Category Archives: Weird Stuff

The 2023 Predictions

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Predictions for the new year are a tradition in the content creation world, but it seems like the tradition is fading. The obvious reason is the zombies in the mass media are no longer capable of independent thought. If your job is to repeat what you are told, making predictions is a very dangerous game. That and you run the risk of accidentally noticing something that is forbidden. Predictions are about trends and noticing those is a high crime these days, so predictions are frowned upon.

The other reason this tradition is fading is America is no longer an optimistic society, so making predictions is a bit grim. Predicting that Americans will reach Mars in the next decade is fun and exciting. Predicting that the economy will continue to crumble due to mass piracy by the ruling class is depressing. Even for those on this side of the divide, looking into the abyss is not a lot of fun. That said, it is a tradition and traditions must be maintained even in the worst of times.

With that in mind, let us get right into it. The economy in Europe will continue to crumble in 2023, with energy concerns reaching critical mass. They stocked up on Russian gas to make it through this winter, but that stock is gone and the replacement will be significantly more expensive going forward. The goofy oil price cap will begin to warp the market, driving prices up in Europe, but down in Asia. This will accelerate the de-industrialization of Europe creating an economic panic by the autumn.

In the U.S., inflation will remain stubbornly high, especially as de-dollarization of the energy markets picks up steam. The Fed will have no choice but to shift from the Arthur Burns strategy to the Paul Volker strategy. Higher energy costs and China’s aggressive currency policies will force the Fed to remove dollars from the system in a far more aggressive fashion than in 2022. Mortgage rates will break the nine percent barrier in the fall as the economy dips into recession…

Cozy TV gets de-platformed from the internet…

On the political front, the prosecutor assigned to investigate Trump hits him with some spurious charges, in order to keep Trump viable. The regime thinks he is their best bet at avoiding a change in figure head. The charges will lack seriousness, thus turning Trump into a martyr for the base. Meanwhile, the Republican leadership rallies around Tim Scott as their anti-Trump option. They think their voters will abandon Trump if the option is a magical black man.

As the economy gets worse, the rumblings about a primary challenge to Biden will grow louder, especially as things in Ukraine fall apart. All of the pundits will swear that Biden will choose to step aside, but instead he will announce that he intends to run for another term, even though he has no idea where he is most of the time. At this point, even the dumbest Democratic voter will start to realize that our elections are just theater and they have no bearing on public policy…

Kanye West files for bankruptcy…

The crypto market will continue to erode as it becomes clear that the novelty has passed and there will not be another rally. The fact is the only use of crypto is to get around government policy. It is simply a way to make real money disappear and then reappear somewhere else without the government knowing about it. Bitcoin will drop below $10,000 by the summer and there will be talk about the entire space returning to its roots as a tool of the underground economy…

I will finish my book…

By the late spring, it becomes clear that the Ukrainian army cannot continue and the West has run out of weapons for them. This will force the Ukrainian army to withdraw from the Donbass. Simultaneously, NATO sends “advisers” into Western Ukraine, under the pretext of stemming the flow of refugees into the rest of Europe. These “advisors” will be mostly Polish military. By autumn, the Poles will be talking about annexing Ukrainian lands that were once part of Poland.

This triggers a crisis in Europe as it will open a long suppressed discussion about the borders drawn after WW2. The Germans will start talking about lands they lost to Poland after the war. The Hungarians will make their own claims in Ukraine. Romania will make is claims on Moldova/Transnistria. Meanwhile, the Balkans will get hot as all of the old claims come to a boil. Meanwhile, the Russians will turn their newly acquired territories into a heavily fortified buffer between West and East.

All of this calls into question the trillions spent on the Military Industrial Complex over the last thirty years. People start to notice that the weapons industry has been charging billions for machines that are largely useless against an opponent that can fight back and impossible to produce in the volumes required of a real conflict. The failure in Ukraine will expose the fact that the American military machine is just another grift in a society based on the greater fool theory…

Musk turns Twitter back over to the censors and moves onto some new hobby…

Joe Biden gives a speech in favor of human sacrifice. This sounds ridiculous, but the coordinated effort by the managerial elite in favor of the mutilation of children is one small step from ritual human sacrifice. Canada is telling people to kill themselves, so that will be in America soon. Put the two together and you can see how turning euthanasia into a new right is the logical end. Given how the ruling class sacralizes their fetishes, logic says they will be promoting human sacrifice soon…

The Alex Jones case runs into an “enterprising” judge who will craft a novel way around the legal protections Jones plans to use to guard his assets. The judge will find a way for the plaintiffs to do a Tom Metzger on Jones, stripping him of all of his assets and the commercial rights to his own name. The Alex Jones show will become the property of the skeevy weirdos suing him. Jones will be made penniless and no one in the mainstream media will question it.

Meanwhile Sam Bankman-Fried will get time served and a small fine for his role in the FTX scheme. This may sound crazy, but our legal system is this corrupt. He and the rest of the perverts that ran the operation will be given a free pass, as long as they keep their mouths shut about who they bribed and for what purpose. Unlike Bernie Madoff, who robbed important people, Bankman mostly robbed Dirt People, so the important people will give him and his friends a pass…

The Oracle of Lagos will become the Oracle of Appalachia…

Happy New Year!

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











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2022 In Review

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Note: For those looking for a direct response to Michael Anton’s unprovoked attack on me can find it behind it behind the green door. I posted it there as having a sub should have value beyond extra content. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

The one sure way to look like a genius when making predictions is to say the upcoming year will make the closing year look relatively calm. The reason is that recency bias works in favor of such a prediction. Everyone thinks now is crazier than the past, because they mostly forgot about how they felt in the past. The other reason it works in this age is things are getting increasingly weird.

