A Z Potpourri

Posted on March 29, 2024 by thezman

It is appropriate that on this Good Friday I have carried your questions up the hill to my studio and answered them in the podcast. Lots of good ones this time. No questions about Easter, which was not a surprise, as I do not do a lot on religion. Putting the show together, it occurred to me that we will soon see a push to remove Good Friday from the federal calendar of holidays.

Easter has already been greatly minimized. When I was a kid, spring break was always before or after Easter. The schools did an Easter show where the little kids were dressed up in silly outfits to entertain the parents. We also made Easter baskets and colored eggs in school, which is banned now. I think the Easter basket tradition has pretty much gone away entirely at this point.

The current war on the phrase “Christ is King” is a no doubt the first shots in the coming war on the remains of public Christianity. If they manage to make public professions of Christian faith “antisemitic” then it will not be long before Republican governors are banning all displays of Christianity in the public square. It may sound crazy, but most of what is normal today was lunacy just a few years ago.

For now, at least, I hope everyone has a blessed Good Friday and Easter weekend with your friends and family. For the Orthodox readers, you will have to wait another month this year, but that is how it goes some years. Catholics, of course, will be saying a special thanks for the Episcopal Church. It is a reminder that no matter how terrible things have gotten for Catholics, it can always get worse.

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. 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 via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Micro-Nationalism
Not Even Wrong
Ben Shapiro
Candace Owens
Blacks
Immigration
Women
Modern Crap
Suburban Peasants
We are Doomed

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Full Show On Rumble

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The Floor Is Yours

Posted on March 28, 2024 by thezman

Note: Tuesday I was on the Killstream with Ethan Ralph. It was a fun conversation about a bunch of different things. Here is the link. I arrive at about the three hour mark, so fast forward to 3:37:45.

One of the projects that has been on the drawing board for far too long is to upgrade this site and add some additional features. One reason for this is simply to freshen things up a bit, as the site design is over a decade old. There is something to say for tradition, but people expect websites to freshen up their style every so often. A site that sticks with an old look and feel is often assumed to be abandoned or poorly maintained, so giving this site a refresh is something that is long overdue.

Another motivation behind a refresh is to add some features. The problem with using WordPress is most of the plugins do not work. I am not on the WordPress server so do not mention that for the sixth million time. I host my own site, but I use the open-source WordPress software that anyone can download. Even the plugins you can buy are a roll of the dice in terms of functionality. The people behind them often have names that look like an eye chart and the support is what you would expect.

Moving off of WordPress opens the door for other options that are more professional and have real people supporting the product. One option is Locals, which is connected to Rumble in some way. This is becoming popular with the livestreaming crowd as it offers a paywall service, credit card processing and additional features to go along with the normal livestream chat services. The trouble is that it is intended for video creators, so it lacks the features a writer expects.

Substack is slowly building out its services. They can host audio and video, which people with a green door subs already know. They started out as a writing platform, so they have a lot of useful features for writers. More than a few “magazines” now run on Substack using their custom design features. The risk here is being on a platform that could easily be taken over by lunatics. There is already a war against the site by lunatics, so it is not hard to see where that is headed.

The final service that people use is Gumroad. Paul Ramsey and Keith Woods have been on this platform for a long time. This is a small platform, so they are not throwing people off for heresy. This is a familiar pattern now. The video site D-Live did this until the hammer came down and they lost most of their user base, because they were forced to ban the blasphemers. Given the site is owned by a very strange little man from over the rainbow, one should not be optimistic about its future.

The alternative to using a service is to roll my own site, which avoids many of the problems of using a service and opens the door to customization. I could also keep the Substack and SubscribeStar platforms and allow those users to access pay-per-view content on the main site. Both have API’s for this, which means this site would talk to those sites to see if a user here is a user there. If so, then the user here would be treated as a paid customer here.

This would mean that users can get behind the green door two additional ways, as I can set up crypto and cash payments here. For those too paranoid to use a credit card online, you could send cash, checks, gold doubloons or whatever you have through the mail and get a green door account. The crypto users could also send their favorite form of digital money. I could also integrate GabPay, which I am told works pretty well now, even though they could not service VDare.

If you start with a clean sheet of paper, then it is the time to rethink how something works or does not work. It may be time to rethink some features or add new features, like a better comment section or even a group messaging system. Comment sections have been killed off mostly due to the fact that site owners get the sads when they see the comments, but this site has a lively comment section, so making it better by adding additional features sounds like a good idea.

Right away, I think a better editing system is in order. I have tried a million different plugins for this and all of them are terrible. I tried one that I paid for but I suspect the publisher sabotaged it, as it stopped working for some mysterious reason and they stopped responding to my inquiries. Creating a comment system that works as intended from the start would solve this. That means the ability to format comments and edit them as long as you are a registered user.

Along the same lines, I think green door users should blow past the spam filters, so they never have to wait for moderation. I have to check the moderation queue a dozen times a day, and it is always regular users in there. Not only is that annoying to the user, but it is very annoying to me. It would also be useful for green door users to have the ability to limit the visibility of their posts to other green door users. This is a common feature on sports sites that looks like a good idea.

The final novelty I have in mind is to let green door users create their own page and post their own material. The kook sites like Daily Kos pioneered this years ago and it would add a nice wrinkle to the site. There are commenters who put a lot of time and effort into their commentary, so if they had a way to do long form commentary within the context of the comment stream, it might make for a more dynamic site. Who knows, maybe it would attract other writers.

The point of this post is to solicit ideas and demands. Next month I want to flesh out the basic design and then get to work building it before summer. With the economy slowing down I will have some free time from the day job, so I may as well put the time to good use and upgrade the site. Feel free to send e-mails or comment here about what you would like to see or not like to see. The point of the upgrade is to make the site better for the readers and users, so the floor is yours.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Illiberal Multiracialism

Posted on March 27, 2024 by thezman

This post on Twitter from Vivek Ramaswamy got a lot of attention and not the good kind of attention he has been expert at attracting. Instead, the replies were full of baffled people wondering how he could say such stupid things. To many people, it looked like the sort of race-swapping that is common with Hollywood. Instead of black Vikings he was saying there were black roman emperors. He then went on to claim that these truths were somehow erased from history.

As many pointed out, there were no black emperors and Philip the Arab looked like a typical Roman at the time, as in European, because North Africa was settled by people from the other side of the Mediterranean. The “browning” of North Africa happened long after the Romans were gone. The best part of that thread is he was buried by comments correcting him for his nonsense statements. Maybe white people have reached a point where they will not tolerate this stuff.

The post, however, highlights the impossibility of a multiracial society that operates along liberal democratic lines. Liberal democracy assumes a natural equality among people in that we are born with natural entitlements. Therefore, we get equal rights and privileges in a liberal society. That is fine for an ad hoc arrangement. Pirate ships were egalitarian in their operations, for example, but the pirate ship was never intended to be a permanent arrangement among the diverse men.

Human societies assume permanence and that means they require a story for how the society came together. The Romans, for example, had the legend of Romulus and Remus who founded the city of Rome. The Rape of the Sabine Women is another important part of the story of the Roman people. The origin myths of a people are specific to a people; thus, their history is specific to them. In other words, a people’s identity is exclusive to them.

This is why a multiracial egalitarian society is impossible. You have different people with different identities rooted in different origin stories. Any effort to write the origin of one people into the story of the other people will be viewed as theft. Vivek Ramaswamy in that tweet was trying to steal a part of European history on order to insert his people into your story. No doubt he saw the resistance to this as a slight against him and people like him. This is now part of his people’s story.

You see this with the old race divide in America. Black people have an origin story that depends on white people being the villain. White people have an origin story that does not include black people. Inserting blacks into the white story requires whites to accept guilt for things they did not do and shame for ancestors who made it possible for any of us to have this discussion. It simply cannot work, so any effort to make it work aggravates the natural racial friction in America.

This does not mean a multiracial society is unworkable. The Russian Federation is a multiracial society that generally works. For a thousand years the dominant Russians have ruled lands with significant minority groups, almost all on the fringes of their territory, while avoiding many of the problems we see in the West. The most difficult period was in the early years of communism when the egalitarian impulse tried to eradicate the natural differences between people.

What you see in modern Russia is peaceful separation. The fringe areas populated by various non-Russian ethnicities are left to have their own culture and traditions, as long as they respect their place in Russian society. These ethnic groups have an identity that is tangled up in their relationship with Russians, but also separate and distinct from that of the typical Russian. The modern Russian state encourages intolerance of ethnic agitation among the Russians and the Russian minorities.

Much of the rhetoric you will hear from Russian officials about their ethnic minorities will sound like the nonsense we get from Western rulers, but it has a different purpose, and it is received by different ears. Russian multiculturalism assumes a dominant Russian culture that includes a tolerance of minority cultures, as long as they never create trouble for the majority. In other words, the Russians take some pride in not having wiped out these minorities from their lands.

Applying this civilizational model to the West would mean a European identity that assumes a natural dominance over European lands and the people in those lands, regardless of their minority identity. This sort of cultural chauvinism would allow blacks in America, for example, to hang onto their story of victimhood only so far as it gives them pride in who they are now. Antiwhite animosity would be suppressed officially and unofficially through general intolerance.

Of course, this means applying different standards to different people and that is where things run afoul of the liberal project. In order to maintain peaceful separation, it requires different standards of conduct and mutual exclusivity in large parts of the origin story of the different racial identities. The story of black people would include whites, but not in a negative way, but also exclude whites. The same would hold for the story of the white population with regards to blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and others.

