The Past Is Always Uncertain

Posted on November 20, 2017 by thezman

Progressives are often, and correctly, accused of re-writing the past in order to endorse their current claims about the present. It is a necessary habit that has been incorporated as a feature of the movement. Since most of what they currently believe about humanity and human organization is contrary to observable reality, they have to no choice but to reinvent the past. Something similar seems to be happening with the Buckleyites as they fall into obscurity. They are creating alternative realities to explain the present.

This piece by Henry Olsen is a good example. He makes the point that what so-called conservatives consider to be “conservative” has not been a winning formula for them in Republican elections. He then picks some representative examples of liberty-conservatives, presumably the sort championed by the Buckleyites, who went nowhere in the GOP presidential primaries. The main point Olsen is trying to make is that what he calls the liberty-conservatives have not had a lot of success in elections.

The subtle normalization of Rand Paul is interesting, given that NR types savaged Ron Paul when he was a real candidate. I will also note that National Review was prone to calling the utterances of George W. Bush “Reaganesque” and they praised “compassionate conservatism” as some sort of advanced form of Buckley conservatism. It is what makes their current fetish for timeless principles so comically bizarre. The definition of timeless conservatism is a set of goal posts on wheels that they push around to fit the moment.

That is the thing about re-imagining the past. You have to cherry pick and time shift in order to make it work. Barry Goldwater, for example, has not been salient in American politics for going on 40 years now. The youngest person to have voted for him is now seventy-four. On the other hand, the “liberty conservatives” were ebullient when George W. Bush won in 2000 and the GOP controlled both houses of Congress. Of course, there is no mention of Reagan, who was a Goldwater conservative, and the GOP’s most successful President.

The general point that Olsen is making is that today, the constituency for libertarian-conservatism is small, even within the Republican base. This is probably true, but the question is why? All of the megaphones of Conservative Inc. have been tuned to blast out the message of libertarian-conservatism. Talk radio, websites, Fox News, the commentariat, all of the organs of the so-called Right have been preaching about shrinking size and scope government for as long as anyone reading this has been alive.

So, why is that position a loser within Republican circles?

One obvious reason is no one believes it. When the GOP had opportunities to shrink government, they grew government. When they had chances to normalize our foreign policy, they went empire building. When they had the chance to defend the domestic economy, they threw in with open borders and globalist trade policies. The most egregious sin off all, however, has been their liberal use of Progressive rhetoric to denounce dissenters as racists, excluded from acceptable public discourse.

There is one exception and that is immigration. The one big win for liberty-conservatives was the 1986 immigration reform act. This made it possible for tens of millions of foreigners to flood into the country. Ann Coulter the other day noted that one in eight Virginia residents is foreign born. That means there are more foreigners in Virginia right now than the liberty-conservatives said they needed to amnesty in 1986. The one thing these guys were good at doing has been a disaster for their alleged love of liberty.

You see that in a post from J’Onquarious. The sort of civic minded libertarianism, which is popular with Conservative Inc., is really unpopular with the sorts of people they are hellbent on importing by the millions. The reason their favorite bugman was trounced in the Virginia election is that the sort of people liberty conservatives are fond of championing, are not interested in supporting liberty conservatives. It turns out that a policy of wishing death on your voters and their culture, is not a good way to win elections.

That is not a reality these so-called liberty-conservatives can face. Olsen does not bother to address this, as there is no way to explain away the mathematical and demographic realities. His only mention of immigration is to be gobsmacked at a Cato-backed study that shows Trump voters are not in favor of their wholesale demographic replacement. The fact that their one success has been a disaster for them, never registers. Instead, it is ignored. Olsen’s suggestion is more of the same, just even more of it.

This is where you see that all forms of mainstream conservatism share the same assumptions as Progressives about the nature of man and human organization. It is also why they have developed the habit of rewriting history, especially their own history, in order to explain the present. When you start from the premise that biology is unimportant, that all people everywhere are essentially the same, you are condemned to a life of disappointment, unless you can endlessly redraft the narrative to avoid facing reality.

The one major difference between the retconning of so-called conservatives and what we see from Progressives, is that the latter controls the institutions. Rewriting and replaying old fights is a proven way to distract people from current failures. When you control the levers of power, an unpredictable past becomes a useful tool in maintaining control. When you are allegedly challenging the status quo, an inability to clearly remember yesterday undermines your credibility. No one believes these guys and they keep reminding us why.

