worthless someone will pick it up and carry it away. When we had an office in the city, we would leave old computers on the sidewalk, and they would vanish. The only thing that did not disappear this way was dead bodies, but the scenes from Haiti suggest that this is something that happens in the next stage of social development.

For the last week I have been locking doors after I pass, because it has become second nature at this point. Yesterday was a nice early spring day here in the hills, but leaving the door open to let the air in was too much. Instead, I opened the window of the office so I could keep an eye on things. Perhaps in time I will forget what it was like to live on guard every minute of your life. I may now understand how men who did long stints in prison feel when they get released.

Something I am not sure I will miss is the general stupidity of the place. The best example of this is car inspections. When I moved to Lagos, I had just bought a new truck, but it was registered in the prior state. I learned I needed a safety inspection before I could swap plates. Getting a safety inspection on a new car seemed weird, but how long could it take? It took all day. The guy crawled all over the thing and even wrote up some things that came from the factory as questionable.

I asked the guy why he was doing this as in other states a safety inspection is just a walkaround to make sure every important bit works. The guy told me with compete sincerity that the cars were safer in Baltimore. He could have said it was the law or that his boss required it, thus acknowledging the idiocy of what he was doing, but no, he was fully on board with the policy. Baltimore combines the mindset of the postal clerk with the intellectual dexterity of the population.

One thing that Baltimore has that I have seen no where else is street walkers, by which I mean people who walk in the streets rather than on the sidewalk. You see it the most when it snows and the cars are less controllable. The locals will walk in the middle of the streets. Even in the summer this is common. They will saunter along in the middle of the road without a care in the world. Of course, they jaywalk at a pace that suggests they take pleasure in holding up traffic.

Finally, the last thing I will miss is the tropical summers. Starting in mid-June Baltimore turns into a jungle. Jungle as in weather. It rains almost every night and is suffocatingly humid all day. Yeah, it is hot and humid in the South during the summer, but that weather in a city is a special form of miserable. Baltimore is below sea level, so it is a concrete heatsink in the summer. In fact, the Baltimore – Washington area is a giant metro area plopped into a swampy jungle.

Lots of people reading this will say it gets miserably hot where they live in the summer, and that is probably true, but hazy, hot, and humid in Lagos is unique. I have been in the South in summer. I have been in Texas during a heatwave. I have spent August in Florida and that is about as close as it comes to Lagos. The big exception is Florida has the beaches and lacks the haze. If you want to know what Hell is really like, spend a summer in Lagos and you will sin no more.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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

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

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

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

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

Waiting Out The Weirdness

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Note: The site performance should be better today. Last night I drained the fluids and replaced the filters. The canoodling valve was stuck. I cleaned it up and recalibrated it, so things should be working fine now.

There is an old fable about how if you throw a frog into boiling water he will immediately leap out of the pot, but if you put him in room temperature water and slowly bring the heat up to boiling, he will not notice. The central claim about frogs is false, but the point of the fable is that humans often do not notice gradual change, even when the results of that change are bizarre or dangerous. Often this point is made to explain some new weirdness that people did not see coming.

This is not an expression we see used much anymore, mostly because this age has become so bizarre that the frog metaphor no longer works. Everyday some new weirdness pops from nowhere, as if the people running the simulation wanted to see what would happen if you threw a frog into boiling water. Finding the idea too cruel, they instead hurl modern Americans into a world where men in dresses demand you use their made-up pronouns and pretend they are a third sex.

The weirdness yesterday was the release of Google’s new image AI tool that was programmed to never create images of white people. The director of the project had to go to the media and lie about it being a mistake after people got the thing to create images of Nazis that were Asian and African. It was fine when it was race-swapping people from medieval Western history, but making Nazis anything other than white is a violation of the invisible law of this age.

The salient point here is it was done on purpose. Thirty years ago, it was impossible to imagine people so deranged and degenerate gaining control of the culture and then using their power to create bizarre images of the past. This is not something that you can say happened gradually then all of a sudden. Sure, it fits a general pattern of ethnic hatred, but the weirdness of it falls outside of even the most cynical expectations, despite being part of a growing pattern.

