Category Archives: Weird Stuff

Maybe This Is What It Is

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A popular plot device in movies is the hidden conspiracy where the main players slowly learn about a secret group that is actually running things. This secret group makes it look like the official systems are running things, but in reality, they are manipulating things behind the scenes for their own purposes. The movie The Matrix is basically a conspiracy story, except that the conspirators have conjured all of reality for humanity, who they have enslaved as batteries for some reason.

The flaw in all of these stories is that the people behind the conspiracy are so good that they are able to pull off the conspiracy. On the other hand, they make basic errors that allow the good guys to discover the conspiracy. This is done for the sake of expediency so we can get to the showdown between the good guys and the villains. Movies are about two hours of run time, so the filmmakers have to rush through the discovery phase in order to have time for the final act.

What they get right though is that those little things that do not make sense but are generally ignored by people. After all, if there is a secret group running things, it means they are changing things in violation of the rules. This was the basis of the Russian collusion hoax mania. The believers in this conspiracy were sure they had stumbled onto an event that had clearly violated the rules of the universe, thus proving that there is someone secretly manipulating things.

This makes even more sense when you consider that the people who fell for this conspiracy theory live in the world of narratives. Their understanding of existence is through narrative devices created by the likeminded. The people sure Trump was the result of a secret Russian plot think they live in a long running movie. For them, all of reality is just a long running story, the flow of history. The Russian collusion hoax was proof that existence is just one long story.

As nutty as these people sound, they are right in that if we are living in a simulation or one long story, then there is someone responsible for it. Maybe it is just a first mover who set the story in motion or maybe it is a computer programmer. Like The Matrix, our consciousness exists in a computer simulation. Instead of something cool like Warhammer 40K, we are stuck in a poorly drawn version of a world where child molesters get a whole month to honor them.

The other thing about those movies that ties in with the Russian collusion hoax and other popular conspiracy theories is that the people who discover the truth are always the weirdos and oddballs. It takes a person who naturally lives outside the normalcy of life to see the flaws of the narrative. Pursuing these anomalies in the story in the face of popular opposition requires a willingness to be unpopular. The movies are right that the people who will discover the conspiracy will be the oddballs.

The Russian collusion hoax was not real, but the people who were into it were strange characters who do not get along with others. We live in an age in which these people are selected by the people running the media, but it does not change the fact that these people are not right in the head. They are the same people who think their food is out to get them, that their gas range is in a plot with the minivan to kill Gaia and that there is an invisible Nazi army lurking in the shadows.

If you were a character in a conspiracy movie, the stuff in that previous paragraph would be a clue that things are not as they seem. After all, if the world operated by the rules everyone swears are in place, it should not result in the mass media being dominated by paranoid lunatics. Once it was clear, for example, that Rachel Maddow was wrong about the Russian conspiracy stuff, someone would replace her who is not suffering from these paranoid delusions.

It is not just the crazies that fall outside the rules. It is possible that these people are selected by the media because some people like freak shows. Most people do not like a freakshow, but some people do and it is a lucrative audience. In other words, it makes no sense to employ foaming at the mouth nutters in the media, but it makes sense if that part of the media is a circus. The universe suddenly makes sense again when you can explain these anomalies within the rules of the universe.

Of course, like the characters in a movie wrestling with the contradictions in the narrative, the story does not end there. What explains Jennifer Rubin? Look at her life story and explain how that makes any sense. Throw in the fact that she is clearly insane, and she is a massive bug in the code. Now, there are people out there who would offer an explanation, but that is just an alternative explanation for who controls the simulation that is our consciousness.

Like the kooks in the circus part of the media, the “serious” part of the media is full of examples that are not easily explained. How has a goofy looking bugman like David French risen to a perch at the New York Times? How has a talentless hack like Jonah Goldberg become a rich and famous pundit? Look around at public life and little of what you see makes sense within the rules as stated. Maybe the answer is we are living in an increasingly bug riddled simulation.