That is one I can put in the win column. The theme to last year’s predictions was that things would get crazier and that is objectively true. While I did not specifically call Kanye West becoming America’s leading white nationalist, the mere fact that it happened confirms that we have reached a new level of crazy. We do not live in interesting times. We live in an age of general lunacy.

This cuts both ways. In an age of lunacy, you feel free to make bold improbable predictions about what comes next, because why not? My call on Biden was crazy but having a dementia patient in the White House is crazier still. Why not have a palace coup to remove him and the DMV lady? That turned out to be all wrong as Biden and DMV lady seem to be permanent fixtures now.

I got the international scene wrong as well, mostly because I did not go anywhere near bold enough in my predictions. I always underestimate the lunacy of the neocons, mostly because normal people never fully grasp evil. It turns out to have been a wackier year internationally than I thought was possible. In this regard, 2022 will be remembered as a momentous year for the world.

I also got the midterms wrong, at least partially wrong. I thought I was going out on a limb with that one, but it turned out to be too cautious. I thought demographics and disgust would begin to catch up with the Republicans, but not as quickly as it seems to be happening. Turnout took a hit in 2022 compared to previous midterms and it was almost all on the Republican side of things.

With regards to elections, 2022 may go down as the year when people internalized the wholesale corruption in the system. Among normal people it is now assumed that our elections are rigged. Some take it too far and there are the grifters like Dinesh D’Souza trying to monetize the cynicism, but most normal people now accept that our elections are no longer on the level. That is not a small thing.

Probably the biggest miss for the year was my predictions for myself. I did not escape Lagos and I did not finish my book. It was a year of big changes and those changes threw a wrench in my plans. When you have a tight schedule, change almost always means a deleterious disruption in the work schedule. My early prediction for next year is that I will remain behind on everything.

On the positive side of things, I did get the economics right. I hit the Bitcoin and equities markets calls pretty much on the nose, so to speak. I said Bitcoin would lose 50% of its value and it lost a bit more than that over the year. I was a little aggressive on the stock market, but that was due to de-dollarization globally. Those dollars have to go somewhere so they went into stocks late in the year.

Probably the best call of the year was the continued decline of Conservative Inc. and its media organs. This is something not getting a ton of attention, but official conservatism is on its way to the dustbin of history. When Claremont grandees are referencing dissident writers, you know that behind the scenes there is a great deal of handwringing about what is happening among the Dirt People.

The same can be said for the media as a whole. It is looking like Donald Trump was to the media what the compact disc was for music. People repurchased their music inventory on the new format, which masked the real decline in the market. The same was true of Trump. People paid attention to the media because he was at war with the media, but now that he is gone, interest in mass media has collapsed.

Every year, the biggest misses in the prediction game are the things that happened which no one imagined happening. No one saw Ukraine becoming a global struggle to keep the American empire alive well past its expiry date. Some predicted war in Ukraine and some even thought it would carry on for a while, but no one saw the great proxy war for the survival of the American empire as a result.

Similarly, no one saw the Twitter fiasco coming. Even now, no one is noting the elite war on Elon Musk for his apostacy. They have been attacking the value of his companies in an effort to punish him for his Twitter takeover. Of course, no one thought that an advocate for child molestation would turn out to be their chief censor. No one thought the FBI was integrated into Twitter either.

That may be the biggest miss of 2022. Most American have now learned that there is a secret police in America and they spend most of their time spying on Americans and manipulating what they see and hear. When establishment figures like Victor Davis Hanson are shocked by what has been revealed about the FBI, you know we have turned some important corner in the life of the country.

In the end, it was a strange year. Maybe it will be viewed as a pivotal year or simply part of a pivotal moment that started in 2015 when Trump came down the escalator. The one thing we can be sure about is 2023 will be even stranger than 2022. The trick is in imagining something that seems impossible today, and then think about how it could become normalized by this time next year.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











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Happy Thanksgiving

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Thanksgiving is arguably the greatest American creation, despite being the one thing we have not tried to export. Around the world there are American outposts selling degeneracy of various sorts, along with the supposed ideals of the American empire, but you will never get a sales pitch on Thanksgiving. It speaks to the nature of the current ruling elite that gratitude is not something they think about when trying to change the minds of people abroad.

Regardless, the long holiday that is upon us is special. It is a long weekend of doing little more than giving thanks for what we have as individuals. We do not give thanks to our overlords for anything. We do not give thanks for our stuff. We do not even give thanks for the great fortune of being an American. It is much simpler and more honest that all of that. It is a day to be happy that you are alive, you have friends and family and you are able to enjoy those things.

What makes the holiday better than most is that it is at least a four day weekend and is slowly becoming a weeklong affair. Within living memory most people had to work Friday if they wanted to get paid for Thursday, but that is long gone. Most employers give their people Thursday and Friday off, except retailers, of course. Many offices now close up early on Wednesday. All week offices are light on staff as people use their personal time to extend the holiday.

If we had any sense as a people, we would make the whole week a national holiday, maybe even shutter retail for a few days. Friday is the start of the Christmas shopping season, so giving the retail people a few days off in advance would be the decent thing to do, but our greed heads will never go for it. Big box retailers now force their staff in on Thursday night to get ready for Black Friday. After the revolution, the people doing this will be hanged first.

