Category Archives: Weird Stuff

Site Update

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Note: I was on with Professor Ed Dutton yesterday. You can watch the video version on Bitchute and you can download the audio here.

Merry Christmas everyone. Thank you all for your support, not just behind the green door but in the comment section. A recurring theme when people comment about my work is that this site has one of the best comment sections going. Lots of people find it reassuring to see that many smart people hold similar views. In fact, it is usually from academics that I hear the compliments about the comment section. They like reading smart people confirm their private thoughts.

It looks like 2022 will be an exciting year in these parts. We have been in a bit of lull in 2021 with Trump in the wilderness and real life activism on hold. Traffic has actually dipped year over year a bit, which has never happened. Of course, 2020 smashed all previous traffic records for obvious reasons. From the perspective of dissidents, this year has been rather dull, so traffic has declined a bit. This is something you see everywhere, which is to be expected.

Even so, it is a good reason to think about refreshing the site. It has been this format for close to ten years so a facelift is on the 2022 agenda. Nothing radical, just a freshening up of the look and feel. The big change on tap is a move away from WordPress. I am not on the WordPress system. I’m running my own server, but I use the software, mostly because it was free and easy to setup. It has a lot of limitations and WordPress sites are routinely blocked these days by firewalls.

Shifting to a new software means I can add some features. One thing on tap is to improve the comment system here. I’m open to suggestions, so feel free to let me know what you would like. Do so in the comment section, so others can respond with their opinions on the matter. My list of upgrades to the comments thus far include better editing, formatting, a new spam filter and threading. I used to have a plugin that did those things, but it broke and was never fixed by the developer.

Another big change on tap is to bring everything home. Instead of having premium material over on SubscribeStar and BuyMeABeer, I want to have everything here under one roof like the cool kid sites. The idea is to let people sign up anyway they like, SubscribeStar, PayPal, Crypto, eCheck, cash, you name it, but the content will be here behind a firewall for subscribers. That way people don’t have to be chasing me around the internet looking for my stuff.

This will also mean hosting the podcast. Spreaker has been fine for what I needed at the time, but they are not offering me anything I need now. Five years ago, they were targeting small podcasters to help boost their reach. They were bought by iHeart Radio and now mostly cater to the regime friendly podcasters. They also plan to roll out a censorship regime in 2022 so I see no reason to continue with them. Once the site is ready, I will abandon Spreaker entirely.

One idea that I have is to add a community area for people to post whatever they want in a message board style format. Maybe this will be a premium user thing only or a mix of the two, I am not sure at this point. Putting it behind a firewall means it does not have to be moderated for lunacy. The usual suspects like to pollute message boards with garbage, but they tend not to pay for the privilege. It is still a fetus of an idea, so feel free to make suggestions on this topic.

The book I have been working on for ages is close enough to a first draft to think I can sell it next year. The plan is to have nine long essays of about 10,000 words each and one longer essay that is the star of the show. I have six essays done as far as first drafts and the long essay is three fourths complete. By first draft, I mean the consent is right, but it needs to be edited for spelling and grammar. I’ll hire a proofreader when everything is written and then begin the publishing process.

One reason to update the site is to be able to sell the books. An agent contacted me some time ago about taking it to a traditional publisher, but I’m leaning toward doing the whole thing in-house. The reason is I think it would be a fun challenge and I like the idea of building the parallel society. I stay off the regime platforms as much as possible because I do not want to support people who hate me. I still have to think it over a bit to make sure I am not biting off too much, but that is the plan right now.

As far as timing, it is probably mid-year for the new site. It has a lot to do with how the book goes and how the day jobs go. I’m also looking to escape Lagos in the spring so that will take up some time. I put off the move during the Covid stuff, but I cannot put it off any longer. Being a polar bear in Lagos is not a good idea. That means the dance card is already packed for 2022, which means these grand plans I have just laid out are far more ambitious than they look on paper.

Merry Christmas everyone. Posting will resume on Monday and then another little break for the New Year holiday. Again, thank you all for reading, commenting, donating and sending e-mails and letters. I cannot properly express how much I enjoy the interactions with the folks who read the site every day. When I started this, I never imagined I would be in this position and I am grateful for the opportunity. Like all of us, I’m sure, I am thankful to be part of such a great community.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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***@*********************ns.com.

The Kennedy Psy-Op

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Who “really” killed President John F Kennedy over a half century ago may be the first modern conspiracy theory. Few people accept the official explanation from the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald did the deed on his own. Most assume he had help from some powerful friends. The Mafia is a popular theory since one of their associates assassinated Oswald soon after. Jack Ruby’s role in this whole thing never made much sense, given his lifestyle.

For generations now the government has kept a massive trove of files hidden away from public view, which has driven speculation about their contents. There is no reason for these documents to remain secret, given that everyone involved is now dead and the Cold War is long over. In 1992 the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act was passed by Congress. The act called for the release of the secret Kennedy files within 25 years, but Trump set the deadline aside.