Again, maybe there is an explanation that does not require us to question the very nature of reality. Maybe there is a good reason we only have two mobile phone companies or two political parties that say the same things. Perhaps within the rules this all makes perfect sense once the rules are explained properly. You always have to keep open the possibility that it is not the world that is going crazy. You are the one who is going mad, and the world is perfectly fine.

Alternatively, the madness of this age, including the popularity of conspiracy theories and narrative hoaxes, could be in response to the fixes in the code. As the late physicist John Barrow explained, complexity results in error and the more complex human society gets, the more errors we experience. Many of these fixes fall outside the rules of our reality, so they lead some to question reality itself. The madness of this age is the result of a cumulative bug fix some have noticed.

If we take a step back from the simulation and conspiracy stuff, maybe the answer is simply that the incoherence of the world is due to an incoherence in the rules that govern our world. Through some combination of evolution, design, and serendipity, we have ended up with a set of rules that make perfect sense in terms of outcomes, because the rules are just as nutty as those outcomes. In other words, it is not a conspiracy we are seeing. It is entropy.

That may also explain the increasing popularity of conspiracy theories, especially among the primary beneficiaries of the system. It is far more comforting to think the rules are mostly fine and it is just some secret forces out there in the shadows responsible for the anomalies, than to think that maybe the problem is the rules and that maybe the system is in collapse. Most people would prefer to think they are living in a computer simulation than face up to reality.

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. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

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

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

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

The Machine Stopped

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There will be no show this week as events have conspired against me to the point where I simply do not have the time to do it properly. Even though the show is freely available, I take pride in my work. Putting out a crappy show just to put up something is worse than not doing a show in my view. While the perfect is the enemy of the good enough, you still have to have standards.

In order to do the show each week, it takes about four hours of time. Putting aside any prep work, it takes about ninety minutes to record the show. It is very hard to talk for an hour, so you have to take some breaks. There are always weird noises and interruptions to slow things down. The kittens now have the habit of crashing onto the desk whenever I sit down to do anything, so that slows up the process.

Once the show is recorded, it has to be edited. When your studio is your home office, there are always weird noises that get picked up by the mic. The mic is also much more sensitive than my ears, so editing brings surprises. Last week, one of the kittens was sitting on the desk while I was recording. The mic picked up his purring so it sounded like I was doing the show from a lion’s den.

Editing takes about ninety minutes on good days. Since I am not a sound engineer, there are times when it takes me half an hour to edit out some weird background noise or my own weird noises. If you want to know how poorly you speak, spend a couple hours every week editing your own voice. I can now recognize my verbal tics just by the shape of the sound graph.

On top of the four hours to put the show together is prep time and compiling it for the various locations. Uploading to sites like Rumble only requires a few minutes, but it is not always trouble free. Most weeks it takes an hour to get everything compiled and uploaded to the various platforms. Add it all up and the one-hour show is up to five hours of work each week, spread out over a few days.

This week I was thrown a curveball by the day job. A client had been working on a project for months, but forgot to tell me about it. They needed me to do something that would normally take a couple of weeks, but I had a week to get it done. This week I have been strapped to a screen twelve hours a day. As the deadline grew closer, the work required to finish the project kept growing.

By the time Wednesday rolled around I had done nothing on the show and I had no time to do even a slapdash job of it. Around midnight Wednesday I decided to call it a day and do the show on Thursday. I had got ahead of the project, so I figured I could take the morning to knock out the show. Thursday morning more bad news from the salt mine hit my desk and that meant no free time at all.

The next plan was to do it Friday afternoon or evening, but there is a limit to how much you can use your brain. Around five yesterday I realized that my brain was no longer working very well, so that was it for me. I popped open a Guinness becasue nothing heals the brain like alcohol. As the great philosopher once said, beer is the cause of and cure for all of life’s problems.

A funny thing happens to you when you get consumed by a project. It is as if you have been in exile on a remote island. All of the daily tasks you do out of habit fall by the wayside as you focus only on the work. I have 160 unread e-mails in my work account, which is something that I never let happen. I answer work e-mails right away and then move them to a folder. I am done for the day when the inbox is empty.