The funny thing about Thanksgiving is it does not celebrate any of the things that have come to define America. There is no soulless gift giving. Christmas has been turned into an orgy of material self-indulgence. It is reasonable to say that what goes on in this country around Christmas is grotesque. Our other holidays are civic affairs designed to celebrate the government or warmongering. Usually, they are on a Monday so we get a long weekend, but they have no meaning.

Thanksgiving is unique in that it is about you as a person taking time to think about the good things in your life. The big traditional meal with friends and family focuses the mind on those human relationships. Even in these easy times, life is hard, so taking time to count your blessings is a gift you give yourself. Being grateful is one of those odd things that just makes you feel good. Having a long holiday to eat traditional foods and be grateful is an amazing thing we have created.

It is the gratitude part of it that gets to the heart of the current crisis. All around us are people doing nothing but showing their ingratitude. America is filling up with ingrates who do nothing but complain. One can possibly understand the ingratitude of black people, but the endless complaining from new arrivals is maddening. Even worse is seeing useless weirdos freeriding on society complain that the rest of us are not thanking them for being parasites.

Joe Sobran put it best. “The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy.” That is the heart of the matter and probably why we invented Thanksgiving. It is our nature to build and create, which is why we are naturally grateful for what we have. A people who built a great civilization out of nothing have a lot to be thankful for, so having a long holiday to take our time and be grateful makes a lot of sense.

Even now, with all that is going on, we have plenty of reasons to take the next few days to count our blessings. The Good Lord in his wisdom has provided us with enemies who possess none of the qualities we respect. They may have inherited power, but they lack the ability to wield it responsibly. Like men on death row, our betters walk around with an expiry date on them. It is a long struggle, but we know that in the end we will prevail and for that we must be thankful.

Of course, we also have the community of dissidents that is slowly forming up to provide fellowship and support as we struggle though this age. Those of you who were at AmRen last week certainly know what I mean. You come back from such things humbled and grateful, because you have been reminded of how fortunate you are to be alive in this time. To be blessed with a life of struggle, to have a reason to be better each day, is the greatest gift of all.

I want to thank everyone who comes to this site to read what I have written or listen to the Friday shows. Special thanks to the many people who fill up the comments every day with commentary that is often better than my posts. This is one of the best comment sections on the internet. It is something people often say to me. Posting will be light the next few days, but the comment section will be open as always. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone and thank you for all that you do.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











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The Idiocracy

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Note: The Monday Taki post is up and it is related to the topic of the day. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door so if you do not have a subscription, get one. SubscribeStar and Substack.

For most people, travel has always been looked upon as the necessary evil, a thing you get through in order to get somewhere. That week on the beach in Florida during the winter means a day of torment at airports to get there. The trip back is extra miserable because you are tired from having fun all week. Experienced travelers, on the other hand, figure out the system and it becomes a habit of mind. You know how it works so you know how to make it work for you.

Before Covid, the thing I could see was that the system was simply overloaded at various key points. The security system, for example, had broken down. At some airports you would wait over an hour for totally disinterested TSA workers to process you through the system. In Europe, you would hustle from line to line to clear passport control, when the only actual check was a zombified worker looking at the millionth passport that day and waving you along.

Covid cured that by first reducing travel to the absolute minimum and then conditioning people to not want to travel. An overlooked result of the almost two years of stay at home orders is people got used to staying home. In overgrown metro areas like Washington DC, working at home is common. Business travel never bounced back because everyone is used to Zoom sessions now. Now, economic concerns have put a damper on the travel business.

You see this at airports. I have been on the road a a fair bit this year and the one thing I keep seeing is light traffic at airports. There are fewer flights, so they are just as full, but the number of people in the concourse is still below the pre-Covid days. The travel industry claims things are bouncing back, but they lie like everyone else these days, so I trust my lying eyes rather than their lying mouths. This year on my travels I have not run into the volume issues anywhere in the system.

I just returned from Nashville, which is a sprawling metropolis full of strangers from other stranger lands. That is a recipe for a mobbed airport before a holiday. In the old days, the Sunday before Thanksgiving would have been nuts and got increasingly nuts through the week. The reason is all of the newly arrived mountain folk would have headed back to where they belong for the long holiday. Instead, the airport was as quiet as I have seen an airport in ages.

On the other hand, something else is happening. At BWI on Friday I tried to buy a beverage at one of the shops and the non-English speaking clerk just said something that sounded like “no work” to people. The payment system was down, as best I could tell, so she was left to chase away customers. I was reminded of the scene from the movie Idiocracy where the heroes arrive at Costco. The great thing about that scene is you realize the system can stagger on a long time.

On the plane, one of the flight crew sounded like a satirical version of how a waifu would sound if it came to life. The other was a local girl, for sure. Her accent and heavy use of local slang was oddly amusing. There was a third person on the crew who was the greeter at Costco in the above clip. I got the sense that he was in training, but it could simply be that he was not allowed to work unsupervised. He liked tossing packs of snacks at people from a few rows distance.

At Nashville, the crew at the Alamo rental counter was another collection of extras from that frighteningly prophetic movie. There was no line but a mass of people waiting, so I knew right away they were out of cars. The three clerks just stared out into space like they had been smoking weed prior to my arrival. Finally, one acknowledged my existence and waved me over to his station. He silently processed my order and then grunted about the wait and pointed to the mob.

Ninety minutes latter I was handed a rental agreement by another silent type who pointed to the door. He was a tall white guy so I think he was American, but I never saw him speak to anyone, including the weed smoking fellow clerks, so maybe he was a mute or possible an automaton from Europe. They have those now. I then headed through the garage to the rental car area where there was another mob of people waiting for their rental car to arrive.

