The Gathering Darkness

Way back when I had a real job, I was part of the hiring process for certain positions in the local branches. One of my tasks was to sort the resumes that came in through various recruiting programs. Once a week I would spend a few hours opening mail, reading the resumes, and sorting them into buckets. After a while they would start looking the same. My job was not to evaluate them at that point. I was just sorting them and then sending them on for further processing.

It was a boring task, but once in a while a wacky one would come through to make the few hours’ worth it. One time I got a resume from someone who had worked in local politics her whole life. It was very well done and had a nice cover letter. The letter explained that she had been in local politics for twenty years but wanted to transition into a private sector position. The thing that struck me about the letter is she indicated she was best qualified for a management position, given her experience.

Her experience, however, was entirely useless in the private sector. Her life had been spent working on committees, campaigns, and staffs for local pols. The titles she listed were meaningless gibberish to me. Imagine someone claiming to have been the “The Deputy Assistant Centurion of the Alpha Quadrant” in charge of “nebulizing the remulac” and you get the idea. I read the job descriptions carefully trying to figure out what the woman actually did in the listed positions. No luck.

At the time, I just thought it was a strange resume, but over the years I have come to realize that the world of politics and our world disconnected at some point. There has always been a separation of politics and regular life, but with enough movement back and forth to keep both sides tethered to one another. There was also the practical reality of politics depending on popular support. If things got bad for the people, they may try to hang the king, so the king had to keep an eye on them.

Today they are completely different worlds. I have a segment on Liz Cheney. Her life may as well have been lived in another solar system. Technically, she is supposed to be representing the interests of Wyoming in the people’s house. In reality, she is the Cloud People’s representative to the Dirt People of Wyoming. She may as well correspond with them via video link, like the alien overlords in sci-fi movies. “People of Wyoming, this is your humanoid representative. Obey and listen to instructions.”

Again, all societies, regardless of the form of government, have a ruling elite that is often at odds with and out of touch with the people. That is why there are subsystems that provide feedback to the decision makers. That is the problem that parliaments are supposed to solve. How best to keep the rulers and the ruled in communication so both sides understand the other enough to avoid conflict. Today, those feedback loops no longer exist. The political system operates in isolation from us.

The result is we have the Dirt People thinking they live in a representative democracy where their votes dictate public policy. The Cloud People think they live in a novel form of dictatorship where their decisions are applauded by the masses. It is why so many of the Cloud People are convinced there is an evil conspiracy afoot to rile up the masses against the system. Why else would they not be clapping? From their perspective, the system is running as expected, so the opposition is illogical.

The Dirt People, having been trained their whole lives to think the humanoids they choose between in elections care about their votes, are baffled by why those humanoids never following instructions. Unable to question the logic of the system itself, they come up with novel theories about why the Cloud People are doing the things they are doing. At some point, the right answer is “they are not us”. That is always the answer when the Cloud People float too far away from the Dirt People.

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


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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Driving Home Some Points
  • 22:00: Salad Bowls
  • 37:00: Cloud People (Link)
  • 47:00: Novel Fascism (Link) (Be Like Me)

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271 thoughts on “The Gathering Darkness

  1. Another form of fraud is something I bring up a lot with friends

    Chicken wings

    I would say in 75% to 95% of cases you order wings but get drummettes, or maybe 5 drummettes to one wing — something like that

    So you order the premium part of the bird but get the cheapest part

    surprised there has never been a class action lawsuit

  2. Live not by lies; LOLZ

    Unfortunately the effects of exposure for lies are NIL. Especially as everyone already knew it. As long as they want to wait it out and hope it blows over or goes away absolutely no revelation has any effect. Its the reverse of Trump: the elites are immunized by the volume and virulence of their lies.

    The real vaccine for power is lies, not truth. Power knows this, our American Sheeple do not. In fact that they lie and keep breathing tells Power they have real power; if they point Deer we say Horse.

  3. Great podcast. I haven’t read the comments yet, so someone may have raised this point in regard to your last segment.

    It emerged during the Russia hoax that the Five Eyes nations routinely use each other’s intelligence services to spy on each other’s citizens. In that case, Australia of all places was involved in the failed coup attempt, as one example. Several British spooks spied on Americans for the FBI and the IC. So it certainly isn’t novel in a this narrow sense that the feds would farm out their Stasi operations to private concerns.

    Hopefully the rest of the world will distance itself from the United States and marginalize it as it descends into fascism. My bet is does, although the other Five Eyes have decided to joint the United States in its embrace of totalitarianism.

  4. Shrinkflation. My city just did the most amazing thing which for some reason no one has noticed, I keep asking people. They decided recycling was now going to be picked up every other week instead of every week but none of the prices got changed. Absolutely amazing.

  5. The CIA is now recruiting to fight the patriarchy.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X55JPbAMc9g

    “I am a woman of color. I am a mom. I am a cis gender Millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. . . I am intersectional. But my existence is not a box checking exercise.”

    “At 36, I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.”

    Xi might as well give up

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    • What is it with the intelligence services that attracts these loons? In my experience, military intelligence was a weirdo magnet, too.

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    • “I can wax eloquent on complex legal issues.” She’s no idea she just ridiculed herself.” LOL

      “I am a woman whose inflection does not rise at the end of her sentences. Suggesting that a question has been asked.” Damn, they got deep into the nitty-gritty in this ad. Did she tell us her favorite ice cream flavor and bra size?

      “I used to struggle with imposter syndrome.” WTF LOLOLOL That’s a thing? Is it in the DSM IV? Does insurance cover it? Do I qualify if I like to consider myself Dissendent Right but deep down I know I’m too soft on the gays?

      Interestingly, she filled up that ad with about 45 adjectives about herself, yet not one was “I’m an American”. Unless I missed it. She was pretty wordy. I kind of glazed over after the 25th ‘I’ma’. Would have been great if the scriptwriter sneaked in “I’ma full-blown narcissist.” And just told her that narcissist means she’s anti-drugs.

  6. On a lighter note, we keep the lights on in canada because we only get 5 hours of sunlight for 5 months of the year. Where I live during the summer we will have sunlight until 11 at night.

    In the winter, If you have a 9-5 job you will be going to work in the dark and driving home in the dark.

    • is it true Canadian women’s nipples glow in the dark, as a result of some kind of adaptation to the long hours without light?

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  7. Can’t remember where I read it

    But some years ago I was reading that the problems the old WASPs had with Jewish students at Harvard Law was precisely what Z talks about. This was obviously long go the Jews were just starting to gain entry into the place.

    They were too concerned and fixated on the letter of the law and no the spirit of the law. Those exact terms were used.

      • That’s something I’m aware of thanks to z man…letter of the law vs. spirit of the law….thanks for that Z.

    • Asians Vs Jews for the ruins of Ivy League: It must suck to be out-cheated and out-scammed by the real Asians as opposed to the pretend/denial whatever goes on under those hats minds of theirs…

  8. A ray of sunshine in the gathering darkness?

    Today, for the first time in a year or more, I shopped at my local Wal-Mart without mask. Unlike prior times, there was no cordon, no signage that I must wear one. Some local stores still have signage and I (usually) honor it. Florida was one of the less lockdown-prone states. I checked and my county’s official policy is something like “masks suggested for commercial areas but not mandated.” In any case, it was nice weather, and especially uplifting to shop for groceries unchallenged. Employees are still masked. I’d say maybe 20% of customers are maskless. My area is pretty typical of central FL: a mix of retirees, white trash with a minority of minorities, primarily the Australopithecus 😀

    • About an hour ago I was first to board an elevator and, at the last second, a group of four asked to enter and I let them on with a polite greeting. Once aboard they thanked me and I replied that many folks still won’t share an elevator with a maskless man. The four began exchanging nervous glances and they hustled off when we arrived at the ground floor, them sorta half-jogging away from The Great Contagion.

      They hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t wearing a mask until I called their attention to the fact, the inertia set by indoctrination is so overwhelming they don’t even perceive reality when it is staring back at them.

      Yesterday, I rode my bicycle for a dozen miles along the Chicago lakefront. Gorgeous Fall-like day in the upper 50’s with deep blue skies and a gentle breeze. Everybody was out enjoying the light and the blossoms. Golfing, biking, playing tennis, hitting at the driving range, walking dogs, playing frisbee, taking photographs, hammocking, picnicking, roller blading, horse shoes, riding those motorized wheels, juggling, training, skateboarding, fishing, and just doing the things people typically engage while at the lakefront. And ninety percent or more of the bastards wore their cheap, inefficacious face masks including the children and the shirtless basketball studs.
      (When I stopped at a crossing, a twenty-something chick called me an asshole for not wearing a mask.)

      Chicago will be keepers of The Plague Narrative for the rest of the country at least until St. Fauci ascends into heaven and Big Pharma controls all the wealth. For respite, I am headed to New England for a week’s worth of driving a rental car around a five-state circuit and just chilling out — because — and I pray the bloody yankees exhibit a bit more common sense than here. Please oh please.

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      • Stadtluft macht sklavisch. Secular urbanity is a road to serfdom, so I don’t breathe much of the air here, esp. in Logan Square to the south of me. I often think that it’s time to get out, but then I become enthused once again by the idea, arguably just an impractical fantasy, of turning the place upside down. And I’m not fond of moving to the burbs or the hills. So I say put.

        If you happen to find yourself driving along the coast near the border of Maine and New Hampshire, consider stopping at Strawberry Banke in Portsmouth, NH. It’s said to be the oldest European settlement in New Hampshire, and among the attractions is a reminder that the people there must have been very short centuries ago. When I was there 26 yrs ago with a girlfriend, we spent a few hours at the museum, then crossed a bridge to Maine on foot for clam chowder and lobster at Warren’s Lobster House, iirc. A nice surprise on the way over was seeing Gorton’s fisherman motoring his boat up the Piscataqua River. He was all dressed up for the misty winds that day.

        Addendum: The museum isn’t open until Sat, June 19, and “all are required to keep a safe distance of at least 6 feet between households at all times and wear a mask covering over mouth and nose.”

      • Ben: “Everybody was out enjoying the light and the blossoms. Golfing, biking, playing tennis, hitting at the driving range, walking dogs, playing frisbee, taking photographs, hammocking, picnicking, roller blading, horse shoes, riding those motorized wheels, juggling, training, skateboarding, fishing, and just doing the things people typically engage while at the lakefront.” WTF. Why did you list everything?

    • It still feels like a gulag in Tallahassee. They’re fanatics. Surrounding counties are mask-free, especially in Georgia.

  9. Regarding the Z man’s comments on the letter vs. the spirit of the law, let’s give credit to the absolute masters of manipulating the letter of the law.

    Orthodox Jews are forbidden, by their God, from performing certain activities outside of their home on their sabbath day. Inconvenient.

    They use strings or other devices to encircle their neighborhood and redefine their “home” as all the territory within these series of strings. The eruv is born. The perfect illustration of the mind behind our present set of absurdities.

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    • The practice of constructing an eruv has served Jews well. The eruv is a brilliant solution to how to bring the the sacred and the wordly together with the least amount of conflict.

      Today’s absurdities derive from a denial of what is sacred.

      • I think the attempt to Eruv out the world will fail.

        Especially with the Eruv on the Potomac being a college town run by Basic Becky Ocaiso Cortez and crew…

    • Don’t forget about your friendly neighborhood Shabbas Goy!

    • For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them vs Just tie a string around it lol.

    • I like the little blocks of wood on the head. can’t say why, it just amuses me. oh, and making the chicks sit on one side of the room, away from the men.

  10. https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/05/07/portland-blm-antifa-draw-guns-on-drivers-to-enforce-no-go-zone-in-broad-daylight-n1445236

    You read through this and you understand that the problem isn’t the BLM/Antifa thugs at all.

    It’s the people in charge of the government that are failing to do their duty.

    The right target for fixing this isn’t a bunch of barbarian joggers with guns. The target is right at the top.

    Decent people can’t fight back against BLM/Antifa because they know the government is protecting them.

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    • So what recourse to we have when the government has declared you an enemy of the State? The truth is we HAVE no recourse. We are doomed.

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        • We do have recourse yes. But increasingly, it looks like it’s going to be limited to a rather high personal risk of life-without-parole (if you’re lucky) and/or Federal indictments for violating some precious citizen’s “civil rights.” 🙁

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          • Stay away from cities and crowds. Stay away from the justice system. Avoid capture. Run. Lie. Hide. Deny. Alibi. Stealth.

          • A man could do worse than join BLM and agitate for the government to impose woke quotas on corporate management, at least 75% must be black, at least 80% of board members black, luxury homes worth more than $5 million seized and given to randomly chosen black people.
            The Salem Witch trials ended abruptly when the wife of the Governor was accused.

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      • Seems I remember a story about group of extraordinary men pledging their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to overthrow a tryranical govt. against overwhelming odds.

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        • The ‘tyranny’ of the British colonial government didn’t hold a candle to today’s anarchotyranny at the hands of the woke.

        • The crown’s forces were far, far away. And had limited power. I fully expect drone strikes and Special Forces raids on Tallahasse, Austin, and other state capitols over another lockdown, BML stuff, who knows.

          But there are tools — boycotts of all corporations. Pressing for state taxes on big Corp. Pressing for lawsuits against Big Corp (trial lawyers next mansion act) like obese/diabetic against Coke, Pepsi. Against Disney by escapees of Chinese labor camps. Or relatives. No major victories just grinding attrition social conflict designed to make everything and anything Globohomo does very costly.

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      • Carl,

        Jesus.
        Well if you’re doomed you have nothing to lose Carl.

        You’re doomed by who exactly? AOC?
        The Trannies?

        The Shetl-Stoeffel ?

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    • As someone with loved ones in Portland, OR all I can say is that those assholes deserve everything they get.

      Even though I love them, they are so sanctimonious and conformist, while imaging that they are compassionate iconoclasts.

      Even though I love them, I hope it gets much worse. They deserve it.

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  11. Great show. Yes, we are rapidly moving to re-education and forced labor camps. If and it is true, our rulers are foreign weirdos who really, hate us, like Liz Cheney, then yes the solution to our existence being a problem will be to copy China.

    Fortune 500 companies like Nike and Apple are likely drooling over the cheap, high IQ labor they’ll get by forced labor camps. And people like Cheney are likely to make that happen.

    Will Cheney be forced out? I don’t know. McCarthy does he really want to be Speaker? Or does he figure that’s the feudal fief of Pelosi and does not and never will belong to him. Republicans like losing. Its a drug, they’re addicted. They’d rather lose than win and be responsible. Example: “show respect to Mitt Romney” etc. Of course, ambition can be a positive … the John Cox guy here in California is going all Trump to out maneuver “Caitlyn” Jenner.

    • you will never get back the time you waste paying attention to the gop in cali. your time is more profitably spent — for example — scouring the internet for reports of celebrities with haemorrhoids.

  12. Just remembered something I was going to mention in relation to petty tyrants in the bureaucracy. In the afterword to the novel Roadside Picnic the Russian author relates the tale of trying to get the novel published through the Soviet apparatus. Figuring that it wasn’t being approved because censors were uneasy with it, he submitted a bunch of malarkey about how the novel was a reflection of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie*, etc., stuff that would take more than a little bit of imagination to “read into” the novel. Anyway, at some point (glasnost or the fall of the soviet empire, I can’t remember which) he found out that it wasn’t approved “just because”; it was completely arbitrary and had nothing to do with the content of the novel (which is excellent btw).

    *The newer digital release has a forward written by some idiot lefty westerner who oddly reads the same things into the novel that the author more or less said didn’t exist.

    • I can’t believe someone else here posted about that story! That’s odd they didn’t OK it, as sci-fi was usually an area that soviet writers could work in without too much interference. Anyway, a truly excellent piece of sci-fi with a unique “angle” on the genre.

    • how do you get a silver star working in food service?! knife nicks? extra stingy onions?

  13. Can validate the netherworld of the “lists”. Friend’s 10 year old has what turns out to be a perfect three name match for an IRA terrorist. Who apparently was on the early iterations of the “no-fly”–so every family flight was a process of “you are on the list”, “my kid is 10” “but his name is on the list” “Ok, we’ll have to get someone senior to interview you”….into the small room….”yeah I guess this 10 y/o is not an IRA master bomb maker”. Finally had to contact Chuck Schumer’s office to get something done to stop flagging th poor kid. Took about a year. They never new what was done, but he stopped flagging.

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  14. Apropos of Friday, I found this:

    “live your life in such a way that your heirs sort through your possessions whispering “what the fuck. what the FUCK. What in the SHIT.””

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      • It’s especially funny because the name Z-man sounds like a schizophrenic’s imagined superhero.

  15. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Gathering Darkness

  16. I never talk politics on the job, and covid is political. But today one of my clients said that business was booming and wire transfers in banks were usually high. When asked why, she said because covid was over. I asked her if she would say things were “back to normal” in China, she said yes.

    Just one persons opinion, but its depressing . We are far worse than China regarding freedom.

    I blame, like I always do, the enfranchisement of females

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    • Absolutely. Allowing women to vote turned the government into your rich boyfriend for about 45% of the population. Women are generally only looking for a way to get support or status and so make poor leaders and even worse citizens. Keeping women focused on family chores made it possible for civilization to advance. One observation I always love that shows how women manage things is: for thousands of years women used midwives to have babies and like a quarter of women and half of babies died. Then men invented gynecology and obstetrics and within a hundred years solved both problems. Women never will solve a problem like that.

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  17. just out of curiosity, is there anyone here who hasn’t seen the movie “Dr Strangelove”? it would be interesting to hit the up vote if you have seen it, and the down vote if you haven’t. now if you have seen it, but reflexively down vote me, maybe you can post a reply that you have seen it (and I will add the number of replies to the “yes” vote count. and I think it would improve the data quality if you vote before heading over to IMDB (to look up the title).

    this technique seems like a fun and easy way to take a poll of the blog readership.

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        • “I-I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love…Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I-I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake. But I do deny them my essence.”

          and that is the plan to defeat the Borg: deny them your essence 🙂

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      • it’s one of Kubrick’s best, done before he ascended to god hood. Peter sellers shows why he is/was one of the very funniest actors ever. the basic premise is a rogue colonel takes over a missile base and launches preemptively at the CCCP. it’s a black comedy and genuinely one of the funniest movies ever made.

    • Slim Pickens at the end was priceless. I understood his character’s motivation completely. When I was stationed at McConnell Air Force patch assigned to Titan II communications, every time we went out to a.missile.complex part of briefing in to the complex included notice of a warning klaxon to tell us the shit was hitting the fan and we would be under EWO (Emergency War Orders) conditions. I would always volunteer to confirm the condition of the blast doors – on the way out! McConnell is located ar Wichita, Kansas. At the time there were 24 Titan II missile silos around Wichita. Additionally, almost half of the light planes on the planet were manufactured within a half hour’s drive of downtown Wichita. PLUS there was MAJOR Boeing repair depot for B-52s on McConnell. If things had gone south that whole part of Kansas would have been a sea of glass after the 1st strike. I, for one did not want to survive a nuclear apocalypse since my wife would be vaporized along with Wichita. Also, my family was all living in San Antonio, another prime target. Nope! I did NOT want to survive.the first strike so I volunteered to watch the fireworks.topside from a safe distance.from the launch duct.

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      • wow, I wasn’t expecting such a great story to go with my question! thanx for sharing…

      • Your story is nearly identical to a discussion I had with my dad, way back around ’82 or ’83. He was a mechanical engineer at Rockwell International, in their Seal Beach, California facility (with a very high-level security clearance). Literally just down the street was the Seal Beach Naval Munitions Base (it’s still there, btw).

        I asked him, “Dad, if the Commies make a nuclear attack on us, what will happen to our house?” He replied almost instantly, (which means he had thought it all out before) “Well, the Russians know exactly where the Naval Munitions base is, and we’re pretty sure they have targeted that base for destruction. So, if they drop one of the really BIG ones on the base it will kill everybody for about a 20 mile radius. We live 19 miles away, so we’ll be pretty much vaporized. So don’t be worrying about that kind of stuff.”

        That was ironically comforting to me, just as you mentioned in your comment. My dad was a good guy.

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        • Nah, you would have been alright.

          There are online calculators available where you can calculate nuclear bomb blast effects. See here for instance: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

          Assuming a large nuclear bomb — 300 kt — and air burst detonation, worst effects (fire ball radius, 500 rem radiation) are found within half a mile of the explosion. 500 rem radiation means you have 50% chance of death in 60 days. However, note that for this worst case effect to happen, you would have to be standing outside within this half mile blast radius. If you are in a basement with concrete walls and ceiling, even an airburst direct hit within this radius would likely be survivable. If you are farther than a half mile away and in a basement you might have a partially collapsed house on fire, broken windows, a big dust cloud, etc after the explosion but you will most likely be alive.

          Other things to consider. Almost no one in the US lives within a half mile of something worth destroying with a nuclear weapon. The perimeter fences of many military installations are often more than a half mile from the objects inside these installations that would be targeted by ICBMs. And these weapons are very accurate (expected to miss targets by less than 50m). So even for people living close to targets survivability should be very good. Also, there should be at least a 10 minute warning in an ICBM scenario which gives people time to get to relatively safe places. This would be more than enough time for most people to get away from places that are likely targets and to find some sort of shelter.

          TLDR; nuclear war less deadly than you think.

          • Buddy, 300 kt is nothing but a firecracker. If I go out in a “nucular” war, I will have nothing less than the Tsar Bomba, 50 megaton bad boy.

        • That’s a good story. I guess I heard similar, having grown up around the target-rich DC area. Those of us who are older perhaps think the specter of nuclear war ended with the end of the Cold War ca. 1990. But is that really true? If they push the button I want to be one of those near ground zero. Have you ever read any of the realistic scenarios for a major nuclear exchange? The old line “the living will envy the dead” does it justice. 🙁

          • The threat of nuclear war is probably higher today than during the height of the Cold War. The problem now is instability. The Cold War stalemate was between two large, stable powers with known ideology and tendencies, both run by capable and intelligent men (and yes I mean men, not shemales, wammen, or soyboys.

            The current global power triad is a rising China and Russia, both racing ahead of the US in weapons tech with a weakened and factionized US “led” by Biden and Harris’ Flying Circus but actually controlled by a shadow government with unknown goals.

    • Obviously yes, but it’s curious just how often it’s being re run on cable right about now.

    • “Gentlemen! This is the War Room! There’s no fighting in the War Room!”

  18. I was out buying weed, and started bouncing through my radio presets, and listened a bit on the ABC owned station (in LA). the two knobs talking were discussing how the 18 worst states for china flu job deaths (i.e. a job that has gone away for anyone, not just the person who used to have it) are all Dem run (gov, hor, sen), while the 18 best (i.e. least) were all red states, again gov, hor, and sen.

    and I couldn’t quite tell if they were really as clueless as they sounded, or if they were putting on an act. but they were voicing curiosity about why this had happened, as they felt employment was completely separate from political choices made?! they really thought this was just people in one state actually choosing somehow to be unemployed, or something like that. it was all very coincidental

    I think I have a good ear for picking up on various tics that indicate that someone is lying or being manipulative in some way. and these guys were kind of bouncing back and forth (as they talked) from sounding a little bit guileless and a little bit guileful. but you have to wonder why they would even bring this information up, if they thought it was against collective narrative.

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      • why not, it’s fun and pleasurable. cheap too. if you disapprove of it, then you should stop listening to music, looking at art, or reading books. just to be consistent.

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        • The Boomers cannot come to grips with the fact that they lost the war on drugs and wasted decades doing so to the detriment of civilization. Especially White Christian Males from the olden days. They just can’t accept they were wrong about weed. Among younger people, its use is practically universal.

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          • Legal weed may have been inevitable, but another drug is no great benefit to our already subpar youth. Studies abound wrt the effects on mental development.

            When I was at the university, one of the faculty invited me to a student party at his home. Weed was in use a plenty. Not a big deal being that the average IQ in the room was probably 2 standard deviations above the “norm”. Quite a different story if you’re a “Jose’” trying to pass HS algebra!

    • Which part of LA are you in? Let me know if you’d like to get a beer sometime. I live close to Downtown, and I don’t know anybody in this town who reads/listens to Z.
      -Subudai

        • It’s a bloody nightmare here. When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that this place would turn into Blade Runner. Minus the replicants and flying cars, he wasn’t far off the mark.

        • “You may be the only two in California.”

          I’m central coastal Cali. There might be a lot of dissident Californians on the ‘Net just because we have nobody to talk to in meatspace.

    • Karl, the weed issue is kind of like the negro issue. Just like there are some people who can handle weed, there are some civilized negros. But just like a community with a high enough number of negros becomes a ghetto, a community with a high enough number of weed users becomes leftist and degenerate.

      If you grant an exception because of the exceptional, you reap the wreckage of the average.

      If we exclude negros, should we not also exclude weed users?

      Does my analogy extend to people who drink alcohol?

      • your real question/thesis is about the nature of community. how should it be organized, what should the scope of it be. too big a subject for a comment.

        the genius of early America is that the intent was to allow all different types of communities. and they did.

        so let me turn the question around, why shouldn’t people who like weed be able to form their own community?

        also, while it is true a lot of degenerates like weed, they also like bread.

        anyway, I encourage all the non-smokers here to continue enjoying the Biden years, while I hit the green fast forward button and scoot to better times, when ever they get here.

    • I’ve observed that weed once a week or less is fine, and likely has no longstanding deleterious effects on one’s psychological health. I myself smoke once or twice a month. It’s just superior to alcohol. Makes me less sleepy, more relaxed, and counteracts my low-average BMI. At 6’4, I look like a fusion of a stick bug and a saltine cracker.

      I will say this: weed definitely can be harmful, especially for people with preexisting psychological disorders

  19. Crypto is another huge scam going right now.

    I like how they are trying to spin anonymity as one of the main benefits.

    In any transaction, there needs to be a minimum of two parties known to each other.

    If you have complete, perfect anonymity for everyone in a privacy coin, how would it ever be possible to transact at all, if the identity of all other parties are completely unknown and unknowable?

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    • you made a category error there. I can mine crypto without anyone else being involved. it’s a weird kind of thing because it’s all based on credentials and not actual physical possession. plus being s/w, all your crypto can be “erased” or “taken” if some entity has more than 50% of the mining capability, or if enough miners decide to switch to a different version of the s/w. this actually happened to bitcoin a few years ago. nothing claimed about block chains is in fact true. it’s just a big Chinese casino.

      • This is something I have always wondered, if you use crypto$ to buy weed (for example), then there is a record of possession of crypto$ change without indication of why the change happened. So far so good. But how you make sure the seller did not record his transaction associating it to the weed sale? What if the authorities knowing this guy is a weed seller just consider any crypto$ coming to him suspicious and then they track the possession of $ to you?

        Does Crypto$ work like having marked bills somehow? Or once the transaction is done is really untraceable provided your own wallet is private? I am maybe too paranoid, but I always have wondered how really private can Crypto$ be if you need all the transaction history to be able to claim property of it.

        With real money you know that unless you are dealing with marked bills (by serial ID identification) and even in that case you have to be in possession of said marked bills, you are safe. Once the dollar is away from you is not possible to know it came to you or can be traced to any particular transaction. Maybe you got the bill as change for a purchase, then you spent it and then it got to the weed dealer by other means, so you can claim there is no evidence as you do cash transactions all the time with “anonymous” currency.

        I understand Crypto$ pretends to be as good as regular currency, but being stored in databases I think this is more difficult to implement as every change of hands in crypto$ is stored somewhere. Am I wrong? Is the history wiped out and you can claim possession without it as with paper dollar bills?

        • Don’t remember where/when but I remember reading that somebody decided to test dollar bills for cocaine residue and it turned out that almost all of them tested positive. LOL Makes you think, doesn’t it?

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        • I am not an expert on it, so my explanation might be off a bit (hopefully not a lot). bitcoin is a type of “block chain”, which is a kind of digital ‘ledger’. when a particular bitcoin (or even a fraction of a bitcoin) changes hands, a transaction is sent out from the source of the transfer (like an exchange; coinbase.com is a well known one) to the network of computers running the s/w for that particular ‘coin’. they all update their copies of the ledger, and this is a pretty lengthy process and the network can only do a relatively few transactions at any one time.

          the other aspect of ‘coins’ is mining them. supposedly there is a fixed number of a particular coin at the time the coin goes live. this is not true. but anyway, miners compete to create new instances of the coin. once all the tokens for a given coins type are mined then mining stops. when you successfully mine a coin it goes in the ledger and you can spend it.

          if someone gets your credentials (or you lose/forget them) then your coins are gone for good. this happens all the time, BTW. a news knob was showing off a bitcoin he had bought and showed the camera his credentials, and someone nabbed it before his segment was over.

          if you want to talk about lost opportunities, I read about bitcoin the day it was released, and there after. just seemed like some new kind of s/w toy, and it was for a couple of years. I could easily have mined a couple of $B back then (As could anyone else reading about it)

        • Each coin is in effect just a big number.

          The number comes into existence on the blockchain by satisfying some property of the hashing algorithm (known as mining).

          It must always reside somewhere in a wallet. Which means it is associated with some other big number (this is the current owner) Although in reality it never really goes anywhere. Each transaction just atomically changes the associated wallet number. A number of txs make up a block. Once a majority of miners agree the block is cryptographically valid the block is then fixed on the chain.

          Every transaction and each wallet association that has ever happened is therefore on the chain, as all future block integrity is defined by the chain history as a tree of hashes (hence the name block chain)

          So if you know who the wallet numbers are, you can trace every coin and transaction that has ever happened to it.

          There are lots of ways to find who owns the wallet number from leaking associations, network monitoring, access to the PC etc.

          Bitcoin is in many ways the least anonymous currency in existence.

    • I do not pretend to understand bitcoin and I have never looked all that closely at it, but I have read that bitcoin simply is not anonymous.
      Cash, OTOH, is anonymous.
      The narrative around bitcoin has shifted from being a medium of exchange to a store of value. It can never be a widespread medium of exchange. More than 1/2 of the people in the US have an IQ under 100. If you need to read a book-length FAQ about how to use bitcoin, it’s too complicated. If you can lose all your money forgetting a password, it’s too complicated.

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      • Heck, some of the 12 page white papers are little more than buzzword salad.

        Ravencoin is a good example of this.

        The other red flag is that crypto is suddenly being pushed almost as heavily as the Beer Flu jab.

        It’s clear there’s a concerted effort on to get as many people piling into crypto as possible.

        • Same happened with gold and silver a few years ago. Libertarians were leading the way them, too. Probably just the Market! doing its thing. Democrat rule makes everybody a prepper.

          • Certainly boom times for the firearms business, at least until they are taxed or prohibited out of business Who’d have ever thought that lead would become a precious metal? 😀

        • Its to prep everyone for the coming central bank switch to digital currency. Complete real time monitoring of every single money transaction including private ones, no ability to store money outside the system, time limited currency, programmable dollars so you can only spend them on certain goods, the possibilities are endless for control, and its coming to a country near you sooner than later.

          You can be sure the powers that be practically jizzing themselves silly over the prospect.

          All cash will be phased out probably across the west in tandem I expect.

          Funnily enough the physical dollar will probably still circulate in the 3rd world as an identifiable value token, even if it will have no value left in its original country.

          • I assume at the point of complete digital currency mandate, DR types will respond with barter or precious metals as an under ground, secondary, “currency”.

          • Alternative currencies, anonymity and privacy, or at least the desires for those, are as old as human civilization. Despotism resistant money will always exist, but perhaps in more inconvenient forms (barter.) What such government actions DO accomplish is destroy freedom and any hope for the efficiencies that only a relatively free society can produce.

        • “The other red flag is that crypto is suddenly being pushed almost as heavily as the Beer Flu jab.”

          I think all this crypto business is very convenient for higher ups as a reservoir for inflation. So was TSLA and similar companies, but they had some limits to their valuations, before it will become obvious what they really are. Cryptos have no limits, no fundamentals for the reality check, and there is that belief that they will outlive fiat currencies, so some people actually think that cryptos are the way to go WTSHTF…

          Of course “usual suspects” can get to fill up in the meantime as cryptos bounce back and forth.

          CPI is nonsense, so is unemployment number and pretty much every other aggregate. You can do anything you want with raw data until books are properly cooked. For now anyway…

          Imagine real prices with big chunk of USD out of those “storage” assets…

        • This is what had kept me out of crypto. Too much public (and institutional?) support. I feel like a great rug pull is coming

    • “If you have complete, perfect anonymity for everyone in a privacy coin, how would it ever be possible to transact at all, if the identity of all other parties are completely unknown and unknowable?”

      Howard, your question is a good one and the problem was solved in the 1970s by public key cryptology, which is one of the great intellectual advances of the 20th century.

      The fulcrum of the solution is a mathematical object called a “one way function” or a “trap door function.” Incredible intellectual creativity/discovery.

      Worth researching, if you’re curious.

  20. Your mention of looking over resumes reminds me of when I worked a small consulting firm. The head research assistant who I was friends asked me to help him out. He had to cull the 50 or 60 resumes down to 10 for in-person interviews.

    Though small, this was a fairly known firm and very useful to get into MBA or PhD programs, so we got top-notch resumes. (I got into the firm via a backdoor. I would have never been considered with my background.) The head RA was laughing because the 50 or so resumes that made the first cut was literally all perfect.

    They RA jobs were for people just coming out of college so the resumes generally only had academic experience and internships. Every resumes was Georgetown, Cornell, Duke, Stanford, etc. Every kid was great grades, great internships, great extra-circular, etc. There was nothing to put one resume over the other.

    So head RA and I just started to toss resumes out for whatever stupid/funny reason that we could think of. Kid is from the South (which the head RA didn’t like), he’s out. Kid put prep school on his academic background, what a dick, he’s out. Kid has a funny name, he’s out. Kid played squash. Who the fuck plays squash, he’s out.

    It showed me how random the hiring process can be.

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    • He’s pretty amazing, wrong about some important things, but prodigious and insightful too

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  21. My word, is anyone else watching the (((CIA))) furiously levitating the markets on the trash jobs numbers?

    Talk about fake….

    • The CIA has been accused of many things over the years. But yours is the first I’ve heard of them manipulating markets. 🙂

      • Why wouldn’t they?

        It’s known they have an infinite, poppy-based revenue stream and bottomless black budgets.

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      • how are they doing that? and why use them to do it?

        the cia has discovered a tranny gap, and is working fiercely to close it!

      • The CIA and the Fed are two departments in the same organization. Policy is coordinated by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), on behalf of the financier oligarchy:

        CFR CIA directors: Burns, Morell, Petraeus, Hayden, Goss, Tenet, Deutch, Woolsey, Webster, Casey, Gates, Turner, Bush, Colby, Schlesinger, Helms, McCone, and Dulles

        CFR Fed Chairmen: Powell, Yellen, Greenspan, Volcker, Miller, Burns, Martin, McCabe, Black, and Meyer

        • Thank gosh somebody finally said it: the (((CIA))).
          State Department, not Defense.

        • Aha! I get it now. Government of the people BY the banksters FOR the banksters. Do I qualify for the DR equivalent of being awake? 😉

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      • To be fair, there were the Options Trading anomalies during the week leading up to 9/11 tracing back to a firm with CIA ties.

  22. Even dirt people are out of touch these days. Hell, once upon a time I thought college qualified me for a career. And maybe it does if you go to the right school, repeat the right lines, and kiss the right asses. As many have said, prosperity has ruined us.

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  23. A classic example of letter of the law vs. spirit of the law is second amendment jurisprudence where anti-gun lunatics are forever trying to convince people that “the right of the people, to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” really means the people have no right to keep or bear arms whatsoever.

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    • I’m starting to suggest to people who talk about the constitution that it was for a different country, and we should stop talking about it, and switch to what we want now, for a new country.

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    • While the Constitution specifically mentions guns, there is absolutely nothing in the Constitution about abortion, yet, apparently, is a sacred right.

      The law is whatever they say the law is. The law isn’t even a group of non-negotiable rules anymore. The law is a weapon. There are endless flexibilities in the law.

      Take the plea-bargain. It is very easy to manipulate you into a position where you take your chances in front of jury and risk 20 years or take probation today and it’s all over. Or if how you are a white person accused of breaking the law in the suburbs or a diversity person in the city. The cities are loaded down and plea almost all of the cases and divert many first (and 2nd and 3rd) time offenders.

      • While the Constitution specifically mentions guns, there is absolutely nothing in the Constitution about abortion, yet, apparently, is a sacred right.Erm, excuse me. Rights specifically enumerated in the constitution are not the only rights we have. Or did I misunderstand the 9th amendment? For the record, while I have no problem with a “right to privacy”, I do object to the slaughter of the unborn – even when it is unborn Blacks who are being slaughtered.

        (And, yeah, I expect a flood of vituperation.)

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        • The issue of privacy around abortion is one of the most dishonest arguments in modern law. Using this logic, there can be NO illegal drugs. After all, your privacy is absolutely sacrosanct! That’s why the feds aren’t allowed to spy on you! (lol)

          The prohibition of abortion is not about patients, it’s about murderers masquerading as doctors. It is not about throwing young whores in prison, it’s about imprisoning “doctors” who want to kill babies for a living. Just like drug laws were not designed to throw 16yo kids in jail for smoking pot, they were meant to put the people profiting off of poisoning our kids in prison.

        • I’d like a free abortion drive thru in every black neighborhood, right next to the liquor store and the pawn shop.

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      • No, the Constitution doesn’t mention guns at all. It does mention the right to keep and bear ARMS. In 1789 arms consisted of not only firearms but knives, swords, pikes, maces, garottes, slings and javelins. Any law infringing on these weapons is unconstitutional.

  24. The other day I had to remedy an error in my health insurance. A policy I purchase from the State exchange.

    Apparently one of the vibrant paper processors, probably “working from home” to avoid sudden wuhan death syndrome, updated my address but failed to change the county of residence.

    This one field in the database caused a cascade of errors that had me in the phone with three different departments and a supervisor to resolve who’s on first.

    Apparently two county admins were claiming me on their rolls but neither actually had assigned me to a provider because the “system” didn’t recognize me as a resident in that county. This error persisted for almost a year while the two sets of automated e-mails each demanded my attention to non-issues. Except for the “free” vax of course!

    The best part: “would you like us to include voter registration when we mail you your new paperwork?”

    “Yes please! I will take three.” The lady and I shared a laugh. A rare bit of humanity in the machine.

    The divides are so stark and the bureaucracy so absurd that even the automatons keeping the systems in motion have become detached from any meaning. Its all on autopilot and the database is full of errors.

    Us humans will be getting to know each other again soon, best to get ahead of that terrain up ahead.

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      • Of course, but two of them were sent to DNC headquarters which will vote them as a service to Screwtape.

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        • Not far off. My old provider network was also the primary medicaid provider. Going into that hospital and clinic network was like going into a Los Angeles DMV.

          All of these automatic voter roll stuffing programs are straight up invader/POC/assistance program Democrat vote harvesting.

          I saw the same thing when I was volunteering through some NGOs. Lutheran and Catholic “refugee” rackets.

          Priorities are: capture State bennies, register democrat, vote democrat.

          During Orange Man Bad’s run I saw vote harvesting programs in person.

          Young, homely single white girls with masters degrees in “inter-cultural communications” filling out ballots for newly printed “citizens”.

          “You know it OMB gets elected you wont get this money anymore and your sisters family wont be able to come here…”.

          The kids were terrified. Their teachers were telling them OMB would send them back to the blue helmet camps.

          We were way past voting before the whole midnight dumps.

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    • I get (nearly) free health coverage as my income is low enough to qualify for the full subsidy for Obamacare ($10,000 worth of tax-free benefits a year! What’s a retired conservative to do??? 😀 )
      I received an email that I should re-enroll for current year because new laws expanded benefits, etc. So I spent the few minutes doing so. I also updated my income to reflect the whopping $73 increase in my income 🙂 Long story short: My monthly cost dropped a few dollars. I’ll still get all of it refunded when I file my 2021 taxes.

      I can identify with having to deal with equal-opportunity government hires. A few times I’ve had to prove my income, send or fax in statements, bank deposits and so on. Talk about some obtuse people!

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  25. Thanks for yet another great podcast.

    The weather where I live is absolutely perfect and my kids and I are getting out to enjoy it as much as possible. This morning, as we jogged past our leftist neighbor’s home, we saw their young children peering out at us through windows. They’ve been locked down for over a year now. I mentioned how sad it is for those poor kids and my son said “yeah, but the real problem is it seems like they want to make life miserable for everyone else, too.”

    He’s right. They are hell-bent on it and it’s disgraceful that this is the world they will inherit.

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  26. You example of traffic cameras and the like is very interesting. This is an area that almost every person would probably like to see reformed. Here in The Isles, we have cameras all over the place and many don’t need to be there. In a world where we did things for the people, most of these would not have even been erected in the first place. But as you say, they are a good way to extract wealth. It’s also a nice PR coup for the state who spin it as ‘look how much we care’; a symbol that that has limited practicality… like the Covid mask business.

    Usually, such cameras are erected after a crash, and maybe even small campaigns can begin to build a couple down one street because a mother loses her child. They have a cause, and see know harm in it, so support a measure of dubious effectiveness… of course, the state is only too happy to oblige. I am unsure that they really ‘help to prevent accidents’ as is often claimed. But because it is done ‘to save lives’, one knows not to question it.

    • Apologies. I forgot to actually make the point of my post. This was that traffic camera reform and a whole host of other mundane policies really are useful and helpful. So people focus on them. Instead, people choose to champion BLM, Climate Change, Covid or some other grand-in-scale thingy with no immediate benefit.

      • Back when traffic cameras were a bigger thing in Ohio the city of Cleveland would put one or two mobile units on the east side corridors. Now, if an east side resident stood on the same spot as these cameras overnight there would be a serious non-zero possibility of them getting shot or run over, and yet the things sat around the area for years unmolested. I joked at the time that a rumor should be spread that the units are “powered by pot” and then maybe the locals would do something about them.

      • Problem I always had with traffic cams is that the citations are always sent to/logged against the registered owner. What happens of some family member has borrowed your car and runs a red light? Correct! YOU get the ticket and the person who runs the red light walks free. Same with automated speed traps. There was a period where our daughter’s car was on the fritz and she couldn’t afford to get it fixed. So.we.let her use mine since I was retired. I love my daughter to.death but she DOES have a lead foot. If she had been tagged by an automated speed trap instead of a.live cop who.could get her driver’s license it would have been ME getting the ticket, not her. Procedural cop.shows not withstanding, there are TOO DAMNED MANY cameras already!

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    • Red light cameras were removed from my city several years ago because of, “disparate impact.”

      I also think that the city wasn’t making much revenue on them.

    • Yes when it comes to “public safety” the transhuman savior of technology is the solution like all the rest of our problems. People are already conditioned to accept submission to the network in exchange for feels.

      De-policing, primarily in the form of bodies in the streets, was going on long before the poo flinging BLM thing.

      Remove humans, replace with an array of cameras, listening devices, data harvesting “AI” pre-crime computing, and other public-private infrastructure means the revenue generation, control, and pay-to-play (or avoid) is optimized toward the market that can and will pay,
      while the law of the favelas fills the vacuum in meatspace.

      My former city was one of the hottest markets in the nation. Yet all that wealth and tax revenue surpluses somehow never translated to enough cops on the street.

      But they did install cameras everywhere and a city-wide gunshot detection array and multiple “community initiatives” where some smooth talking blacks got salaries and office space and conference travel budgets.

      Over time the physical boundaries of no-go zones grow and rub against the shrinking tax plantations and the people will demand even more technology because they would still rather pay the toll than notice anything racist about their fellow citizens.

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      • I live in a majorly diversely enriched city but did not grow up here so I can confirm, from an outsiders point of view, that people would rather “pay the toll” than publicly notice anything racist. That’s the inertia of local institutions. Nobody in a local government office is going to notice anything racist because the employees are almost all black. Mostly black people work in every government office.

        They genuinely believe that the only difference between themselves and white people (or white neighborhoods) is that the police do not harass white people. If you say that the police have no reason to harass white people because we aren’t committing hardly any crime relative to everyone else, they would tell you that’s white privilege because if you didn’t already have everything given to you by society, you would have to commit crimes to survive these mean streets too. And now they are basically organizing everything around a kind of resentful proof of that theory, where the government itself is actively making white people’s lives worse and lavishing gifts and charity on non-white people, apparently in hopes that we will all start robbing every gas station and raping people all over the place and doing drive by shootings. I think they are more confused than anything as to why this isn’t happening and literally all of the crime is still young black men. White don’t more white men want to rape, rob, and murder in response to being treated unfairly the way black men do? It’s just mystifying.

        It’s like black people got a little power and then used it to reverse engineer all of the stuff they think was done to “them”. But nothing was actually done to them here. It’s a huge city which they almost entirely control in every way and have for decades. They are being encouraged to have these florid memories of historical persecution and act out on the basis of those fictional affronts to harm white people.

  27. Oddly enough, this push for greater centralization from the Cloud will probably result in a vastly increased localism. Our Imperial Overlords in Tubman, Distrito Federal, make their decisions, but their on-the-spot impact is determined by the DMV lady, the “doctor” at your local Doc-in-the-Box, the county sheriff… all of whom are, in this best of all possible worlds, easily-bribable foreigners. Absent total economic collapse — and it seems that, despite all reason, the money printer can in fact go brrrr indefinitely — you’ve got, in effect, a bunch of medieval peasants with laptops. Most medieval peasants had no idea who the “king” was at any given time…

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    • “…Most medieval peasants had no idea who the “king” was at any given time…”

      Today’s peasants with their “cell-phones” and their cat videos are no better. The rulers are shielded from view by layers of frontmen and a maze of obscure, interlocking organizations (corporations, foundations, think tanks, etc). The high-profile clown shows in DC, at the UN, etc are just a made-for-TV distraction.

      • I plodding my way through “The Protocols of the Learned Elders” (aka “…Elders of Zion”). This is likely a hoax, perhaps even a satire. But it was influential enough that Henry Ford used it, as did (I read) Hitler, and it remains a hot property for the antisemites and, as a result, the Zionist lobby. But like any good fiction, it’s intriguing how much general truth there is in it.

        Relevant to the current thread, I don’t have an exact quote, but a recurring theme of the book is that the secret rulers all all but undectable. They have either trained, compromised (e.g. blackmailed) or bought the rulers and their functionaries until they have a perfect running system. For something first written over a hundred years ago, it sounds remarkably prescient upon how many governments, including ours, misbehave.

        I like the part where they’ve even compromised the [Free-]Masons. Yes, the Elders are so sophisticated that they are, it is claimed, a group of conspirators who have taken over another historically accused secret group! 😀

        • “Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history,d egrees, charges, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from the beginning to the end, with the exception of only one by-degree and a few words in the obligation… It is impossible to be well posted in Masonry without having a Jewish teacher…”

          — Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, leader of the “Reform” sect, The Israelite, 03-Aug-1855, pg. 28

    • Severian,
      “Tubman, Distrito Federal” is both hilarious and depressing.

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      • Not mine, let me hasten to add. It was coined by MBlanc46, who I’m pretty sure comments here regularly. I shamelessly stole it…. errr… nationalized it, in the name of the people, from him.

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    • Good point. There was an upside to Covid, or at least a potential upside. When local businesses were allowed to remain open, even with restrictions, area people patronized them and avoided more distant suburbs and urban districts. Sometimes this was due to overwroughr fear, sometimes sympathy. Most importantly, people became aware they had local businesses that cost a bit more but were nice to have around

      Yes, yes, the lockdowns enriched Amazon and Ebay and destroyed multiple small businesses. Long term, ironically, .Mom and Pop joints that survived are likely to get more patronage.

      I want to live among people who don’t know the president’s name or at least care to know it.

  28. I wonder what Churchill would have thought about were we are now. Would he lament our failure to learn from history so as to manage “the awful unfolding scene of the future.” ? Since it appears all the pieces are almost in place for the next big game would he be thinking our finest hour is approaching, or perhaps it’s better to let it all burn?

    We do indeed live in interesting times.

    • He did, in many of his writings allude to – and perhaps even explicitly call for – a ‘United States of Europe’. So who knows, he may be ecstatic to see it fully realized. That said, he probably envisioned it run by people who were not quite the same as those that are indeed there. I am not so much opposed to centralization and standardization of things when it seems sensible; but please let it not fall to the hands of anti-whites. For all his faults, and there were plenty, ol’ Winston did call a wog a wog.

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      • After the war in Europe was over he (Churchill) saw the almost immediate migration into the UK and wanted to stop it with the slogan (from memory) which was ‘keep Britain white’. It didn’t work as he was voted out after the war and well momentum. He got back in later, but as I say, momentum.
        He did lament that he was so focused on Germany that he didn’t see the rise of Russia – which had been on a war footing since the early 1920’s. To be honest though, he was such a drunkard I’m surprised he saw anything.

        But we Brits and Yanks have to accept that not only did we deliberately murder German civilians in our terror bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, we destroyed nationalism in Europe and made it a sin. There are no refunds, and so we are destined to suffer.

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          • Be sure to check out how many of the “group leaders” have ties to MI5 or the Soros foundation before you sign up.

        • Was it “we” (e.g. the UK or USA) or was it really (them), as various conspiracy groups have alleged for a very long time, that fomented so many bloody Euroepan wars, WW II perhaps being the worst to date? Even if my current reading (“Protocols of the Learned Elders”) is fiction as I think it is, it certainly is NOT fiction at least here in USA, that (They) disproprtionately occupy posts of power in government, banking, industry, etc. Add in their historical unity of ethnicity and religion, as well as slightly higher IQ than their hosts, and you have more than a little basis in reality for the wild conspiracy theories.

          Humorously (?) I wonder if (Their) alleged long term goal (world domination of course) can realistically be achieved. Take as a given that (They) historically have evolved to be a symbiotic entity, perhaps even beneficial at times, but always requring a “host” culture or nation in which to live, a separate people yet ones still giving (and yes, taking) from the host populace.

          Stumbing blocks to world rule? They’ve officially had their own country for 75 years now, and it’s never exactly been a model of stability. And finally, if their ultimate machinations are achieved, how will they continue to be a parasite if they become the host? 😀

          • Here’s some more light reading to add to your list:

            “Comparative study of the Protocols and of the Weishaupt papers leads to the strong deduction that both derive from a common and much older source…

            This “absolute despotism” is to be vested in the international super-State at the end of the road… The chief result of the First War was to establish revolutionary-Zionism and revolutionary-Communism as new forces in international affairs… The chief result of the Second War was that further “territorial gains” accrued to, and only to, Zionism and Communism; Zionism received its resident State and Communism received half of Europe. The “deadly accuracy” (Lord Sydenham’s words, 1921) of the Protocol’s forecasts seems apparent…”

            https://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=ControZion&C=27

          • The UN was created after WW2. International trade changed drastically DURING the war. The IMF, GATT, the WTO were all created toward the end of WW2 (Bretton Woods meeting etc.)

    • Why would we care what that utter failure would think of us now? He was himself a fat drunk who failed upward his entire life (thanks to his connections to certain international banking types). His colossal mistake at Tripoli should have ended him forever. But through the (((Focus group))) he was able to become politically relevant.

      Then once again he roused for war, not because it was necessary or noble but politically expedient. He played a large part in forcing the hands of parliament into declarations of war, was named admiralty of the navy where he immediately set about failing (check out the invasion of Norway–inexcusable!). Of course he was named PM, and many of his decisions thereafter led to the the fall of the British Empire.
      It is truly amazing that we admire the man as some kind of mythic hero today. He could write a good turn of phrase every once in a while, I’ll give him that. But those were few and far between his bloated, hyperbolic, adolescent grumblings.

      I know we need our heroes, but by God, not that fat toad!

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      • Sorry for that unprovoked rant 😳 The other day I heard there was some poll or other years ago in which he was named Best Briton in history. I just think there are a host of better candidates for that title.

        • I hear people in these comments criticizing Churchill because he wasn’t perfect, he did this less than ideally, blah blah blah. guess you never heard of Pearl Harbor, or the Kasserine pass, etc etc etc. people like the turds slamming Churchill have the Britain they deserve. “it’s not perfect so it’s bad” is the hallmark of childish thinking; a specialty of the left. and that’s the dirty secret of what people call the alt-right – they are thoroughly leftist in their thinking, but don’t know or acknowledge it.

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          • Look here Karl, you can call me a turd or a dirty little alt-righter, but never call me a leftist!

            My post was a bit “bloated, hyperbolic and adolescent” itself, was in poor taste and out of place especially on this site which I respect very much. As to the rest of your comment I’ll just say that there are more important battles to fight, rather than get lost in minutiae over this topic.

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          • If Churchill had been perfect, he would’ve taken the orders of his masters and murdered every single German on the face of the earth.

            So, no, I don’t think this is about wanting Churchill to be more effective. God forbid.

        • If you did such a poll in AINO, it would turn up Marchin Looter Kang, Joonyer. By comparison, Churchill’s a pretty good result.

      • Heh. You are very much correct, close examination of his record shows that he was flawed in all sorts of ways. Furthermore, it looks like he pushed for the sorts of globalist empire that is the ‘de facto’ standard of today. Not to mention the friends he kept and his creditors.

        Yet the myth is so strong, you could bad mouth him, even in a very tepid way, in many public places in the UK and get sharply rebuked. You may even get into some physical bother. People of a certain age love him. Many of the working class whites that I know, all over 50, also feel the same way. That myth is something that binds a certain set of Englishman and if I had to find a single word for it, it would be ‘tenacity’. From the myriad conversations I have had with people about him, this is the image it seems the myth has conveyed to them.

        It would appear that, as usual, the picture of the ‘fat toad’ in a suit with a Tommy Gun is worth far more than all the scholarly material available about his life an times. I agree with every word you’ve said. But the myth is important. I know that when I meet a man defending Churchill, he be a good man; perhaps a man for our side.

        “It is truly amazing that we admire the man as some kind of mythic hero today.”

        All our best heroes are surrounded by myth. Let the truth be for the handful of seekers, and let those who wish to be guided by the myth and look no further that it do so. Providing it is a good myth, and a myth that honours tenacity is a decent start. However shaky the facts may be.

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        • Seems apt: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

        • “But the myth is important. I know that when I meet a man defending Churchill, he be a good man; perhaps a man for our side.”

          In this I agree with you. A few years ago at my favorite cafe I had a conversation with an older Boomer who was reading a book about Churchill. I kept my reservations to myself and had a lively discussion with him on Churchill, WW2 in general. He is a kindly salt of the earth type, and I go out of my way to catch up with him whenever I see him around.

          I very much respect and revere myth as essential as well. The mythic import of WW2 is one of those topics I struggle with. I think it definitely had a positive utility as a unifying myth up to a point. For the most part, the myth has turned for the worse unfortunately ( holocaust worship, obsessions with racism etc.). I will admit, when they were tearing down Churchill’s statue last year, there was a certain tension/dissonance within me.

        • Churchill does provoke strong reactions in a lot of people. As a man of his age he was better than most, worse than a few. I think he recognized the dynamics of human societies ( better to be the boot than the face), but like all “Great Men” he thought he was smarter than he really was. I try to avoid that trap by realizing I’m not that bright.

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          • We have to guard against projecting current knowledge onto the past. What defined a great man in the past, what men who strove for greatness used as a model, was rooted in certain assumptions about life. No European man in the middle of the last century could imagine his lands being majority non-white, for example. The times call for a different hero when your people are a minority than when your people are the entirety of society.

            The guys who try to recast Churchill as a slave to certain interests are doing the same thing that the Left does when slandering our ancestors. Both cases are exactly that, a slander of our ancestors.

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        • OrangeFrog: You are absolutely correct that people need their myths, while the actual record shows they were extremely flawed. My husband had a positive military/political view of Churchill; I was more in favor of his purported bon mots. But his banker entanglements appear to have been far more extensive than I ever realized, per this link I posted yesterday (https://thuletide.wordpress.com/2021/05/06/world-war-world-government-and-international-finance/).

          I’m to the point that I now automatically assume anyone who’s been involved in politics and/or world affairs for the past 75-100 years has been coopted by the vampire squid of money and power.

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          • “Churchill’s biographers depict him as suffering from depression during the inter-war years and thinking himself ‘finished’ politically…reflected in his published words to Mr. Bernard Baruch early in 1939: “War is coming very soon. We will be in it and you will be in it. You will be running the show over there, but I will be on the sidelines over here”.

            Very soon after he wrote this, Mr. Churchill ‘s political fortunes took a sudden turn for the better and (as in the case of Mr. Lloyd George in 1916) his attitude towards Zionism appears to have had much to do with this…”

            https://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=ControZion&C=38.0

        • Speaking of Britons, this discussion reminds me of a great fiction novel (and movie) by Ian McEwan called Atonement. I highly recommend. Among its many themes is the power and importance of stories, and how careful we must be with them. Even small stories, (especially little lies false accusations) can have tremendous impact upon the world and the future. They can destroy relationships, careers, lives forever.

          Stories also have the power to rectify past wrongs. To uplift the human spirit. We can perhaps repair the reputation or the memory of others through story, can seek a sense of “atonement” in that retelling. We can give the lost symbolic meaning and power after death. However, once a decision is made, and once action is taken, we cannot bring the world back. What occurs after our stories–before our atonement– has occurred. Who is dead stays dead.What has been destroyed must suffer destruction.

        • It sounds like ol’ Blighty’s Churchillians are somewhat analagous to AINO’s Grillers.

      • As a British ex-Army Officer I have to say that I feel extremely strongly about your rant and must reply with…………

        I second your statement and could not agree more! I’m glad to come across someone with the same views about that vile man that I do.

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        • you aren’t fit to wipe Churchill’s ass, much less comment on him. and I think you are a liar about being ex-military.

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          • From a person who can’t even capitalise the first letter of a sentence.
            But just to set the record straight, I am an ex Officer, and also awarded with a QGM. A patriot who has seen enough good men die and maimed by our scumbag politicians. Good luck with your blind bulldog nationalism.

      • It was Gallipoli, not Tripoli, which are not even on the same continent and the British Empire was already well into decline by the time he became Prime Minister. Thanks for giving us great examples why people on this side so often get dismissed as ignorant cranks when we try to convince people the cartoon character version of history they have fed their whole lives is mostly a pack of lies.

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        • “Gallipoli,Tripoli”
          Yeah it was an honest mistake, but one might be able to understand the reason for it, especially considering there is no edit function anymore?

          “British Empire was already well into decline by the time he became Prime Minister”

          Well of course, but he certainly hastened that demise, no?

          “Thanks for giving us great examples why people on this side so often get dismissed as ignorant cranks when we try to convince people the cartoon character version of history they have fed their whole lives is mostly a pack of lies.”

          I think my understanding of Churchill and WW2 is actually far from “cartoonish.” Cartoonish might be to believe the myth as fact and confuse the two. I understand the myth, and I know the facts. Do you? What are your thoughts on Hitler? I’m sure those aren’t cartoonish at all!

          Honestly I regretted typing it immediately because I realized the shitstorm it would probably stir on here. It was probably not in good taste, but again, without the editing function I was left with my initial decision.

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          • it wasn’t an honest mistake, it was talking out your ass without checking first. which would take 5 seconds. you obviously are a very ignorant person, and your opinions re safely (and profitably) ignored.

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          • I was calling the popular myth that gets presented to the public you are trying to refute cartoonish. If you want to convince people of this making obvious basic factual errors is going to kill your argument. So is attributing the decline of the British Empire entirely to one man and a cabal of Jewish bankers. If that is all it took how great could the empire have been? People are taught history from a heroes and villains perspective, undoing that would go a long way to help them have a better understanding of it. You haven’t done much more than disagree with who the establishment says the heroes and villains are.

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          • He fucked up North Africa also, by sending half the troops to Greece. That allowed the Germans to retake NA, which led to Tripoli. 300 fighter planes were left behind in Greece which could have been used to defend NA and Crete which was also lost. Drunk Churchill again bailed out by the blood of patriots.

      • I find it fascinating how much these ‘heroes’ of prior ages don’t appear terribly heroic when some of the polish comes off. Lincoln comes to mind immediately. The vaunted jewel in the Lefty Crown, but damn did he inflict tremendous damage upon the nation. And again, there was a bankster’s ideology behind his motivations too since he really didn’t give a hoot about the farm equipment as the myth tell us he did. That was an economic war and the darkies were simply talking points.

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        • Karl, you win. The similarities in the words Galipoli and Tripoli and my mixing of them while writing my comment was inexcusable and prove that I’m an idiot never to be trusted ever again.

          Barnard:
          “So is attributing the decline of the British Empire entirely to one man and a cabal of Jewish bankers. If that is all it took how great could the empire have been?”

          I don’t think I said that and in any caase nor do I think it. That would be ridiculous. I also don’t think one should ignore entirely the results which banking connections had on Churchill’s ascent and decision making, as well as how Britain’s role in WW2 influenced its eventual demise.

          “People are taught history from a heroes and villains perspective, undoing that would go a long way to help them have a better understanding of it. You haven’t done much more than disagree with who the establishment says the heroes and villains are.”

          This I can most certainly agree to a point. Good v Evil is probably the only way the masses will ever understand history at least for the forseeable future.
          I’d like to think that I do have a nuanced version of WW2 and history in general which can leave out emotions and Goody v Baddy sentiments. Though obviously, my comment did not express that. Perhaps I slip up from time to time.

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      • My favo[u]rite:

        Society matron, in disgust: “Mr. Churchill, you are drunk!”

        Churchill: “Indeed I am madam, but in the morning I shall be sober, but you shall still be ugly.”

        • Another good one:

          Lady Astor: “Winston, if I were your wife I’d put poison in your coffee.”

          Winston Churchill: “Nancy, if I were your husband I’d drink it.”

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        • Ben – That’s exactly the one I had in mind when I mentioned I liked his bon mots, although the version I read didn’t have the end specifying she would still be ugly – it’s more powerful that way – merely implied – when he simply says Yes, but in the morning I shall be sober.

    • One of the many things Churchill envisioned was a global Union of the English Speaking People. Since he was the best known public figure in the English speaking world I think I know who he had in mind to run the show.

      • How ironic that the Anglophone world is the most cucked of the West. (I suppose the Scandis and the Dutch give us a run for the money, but the point still stands.)

    • “The Last Lion” – Winston Spencer Churchill by William Manchester.

      Definitive set on Winston. Extremely entertaining to listen to the audible version; provides excellent context for the time in which he lived.

      Say what you will about Winston: he was an amazing writer. A flawed man, undoubtedly, but full of courage and ambition throughout most of this life.

      Dissident politics could use more men like this. Young men like this.

      • Indeed. Though his generalmanship leaved something to be desired but the man had chops and was the best fit to lead Britain in WWII. That one cannot be taken way from him.

        We certainly could use a hundred young Churchill’s here in the U.S.

    • Hard to imagine how the Empire could have resulted in anything other than the annihilation of the Metropole though. The British colonies in Africa and Asia, even under the best circumstances, would have ultimately ended up with native rulers and those rulers would have ultimately taken over the empire itself. I mean that from the point of view of imagining that the empire lasted. The “Queen of England” would have ended up being some Nigerian or Kenyan or Chinese or Indian/Hindu princess who lived in London and had a hereditary claim to the throne, as absurd as that sounds. The Europeans sealed their fate when they tried to create global empires. They were doomed to be multi-racial, which is the end of white people. They were wrong to think they were going to create a vast multi-racial empire and then always have white people from Europe somehow “at the top” running things.

  29. The “grass is always greener” means that the cloud people never have to acknowledge that they are the cloud people, because they all know someone much richer. It’s how Pelosi can bitch about Trump’s state and local deduction cap hurting the “middle class” with a straight face. If the people who give you orders have billions, your one-hundred million doesn’t seem obscene, even though your salary is only in the low six-figures (Nancy Pelosi must be one sound investor). There was an article in one of those New York based culture papers saying, with a straight face, “You try living in this town on only $500,000 a year.”

    Then you have the cloud people who are just totally delusional, like Anderson Cooper tearing up when Trump called Haiti a “sh*t hole,” and lecturing him for his privilege. Cooper literally does look like some sort of alien, a perplexed sapient, grey-headed humanoid (sort of) trying to understand this illogical emotion called “racism” that the primitive Caucasians of the lower orders harbor against their dusky brethren. Extremely illogical, all this talk about borders.

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    • I’ve used Lizzy Warren as an example of this in the past. Her mansion looks humble compared to those of her patrons, so she thinks she is working class. She has no idea how ridiculous she look standing on the step of her mansion doing the William Jennings Bryant routine, because everyone she knows thinks it sounds great.

      The one exception is Tucker Carlson. He knows he has no idea how the rest of us live and he is careful to say it. He runs into normal people on fishing trips and talks to them. I give him a lot of credit for being honest with himself and his audience on that score.

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      • I have never read any of the people who worked at the Daily Caller bash Tucker. Even CNN dimwit Kaitlin Collins who got her start at the Caller as the entertainment reporter posting clickbait about celebrities doesn’t take shots at him. My impression is that a lot of them came from more normal families and that trying to get people from outside the Washington bubble was intentional on his part.

        Now that he is living in Maine most of the year it might be helping change his perspective too. He is only about a half hour from the New Hampshire border, not in one of the coastal enclaves that fill up with wealthy elites during the summer.

      • Back in the before times, some pundit declared their shock at an election result by saying ” I don’t understand, no-one I know voted for Nixon”.
        It has only got truer.

        I’ve recently re-bought, in Audio book, Tom Wolfe’s great exposes,
        “Radical Chic” and “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers ”

        Here’s the Wiki piece

        “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a 1970 book by Tom Wolfe. The book, Wolfe’s fourth, is composed of two essays: “These Radical Chic Evenings”, first published in June 1970 in New York magazine, about a gathering Leonard Bernstein held for the Black Panther Party, and “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers”, about the response of many minorities to San Francisco’s poverty programs. Both essays looked at the conflict between black rage and white guilt.[1] ”

        Sound familiar?

  30. Spot-on, the stolen car snippet as anarcho-tyranny experienced first-hand; luckily, my car was found and I was notified. Went to impound that very day, and still had to pay $250 to reclaim MY car, stolen from where it was parked, in front of my suburban home. And, lucky for me, too, as the rate was $50/day unclaimed.

    Separately, on spirit of the law vs. letter of the law, I’d observe that uncivilized people respect neither; or, more precisely, are very fluid in which they observe, depending on which construction suits their needs at a given moment. Our rulers, then, are outside of the law or custom, a practices even most barbarians did not embrace. This is not a revelation to the choir to which I’m preaching, lol, but it cannot be repeated often enough.

    NB: Apologies for the use of xim political science catchphrases ‘construction, and ‘fluid.’ I must be slipping, as I couldn’t work in bodies, deconstruct or disrupt, though both are the end products of progressive practices.

    • I experience it regularly with burglaries of my rental properties. The police exist as nothing more than a paperwork provider for the insurance companies. No attempt is made to catch the burglars.

      There is a striking difference, however, between the rural Sheriff’s department out where my ranch is and the urban police departments where my rentals are.

      I have an unoccupied mobile home on the ranch that I was using for storage. It was burglarized and the Sheriff’s dept. went whole hog. They actually caught the guys and sent them to jail.

      However, what really kicked into gear out here was the local grapevine. As soon as I told friends about the burglary, reports started to roll in from friends not only who did it, but where a bunch of my stolen stuff was! The two boys who did it were in deep shit in no time. One of their parents showed up at my place with a pickup truck of stolen goods, begging me to take it back. Another carful of stolen goods was pointed out to me at a mobile home in a nearby village.

      I didn’t get everything back, but I got a lot back. and the grapevine was actually more effective than the cops.

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      • That’s a great story. Short and to the point. Very handy for convincing people about the value of strong, trusting, local communities and the benefits they confer. Glad to hear some things still work as they ought to!

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      • Vizzini- Lovely illustration of the positive power of a homogeneous community. Glad most of your stuff was recovered.

        • One of them actually is dead now. A few years later he was stealing copper not far from me and got chased. He tried to ford a creek in heavy rains with a big loop of copper around his shoulders. Drowned.

          I cried a lot.

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      • Had a house in vibrant Atlanta forcibly broken into a few years back.

        Atlanta police department was exactly how Z described: here’s your form for the insurance company. My shift ends in 5 minutes, so …goodbye.

        However, the LOCAL police township pulled over an expensive SUV full of 4 “youths” 6 hours later. They profiled the “youths” and decided it was odd to see an expensive car full of stuff and certain occupants.

        Everybody exited the car and bolted when they we pulled over. My stuff was all in the back. From theft to recovery in under 12 hours.

        So yeah….local cops, who have to live amongst their neighbors tend to be WAY better than massive mega-city police departments.

        Course, that would probably be seriously illegal to profile today. It’s clown world.

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      • My family has an equally amusing, albeit much more modest story. My Dad retired to the
        [insert spittoon sound effect]
        Blue Ridge of East Virginia in the mid-70s, in a tiny home, joined a few years later by Mom. Dad checked out about 15 years later. Mom hung on as a disabled widow for nearly 10 more years. The sparse neighbors were, well, rednecks and mountain people. Crime was rare, unless you count poaching 🙂 Once some of Mom’s stuff was stolen (the shed didn’t even have a lock) and like you say, she complained to the grapevine. Within a day some of the items (a ladder, I think) had magically reappeared 😀

  31. Charles Murray accurately highlighted this “Cloud vs Dirt” disconnect some years ago in his book “Coming Apart”. Back before the US fully globalized its economy in 1980-90s, your boss, his boss, and maybe even his boss all lived in the same town and maybe even in the same neighborhood. One of the more startling stats that Murray stated in a book chock full of stats was that in the 1970s, the average US CEO made about 6-7 times more than his avg employee made. By the 2010s this stat had increased to 16-17 times. I’m sure now it’s well over 20 times. And of course with such income disparity, your typical F500 CEO would not be caught dead in any neighborhood of any of his employees. There’s your major disconnect. The rich have gotten insanely richer and are no longer part of your neighborhood, your town, maybe even your planet.

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    • A very good book! And, decades of cultural Marxism has worked its ‘disrupting’ effect on the once stable white working class ,, the real nugget in the book.

    • There is also a big divide between managerial class and the private sector. Around here, a public school teacher makes about the same as an engineer. Add in benefits and the teacher makes more and they get summers off. When you get to higher rungs, the gap is quite large. Then you have the widening cultural divide. Spend time in Northern Virginia and you quickly see that it is not America.

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      • I strongly encourage everyone to spend some time in Cloud-Cuckooland. If you can’t get to Northern VA, any college town will do. If that’s impossible, an episode of the old tv show Portlandia will do it. This is a show all my Liberal friends assured me I’d love, “because it makes fun of Liberals.” Which it does… though, of course, the punchline of every “joke” is that Liberals are just too special, too wonderful, too caring to make it in this sick sad world.

        That’s the crucial thing to grasp. In the same way primitive hunter-gatherer tribes spend some huge percentage of their day just walking around the forest looking for a few berries, so Cloud People spend their entire days looking for some tiny, obscure new way to virtue-signal. It’s unutterably exhausting to normal people, but it fills their lives with deep meaning. They don’t notice that a loaf of shade-grown, free-trade tofu costs $30, in the same way the hunter-gatherers don’t notice the trees. I’d rather chop off one of my toes than spend a second contemplating my pronouns, but to them, that’s not just living, it’s living well.

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        • LOL. I get all I can handle when I visit daughter #2 in the Nutmeg state. Though, as Z has observed, the lunacy of peak liberalism is perversely offset by the fact that I’m living the white nationalist dream while there.

          • That’s what got me with the flood of people who moved to the Portland area: none of them could be honest with why they were moving there. I knew what I liked about the place right away, but if I had to guess I’d say that the local…unpleasantness is due to the cognitive dissonance within the heads of the locals who made a point to live around other white people, but not wanting to admit that they’re the type of people who would do such a thing.

      • Many years ago I read a book called “Over the Hills” by a reporter named David Lamb, who was middle-aged and rode his bike across America, from DC to Los Angeles. This was back in the mid-90’s. One thing that struck him was how vastly different the people in places like rural Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, etc were compared to those in the DC area, where he lived. The gulf is probably wider today, 25 years later, but the bigger difference is that those rural folks are not only different, but actually despised much more today by the big city elites.

        • Is that the same David Lamb who wrote the book The Africans? How in the world has he not been unpersoned yet? That book was supposed to be some anti-White, anti-colonial screed, but if you can find it today — good luck — it just confirms everything you ever thought about Africa, in spades.

          Jonah Goldberg (of all people!!) quoted a great story from it way back in the days: Two fighters from the Zaire Air Force are approaching the base. The landing strip is covered in fog, so the tower radios that the pilots can’t land. So the pilots eject, since “you can’t land” means “you can’t land, ever.”

          Africa wins again. This was sometime in the 1980s, if you want a glimpse of the near future.

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          • I’d never heard of David Lamb. Looks like he passed away in 2016.

            From his bio, he looks like the no kidding, fearless, boots on the ground reporter that writes some really good stuff.

        • Unfortunately, there is no escape from the pozzed urbanite “culture”, which infects every corner of the nation. Every hick in the sticks now has a DirecTV dish and a cell phone. It’s the same story even in places like Guatemala with its tin roof shacks.

          • Same in North Africa.

            We joked the mini-dishes were the true regional flower.

            Even the most rundown shack has one.

            They all have cheap keycodes to access the Western movie and adult channels.

            As a result, they all think we live in mansions, own five cars, work 10 hours a week, and sleep with an endless string of blonde models.

      • Purely in terms of compensation, anyone who puts in the long hours and effort to become an engineer in Clownmerica is a fool.

        Myself included.

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        • I am a recently retired s/w engineer and I agree completely. funny enough, I never really liked other s/w engineers as they are a socially maladroit lot (unless they are a sagitarian boomer :P) but these days they are some of the most virulent sjw’s going. and like the germs killing martians (in you know what) the sjw’s are killing big tech.

        • Software engineers make more money than most other people. If you are not the type that can or wants to run a viable business, it’s still a good job.

          • I guess. lots of young people think it’s ok the way it is now, which is very heavy on administrative type work. I would say now days its 80% admin and 20% engineering — in software development.

      • Zman – What’s happened to Northern Virginia is truly sad. Although it had its share of federal workforce even back in the 1980s, it still retained a solid plurality of local people and genuine businesses. The Salvadorans and Nicaraguans were already a regular nuisance, however, and now they’ve spread further into Virginia. Those small, older rental homes are now massively overpriced properties of massively overpaid federal workers.

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        • I don’t know if I’ve shared this story but here goes. My childhood in the Northern VA area encompassed about 1968-1980; I arrived in the DC area about aged 6. I was in private schools first through fourth grades. I never felt I really fit in. My parents were frugal by late-60s standards: VW, Rambler and black and white TV; neighbors had Cadilacs and Color. And conservative. Some of this rubbed off, I guess. Even by the early 70s, age 12 maybe, I knew my private school was not for me. I asked my parents to put me into Fairfax County public schools. They did! I was a happy if not exceptional student from grades 5 through 12. The private school I’d abandoned in 1972 got even MORE “Hollywood” after I’d left it.

      • Yep. Public school teachers in Fairfax and Loudoun can make ~$80k to even as high almost $90k if they get some bogus masters degree.

        And that’s for nine months of work, good hours and a guaranteed job.

        An $85k salary for nine months equates to ~$115k for twelve months. The pension is worth another $15k so you’re looking at the equivalent of $130k. A married pair of teachers are doing just fine.

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        • Elementary school teachers in NYC can earn $100-120K after working twenty years. