Election Special

One proof that the political class is well aware that their role is to provide theater for the masses is what we see happening with impeachment. The Senate is planning to wrap up the show today. They will have some manufactured drama today, but what will happen is what everyone always knew would happen. The show will close today with a vote to acquit. The actors on the Democrat side will spend the weekend talking about their performances and their next roles, but that’s it.

The reason this show had to end today is the next show has booked the political theater, so the impeachment crew has to clear out. The Democrat primary starts next week with the Iowa caucus. The inner party and their media organs want exclusive access to the audience, so it means closing down impeachment. Bug-eyed Adam Schiff will be given his award, packed off to the loony bin for some rest and the cast of election show will make their debut on Monday.

Unlike impeachment show, which was never allowed to go off script, election show is looking like an improv skit gone terribly wrong. The main star has come down with a very bad case of dementia. His understudy is an elderly Jewish man unaware of the fact the Soviet Union collapsed thirty years ago. The rest of the players look like call backs for a film student’s graduate project. What happens after the show opens next week could be some of the best unintentional comedy of the year.

Aside from the entertainment, there is a good chance this is one of those clarifying events like the 2016 election was for many conservatives. A lot of people moved into dissidents politics when they saw how the so-called conservatives responded to Donald Trump in the primary. Something similar could happen to Progressives when they see their party side with Wall Street to block Sanders. It’s possible the party could literally throw in with a billionaire to stop the Sander’s movement.

A big part of what holds Progressive whites inside the orthodoxy is their belief that they are part of a reformist movement, fighting against vested interests. If their party drops the mask and tries to rig the vote against Sanders or sides with a billionaire like Bloomberg, maintaining that delusion will be impossible for many. Dissidents could suddenly find themselves getting very different questions from their Progressive friends and family over the course of this campaign.

That’s not to say there will be a suddenly revolution on the Left, with white Progressives crossing no man’s land to embrace their brothers on this side. As with Trump, many dead end types will stay on the revolution. In every slave revolt, it is always a minority that does the revolting, while the majority play it safe. Still, it is an intriguing possibility that will offer up opportunities for dissidents. No one knows what will happen when a bunch of white Progressives get red pilled.

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. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.


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 Way We Were
  • 17:00: Of Primary Importance
  • 27:00: The Iowa Caucus
  • 37:00: The New Hampshire Primary
  • 47:00: Nevada and South Carolina
  • 57:00: Closing

Direct DownloadThe iTunesGoogle PlayiHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Impersonal Tyranny

Generational politics are useless, for the most part, but you can see certain trends when comparing generations. Marriage and fertility rates are the two best examples. Go back to the generation that fought the Great War and you see very high marriage rates, even among blacks, high fertility rates and low illegitimacy rates. Examine subsequent generations and you see how all of those measures changed. The childless urbanite cat lady was many generations in the making.

You can tease out something similar by looking at how people ruled over people in the past versus the present day. A century ago, most men were directly ruled by other men in their daily lives. This is not about political structures, although that was often true, but rather the interpersonal relations of daily life. Men worked for other men. Whether it was in a factory, at the docks, in agriculture or anywhere else, men worked for men in a very direct and personal way. They had a boss who bossed them around.

A man working on the docks, unloading ships, would show up for the daily muster and a supervisor would assign him to a gang. He and the other men in the gang would be directed by some other man. Correction was in the form of yelling and threats. If there was some confusion, the man in charge took control and told the other men what they should be doing. There was no committee that issued a bland directive or a bit of software that compelled a certain type of behavior.

That is a big difference compared to today. While most people have a boss in their work place, the boss has no real authority. He is just a conduit for company policy. He gets trained in people skills, the sorts of passive-aggressive cajoling that passes for management skills in the modern corporation. Increasingly, he does not actually manage his people. He uses software to measure productivity and issues bland e-mails to his staff. He measures compliance with the software system.

This is most obvious in a warehouse facility. In the old days, men would pick pack and stack items in the warehouse, at the direction of a supervisor. If they screwed up or screwed off, the boss would yell at them. Today, they are directed by an algorithm that guides their work. A hand held corrects their mistakes in real time and provides structure to their movements. Software tracks their productivity. The people inside an Amazon facility are ruled by robots, not men.

This is not just the result of technology and the drive for efficiency. A big driver is the declining personal skills of modern people. Each generation becomes less secure in confronting their fellow humans. A century ago, the boss enthusiastically corrected his people and his people just accepted it. Getting reamed out by the boss was just a part of life on the job. Today, getting corrected by the boss could very well result in counseling sessions for both parties.

You see the generational aspect to this on the campus. This story about the University of Missouri monitoring their students like pets is a good example. Within living memory, instructors took attendance and confronted the tardy and chronically absent. Since neither side of that transaction in the current age could withstand the emotional strain of such a confrontation, software will do the job. The students will happily comply, preferring to be ruled by their mobile devise.

This is a dynamic, of course. As technology allowed businesses, for example, to improve error rates, they began to subtly select for different types of people. The hands-on, direct style of management slowly fell out of favor.  Similarly, the best people to hire as workers were those comfortable using technology. Each generation was more tuned to the impersonal styled than the prior generation. This has continued over a few generations to where we are now.

