The Upshot

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I was in the diner picking up my lunch and they had ESPN playing on the television in the main seating area. They used to have CNN playing during the panic, but that was when they were not allowed to seat customers. I’m pretty sure when they were allowed to seat people again, those people complained about CNN, so they changed it to something they thought was neutral. The lunch crowd at most places, especially old-fashioned diners, is going to be old and white.

Of course, ESPN is now hate-whitey all the time. I have not watched the channel in so long I no longer recall when I last watched it. Probably a sporting event of some sort back in the before times. While I was there, they had a parade of famous blacks on to complain about white people. The absurdity of rich blacks moaning about racism is lost on the blacks, but I suspect it is not lost on whites. There were more than a few angry faces looking at the television while they chatted at lunch.

It is hard to avoid your own bias in times like these, but I do wonder if our rulers have inadvertently created a problem for themselves by politicizing sports. Watching sports was the last refuge for white people. There is a pretty strong correlation between interest in sports and the politicization of society the last three decades. The Cold War ended, liberal democracy was let off the leash and then everyone crowded into sports venues to escape the relentless spread of politics.

Of course, with the long sports holiday due to the panic, one that could probably be extended through the year, that refuge does not exist. Lots of normal white people with only a passing interest in politics are now facing the grim reality of what America has become over the last few decades. The great doses of Soma that was the NFL, for example, are now going to be the opposite. Instead of putting whitey in a trance, they will rub in his face the fact that he is now forced to wash the feet.

Again, this could be my own bias at work. A year ago, I would be looking forward to college football season. It was the last sport I watched with any regularity. I like the traditions and variety. Now, I have no interest. They could play the games in my front yard and I’d close the blinds. I’ve moved past disinterest into outright hatred of the whole sports entertainment world. The reason is I hate that they have decorated it with their vulgar and degenerate politics.

Time will tell, but the magic of human society is that twenty percent of any population is the threshold for change. Self-identified Progressives are 20% of American society, but they run everything. Muslims are about 15% of France now and they are pushing around the natives. In both cases, they are well organized, but it just shows how a society can be ruled by a minority. If 20% of white people are red-pilled by the current race war, the nature of white people changes in a hurry.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The Man For Our Age (Link)
  • 12:00: Covid Fallout (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 22:00: Jim Snow America (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: The Thrust Of It (Link)
  • 42:00: Hate Hoax (Link)
  • 47:00: It’s All Oogily-Boogily (Link)
  • 52:00: The Cuck’s Life (Link) (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/VPriCcuiRGM

Strange Days

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Way back in the time before corona, it was conventional wisdom that shutting down the economy would have dire consequences for the economy. Whether you were on the panic side or the skepticism side, you were sure that locking down the economy was going to be bad for the economy. The stock market losing a third of its value in a week seemed to confirm it. No matter the truth of the virus, the consequences was going to be an unprecedented economic depression.

Here we are four months on and the world does not look like anyone imagined it when this all started. The promised bodies in the streets never materialized. The virus has thus far been a sever flu season hyped up by mass media. The promised depression has not made an appearance. The streets are still mostly empty during the work day and many businesses are still closed. Those that are open have all sorts of restrictions and they seem to have fewer customers.

What we don’t have is people out banging their pots and pans demanding the government do something about the economy. A lifetime ago a handful of white people showed up at state capitols demanding the end of the lock downs, but that soon gave way to swarms of blacks and Antifa promising to burn the cities. Otherwise, the productive portion of society seems to have gone back to sleep. Those working from home, work from home and those not working stay home.

The weekly jobless claims say that 30 million Americans are currently unemployed, but no one seems to notice or believe it. Of course, no one should believe the official statistics from the government and other sources. The only thing true about these numbers is they are constantly revised. We do know that 30 million people are still collecting unemployment benefits at the moment, so at least that many people are not working, but would like to be working.

The virus and the economy are a good example of partisanship. The panic crowd, which overlaps considerably with the anti-Trump, Hamilton listening set, was so sure the virus was a plague sent by the gods because of Trump they are convinced the hospitals are overrun and people are dying in the streets. Similarly, the skeptics of modern economics are so sure the system cannot last, they believe we are in a grinding depression that will explode into civil unrest at any moment.

What we are living through right now is probably one of those times when the partisan framework gives way to a new partisan framework. Perhaps in liberal democracy there needs to be a regular molting of the old partisan skin so a new one can emerge and refresh the debate. After all, forty years ago, the Left was endlessly going on about free speech and the dangers of corporate media. Today, it is the Right that champions speech and opposes corporate media.

Putting that aside, what we are seeing in the economy runs counter to pretty much everything we have been told for generations. The government should not be able to manufacture trillions of dollars without causing hyperinflation. This was something everyone, Left and Right, knew was true not so long ago. Here we are with the US debt at 23 Trillion, a number so large no one can imagine it. So large, no one bothers discuss it anymore. No one cares about the debt.

Similarly, we have been told for generations that the US savings rate was so low that the typical American could not afford to skip a paycheck. Small business was so strapped it could not go a month without business. We’re four months into the lock downs and we don’t have soup lines. Instead, Americans are paying down credit card debt at a record clip. In fact, credit card debt is now the lowest it has been in over a decade and headed for unprecedented lows.