Uncivil Religion

Posted on November 19, 2017 by thezman

One of the weirder aspects of the modern age is the endless calls for unity from our superiors, particularly those in the Progressive camp. It is weird for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact the Left is endlessly trying to marginalize anyone that disagrees with them. It is how diversity came to mean rigid homogeneity. Putting aside the hypocrisy, it is weird because it is fairly new and very un-American. It also contradicts the very premise of democracy, which is about competing opinions, jostling for support.

It seems that the calls for “unity” have coincided with the spread of the American civic nationalism stuff. Thirty years ago, no public figure talked about “who we are” or made grand claims about a unified America culture. In fact, the lack of conformity was the gold standard of intellectual rigor. Democrats used to claim they had so much internal debate, it was like herding cats. Republicans used to crow about being the party of ideas, meaning that they had the bulk of free thinkers and dissident chattering skulls.

It is not a coincidence that the flowering of the civic religion stuff has coincided with increasing calls for unity and now the un-personing panics. Religions, particularly in their growth phase, are highly intolerant of competing religions. It is why the Left, even today, attacks Christianity. They see it as competition. In order to have a civic religion, it means stamping out ideas and movements that contradict it, even if those ideas are rooted in observable reality. In the name of unity, dissent must be crushed, along with the dissenter.

Related examples of this are Iran and Saudi Arabia. The ruling elites of both lands are members of sects within Islam. In both countries, the demands of unity require hordes of religious enforcers making sure no one has incorrect thoughts. To tolerate any dissent puts the power and authority of the ruling elite into question. Since the ruling elite are the embodiment of the religion, any dissent is a direct threat to the very existence of the theocracy. Unity is a necessary element of theocracy, even it comes at the point of a gun.

In terms of pure civic religions, ones that expressly reject the supernatural, the most obvious examples ended in bloodbaths. The French Revolution is the first real stab at establishing a civic religion. Nazism, Bolshevism and Maoism, on the other hand, quickly devolved into murder machines, killing off over one hundred million, but they did so in the name of national unity. With Nazism and Bolshevism, even well intended questioning of the prevailing orthodoxy got you killed. Again, unity abhors anything resembling dissent.

There is a chicken and egg issue here. Is the rise of a priestly class the inevitable result of a civic religion, or does the elite attempt to legitimize themselves by peddling civic religion and making demands for unity? In prior ages, ruling dynasties would claim divinity in order to eliminate challenges to their reign. Even today, the motto of the monarch of the United Kingdom is dieu et mon droit. I will also note that the kingdom is united in the body of the monarch. This is a common element of all European monarchies.

Getting back to modern America, the fetish for unity and the promotion of the American civic religion looks a lot like a search for a reason to maintain the status quo. It is reactionary. The very real threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War held the American nations together, under the Yankee Imperium. Once that was gone, something had to replace it, or the Cold War arrangements would be replaced. It is not an accident that “both sides” of the political elite rely on the same language to quash dissent.

The increasing demands for unity, however, will probably backfire. You see this with social media. Facebook has instituted polices to silence unapproved facts. They have been moving much slower than Twitter, which is aggressively going after anyone who disagrees with the Council of Cat Ladies running the place. They have now declared jihad against anyone who is suspected of thinking bad thoughts. That means they will use your search results and surfing habits to police your access to Twitter. Think about that.

The unintended result of this is to de-legitimize the Right half of the ruling class. A so-called conservative with a twitter account, especially one with a blue check, will now be seen as nothing more than an organ grinder’s monkey. The civic religion only works when political debate is confined to the tiny ideological space occupied by Progressives and their hand-picked opposition. Strip away the legitimacy of the so-called conservatives and the civic religion is revealed to be a public relations campaign by the ruling oligarchs.

That is the core reason that American public debate seems so uncivil. In an effort to defend the status quo, the ruling elites have become increasingly aggressive at stamping out dissent. The whole “Russian hacking” nonsense was a thinly veiled way of saying that those who voted for Trump were either stupid or un-American. The fact that it appears the purveyors of this story were themselves in cahoots with the Russians suggests there are no limits to what they will do to crush their opposition. Torquemada would be proud.