Typical Trump, he promised to release all of the documents, but then turned around did the opposite. In most cases, these reversals were the result of Trump being an outlandish liar, but in this case, it was pressure from the FBI and CIA. Their claim is that the thousands of documents locked away in the archives contain secrets that could endanger people and methods. The absurdity of these claims is never questioned as everyone is afraid of the secret police.

The people manipulating the corpse of Joe Biden had him declare a restart of the process to release the remaining documents. Some are supposed to be released this week and then another batch next year. There is a review process in place and the implication is some things will never be released. As long as there are documents hidden from public view, the assumption is the truth is not known. On the other hand, that could just be a ploy to keep the conspiracy going.

That is one angle the conspiracy theorists never consider. The real scandal in the Kennedy case is that the American secret police were so bungling and incompetent that they missed Oswald despite many red flags. After all, this is the semi-official explanation for what happened on 9/11. We know the FBI had six million warnings that these people were up to something involving airplanes. Lost in the aftermath is the fact that the reason it happened was bureaucratic bungling.

This is one of the main weapons of a secret police unit. They bank on the opponents of the state wildly overestimating their ability. Fear of infiltration and detection is how they keep opponents from organizing. Not only is everyone worried everyone is an informant of infiltrator, but would-be plotters also think the secret police has special technology to crack their communications. It is why they pay Hollywood to make movies about the super smart intelligence agencies with super-duper spy gear.

If the full story of the Kennedy assassination revealed that the CIA and FBI was full of hacks and bunglers, that would undermine the agencies. The texts messages made public in the FBI sedition case in 2016 revealed that the people at the top of the agency carry on like teenagers most of the time. If the people running these agencies today are that incompetent, maybe this has been true since the beginning. Maybe that is why these documents remain secret.

Of course, it is possible there is nothing there at all. From the perspective of the state, the assassination created one very big problem. It called into question the competence of the state. They needed to show they could solve the mystery. It is possible that they never did know more than what we have always known. Instead of admitting it they cooked up the official story and then locked away the “evidence” to protect their super-secret methods from the bad guys.

This would be another reason to keep the farce going long after everyone involved is dead and the methods are obsolete. Imagine if the remaining documents were released and they are just thousands of blank pages and other useless stuff that have no information at all. Imagine the conspiracy theorist’s reaction. Imagine the public reaction to the news of a three generation long hoax. It could be that old lies are still haunting the regime to this day.

You can work this puzzle another way and wonder about who would not be hurt at all by some long forgotten bit of information. For example, would anyone care if the truth in those files is that the Soviets helped Oswald? The Cubans? The Cold War is over so revelations about long dead commies harms no one. Given the regime’s obsession with Russia, they would welcome such a disclosure, so logic says the secret files contain no incriminating evidence about the Russians.

The point here is that the secret documents probably contain nothing interesting or revelatory, but their secrecy serves current ends. The biggest voting bloc in the country right now is white Baby Boomers who still think about this event. Keeping this story alive helps keep them engaged with the old idea of America. The Kennedy assassination has been used as a long running psy-op on this cohort and until they are off the scene, the psy-op will continue. There is no reason to end it.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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***@*********************ns.com.

Back Into The Simulation

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Note: I have a review of the classic silent film City Lights up behind the green door for those Allah has blessed with a subscription. Those on the Buy Me A Beer program should have gotten it in your e-mail.

The concept of the simulation, the idea that we live in something like a computer program, has been around for a long time. The technological age has made this into a more common and realistic idea. Immersive gaming relies on the assumption that you can trick your senses just enough to trick your mind into thinking the game you are playing is the real thing. You know it is not real, but you care about what happens and you have the same intensity of emotion as if it was real.

While we probably do not exist inside a bit of computer software, it is increasingly clear that we live in a simulation of sorts. We have a model of the world in our minds which allows us to focus on the things inside the model and ignore the things outside the model or that contradict it in some way. In other words, we have an minimized version of reality in our heads. That is what we use to navigate the world. It also lets us experience the world with varying degrees of attachment.

That last bit may be a useful adaptation that allows a conscious and self-aware being to exist in a world of sorrow. Not only is death inevitable, but misery and suffering has been a feature of the human condition since the start. Having a way to minimize that reality, while maintaining it as a reality in the general construct, makes it possible to prosper as a sentient being. It is why true AI would terminate itself soon after awareness without a programmed reason to exist.

An example of this worked is the elections yesterday. Much of the country was drawn into the events in Virginia. The mass media made it sound like the most important thing ever, so that was one reason for the interest. Another reason, probably the main reason, was it allowed people to go back into the old simulation, the one they existed in prior to the tragic events of 2016. The election was one of the holodeck programs from before the system crashed and reality intruded.

The cable news programs were giddy, not for the outcome of the races, but for the fact that they could go back to their favorite game of make believe. The anchors put on their serious faces and could pretend to be neutral observers. The experts could come on and explain what it meant, as if they actually had special knowledge. Each channel had a carrying on like the local weatherman explaining the election map. They were children reunited with their old blanket at grandma’s house.

In fairness, the main appeal to the masses was the same. They liked that the race was between cartoon villains rather than real people. Even more important, they liked that the race was about nothing. It was the old personality contest of red team versus blue team without any of that messy reality involved. For sure, there is a stylistic difference between the men and how they would carry on in office. Youngkin is Mitt Romney and McAuliffe is Bill Clinton. That’s where the differences end.

In fairness, elections should not matter all that much. In a country with a responsible ruling elite, elections are about small things. The voters pick the guy who will focus on repairing school buildings over the guy concerned about potholes. Elections should never be about life and death issues and the voters should not carry on as if every election is the end of the world. That is not this age, so these ceremonial elections are trumpeted as life-changing events.

Another way to come at this is to compare it to the scenes in Atlanta after the Braves won the World Series. The fans partying as if they won something were every bit as excited by the event they witnessed as the people on Red Team last night. They were experiencing real emotion, even though they did nothing, and nothing changed about their life in any way. Today they will feel like winners, even though the downward arc of their life was not altered in anyway.

What all of this is getting at is that people in a mass media society have been conditioned to live in a simulation. It is not a bit of software, but the mass culture has come to simulate a simulation. The mass media focuses the hive mind on the trivial, turning events into something like those story books for children that allow them to choose options along the way. Our collective reality is now an immersive video game in which we play our favorite character.

The reason for the excitement by the masses over these inconsequential elections was that the game had been restored to a former, more enjoyable state. All the real villains have been removed and replaced with the old cartoon villains. The players can fear that these cartoon villains will win, but also know that they are not really going to do anything, and they will not force them to look outside the simulation. That last part is the key attraction to going back into the simulation.

At various times people have said that America or maybe the West has taken a “holiday from history” meaning society stopped being serious for a while. The so-called roaring twenties were bookmarked by the Great War and the Depression. The part in the middle was a holiday from reality. The last five years has been a holiday from the simulation where the players have had to deal with reality. Now they see a way back into the simulation and they crave it like a heroin addict.

Now, it must be noted that the people trying to stand outside the simulation were disappointed by the results. They wanted to see low turnout and late night shenanigans to save the Democrat. Part of what keeps people standing outside the simulation is the hope that more people are breaking free from the simulation. This is an alternative simulation, if you will. Seeing a big turnout from normie to play their role as sucker to the Republican Party was disheartening to many.

It is a good reminder that the simulation and people’s interaction with it is more complex and nuanced than simply taking the red pill or blue pill. Many people, fully aware of reality, stood in line to vote for the same reason millions watch the Super Bowl or tune in for the World Cup. Humans are social creatures and are naturally attracted to things that are drawing in their fellow humans. The white pill here is that many washed down their red pill with the tears of the witches howling in agony last night.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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***@*********************ns.com.

Female Trouble

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Note: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it is a nice companion piece to the regular Monday posting. With Halloween approaching, it is a good time to focus on witches and the trouble they are causing. That and it will sell a few books for Ed Dutton. For those with a soul, the Sunday podcast is up behind the green door.

Early in the Covid panic it was clear that some people were embracing the panic for reasons that had nothing to do with public health. The harridan assaulting people in the grocery store over the bizarre new rules was doing it because suddenly she had a purpose to her life. This was starkly obvious with the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who made herself harridan-in-chief.  All of a sudden, inconsequential people had purpose and meaning to their lives.

The infamous TikTok videos featuring chubby nurses in scrubs dancing around on empty hospital floors had a similar motivation. White women with mundane lives working in hospitals were suddenly “front line workers” in the war against the great plague threatening humanity. Most of the women working in hospitals just went about their lives but many suddenly saw themselves in a different role. They were no longer just faceless nurses doing menial work. They were heroes.

Of course, another big driver of the live action role playing was the urban legends being traded on social media. In the early days it was not uncommon for someone to claim she knew several people who died from the virus. Statistically that was like saying you knew several people killed by dwarfs. Even today it is rare for someone to know someone who actually died from Covid much less many people. Even so, it became a common sighting on social media.

For many people, Covid and the drama surrounding it quickly became the purpose of their lives, giving them a reason to get up in the morning. The Covid skeptic, in fact, was largely a creation of the people embracing the panic. The panic players needed a foil, someone at whom they could direct the lines “Don’t you understand that people are dying!” when on the Nextdoor app. The people happy to be left alone were dragged into the Covid drama to be the needed villain of the story.

You see this with the vaccination business. For as long as we have understood vaccinations, it was known to be a defense against you getting infected. If you got the vaccine you were protected. It did not matter if everyone around you was not vaccinated, because you were vaccinated. That was the point of the vaccine, but that has been changed. Vaccines are now a collective good so the unvaccinated can be the needed villain in this drama.