One driver of the credit card debt decline is the collapse in spending. This makes sense, given those empty streets and closed shops. Still, people worried about money tend to hoard cash, rather than pay down debt. You can always tell the credit card company to go screw, but you can’t do that with the landlord, the mortgage company or the grocery store. Contrary to conventional economic wisdom, Americans are choosing to pay down their debts right now.

The weirdness in the economy is just one item. No new movies or television have come out since the panic and no one seems to care very much. Sports entertainment has been shuttered and no one seems to care. All of the spring and summer youth sports have been cancelled. This time of year, kids into baseball, lacrosse, soccer and big-time football would normally be in summer leagues. Their parents would be toting them around the country. None of that is happening.

You can probably spend the better part of day listing the things that used to be a fixed part of daily life that are now gone. More important, they are gone and no one seems to notice or care. Talk to people with kids in the summer sports and they will tell you the kids have quickly adjusted. They are doing other things. Parents with small kids are quickly adjusting to life at home with the kids around all day. Kid sounds are the background music of Zoom sessions.

The point of all this is we are like people who have been dumped out of their canoe in the rapids and we are now being swept down river. All sorts of things are happening to us and around us, but we have no way of getting our bearings. The thought of getting back into canoe has long passed. Now it is just a matter of surviving each minute until the river calms or we bash our head into a boulder. We have no perspective and no way to gain perspective until we reach flat water.

That means we really have no idea where this will all end. Maybe that’s why there is a strange calm over daily life. Maybe that’s why people are instinctively paying down debt and hunkering down. It may not make total sense, but in uncertain times, simplifying the household finances becomes a point of stability. Again, it is hard to know, as we are all just being swept along. Still, the one thing we can know is that we are being swept along by forces outside our control.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Beginning Or End?

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Way back in the before times, whenever the topic of Soviet propaganda came up, inevitably someone would mention that it was necessary in order to keep the people from revolting against the system. There was an assumption that the propaganda worked to some degree in convincing the public. The truth is, it was never particularly effective on the masses. Instead, the real value of propaganda is in keeping the believers from questioning their beliefs.

We see this today with the massive propaganda barrage from the ruling class media organs regarding the race war. They endlessly wave around claims about how much public support there is for toppling statues, assaulting old white people on the streets and perpetrating race hoaxes. It is the oldest and dullest form of persuasion. “All the other kids are doing it. You don’t want to be left out, do you?” It’s so crude and clumsy it often feels like it is an inside joke at times.

For example, this piece rocketed around the sports media sites. The claim is car racing, especially newly woke NASCAR, is getting record audience numbers. They don’t make the claim explicitly, but clearly the intent of the post is to suggest wokeness has been good for car racing. Of course, TV ratings are entirely fake and have been for a very long time, but even taken at face value, NASCAR is as popular right now as a moderate YouTube star or OnlyFans bimbo.

If you are running a billion-dollar sport and you can only draw a million fans when no other sports are permitted to operate, you have serious problems. That’s the world of facts and reason. In the world of wokeness, a slight bump after a series of embarrassing public relations blunders is a triumph of the will. It is all the proof the great and good need to convince them that turning NASCAR into an endless lecture on the horrors of white people was a great idea.

What we will not see, of course, is a similar story a year from now when the sport is struggling with half-empty stands and dismal TV ratings. That’s not the sort of thing that keeps the true believers energized. In ideological societies, truth is a very dangerous thing, not because it gives the doubters ammunition. Truth is dangerous because it undermines the zeal of the believers. That’s the real motivation behind this race war unleashed by the ruling class. They needed to inspire the faithful.

This need to constantly tend their own garden is why the rulers are now banning harmless people like Stefan Molyneux from the internet. Whatever you may think of his performances, Molyneux is pretty much just a garden variety AnCap. He sprinkles in some crime data and facts about race on occasion, but he has not done much of that in a long time now. Instead, he has retooled himself into a street corner Socrates, but he was banned from social media anyway.

People on this side are tempted to think his banning is due to his occasional flirtations with race realism, but if that were so he would have been zapped years ago. In reality, the people in charge are running low on people willing to go onto their stages and play the villain for them. Twitter is all house broken conservatives and Progressive cranks, with the latter outnumbering the former 100-to-1. After years of human sacrifice, the stock of sinners is running low, so they are creating them.

Therein lies a significant difference between what we are witnessing today and what went on in communist countries. At some point after the war, communist propaganda shifted from promoting the glorious future that was at hand to promoting the glories of the here and now. That is, the point of communist propaganda was to endlessly remind the people in the party that there was no need for change, just constant vigilance against the remaining reactionaries.

That does not appear to be in the cards for liberal democracy. It is a constant revolt against the present, even when the present is the creation of the people doing the revolting, as we see today. That’s why the propaganda gets more intense and more absurd with each click of the ratchet. It’s as if the faster they chase after the glorious future, the further it recedes into the distance, so the only solution is to run faster and that means more sacrifices and more witch hunting.

It is tempting to conclude that they cannot keep up this pace for long and will at some point exhaust themselves. That is probably true, but that point may be well beyond where we stand now. Look at the way they have reacted to the rioter in Seattle being run over and killed. Instead of sobering them up, it is becoming something of a blood sacrifice. The new religion has no limiting principle, so the limit of their fanatical zeal may turn out to be physical reality.