Where we are now, however, is a curious place. Spend time on a college campus and some things jump out at you. One is the students are surprisingly compliant. The days of college pranks and rebellion are largely over, especially at the elite colleges. The students are consumed with adhering to the rules, as well as currying favor with their human superiors. The woke rage heads get headlines, but college life is now mostly a culture of banal conformity.

It has also made young people socially awkward. Young people have grown up interacting with one another through the medium of technology. Participation in sports, for example, is at all-time lows. Free play is unheard of today. Instead, the young generation has been raised to have a robot master gently nudging them along, even in their interactions with their fellow humans. One consequence has been the sharp decline in sex. It turns out that socially awkward weirdos have less sex.

A preference for impersonal rule and the collapse of interpersonal skills does not bode well for the future of western society. Prisons function along these lines. The guards are rule-following functionaries in a system. The system is designed to reduce socialization among the inmates, in order to maintain control and reduce conflict. A society built on such principles will inevitably lead to a similar authoritarianism. After all, there are no elections inside a prison.

That may be what we are seeing with the rise of the tech giants. The old organizational systems of liberal democracy no longer fit a people, afraid of one another, but comfortable with machines. Instead of a revolution and new political order, the machines are simply filling the vacuum. The politicians no longer have the will to create and enforce rules, so the tech giants have their robots do it. Again, most young people prefer it. They want the machines running their lives.

It has always been assumed that if mankind is going to off itself, it will be through the accidental use of technology. Something like a nuclear war or a man-made plague are the most popular options. It may be that our demise will simply be due to technology dehumanizing us to the point where we no longer have enough interest in one another to bother mating. Instead of fire, it will be ice, the icy stare of people looking at one another through the lens of technology.


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 New Hope

One of the unique features of the current year is the very large gap, the great divide, that separates conventional wisdom and its critics. On one side, the conventional side, people still operate inside the moral framework that formed up in the 1960’s and blossomed in the 1980’s. On the other side are the critics and dissidents, who are operating under an entirely different framework. Not only is there no overlap or areas of agreement, there’s little contact between the two sides.

This is a new thing. In the 1980’s, as the neoliberalism was coming together, critics and enthusiasts occupied the same physical and cultural space. On TV chat shows, old school conservatives could challenge new school conservatives about trade and immigration policy. Paleo-libertarians could challenge both sides of conventional politics on money, economics and social policy. Newspapers would run columns by columnists, who questioned the emerging orthodoxy.

That’s not something you see these days. For example, read conventional conservative websites and they are nothing but the same dull mush they have been churning out for the last few decades. There are no lively discussions about immigration or the impact of the demographic changes. National Review hardly bothers to cover Trump. They just seem to be waiting it all out, hoping the bad man goes away. Otherwise, they carry on like 2016 never happened and that mob to their right does not exist.

The Left is actually much worse. Take an evening and watch the left-wing cable chat shows and you will find yourself in a world of make believe. It’s a useful only in that it is a glimpse inside the very weird world of the Washington chattering classes. Again, the days of having on contrary opinion are long gone. Instead, these shows and the print publications that fuel them are like choirs. They sing familiar tunes to the faithful in order to drive away all doubt. The one true faith is all you see.

This strange insularity is, in part, what is driving the dissident right. Every day refugees from the other side turn up on this side, looking for answers. After the six millionth recitation of the catechism, even the timid start to wonder why things never seem to get better for the bulk of Americans. The funny guys with the frog things at least offer some comic relief. Traditional Christians find themselves on the same side as racists, because the people on the other side made it so.

An illuminating example of this hard divide between orthodoxy and dissent is this post by Steve Sailer, reviewing a book by conservative thinker Christopher Caldwell. Sailer describes his book as “an explosive rethinking of history since JFK’s assassination that comes to the reactionary conclusion that the only salvation for American conservatism is to repeal the sainted 1964 Civil Rights Act and restore the constitutional right to freedom of association.”

Right away, that should cause most dissidents to stop and wonder how it is possible that such a conclusion is novel in anyway. As recent as the 1980’s, critics could openly talk about the negative consequences of the Civil Rights Act. Into the last decade, legal scholars could publicly question disparate impact, which is one of the deformities that has arisen from the arguments behind the civil rights. Today, none of this is possible on the other side. Those things can only be spoken of on this side.

That’s why Caldwell’s book will be treated like an original document by the people on the other side of the great divide. The sorts of topics and modes of thought increasingly common on this side of the great divide are completely forgotten on the other side of the great divide. So much so that many people on that side, even the smarter ones, are barely away such thinking exists. It is as if they live in a universe that now operates by a different set of natural rules. It truly is a great divide.

Now, it must be noted that Caldwell probably does pay attention to what happens on this side, as best he can. He has to dodge the morality police, so perhaps that is why he chooses to frame his critique as he does. Still, it has the feel of someone, after having done everything they could to get their way and silence their critics, discovering they were wrong all along. Instead of rehabilitating their critics, however, they proudly claim their arguments for their own.

That’s not what’s at work here. Caldwell, as far as anyone can tell, has not been standing with the harpies, as they drive out the unbelievers. He’s always been a skeptic of the prevailing orthodoxy. He is, however, an insider, a house approved critic, who speaks to that audience. His book is not aimed at dissidents, but at the sorts of people he socializes with at book parties and conferences. He is one of them, not one of us, even if he does not share their loathing for us.