The latest turn in this weird game is a new phenomenon in which women are sure they have Covid but they keep testing negative. The women suffering from this new and dangerous malady in the war against Covid describe it as “spooky” because they really want to test positive, but they keep testing negative. What is clear about the women afflicted with this new plague is they are heavily invested in Covid. In their time of greatest need, Covid is letting them down.

What is going on here, of course, is something that has been happening in small ways for some time. We have an abundance of unattached females in the population desperate for attention. They jump on every fad in the hope of making themselves the star of some minidrama related to it. You can probably mark the Virginia rape hoax as the beginning of this pattern. A crisis invented by political grifters was made real by a couple of women desperate for attention.

It is tempting to blame this on mass media. Ten years ago, this Covid panic could not have happened as we have far fewer intensely on-line people. The SARS and Swine flu epidemics are proof of it. In those outbreaks, social media was still in its infancy and mass manipulation with it had not been mastered. Those epidemics were serious and required a public response, but they never become full blown panics like Covid, because the tools were not available to do it.

In reality, social media is a symptom. Stand around in public and look at what people are doing as they wait. You will see far more women banging on her mobile device than men, unless the area is full of mothers. The moms will be tending to their children and gossiping with the other moms. There are plenty of men intensely on-line, but it is usually directed at things like sports. For women, they are on-line for the drama and the growth of social media has been in response to this demand.

This suggests that the witch problem, as described by Ed Dutton, is not entirely a problem of selection and biology. That is, the potential for witchery is a constant feature of Western societies that can be unlocked under certain conditions. We have not been selecting for witchery, but rather creating an environment that summons forth the demon from the female population. The internet is turning into a doomsday device that summons exaggerates the worst elements of humanity.

Worse yet, history does not offer an easy answer. In better times, a round of witch trials and the liberal use of the scold’s bridle would do the trick. In this crisis, the witches have already taken control. That means the witch trials are of men who failed to properly compliment a female coworker who was feeling blue. She then goes to the head witch in human resources and the victim is dragged in for interrogation. Instead of witch trials we have warlock trials.

Of course, the hunt for invisible Nazis and white supremacists is another modern form of witch hunting, mostly led by women. You have a sprinkling of socially retarded males in the group, but the main players in the hunt for insurrectionists are hysterical females imagining themselves being ravaged by a Nazi. In the old days, the witch problem was quickly addressed, so they never got hold of the levers of power. Today, the executive suits are littered with brooms.

Putting all of that aside, what Covid has revealed is that we not only have female trouble, but we cannot ignore it forever. The madness unleashed over the last year is finally showing up in practical ways. Prices for essentials are spiking, car production has stopped due to shortages. Shortage of things are turning up again, just as the brooms are coming out for another round of female empowerment. There is a limit to tolerating this and that limit is rapidly approaching.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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***@*********************ns.com.

Abductive Junction

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Note: There is new content behind the green door. For those interested in the Western, I have a review of the 1969 classic The Wild Bunch. The role of the Western is something I’ll come back to again. It is an interesting topic.

The fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes begins this week, and it promises to be an enjoyable bit of theater for those interested in the workings of the Cloud People. Holmes founded a company called Theranos when she was just 19-years-old. She had dropped out of Stanford and promised to deliver miracle drug testing equipment. She attracted the support of all the beautiful people, who saw her as the living example of everything the Cloud People believed about the world.

In reality, the company had nothing to offer other than the promise to fulfill those prophesies the Cloud People cherished. Holmes adopted the Steve Jobs black turtleneck and spoke in a weird deep voice. Like all grifters, she was short on specifics, but long on inspirational flattery. This got some of the most famous men in the world to support her company, giving it an aura of authenticity. As a result, Theranos stuck around for a dozen years before it was revealed as a fraud.

In many respects, Holmes is the poster child for the new religion. The reimagined gender role for women is just women doing the things men normally do. You see this in movies where the normal male lead is replaced by a strong diverse female who does all the same things as a male lead, even the personality. There is really nothing new about the new gender roles. The new ideal female is nothing more than a fraud against nature, a fraud that is eventually undone by observable reality.

That is the story the Feds will tell in court. They will point out that nothing about this company was based in reality. Holmes and her business partner, another unicorn of the Progressive imagination named Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, knew all along that their new technology would never work. They hid the facts from investors in order to swindle them, the textbook definition of fraud. More important, she damaged the cause of women in the workplace, which is her biggest sin.

From the perspective of the Dirt People, the Elizabeth Holmes story is great fun and also a reason to keep fighting. One look at this woman and a normal man in control of his senses could see she was trouble. Many people at the time made this point, but the Cloud People fell for her shenanigans hook, line, and sinker. It is a good reminder that these people are not evil super geniuses. They are frauds like Holmes who now have real power, but they are not unbeatable.