There are obvious problems with the concept, not the least of which is the narcotic of egalitarianism that flows through the veins of every European. Before the West can appropriate a civilizational model to managing their now multiracial societies, they must first break their addiction to egalitarianism and natural rights. That will most likely only come through a struggle to avoid extinction. Even so, civilizationalism may be the only path forward for the West if it chooses to survive.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Bridge Thoughts

Posted on March 26, 2024 by thezman

In the 18th century, planners did not have to worry too much about ships smashing into bridges because ships were small and made of wood, while bridges and seaports were massive and made of stone. If a captain made an error and hit a bridge support, his ship would be damaged, but the bridge would be fine. The worst case is it would take a few days to clear the debris of the ship from the waterway. In other words, the seaways were somewhat error resistant.

The news of the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse is an obvious example of how this is no longer the case in the modern world. That ship is massive, relative to anything that existed a century ago, much less the 18th century. The bridge, in contrast, was a slim wisp of thing compared to bridges in the past. When it was completed half a century ago it was the third longest truss bridge in the world. Now, of course, it is a pile of scrap iron after having been knocked off its moorings.

People will naturally rush forward with their favorite pet theory about how this could have happened. None of these claims are about the accident or why it happened, but rather a way to use the event to promote their favorite theory. Steve Sailer has decided to avoid the usual answers and instead go with an insane theory about bombs being squirrelled away on the ship. No doubt the usual suspects are working on a plot where Putin is responsible for the accident.

For those who know how ports operate, especially an inland port like the Port of Baltimore, the most likely answer is more mundane. These ships are piloted by a harbor pilot in and out of the upper bay. These are men who know every inch of the waterway and rely on a large support staff to pilot the vessel. That means the cause is a failure of that system, most likely the ships navigation systems. It lost power and the crew was unable to restore power before hitting the bridge.

Putting that aside, the port is the ninth largest seaport in the country and has certain specialties like the import of cars, which cannot be easily replaced. Until the bridge debris is cleared from the waterway and the waterway is inspected, the port will remain closed, which will create supply chain problems throughout the year. Of course, the bridge is a vital part of the local ground transportation system. Baltimore is surrounded by a beltway system and this bridge was a key part of it.

Replacing the bridge has been debated over the last ten years, but the will to do it has never been enough to overcome the sclerosis that plagues state politics. A project that will not be done until most of the people voting on it are dead or retired is never going to get a lot of support in the modern age. The things that get pols trending on social media is what gets the support, even if the reason to be trending on social media is the ghetto has just lost track of one of its simpletons.

Now they will have no choice but to replace the bridge, but that will take years to debate and then years to get approval and then more years to build. The people who make the economy work will figure out ways around this new obstacle in the meantime, so there will be no sense of urgency to address the bridge problem. In fact, it is entirely possible that the bridge is never replaced. A generation from now people will look at the remaining pillars the way people look at old Roman aqueducts.

If you want to contextualize this accident into something bigger, the best approach is from the angle of complexity. Like everything else in the American economy, our ports have become extremely complex systems with many points of failure. There are millions of people with the word “logistics” in their job title who make sure that some point of failure does not fail in the complex system of moving goods in and out of the country and around the country to your store.

One reason for that is the berserk quest for efficiency. Every manager in the system dreams the dream of that box of Cheerios arriving on the shelf just at the moment you decide to reach for it. Everything in the economy is now geared to reduce the shelf time, warehouse time and transport time of every item. Every bit of extra is cut from the system to maximize profit, but the result is often fragile systems that work well when there are no problems but fail miserably in a crisis.

The complexity problem is turning up in the Ukraine war. Russia, with its massive industrial base and redundant systems, now outproduces the West in terms of military supplies at a fraction of the cost. Western countries with massive GDP’s are faced with impossibly complex economies that cannot be quickly modified to address the need to make even simple things like artillery shells. Like the now collapsed bridge, solving this problem will probably never happen.

That is the other angle to this accident. That bridge was built in 1976 and was out of capacity twenty-five years ago. A second span should have been started at the turn of the century with a third span or another bridge up stream in the works, but these sorts of projects are not popular with modern politicians. Half a century ago, the political class was not obsessed with media attention, so they could think longer term about projects that would benefit those who followed them.

It is popular to blame “democracy” for our present ills, but our political system has not changed in fifty years. If anything, we are less democratic today. What has changed is the explosion of media. We now live suspended in a media solution. As a result, even the lowest person measures himself by likes, follows and media exposure. This has warped the political class the most, turning them into ridiculous carny acts that do nothing but find ways to get attention in the mass media.

In the end, none of this matters. The bridge story will dominate the news for a few days this week, but then the media will be onto the next thing. By the end of the summer the port will be reopened, and the bridge will be forgotten. The bridge is a symptom of a much larger problem for which no one has any answers, at least not answers that get you trending on Twitter. Maybe the remains of the bridge will one day be a warning that a people that does invest in its future has no future.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

The Gangster State

Posted on March 25, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the horrors of living in a town free of diversity and a post about the internationalization of Hollywood. The Sunday podcast was posted early for a change. Subscribe here or here.

