Category Archives: Weird Stuff

Is Drudge On The Level?

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The first time I heard of Matt Drudge was in the 1990’s. I was living in Virginia and I would listen to Mary Matalin in the car. I think her show was syndicated, but it was broadcast from a station in Virginia. Matalin would have Drudge on her show to talk about the gossip in his newsletter. This was before he had a website. Not long after, he started a website and then the whole Monica Lewinsky thing blew up and Drudge became a household name. Like many people, I visit his site daily to see what is happening in the world.

In 2012 I started to wonder if Drudge was on the level. He promoted so many pro-Romney stories, it felt like he was working for him. I get that Drudge is right of center in his politics, so he does a lot of “counter programming” in his choice of stories, in order to keep his mostly white middle-class audience. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were the dream team of SWPL-ville civic nationalism. Therefore, it made some sense to tilt toward Romney against Obama, but his promotion of Romney struck me as a bit deceptive.

The truth is mainstream news is 100% access journalism. If a reporter wants to get stories handed to them – and that is how all news is done now – they have to play ball with the people making news and their appointed gatekeepers. That is how Harvey Weinstein kept his troubles out of the news for decades. His people would give reporters gossip on celebrities so they would not spill the beans on Harv and his love for potted plants. A site like Drudge is just as beholden to that system as any other news site.

The thing with Drudge though, is he made his bones playing all sides of the street. He was willing to promote anything that was newsworthy. That meant that the Prog media was willing to dish him inside stuff on their own people. The Bezos Blog and Carlos Slim Times love it when Drudge links to them. He sends tens of millions of eyeballs to any site he links to, even if it is a side link. As a valuable promoter, in theory, he is getting all sides sending him tips on politics, current events and the happenings in Washington.

I am starting to wonder if that is still the case. In the last election, he was not pro-Trump. For a tabloid guy, Trump should have been manna from heaven. Instead, he tilted toward the company line about Trump. Every time the RNC howled about how Trump violated some sacred taboo, Drudge was out there with fake news stories about how the end of the Trump campaign was near. It got to be a running joke in my office. Every time Drudge had stories about how Trump went to far, you knew Trump’s polls had ticked up again.

Maybe it was a coincidence, but two elections in a row and Drudge was out pitching the RNC line. It is almost as if someone inside the RNC is feeding Team Drudge the narrative now. That is very obvious in the Roy Moore flap. From the start it looked like a Mitch McConnell hit job. That is mostly because it was so ham-fisted. McConnell is not head of the Stupid Party because he is a brilliant tactician. Yet, Drudge was posting links to all the RNC sourced stories, in a way that started to look choreographed.

The topper was the fake poll leaked by the RNC and the Gloria Allred stuff. The poll was laughable. Even Democrats snickered at it. Yet Drudge had it up on his site in red for two days. Then the Allred hoax collapsed and he had nothing on it. In fact, now that Franken is the top story and it is clear the hit on Moore backfired, Drudge has suddenly forgotten the Alabama senate race. This comes as the Republicans are now hiding under their desks, wondering when the harpies will be coming for them over a sex scandal.

Now, it has to be mentioned that Drudge is a homosexual. He is also one of the fussy sorts of gays, like Lindsey Graham, who are attracted to gentry conservatism. A southern firebrand or someone opposed to homosexual activism is going to come in for criticism by Drudge. His coverage of the South and Christians has always reflected his homosexualist sensibilities. A guy like Roy Moore, who is overtly Christian and vocally opposed to the normalization of homosexuals, is not going to be popular at the bathhouse.

Even so, in the age of access journalism, succumbing to temptation is to be expected. I have written before about how access journalism has turned sports reporting into company public relations departments. The same thing has happened to mass media. This is most obvious when mass media tries to cover the alt-right. The “reporters” now working in mass media do not know the basics of news reporting. That article on Anglin is embarrassingly written and riddled with easily checked factual errors. It is bad reporting.

Modern media people are stenographers with a social media strategy. They do not know how to do traditional news reporting. Some are story tellers who leave gaps in their tale to place some cherry picked quotes, while others just wait for someone to hand them a story they can type up for their employer. It is most obvious in sports reporting, but it is true all over. There is no upside to being curious or inquisitive. That may be what has happened with Drudge. He has a good gig so he plays ball with the “news makers” now.

A Rambling Car Shopping Post

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I have been looking at new cars for a year or so. I started thinking about getting a new car a few years ago, when I realized I was getting to the age where owning a sports car might be a now or never proposition. To enjoy a sports car means driving fast in places where you are not supposed to drive fast. That means having the reflexes and risk tolerance to take chances. There really is nothing sadder than seeing an old woman driving a Porsche or some old guy putt-putting down the road in a Corvette.

I have yet to pull the trigger on the car buy. The main reason is I hate the hassle of buying a car. The way cars are sold in America has never worked for me. I do not want to develop a rapport with the car salesman. I do not want him (her) to help me develop a relationship with the car that will tell the world about me. I am not interested in having a self-actualizing experience with a car. I guess I am a weirdo, but I do not think the way I live my life needs to make a statement. I just want to enjoy the time I have.