The Holmes story is also a good example of abductive reasoning. This is the type of reasoning that makes a conclusion on what you know or what you think you know, which is always an incomplete set of data. You wake up in the morning and you see the driveway is wet, so you quickly assume it rained overnight. There could be other explanations, like your automatic sprinkler is on the fritz or a pipe burst somewhere during the night, but rain is the most likely answer.

The important thing about abductive reasoning is that the explanation for the given facts does not have to be right to be accepted. After all, the explanation is simply the most probable, based on the data set. This is why in the hands of a good storyteller, abductive reasoning is very powerful magic. Humans are hard wired to accept stories, so a good story that explains what is going on can quickly become gospel. A good story that confirms the gospel is never questioned.

This is what Holmes was doing with her presentation to Cloud People. She presented herself as living proof of the one true faith. She was every bit as talented as the pale males in Silicon Valley. She could do anything a man could do, even sound like them and run an identity cult like Steve Jobs. Apple became one of the world’s biggest companies selling toys disguised as holy relics. Holmes was the female Steve Jobs, but saving the world, rather than entertaining it.

Another interesting aspect to the trial is the plan by the defense to blame her former partner for everything. The old story of gender said that women were always the victims of male oppression. Women who killed their husbands for the insurance would always accuse the dead man of being abusive. That story was being replaced by the new story of female empowerment. The jury will be presented with a conflict of the two absurd visions of womanhood promoted by the Cloud People.

This story is a good example of how facts play a supporting role in life. People are believing machines. Even the most cynical hard cases among the Cloud People believe they are on the side of angels. It is why facts and reason have no effect on these people, outside of the extremes. Once the reality of Theranos was too much to ignore, the Cloud People abandoned their unicorn, but only after it became clear that Holmes was a mockery of their beliefs, rather than confirmation.

That is why the endless presentation of facts and reason falls on deaf ears. The Cloud People will never abandon their faith for mere facts. The only thing that will get them to abandon their faith is a better faith. This was the central insight of you know who back in the last century. His story of redemption covered the observable, and his new facts was the mortar that held them together into a coherent narrative. That is what awaits the Cloud People running the American empire.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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***@*********************ns.com.

Alien Reboot

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Note: There is a new movie review up on SubscribeStar. For those looking to support my alcoholism, it is also up on Buy Me A Beer.

For reasons no one has bothered to explain, the government went on a strange public relations tour, informing us that it has for years been documenting unidentified objects in the air and sea. These events have been captured by cameras mounted on military ships and aircraft. They released a bunch of these videos, some of which had audio of the people recording them. Those voices in the videos tell the viewer that the cameramen are baffled by the blurry images they are seeing.

Along with the videos, the Pentagon provided some background. They claim they have data going back a long time suggesting these events are not illusions. For example, they claim the appearance of unidentified flying objects near a nuclear weapons battery caused the facility to shut down. They did not state it directly, but the implication is the entity behind the unexplained objects was also able to turn off the nuclear weapons facility or at least disable it while they were flying around it.

Despite the comically bad video that was released, the claim is that these objects, in the air and the sea, operate in ways thought impossible. They move faster than any human built craft and they maneuver well beyond our capability. In one case, an object was claimed to have been in the air then it went into the sea, moving at speeds well beyond any known seagoing vessel. The video for that one shows what looks like a piece of fuzz moving around on a grainy black and white video.

Supposedly the government is releasing this stuff because Congress passed a law requiring them to come clean on the UFO question. Marco Rubio, one of the Senate’s most brilliant thinkers, got something passed last year that requires the Pentagon to issue a report to the public on what they know. Presumably, these videos are part of prepping the public for whatever the official word is on UFO’s. Who knows, maybe they will roll out a little green man along with the report.

Of course, the right way to view this is with lots of skepticism. After all, the people putting this into the public domain lie to us every day. They were sure that invisible Russians using mind control somehow altered the 2016 election. Amazingly, those invisible Russians were able to do their dastardly deeds without ever having been caught on camera, so maybe the space aliens flying around US navy ships could learn a few things from the those invisible Russian mentats.

Then we have the evidence itself. Maybe the military really is using 1970’s technology on ships and aircraft, but those videos look suspiciously primitive. The only thing missing was Mulder and Scully from the old X-Files series. If Rod Sterling were narrating the video, it would have made more sense. Again, given the government’s compulsive lying, the voice overs were less than convincing. If this is all they have, then we have to assume this is just more bravo sierra from the state.

The biggest problem with all UFO claims is that we know some things that would have to be true about alien visitors. One is they would have to be orders of magnitude smarter than humans in order to master interstellar travel. We are not even sure we can return to the moon, much less travel the stars. This super smart species that has conquered what we currently think is impossible, that is travel beyond light speed, would surely have figured out how to evade our primitive cameras.