The point of all this is that this may be the early stages of the revolution. It is popular with the older crowd to compare now with the 1970’s, when the cultural revolution of the 1960’s collapsed into anarchy. In other words, it is 1974, Trump is Nixon and Joe Biden is Jimmy Carter. In reality, it could be 1968 and Trump is Johnson. He certainly spends like Johnson and dithers like Johnson. We may be living through the good part of the revolution and things will get much worse from here.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The American Drama

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One of the sports leagues announced recently that they intend to get rid of the white national anthem before games and play the black national anthem. Most white people, of course, were surprised to learn there is a black national anthem. Racists were momentarily excited, thinking that maybe blacks now had their own homeland, but that was not the case. Instead, it turns out that the black national anthem is a poem written a century ago by black civil rights activists.

It is an interesting bit of history that is worth considering. The poem itself reads like a call to black unity. The celebration of their new found freedom does not indicate what they hope to do with it, but there is a prayer to God that they will keep on the righteous path to victory, whatever that means. A cynic cannot help but notice that the poem and the musical performance was really aimed at the white Progressives that saw black abolition as their Christian duty.

It is a good reminder that the history of black civil rights can probably be best explained by the phrase, “Now what?” After the Civil War, the blacks were freed, but then everyone, including the former slaves stood around asking, “Now what?” The people who did the freeing did not have an answer, so everyone else was left to sort it out. The people in the Old South, black and white, had to come up with new living arrangements and nature, as it always does, took its course.

Something similar happened after the Civil Rights movement. Legal segregation and discrimination were eliminated and then everyone was left to wonder what will come next, but the civil rights champions had no answers. After a couple of decades of inaction, the final resolution was a few statues of Martin Luther King and a federal holiday for him. The efforts at forced integration were slowly abandoned in all the meaningful areas and we were back to where we started.

The cold-hearted cynics have always said that white Progressives and their fellow travelers just see blacks as another weapon in the Cold Civil War. If they actually cared about the condition of real blacks, they would address the horrific crime levels and social pathology that immiserate blacks in America. Instead, they periodically unleash black crime waves on the bad whites, along with lectures about social justice. In other words, none of this has anything to do with blacks.

That’s certainly true, but it mistakenly asserts a consciousness of action to the Left that probably does not exist. Talk to your self-righteous lefty about the current ructions and they have no idea why they are out in the streets ululating about racism. Like a trained circus animal, they are responding to prompts and expecting certain rewards. You, the racist bad white, are supposed to get vexed with them, so they can feel the dopamine rush that comes from self-righteous indignation.

This lack of consciousness is better observed in something that is less radioactive at the moment. Disney has now added the musical Hamilton to its subscription offering, causing every Progressive in America to sign up for it. The play has become something like the old musical Cabaret. Instead of being a show about Nazis, Hamilton is a show about social justice. The sound track is something like “Horst-Wessel-Lied” for the modern Left. It’s more than a musical for them.

When you press them on why they like it so much, they cannot explain it. A paranoid conspiracy type would be forgiven for thinking that maybe there is a subliminal message in these songs. As soon as a person prone to Progressive fanaticism hears the soundtrack, he spends hours listening to it. A couple of years ago when the soundtrack was released, it became a moral signifier like an Apple product. The good lefty would ostentatiously reveal he was listening to it.

This is where you see the total lack of reason and introspection on the part of Progressives caught up in the ecstasy of these moral panics. Hamilton was not black and he was certainly not a social justice warrior. In fact, he was probably the one Founder who was the least in favor of popular government. He is an unlikely hero for people claiming to be the liberators of the oppressed and the champions of all-inclusive liberal democracy, but that’s where they are.

That brings us back to the black national anthem. Like everything else about race relations, that poem was never about blacks or their disposition. It was written to titillate the good whites in the halls of power. It was their pets obsequiously performing a ritual for them. Similarly, Hamilton is just feel-good revisionism for white liberals. A bunch of blacks perform for their white masters in a way that flatters the master. Race is just another popular theme in the Progressive Dionysia.

There is no shortage of analysis trying to explain the insane behavior of mobs pulling down statues. All of it from outside the Progressive hive misses the point, because it projects reason and consciousness of thought onto the performers. What’s happening is these people are just that, performers. They are unconsciously playing a role, like participants in a pagan ceremony. They are doing so for their Progressive audience, who cheers and sobs after each statue is toppled.

This is the real source of power of the Left. It is not that they control the institutions or control the media. Those are consequences, not causes. Their real power is they control public morality and the expression of it. All public rituals are funneled through left-wing mythology, drawing in friends and foes, all of whom play a role in the great ongoing morality tale of liberal democracy. Like pre-reformation Catholic Church, the Left controls the supply of salvation.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Interview Of Nikole Hannah-Jones

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The following is a fictional transcript of a negotiation between white people and black people in America over reparations. Representing black people in the negotiations is Nikole Hannah-Jones, a staff writer for New York Times magazine. She is the creator of the 1619 Project, which is an ongoing blood libel against white people. Representing white people of America is the typical white person, who has tried in good faith for generations to figure out how to include blacks in civil society.