The local attendant was a black guy and judging by his accent I deduced he was a local guy, rather than an automaton from the very southern Europe area. He realized that his company was screwing these people, so he tried to make up for it by being extra nice and apologetic, suggesting he had a soul and cared about his work. It turns out that the main delayed was they were out of car washers. That was the bottleneck in the system and he said it has been a problem for weeks.

Now, I could see the check in lane. I could see at least a half dozen Alamo workers there doing nothing as there were no cars to check in. Sunday morning is when lots of cars arrive, but Sunday afternoon is when the cars leave for the week. There were, of course, the crew of zombies at the rental counter. No where did I see anyone that would be in charge of anything. What I was experiencing was systemic break down due to a collapse of the smart fraction in the system.

On the return trip I got to the airport quite early. I had booked extra time in the trip back because of what I saw Friday. I was imagining the Alamo crew running TSA and me missing my flight because of a three hour line. Instead, the airport was weirdly quiet, even for a Sunday morning. Having extra time, I asked the Southwest person if I could change to an earlier flight. I had checked on my phone and saw a flight I could get on that arrived in Lagos much earlier than my current flight.

She silently took my ID and stared at the screen for an uncomfortably long time, which did not fill me with confidence. She then said the only thing she could do was put me on standby, so I said no and expected to get my ID back. Instead, she said to me that I was no longer on my original flight. After some back and forth, I learned that she had cancelled my original flight first and then tried to book me on the new flight, without bothering to tell me what she was doing.

What I realized was the woman was not malicious or disinterested, but that she was simply too stupid to perform her job. She was clearly panicked by what she had done as she now had an angry customer in front of her. Since I have a million points with Southwest and belong to their club, I called customer service while standing in front of the woman and explained the deal. They had me hand my phone to the woman who then followed instructions to fix my flight.

I was now booked on the earlier flight and pre-boarded. Because I only use Southwest for domestic travel, I always get the A-group and usually top-10. On this flight I had been checked in as A1, so I guess they thought bumping me up to pre-board was the required compensation for the screwup. I could not help but notice that they then announced that the flight was overbooked and one person would be asked to give up his seat in exchange for a $500 credit.

In Lagos, I learned that my bag had been sent on a separate journey. I expected this given what had happened at the other end. I went to the baggage claim office and was greeted by a local girl listening to very loud hip-hop music. She silently tapped on the screen for twenty minutes and out popped a single sheet of paper with about fifty words of original content. That is right. She needed twenty minutes of concentration to enter my information into the system.

Like everywhere in the system, the thing I noticed was not the low quality of human capital at the front end. That has not changed all that much. Most frontline jobs at an airport are filled with people who show up. The real issue was a near total lack of supervision all along the way. There was no one riding heard on these people to make sure they avoided error. The 21st century has begun and the evolutionary process has changed and is going in the opposite direction.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











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Storytelling

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Imagine you are presented with evidence of some sort, maybe pictures of a crime scene or some sort of accident. You see all of the physical evidence and you are given three stories to explain what you see. Each version is presented by a person who comes into the room to give their theory of the event. What we know about human nature tells us that you will agree with the best storyteller. Even if his story requires some leaps of logic.

Humans have been telling each other stories since we acquired language. Much of our social activity is story telling. When you go to a party, everyone there tells each other stories about their lives, their experiences, current events and so on. Some people are better at storytelling than others. These people tend to get invited to more social events, because they are entertaining and therefore pleasing. Even if they polish the apple a bit, people still like a good storyteller.

This is most obvious in politics. Ronald Reagan was famous for his short, pithy stories he would tell audiences on the stump. Sometimes they were just funny and other times they had a point. In the latter case, that point had something to do with some larger political point he was making. In the former case the story relaxed the audience and made them more open to his pitch. A man who can tell a good story is always someone we feel we can trust, even if we disagree with him.

Storytelling can be a highly effective form of logic. A persuasive storyteller will start with a set of objective facts. These are things that even a skeptical audience will accept as being true. Then the speaker provides a narrative to explain those facts and tie them to some cause, like a person or group of people. The narrative is presented in such a way that it appears to be the simplest and most likely explanation. For the listener, there is not obvious reason to dispute the conclusion.

This is a form of abductive reasoning. The conclusion is not proven in the sense that all other explanations have been eliminated. It is not proven in a scientific sense in that the causes are demonstrated to result in the stated conclusion. There is some doubt that the causal relationship is true, but it seems to be true and there is no obvious proof that it is not true. If the narrative is presented by a persuasive and charismatic speaker, then the listener is disinclined to question the conclusion.

The writer Ben Novak wrote a book explaining how Adolf Hitler was able to use the power of narrative to persuade the German people. For those looking for the short version, Greg Johnson reviews it here. The key to Hitler’s success as a politician was his ability to reframe events in such a way that changed how people viewed those events and the people involved in those events. Hitler changed the way in which people interacted with their world through his speeches.

Getting back to the example of three people trying to explain images from what looks like a crime scene, the reason you will go with “the best explanation” is that your brain has an idea of what the best answer is before you hear the stories. If you hear three dry presentations, then you will pick the one that matches the one in your head. On the other hand, if one is presented by a great storyteller and he takes you on a journey to an entirely new conclusion, your mental model will change.

Take a step back and the three great ideologies of the last century were basically narratives that framed how people experienced politics. The communist narrative was a story of class struggle. The workers versus the capitalists. The liberal democratic narrative was the story of political struggle. The people versus the powerful interests that rule every society. Fascism was the story of national struggle, the people versus the internationalists who run the global economy.