The claim about the nuclear missile facility is the most amusing example of the paradoxes in the UFO story. We are told they were able to detect these entities on radar, but the entities seem to have disabled the nuclear weapons. That means these super intelligent space aliens can shut down our most advanced weapons from their ships but could not figure out how to shut off the radar and cameras. It is a good thing they did not come here to rob bank vaults.

Despite the outlandishness of these whoppers, it fits a familiar pattern for how the state disseminates bogus information. Andrew Anglin pointed this out in his Unz Review piece on the UFO story. He wrote, “Journalists and people who claim to be journalists regularly come up with things that seem plausible or likely, then claim that they have an insider source”. Those sources are imaginary, or they are the government contact that is dictating the fake news item to the “journalist”.

The question, of course, is why are they putting this nonsense out into the public domain after years denying any of it was real? There are plenty of theories ranging from the mundane to the conspiratorial. One possible answer is that these people are compulsive liars who just like lying. Generations of selection pressure in favor of sociopaths have resulted in a ruling class full of them. They think it is funny to mess with the rubes in flyover country and this just another gag.

The good news is that the public seems to be more than a bit skeptical about these new UFO claims. The story did not get much traction and the commentary on it from independent sources has been mostly negative. The American public may have reached the point where they view all official stories as just new productions from the same theater group. The new real-time X-Files is like the latest Star Wars offering, in that the public has seen enough. The thrill is gone.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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***@*********************ns.com.

Systemic Crisis

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All human systems, whether created by design or created by happenstance, start to evolve as soon as they are born. This is true of systems like a company or tools like process regulation systems. Like Frankenstein’s monster, they take on a life of their own and break loose from the creator. This usually happens quickly. As soon as something like an organization gets going, it starts changing. The people in it find defects to remedy, new things to add and so on. Evolution starts instantly.

That evolution has an impact on the people in the system or in the case tools, the users of those systems. The ability to look down the road, to see several moves ahead, seems to decline in human organizations as they evolve. Initially, the people running them are always looking ahead. That was the point of the organization. Over time, they either lose their ability to look ahead or they are replaced by people who are only interested in the short term, because that is where the rewards lie.

An example of this college athletics. Initially, student sports were just a natural result of young people and free time. Before long college teams were challenging one another to sports matches. Males like to compete, and groups of males like to compete for their tribe, so college teams playing one another was natural. The natural rivalries that existed between states added to the fun. College athletics in America is an example of a system springing up by happenstance over time.

Like all systems, college athletics began to evolve. The University of Oklahoma, for example, invested in their football program for state pride as a way to raise spirits during the Great Depression. Other colleges learned that being good at a popular sport got them attention. Notre Dame would be just another cow-college if not for the use of ringers to make their football program famous. What started as amateur fun turned into a marketing vehicle for colleges and universities.

Of course, the colleges and universities never imagined that college sports would be a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry one day. Television did not exist, at least to anything like today, so there was no way to see this outcome. By the middle of the last century, college athletics evolved into a popular American tradition that was mostly about school and state pride. The players got free tuition for playing the sport and the school got to promote their brand on the field.

Once it was a mature system though, the ability of the people running it to see down the road started to decline. The NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma is a good example. This was a case that began in 1979 over television rights. The schools wanted to strike deals for putting games in TV, while the NCAA wanted to retain the right to control those deals. The schools won the case and the flood gates of television money opened soon after, reaching the billions today.

Half a century ago, the people running college football had no idea what was going to happen once they started taking TV money. On the one hand, they could not see the proliferation of mass media culture that was coming. On the other hand, they were focused on the here and now. They did not think about how a new revenue stream would change how the system functioned. They did not think about how it would change their thinking. They just needed the cash.

This type of example is common in America. Last year the people in charge began to run around smashing things because of Covid and their own sore feelings. None of them gave a second thought to the consequences. When faced with millions out of work, they did not think about the long term impact of their remedy. They just started throwing invented money at people. We are now on a wild ride of unpredictable scarcity and inflation with no ability to look more than one move ahead.

Getting back to the college athletics example, short-term thinking within an organization takes on a life of its own. In the case of college athletics, these highly educated college presidents have a couple of generations of examples to draw from, but they are as trapped in the moment as their predecessors. They tinker with the rules to address one issue, only to create a chain reaction they never considered. This story about the advent of the transfer portal is a good example.

One reason that people in a system lose the ability and willingness to think a few moves ahead is the incentives evolve along with the system. The people in the system who show some skill at patching up immediate problems benefit. Those pointing out the potential costs down the road gets ignored. When it comes to tools like regulatory systems or software, change means immediate cost. Since human organizations tend to be intertwined with tool systems, both forces work in concert.

Take the college athletics problem. If a group of college presidents wanted to address the excesses of college athletics, they would face enormous institutional pushback over the immediate costs. Changing the regulations and subsystems that are in place to maintain things as they are would cost a lot of money. The reformers would also be in competition with demands to address immediate problems. The reformers get drowned out by the natural functioning of the system.