This does reveal a truth about any possible reform movement that could arrest the decline of the West. If the other side is to regain their wits and begin to turn back from the abyss, they will have to do so believing they are the ones sorting this all out. They will not credit the people they drove away, for the crime of questioning what turned out to be a defective orthodoxy. Reformers need the legitimacy of insiders, which means maintaining the gulags for the old heretics.

Even so, what Caldwell’s book suggests, however, is that there is some leakage between the dissident right and the prevailing orthodoxy. It is not a one-way mirror that divides the two sides. Some of things on this side are slowly making their way over. For those hoping for a peaceful transition back to normalcy, there’s the white pill. One book here, one speech there and before long, the other side has their Khrushchev. It is a thin reed, but it is some hope for a soft landing.


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!


Quantity & Quality

Minority populations in any society have faced the twin problems of expulsion and absorption by the majority population. On the one hand, they need to play an important enough role to be needed by the majority, but not become a threat. On the other hand, they need to maintain enough separation between themselves and the majority in order to keep their people from fully assimilating and disappearing. Assimilation in America, for example, has erased much of late 19th century immigration.

The Amish are a popular example used by people interested in demography as well as human behavior. Beginning in the early 18th century, these mostly German Anabaptists began moving from southwestern Germany to Pennsylvania. They were rural people, so they settled into rural parts of the colony as farmers. They setup their unique communities and exist to this day as a unique and separate minority. Amish in America number about four hundred thousand.

A theory for why this tiny minority that lives outside modernity has managed to survive is that they have become more Amish over time. That is, the traits that make them Amish have become more intense in the population. This has been a natural counter to the increasing pressure of the modern world, which seeks to homogenize everything to death. As the tentacles of cosmopolitan globalist get stronger, this defense mechanism of the Amish has grown stronger as well.

The theory works something like this. Let’s assume a range of Amishness that runs from one to ten. One is the least Amish and ten is the most Amish. In the early years, the average Amishness of the group was around five. Some people were attracted to the community for reasons other than the rural, separatist lifestyle. Others were extremely attracted to the whole package that defines the Amish community. Let’s assume a normal distribution of Amishness in the community.

Over time, the people closer to the low end of the scale would peel off for one reason or another, deciding to leave the community. The sorts that were just in it for religious reasons would find a community of people who shared their beliefs, but also engaged in the modern world. Every generation, the people lacking the Amish trait would be tempted to leave the community. In time, the average Amishness would increase as the low score left and the high score multiplied.

This is not just a cultural issue. There is a biological component. Just as height is a function of genes, personality traits are also rooted in our genes. This unique sense of belonging was most likely part of this people before they embraced their particular religion in the Reformation. Inside the group, the more intensely Amish will be more fertile, while the rest will be less productive. Every generation, the most Amish of the Amish would outnumber the least Amish, increasing over all Amishness.

That’s the very shorthand version of what is called boiling off. Something similar has probably been happening with ultra-orthodox Jews. Those Jews with the traits that are selected for by the cult rise in status, get married to a female inside the cult and have lots of children. Those lacking these traits, are not only less desirable, but less interested in wearing fur hats in summer. They will be less likely to marry a member of the cult and reproduce. They may leave and take their genes with them.

These populations of ultra-orthodox Jews have developed a natural barrier between themselves and the host society. Anyone who has had dealings with the ultra-orthodox knows they are like space aliens. In fact, they are like extremely obnoxious space aliens, who seem to oblivious to their surroundings. Their hostility to outsiders is so intense and instinctive, it presents a barrier between them and everyone else. Even other Jews, maybe especially other Jews, find them impossible to tolerate.

This raises the question as to whether some form of this has played out in the more secular Jewish community. Ethnocentrism most certainly has biological roots, growing out of endogamy, the habit of marrying within the group. This was true of Ashkenazim for a long time until they reached America. In the 20th century, these Jews were faced with a set of conditions for which they had no natural defense. That is, they faced no strong hostility from the majority society.

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the Ashkenazim could marry outside the group and participate in all aspects of society. The result being lots of the less Jewish members simply blending into the surrounding population. First, they lost their connection to the faith and then they lost their connection to the identity. Lots of Americans have a Jewish grandparent or great grandparent, but have no connection to Judaism or Jewish identity. That was lost in the past.

Unlike the Amish or ultra-orthodox, over all fertility among Jews has plummeted, so the highly ethnocentric are not producing children faster than Jews are defecting. The overall size of the Jewish community has declined of late and current fertility numbers suggests a sharp drop in this century. Still, if the highly ethnocentric marry within the group, the result over time could be an increase in ethnocentrism. Those with strong Jewish identity will be the those with extreme ethnocentrism.

Of course, without the more secular and assimilated Jews around to police the ranks for excessive expressions of ethnocentrism, the hyper-Jews begin to dominate. That could be why the modern media age seems to be festooned with Jews like Michelle Goldberg and Ben Shapiro. There are no moderate Jews around to muzzle these people or at least moderate them. From the perspective of outsiders, these extreme voices of ethnocentrism become the voice of the entire Jewish community.