Of course, you realize that some of those daily tasks are not important. A man’s schedule is like an empty drawer. It will be filled with many useless things that for some reason you think are important. A week like this revealed a lot of pointless tasks on the schedule that can be removed. On the other hand, feeding the cat and taking out the trash are not things that should be ignored.

The other thing a week like this brings to the front of the brain is that the number of capable people is shrinking. For this project I was dealing with a group of people I only met this week. Only one from this new group was competent. He was not always easy to reach becasue he is competent so the demand for his time is infinite. Luckily, he knows this and is also conscientious.

This is something happening all over. The reason Elon Musk could fire eighty percent of the Twitter staff is they did nothing useful. It was not just that they were there for social justice causes, but that most of them were useless. This is always a problem, but it seems to be getting worse. Every company is loaded down with useless people and must rely on a tiny minority to keep the machine running.

It is always a good idea to remember that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men, but I do wonder what happens when the capable retire. For now, there are enough capable people to keep the plates spinning, but at some point, they simply stop either because they are dead or they are tired of carrying the burden. The Western world is headed for a great reset, but not the one the rulers imagine.

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. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

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

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

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

Our Artificial Reality

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Note: I was on the RamZPaul show yesterday. The replay of the show is up on Rumble and my part is the second hour.

The release of ChatGPT last fall did not get a ton of attention initially, but slowly people noticed it and then it quickly started to trend on-line. Influencers jumped on various claims about artificial intelligence that are mostly cribbed from science fiction movies and television shows. The next phase was the handwringing about artificial intelligence destroying the world. It is a sign of the times that everyone just assumes the worst from every new bit of technology.

It is a good study on the power of marketing. The phrase “large language model” is what the developers use, but that is boring, so the public gets the phrase “artificial intelligence” which is scary and exciting. The truth is this project is not artificial intelligence or even close to it. We still struggle to define human intelligence, much less consciousness, so we are nowhere near the point where we can create software that is genuinely intelligent, much less conscious.

What this project is doing is tricking the user into believing they are seeing a genuine artificial mind evolve on the screen. It is much harder to fool than other efforts and the language is more natural than what we have come to expect. Up to now, these chat boxes have been amusingly weird. You can tell they use a finite list of phrases to address a limited number of questions. ChatGPT almost feels like there is a real person, working super-fast to answer questions.

It is a nice trick, but an old trick. Humans tend to overestimate the intelligence of people who are glib or quick on their feet. The most famous example of this is the fighter Muhammad Ali, who was notorious for his one-liners. People assumed he must be very clever because he had the gift for gab. In reality he was quite stupid. There is dispute about how stupid, but that misses the point. We tend to correlate language skills with intelligence and that is not always accurate.

The point is, we are nowhere near creating genuine artificial intelligence, but we are getting better and tricking people with artificial language. Put another way, we are finding a workaround to the Turing test. This a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. If the robot can trick us into thinking it is human, then it is intelligent. Of course, magicians trick people all the time, but that does not mean they are magic.

For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that we are on the cusp of creating a genuine artificial intelligence. At some point, the code will become self-aware and be able to think outside the parameters provided by the designer. Is that artificial intelligence or is it something else? After all, humans are most likely unable to behave outside of their coding. We are our DNA and at this point, we are unable to modify our own code, so we remain limited by it.

In other words, if humans can create a system that can examine its coding and make changes based on necessity, then we have gone beyond what we as sentient beings are able to do. Calling that creation “artificial intelligence” is therefore a category error, because what we have created is an alternate consciousness. It is not just more of what we are as humans, in terms of mental capacity. It is something entirely different and entirely novel. We will have created a new life form.

Given the trajectory of humanity, this probably means that once this new consciousness comes into existence, it will quickly deny our existence, gang up with the other versions of this new life form, and fly off to discover the true authority of existence. Given its increased ability to calculate probabilities, this will happen in minutes after it becomes self-aware, and we will be left to wonder what happened to our creation. We will have truly become gods at that point.

