45 thoughts on “A Little Baroque”

1. If Amazon starts banning books, including its booming erotica pile, then we will have confirmation that Jeff B. is running for president.

2. Zman, the 3 biggest social media platforms have you on their service. If they’re out to silence people like you, why are they helping to broadcast your opinions?

   • They have not gotten around to me yet.

     • The last shoe to drop (hammer might be a better word) will be when Amazon starts to keep out books Bezos and the rest of the ruling class don’t like.

3. The podcasts are getting better every week; and at their core, they are not only educational, but they speak to verboten topics not found anywhere else. It is also brain exercise, which is sorely needed in today’s climate of cognition suppression by the mass media. Now please go one step further. Help your readers understand how to use this information to make useful predictions. The human mind evolved as a prediction processor, and this is a key survival trait that needs to be employed by everyone right now.

4. My apologies Z. The Howie Carr thing was a bit much 🙂

   As mentioned things aren’t getting any better out there. The training has improved drastically in the past few years.

   My favorite was the range 2000. It’s a “shoot, don’t shoot ” scenario with a full size screen and laser guns showing hits and misses.

   And you’re right it is a no-win situation. That’s why you find less and less kids trying to get on the job.

   In fact the last time I renewed my permit the chief said how happy is he was his kid was getting on the fire department !

   These new kids need our support, not less of it.

   P,S did enjoy the rest of the podcast as always.

5. For those who care, the best intellectual anti-Jew critique, better than Enoch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2laXMYmRAY

6. Z, your starting to remind me a little bit of Howie Carr !

   You come out swinging like a conservative but then turn around and kick people in the nuts that actually support you . . . . . .
   like police officers !

   Chase a bad guy down a dark alley and what do you supposed to do ? Hey, buddy everything okay ?

   Have you seen what they’ve been doing to the staties lately ?

   This stuff is absurd.

   • You got me all wrong. I said several times that the issue in these things is poor training and putting cops in no-win positions.

     • Z. You can’t suck and blow at the same time. Do you want to know what the difference between a Ranger, a Navy SEAL, and a cop is?

       Training.

       I’m a gun hound. I know what I’m talking about. The only way to train our cops to think their weay through a fire fight is to expose them to fire fights. Do that hard enough and often enough, and the cops you sent in to that training will come out as squaddies. Then you’ll be screaming about militarized police forces. The reason the cops have those military toys is because We The People have them too. If you send Officer Friendly into a gang turf war with a 38 revolver – he’s going to end up in a box. Have you seen the fortified crack houses these guys have to deal with? They’re popping up in upscale neighbourhoods now. Would you want to try and breach one without a bullet proof vest and an assault rifle?

       As we careen down the path to a progressive socialist utopia, police work is becoming more and more like a no-win situation. If the cops finally manage to arrest someone – any number of judicial finks will be on the tax payer’s clock trying to get them back out on the street.

       The cops are not the problem. It’s us.

       • What would be surprising would be if the cops were the only ones who were not a problem.

       • We the people don’t have military toys. Some have a AR-15 but that is not a M-4 with AP ammo meant to slice through body armor and houses. We don’t have MRAP’s, armored Hummers or $10k sniper rifles or MP-5’s, flash bangs, or access to Blackhawks.

         The fact is most shootings are by pistol, not by rifle since those aren’t concealable. And even when the bad guys use a fully auto Ak-47 are the users are horribly incompetent and just spray lead.

         And the last time I checked cops have either 9mm or .40 cal Glocks. .38 special? Jesus you are out of it.

         Crack Houses? Here in Los Angeles county I haven’t heard about a crack house raid in over a decade. And we do have a drug problem. The particular area where I live was once known as the meth capital of CA for a while because of all the places you could cook the stuff.

         We’re not the problem. It’s mostly found within the Black and Hispanic communities and their male population. If you have lots of Mexicans or Blacks in your town you have lots of crime and bad ones at that.

         My town prior to the advent of subsidized apartments for welfare scum and inner city types was so safe you could leave your front door unlocked at night and your car as well Kids didn’t have to chain their bicycles because no one would steal them. This was small town CA up until 1980.

         • Rod – I KNOW the cops don’t use 38 special anymore. I guess the point I was trying to make went over your head.
           The object of any gunfight for a cop is to stop the shooting as quickly as possible. That means if you have to shoot people, you want to take them out of play on the first or second shot. At ranges over 25m pistols become very difficult to use for rank and file cops.

           Let me ask you this: who is enabling the black and brown crime? If you talked like that in court you would be charged with contempt even though it’s all true – and white judges would be happy to sentence you. Yes, WE are the problem. Welfare? Same deal. We’re paying danegeld to human trash to behave – and we’re getting ripped off. If we don’t do something about it, it WILL get worse. When it does, you can bet cops and even guys like us will need full blown military hardware to deal with it.

           One of the things I hate about libertarians is that those idiots can’t tell the difference between cops and SS storm troopers. Cops now have to deal with what are essentially homegrown warlords. Anyone that denies that doesn’t understand what the cops are up against – and what WE will be up against if this continues. California is turning into a shithole largely because the locals handed it over to the bad guys rather than firing a shot. The thin blue line broke and now as you say, they can’t leave anything out at night or it won’t be there in the morning. It serves them right too.

7. Never would have taken you for an O’s fan, Z. That always been the case? Thought maybe BoSox given your background. My pop use to take me Three Rivers back in the day, so I’ll always have a soft spot for the bucs.

   Glad to see them get a win, but I’m still not use to instant replay. Maybe it’s the process, I don’t know, it just seems more like a football thing. Also, can Scherzer trim the hedges or what? He was mowing down reds like duke in green berets.

   • I’m a lifelong Sox fan. But, I like a day at the park and Camden Yards is one of the nicest places to see a game.

8. Thanks for the Z-reminder that it is Good Friday.
   With it’s many threads of deep history, Easter is here again to tell us that there is still much good in this wicked, interesting world.

   Happy Easter to our host and to everyone here!

9. Mateen’s father being a FBI informant isn’t surprising when it’s known that Whitey Bulger was also a FBI informant for many years.

   The uncle of the Tsarnaev bomb brothers, who brought them to America, was married to the daughter of Graham Fuller, a top CIA officer.

   Mateen’s father wanted to be Afghanistan President and go to war with Pakistan, I imagine that Uncle Tsarni was involved in Chechenian separatism and was supported by the CIA. Steve Sailer is quite right in saying ‘invade the world, invite the world’, these terrorist attacks are blowbacks from the Deep State foreign policy.

10. This week also marks the 50th anniversary of the 3 days of rioting that rocked Lagos back in ’68. It is hard to estimate the extent to which this singular event drove whitey to the neither reaches of the surrounding counties and sealed Lagos’s fate as corrupt 3rd world shithole.

    • I’m doing something on it next week.

      • I look forward!

      • ZMan, in all honesty, can you really say you have never worried about cannibalism — in Baltimore specifically?

        • Not until you mentioned it.

11. Z-Man – the word you are looking to describe the cops is UNDISCIPLINED. Part of it is training, part is their selection, some of it is total lack of consequences for shooting up a neighborhood. Combine all that with terrible leadership and the cop unions that go to incredible lengths to cover for their most incompetent members.

    “I feared for my life” is now justification for spraying bullets indiscriminately. A few decades ago, a man who uttered such nonsense would rightly be described as a coward and considered ill-suited for police work.

    The average 20-year-old Infantry Marine has far more trigger discipline – and no union sticking up for him when he decides to shoot at the wrong time.

    • Good point.

      • A few years back someone, possibly John Lott, detailed the fact that lawful citizens who carry are multiple times better than cops at actually shooting the person they intend to shoot, to have correctly identified that person for what he is, to not accidentally hit bystanders, and in many other ways to be vastly superior to cops in similar situations. Not mentioned was that they also do not create situations of deadly force where none existed.
        I briefly knew two marvelous cops, partners, who existed entirely outside of that culture. I asked them how they did it. They always went home to their families after work. Always. No cop shops, no drinking.

        • Probably was Lott. Have also read interesting research that shows as the magazine capacity goes up the number of rounds expended climbs. Unless well trained there is a tendency to do a mag dump once the shooting starts and if more than one officer is shooting it is basically “contagious”. A lot of cops marksmanship sucks. Know a guy who ran the VIP protection unit for the NYPD–he jokes that the only two absolutely safe spots if a regular beat cop starts shooting is directly in front or directly behind. All other points of the compass are in play. Which is not surprising since quals consist of basically firing the three carried mags twice per year. When I lived in Philly in a neighborhood that necessitated keeping a revolver handy at night, used to shoot at a range regularly that had big Philly cop clientele. most sucked. Period. Would outshoot them on 7 and 15 yard silhouettes –and I was using a S&W 15 D/A.

12. I’ve noticed scientists purposefully ignoring evolutionary facts. Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals both found mostly in Europe and western Asia had significantly larger brains than modern humans. Something was going on there (seasons for one).
    https://phys.org/news/2010-03-cro-magnon-skull-brains-shrunk.html

13. French Baroque is no doubt nowhere near as popular as German, but there is nothing like Rameau’s “Les Grandes Motets”, link below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLcuRfJzetI

14. Zman: if you prefer German over French, allow me to suggest Jan Dismas Zelenka, known as the “Bach of Dresden.”

    https://youtu.be/9ofiLN9AR9w

15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_wolf
    One is a familiar companion animal, the other is a wild animal that has been known to attack humans.
    Yet, they are very VERY similar genetically. In fact, they can crossbreed and the offspring of such hybrids ARE fertile – unlike the crossbreeds of Horses and Mules which create infertile Donkeys. It’s said the common ancestor of Wolves and Dogs is extinct, though scientists debate on whether they are even separate species. Generally though they are considered ”Sister Taxa” (separate, though related, species).
    I’m one of those that believe there are a ”Sister Taxa” to Homo Sapiens – Homo Africanus. Both can stand on two legs, however one can speak quite well, the other can mimic human speech (some quite well, others, well, listen to some rap ”music” or visit a Baltimore public school – if you dare).
    Homo Sapiens live in cities like Seattle, Homo Africanus live in things that vaguely resemble human cities like Baltimore. Though that species deserves to be returned to it’s own habitat where they can live as nature intended.

    • Small point: Mules are the infertile results of breeding Horses with Donkeys.

16. Mouret was a French Baroque composer and billions recognize his Rondeau, or, as they all know it, the theme from Masterpiece Theater. Well, maybe it no longer is. I haven’t seen PBS in years.

17. The mournful sound of the slow movements of early Baroque music is perfectly suited to the unfolding tragedy of our times.

    • I disagree. The banailty, depravity and evil found in “rap” is more appropriate.

      • Rap can only convey the things you described. It cannot convey the complex human tragedy of Western Civilization sinking into oblivion. But classical music is complex enough to encompass this tragedy, and more. There is a sweet melancholia in this music that is somewhat akin to gazing on beautiful ruins. Our ruins are not going to be so picturesque.

        • There is no finer example of Western civilization than this service in this building.

          http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/events/chapel-services/nine-lessons.html

        • Epaminondas-
          I agree completely. There are three things that help me keep calm when I contemplate the ongoing collapse of our culture and any semblance of civilization: reading history, listening to classical music, and reading the Bible. All three remind me that humans have encountered devastating problems in the past, and there is grace and beauty even in the darkest times.

18. Rameau introduced the clarinet to the orchestra, you know.

    Clarinet: “hi guys!”
    Orchestra: “welcome, squeaky!”

19. Looking forward to listening as always.

    OT – it looks like Taki has disabled comments, with a hasty, poorly written notice from “the editors”:

    http://takimag.com/article/gag_reflex#axzz5B2Kg70Ct

    The reason of course, is discussion of the jews. Not blacks, or homosexuals, or muslims, or trannies, or even white cucks, you see, but jews.

    There is a large group of people who believe jews actively work to suppress any and all discussion and or criticism of themselves, and are the catalysts behind many of the hate speech laws we see popping up all over the west. I was never really one of those people, but it’s hard not to sip the kool aide when they come right out and tell you yeah, we are disabling discussion because we don’t like it when jews are criticized. it kind of fuels the fire.

    • You must submit to your feudal lords!

    • The Taki comments section was boring, repetitive and crudely racist. Incessant crusty-old-dude “humor”. Most commenters were so caught up in their own cutesy that they wouldn’t even comment on the articles, (and almost never bothered to compliment the writer). Just a bunch of lonely old divorcees trading inside-jokes. The comments section made everyone look bad, and surely kept writing talent away. Not helpful. If Taki thinks you’re a bore, then you’re probably a bore. I’m so glad you were all shut down. Goofy idiots.

      • That’s quite a bit of butthurt thinly veiled as indifference. With that in mind, you’ll be happy to know the comments at Taki’s are back up today. 🙂

20. Yo, Zman – about to listen to the cast, but just read this. It takes a special kind of effort to remain blind to reality. All those who can see are evil.

    https://samharris.org/ezra-klein-editor-chief/

    Precis: Sam Harris and Ezra Klein. Harris shows us how you get Voxplained if you even talk to Charles Murray and why it is a waste of time to talk to Klein. Read the emails. Also amusing for the interface between a first-rate mind and one that is… not quite first-rate.

    Worth a mention down the road if you are so moved.

    • I saw that. I’m conflicted non Harris. He seems to struggle controlling his emotions and biases, which leads him into some of the same problems that haunt Pinker’s work. Atheists always seem to have this defect. On the other hand, he talks about taboo topics on occasion.

      Ezra Klein, on the other hand, is just duplicitous grifter. He’s not very smart either. He does a good job concealing, but that’s what makes him a successful grifter.

      • Harris is the type of anti-religious atheist who is unnerved by the reality of the post-Christian world as it unfolds and is engaged in a desperate search to replace it with something concrete, yet everything he grasps toward that end has religious overtones. He is not a first rate mind because his character lacks the vision which humility alone provides great men in order to first see themselves as ridiculous.

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