This raises another angle. As America becomes majority-minority, the same sorts of pressures will shape white populations. Southern whites, for example, will probably become more Southern. Those with a strong sense of community will marry others with the same traits and have lots of kids. The Southern whites, who wish to live as urbanite bugmen, will head off to urban areas to die. This will repeat in all regions and over time, the regional culture will become more intense.

That’s not the only possibility, of course, but it is good reminder that numbers are not all that matters in demographics. The Amish have survived in a hostile world by becoming more intensely Amish. Jews have survived all over the world through endogamy and ethnocentrism. Cultural and spiritual intensity, like fanaticism, are force multipliers. They allow small groups to punch well about their numbers, even less intelligent people like the gypsies.


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 Game Of Chance

Chance plays an underappreciated role in human affairs. Whether it is the weather or human error, unexpected events often change the course of history. The death of Ogedei Khan in 1242 halted the Mongol invasion of Europe. Constantine having a strange dream prior to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, advanced the cause of Christianity in Europe. The shifting winds at Salamis allowed the Greeks to defeat the superior Persian navy. Chance is often a player in human affairs.

A recent example is what happened in Iran. According to news reports, the experts gave Trump a list of options, with droning the general deliberately setup as the least pleasing option. For some reason, he picked that one. Maybe it is apocryphal or maybe they were just dumb about it, but the unexpected happened. Of course, the Iranian response was altered by the unexpected blunder of shooting down the passenger plane on the night of their response. No one imagined that happening.

We may be seeing a similar bit of chance in China, as she contends with what is becoming a very serious pandemic. Right now, the cause of this infection is being blamed on eating weird foods, but no one really knows. There are serious people wondering if this is not the result of some error in their bio-weapons program. The Chinese did steal coronavirus from Canada recently and we know they have a clandestine lab located in the area of the pandemic. It’s not an unreasonable suspicion.

A lot will depend on how things unfold over the next several weeks. If they are able to contain the spread and the death toll is limited, then the cause of this outbreak will not be important. The way the Chinese handled it will get the attention. On the other hand, if things get much worse, then people will want to know how this happened. Even in a big country like China, a million deaths will spawn a lot of speculation. No one is going to accept the bat stew argument or dumb luck as an excuse.

The thing is, chance often finds the raw nerve in society. For example, most Americans were always unsure about the competence of the Bush administration. The handling of the Katrina disaster confirmed in the minds of most Americans that the administration was not very competent. When Iraq started to go sideways, that lack of trust turned into a collapse in support. The public, especially conservative supporters, were unwilling to take the administration’s word for anything happening in Iraq.

Of course, the collapse of conservative support for Bush had consequences. Obama beat Clinton in large part on being an outsider. He also beat the fevered warmonger John McCain for similar reasons. It’s hard to know, but Katrina probably had more to do with putting Trump in the White House than anything else. His rise in the primary was due in large part to voters remembering the incompetence of the Bushies. An ill-timed storm did what the paleo-cons could not.

We may be about to see something similar in China. The last few decades have seen a great alteration of the country and the people. In one generation, families have gone from rural peasantry to urban middle class. The unprecedented economic boom in China has had unprecedented cultural changes. It’s also changed the nature of the ruling class as well. The combination of elements we see in modern China is not only totally new. It is untested. It has never been under pressure.

What China is today is an accidental compromise between the prosperous urban dwellers and the legacy ruling class. It just sort of happened. As long as the good times keep rolling, the new class of Chinese will tolerate the corruption and petty shenanigans of the ruling party. Dealing with crooked officials or petty tyrants harassing trouble makers is a tax people are willing to pay, when times are good. No one really knows what will happen if times stop being good.

This virus outbreak could be the big test. It really does not matter what actually caused it if the government is unable to contain it. People unhappy with the party will use the crisis as a chance to speak out against the party. That’s how rumors about the plague’s origin will emerge. Instead of blaming peasants eating bats, it will be bureaucrats experimenting with bio-weapons or perhaps experimenting on people. A crisis can easily become a vehicle for conspiracy theories about the state.

On the other hand, politics in China is fundamentally the same as politics everywhere else in the world. The people in charge of the party are at the top of a faction that is currently dominating the other factions. There is no question, for example, that there are factions unhappy with how Xi Jinping is handling trade issues with America. Some want a harder line, while others want a more conciliatory approach. A stumble in handling the pandemic could open up these riffs within the party.

Again, much will depend upon how events unfold in the coming weeks. As things stand, this virus has at least two characteristics experts predict will precede a disaster. One is the virus is contagious during the “incubation period.” This means people can spread the virus to others, weeks before they show signs of infection. This accelerates the spread, as authorities cannot react in time to quarantine the infected. Given modern travel, this is what makes this virus so concerning.

The other red flag is the mortality rate. The numbers coming out of China are mostly certainly wrong, but we have roughly 100 confirmed deaths and 3,000 cases. That’s a three percent mortality rate. The Spanish Flu was around ten percent, so this virus is not as deadly yet. That’s actually bad news, as it means the infected linger on and have a greater chance to infect new people. A quick death actually aids in quarantining a virus outbreak. More bad news for China here.

Again, nothing could come of it, but that’s how it works with chance. It is only after the fact that people see the long shadow of the unexpected event. The Persians did not grasp the significance of the skirmish at Thermopylae until they were being chased from the field at Platea. China could be on the verge of a great leap backwards, as her people turn up in hospitals with pneumonia. All the conditions are in place for chance to have a starring role in this story.


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!


Attention Rather Than Merit

Attention, as in other people noticing someone, is a necessary part of status, which itself is an integral part of the human condition. Human organization is hierarchical, with the most successful males at the top and the least successful at the bottom. In order for a male to gain status, he must get attention for whatever deeds are rewarded by the community in which he exists. Status seeking therefore requires attention seeking to the extent that others notice the status establishing act.

For most of human history, the causal relationship was pretty simple. The man did something that was important for the community in a way that was better than the average man of the community. Hunting for example. He may parade his success around before the rest of the tribe as a way to show off his skill. This got the attention of the tribe and he was recognized for his skill. This recognition of his achievement increased his status within the tribe.

As people settled into communities, the types of skills rewarded by the community increased along with the customs for celebrating them. The Roman triumph was nothing more than a way to give attention to the triumphant general, in order to celebrate his victories and therefore increase or secure his status. The American habit of having a daylong celebration for installing a new President is really just the modern equivalent of the Roman triumph. We celebrate the man for his victory.

Spin this telescope around and it is fair to say that attention is a normal human trait that is expressed in all times and places. This male desire for attention is rooted in the desire for status. This is, of course, entangled with the female desire for the attention of high status males. That in turn leads men to find new challenges in order to show off their prowess. Even the most extreme example of sacrificial piety may simply be the manifestation of status seeking.

Whether it is conquering new lands or increasing the prosperity of the people, the need for attention and status is the main driver of human history. The need to be better than those who came before you, in order to get attention and therefore status, naturally leads to increasing the stock of human accomplishment. Each generation seeks to surpass their ancestors in the things important to their people. The young are always in competition with the shadows of their ancestors.

If we just focus on attention seeking in the modern age, it reveals a lot about what is valued in this age, what will provide status. For example, in modern sporting events, the players are always looking to draw attention to themselves in various ways. The most popular way is to perform some form of boogie dance after a play. In American football, the boogie dance now accounts for a large amount of the player’s attention, as they practice these routines for hours.

Outside of sports entertainment, social media provides the best opportunity for one to gain attention. Males will post outrageous things in order to offend what they believe to be convention. Alternatively, they will post exaggerated versions of some ideal with which they want to be associated. The Bronze Age Pervert cultivated a cult following by posting exaggerated claims about himself and his lifestyle on Twitter. He got lots of attention to a virtual version of himself.

A recent example of this phenomenon is the story of a guy, who created a fictional version of himself as a high stakes sports gambler. A young male calling himself Robert Gorodetsky, made a name for himself pretending to be a big time gambler. His status was first cultivated by using Instagram to get attention to his outlandish behavior in and around the professional gambling scene. This gained him attention and status, as well as some suckers willing to give him money.

It is tempting to say this was just a swindle, but the evidence suggests his primary motivation was attention. The money he got was all used to promote his image on-line. He wanted to be known as this high stakes gambler, but he really had no desire to be an actual gambler. It appears he just burned through the cash like any other idiot. The purpose of it all was to be a big deal on Instagram.

By just looking at how males today seek attention, what we see is that they are mostly empty gestures. There is no merit at the core of the act. Rather than parade around the village with their kill, they are parading around empty handed, making wild claims about what they did on the hunt. Status in this age is now gained by telling increasingly bizarre and outrageous fishing tales. It is a desire to seek attention, and therefore status, without first doing anything of merit.

This is not just a phenomenon among the proletariat on-line. In fact, it is a habit learned by watching the elites. Status in areas like politics or entertainment is often just the result of clever attention seeking. In the music business, attention seeking has been industrialized and monetized. In politics, the people running for office take pride in having never accomplished anything. In fact, never have tried to accomplish anything is the badge of honor. A man of deeds is wholly unwelcome.

Of course, this is further evidence of the feminization of society. Attention without merit is an entirely female trait. Males take great risks to accomplish things for which they will get acclaim and status. Females use their natural charms to gain the attention of the high status males. For the female, the accomplishment is in gaining attention, rather than in doing something that results in attention. Today’s male social media stars are highly feminized males performing female roles.

One possible reason for this is that the avenues for gaining male status have been cut off by modernity. Richard Spencer cleverly played on this to attract an audience of young males on-line. His “Faustian man” stuff was an appeal to the natural desire of males to accomplish great things. Ironically, it was just an attention seeking act by someone with no accomplishments. Even so, it is another bit of evidence to suggest there is an unrealized desire at the core of this new attention seeking.

Another possible reason is we have quickly evolved into a state where high-testosterone males are marginalized, in favor of more compliant and less threatening low-testosterone males. The defense mechanism of the neoliberal order is to flip the normal status system on its head. The new world order is a matriarchal structure that rewards empty gestures and attention seeking. This would also explain the whole tranny thing.  Males now compete to be women.