Whenever there is a terrorist attack, the main question immediately after it is who conducted the attack. This is not just for the mundane reason of apprehending the people responsible, but also for understanding why they did it. Terrorism, by definition, exists within the context of a larger political cause. A crazy person opening fire at a mall is a different thing than an Antifa member opening fire at a church school. The former is simply crazy while the latter has a political motivation.

After the attack on the Moscow music venue over the weekend, the first thing people naturally asked is who did it. The Russians quickly apprehended the four gunmen and then the question shifted to who sponsored it, as it was clear that these four people could never have done this alone. The Russians have arrested a dozen other suspects they think may have been involved, but the four Tajiks have been identified as the shooters and they have confessed.

The bullets were still flying when the many bot accounts operated by American intelligence started to flood social media platforms with claims that it was Islamic terrorism, which was a red flag. Then Washington rolled out the ISIS-K claim, which is another red flag. No one had ever heard of ISIS-K until now, so that is one problem, but the bigger problem is ISIS is an American creation. Coupled with the recent State Department warnings, it looks suspicious.

It gets even more suspicious when internet sleuths figured out that the head of ISIS-K is a person calling himself Sanaullah Ghafari, who used to work at Bagram airfield as a special guard to the vice president of the American backed Afghan government, until that government was ousted by the Taliban. Mr. Ghafari also has ties to NATO as a sanctioned arms dealer. Maybe this is the wrong Sanaullah Ghafari, it is a common name, but it is another red flag.

What we know is that four Tajiks were given weapons that are exceedingly rare on the black market and paid a quarter of a million dollars each to go on a shooting rampage in Moscow and then they fled toward Ukraine. Washington claims they were backed by an organization that was created by Washington and appears to be led by a man with deep ties to American intelligence. It should be noted that Washington is now backing off the ISIS story, which can be interpreted in several ways.

There is another way of looking at this. It is possible that the White House simply has no idea what is going on with Project Ukraine. This would not be the first time they were caught off-guard by a terrorist act. After the Nord Stream attack, the Biden admin jumped from story to story, trying to find a narrative that people would accept, until the CIA planted the story of Ukrainian frogmen using a dingy to float out into the sea and plant the bombs on the gas pipeline.

The Biden admin was also lost when Daria Dugina was blown up by a car bomb in an attempt to assassinate her father, Alexander Dugin. The first story said that there was no way the Ukrainians were behind it. Eventually, they had to admit that it was most likely Ukrainian intelligence behind the assassination. This event was the start of a pattern where Ukraine or friends of Ukraine in the murky world in which the Kagan cult operates do things outside official channels.

Of course, stupidity always plays a role in these things now. Back when all the best people were sure the looming Ukrainian offensive would smash the Russian lines, Mark Milley, told a gathering of top NATO commanders and Ukrainian special forces being trained by the American military, “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night. You gotta get back there, and create a campaign behind the lines.”

Every day for over two years voices of authority in Washington have said that Ukraine must win by any means necessary. European leaders come out daily and say there are no red lines when it comes to beating Russia. France is now threatening to send their troops into Ukraine and encouraging other NATO countries to join them. If you are running a CIA operation in Syria, like Sanaullah Ghafari, you are not going to hesitate to help your friends put together a terror attack in Moscow.

Getting back to the central question of terrorism, the answer here may be that this is the result of the Biden administration losing control of their foreign policy. They are no longer calling the shots. Instead, it is the shadowy world of the usual suspects doing what they like without regard to the political or geopolitical consequences. It is not as if the political class ever had tight control of foreign policy. Maybe now they no longer have any control over what happens in their name.

If you want further evidence that the White House no longer controls foreign policy, you can look at what Israel is doing. Netanyahu is openly defying the White House in his campaign to drive the Arabs out of Gaza. Anthony Blinken has been sent there to beg Netanyahu to stop a dozen times to no avail. If America’s greatest ally no longer cares what the White House has to say, maybe Israel is simply working with people it sees as more important than the White House.

Since the most likely suspect in the Israel case is also behind Project Ukraine, it is not a big leap to think they are working with the Ukrainians to conduct terrorism. It is also not a big leap to think that these same people would turn their weapons on politicians that do not support their projects. Given the direction of the Ukraine war, this may explain why European politicians make daily devotionals to the project. They do not want any Tajiks showing up at their house.

All of this is speculation and supposition, but it fits in with the general breakdown of order we see in the Global America Empire. For the last ten years this has been the defining feature of America. The rules are falling to pieces because powerful people refuse to abide by them or enforce them. This Ukraine fiasco suggests that America is falling into gangsterism. Powerful players no longer care what elected officials say or think as they conduct their private agendas.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Bad Ideas

Posted on March 22, 2024 by thezman

Intellectual history is generally the study of good ideas or what we currently think are good ideas, but it is the bad ideas that have the most impact. The use of slave labor in the New World, for example, seemed like a good idea at the time but has proven to be a terrible burden on us. If the slavers knew that their descendants would be tormented by the consequences of slavery, would they still have done it?