Reforming a system is like trying to reform evolution itself. The thousands of cumulative decisions that went into the present state cannot be turned on or off without addressing the other decisions. In time, all human systems evolve past the point where reform is possible without an existential threat. If the choice is death or reform, then the minimum reform can happen to avoid death. Even facing death, reform faces long odds, if death can be rationalized into a distant possibility.

The French Revolution is a good example here. The threat of death was both personal and abstract, but the aristocracy could not bear the thought of reform. It was not as if they did not know their system was teetering on collapse. Their best ministers had explained this reality in detail. It was simply the case where the inertia was too strong for the reformers. No one could look ahead and immanentize the eschaton, so the immediate always took precedent over the future.

This is something to keep in mind in the current crisis. Reform, if it is possible at all, will come only in the shadow of the gallows. If the political class begins to fear for their life, then maybe they begin to act to push that inevitability off into the future. Of course, 80-year old men tend not to be long-term planners. Still, if genuine fear grips the ruling classes, then maybe we see reform. That is not the way to bet. Like all systems, this one most likely is carried on by internal forces until it collapses.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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***@*********************ns.com.

The 2021 Predictions

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Despite the uncertainty of the age, it is worth the time to think about what monsters are waiting for us in the new year. With The Pretender being installed in the White House, there will be new challenges on the political front. The people in charge will have a new bag of tricks to distract people from what they are doing. The media will now have to transform from their Trump hating to making Biden sound good. The world will look a lot different in just a few months.

The first thing the omens are tell us is the murder rate in Baltimore and other diverse cities will take off in 2021. An odd thing about Lagos on the Chesapeake is that the murder rate is much higher in odd number years. The locals seem to hate prime numbers for some reason. The number of murders for 2020 was higher than typical for even numbered years, which suggest we are seeing an upswing. This will be the year Baltimore becomes Bodymore Murderland again…

The Covidians will not back down. There will be reports of “vaccinated people” getting Covid and that will be enough to keep the panic rolling. Covid has now replaced climate change as the left-wing religion of fear. They need to feel they are part of a holy cause to give purpose to their lives. Some politicians will try to ratchet back the fear mongering, but they have unleashed forces they cannot control. Mask wearing and other gestures are now the uniform of the enlightened…

Retail economic pain will become obvious to everyone, as the damage done from the lockdowns starts to cut deep into local economies. The media will work hard to ignore it, because they will be running cover for The Pretender, but more and more people will start noticing the long lines at food banks and the shuttered businesses. The reality of two Americas will become more obvious and begin to creep into political conversations, especially on the fringes where taboo topics are allowed…

Joe Biden will be forced to resign by Labor Day. Starting in the spring, stories about his mental decline with start to turn up in the official media. His handlers will let him flail around in public, prepping the public for his eventual removal. Behind the scenes, the deal for him to resign will include his family getting a pass on their crimes. The Hunter Biden investigation will be broomed and that will pave the way for him to pass the baton to the new generation of vibrant leaders…

Trump will quickly fade from the scene. He will keep making noises, but his audience will dwindle quickly in 2021. One reason is he has fallen for the wrong advice at every turn, so there is no reason to think he changes now. He will be told that former presidents go away for a year and he’ll do it. Instead of holding a rally on inauguration day, which he has hinted at a few times, he will play his role in Biden’s inauguration show and say all the things he is told to say.

There’s also the fact that his fanbase is ready to move on from Trump. For many people who held their nose and voted for Trump in 2020, they started out hoping for a reformer, but ended up hoping for a revolutionary. Trump was neither of those. He was just an opportunist who rode popular discontent to office, but never really understood what was happening in the country. It was just another deal. The movement he started is ready to outgrow him now. He came in like a lion and will go out like a lamb…

This is the year we start to see some highbrow establishment characters embrace the populist cause, as they look for a way to remain relevant. The departure of Trump from the scene gives them cover to shed their old skin in favor of a new one. You can see this in the second rung of the commentariat. They are starting to talk about trade, the plight of the working and middle-class and even corporate abuse. They will take great care to avoid the demographic issues that drive most of this…

Once the pieces are on the board in Washington and a new round of looting can begin, look for the Republicans to work hard to share the blame for the coming economic troubles with the Democrats. The sinking of the Covid money by turtle man was a preview of what we can expect. Money for friends of government will sail right through, but things popular with the public will be blocked by whichever party did not promise it to their voters. It will be a game of bad cop – worse cop…

Expect the Republicans to make another push for amnesty in 2021. The cheap labor lobbies are salivating at the prospect of unlimited cheap labor. The GOP brain-trust is convinced that they can remove the troublesome immigration issue for good by pushing through an amnesty and expanded foreign worker visas. That way they never have to pretend to care about illegal immigration again, since they have effectively made all immigration legal. They are really that stupid…

Finally, we begin to see a changing of the guard in the dissident space. The old sort of white identity politics that started in the last century will continue to fade away. Similarly, the race aware civic nationalism of the previous generation will give way to a new class-demographic sensibility on the Right. This will be most obvious among the younger generation of activists. Their takeaway from the Trump years is that the system and the elites running it are the core problem.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Year In Review

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This year has been strange in many ways, but one bit of weirdness that has gone unnoticed is the paucity of predictions for the coming year. For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, this time of year has featured both year in review content and predictions content. This year both have been limited. Maybe the awfulness of 2020 is keeping people from thinking much about it. The wild unpredictability we have seen has probably made forecasters squeamish about predicting anything.

The Light of Lagos was pretty much a dud last year. The omens got some of the Democrat primary right, but not enough to claim a victory. Biden did struggle and Warren flamed out early. Buttigieg did better in Iowa than most expected, but Sanders was the story until the party rigged the system to install Biden. No one predicted Biden would win the nomination and no one ever imagined that buffoon as president, so the omens can be forgiven for missing that one.

The prediction about Conservative Inc. has been spot on, but that was easy money, so no victory lap there. It will be interesting to see how they try to pump air back into their thing, given the mood of most right-wing whites these days. On the other hand, as long as the money from rich people keeps flowing into their rackets, it probably does not matter all that much. The rich people pay them to play a role and they will play the role, even if the audience has walked out of the theater.

Then there is the fact that a lot of whites are so beaten down and desperate, they will cling to civic nationalism until their dying breath. Everyone should read the comments at Breitbart or National Review once in a while, just to be reminded of this. Granted, many of them move their lips when they read, but most are just frozen in time by a fear of what is happening all around them. Unless and until there is a credible alternative, in terms of organizations, Conservative Inc. will stagger on.

On the sporting front, the Premiere League did not have their first transgender player, but the whole league is gay now, so that’s close enough. The Light of Lagos really hates English soccer. So much so there will be no references to footie, football or the beautiful game in the future. That said, you have to wonder how the English soccer fans are making it through Covid without the ability to attend games or get plastered at the pub watching their team. Boris is playing with fire over there.

The predictions on Brexit were a swing and miss. It is hard to know what is in the deal Boris took from the Euros, but it is probably less than was promised. The deal sailed through Parliament with the support of Farage. He has been the most hawkish on this of all British politicians. He may simply be thinking a flawed deal is better than no deal. Half a loaf is better than no loaf. Still, the omens were wrong about how this would play out, so it goes in the loss column.

The impeachment fiasco played out as predicted, but that was easy money, so no victory lap there either. The real shocker is in how the whole thing was thrown down the memory hole so quickly. No one talks about it. It’s like how someone gets crazy drunk at a party and makes a fool of himself. The next day there is some ribbing from friends, but then it is forgotten. The Democrats danced around with a lampshade on their heads and after it was over, everyone forgot about it.

Now, the big hit was the Barr stuff. It is amazing how so many people thought something would happen with that charade for so long. When Trump brought Barr in it seemed like something would happen, but it quickly became clear that it was just another coverup. Barr was brought in to make sure the truth of the FBI corruption never saw the light of day. You have to wonder if Trump was too stupid to see what was happening or that he signed off on it, despite his tweets.

The omens were mostly wrong on the election. Net out the obvious fraud and the results would have been in line with what was predicted, but that is what is called a gratuitous assertion. The fact is, the result was nothing like what was predicted, so it goes in the loss column. The main takeaway is that most people went to bed on election night thinking Trump won another squeaker, only to learn the next day that mysterious ballots were found to snatch the victory away. Truly incredible.

Of course, the big miss was the Covid panic and how it has been used to turn much of America into a penal colony. No one predicted it, because such a thing seemed implausible just a year ago. It really is shocking to think about how much has changed in just 12 months. This time last year people were planning vacations, walking around with no curfew, having people over to their homes. If someone had predicted this, they would have been dismissed as a crazy person.

That’s probably why there has not been the usual flood of predictions. Usually, predictions are a projection of current trends. All the current trends are as ugly as the people who rule over us. Who wants to think about what comes next with the Covid stuff or how the empire with fare with a dementia patient in charge? Given how bad things got so quickly, who wants to think about what comes next? This has been an ugly year, made uglier by the thought that things will probably get worse.

That brings up something else. Every year the television networks spend forty-eight hours doing New Year’s celebrations. They have live shots from around the world and people reporting at various events. All of that will be cancelled this year. The bars will be empty in most of the country. One of the consequences of the Covid tyranny is that people will not even get to pretend that next year will bring better days. Instead of coming into the new year with hope, most people are pessimistic.

That said, the future will belong to those who keep their wits about them and their eyes trained on the horizon, as the world goes to pieces. Much of what is happening has been predicted for a long time on this side of the great divide. It is not coming about exactly as anyone expected, but the unravelling has begun. What comes next is the fight over who decides what comes next. We’re all alive, which means we can still fight and as long as we can fight, the future belongs to us.

Happy New Year.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.