This heavy handedness also legitimizes the dissidents. Gab has struggled along, but the purges and promised purges resulted in a boost in membership. The steadfast determination by the owners, in the face of serious threats and even laughably stupid threats, has given them legitimacy with people who think a marketplace of ideas is essential to civil society. Put another way, that which was previously dismissed as heresy, now has the air of legitimacy. That is the real threat feared by the ruling class.

Eric Hoffer said, “Fanatical orthodoxy is in all movements a late development. It comes when the movement is in full possession of power and can impose its faith by force as well as by persuasion.” It is also a late phase effort, a rearguard action, intended to defend the status quo, despite there no longer being an obvious use for it. The current arrangements in America no longer serve anyone other than the relatively small number of people who live like royalty in the Imperial Capital and its satellite cities.

At some point, the cost of maintaining unity among increasingly hostile tribes outweighs the benefit. The increasingly shrill demands for unity and obedience, along with the corresponding fissures opening up in public life, suggest we are following a familiar path that leads to a break down. Some social scientists seem to get, to some degree, what is happening, but no one knows what comes next. Maybe it is just too frightening to consider or maybe it is impossible to know. What is not coming, though, is national unity.

Is Drudge On The Level?

Posted on November 18, 2017 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heading Out

Posted on November 17, 2017 by thezman

This week the show is a bit lighter, as I’m preparing for some much needed time off. I always take time off around Thanksgiving. Given that I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for most of the year, I’m really looking forward to some down time. Between the podcast and blogging, my media empire is a solid 20+ hours per week of effort. The podcast takes about ten hours each week, give or take, when I add it all up. Blogging and responding to comments takes up about the same amount of time. it’s not a full-time job, but it is in addition to my full-time job.

I’m not complaining. I enjoy doing this as a hobby so its not like it is work, but it can become a bit of grind. I can tell that my material has become a little flat over the last month or so as my batteries drain down, so I’m taking next week off. There will be no podcast and posting will be lighter than usual. I’m planning to stay off social media too. Things like Twitter and Gab are what you make of them, but it is a good idea to unplug on occasion.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. One thing I plan to do is think about the format during the break, but for now it remains the same. There is also a bonus track on Gab, where I talk about some current events and why we are lucky to be living in this age. If you are not on Gab, you should be. Despite their flaws, they are the good guys fighting to keep the lamps from going out in the West.

For this week, Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the four longer segments from the show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android phone 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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: More Millennial Talk (Link) (Link)
12:00: Finnish Gamers and Bronies (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
22:00: Real Science (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
32:00: Sweet Home Alabama
42:00: Mali (Link) (Link)
47:00: Evan McLaren (Link)
52:00: Trannies (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link)

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

The Tribe To Emulate

Posted on November 16, 2017 by thezman

The Asians are often called the “model minority” in America. This is based on the fact that they have low crime, low welfare dependency, low social dysfunction and high academic achievement. Some mentally unstable Asian females have tried to rail against this as racist, but Asians make terrible social justice warriors. That and only a lunatic could construe what is an obvious compliment as racism. The thing is though, they are not the model minority. The most successful minority is the Jews.

If you are in an African tribe and your people are thinking about moving to the West, the group you would want to emulate are the Jews. They have figured out how to wildly succeed in all sorts of places, always as a tiny minority. This is in despite of some serious efforts by majority populations to keep the Jews from succeeding. Then there was the bit of trouble in the middle of the last century. Asians cannot hold a candle to the Jews in this area. In the US, Jews have become the ruling class.

Steve Sailer has noticed something that has been an internet meme for some time and that is “Jewish privilege.” This used to be a gag in response to the cries of “white privilege” by Progressive lunatics, but it is slowly becoming a legitimate topic for public discussion. Whether or not you buy into the whole “privilege” argument, the point is Jews have been wildly successful in America. The question that should follow is why? What group qualities have worked for Jews that are unique to Jews in America?

Now, this is usually where people will starting mentioning Kevin McDonald and The Culture of Critique. The more empirically minded will bring up the landmark study of Ashkenazi intelligence, by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, Henry Harpending from a dozen years ago. Neither of those are going to help your African tribe make it work in the West. That’s like the Koreans reading the Talmud looking for the secret of Jewish success. A better approach might be identifying a few qualities and copying them.