There is also the fact that I cannot seem to make up my mind. I am not a car guy, in that I do not get into the car culture. A part of owning a sports car is being a part of the social life around owning it. I think a car is, for the most part, a necessary item of life. I want my car to start in the morning, warm up quickly and have a cold air conditioner. I never listen to the radio, but Bluetooth is a nice feature so I can listen to my favorite hate-thinkers on road trips. Otherwise, a car is like the toilet. I only notice it when it does not work.

Still, I feel like I should buy a sports car before I am too geezerly to enjoy it. I have looked at a number of them over the last year. The last sports car I owned was 30 years ago and it was used when I got it. It was fast and fun to drive, but compared to what is on offer today, well, there is no comparison. Modern technology has made affordable sports cars that are vastly better than the most enthusiastic drivers. A modern sports car is not a machine you control. It is a technology platform and the driver is just one part of it.

Something that I did not expect when getting into this is the class issue. I grew up country poor, but I am not country poor now. I have been all over the world and I have been around very worldly people. I retain my working class sensibilities, but I am not going to lie and say I prefer the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. Whether I like it or not, the car I buy will say something about me. Am I a man who prefers an Audi or a guy who thinks a Camaro ZL1 is the right choice? I never had a reason to think about it until now.

Having driven a number of different cars over the last year, I have come to believe that the professional auto journalists are just public relations flacks for the car industry. For instance, I drove a Mustang and a Camaro on the same day. I was in the muscle car mood and they are the two premier options in the category. I read the reviews of them on the popular car sites. I was expecting one model to be refined and the other more brutish, as that is what all of the reviews indicated. Both cars felt pretty much the same.

That is probably the biggest obstacle to me pulling the trigger. There is a weird sameness to all of the new cars. A few weeks after the muscle car testing, I did a day of driving European sports sedans. The sameness of the cars, at least in terms of driving them, is the one memory. I found I had to keep a list of the small differences between, say, an Audi and a BMW, as they were otherwise indistinguishable. There is no quirkiness or originality to set one off from the other. It is like the car makers are all aiming for the same goal.

This sameness is due to the fact the car makers are global companies now. Instead of the British car makers building cars mostly for Brits and the German makers building cars for Germans, car companies are rootless cosmopolitans, making cars for the world. That means they think they need to avoid the quirky, local flavor, as much as possible. It used to be that America cars were utilitarian and made for the open road. European cars were sophisticated and built for tight corners. Now, they all do the same things and look alike.

This sameness extends to how they sell cars. The last time someone tried to re-think the retail sale of cars was when Saturn was rolled out. Their pitch was the “no-haggle” price and a limited set of options. It never really worked as people have been conditioned to haggle over the price of a car. That and they rolled out the no-frills option idea just when technology was allowing everyone to have a bespoke experience buying everything. The “customized experience” is a great sales tool as everyone wants to feel special.

Look at the car dealers today and they all do exactly the same things. Even their website is cookie cutter. Other than some aesthetics, it appears that maybe one or two website companies have built every dealer’s website. That is realistic. There is one main software maker for car dealership software. I no longer recall the name of it, but one software package was used by something like 90% of all new car dealers. It is realistic to think that they or someone else is doing the same thing with the websites.

Despite the uniformity, the other thing that strikes me about the dealership websites is their uselessness as sales tools. I have noticed that the cars on the site, often do not exist on the lot. At the same time, the cars on the lot are often not listed on the site. Dealers are famous for the bait and switch tactic, but this just looks like sloth. Spending time in the dealerships, the vibe I get is that the business remains hostile to technology. They just want to sell cars to the people who walk into the showroom.

As far as the car purchase, I am still weighing my options. I am down to one of the muscle cars or one of the German sports sedans. I have always liked the look of an Audi, but I fear the repair costs. BMW’s are known for sturdiness, but I am told that is not longer true, so maybe a Mercedes. Having driven enough of them, I am sure I would enjoy owning any one of them. But I still cannot get over the thrill of driving that Camaro ZL1. It was like being strapped to a rocket sled. I could get used to that in a hurry.

The Death of Hollywood

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I was listening to sports radio off the internet the other days and I kept hearing ads for the fall television lineup from CBS. The sport station is affiliated with CBS Sports, so they do cross marketing of their content. Like most people, commercials of all kinds are just background noise to me most of the time. Maybe radio ads have some sort of subliminal effect, but my suspicion is they are just a waste of money. I barely listen to the content. Like most people, radio is just background noise for me.

Anyway, I was about to turn off the radio and do something else when they were going through the “great new shows” on CBS. Having dropped television, I stopped to listen to the promos out of curiosity. I cannot remember the last time I followed a network TV show like a sitcom or serial drama. Probably Seinfeld 20 years ago. Anyway, the ad was long and ran through a list of shows, describing each one in exited tones. What was striking is that each sounded more horrible than the next. Here is the list.

I cannot help but notice the number of shows dedicated to defending the realm. Some of the shows could be anything, but twelve are clearly about agents of the state defending the state against the bad people. Most of these are shows about the sorts of people our social media overlords are trying to create on-line. That is, they use their super goodness powers to magically identify the crime-thinker. Rather than having a tough guy doing the hard work of policing the streets, its a dork using brain waves to zap the bad thinkers.

Looking at the other networks, it is a slightly different trend. ABC shows are mostly about unconventional families, non-whites and women. Fox is full of blacks and race mixers, but with a low-brow comedy theme. NBC is heavy on the fire department shows for some reason. Maybe they struck a deal with CBS. Again, these are shows about defending the realm against threats. If you were observing America from another planet, just using television, you would think America is riddle with crime and fire bugs,

As a cord cutter, I have no occasion to see any of these shows, so I could be all wrong about the quality and content. I just know that the only network show I hear mentioned in my daily life is Big Bang Theory. I do hear plenty of people talk about shows they follow on cable or service providers like Amazon and Netflix. Maybe the people I interact with on a daily basis are not the typical network TV viewers, but my guess is the audiences for network shows have shrunk quite a bit over the last decade.

My other hunch, and I may be off base on this, but I suspect these shows are written by women or at least have lots of female writers. Shows like The Good Fight and Madame Secretary are obviously aimed at cat ladies. The latter was clearly an infomercial for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. It is a safe bet they had shows written about how the main character wins the White House, so they could retool the show to be about the wonderfulness of having the first female President. Thank you, Donald Trump.

On the other hand, the apparent crappiness of television shows could simply be a part of the general crappiness of the mass media culture. The movie business is suffering from a season of awfully expensive flops. So much so the whole business model is being called into question. Bad movies are getting yanked from theaters and the theaters are offering incentives to people to watch the bad movies. Maybe it is just a blip, but the big studios are treating this like a sea change in the business. Something big is happening.

Maybe it already happened. The last time “everyone watched” a network show was probably the 90’s with Seinfeld or maybe the Simpsons. When was the last time you heard someone use a pop culture referenced to a sitcom or network drama? What is happening to the movie business, may have happened to network TV and no one noticed because of the cable shows and cord cutting phenomenon. Put another way, the root cause of all of these phenomena may be a change in who runs the media business.

It could also be the radical feminization and politicization of the business, rather than the product. The sexual harassment hysteria gripping both Hollywood and the news entertainment rackets suggest the cat ladies are staging a final takeover. Someone named Mark Halperin is the latest male to be hurled into the void by the ladies. The general awfulness of our mass media could simply be the result of diving off the talent and replacing it with social justice warriors and their crazed enablers.

I watched the HBO series Rome recently. It was on about ten years ago and covered the period from the rise of Julius Caesar to the triumph of Octavian over Antony. It was a big budget affair with lots of well done costumes. The story, on the other hand, was mostly about the catty women and their intrigues. That and overly long sex scenes that were unrealistic and stupid. Feminists love this stuff, which is why every tackle-faced cat lady in America camped out to see the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Gray.

I have argued on and off for a while now that we are at the end of a great cultural cycle. The old culture that was born and flourished in the 20 century is dead. We still have the structures and institutions from that era, but they are husks of themselves. There is no cultural energy to animate them and give them vibrancy. The collapse of Hollywood may be a sign of it. Movies and TV are artifacts of the last century. Like zombies, these institutions shuffle along, searching for brains, but they are finally collapsing into dust.

LA Confidential

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A popular topic of conversation on the Dissident Right is the imagined future the Cloud People have planned for us. The word “Brazilification” gets thrown around a lot. Going by mass media, the future will be populated by hairless, caramel colored mulattoes and Asians. That’s unlikely, but the majority-minority future is inevitable. That means America will be a very different place in another generation. Just look how fast Los Angeles went from being surf city to a sprawling version of Tijuana.

Digging around in Baltimore City arrest data last week, I got curious about what other cities had exposed their arrests data to public download. There’s not a lot of consistency, as this appears to be a new project. My guess is some company has figured out how to game the Federal grant system and they are helping cities upgrade their IT systems with Federal dollars. Anyway, I found a data set from the Los Angeles police department that is pretty big. It is their arrest data going back to 2010.

Los Angeles is a city of 3,884,307 people. Since the start of 2010, the LAPD has made 1,146,393 arrests, which is roughly 450 arrests per day. That’s an interesting figure, given that LA has a relatively low homicide rate of 6.7. Baltimore has a murder rate nine times higher, but an arrest rate just 10% higher than Los Angeles, when adjusting for differences in population. Maybe it is just the nice weather that makes people less inclined to homicide one another. Or, it could be the population mix. Here are the demographics of LA.

Los Angeles not only has a relatively small black population, it has a much larger Asian population than you see in most cities. In fact, Los Angeles is an interesting mix, because it is one of the few majority-minority cities. It’s also a large city so the sample size is very big. A boutique college town with lots of diversity is not going to tell us much about our multicultural future, despite what the Cloud People may think. Here’s the break down of arrest per population group.

The law abiding Asians make up for a lot of black crime when you look at the data. The cool thing about the Los Angeles arrest data is they go further than most cities in identifying the ethnicity of the offender. That’s probably something we will see everywhere as America gets less white. The old way of counting white and non-white only made sense when America was mostly white. In the Cloud People paradise, every group gets a classification in the system. Here’s a break down of Asians into their known groups.

Of course, the fun begins when we start to look at homicide numbers. Here’s the break out of murder related offenses by race

What’s interesting is that Hispanics are not over represented in overall arrest data, compared to their share of the population, but they are over performing in the violent crime area. That’s probably due to the drug trade, but that is a guess. The arrest breakout also helps when trying to parse Hispanic whites from non-Hispanic whites in national crime figures. Of course, the old familiar pattern of black violent crime is present in the LA numbers. Blacks are 10% of the population and 36% of murder related arrests.

Here’s the break out by age.

Here’s the arrest by day. It seems that warmer areas have a flatter curve on this for some reason. Maybe cold weather alters police behavior in some way or maybe criminals prefer mild weather. At some point, once I have a enough data from different regions, I’ll do a degree day calculation on arrests to see if there is a correlation. That would maybe say something about police habits.. Doing the same day for day of the crime would maybe say something about the behavior of criminals. Or maybe not.

One interesting thing in the LA data is the number of old people in the arrest data. There are 48 arrest records for nonagenarians. Two were homicides, which is incredible. Even more amazing is 15 arrests were for drunkenness. Maybe this is not so odd, as alcohol related offenses are the third most common arrest code in the system. Drugs are number two with Miscellaneous being the top reason to arrest someone. This is a pattern I saw in the Baltimore data. The arrests codes are not well maintained or enforced.

Here is a break down of arrest codes.

What becomes clear when looking at the Los Angeles crime data is that de facto segregation is a fact of life in a majority minority city. When you break it out by race and area, you don’t have to know a thing about LA to see the pattern. The other thing is Hispanics bring elevated levels of crime, but not the rates you see with black. It’s one reason the Cloud People like Hispanic migration. They get all the benefit of a servant population, without the headaches that come with Africans.

The other interesting thing about Los Angeles is that it is majority-minority, but whites control the political system. Look at the city council. It’s mighty white for a place with just a 30% white population. The truth is, Hispanics are not a group with a real identity. That’s just a made up thing by Progs. Mexicans from the north have little in common with Guatemalans or even Mexicans from the south. This makes forming a unified coalition that can punch commensurate with its weight nearly impossible.

That’s another reason the Cloud People have no fear of migration. So far, it has not cut into their authority. If anything, it makes it easier for them to deal with blacks and troublesome whites. Progs are diluting black influence in their coalition with Hispanics and they are replacing the white working class with them. The Hispanic laboring class makes fewer demands and is far less organized. They may not be reliable voters, but they are cheap voters, relative to working class whites. That’s the way it works for now.

Suicidal Prog Boomers

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Whenever there is a man-made mass casualty event, to use the term of art, there are a finite number of narratives. There is political terrorism, lone crazy guy, disaffected youth, political crazies, religious crazies and finally, the conspiracy. The 9/11 attacks were well planned political terrorism, while the Orlando gay club shootings were just a religious crazy. Columbine and the black church shooting were the work of disaffected youth. The Connecticut school shooting was an example of a nut getting loose with a gun.

One interesting thing about the recent political crazies is the perpetrators have been acting in defense of the establishment. The BLM murders were blacks motivated by President Obama to kill whites and cops. The guy who shot Congressman Scalise was a Bernie Bro. The knife wielding crazy out west was a Bernie Bro too. Even the hoaxes are done by people who are trying to defend the status quo against dissent. The last anti-government act by political crazies was the Federal building in Oklahoma.

The other interesting thing is that the stuff getting called terrorism is almost always done by crackpots and lunatics, using religion or politics as an excuse. The well organized terror attack by competent political actors is rare and increasingly rare. The West suffered more from this sort of terrorism in the 60’s and 70’s than today. The so-called “lone wolf” stuff the authorities worry about is always a lunatic getting into Islam or Progressive politics, then deciding to start killing people for the cause.

Another thing worth noting is that after Columbine, we were told by experts that this was the coming trend. Disaffected white youth would be going nuts and shooting up public places. That never happened. Shootings at schools tend to be adults and those adults tend to be known lunatics. The Columbine style event never became a trend. The closest we got was Dylan Roof. It is an example of how the people running the media have a ready supply of ways to blame white men for everything.

The thing about all of our recent massacres is the narrative was quickly revealed, even with the media trying hard to lie about it. A Muslim nutter goes crazy and the media will write endlessly about how the motive is unknown, but the truth gets out pretty quick. The same is true of the random lunatic. In all of these cases, we quickly learn that the perp was under medical care and had a long history of serious mental illness. The political crazies like the BLM guys make their reasons known on Facebook and Twitter.

That is what makes the Vegas shooting interesting. This is an outlier case in many ways, but the fact that no one seems to know why he did it is the biggest clue. This is a guy with no social media presence. In this age, which is exceedingly rare for anyone his age. For political or religious nuts, it is an impossibility. That is the thing about these events. They are almost always the denouement to a cycle of madness. The shooter becomes increasingly deranged and then finally moves to do something big.

Similarly, political terrorism is salient only when the reason is made public. The IRA took credit for every single bombing, even some they may not have committed, in order to get their message attached to the news of the bombing. It is why ISIS, and before them Al-Qaeda, took credit for every death on earth. One of the truths about most of the stuff reported as Islamic terrorism, is that it is just random lunatics who know Arabic. They find a reason to go crazy and attack the infidel on-line and then act on it.

What we have here is a guy who was financially successful, old and boring. The weirdest thing about him, beside the fact he is a mass murderer, is that his brother appears to be nutty as a fruitcake. Otherwise, the guy is a semi-retired boomer, spending his days playing video poker at a local watering hole and tending to his real estate investments. If not for his corpse at the scene, this guy would be on no one’s list of suspects. Maybe there is much more to the story, but for now, this guy is the extremist of extreme outliers.

The one thing we know so far is the guy was a careful planner. He apparently had his wits together enough to spend months planning his work and working his plan. He studied up on firearms, learned about shooting from an elevated position at a distance. The police found notes he made calculating drop and distance so he could increase is killing rate while shooting into the crowd. This is a guy who spent a long time thinking about this and planning for the right event on which to unleash his attack.

The other thing we do know is he decided to kill white people. Even taking what the media reports at face value, this guy spent all of his planning time in order to kill white people. If he had shot up a hip-hop show, one that did not shoot itself up, everyone would have made the connection right away. There are few places as white and middle American as an outdoor country show. White people go to these things to celebrate being a honky with fellow honkies. They are one of the few black-free zones in America.

The conspiracy theorists will run wild with this, but the real story behind this thing may simply be that it is another disaffected Prog Boomer. James Thomas Hodgkinson, the guy who shot Congressman Scalise, was a 66-year old Bernie Bro. Stephen Paddock was a 64-year old, who ticks many of the same boxes. His brother looks like the sort of guy who spends his days listening to NPR and ranting about the Republicans. Given the way the media tried to hide the motive of Hodgkinson, it is reasonable to think this is similar.

The news was full of cranks and quacks after Columbine, telling us that disaffected young white males were going violently crazy. That never happened because young people are very rarely so cynical about their future that they become suicidal. Old people, on the other hand, have lots of reason to fear the future. They not only face the grim reality of the actuarial tables, but the grim reality of present failures. For old Bernie Bros, these are the worst of times. Maybe the future of mass shootings is the suicidal Prog Boomers.

TV And The Cloud People

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The other day, Tucker Carlson told someone that Trump trusts television more than he trusts the pollsters, when it comes to judging the public mood. Having spent years working in TV, Trump not only knows a lot about it, but he thinks the good TV people know more about public tastes than the political professionals. The political class, of course, roared in laughter. They think Trump is a rube, of course, but they are also sure they know more about the Dirt People than the Dirt People know about themselves.

This is another case where Trump’s common sense serves him well. The people who have long careers in television all have something in common. They make it their first priority to give the public what they want. Whatever political or personal agendas they have are secondary to putting on a good show. Unlike a pollster or political operator, the guy pitching TV shows has skin in the game. He has to be good at gauging public attitudes or else the show flops. The pollsters never suffer for being wrong.

The thing is though, the TV shows also tell us, the Dirt People, something about the people who rule over us. Hollywood is, after all, the class of people in American, whose duty it is to sing the praises of our rulers. It is also their job to sell the public on the official cultural agenda. Whatever fads or social issues are being pushed by our ruling class, will be praised in our TV shows and movies. It is why all of our action heroes are barren cat ladies now. It is why commercials are now full of race mixing.

On rare occasions, the people making this stuff reveal things about themselves and about the ruling class in general. Someone recommended the series House of Cards to me the other day, so I have been watching a few episodes a night over the last week. As far as this stuff goes, it is not as good as I would have expected. The chattering classes swooned over it when it came out, but it is not in the same league as a show like Breaking Bad. Still, it is not terrible and it is easy to see why people would enjoy it.

Usually, political dramas are terrible because the makers are more concerned with selling a political agenda. The shows are just thinly veiled political ads for the Democrat Party and various Progressive agenda items. That means lots of shows about abortion or sexually confused people being roughed up by the honky. House of Cards, at least so far, avoids that stuff and sticks to the intrigues of the main characters. People, especially women, like watching that sort of thing.

The fascinating thing is that is the politicians are portrayed as true masters of the universe. Everyone is portrayed as shrewd political operators. The main character would make Machiavelli blush. Usually, Hollywood portrays politicians as evil and stupid or sincere and naïve. House of Cards is a one long celebration of the genius and cleverness of the political class. It is not the issues they champion that makes them wonderful. It is their nature. They are simply better than us.

That is made clear in how the politicians in the show deal with Dirt People and the news media characters. The Dirt People are all dumb and helpless without government. The main character solicits a rib joint in the first season. Once this gets out, the rib joint gets famous, but the inherent defects in the proprietor and his Dirt People habits, lead him to failure, as he inevitably does stupid Dirt Man things, like try to help his son. The main character is forced to cut him loose and let him slide back into the muck.

The portrayal of the news media is the most interesting. On the other hand, they are universally portrayed as loathsome clingers, who serve only to drag down the Cloud People. The female reporters are whores, who will bang anyone for a story. The males are feckless and stupid. The one exception thus far in the show is the owner if a newspaper that is supposed to be the Washington Post. The owner of it is a Katherine Graham like Cloud Person, but her people are all loathsome Dirt People.

This is the most interesting part of the show thus far. I am into season two now. The main character has murdered one reporter, had one framed for a serious crime and scared another off to the hinterlands. He also has engineered the termination of a big shot editor at the Washington Post. None of this treated as a big deal. These news media types are so low on the food chain in the mind’s of the writers, which throwing one of them in front of a speeding train is no big deal. Even Trump does not hate the media that much

It is easy to overstate these things, but House of Cards is one rare example of the Hollywood people revealing things about themselves and their masters. It may be the result of Netflix producing it, rather than a Hollywood shop. For generations, the people making TV shows have stuck to the script when it comes to the class structure in America. Alternatively, this was deliberate. The makers wanted to flatter the political class by telling them things they tell themselves. The result is a window into the political class.

The Provacateur

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Way back in the olden thymes, there was a guy calling himself Ken Kesey. He is famous with Baby Boomers for having led the Merry Pranksters, a group of hippies and degenerates, who scandalized American society in the 1960’s. He and his crew drove a psychedelic school bus across country, hosting parties and handing out LSD. Tom Wolfe wrote about their early escapades in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Most people no longer recall that Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

That last fact is important. The movie version of his book is a classic that transcends generations. The movie was released 42 years ago and people still reference it today, even when they do not know it. It is like The Godfather or Gone with The Wind. Despite its status, Kesey is best remembered for a bus trip a half century ago. That is because his provocative hijinks came to represent a key element of the counter-culture movement we associate with the 1960’s and the baby Boomer culture that arose from it.

The provocateur has always had a role in human affairs. The court jester, in many respects, was the formalization of this role. The jester was the one person who could mock public piety – to a point. Eventually, the role of the formal jester was replaced by theater and then comedians and writers. The internet provocateur is an extension of this, and to some degree a revival of the classic jester. Kesey was jester for his age. Today, an Andrew Anglin is the jester of the modern information age.

For those unfamiliar with Anglin, he is the guy behind the website The Daily Stormer, which has been shutdown on numerous occasions. Whether or not it was actually shut down by his registrar is hard to know. If it was shut down because it was outlandishly offensive, or he cooked up the story as a prank, is not important. Whether it was a provocation or a prank, it has put the spotlight on the very real fact that on-line speech is now controlled by an oligopoly.

That is precisely the role of the provocateur. By breaking every conceivable taboo, Anglin is forcing a debate on the topic of speech. How much speech will be permitted and who will set and enforce the limits are fundamental questions that determine the arc of a society. In America, it has long been understood that the limits are immediate public safety and they are set after long public deliberation and due process. Everyone is taught the famous line about burning theaters for that reason.

Americans have also just assumed that free expression is too sacred that no one would dare violate it, but that is not where we find ourselves today. The people in charge believe they have found a loophole. They have outsourced policing speech to private companies, who can claim to be enforcing terms of service as private companies. Under the current arrangements, FaceBorg can ban any mention of the country Niger, even though it is perfectly legal to yell “Niger!” in a crowded theater.

That is the value of an Andrew Anglin. Yes, his Nazi routine is troubling and his followers on-line are embarrassing to those involved in politics. This was true of hippies and the Merry Pranksters too. Read a guy like David Horowitz and you will learn that people in the New Left worried greatly about the loose cannons and provocateurs. In the end they figured out it was best to just let those guys do their thing and not comment on the acts but focus on the larger moral issues they raised.

That is how a guy like Andrew Anglin should be treated. You do not want to be seen standing next to him at a public event, but you do want to be seen supporting his right to attend public events. You do not want to be paling around with him on-line or posting links to his stuff, but you do want to be the guy defending his right to be a Nazi asshole on the internet. When his antics threaten your assets, you want to be the guy who crushes him like a bug. The jester must always serve at the pleasure of the king.

That is what some of the important figures in this thing have to learn. Anglin causing trouble on Gab, for example, is fine up to the point where he puts the enterprise in jeopardy. At that point, the owner needs to quietly step on him. Similarly, alt-right big shots would be wise to comment about Anglin and his antics, but not get in bed with him. Anglin is a pyromaniac who can just as easily burn down your house as someone else’s house, so you do not invite him to stay in your basement, where you keep the flammables.

The thing to remember is provocateurs and jesters are important tools in modern political discourse. The key to victory is to destroy the other side’s moral authority. The most effective way to do that is to mock their piety and taunt them into revealing the face behind the mask they present to the public. When someone loses their marbles over being mocked by an Andrew Anglin, they inevitably say and do things that reduce their status in the eyes of the public. Do not be that guy and do not be the guy standing next to Anglin.

Diary: September 2017

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The end of summer bums out a lot of people, but I look forward to it. I really do not like summer very much. I am an Ice Person, which means I am built for a climate where the civilized people build civilized things. Let the savages have their tropical weather, where they can wriggle around as their barbarian nature instructs them. I would prefer it if the temperature never got much above 70° American. If that means cold snowy winters, so be it. I like snow and cold. I am an Ice Person…

The podcast is going better than expected. I have been fiddling around with different things, seeing what works for me. One thing that seems clear is YouTube is a waste of my time. I get very few listeners via that platform and there is no reason for them to listen there versus this site. I think I will just drop YouTube entirely once I sort out how to post the whole podcast as parts on the site here. That is not a technical hurdle, more of a lazy man hurdle. I just need to commit the time to doing it….

The interesting thing I have learned about YouTube is that it is just an elaborate skimming operation. They have an algorithm for checking if you are uploading content that is owned by another. That means if I use a Willie Nelson song in my podcast, I get a notice that the copyright holder has laid claim to my material. That means YouTube gets to keep the ad revenue from my upload, presumably to give it to the copyright holder, who has made the claim. There is, of course, a dispute mechanism.

The first thing that is clear is a clip shorter than 20 seconds does not trigger the YouTube copyright algorithm. I tested this. The other thing is the notice that the “owner” of the copyrighted material has made a claim is a lie. YouTube is just pattern matching against a database. The real owner has no idea that their material is being used by another person on YouTube. What this most likely means, given the theft culture of Big Tech, is that YouTube is using this to steal from the owner as well as the uploader.

“A dog that will bring a bone will carry a bone” is an old time expression to mean that a person who will steal for you will steal from you. That is true of Google. They steal from the people who use their services and they (most likely) steal from the people on whose behalf they are stealing. Their fraudulent traffic numbers scandal is probably the tip of the iceberg. Google is based on a theft culture. That means they will steal from everyone, including their employees and potential employees…

As far as listener numbers, each week the numbers go up by about 10% versus the previous week. Depending upon who you talk to, the goal in the first year is to get to between three and five thousand listeners. That is the base. Then, in fits and starts, you see the numbers go up quickly. That is how it went with this blog. I was at those numbers for a while and then traffic started to leap each month. Assuming that is true with podcasts, I am ahead of schedule. I thank everyone for listening and recommending…

The site had record August numbers. Historically, July is the slowest for traffic and it was the slowest month this year, but well above 2016. August traffic took off, probably due to the Prog Loony Outbreak after Charlottesville. Traffic was ~30% higher in August 2017 versus August 2016. I seem to be getting famous so I am getting a lot of “alt-curious” people visiting for the first time. I have gotten twenty-five e-mails in August from first time readers happy to have found a home. It is good to keep Hell stocked with souls.

As to the real numbers, August had 90,000 unique readers versus 67,000 for the same period last year. It is not an all-time high, but July and August are the slowest months for web traffic. Strangely, 1.6 million pages were served up, which is a record. Sailer says he gets a million page views a month and I know he has more readers than me, so maybe page views is not a useful metric. It probably depends upon how your site is constructed and how often you post. Regardless, the site gets more popular each month….

I have been mulling a rework of the site’s look and feel. The main reason is to keep it fresh, but I am also thinking about how to curate the podcast here, rather than on Spreaker. I am also thinking about doing some video on some empirical topics like race, crime and demographics. YouTube is a terrible company, so I will want to host the videos on my server. No, I will not be making an appearance. I have a face for radio. I am thinking about presentation type videos. If anyone has a suggestion for topics, I am all ears…

The interesting thing I have seen looking through the site stats is that DuckDuckGo is becoming one of the more common referrers to the site. For those unfamiliar with DuckDuckGo, it is a search engine. I have started using it because it is better than Google. For a while now, I have noticed that Google search results are increasingly erratic and I have to use their advanced features to find things. That and the revelation Google is run by lunatics seems to have pushed people to seek out alternatives.

Along the same lines, there is a search machine called Qwant. It is especially useful for esoteric searches, because it vomits up everything. There is a lot more to it and I have yet to explore it fully, but if you want another option for searching, there is that. I have also started playing around with Opera’s new browser called Neon. It is a major re-think of the browser. I am not sure I like it, but Opera has been on the cutting edge when it comes to privacy so maybe they are blazing a trail with this thing.

The fact is, alt-tech is mostly vaporware at this stage, but there is a demand for products and services not made by bloodthirsty lunatics, with no respect for human rights or your privacy. An opportunity invites lots of experimentation. Tech 2.0 looks like it is going to be a rework of existing ideas but based on a traditional customer relationship. That means lots of people trying to figure out how to make that work, while avoiding the bloody hammer of the Robber Barons of Silicon Valley. Let a million flowers bloom…

Thank you to all of my readers, listeners and those who bully their friends and neighbors into visiting the site. It is a long war and we have to support the media that supports u, so use this as an excuse to throw Steve Sailer, VDare and American renaissance a few bucks if you have it. They need it and you need them…

More Devil’s Dictionary

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A couple of months ago this post generated a ton of suggestions. It seems like a worthy project, as our rulers keep producing new words and phrases to fool us. In the fullness of time, someone is going to write a book on how marketing techniques infiltrated the minds of our rulers, like a virus, causing them to increasingly rely on cheap marketing gags to communicate to themselves and the rest of us. The result being a ruling elite that sounds like commercials for laundry soap.

With that in mind, here are some new additions to the list.

Show your support: This is always a demand from a company or organization for you to buy their stuff so they can spend the proceeds on themselves, while taking credit for some good deed. Currently, retail chains are having their cashiers harass customers into giving money to the Red Cross for hurricane relief in Houston. The end result will be a photo-op of the executives posing with the Red Cross, handing them a big check, so they can claim to be supporting the community.

Inclusivity: The rallying cry of modern terrorism. Every organization that is about to be assaulted by tackle-faced social justice warriors gets a committee on inclusivity. This a place where lunatics plot to destroy the organization. Google started one of these and is now in free fall. Node.js is the most recent to be attacked by the ISIS of the West.

Affirming: Lesbians and middle-aged cat ladies are riddled with self-doubt, because they chose a lifestyle that is at odds with human biology. This leads them to create organizations, usually within other organizations, which are designed to tell them that they made the right choice, even if nature says otherwise. Protestant churches have all become affirming as they embrace every anti-Christian lunacy.

Brave: The Progressive religion is built around the concept of the struggle. Prog loonies all imagine themselves as paladins fighting the monster called fascism. Therefore, anyone who sallies forth into the public square to preach the good word is called brave. The irony is that it is safe. Antifa is called brave, while the people they are beating with clubs are called cowards.

That is not who we are: This is one of those phrases that is not intended for the wider audience. It is almost always said by a so-called Conservative in reaction to something normal people are doing. The person saying it is trying to signal to The Hive that they are not associated with the bad thing in question. When Paul Ryan says to his voters, “This is not who we are” he literally means he is not one of the dirt people in his district.

Send a message: This is another code word that people in The Hive use in public, but it is not intended for the public. When a politician talks about “sending a message” he means to signal his virtue to the rest of The Hive. The message to the rest of us, if any, is that the person saying it should probably be hurled into the ocean before she gets us killed.

Problematic: This is a favorite of Prog loonies. It means the speech or act in question could be ruled heretical. The problem is they lack the words to condemn it and an easy escape route to run away from it.

Troubling: This is the same as problematic.

Vibrant: This is a favorite term to mean no white people. A neighborhood is vibrant when it is full of boarded up houses and gang-bangers with pit bulls.

Sustainable: This is one of those words that should be included in the humor section, but the people who coined it have no sense of humor. Anything that is labeled “sustainable’ is always something that is not sustainable. Alternatively, it may be sustainable, like organic farming, but will require a great die off of humans. Whenever you hear this word, assume the person using it fantasizes about putting you in an oven.

Accepted: This is when some outlier or fringe population forces the majority to forgo its own preferences for those of the outlier or fringe population.

Passion: This is what happens to Progressive white women in the modern era. They are suddenly gripped with passion. Like Hitler, whose passion for killing Jews was all consuming, passionate women are obsessed with killing erections. Passionate women are always wildly unattractive and ear-piercingly obnoxious.

Growth: This is always used in economic debates to signal that something is good for rich people. A pro-growth policy is one that allows the rich to hoover up more money from the middle-class. When pundits accuse a politician of promoting polices that will hurt growth, it means the billionaire who owns the pundit is vexed with the politician.

Toxic: Any argument or fact that can be screamed away, because it is obviously true, is called toxic. The users of this word believe that the magic of their incantations will make the dis-confirming thing go away. Normal men being normal in public, for example, is branded as “toxic masculinity.” White people not robbing liquor stores or shooting one another over sneakers is “toxic racism.”

Sharable: This describes something that appears to be free but is used by the true owner to harm others or steal their property. Progs call doxing, for example, a sharable strategy. Tech companies like sharable technology because it means they get to install their spyware on your phone or computer.

Dialogue: This is when a Prog loony screams at you and you sit and take it. You are having a dialogue! If you refuse to put up with the lecture, then you are being divisive and polarizing, which is both troubling and problematic. It means you could be suffering from toxic racism.