Whatever the reason, we now live in an age in which genuine merit has no value, while pointless attention seeking is the coin of the realm. A young male would rather invest his time building his YouTube platform than acquiring practical skills that allow him to accomplish practical deeds. Because attention is disconnected from accomplishment, all attention is the same. This would be why young males have turned the movie Joker into an instant cult classic.


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!


January Grab Bag

Because I’m so pressed for time these days, back during the holidays I sat down and wrote out a podcast schedule for the month. I figured impeachment would be a hot topic this week, so I assumed I’d have plenty of impeachment related news items to talk about this week. Instead, everything about this farce is a snoozer. Even the lefty news outlets are struggling to pretend they are enjoying it. Adam Schiff’s big show is a good reason why the Finns have the word myötähäpeä.

The only angle to this thing of any interest to me is the bizarre circling back to the Russian collusion hoax. I think most of us thought the fakers knew the story was fake, but they were hoping to fool people with it. That may be true with some of them, but it seems clear that people like Adam Schiff really do believe this stuff. He thinks the Cossacks are warming up, waiting for Trump to give the signal. He is a deranged lunatic, who belongs in an asylum.

A long time ago I tried to think of a metric one could use to measure the general lunacy of the ruling class of a society. For instance, measure the distance between official truths from actual truths. The greater the distance, the nuttier the people in charge of the society. Think about some of the things that come out of North Korea about the Dear Leader or whatever they are calling the guy now. Compare that to what the Swiss say about their president, for example.

Another possible measure is the amount of propaganda expelled by the ruling class either in volume or intensity. The more they harangue their subjects, the greater the distance between them and reality. The trouble with this approach is we are swimming in made-up nonsense. Spend a little time watching television. The North Koreans install loudspeakers in the town square to blast propaganda. Americans install flat screens in their homes to receive the official truth.

Conceptually, it works, but measuring official insanity is probably best left to general instinct, rather than some money ball approach. Five minutes watching the bug-eyed lunatic on the Senate floor is all you need to know about a significant portion of the American political class. Further, the tolerance of a mentally unstable person in the Congress, tells us the whole lot are beyond saving. In Washington, a kook like Adam Schiff is not out of the ordinary. He is the norm.

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. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.


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 (Link)
  • 02:00: Maybe No Reason At All
  • 22:00: Numbers
  • 42:00: No Privacy (Link)
  • 47:00: Erasing Your Past (Link)
  • 52:00: Clown Versus Clown (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct DownloadThe iTunesGoogle PlayiHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Mediocrity Chic: Party At Bari’s

Contrary to most opinion, a society’s ruling class attains its position by being cleverer and more determined than the rest of society. The first generation to rise to the top of society and establish itself as a ruling class, or at least an important faction of the ruling class, earned their way to the position. They may not be smarter or more virtuous, but their combination of talents is what put them at the top. Luck played a role, but otherwise, they earned their way into the position.

Decay is a feature of the universe. Even black holes lose mass over time, a process known as “Hawking Radiation.” The first generation to set themselves up at the top of a new order are more ruthless and intelligent than the rest of society. The generations that come after them are another matter. Decay sets in with the subsequent generations, as positions of power are taken up by people who did nothing to attain their position, other than have the right parents.

An example of this process is in this story about a Manhattan book party for the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. According to the Jerusalem Post, Weiss is one of the 50 most influential Jews. In fact, they have her listed as number seven, which would qualifier as being something of a super Jew. The veracity of such a claim is disputable, but Mx. Weiss is no doubt an influential person among the ruling elite. She is treated as an opinion setter and spokesman for her generation of elites.

Mx. Weiss is also remarkably mediocre. In fact, mediocre in this case is probably a slander against the honestly mediocre. She was famously outfoxed by YouTube personality Joe Rogan, a man who spends his free time smoking weed, taking blows to the head and watching cartoons. She went on his show repeating Zionist talking points, but proved incapable of explaining any of what she was saying. She was revealed to be a dingbat with no grasp of the basics.

The fact that this was not disqualifying is a sign that the Jewish ruling elite of today is a significant downgrade from those who made the last century the Jewish century. Further proof of this is the fact that people still pretend she is an intellectual. Her participation in the entirely synthetic Intellectual Dark Web is a sad commentary on the decline of Jewish intellectuals in America. If the Tribe is counting on people like Weiss to lead them, they best have the bug-out bags ready.

The career path of Mx. Weiss is what you see in a decaying ruling class. Her reason to have an exalted position in the media is she was willing to slander BDS activists while a college student at Columbia. Her hard work as a skirmisher in that never-ending Bronze Age conflict landed her a spot at the Jewish Forward. Two years later she is at the Wall Street Journal and then a few years later the New York Times. That’s quite remarkable for someone who cannot outwit Joe Rogan.

Of course, Mx. Weiss is not where she is because of her intellect. She is where she is because she can be relied upon to repeat the talking points popular with an ossified ruling elite. She has been assigned to the department charged with repeating the blood libel against white Americans with regards to Jews. Her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, is a collection of talking points Max Boot threw away, because he thought they would make him look deranged.

Mx. Weiss is not an outlier. She is just an amusing example of the low-quality harpy that is taking up positions in the ruling class. Her robotic recitation of Zionist talking points makes for good parody, but her lack of intelligence is emblematic of the emergent woke intellectual class. As Steve Sailer recently noted, it is impossible to find a bright and curious person in the woke intellectual class. They are not even clever in how they present the tired dogmas of multiculturalism and intersectionality.

In addition to the overall decline in intelligence of Western society, another factor plays a role in the rise of a dingbat class. The intellectual elite that won their positions in the last century selected proteges who supported their position. They were not selecting people who would challenge their newly won status. Instead, they selected people, who agreed with and extended their opinions and ideas. In short order, flattering the master became the fast track to fame and fortune in the intellectual set.

Half a century ago, Tom Wolfe described the Manhattan intellectual set as bourgeois urbanite poseurs, who decorated their language with radical language in order to affect worldliness and prestige. These were the sorts of people who liked being seen with radicals and terrorists, but lived in safe comfortable neighborhoods, made possible by the sorts of people, who made sure the radicals never won. It was a contrived radicalism to disguise a timid adherence to conventional bourgeois norms.

Today, the heirs of those radicals, lampooned by Wolfe, are bourgeois urbanite poseurs spending their time pretending to be free thinkers and skeptics. They decorate their language with words and phrases borrowed from books they never read, in order to affect erudition and sophistication. Instead of posing as radicals, they pretend to be thoughtful intellectuals questioning elite opinion. It is a contrived intellectualism to decorate banal recitations of managerial class dogma.


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 Plague

The zombie apocalypse is upon us. It is time to load up on ammunition, potable water and the dehydrated food they say will last generations. Of course, it also means cutting yourself off from the rest of humanity, as you can’t be sure when they will catch the virus and turn into a zombie. You might have to use the ax on the guy next door, who just moved in, so there’s no point in getting know him. It also ensures that whatever is turning people into zombies will not get to you.

We may not be on the verge of a zombie apocalypse, but there is a cornavirus outbreak in China that has spread to several other countries. The Chinese are taking it very seriously, warning people to limit travel and avoid the outbreak zone. They are saying the virus has mutated, but what exactly that means is unclear. There has been at least one case in the United States. The infected person had recently traveled to the outbreak region of China and developed the symptoms.

Now, it is highly unlikely that this will turn into a pandemic that wipes out a large swath of humanity, like the Black Death. It’s not impossible, but the odds are low because of modern technology. One reason the plague spread so easily is the poor sanitation in urban areas. People were exposed to all sorts of unhealthy things. They also lacked the medical care we take for granted. Mortality rates for plague today are about 10%, while they were as high as 60% in the Middle Ages.

Even as recent as a century ago, doctors were still blaming miasmas, bad odors, for various diseases. One reason the Spanish Flu spread so far is the general understanding of germ theory was in its infancy. Rather than isolating infected people and quarantining infected areas, people traveled as normal, spreading the virus all over the world in a short period. The Great War had millions of people moving from their homelands to foreign areas and the virus went with them.

That is the one connection between the last great pandemic and this new coronavirus outbreak in China. Every day millions of people leave their home area and travel to some new area for business, crime, tourism and so on. Humanity is probably more mobile today than at any time in history. Maybe there was more net mobility in the great industrial wars of the last century, but it is close call. The possibility of something really bad being spread by people is therefore at a peak.

Modernity may be the reason we are much more vulnerable to a civilization-wrecking pandemic than at any time in the past. A century ago, most humans lived in rural areas and farming was the number one employer in most of the world. Even industrialized nations still had close to half the workforce engaged in agriculture. Most men still had the wherewithal to maintain themselves in a pinch. The cities would be crippled by a plague, but the rural areas could carry on,

Today, 90% of western populations are dependent on the system to provide the basics of life, like food, water and heat. If enough people die from plague or even get really sick, the supply chain will break down. Given how near run all modern business is these days, the margin for failure is pretty low. A few weeks of failed logistics in the food business would leave whole communities starving. One water main break could cut off water to an entire city, if the work force has fallen ill.

Modern society could be like Jenga, the kid’s game where players take turns removing one block at a time from a tower of blocks. When everything is running as designed, removing one item does not cause collapse. If a few items stop working, then maybe it just takes one wrong failure for the whole thing to come down. For example, a pandemic plus a series of bad weather events leads to widespread food shortages, which in turn lead to civil unrest in major cities.

There’s also another angle to the risk analysis of modern society. Much of the infrastructure in America has been neglected for generations. Drive around an East Coast city and the roads are like the surface of the moon. Under those roads lie generations-old sewer, gas and water pipes that have been neglected. It takes a lot of manpower to keep them running. The same applies to lots of other basic infrastructure around the country. Manpower is needed to keep it functioning.

One reason for this is simple corruption. The ruling class no longer feels a duty to the societies over which they rule. They are extractive in nature, seeking only to skim and pilfer what they can from the people they rule. Another reason though is the collapse of social capital from mass migration and financialization. Most of the public stuff we rely upon is maintained by local communities. The obliteration of those over the last few generations is showing up in the infrastructure.

In a serious crisis, like a deadly pandemic, survival will depend upon communities voluntarily working together to provide the basics and care for the weak. For much of America, this is now impossible. In Europe, where 80-90% of people live in urban areas now dominated by foreigners, it would also be impossible. The point being, the cost of responding to a serious pandemic like the Spanish Flu is now much higher. In fact, we may not be able to react to such a threat.

Now, it is possible that like scarcity, humanity has overcome the threat of pandemic, through medicine and technology. The SARS outbreak killed 800 people, but in a world of billions of people, that is a trivial event. It’s three airliners crashing in a year. Just as we no longer prepare for famines in the West, we may no longer need to plan for another round of the Black Death or similar. Of course, people had similar thoughts before the outbreak of the Spanish Flu a century ago.


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!


Progressive Whites

Yesterday’s gun rally in Richmond Virginia was a great success, at least as a public relations item. You can tell that by the relative lack of interest by the Left. Nothing about the event fit into their narratives, so it had to be ignored. Fanatics see only that which confirms their fanaticism. In this case, they wanted to see white supremacists dressed in Klan robes and Nazi regalia, terrorizing poor black bodies, while Antifa battled them in the streets. None of that happened.

The question that never gets mentioned in all of this is exactly why the newly ascendant radicals in Richmond are attacking gun owners. If you look at what they are proposing, none of it has much practical value. All the talk of confiscation is belied by the actual bills they are producing. One limits handgun purchases to one per month. Another bans private sales of regulated firearms. One vindictively targets the NRA shooting range in Northern Virginia. These have no practical purpose.

The answer here lies in understanding how American Progressive’s view society and their role in it. Contrary to popular opinion, the people behind this stuff are not communist, motivated by Karl Marx. They are not controlled by hand-rubbing lizard people living in a secret volcano. They are not triumphant browns. The people pushing this stuff are white people. There are a few Jews and browns tossed in, but the main body of the Left is still white and formerly Protestant.

The white American Progressive has always imagined society as a fully enclosed community, that is judged as a whole. A popular slogan among them is that “society is judged by how it treats it weakest members.” This is an explicit expression of communal judgement, which is the traveling partner of communal salvation. The white Progressive looks at society as an organism that moves forward as a whole. If some parts lag behind, the whole thing slows to a halt.

Further, the white Progressive believes in the unitary reformer. That is, the reformer is not just focused on one area of society, but the whole of society. Even if their efforts are in one area, those efforts support the whole community. A reform effort that does not promise to move the whole of society forward is of no interest. For white Progressive reformers, society is the flock and they are the shepherds. Anything that threatens their effort to guard and guide the flock must be eliminated.

It is this spatial understanding of the world that helps explain these largely symbolic attacks on the Second Amendment. In the hive mind of the white Progressive, people who own guns are outside the domain of the righteous. Therefore, they must be marginalized from society. Much in the same way they anathematized smoking, white Progressives seek to make owning a gun disqualifying. Symbolically, these measures are aimed at putting gun rights outside the whole of society.

This territorial thinking is why Charlottesville remains an important symbol for white Progressives and why Richmond will be erased from their memory. In the former, the righteous chased the threat to the flock from the field. The physical place of society was literally reclaimed by the good guys. Richmond, in contrast, was when the dark forces of society were permitted to operated unmolested. The bad guys did not win. The shepherds were forced to hide their flocks.

There is another aspect to this. White Progressives are aroused by the thought of the Charlottesville riots, because the radical mind needs violence in the same way the body needs food. While many white Progressives reformers are sincere, if deranged, others are in it for the blood. They need to terrorize and attack the enemy. In the same way the bully needs to terrorize the nerd in order to be a bully, the white radical needs the enemy of the cause in order to maintain his identity.

Therein lies the other reason why Richmond will be forgotten, while Charlottesville will be a regular story in the 2020 election. It was there that the need to terrorize the enemy of the flock was fully actualized. They not only chased the evil doers from the field; they drew blood and they had a sacrifice. Notice they always remember the fat women, who died, but not the cops. That’s because she was a blood sacrifice to the cause, while the cops that died were just collateral damage.

This is how to understand these pointless gun grabbing efforts, as well as many other Progressive fads we see today. In Virginia, these proposals are like the winning side erecting a trophy on the field of battle. The good whites have recaptured the heart of the Confederacy, the home of the bad whites. They did not eliminate the enemy, however, as they are still out there in the counties that refused to support the Progressive reformers. The fight must continue.

This is why facts and reason have no effect on white Progressives. They see themselves as defenders of the innocent against the attacks of those who seek to destroy the whole by corrupting the weak. Against such delusions, facts and reason are wholly ineffectual. Appeals to their humanity, on the other hand, are infuriating, as it calls into the question the point of their existence. It is why they are most vulnerable to moral arguments. It cuts to their sense of identity.

Of course, the Left is not just white Progressives. There are other parts, but their motivations are different and mostly modifiers to the whole. These other groups operate from ethnocentric motives. Blacks want free stuff and easy access to white people, while Jews want what is best for Jews. The newly arrived non-whites want a short path to the material assets of the white majority. The bulk of the Left, however, are white Progressives, who provide the power and authority.

The thermal exhaust port of the Progressive death star is their sense of moral purpose, not factual accuracy or even the relationships between the tribes of the Left. The white Progressive sees contrary facts and internal divisions as challenges the righteous shepherd must overcome. Call into question the moral standing of the white Progressive and the very center of the Left begins to collapse. Self-righteous certainty of purpose is the main tent pole that holds Progressivism together.


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!