One is something Steve Sailer noticed during the short-lived Larry David flap. It used to be that Jews were obsessively self-aware. Thaddeus Russell touches on this in his book, Renegade History of America. Jews used to obsess over the quirks and flaws of their people, and tirelessly harangue the tribe about the flaws. Shame is taboo these days, oddly enough. but it makes for an excellent self-policing mechanism. In fact, it used to be the default way in which the American ruling class policed itself.

Related to the self-policing instinct is clannishness. A lot of alt-right people criticize Jews for being clannish. They call it nepotism, but they really mean clannish. There is no doubt that Jews throughout the diaspora have always worried about what is good for the Jews, so much so it is a cliche. The thing is though, unlike, say, Arabs, Jewish clannishness defends the tribe against all threats, external and internal. Arabs will protect complete idiots, who cause the tribe trouble. Jews do not do that with their members.

This is something that all identity politics should adopt. Going back to the African tribe at the beginning, if they have a member, who brings shame on the group or simply cannot pull his weight, the best course is to cut him lose. If you have talent and you are Jewish, the tribe is an enormous asset. if you are a mediocrity or a loser, being Jewish is not going to benefit you in the least. Clannishness as a reward encourages loyalty, but it also boils off the losers who drag down the group. Along with shame, it makes for a better tribe.

Another quirk of the Tribe that could help any tribe is the unwillingness of Jews to self-marginalize in society. The Ultra-Orthodox do this, but they are the exception. Generally, Jews engage with the society in which they reside and are willing to engage at the highest levels. Gypsies in Europe, in contrast, live on the fringes. Asians in America tend to gravitate to a little Hanoi or a Chinatown. Jews do not do that and when forced into a ghetto, and we have the word ghetto thanks to the Tribe, Jews resist it and try to engage.

This is not just something Jews have done in America. Italians and Irish are notable examples of groups that would not stay in the ghetto. Unlike Europe, America has never had a lot of rules about this stuff. We did not inherent Europe’s class structure. Still, the winning hand everywhere is to not settle for a quiet little corner of society. The winning formula is to embrace the greater culture and carve out a place in the center of it. The trouble last century in Germany not withstanding, it has worked very well for Jews.

Going back to the shame issue, there is a Jewish quirk that is a huge advantage and that is a form of shamelessness. That is, Jews are never ashamed of their efforts. You see this with the neocons. Guys like Bill Kristol have no problem walking around in public, despite the things he has done to the country. Anthony Weiner was out and about, even after he was caught in the “bing-bing-bing.” It is not always an asset but having the conscience of a burglar makes it easier to overcome failure and keep plugging.

The genesis of this post is a conversation I had with a Zimbabwean. We fell into conversation about his country and one of the things he said was that his people are the Jews of Africa . He thinks his people should come to America and follow the same path as the Ashkenazi. I did not think to ask if he was Lemba, but that’s my hunch. His general point was that inculcating certain group habits that have worked for other groups, is a good way forward for tribes, be they in identity politics on the African bush.

Cord Cutting

Posted on November 15, 2017 by thezman

Anytime I mention cord cutting, I get a ton of responses on it. It is not just about the cultural phenomenon. For a lot of people, the alternatives to the traditional cable model are much better at delivering the desired content. If you think TV is immoral, the solution is simple. Do not buy a television. If you enjoy some shows and movies, it gets a little more complicated. Given how many times it comes up, I thought it would be worthwhile to post about what I am doing as a cord cutter. Others can chime in with what they are doing.

Like a lot of men, I ended up with a cable bill because I liked sports. When I was a kid, there were a few games on a week. Then ESPN came on-line with live sports. Then regional sports networks. Now every league and sport have multiple channels dedicated to showing live events. It is the golden age of TV sports, if the gold standard is measured in quantity, rather than quality. That said, I had all the other stuff on cable so I tried to watch popular shows. It was there and people talked about, so I watched.

My first foray into cord cutting was due to technical issues. I did not have cable for a summer and one of things I noticed is I did not miss it very much. I have always been a baseball fan but listening on the radio is a better way to consume baseball. The other stuff I used to watch, well, I did not miss it. If I wanted to watch a movie, I got a disc or watched one of the discs I owned. That is one of the truths of TV watching I learned. Most of what we watch is re-runs and old movies that we have already watched.

With that in mind, I cut the cord at the same time I bought an Amazon Fire TV box. This is a simple little device that lets you access Amazon library of movies and TV shows, over the internet. It plugs into your TV via an HDMI cable and connects to the internet over your wireless. You can also connect it with an Ethernet cable. It also has a simple browser so you can access video on the web, like YouTube. It lets you load apps for other video content providers like Hulu and Netflix. There are a lot of small providers with apps.

I have been an Amazon Prime member for a long time, as I do almost all of my shopping on Amazon. The free shipping pretty much covers the cost of the membership for me. That means I get all of the Prime video, which is old movies and TV shows. For instance, I watched a series called Justified that had gone off the air long before I heard of it. They also have original content and some of it is very well done. Amazon also has a movie and TV show rental service. For most people, Amazon Prime for $90 a year is all they need.

In my case, Amazon is all I needed, but I got curious and sampled some of the other serves and devices just to see what was available. I tried the Hulu live TV service, which is one of the many new services for live TV. Their package has most of the popular cable channels for $40 a month. That also gets you their massive library of old TV shows going back to forever it seems. If you liked Taxi or Three’s Company, you could watch it with your Hulu service. You can also watch Hulu on other devices like phones and tablets.

I gave the DirecTV service a ride and it was buggy as all hell. They say it got better, but my experience was not good. In theory, it should be great as it is an internet version of the DirecTV service, which rated the best of all traditional TV offerings. I know when I used their satellite service, it was fantastic. Their internet option has lots of content, but getting it too work was so frustrating I finally gave up and deleted the app. I was an early adopter so maybe it is better, but I would recommend Hulu over DirecTV for most people.

Now, if you are not interested in the Amazon ecosystem, then you can use something like Roku. I got one of these free when I signed up for something. Like the Amazon box, it is a small device that connects to your internet via wireless and to your television through an HDMI cable. The interface is easy to use and the setup is super simple. I had it running in five minutes. That is really the amazing part of all of these new devices. They are vastly simpler to setup and operate than your old cable box.

Roku does some things really well. It is good at buffering content so even if your internet connection is a little buggy, you get no interruption in the video service. Amazon is not as good at this. It is also really good at finding content on your PC’s so you can use the Roku to play your music and movie collection in another room. I was really impressed at how well this feature worked. I have a vast music collection so having it available anywhere is nice feature for me. I would imagine the same is true for video collections.

One more thing about the ease of use bit. The new devices are modern, unlike your old cable box. For instance, they use Bluetooth for the remote. You do not have to point the remote at the box, which means the box can be hidden away for a nice clean look to the TV area. I have mine behind the TV. The remotes are also amazingly well designed. You can navigate everything with a few buttons. The Roku remote has a feature where you can plug headphones into the remote and listen, without disturbing everyone else.

Finally, there is one other thing I have been doing. I loaded an app called Kodi on the Amazon Fire TV. This is a service that uses add-ons to allow you to see content from anywhere on earth. The legality of this service is dubious, but it is impossible to police. The upshot is you can use Kodi to get all your TV and movies free. You can also watch sporting events from all over the world too. There are two downsides. One is you have fiddle with the installation and configuration. The other is the quality is not always the best.

If you are the sort who enjoys fiddling with stuff, then you can find plenty of on-line guides to setting up the Kodi system. Here is a guide to installing Kodi on a Firestick. You can get the Fire TV Stick for $40, so you can use it for an experiment without spending much. You can also buy a box that is configured, but people really into this stuff tell me those boxes are mostly junk. My experience is that installing on Amazon took about 30 minutes, most of which was spent watching a video on YouTube. Otherwise, it was simple.

Here is the thing with Kodi. I have no idea how it is legal or how it could be policed in the future. This has the same vibe as the Napster and LimeWire fads of yesteryear. The technology is designed to circumvent current efforts by the gatekeepers to maintain their monopolies. In the music rackets, the gatekeepers eventually waged jihad on the users in order to scare people out of using file sharing. It failed, but a lot of people were bullied and hassled by Big Music. You need to assess your risk tolerance before using Kodi.

That is my cord cutting story.

Clown World

Posted on November 14, 2017 by thezman

I was talking with someone the other day, who I know well enough to talk about current events. I do not talk about my politics with anyone in real life, but I will chat about current events in the cable chat show sort of way, always careful not to take the wrong side. If I am around a gang of Progs, for example, I make sure to sound like an NPR listener, if I am forced to speak about current events. The person I was with is what you people would call a Boomer normie. He watches Fox News and voted for Trump, over Hillary.