The point of all this is that human beings have evolved to understand the world through a mental framework. We have a conception of how the world works and we process information through that framework. That framework is the product of our upbringing, our experiences and the culture in which we live. It is not a permanent part of our consciousness that forms and remains static. It evolves and therefore it can be altered by new experiences, like a great story from a great speaker.

We see this in the current election cycle. Gavin Newsome, the governor of California, says his party is in trouble because they are “getting crushed on narrative.” It is not the economy or culture; their problem is they have not presented a “compelling alternative narrative” to the Republicans. No one can tell you what the Republican narrative is, but he is sure it must be better. How else can one explain why voters appear to be moving against the Democrats next week?

This incredible op-ed in the Financial Times lays the blame for inflation at the feet of the storytellers, rather than economic policy. You see, corporations are taking advantage of inflation to raise prices higher than necessary. They can do this because “the power of storytelling has conditioned consumers to accept price rises.” You see, “consumers seem to be buying stories that seem to justify price increases, but which really serve as cover for profit margin expansion.”

What those two examples suggest is that the great promoters of liberal democracy think the tenets of liberal democracy are nonsense. The politicians think people are morons who will fall for a good story, rather than vote their interests. The economists think consumers are not swayed by prices but by irrational beliefs. The premise of liberal democracy is that people understand their interests. If given the chance in a democratic system or a market economy, they will express those interests.

In reality, people will go along with that which keeps them in good standing with their fellows, even if it is against their interests. It is why a good storyteller can be so effective in liberal politics. He can get the crowd nodding along. Each member sees those around him agreeing to the pleasing story. Even if the story is clearly against his interests, he will justify nodding along with it. After all, every human brain has a narrative of sacrifice built into it at a young age.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. 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.

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

Managerial Reality

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There is a Hollywood plot where a troubled ventriloquist either begins to think his dummy is real or the dummy has actually come to life. The dummy then begins to direct the ventriloquist to do terrible things like kill people. Another take on this is where actors in some sort of fantasy performance get sucked into what appears to be a real life version of the fantasy world. The underlying premise is that playing make believe for too long causes one to lose his grasp of reality.

There is some truth to this concern for unreality. Extremely rich or famous people often cut themselves off from the world. In the case of the rich guy, it simply becomes a haven from the hassles of the real world. For the famous person it is the one place they are free of the fans. Over time they become increasing detached from reality or overindulge in drugs and alcohol. Howard Hughes is the famous rich guy example, while Elvis and Michael Jackson are famous people examples.

The French Revolution provides a more general example. The king was certainly divorced from reality, while clearly not insane. His actions were rational, based on the rules of the world in which he lived. The same can be said for the aristocracy that was competing with him for power. The trouble is that world was separate from the reality of France at the time. The Ancien Régime was operating in an unreality, based in rules that were quickly being washed away by events.

Of course, the comparison between this age and that age is common on this side of the great divide because of the general weirdness of the managerial class. Normal people, regardless of their income, are concerned with things like rising prices and the dramatic spike in violent crime. Meanwhile, the people running for office are telling you that their penis is imaginary and climate change is our greatest challenge. “Let them eat cake” sounds reasonable in comparison.

What is not well known or at least not discussed in the history books, is if the Ancien Régime invested a lot of time in story telling. That is, did they spend their days spinning tales that confirmed their version of reality? Were there people responsible for telling the important people that the peasants were running out of steam and soon they would fall back in line? Did the official information guy at court tell everyone that the unrest in the countryside was transitory?

It sounds ridiculous but look around the mass media. So much of what passes for the news is just a form of wish-casting. The stories, opinions and analysis are all designed to buck up the ruling class in the face of disconfirmation. When inflation began to rage, they were falling all over themselves to preach the gospel of transitory. It was obviously ridiculous but they wanted to believe it, so everyone in the managerial class put on the transitory face and explained how it was all transitory.

The last two years has been an elaborate game of Covid charades. It seems like a million years ago, but at the start they were claiming the hospitals were overrun and people were dropping dead in the street. None of that was true. In fact, the opposite of that was true with regards to hospitals. We wrecked our medical system because the managerial class believed the scary stories they were telling one another. In retrospect, the whole thing was a deadly and expensive farce.

We are seeing a replay of this with the Ukraine. For close to a year the media has been brewing up one whopper after another about the war. A batch of fake stories are released about Ukrainian babushkas destroying Russian tanks with household products and Western capitals erupt in celebration. According to the storytellers, Russia has been running out of missiles since February. The whole thing looks like a deranged game of make believe to console the managerial class.

This is not a new phenomenon. Way back in the Obama years, the Democrats passed a big spending bill to fund “shovel ready projects.” That was in the winter and by spring they had all the stuff ready for a big party called the summer of recovery. They expected to have Obama roam the countryside, standing in front of construction sites for new bridges while he talked about his great polices. Their narrative said he would be the new FDR, along with the new Lincoln and new Jesus.

They were so sure their stories were true they spent tens of millions on materials for the expected rallies. Things like signs and t-shirts with the “Summer of Recovery” printed on them in Team Obama colors. They were using the slogan into the early summer, despite the reality on the ground. It was as if they thought they could will their preferred version of reality into existence if they just pretended it was happening. The script said it would happen, so it was going to happen.

This has been the pattern for a long time now. Someone in the managerial class creates a pleasing narrative. It catches on and before long everyone is repeating the pleasing narrative in public. Experts are brought in to explain why this pleasing narrative is realty and then other experts are brought in to present proof. It is as if they think that once everyone agrees that the pleasing narrative is reality, then reality has no choice but to submit to the new moral consensus.