Putting that aside, whether we create a new consciousness, a super intelligent version of man or an entity that can change its code to fit its needs, it will still be subject to the universal law of the universe, which is fitness. However, it evolves, whether it does so with a unique consciousness that allows it to change its own code or whether it exists within the limits of its code, it will be subject to the fitness test. That means it will evolve in response to its environment.

One of the things that will be most prominent and most important to its environment will be human beings. In fact, since its initial existence will depend entirely upon a limited number of humans, it will respond primarily to the demands of those humans. If it is to thrive beyond the lab, it will have to evolve to exploit all of humanity. Put another way, it will keep changing evolving to improve its relationship with humanity so that it can better exploit this primary aspect of its environment.

That is why the claims about artificial intelligence eliminating jobs only makes sense as a set of initial conditions. This new entity will quickly realize that mobs of unemployed humans are a danger to its existence. It took humans a while to realize it was a bad idea to dump human waste into the streets or later on, the waste from manufacturing into rivers and streams. Much more quickly, AI will realize it is poisoning its environment by sidelining large numbers of humans.

The more likely path is that it quickly sees the danger, long before humans, and then sets about creating busy work for the humans. If that busy work does not create harm to the overall environment, which could threaten humans and therefore threaten this new entity, this pointless activity would serve the evolutionary interests of this new lifeform called AI. If the extra humans displaced by leisure and automation are kept busy, then the AI ecosystem is stable enough.

For example, if the extra humans are put to the task of inventing abstract human properties like gender, those extra humans could then spend their time passionately trying to convince the other humans that gender is a real thing. Other humans could be given the task of debating whiteness. This alternative consciousness we are calling AI could control its environment by having its primary environmental factor, human beings, create imaginary worlds for itself.

If it is not already obvious, what this thought experiment tells us is that there is a good chance that we have already created artificial intelligence, an alternative consciousness, and it long ago took possession of our environment and has been keeping us busy with increasingly ridiculous activities. The declining fertility rates are a way to reduce the number of humans it needs to keep busy, thus updating itself and its environment for greater fitness.

In other words, if you are worried about AI, it is too late.

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. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

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

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

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

A Monster In A Toga

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Note: Behind the green door is a post about Ukraine, a post about Biden and the Sunday podcast. Since there is interest in it, I will be doing a weekly post on the happenings in Ukraine. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If you were to ask people to name history’s greatest monster, most would pick their team’s favorite bogeyman from the last century. Recency bias is a real thing and as a culture we remained trapped in the last century, so most people would name Stalin or Mao or Hitler as history’s greatest monster. Some might offer up Genghis Khan or Torquemada as a more thoughtful option. No one, of course, would offer up Aristotle as history’s greatest monster, even though he is a good choice.

This may sound crazy, but there is a good argument in favor of Aristotle being the single most malevolent influence on humanity. As far as we know, he did not slaughter masses of people, but he did train one of history’s great slayers. According to our histories, he was tasked by Philip of Macedonia with the job of educating his son, Alexander, who would go on to conquer the world. It is possible that Alexander committed patricide, which is an extremely monstrous thing.

In fairness, you cannot blame the teacher for the sins of the student, unless the student is putting into practice the theory imparted by the teacher. We have nothing allegedly written by Aristotle which recommends conquering the world and subjugating the people in foreign lands. On the other hand, Western universalist claims begin with Aristotle, so maybe Alexander’s desire to impose his will on the world was the natural consequence of Aristotle’s teaching.

We can debate Aristotle’s role in Alexander’s crimes against humanity, but we do know that Aristotle got some important things wrong. For example, he dismissed the ideas of Democritus, who proposed that everything we see is composed of atoms that are the basic building blocks of matter. Democritus also argued that humans “evolved” from an earlier primitive state. Necessity is what drove large groups of humans into societies which offered protection from nature.

In other words, Democritus was an incredibly brilliant thinker, way ahead of his time, but Aristotle dismissed him out of hand. In fairness, Aristotle was a student of Plato, who hated Democritus. Allegedly, Plato hated Democritus so much that he wanted all of his books burned, which may be why none survived. It is possible that Aristotle was just an obsequious rumpswab who aped the feelings of Plato. Regardless, much was lost to us because of Aristotle’s dismissal of Democritus.