People often want to think their age is a wacky time compared to prior ages, but objectively the culture tends to move slowly. Maybe there are fits of upheaval, like the civil rights movement in the middle of the last century, but even that was the climax of a process that started generations earlier. You could draw a line from Gettysburg to white children being marched at gun point into black schools. You cannot draw a line from the present black Nazi AI to anything in the past.

If you are middle-aged or older, this election is shaping up to be so outside of anything you have experienced that space aliens could staging it. For decades both sides of the political consensus warned about authoritarianism. All of a sudden, both sides are perfectly fine with it. One side wants to round up dissidents and put them in jail while the other side pretends it is not happening. Notice that no senior Republicans have had much to say about the Trump case in New York.

Of course, the election itself is from bizzarro world. Joe Biden is so feeble and mentally infirmed that he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial, but he can possess the nuclear football and run for reelection. Donald Trump, a man known to us for his outlandish real estate mogul lifestyle and television ventures has transformed in the Gracchi brothers and Lucius Junius Brutus. An entertainment personality has now become the most courageous man in American politics.

It is impossible to overstate the weirdness of this, but it is not the weirdest thing about the coming presidential election. In all probability, the states that were fortified for democracy in 2020 will be fortified for democracy in 2024. The result will be four more years of man who is unable to count to four. Go back to 1984 and tell people Joe Biden will be alive in 2024 and they would be shocked. Tell them he will be president and they would laugh in your face.

The thing is though, this is not the weirdest thing happening right now. Here is a story about parents in Indiana who had their child snatched from them by the state because they did not subscribe the pronoun business. Not long-ago, people who even the most cynical thought were exaggerating warned about this stuff. “They are coming from your kids” was over-the-top rhetoric. Today is just a thing that no one finds all that shocking as it is just another deranged item on the list.

Again, it all feels like the people running the simulation are in a competition to see who can produce the most insane thing to foist upon us. It is not entirely wrong as all of this originates from the people who control the centers of cultural power. The people running the Google AI platform deliberately chose to race swap all the images and prevent any images of white people. The people stealing children in the name of pronouns know what they are doing. The question is why?

That is the weirdest part of this age. There is no good answer for why the people in charge are doing these things. You can say money and power, but they have all the money and power. People who blame it on money and power are simply trying not to think about it too much. You cannot blame them. The other answers can get you hurled into the void as a heretic or cast you as some sort of nutter. We are all left to hope the fever breaks, even though it clearly it is not breaking.

In the end, everyone is left to wait it out, like a bad storm. Instead of huddling in the basement, hoping the house does not come free of the foundation, most people do their best to avert their eyes. Maybe that is the appeal of VR goggles. You can venture into the world and not see the weirdness. You will not see the bus coming at you, but at least the end will be quick and free of bearded men in frocks, but how long before the weirdness is injected into that realm?

The only good news in all of this is that reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it. No matter how infuriating or terrifying things get, reality will not yield to the dreams of the crazies. This was the lesson of the French revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and every ideological movement. It will be the lesson of whatever this cultural revolution is called when it finally ends. The other lesson is the crazies always meet a fate worse than they inflict on their victims.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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

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

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

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

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

Killer Drones

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Note: For those looking for a good book to read, check out this new novel Faction: With the Crusaders, which is the follow on of the writer’s first novel called Faction.

If you were alive a thousand years ago and decided you wanted to kill the local prince, it meant getting within reach of the prince. You would have to get close enough to stab him with a knife or poison his food. That meant getting past the guards and his retainers who were always with him. For anyone but those with regular access to the prince this was near impossible, which is why political assassinations were almost always a part of palace intrigue or a palace coup.

Ranged weapons changed this math a bit, but the bow was around a thousand years ago and was not a weapon for this type of activity. The reason is bows were primarily for hunting at close range or part of a system for war. The hunter would need to get close to his quarry as bows were not terribly accurate. In war, masses of archers operated a lot like a missile battery. They would fill the sky with arrows using volume to overcome the limited accuracy of the weapon.

The first real innovation in weapons that could be used for assassinations was the crossbow which arrived in the Middle Ages. We know the ancients had crossbows and used them in war, but they were not terribly accurate. The cost made them a weapon of war rather than a tool for private use. The crossbow disappeared from Europe for almost a thousand years, but then reappeared in the tenth century. Technology soon made them cheap and deadly accurate in the right hands.

This is why medieval leaders grew concerned with this weapon and tried to ban their private ownership in some cases. A weapon that a peasant could own and master that would allow him to strike the prince from a distance created a new problem for the ruling class of the time. A couple of angry peasants on the roof tops or even in the crowd could kill the prince. All of a sudden, having guards and a retinue was not enough, so the prince had to be more careful around the peasants.

Of course, we see the same thing happen with firearms. In the 18th century it was not a great weapon for assassinations. If you could get close enough you could kill the prince with a muzzle loader, but you would also be easy to spot. The first widely available firearms were not great for up close work. Pistols started to change this, and technology soon made it possible to conceal a deadly weapon on your person, thus making the assassin a real threat to authority.

Even though the problem was obvious, it took a while for rulers to figure out how to deal with firearms as political weapons. The same is true for things like roadside bombs and bombs delivered through the mail. A hundred years ago anarchists sent bombs to rich people through the mail. Of course, political actors were able to assassinate important people with the use of commonly available firearms. This is no longer an issue, as the ruling class has adapted to this threat.

This may be about to change. The use of FPV drones in the Ukraine war is doing to range weapons what war did for prior weapons. The FPV drone is a First Person Video drone that an operator uses to put an explosive on a target. The drone has a camera so the operator can look through that camera to guide the drone to the target where it explodes upon impact. Two years ago, these did not exist as a practical matter, but now the battlefield is littered with them.

The reason the skies are full of drones in Ukraine is they are cheap to produce and cheap to master. A team of two can become a highly effective weapon on the battlefield with a week of training on the drone. Training men to use million dollars tanks and artillery takes years. The drone is not a replacement for these weapon systems, but they are proving to be a cheap way to increase the combat effectiveness of troops that have the minimum amount of training.

A big part of the drone war is that the soldiers are learning to operate them and also repair them when needed. After the war, millions of men will go back to civilian life knowing how to make a cheap flying bomb they can guide to a target. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian men will come home angry at their politicians or the politicians of Europe about their conduct of the war. In other words, you do not have to be a genius to see the potential downstream consequences of the drone revolution.

For the last fifty years, the West has had to deal with terror attacks, which meant bombs, mass shootings and hijackings. Western elites had largely insulated themselves from assassination, so the only political violence was attacks on civilians. Now that is about to change as the terrorist can fly a bomb through the window of a rich person’s home or into the limousine of an important person. The math of political violence is about to change due to the drone.

History tells us that no one will notice this until a lunatic flies his homemade FPV drone into a government building. Then the security industrial complex will get the money to unriddle the problem. The battlefield will provide a lesson here as well because those soldiers using drones are working on defending against them. Reports suggest the Russians are way ahead on this, but it will not take long before the private sector in the West is working the problem of killer drones.

In the middle of the last century, it was still common to see politicians mixing it up with the people, but that no longer happens. Over time the threat of political violence, despite the rarity, has put the political class behind a wall. Drones will probably put them in a bunker, but it will also put the managerial elite in bunkers too. They will cease to be real people and instead be nothing more than images on our screens. The FPV drone cannot hunt what it cannot see in the wild.

It will also mean new rules to monitor the sale of components used to make drones, like we see with explosives and street drugs. You cannot go into a store and buy certain cold medicines without a note from the state. It will not be long before you must pass a background check to buy a drone. We may even see politicians try to ban assault drones on the grounds that they are weapons of war. It sounds ridiculous, but our rulers think this is a good ad, so nothing is too farfetched.

This thought experiment is a good reminder that war has downstream consequences that no one can foresee. Cheap crossbows were great for waging war, but lots of good crossbowmen in the crowd were not good for the king. The same proved true for other weapons of war. We are about to see the same thing with this war. In the fullness of time, it will be seen as an inflection point and maybe one that makes the economics of the Western ruling system unworkable.

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