White Person: Thank you for agreeing to begin this dialogue. Having read your latest, uh, column on reparations, we, and by “we” I mean white people, have decided that it is time to think about reparations. While we in no way accept the claim that modern whites owe modern blacks anything for the alleged crimes of our ancestors, in the furtherance of peace between the races, we are open to discussing reparations.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Yes, well, as I said in my post, if true justice and equality are ever to be achieved in the United States, the country must finally take seriously what it owes black Americans. It is time for this country to pay its debt. It is time for reparations.

WP: Presumably, when you say “the country” you mean white people. You don’t expect Asians, newly arrived Africans and Native Americans to be part of this.

NHJ: I don’t understand.

WP: What don’t you understand?

NHJ: I don’t understand what “presumably” means.

WP: Oh, I see. Well, I’m here to speak on behalf of white people. I cannot obligate Asians or newly arrived Africans, or Arabs or anyone else to reparations. You mentioned white people 197 times in your column. You mentioned black people 179 times. Asians, Jews, Native Americans, Arabs and so on were mentioned zero times, so this is about blacks and whites, correct?

NHJ: That’s right. As I said in my piece, generations of white violence against black bodies has to be addressed. There can be no peace until white people accept what they owe to black people. Going back to the very beginning….

WP: I don’t mean to cut you off, but I read your piece and I have read all the other stuff in the 1619 project. Like all white people, I have grown up hearing the long list of grievances of black people. That’s why I’m here. We agree. It is time to negotiate a settlement in order to get racial peace.

NHJ: It has been more than 150 years since the white planter class last called up the slave patrols and deputized every white citizen to stop, question and subdue any black person who came across their paths in order to control and surveil a population who refused to submit to their enslavement. It has been 150 years since white Americans could enforce slave laws that said white people acting in the interest of the planter class would not be punished for killing a black person….

WP: Okay, okay, I got it. I read the piece, a few times, in fact. If all you’re going to do here is recite from the list of grievances, then we are wasting our time. I’m here to talk about reparations.

NHJ: If black lives are to truly matter in America, this nation must move beyond slogans and symbolism. Citizens don’t inherit just the glory of their nation, but its wrongs too. A truly great country does not ignore or excuse its sins. It confronts them and then works to make them right. If we are to be redeemed, if we are to live up to the magnificent ideals upon which we were founded, we must do what is just.

WP: Yes, well, that’s fine, but can you tell us what you mean by pay its debts? I’ve read all of your work. I’ve read Ta-Nahesi Coates on the subject of reparations. What seems to be missing is the dollar figure.

NHJ: As I said in my piece, generations of white violence against black bodies has to be addressed. There can be no peace until white people accept what they owe to black people….

WP: Right, I’ll stipulate that. In fact, without qualification, I’ll stipulate to all of the claims in your work. What I’m here to discuss is reparations. What number do we put on the check to make black people whole? What is the debt you expect us to pay?

NHJ: As I said in my piece, until white people atone for their crimes against black people and pay their debt…

WP: Hold up, I just said we will stipulate to all of that.

NHJ: I don’t know what you mean by “stipulate”, but white people need to accept their debt to black people. As I wrote in my piece…

WP: Sorry to cut you off again, but that’s what stipulate means. We agree to all the claims made in your work and in the work of others. We’re not here to debate it or hear another recitation of it. We are here to negotiate the check.

NHJ: Check?

WP: Yes. The check. We are prepared to write every descendant of slaves, even those of mixed race, a check. We’ll pay the debt you feel you are owed.

NHJ: I don’t think a check can cover the pain of 150 years of suffering…

WP: Okay, then what else do you want? Land, like a black homeland? A ride to the airport? What? Tell me what we have to do to close the books on this.

NHJ: As I said in my piece, until white people atone for their crimes against black people and pay their debt…

WP: I got it. We all get it. That’s why we’re here. What do you want from us?

NHJ: We want justice.

WP: Fine. What does that mean? What do we need to do in order for you to have justice? If it is not a check, then what is it.

NHJ: We still want the check.

WP: Okay, how much. What’s the number?

NHJ: But it can’t just be a check. White people have to atone for the crimes they have committed against black bodies…

WP: Look. I’m starting to lose my patience. We agree to all of that. What we want to know is what we have to do, in specific terms, in order for you people to believe you have justice and to believe the debt is paid. If it is not a check, then what is it?

NHJ: As I said in my piece, financial restitution cannot end racism, of course, but it can certainly mitigate racism’s most devastating effects. If we do nothing, black Americans may never recover from this pandemic, and they will certainly never know the equality the nation has promised.

WP: Okay, so what you are saying is there can never be reparations, as there is no way for you to ever feel you have been repaid. Reparations means the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged. It sounds to me like you will never forgive whites, much less allow whites to make amends, so what are you asking?

NHJ: We want what we were promised.

WP: Okay, what were you promised and who promised it to you?

NHJ: The civil rights movement ostensibly ended white advantage by law. And in the gauzy way white Americans tend to view history, particularly the history of racial inequality, the end of legal discrimination, after 350 years, is all that was required to vanquish this dark history and its effects. Changing the laws, too many Americans have believed, marked the end of the obligation.

WP: I see. You don’t really want reparation. What you want is a raise. You want to live on the guilt of modern white people forever, but with the condition you get to demand a raise every generation. In fact, there can never be peace, as that would mean no more raises and maybe no more white guilt. After all, if we feel we paid our debts to you, we have no reason to keep paying you.