Of course, the life of a bad idea is the result of the people choosing to embrace the bad idea, often when it is obviously a bad idea. Much of what Marx had to say about economics, even in the context of his age, was obvious nonsense. Further, people knew enough about the human condition to know that communism could never possibly work, but intellectuals chose to embrace it anyway.

Put another way, stupid ideas need a special sort of stupid person. Orwell famously wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Orwell was addressing the educated opinion in England at the time that Germany would win the war. The basic concept is something of a universal, as we see today with our “expert” class.

Even so, ideas matter and this age is haunted by bad ideas that should have been relegated to the dustbin of history. That is the show this week. It is a breezy survey of some of the bad ideas that still vex us. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but the things that came to mind when I cooked up the idea for a show. Feel free to add your favorite stupid ideas to the list.

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. 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 via crypto. 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. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Equality
Utilitarian
Progress
Marxism
Social Contract
The Social Construct
Individualism
Reason
The Trouble With These Ideas

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Work Until You Die

Posted on March 21, 2024 by thezman

There seems to be a secret plot to inject the idea of cutting Social Security into the national debate for the looming presidential election. This plot is among the slithering lizard people known as the conservatives. It started with the oleaginous Ben Shapiro demanding that white people work until they die. He then went to Twitter to gin up more talk among the mouth breathers in favor of cutting Social Security. Now the Republican Party is promoting the idea in Congress.

It is an odd coincidence that once Trump secured the nomination, his alleged allies started talking up an idea that has no constituency. No one wants to throw their granny into the street, and no one wants to throw their parents into the streets. More important, the tens of millions of retired white people do not want to be thrown into the streets, especially in the name of sending their last pennies to Israel. It is the third rail of politics for a reason, so why are these reptiles bringing it up now?

The most popular reason is they hope to slime Trump with this issue, thus undermining his general election campaign. They assume, and probably correctly, that the mass media will claim he wants to murder your granny in the promised bloodbath this autumn, no matter what Trump says about the subject. So far, Trump has mostly ignored it, only mentioning the problems of fraud in Medicare. Fraud is a massive problem with Medicare, but fraud is a defining feature of America now.

Another reason for this sudden interest in poisoning their election chances is that idiots run the Republican Party. The reason the party has been called “the stupid party” for generations is it is run by stupid people. They are clever and scheming, necessary skills for democratic politics, but they are not as cynical as the the other side. As a result, Republican leaders are the forever Charlie Brown, sure that this time the Democrats will let them kick the football.

Then there is the fact that the Republican Party and American conservatism evolved in the 20th century as losers. The GOP’s natural role is as the cleanup crew for the Democrats, who run around smashing things. For their part, the so-called conservatives busy themselves racing in front of speeding trains yelling “stop” while the rest boast about how their principles forbid them from winning. Conservatism evolved to be the consolation prize for the politically inept.

You can probably take a little bit from each column and produce a mix that explains the sudden interest in snuffing out granny. There is nothing about any of these possible answers that contradicts the others. Ben Shapiro is a skeevy little hobbit man who hates Trump with the intensity of a thousand suns, but he is also a mediocrity who has a habit of stepping on rakes. There is a reason that his handlers make sure to never expose him to adults during his public appearances.

There is another element to this and that is the desire of many people, no doubt many people from the loser party, to get back to debating issues. The United States does have real problems that could quickly become catastrophic problems if they remain unaddressed by the political class. For example, there is a pre-French Revolution vibe to the government’s finances. This post in Chronicles is a good explainer and a good example of the desire to return to real issues.

Now, “experts” have been predicting doom over the national debt for generations and doom is always twenty years off. It is like the collapse of “fiat money” or affordable solar energy in that it is always twenty years away. Unlike the other two, math says there is a limit to how much debt the government can issue. At some point, the appetite for new debt will decline as everyone will be holding as much debt as they need. At that point, new debt comes with new, much higher costs to the government.

As far as how to avoid this debt cliff, the only answer is the one answer everyone agrees must never be debated. That answer is ending the Global American Empire and returning to normalcy. That means reducing the military budget by ninety percent, deporting the tens of millions of freeloaders, and cracking enough rich people’s heads, maybe even lopping off a few of them, to get the economic elites inline. None of that can be debated, so they talk about killing your granny.

For the most part, Social Security runs reasonably well. The big problem, as far as old people programs, is Medicare, which is riddled with fraud, but Social Security is largely free of fraud and waste. Suring up its finances during the great baby boomer retirement should not be a great challenge. If life expectancy continues to decline, then it will be a self-correcting problem. In other words, if you are worried about the looming debt crisis, there are better places to look for answers.

That is what really gives this topic the French Revolution vibe. A big reason for the revolution was the gordian knot of royal finances. France desperately needed financial reform, but the rich people opposed it because they saw no profit in it. The Global American Empire faces the same problem. All the best people agree that we face a looming financial crisis, and they all agree that they will not sacrifice a hair on their heads to avoid it. Instead, they think you should work until you die.

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Bourgeois Minoritarianism

Posted on March 20, 2024 by thezman

Edit: A friend of ours, Judd Blevins, is under attack by the usual suspects and could use some help in his fight. He is a good man trying to serve his community, but the freaks and weirdos are trying to ruin it. Here is his story and a way to send him a few bucks.

The weirdness of this age is a constant topic of discussion, mostly due to the fact that every day brings new weirdness. Ten years ago, if you said men would go to jail for defiling the sodomy flag, people would have thought you were nuts, but this is a thing that now happens in America. You can burn the American flag, but if you get caught insulting the sodomy flag you go to jail. A common side conversation these days is debating what new bizarre and deranged thing comes next.

The question that never comes up in any serious way is why the ruling class spends so much time manufacturing these perversions of reality. Why do these bourgeois people who rule over us embrace bizarre social fads when it is clear they would not incorporate them in their daily lives. Notice, for example, that advertising agencies have almost no diversity, but all of their ads are antiwhite. They promote race-mixing even though they go to great lengths to prevent this in their own lives.

The place to start is how these people see themselves. The people at the top of the various institutions that control society do not see themselves as an elite. Instead, they seem themselves as servants of the elite. Claudine Gay, the former head of Harvard College, never saw herself as part of the elite, despite the position, because she has always had a boss, someone with control over her. Even as Harvard president she had to kowtow to the billionaire donors that fund the college.

This is a reality of our managerial elite. Even though they occupy positions at the top level of critical institutions, they always feel like hired help. The angst of the college president is no different from that of the middle-class manager living in a suburb, but the stakes are much higher. Normal people were outraged that Claudine Gay kept her salary, but her loss of status was the real punishment. In a world controlled by bourgeois status seekers, losing face is worse than death.

For normal people, fear of losing a job or looking bad to your peers is a motivation to conform to expectations. For the managerial elite, this curdles into a resentment of the system over which they rule. These people are the resentful house slave who finds small victories in undermining the master of the house. The embrace of these deranged social fads is a way for the managerial elite to tell their bosses that they have some agency and command their respect.

Managerial angst works another way. The system that allows for the managerial elite has as one of its principles that it is open to everyone. If you do certain things you can rise up the system into the elite. When you strip natural talent from the equation, then all that is left is a recipe for success that anyone can follow. This means that the people at the top can always be replaced by the steady stream of strivers below them who are busy ticking boxes on their resume.

This is the other jaw of the vice that squeezes the worldview of the managerial elite and leads to the proliferation of social rules. In a true meritocracy, the only disqualification from reaching the top is a failure to abide by the rules. The proliferation of arbitrary and capricious rules of conduct replaces what used to allow elites to hold onto their position in the face of more talented challengers below them. The elites can still utter, “He’s not our sort”, but the reason is morality rather than bloodline.

This also breeds resentment of those below the elite level. It is clear that a key motivation behind these degenerate social fads is spite. The managerial elite looks around and they see danger from top and bottom. At the top are rich white-presenting people who seem to live outside the meritocracy. Below are white people who wish to work the meritocracy to climb the ladder. Scandalizing white people in general provides a salve to the fragile psyches of the managerial elite.

This sense of being surrounded on all sides may explain how our elites think of themselves as minorities. It is bizarre to see rich people like Nancy Pelosi carry on like she is an oppressed minority. Many have noted that the proliferation of females in the managerial class has brought with it the victim mentality, but it may simply be that females are more sensitive to it and much more willing to find ways to publicly express this sense of being an oppressed minority.

From the perspective of the managerial elite, they are a minority. When they leave their swank residences, they see miles and miles of Potemkin suburbs, cheap copies of their neighborhoods, clustered around synthetic “town centers” that have the big box retail shops popular with the masses. The managerial elites think these are made possible by their efforts, but they also resent that they are not loved for those efforts, and they rage at the fact their bosses in the economic elite profit from these efforts.

What this suggests is that the conditions that must exist in order to maintain the managerial elite in their positions, by maintaining the system itself, must also lead to the petty degeneracy we see today. A system that values equality, democracy and eschews class distinctions, but exists in contradiction to those things produces a special sort of angst among the managerial elite. Their embrace of degeneracy is, in effect, a slave revolt against a system that is spiritually eviscerating.

Put another way, the the system of values the managerial class must embrace as they rise up the ranks increasingly comes into conflict with the reality of the system as they rise higher in the system. The middle-manager gets the praise of his boss by a selfless devotion to his work, but the people at the top got their position by a ruthless exploitation of those below him. It is this conflict that leads to the boiling hatred of the system that makes the managerial elite possible.

A strong society has a strong elite that works within the set of values embraced by the elite and is manifestly obvious to outsiders. A warrior elite will value the attributes that make a great warrior. An aristocracy will value those qualities that define the aristocratic class like bloodlines. Managerialism, in contrast, has a value system that is in conflict with the requirements of the managerial elite. It is this internal and unresolvable contradiction that leads the elite to attack their own system.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

The End Of the Line

Posted on March 19, 2024 by thezman

In his farewell address, George Washington cautioned against the habitual hatred or the habitual fondness toward other nations. The former is easily understood, as hatred for other countries can lead to wars that are against the interest of the people. The latter is less well understood. Having strong relations with another country seems like a good thing, but if taken too far it can easily lead to compromises that harm the people and also create animosities with other countries.

If your country is predisposed to trade with Country A under favorable terms, but not with Country B, the latter is going to assume this is due to some animosity and maybe consider you to be a hostile adversary. On the other hand, the friends of Country A will naturally assume they deserve the same consideration as Country A. The adversaries of Country A, of course, will naturally assume you to be their enemy. When a country makes an ally, it assumes the ally’s enemies.

This was the crux of Washington’s message. relations with other countries must always be measured against the yardstick of national interest. A temporary alliance with another country is good business if it is good for the people and it does not bring with it long term complications with other countries. Open-ended alliance by definition will bring long term complications, which is why they must be avoided. This is where the phrase “entangling alliances” originates.

We may be seeing this play out with the open-ended relations America has had with Israel for the last half century. Both political factions in Washington find themselves lashed to an Israel government committed to a policy in Gaza that most of the world sees as a genocide of the Palestinians. The defenders of Israel will dispute this, but that does not alter the political problem for Washington. Most of the world opposes American support for Israel’s continued attacks on Gaza.

Last October, both factions in Washington were tripping over one another to show limitless support for Israel. Then the growing Muslim population in the United States, imported by the two factions in Washington, started to rebel against the Democrat side with protests and boycotts. The Republican side found that their voters were not all that interested in this project. In fact, there is a growing anti-Israel faction developing within the populist grassroots of the Republican coalition.

That may be why Chuck Schumer just gave a speech condemning Israel Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, demanding new elections in Israel. This is something that was thought impossible six months ago. The Israel lobby’s lock on both parties is such that no one would have dared speak out this way. Clearly, concerns about the impact on the coming election in places like Michigan is part of it. Schumer is trying to split the Israel lobby by isolating and attacking Netanyahu.

Joe Lieberman was quick to condemn Schumer for his “attacks” on Israel. Amusingly, Lieberman is defending the grotesque double standard applied in favor of Israel by claiming that Schumer is not applying the same standard to other countries like Ukraine and Britain that he is applying Israel. Of course, Donald Trump, hopelessly trapped in the last century, is attacking Schumer thinking this pleases his base and it will get Israel money flowing his way.

The trouble for both sides of the political class is exactly what Washington warned against in his farewell address. This open-ended commitment to Israel creates unnecessary enemies and strains necessary alliances. The most important country in the region is not Israel, but Saudi Arabia. Support for Israel in this war in Gaza may be the final nail in the coffin for this long profitable relationship. The petrodollar is the cornerstone of American hegemony around the world.

For a long time, this open-ended relationship with Israel was sustainable because the United States was the lone superpower. Everyone had to do business with the Americans, even if they did not like it. The Saudis needed American protection and financial support, so they had to turn a blind eye to the Israel problem. The rest of the Arab world saw what American power could do in Iraq and to Iran and wanted no part of that, so they looked the other way as well.

The world is quickly changing, and this open-ended relationship is now becoming another liability for the American empire. In fact, Israel is making Washington look feeble by refusing to back off their war in Gaza. The rest of the world sees a pipsqueak country leading a supposed superpower around by the nose. In other words, this is not just bad for business in the Middle East. Washington’s Israel problem is becoming a global embarrassment for the American empire.

This is the problem with empire. Empires function as protection rackets, which means defending weaker powers. Those weaker powers, however, must be tightly controlled or otherwise they will pick fights that must be fought by the empire. We got the Second World War largely due to Britain making an open-ended commitment to Poland, which went out of its way to pick fights with Russia and Germany. Israel is now threatening to start a wider war unless it is allowed to wipe out Gaza.

It is also a great example of what Washington warned against. The habitual fondness for Israel has made America a slave to the policy preferences of Israel. Worse yet, it has institutionalized foreign lobbying in Washington. One reason politicians care more about foreign countries than America is it is far more lucrative. Our “friend” Israel is happy to shower your representative with cash if he puts the interests of Israel ahead of the interests of you and your community.