I forget what we were discussing, but he said, “Do you ever get the feeling that things are spiraling out of control?” He went on to point out that his parents thought the world was going to hell when his generation was going crazy, but he did not think they ever lost confidence in the country. They were just sick of the kids and communists. His last thought on it was “It just feels like no one is in control anymore. All it is going to take is someone to pull on the right thread and the whole thing comes unraveled.”

I did not have a response, as that is the sort of topic that leads to saying banned things in public and you cannot be too careful. Even when around people I am fairly sure think the bad thoughts, I have made a habit of keeping my mouth shut. I figure it is good practice for when they start coming door-to-door like they are doing in Europe, looking for people who post truthful things on social media. It will probably never happen in America, but you can never be sure, so I only speak freely around certified hate thinkers at hate conferences.

All that said, there does seem to be a constant state of crisis about things now. I do not remember that being true during the Obama years, even though there was that constant sense of foreboding over economics. The near death experience faced by the financial system in the Bush years is the reason. My sense is most people, even Cloud People, think we just got lucky. The mortgage meltdown was just one of the tremors before the credit volcano explodes and covers the world in useless debt.

It does feel different now. Part of it is the Prog panic over Trump. You cannot engage in mass media without seeing someone shrieking about the latest Trump crisis. It is not the shrieking that is unsettling, it is the ham-handedness of it. The Never Trump loons like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg are so transparent and phony, it makes most people wonder if we are ruled over by sociopaths. It is not the constant state of panic in the media that is unnerving to be people. It is what the panic is revealing about our ruling class.

That is just one aspect. The troll culture is another. Americans are increasingly getting their news through social media. That means they inevitably run across guys like Mike Cernovich. He is just one of many professional trolls who are slowly casting themselves as legitimate news reporters. It is not what they post, so much as how much they post that gets them attention. They are a shotgun blast of bullshit, hyperbole and self-promotion that fills the space. A million Geraldo Rivera’s have taken over social media.

It is not just the fringe trolls. Mainstream soy-boys are now hired to generate click-bait for mainstream news sites. Most people reading this remember when the Boston Globe was a readable newspaper. No more. Idiots writing about gun confiscation are just dull-witted attention whores. He even brags about it. The thing is guys like him would not survive the first week of the civil war that would ensure if the government tried a gun grab like he proposes. Congress would be forced to hold session in Canada or Hawaii.

There is also the clown world aspect to it. Americans go on-line and learn that the US Army has now lifted a ban on the mentally disturbed. That’s right, they are letting “people with a history of “self-mutilation,” bipolar disorder, depression and drug and alcohol abuse” join the Army. Imagine yourself or your son in a unit with guys, who cut themselves or struggle with thoughts of suicide. If you are a normie, you look at that and think they have already let crazy people into the Army and now they are in charge.

On the other hand, it is just another day in clown world. Not so long ago, men who dressed as women – and the trans thing is always men dressing as women – were expected to keep that stuff private. If they could not control themselves, then they were shunned or even institutionalized. It was just assumed that people who think they are trees or space aliens or Filipinos trapped in a white guy’s body are suffering from a form of madness. Today, they are celebrated as heroes of the culture, by the people in charge.

That may be why people think things are spiraling out of control. It is not the lunacy; it is the pace of lunacy. It seems to be accelerating. In one generation we went from “Maybe one day a black guy can be president” to having an exotic weirdo with a Muslim name in the White House and his supporters making war on the native stock. One day, comics are making gay jokes as part of their act and in the blink of an eye, Canada is throwing comics in jail for upsetting lesbians. The clown world spiral is accelerating.

In the 60’s and 70’s, the narrative had two sides. The Prog version was that young whites wanted to open society up for the smattering of non-whites, particularly blacks. The alternative narrative was that white society came under assault by cosmopolitan communists who used the youth movement to attack white society. Both sides relied on a civil war framework to describe that age. Both sides assume some sort of resolution where a middle ground is the result and everything gets back to normal.

That is not the vibe of today. It feels like America is a fleet of ships lashed together for so long that no one remembers why they are lashed together. As the ropes begin to break, no one is trying to repair them. Instead. people are severing them so everyone can drift apart and go their own way. In the process, various madmen are setting fire to other boats and cackling like lunatics. Those who want to keep things together, just because that is the way it has always been, are starting to think it is time to cut everyone loose.