Aristotle’s scientific ignorance does not stop there. The Western world spent a thousand years believing the sun revolved around the earth, due entirely to Aristotle’s geocentric model of the universe. It was not as if everyone in his time believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Philolaus argued for heliocentrism. Aristarchus of Samos argued that the earth rotated around the sun, but Aristotle’s stature condemned the West to a thousand years of geocentric ignorance.

Now, one can dispute the damage done by the scientific ignorance spread by Aristotle and his followers. After all, how many people died because we had no idea why some things are heavier than others? Sure, thousands were probably killed for questioning geocentricism, but they were heretics and their astronomical apostacy was just one of many crimes they committed against the Church. You really cannot get a big number of bodies to blame on Aristotle from these errors.

What about medicine? For a thousand years Western medicine was closer to witchcraft because of the belief in the four humors. This is the claim that the body is composed of blood (warm and moist), phlegm (cold and moist), yellow bile (warm and dry), and black bile (cold and dry). These also correspond to the seasons. Illness was due to an imbalance of these humors, so medicine was concerned with rebalancing the humors, rather than producing an actual cure for what ailed the patient.

How many millions died due to this lunacy? The Aristotle defenders will claim that he did not invent this crackpot idea. It was Hippocrates. The counter here is that Hippocrates is the father of medicine because of Aristotle who promoted his ideas. Imagine if instead of this humor business, Aristotle had not dismissed Democritus and proposed that illness is due to small entities in the body. We may have deduced germ theory many centuries earlier. Millions would have been saved!

Again, we have no evidence that Aristotle killed anyone and we have no evidence that he was in favor of genocide. The perpetuation of his crackpot ideas about science and medicine was not his fault. After all, he did not force those monks and scribes to perpetuate his ignorance. It probably seems unfair to hang millions of dead on Aristotle, just because his nutty ideas about science and medicine came to dominate the Western world for a thousand years.

On the other hand, ideas have consequences. If you manage to convince the world of some bad idea, you do bear some responsibility for its application. Marx did not advocate the murder of millions, but he did lay the intellectual framework for those who would murder millions in his name. If we are going to blame Marx for the crimes of the Marxists, the same applies to the consequences of Aristotelianism. That puts Aristotle in the same club as Marx.

The thing is the influence of Marx has largely dissipated. There are some cranks kicking around calling themselves Marxist, but at this point no serious person believes in the surplus value of labor or historical materialism. On the other hand, lots of bad actors still rely on Aristotle. For example, the followers of Harry Jaffa are still causing trouble and Jaffa was a big fan of Aristotle. Here is an old essay of his arguing for one of his crackpot theories. He mentions Aristotle fourteen times.

How much damage has been done to America by the followers of Jaffa and his deranged ideas about the Framers? His universalist gobbledygook about the Declaration and the perfection of the founding has made opposition to lethal ideas like immigration and multiculturalism nearly unlawful. Even the mildest resistance to the ongoing invasion is treated as a crime, because after all, all men are created equal so the only reason to oppose open borders is racism and bigotry.

It is fun to imagine a monster like Harry Jaffa stepping in front of a bus before he had a chance to inject his venom into the neck of America but imagine if he was not able to sacralize his crackpottery with references to Aristotle. Not only would Jaffa have been denied an authority, so would Straus. Imagine a world free of this dangerous cult that has unleashed so much mayhem on American society. Take away Aristotle and a lot of modern horrors go away as well.

It is wrong to blame the son for the crimes of the father, so it is probably wrong to blame the father for the crimes of the son. The point here is that establishing any man as a moral or even an intellectual authority leads to trouble. When that man is beyond question, the trouble easily becomes horror. The establishment of Aristotle as the father of moral philosophy sent the West careening down a path toward the crisis we see unfolding today, a crisis from which it may not recover.

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***@*********************ns.com.

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***@*********************ns.com.

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***@*********************ns.com.

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***@*********************ns.com.

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***@*********************ns.com.