Washington wrote, “The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.” America has been a slave to Israel for a long time, but even a slave will revolt when his survival is at stake. That may be what we are seeing with the Schumer speech. This open-ended relationship with Israel is threatening American hegemony in the world. Having the most Jewish man in America give this speech was a signal that the slaves are about to revolt.

In the end, this Gaza affair may be the bridge too far. Americans are sickened by the footage and offended by the defense of it. Now the elites are fearing that this affair could undermine their position. Once the politicians see that there is no penalty for opposing this stuff, then the whole arrangement will begin to unravel. Israel’s control over Washington and the public debate over this relationship may have reached a tipping point and may no longer be tolerable.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Our Democracy

Posted on March 18, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about living in a world where you can be jailed for holding the wrong opinions and a post about my used car lot. The Sunday podcast was posted early for a change. Subscribe here or here.

Joseph de Maistre famously observed, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” We get a sense of that in the weekend media drama over Trump using the word “bloodbath” in a speech. He used the word in reference to what would happen to the auto industry under a second Biden term, but the media left out the part about the auto industry.

The result was a media frenzy based on the false claim that Trump was promising some sort of homicidal revenge if he did not win the election. One media pinhead after another went to their favorite platform to repeat the claim. In some cases, they did so on video platforms as the video of Trump giving the speech in which he used the word was playing in the corner of the screen with the sound muted. So much for the second half of that de Maistre quote about honest people perpetuating the crime.

It probably would have gone like so many other fake media narratives in that normal people without access to the megaphone would have spent days clarifying what was said but by that point the media would be onto the next lie. This time the world’s richest man noticed and posted about it on Twitter. Joe Scarborough deleted his post about it, but others kept up the lie. Nancy Pelosi made the rounds stammering through the claim that Trump is promising a homicidal rampage.

There is nothing new about this, of course. The entirety of the Trump administration was spent this way, where the media would make up obvious lies and people would spend days correcting the lies. The difference now is the world’s richest man has suddenly started to notice things like this. Elon Musk is an eccentric guy, but when he notices something the world notices it with him. Musk seems to be taking aim at the legacy media this cycle, so it will make for some good drama.

This misses the larger issue we see with this story. The person who initiated this drama over Trump using the word “bloodbath” lied and she knew she was lying when she claimed he said, “there would be a bloodbath if he lost.” Her bosses surely knew she was lying but went along with it because it would get attention. The rest of the media who piled on also knew it was a lie. In other words, everyone involved knew it was a lie, but they kept on lying, even when everyone knew it was a lie.

In theory, the media is supposed to be the arena of public debate, where the political combatants argue for their proposals. In imagination land, the media is just a referee, but in more sober telling the media is a collection of competing entities fighting to gain the trust and attention of the market. The marketplace for information should correct for this constant lying, much as it prevents the one airplane maker from filling up on diversity hires and building planes that fall apart in midair.

Therein lies the problem. Just as Boeing is pretty much a monopoly, the media is also a monopoly and for the same reasons. Over the years, Boeing was able to make the best of friends in government, so that it was able to buy up the competition. Similarly, the media has coalesced around a critical mass of flatterers who have exclusive access to permanent Washington. If you want to buy a commercial plan you go to Boeing and if you want to reach the public, you go to the media.

Just as the free market always seems to end up with a few players controlling the marketplace, democracy seems to end up with a few players controlling the marketplace for ideas. The reason a nonsense story like the Trump “bloodbath” comment runs wild is that the media is a monolith. The people in it speak only to each other and the people in it are selected for their ideological compliance. The media is a massive hive controlled by the uniparty.

Of course, the fact that we have the expression “uniparty” and everyone understands exactly what it means speaks to the reality of “democracy.” Instead of it being the marketplace of ideas, it collapses like all markets into monopoly. Reformers like Trump are treated like upstarts in any industry dominated by a few players. If a collection of rich guys tried to challenge the duopoly of Airbus and Boeing, they would quickly cease to be rich guys, as they would be crushed.

That is the plight of anyone who seeks to reform democracy. The desire for reform comes only when it has evolved to its natural state of oligopoly, which often appears to the people as a monopoly. Like the upstart challenging the major players in an industry, the reformers get crushed, unless they have friends in government. To get friends in government means making the same deal as the major players. The path forward is always a deal with the devil or death by his minions.

Joseph de Maistre said, “To hear these defenders of democracy talk, one would think that the people deliberate like a committee of wise men, whereas in truth judicial murders, foolhardy undertakings, wild choices, and above all foolish and disastrous wars are eminently the prerogatives of this form of government.” That was two hundred years ago before any nation foolishly set about proving him correct. Every day the media reminds us that there is no reforming democracy.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

The Z Blog

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Monthly Archives: March 2024

A Z Potpourri

The Floor Is Yours

Illiberal Multiracialism

Bridge Thoughts

The Gangster State

Bad Ideas

Work Until You Die

Bourgeois Minoritarianism

The End Of the Line

Our Democracy