What you really want is tribute. I think I can speak for the majority of white people and say we would rather have the Dane. At least with him the issue was clear.

NHJ: I don’t understand.

WP: We know.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Right-Wing Marxism

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There was a time when conservatism was defined as a lack of ideology, by which Russel Kirk meant ideology in the Marxist sense. The Marxist defined ideology as a set of beliefs that were assumed to be true, but were, in fact, the product of economic and social conditions of the time. The ideologue, whether he knew it or not, believed in a collection of things he assumed were true in all times and all places, but were only true in his time and place. Conservatives rejected this argument.

That was a long time ago. For generations now, conservatism has succumbed to that old Marxist understanding of ideology. What that usually meant is the so-called conservatives would figure out the position of the Left on some issue and then take an alternative position. Not necessarily the opposite, as they have always been careful to avoid being called reactionary by the Left. This is, of course, evidence that they are reactionary, but reactionaries have some self-awareness.

A good example of this is this piece in the American Conservative. The writer is someone calling himself Charles Marohn, but his friends call him Chuck. He is the president of something called Strong Towns, which promotes itself as an advocacy group in support of rebuilding local community. Of course, it is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Here is their tax filings. Their language and choice of media outlets suggest they are conservative or right-leaning.

The best one can say about it, however, is it is a mix of misguided libertarianism and Breitbart-tier reaction. Consider this line. “After all, there is no greater distortion of the market than local zoning codes, and there are few bureaucracies doing more harm to property rights and freedom than local zoning offices.” This is right out of libertarian market worship. An actual conservative would ask, “Do these local zoning laws reflect the attitudes and customs of the local community?”

Nowhere in the piece is there any discussion about what the local people may want or how these zoning laws fit in with local customs. Instead, the author is frazzled over the prospect that the market, peace be upon it, may be vexed with these laws. Even more vexing, suburban voters have somehow managed to get the Federal government to back these zoning laws. In this case, it means rules against building tenements and trashy commercial development in white suburbs.

In other words, his definition of conservative simply means opposing anything that impedes the marketplace. Further, he points out that these sorts of zoning laws started in the New Deal years. There’s where you see the Pavlovian aspect of modern conservatism. Instead of judging the thing in question against a set of accepted principles, they just ask if Democrats were for or against it. Conservative Inc. better hope the Left never takes a strong stance against suicide.

That’s where you see that conservatism, rather than being a rejection of ideology as the Marxists define it, has become an ideology, one that compliments and supports the prevailing ideology of the Left. In the case of single-family zoning laws, there is no consideration of their efficacy. The writer does not bother to ponder why these laws exist in the first place. Instead, he just assumes they are bad because the Left once supported them and they violate market absolutism.

Of course, he does not address why we have zoning laws prohibiting the demolition of the suburbs with tenement blocks. The Left destroyed those old white ethnic neighborhoods in the cities, by unleashing a black crime wave starting in the 1960’s that drove whites from the urban areas. Twenty years ago, the legendary quantitative blogger, La Griffe du Lion, pointed out just how quickly blacks began to prey on urban whites as their population grew.

At least with the Obama administration, they were honest about why they wanted to destroy the white suburbs with tenements full of blacks. They hated white people and they hoped to reclaim some urban real estate. The game is to change the zoning laws in these white suburbs, so builders can erect apartment blocks. The Federal government, coordinating with the local Democrat machine, then fills them with blacks from the nearest city, using Section 8 housing vouchers.

Toward the end of the piece, he writes, “The progressive left has discovered that single-family zoning has racist underpinnings. That’s great, because we should now have no problem finding common cause for repealing this most distorting of regulations, one that the federal government never should have forced cities to adopt to begin with.” Instead of using this observation to discuss why these zoning laws exist, he falls victim to the fallacy of Chesterton’s fence.

There is another part to the Marxist definition of ideology. Once one accepts that beliefs are shaped by conditions, you no longer have to think too much about the truth content of political beliefs. Your opponents are simply the victims of false consciousness, while your ideas reflect the interests of your side. This inevitably leads to both close-mindedness and fanatical zeal. Any questioning of your side is heresy, while the other side’s arguments are assumed to be without merit.

This is where conservatives find themselves today. They are confined to a moral ghetto created for them by the Left. On the one hand, any new ideas, especially those from the Right, are rejected out of hand. On the other hand, they are completely defined by their opposition to whatever the Left is doing at the moment, but snugly within the confines of the moral orthodoxy. Conservatism has been completely stripped of the ability to question and debate political reality.

This is also why conservatism has turned into a racket. The people inside this maze of right-wing institutions have been imprinted by ideology. They can only see the world in terms of partisanship, a term coined by Lenin, by the way. Of course, the same is true of left-wing institutions. They treat their enemy as an indefatigable foe that is always right there ready to pounce. In reality, both Left and Right are exhausted ideologies and exist like two drunks leaning on one another for support.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Covid Update

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As the inner party feverishly tries to create enthusiasm for a second panic over the coronavirus pandemic, it is a good time to take a look at what has actually happened with the virus to this point. It is easy to forget, given the fire hose of nonsense that comes at us every day, but we were all supposed to be dead by now. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us, a lot more than actually died. Instead, most of us are here, social distancing and wearing humiliation masks to please the rulers.