Maybe that is the best result for clown world. Whatever America was a generation ago or five generations ago, it is no longer that. It is something different and something increasingly untenable. Too many people want off the ride. To return to the previous metaphor, it used to be the responsible thing was to restrain the crazies from cutting the lashings. Now, the responsible thing may be to cut the cords that bind clown world together, before something much worse happens.

Peaceful Separation

Posted on November 13, 2017 by thezman

There are four ways to peacefully govern a multi-racial or multi-ethnic society. There is the hard separation that existed in the North before the Civil Rights Movement. The South had a soft segregation. The old way of stating the difference was that whites in the North were willing to treat blacks as equals as long as they did not have to live near them. In the South, whites were willing to live near blacks, as long as they did not have to treat them as equals. Both are now forbidden to mention in public now.

America has settled on Proportionalism for the last half century, as a way to navigate through the impossible task of keeping the peace between blacks and whites. Now that tens of millions of foreigners have been added to the mix, what was a fairly good situation in the 1980’s has become increasingly untenable. Thirty years ago, most people, black or white, were optimistic about race relations. That is clearly not the case today and people are starting to wonder if it is even possible to make it work.

That is what makes this New York Times op-ed so interesting. The conventional way to read it is as more of the same blame and shame the Left has done for decades. The writer is supposed to be the sympathetic character and the whites are the bad guys in the never ending drama. The writer spends a lot of time listing the sins of white people and how that makes him feel. The thing is though, the way it is written leaves the impression that race relations are hopeless.

For African-Americans, race has become a proxy not just for politics but also for decency. White faces are swept together, ominous anxiety behind every chance encounter at the airport or smiling white cashier. If they are not clearly allies, they will seem unsafe to me.

Barack Obama’s farewell address encouraged us to reach across partisan lines. But there is a difference between disagreeing over taxes and negotiating one’s place in America, the bodies of your children, your humanity. Our racial wound has undone love and families, and ignoring the depths of the gash will not cause it to heal.

We can still all pretend we are friends. If meaningful civic friendship is impossible, we can make do with mere civility — sharing drinks and watching the game. Indeed, even in Donald Trump’s America, I have not given up on being friends with all white people. My bi-ethnic wife, my most trusted friend, understands she is seen as a white woman, even though her brother and father are not. Among my dearest friends, the wedding party and children’s godparents variety, many are white. But these are the friends who have marched in protest, rushed to airports to protest the president’s travel ban, people who have shared the risks required by strength and decency.

What has become common, when blacks are trotted out by Progressive to lecture us about race, is that they make the case that they will never be satisfied with the efforts of whites. A close reading of this essay reveals that the writer is happy with the social structures of race. He does not like white people. There is no way he can be happy in America, living among whites, as long as whites continue to act white. This is the state of things. Blacks can never be happy and whites can do anything to change that fact.

That is not a problem that can be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. When America was 80% white, it worked OK for Progressives, as it let them guilt the rest of the country into going along with the liberal agenda. As America approaches majority-minority status, this is entirely untenable. Ekow N. Yankah, the writer of that piece, is living the dream. He has an elite position in an elite profession. He gets treated like royalty and lives an upper class lifestyle. He is also an African immigrant. If he cannot be happy, no one can.

The thing is the people commissioning these sorts of pieces have to see the implications of what elite blacks are saying. American has done everything humanly possible to make it work for blacks in America. They have to see that white America is completely out of patience with this stuff. If you are a plumber worried that you could be replaced by an indentured servant from over the horizon or you are an office worker worried about the robots, Ekow N. Yankah’s complaints just sound like ungratefulness.

The inevitable end game with race relations as America careens into majority-minority status is separation. The question is what kind of separation and whether or not it will be peaceful. Ekow N. Yankah is an accomplished guy with loads of talent. Africa could use a man like him. Maybe the people in charge are pushing these sorts of essays, because they know what is coming. It helps prepare the ground for the inevitable. Or maybe they locked in the past, and they just do not see what is coming down the tracks

Let us hope it is the former.

I Was Wrong

Posted on November 12, 2017 by thezman

A while back, I said the “deep state” stuff was wildly overdone. There is no deep state secretly pulling the strings. Well, I may have been mistaken. This IBD story makes me look ridiculously naive.

A 1979 column confirms our 2008 editorial positing that the 44th president might owe his meteoric rise to an education funded by Israeli-hating adviser to a Saudi billionaire.

On Sept. 9, 2008, we published an editorial as part of our attempt to properly vet the then junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, whose past was somewhat foggy. We pointed out the connection between one Dr. Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, born Donald Warden, an Israeli-hating Islamist supporter and top adviser to radical Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, and a college student .

That college student, a young Obama, found al-Mansour’s favor and would one day be president as Israel was abandoned by America and the Middle East burst into flames amid a sea of presidential apologies, including one for our freedom of speech.

In a televised interview in 2008 on New York’s all news cable channel, NY1, 88-year-old Percy Sutton, a former borough president of Manhattan and a credible mayoral candidate in 1977, made some interesting revelations about his links to the young Obama.

Sutton told NY1 reporter Dominic Carter on the show “Inside City Hall”: “I was introduced to (Obama) by a friend who was raising money for him.” He asked Sutton to write a letter in support of Obama’s application to Harvard Law School.

“The friend’s name is Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, from Texas,” Sutton said. “He is the principal adviser to one of the world’s richest men. He told me about Obama.”

Sutton recalled that al-Mansour said that “there is a young man that has applied to Harvard. I know that you have a few friends up there because you used to go up there to speak. Would you please write a letter in support of him?” Sutton did.

According to Newsmax columnist Kenneth Timmerman, “At the time, Percy Sutton, a former lawyer for Malcolm X and a former business partner of al-Mansour, says he (al-Mansour) was raising money for Obama’s graduate school education, al-Mansour was representing top members of the Saudi Royal family seeking to do business and exert influence in the United States.”

Steve Sailer has written a lot about Obama’s spooky family connections to Indonesian potentates and US intelligence people. Here’s one of his posts on the subject. Here’s another one. What’s always been remarkable about Obama is that no one ever looked too closely at his background. That IBD story has been kicking around for years, but is just getting attention now. It’s almost like the major news organizations all agreed to not cover any stories about Obama’s past that would complicate the narrative.

My default explanation for this wall of silence about Obama’s dodgy past was that the mass media is both lazy and biased. They report what the Democrats deliver to them. The small portion of the media that is not Progressive gets its stuff from the GOP, but the Republicans are always careful not to upset their friends on the Left. I still think there is a fair amount of that, but most of it is probably the people at the top agreeing to put their thumb on the scales. They thought a black president was a good idea.

That’s all fine, but how is it the Saudis saw Obama as a good investment all those years ago? By his own account, Obama was not looking like a good bet as an undergrad. It was only after he got into Harvard Law that he started to develop the personality to get into politics. As the IBD story notes, the Saudis were sponsoring lots of minorities, hoping to build a class of policy makers and politicians that were pro-Arab. The story mentions their plan was to sponsor up to 10,000 students at $20 million per year.

What the story does not mention is how they would make it work. The story mentions the now imprisoned Prince Alwaleed bin Talal interceding on Obama’s behalf to get him into Harvard. Again, how could he know Obama was a keeper? How could these guys know about any of the students they were sponsoring? As a skeptic of the deep state stuff, that’s a question that I can’t easily answer. I know they were not stopping random blacks, asking for their GPA and whether they hated Jews. It must have been more sophisticated.

I’m not ready to start listening to InfoWars. I’m going to need a lot more than a president with a dodgy back story before I start talking about chem trails and conspiracies. But, I think I was too hasty in dismissing the deep state claims. There’s a level of coordination done out of site that shapes our politics and the coverage of our politics. Foreign powers look for people in the empire to bribe, and those people help grease the wheels and coordinate efforts like the Saudis were apparently running for the last forty years.

A Dark Episode

Posted on November 10, 2017 by thezman

In addition to being low energy this week, I have been in a dark mood. Maybe it is the season. Maybe it is my breakneck schedule. Tough to know. I’m overdue for some time off, but the demands of building a media career do not permit it. That and the day job, which pays the bills, has been keeping me busy, so I have been burning the candle at both ends. That means this week’s show is a bit low energy and bit dark.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. The precision at hitting the mark on each segment is astonishing now. That brings me unlimited joy, bordering on bliss. There is also a bonus track on Gab, where I ramble about stuff after having come home from a bourbon tasting. If you are not on Gab, you should be. Despite their flaws, they are the good guys fighting to keep the lamps from going out in the West.