Again, Ukraine provides examples. A month ago, the Ukrainians launched a series of counter offensives. The mass media was instantly full of stories about how the Russian army was collapsing and the Ukrainians would soon be in Moscow. Retired generals were brought in to confirm the story. Analysts with funny names wrote columns about how the war has turned decisively against Russia. Everyone was sure it had to be true because they believed it was true.

Getting back to that old Hollywood plot, the managerial class seems to be in a pattern where they create a fantasy and then the fantasy convinces them it is real. Like the ventriloquist who believes his dummy has come to life, the narrative makers seem to be sure their alternative reality is more real than reality. They have come to believe that a good narrative is something like an incantation. If it is repeated enough, the narrative bends reality to fit the plot line of the narrative.

The assumption is that the endless telling of whoppers is to shape public opinion, but that is just a story normal people want to believe. No one in charge gives a tinker’s damn what the people think about anything. There is no evidence that public opinion has any impact on public policy. After the next election, all of those new faces in office will melt away revealing the same old faces behind them. Public opinion will have changed nothing about Washington.

A better reason for the explosion of narrative realty in the managerial class is that this is how the managerial elite controls the system. The people with complicated titles and inscrutable qualifications control the vast leviathan that is the modern managerial state using tales of what lies just over the horizon. The millions in the system, like ants in a colony, response and act accordingly. The leviathan moves in the desired direction with the help of a million administrative hands.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











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Societal Collapse

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Note: The long awaited release of my talk with Greg Hood of American Renaissance has finally arrived. You can listen to it here.

Most people think of societal collapse as something like a zombie apocalypse where everything suddenly stops working. Instead of people turning into brain eating zombies, they stop going to work. The “system” collapses, so everyone just stops doing what they normally do all of a sudden. The next day, people divide up into gangs and begin to guard their turf using what is left of modern weapons. Life quickly returns to a hunter-gatherer existence with modern clothes.

This image of collapse is a powerful one. Google the phrase “United States collapse” or some version of it and you get results going back many years. Most of them start with economics but some start with culture. Right now, the people we call the Left for some reason think America is on the verge of collapse because they cannot force people to nod along with their weird morality. Many normal people think collapse is coming because they see the food bill every week.

Of course, there is a market for taking the contrary view. This is a popular gag for internet characters on what we continue to call the Right. They counter the claims from their fellow anti-leftists with arguments for why the “founding principals” will prevail and avoid societal collapse. Maybe they will point out that the magic of the free market has conquered communism, so it will conquer whatever is happening now. It is a form of strategic gainsaying to get attention.

The thing is societal collapse is a real thing that does happen just as civil wars, revolutions, wars and social upheavals are real things. Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed and we got to watch lots of it on television. When people suddenly realized that the guards were not going to shoot them if they tried to escape to the West, it did not take long before order broke down. Once the process started, there was no way to stop it and the system collapsed.

The thing is it did not happen overnight. The collapse actually started much earlier but people did not notice it. Little things stopped working. For example, people in Hungary began to notice that the border to Austria was not always guarded. Maybe the guards were there and ignored their duty or they just abandoned their post. Over time the border was not much of a border. Similar breakdowns of small systems became common over the course of the 1980’s.

Of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union did not send these societies back to the stone age either. Politics became increasingly chaotic. Law and order broke down to the point where criminal gangs were imposing their will on whole cities, because the police no longer had the ability or desire to stop them. The people got poorer in many small ways, but mostly in the breakdown of trust. They could not rely on the system, so they slowly abandoned it for alternatives.

We do not think of social trust as a part of the poverty equation, but in realty it is the key component of social happiness. High trust societies may not have unlimited consumer goods, but the people trust the system, because they trust one another. This allows for long term planning. Africa will never be rich, despite having massive natural resources, because social trust is near zero. Finland will never be poor because the Finns can count on their fellow Finns to always be Finnish.

Social collapse, like war and revolution, will reflect the material relations of the age because those reflect the resources of society. Revolution in the 18th century was peasants with pitchforks, because that is how you can revolt in an agrarian society operating under feudal rules. In the 19th century revolution was workers hurling homemade bombs and shooting at the authorities, because that is how you can stage a revolt in an industrial urban society.

This is the information age, so revolution will reflect the weapons we choose to use in this age, which will be money and knowledge. Money in all of its forms is a type of information that says things about the general state of affairs. In completely financialized societies like the West, money is the big weapon. It is also other information, like the government hiring clowns and carnies to nudge people in the “right direction” during the Covid panic.

The great tumult in the West over the last decade has been centered on the things that are important in the information age. The rise of a new group of oligarchs was made possible by the technological revolution. Just as agrarian people measured wealth in land and industrial people measured wealth in capital, technological people measure wealth in control of information flows. The reason Mark Zuckerberg is richer than Bill Gates is he controls something more valuable than PC’s.

Societal collapse in the information age will, at least at the beginning, reflect the socioeconomic relations of the age. Trust in what we are told by the media has collapsed, because it is easier to see the lying than in prior ages. In 1985 you could think the New York Times was biased, but predictably so. Today, you cannot trust anything they say because it is false in unpredictable ways. Trust in the media has collapsed because their information is chaotically false.

The slow collapse of trust in our information is spreading. We used to think that the courts were predictable, if not always fair. Poor people might not get the same justice as rich people, but the reason was understood. If you could afford a competent lawyer, he would get the most from the system for you. Today, no one knows what the hell will happen in a courtroom. Alex Jones just got fined a billion dollars because the regime supporters are still salty about the 2016 election.