In fairness to the people who made the initial projections, the only way to get any attention in this age is to make outlandish claims. Everything about the modern media culture has evolved to reward the freaks, the crazy and the outlandishly dishonest, so the model makers probably felt they were doing the right thing. They wanted the rulers to treat the virus as a serious threat, so they were okay with rolling out doomsday predictions that were not grounded in reality.

That has not stopped so-called experts from putting out nonsense studies to feed the demands of alarmists. The under-counted fallacy will probably be with us through the election, as that promotes second wave fantasies. In realty, the death toll from the virus is probably overstated, but it is going down quickly nonetheless. That’s because of two things that we see with all pandemics. One is the most vulnerable die first and the other is herd immunity. Covid is following the same course.

A good example of the power of mass media to warp the truth is how the phrase “herd immunity” was quickly turned into an epithet. Even now, alarmist sneer about herd immunity as if it is voodoo. The fact is, the way forward for this thing was always going to be reaching an infection level that slowed the spread of the disease. The only question was how quickly it could happen, without creating problems in the health care system like shortages and overcrowding.

That was the whole point of the lock downs. There’s never going to be a vaccine and there was never going to be an eradication of the virus. We’ve been trying to come up with a vaccine for a coronavirus for a long time. Nothing has come close to working, so planning for one is foolish. Instead, the best approach is to get the young and healthy out there infecting one another and building up their immunity. By young and healthy, it means under 60 and free of serious diseases.

In other words, the lock downs were a dumb idea. Perhaps they were understandable in a panic, as politicians are stupid and like mischief. Now they make no sense at all, at least in terms of dealing with the virus. If there is going to be a second wave, it will be an economic wave. The inevitable Covid flare ups in pockets of the country this fall will simply be the result of slowing the natural spread of the virus and delaying the progress toward the Herd Immunity Threshold.

As an aside, herd immunity does not mean the entire herd must be exposed and develop antibodies. It can mean that, but it can also mean that everyone who could get sick and die from a disease, gets sick and dies. In this case, however, it simply means an infection level where the odds of an infected person contacting a non-infected person falls below a certain threshold. The virus, not having a ready supply of new hosts dies out before infecting the whole population.

For those interested, the panic over Covid is a useful primer on why mass democracy coupled with mass media is a suicide pact. If America was run by a dictator or even a junta, the first step in fighting the disease would be controlling the flow of information about the disease. The media would be tightly controlled and prevented from spreading fake stories about overrun hospitals and people dying in the streets. In fact, we may not even know there was a pandemic at all.

Second, and probably more important, attention whores with outlandish claims would have no platform to spread their nonsense. Instead, the people who know about these things would give their advice to the rulers, who would then make policy. The loons and cranks would be sent to a camp if they got out of line. No one making policy or advising on policy would have an incentive to get attention from the mobs. There would be no market for crazy talk and fear mongering.

That’s what we have seen with Covid. The sober minded virologist advising caution in public policy gets pushed aside in favor of TV clown with dubious credentials. Millions of innumerate people are on social media chattering with one another about facts that they don’t understand. The result of America’s Covid response has been an increase in the levels of stupidity in the public. Everyone is now dumber for having had to put up with months of ridiculous claims about the virus.

The fact is, this brilliant post from March was right all along. Months ago, it was clear that the lock down strategy would not do what was claimed. Even if it did slow the spread of the disease, that was not a good thing. The cost of locking down a country would be prohibitively high. If we lived in a just country, the curve benders would be rounded up by the ruler and executed. The right answer was to prepare the public and the hospitals to tough out what would be a very bad flu season.

That is the one bit of good news in all of this. The public is increasingly cynical about everything they hear from the ruling class. The lies and sadistic punishments in the virus panic moved a lot of people from partisan to hostile. The effort to gin up a phony second wave panic to help Joe Biden in the election will probably be met with a second wave of hostility, much bigger than the first. The ruling class spent what was left of its legitimacy on this virus panic.

In the end, what we have is a very expensive lesson in the folly of mass democracy and mass media. Both are based on the premise that the more stupid people you add to the mix, the greater the collective intelligence of the whole. It’s as if group intelligence works in series, rather than parallel. In reality, the more people participating in politics, the faster dumb ideas are created and allowed to zoom around the system. We’ve reached a point where our society is no longer able to perform the basics.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Cotto-Gottfried Talk

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In an effort to enjoy a little time off this week, the regularly scheduled post will be replaced with a prerecorded item. A re-run, of sorts. My conversation with Joe Cotto and professor Paul Gottfried is up on YouTube. It was probably my favorite one of these I have done. Paul is a brilliant guy, of course, but the topics were just about ideal for the both of us, so it made for a good show. Some technical glitches slowed things down a bit, but even with those, I think it came out pretty well. Enjoy.

https://youtu.be/YiwLJBqGiZc

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

And Don’t Come Back!

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In another highly coordinated effort, the tech oligarchs ritualistically banned a bunch of people and groups from their platforms yesterday. Of note, Reddit banned the Donald Trump fan club from their site. YouTube banned American Renaissance and Stefan Molyneux from their platform. Something called “Twitch” banned the Trump campaign team from its site. All of these people and groups have been accused of impiety by the people in charge of public morality, so they have been punished.

Of course, many of the proscribed have responded according to their role in the great morality play of the Left. They found somewhere on social media to express their outrage and hurt over being kicked off a left-wing platform. There were the denunciations of left-wing hypocrisy and the calls for free speech. The chorus played its role, amplifying the outrage of the proscribed. At this point, the only interesting thing about these rituals is the targets they select for punishment.

Reddit, for example, made an example of the TERF community. Those would be radical feminists who exclude men in sundresses. They were purged for the crime of accepting biological reality. Stefan Molyneux, who has refashioned himself into a street corner philosopher, was banned from YouTube allegedly for advocating violence. In reality, he was selected because YouTube has run out of popular heretics. They have so broken their site that even heretics are losing interest in it.

The important part of this is not the targets, but the ritual. As you see with Molyneux, they will claim a milquetoast libertarian actor is Hitler in order to fill the role in the morality tale. It’s not important that he is not actually Hitler. What matters is they have someone to parade around as a heretic on whom they can ritualistically heap their scorn and then chase from their midst. For all it matters, these recently proscribed people could be macramé enthusiasts or bird watchers.

That’s what people outside the halls of the one true faith fail to grasp. The people deciding to ban Jared Taylor spent no time listening to what he has to say or examining his videos for violations of their morality codes. They are physically incapable of being around those who dispute the tenets of the faith. Jared is just a blasphemer, an agent of the great evil against which they fight. The same is true in varying degrees for all of the people thrown off these left-wing sites.

For the people doing this, the only time they bother to listen to the damned is after the fact, when the condemned are complaining about their banning. Progressivism is a sadistic faith, fueled by the suffering of its enemies. You can be sure the various committees and working groups tasked with finding this round of heretics were replaying Moly’s Twitter performance over and over as they gratified themselves. He was playing his role like a legendary thespian at the peak of his ability.

It is the biggest problem facing those opposed to the new religion. Instead of accepting it as a religion, opponents insist on imposing their own sense of logic and reason onto the actions of these people. “They are banning us because they are afraid of what we have to say!” No, the people conducting these rituals have no idea what someone like Molyneux says in his videos. He could be speaking in tongues for all they care. He is not a person to them. He is a character in their morality play.

The rock heads and cranks on this side will dispute this, because that is what makes them rock heads and cranks. They will keep imposing their sensibilities on the other side, despite generations of evidence to the contrary. Worse yet, they will insist that these left-wing platforms are vital ground. We have to exhaust ourselves fighting to get on these platforms. Of course, that just means a steady supply of people ready to play the role of the damned in the next morality play.

The proper response to all of this is to simply leave these platforms. The argument is that these platforms are the public square, but that’s not true. No one goes on Twitter to have their mind changed about anything. People go on Twitter to have their opinions confirmed by people they already like. The same is true of YouTube. If you really enjoy Moly’s performances, you can always go to his site. This is how it worked up until about ten years ago. It’s how this site works.

Further, the proper response to de-platforming efforts is to ignore them. When you go public and moan about the attacks, the Left is exhilarated. They see the suffering as a trophy that keeps cheering for them. Sure, it is no fun to go through. No one wants to waste time moving servers or changing domain registrars, but publicly complaining about it does not make the burden lighter. It just encourages the people doing it to keep looking for fresh victims. It stimulates them.

Ultimately, our side joins the fight when we finally wake-up and accept the other side for what it is. The Left are not reasonable people. They are not operating from a set of fixed rules that can be mastered by an outsider. There is no beating them at their own game or on their platforms. These are evil people who are only motivated by the suffering of decent people. They feed on your frustration and your complaints. When you engage with them, you are giving them oxygen

The way forward is to reduce the number of contacts between them and us. Instead of going inside the walls of their domains to be fed upon like cattle, make them scale the walls of our domains. No, that does not mean building a new internet. It just means not going onto their platforms. Sure, they can attack Molyneux by going after his registrar or hosting company, but that is time consuming and often futile. It makes them work hard for the dopamine rush of tormenting the condemned.

That’s ultimately the battle we face. There’s no defeating the Left in the conventional sense of a fight. Instead, the goal is to exhaust them. Since a big part of what sustains them is the attention they get from their victims, not giving them that attention increases their cost of operation. The trouble is, many on our side is like a battered wife. They can only feel love when they are being pummeled. They have been conditioned to take the beating and then come back asking for more.

When our side sits it out, the results are impressive. Look at the riots. The Left was sure these riots would draw out “right-wing extremists” they could then use as a foil. When that did not happen, they tried inventing them, but failed to make it work. It’s hard to convince people that the black guys beating a white guy with a skateboard are actually white nationalists. It just underscored the fact that the only people in the streets are left-wing agitators and their pets from the vibrant community.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that is why they have started banning people from their platforms again. The riots have been a terrible disaster for them. They fully expected a dozen Charlottesville-style events, with lots of bad guys they could parade around on their media platforms. Instead they got semi-literate savages and potheads claiming part of Seattle as a new country. This should be the model for all future interaction with the Left. Engage them in the shadows, never in public.

Note: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

GE: The Story Of America

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If you were to pick one company that symbolizes how America has changed and been changed over the last half century or so, it would be General Electric. The company founded by Thomas Edison is in many ways a microcosm of the American economy over the last century or more. It rose to become an industrial giant in the 20th century, the symbol of America manufacturing prowess. It then transformed into a giant of the new economy in the 1990’s, a symbol of the new America.

Today, General Electric is a company in decline. After a series of problems following the financial crisis of 2008, the company has steadily sold off assets and divisions in an effort to fix its financial problems. In 2019, Harry Markopolos, the guy who sniffed our Bernie Madoff, accused them of $38 billion in accounting fraud. The stock has been removed from the Dow Jones Industrial composite. Many now speculate that GE will end up in bankruptcy in order to reorganize.

For those interested in a longer discussion about the history of General Electric, Myth of the 20th Century did a podcast on the company. One aspect they did not cover is how General Electric transformed from a company that made things into a financial services company that owned divisions that made things. Like the American economy in the late 20th century, the company shifted its focus from making and creating things to the complex game of financializing those processes.

Like many companies in the late 20th century, General Electric found that their potential clients were not always able to come up with the cash to buy their products, so they came up with a way to finance those purchases. This is an age-old concept that has been with us since the dawn of time. Store credit is a way for the seller to profit from the cash poor in the market. He can both raise his price and also collect interest on the payments made by his customers relying on terms.

For American business, this simple idea turned into a highly complex process, involving tax avoidance strategies and the capitalization of the products and services formerly treated as business expenses. Commercial customers were no longer buying products and services, but instead leasing them in bundled services packages, financed at super-low interest rates and tax deductible. Whole areas of the supply chain shifted from traditional purchases to leased services.

For example, a local supplier of industrial goods used to own a warehouse to hold the products he supplied to clients. Inside would not only be the products, but material handling equipment like forklifts and shelving. Outside at the loading docks would be a fleet of big scary trucks used to deliver the products. Of course, to make it all work would be a staff of people loading and unloading trucks, moving product around the warehouse, making deliveries to clients and so on.

All of this would require a lot of money to acquire and maintain. That small local distributor would have millions tied up in assets. This is where the magic of cheap credit came into the economy. Companies like GE could go to these suppliers and unleash that capital tied up in those assets, by converting them into leased services. The trucks, for example, would no longer be purchased, but leased from a GE division that paid the taxes, did the repairs and provided spares in peak times.

As an aside, another aspect of this new leased economy is what happened with the people inside of it. That local supplier could not only lease his trucks and material handling equipment; he could lease his people. The building, the warehouse people, the administrative staff, the trucks, all of it, could be turned into a single lease payment for larger operators. This allowed the big players to muscle out the small players in just about every aspect of the supply chain.

What really made this new form of store credit work was both super-low borrowing rates for big players like GE, but also changes in the tax laws that allowed these lease payments to be treated like depreciation. The customer not only got the benefit of holding his cash he would normally use for asset acquisition; he could also get favorable tax treatment on the lease expense. To no one’s surprise, the big lobbyists for these changes in the tax laws were the financial services firms.

That is what GE became in the 1990’s. It was no longer a company that made stuff and financed it for select clients. It was a financial services firm that owned manufacturing facilities that supplied products it could finance. GE Capital became a massive commercial bank, not entirely regulated like a commercial bank and free to invent new financial services to meet its needs. They bought up manufacturing and commercial services companies, in order to monopolize their financing operations.

In the old economy, the credit system existed to serve the broader economy. In the new economy, the broader economy exists to serve the credit system. That which can be turned into a credit instrument increases in value, while that which cannot be bundled into a financial instrument loses value. Small players that provide specialized services lose value, while global players with easy access to credit increase in value. Everyone and everything serves the global credit system now.

This is what happened with General Electric as its credit empire grew. It was first and foremost a finance company. Since the flow of cheap credit was unlimited, the need to find new places for the credit became the point of GE. They bought companies in order to have new clients for their financing arm. They expanded the realm of that which could be leased and financed. By the end of the Jack Welch era, the point of General Electric was to grow bigger in order to supply more credit.

This financialization of the economy also allowed companies like General Electric to maintain implausible growth rates. This is where that credit machine at the heart of the company came into play. They could finance acquisitions with cheap credit. They could structure the purchase of a company in such a way as to realize its revenue now, while amortizing its debt and expenses. Suddenly that new division was wildly profitable through the miracle of off-balance sheet transactions.

The last financial crisis broke General Electric, by exposing a reality of the modern credit-based economy. Without new ways to move credit through the system, the credit system begins to seize up. Since the profit in this system is entirely through the skim, the slowing of credit means a collapse in profits. Once those profits disappear, the ability to make interest payments declines and that slows the system further. GE was close to insolvent within days of the mortgage crisis in 2008.

That is the real lesson of General Electric. The company became something like the old Mafia bust-outs. The whole point of the business was to squeeze every drop of value from clients and divisions. Instead of running up the credit lines and burning down the building for the insurance, General Electric turned the human capital of companies into lease and interest payments. They were not investing and creating, they were monetizing and consuming whatever it touched.

GE came close to collapse in the financial crisis, but they were bailed out. They stagger on, despite having lots of divisions that make high quality products. The cost of unwinding the company back into a normal company will be high, maybe too high for them to survive. The same can be said of the American economy. It will have to be unwound, but there will be no bailout. Instead, it will have to unwind quickly and painfully, in order to become a normal economy again.

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 at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!