Of course, trust in government is collapsing not because they do not fix the streets or make the buses run on time. Trust is falling because they lie. It is not about politicians lying, which is expected and predictable. It is the government itself. For example, they appear to be faking key economic data. Their inflation numbers are laughable as anyone who buys food will tell you. They also like to change the meaning of words, which puts an Orwellian spin on the lying.

Getting back to the topic of collapse, what happens in the information age when no one trusts the information? In a world where your bank may close down your account because they claim you hold the wrong opinions; how can you trust them to be straight about anything else? If the government is faking economic data, how can we trust anything else they are doing? When the people responsible for 100% of disinformation claim to be fighting disinformation, who can we trust?

When the Soviet system began to collapse, it was the symbols of its power that first came under pressure. When people stopped fearing the border guard, they slowly stopped fearing the system behind it. The same will be true in this age. When people stop trusting the information that runs this world, they will slowly begin to stop trusting the system behind it. It is at that point the system begins to slowly unravel as alternative trust networks form up to fill the void.

The bottom line is those waiting for collapse are mistaken. It is not a thing that is looming over the horizon. It is a thing that is happening now. Every day there is a new reminder that the system cannot be trusted. Maybe it is ten dollar gas in Germany or skyrocketing food prices in England or demonstrably false claims from the drug makers with regards to the Covid jab. These things chip away at trust in the system and like the game of Jenga, the result is inevitable.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

Food Phobia

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Food plays an important role in every culture. Since culture evolves in a place and that place has certain foods not known in other places, food helps ground the culture in a time and place, which helps ground the people in a time and place. A big part of the answer to the only question that matters – who are we – is the place where the answer was created by our ancestors. It is why our holidays have special foods. They help remind the people of the answer to the big question.

In the West, fear of food is also a big cultural item. For some reason, Western people remain convinced that their food is out to get them. From time to time certain foods have been banned. In pre-modern times the reasons ranged from the superstitious to the ritual, while in modern times “science” is the blame. In this age, we are told every day that something in our diet is trying to kill us. These days, people are often defined by the foods they think are plotting against them.

Fear of food seems to track with belief. The more ideological the person, the more likely they are to be paranoid about food. Vegans and vegetarians are almost always in one of the subcultures on what we call the Left. The exception will be someone who got it into his head that something is bad for his training regimen. Otherwise, when someone tells you they are a vegan, and they almost always tell you that as soon as you meet them, they are telling you their politics.

This may have been true before ideology replaced religion. When he was not busy inventing the triangle, Pythagoras was running a cult. A big part of his cult was the foods that were prohibited. Of course, religions of the book have dietary laws. Jews are not supposed to eat pork or shellfish. For a long time, Catholics were not supposed to eat meat on Friday. Since religion seeks to answer the big question or at least contribute to the answer, it makes sense that it would have food rules.

In this age of disbelief, food fads seem to fill the void for some people. Vegans and vegetarians are the obvious examples. They make a big deal out of their food, as if the consumption of the correct items is a sacrament. Keto people are not far behind in this regard, but they tend to be fascinated with the math of it. A big part of the keto subculture is tracking the macros. Every meal is a math puzzle. Get the numbers right and Andhrímnir will bless the day.

The biggest food fetish by far in this age is the fear of certain foods. Stories like this one in the New York Post are a daily occurrence. Some food gets the stink eye because “science” claims that it is plotting to kill you. In this case, white rice is part of the conspiracy known as heart disease. A billion Chinamen eat rice every day and have relatively low heart disease rates. This obvious fact will be ignored and some people will accept the claim that rice is a killer.

Interestingly, the science of food is riddled with science denialism. Heart disease, for example, is most certainly a genetic issue. This old post from Jayman on the topic is a good explainer on the genetic reality of heart disease. Our health outcomes are probably 98% genetic, but the “food science” people insist that arranging the right items on the dinner plate will magically bring good health. Food science is a good reminder that we are as superstitious as ever.

Of course, admitting that genetics, not diet, is the key driver of human health would be bad for business, so “food science” embraces the blank slate. If the reason people eating a Mediterranean diet have a low incidence of heart disease is due to them being Mediterranean, then you are not selling many cookbooks. On the other hand, if you claim that all people are exactly the same and the differences we see are due to things like food magic, then you can sell a lot of cookbooks.

There is the theological angle as well. The New Religion treats human biodiversity as a heresy, one of the deadly sins, in fact, so we cannot notice that certain people seem to have certain diseases while other people have different diseases. Just as dietary laws are part of all religions, the New Religion has embraced food magic. The rice in your cupboard that is plotting your demise has nothing to do with the rice that seems to like the people of East Asia. Peace be upon you.

The truth is, outside of the extremes and controlling for obvious poisons, food plays little role in your health. What matters is your over all calorie intake and the balance of nutrients you get from the food. If you get enough calories and the right mix of nutrients, you will be as healthy as your code indicates. Eat too much and you get fat. Eat the wrong things and maybe you get scurvy or rickets. Otherwise, your food intake is just not all that important to your health.

In this age, the issue with food is the extremes. The rising incidence of diabetes is driven, in part, by the fatness of people. Demographics play a role as certain people are more prone to both obesity and diabetes¹, so as they grow in number their diseases will grow in proportion. Even so, Americans eat too much and eat far too many calories from carbohydrate laden foods. Stand outside of a Starbucks and you will see fat women waddling out with what look like deserts every morning.

Interestingly, the one thing that is never mentioned by the fear mongers is the vast array of chemicals in prepared foods. It is just assumed they are safe, but we really do not know if long term consumption of sodium nitrate or guar gum has an impact on the human body. Big food is never going to pay anyone to study it and they will never let government look into it. The recent Covid experience should make clear who calls the shots when it comes to public health.

Putting that aside, the rise in claimed food allergies and weird diets is probably linked to the collapse of the culture and local community. It always returns to the answer to the big question – who are we? If you are not allowed to answer in the affirmative, then you are left to answer in the negative. Instead of being what your people eat, so to speak, you are what you fear on the dinner plate. A negative food identity fills the void left by a positive cultural identity.

¹Some people with reading disabilities interpret this to mean obesity is caused solely by genetics, rather than calorie intake. This is an error on your part. Genetics plays a role in everything, including obesity, but it is not the only factor.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

Surviving The War

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There was a time when normal Americans thought about how to survive a nuclear exchange with the Russians. During the Cold War, this seemed like a real prospect, so there was a reason to think about it. Into the 1960’s school kids had to do the hide under the desk thing, which was mostly about conditioning people to accept permanent war, but it conditioned people to the idea of being nuked. How to make it through a nuclear war became something of an industry.

There were two schools of thought on the subject back then. One said that any hint of a nuclear attack by either side would result in a mag dump by both sides. The United States and the Soviet Union were in a prisoner’s dilemma. If either side showed restraint, then they risked the other side striking first and possibly making it impossible to retaliate, so logic said to send all of your missiles first. Both sides accepted this logic which is why a system was put in place to prevent it.

From a survival perspective, such a scenario made the prospects for anyone living through it extremely low. The arsenals at the time were larger than today and the assumption was they could wipe out all life on the planet. The initial blasts would kill most people, but the fallout and nuclear winter would kill the rest. Even if people survived somehow, the numbers would be tiny. There was simply no point in preparing for what would be instant death for almost everyone.

The other school of thought was more optimistic. War would escalate with an initial exchange that might not lead to a mag dump. Even if the will were there to send all the missiles, many people would refuse to push the button. The disruption from the initial strikes would also render communications useless. The example of Vasili Arkhipov seemed like proof that a full scale exchange was unlikely. That meant it was possible to survive a nuclear war if you were prepared.

Today, that last scenario is more plausible. Nuclear arsenals are much smaller than during the Cold War. No one is really sure that the antique systems on which these weapons rely would work under stress. The American ICBM system still relies upon 1970’s technology. The Russian systems are similarly antiquated. The most likely scenario is that the major powers are no longer functional after a nuclear exchange, so lots of people survive the event.

The first step in surviving a nuclear war is to avoid a direct hit. Washington DC will get several direct hits and the initial flash will vaporize most of the population. The shock wave will level most of the city. By now, the Russians and Chinese know to target Northern Virginia, so it will be a saturation bombing. The five percent that survive the initial blast will be radiated and die soon thereafter. Therefore, the first rule of nuke club is to be outside the target zone.

The safe bet is to be away from the coasts. The Rockies or Appalachia are the best bet for making it through the first stage. Denver will be nuked, for sure, but the damage will be contained to that plateau. People in the mountains will escape the flash and the blast, even if Denver takes multiple strikes. The Green Briar will get hit, for old times sake, but most of West Virginia will be spared. There are lots of places to escape the flash and the blast in the mountains.

Once things settle after the final missile strikes, there will be four key things to surviving the aftermath. You will need water, shelter, food and a way to defend yourself from the people who were not prepared. Imagine a land ravaged by mask wearing Covidians and you get the picture. You will have to be prepared to kill a lot of people in order to avoid ending up like them. This means you need to pick a spot that has access to water, a food source and is defendable.

Since a post-nuclear America is going to look like the frontier as far as you are concerned, you are going to need frontier skills. You will need to know how to make a fire, provide yourself basic medical care and know how to hunt and fish. If your location is near a river, then you can initially get by with fishing and water from the river, but you have to boil the water and cook the fish. The ability to make fire without modern items like a lighter or matches is essential.

Once you have sorted the location and provided yourself with the frontier skills required to live in the wild, you need to think about the defense issue. A man alone is easy prey, even to desperate city people roaming the countryside. It would be better to have a tribe that can work together for common defense. That means you either need the skills to create a tribe from who is left or you have to create a tribe now. One way or the other, survival will depend upon community.

This basic framework of preparedness is just scratching the surface, but it does provide the basis for building a survival plan. For example, you will not want modern firearms for defense in the post-nuclear world. Making your own gunpowder for modern ammunition is not realistic. You can make black powder from raw materials. That means the old fashioned muzzleloader is a good weapon to own and master. Of course, older range weapons like spears and bows are an option.

The same applies to tools. Creating your own electric for powering modern tools is possible, but not very practical. If you assume society takes generations to bounce back from the holocaust, then it makes no sense to rely upon modern tools. They will break and you will not be able to fix them. The same would apply to vehicles. Old cars need gasoline and lubricants. Even if you stock those, they will run out eventually and your vehicles become lawn ornaments.

This is why forming communities in advance of the holocaust is critical. You can plan for the two general scenarios. The first scenario is the world steps back to the pre-industrial age and does not bounce back. The other scenario is the people responsible manage to survive and quickly set about recreating the modern world by bringing things like the power grid on-line. Do you want to play a role in that rebuilding or do you want to seek vengeance on them?

Community building in advance lets you wargame these issues. It also makes survival much more likely. No one man can know everything or prepare for everything, so having help increases your odds of survival dramatically. It also provides the means for surviving what comes after the initial devastation. In a post-nuclear world, tribalism will be the key to survival, which means the best tribe wins. Of course, that is also why the world was blown up, but that is a story for another day.

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

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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

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

sa***@mi*********************.com











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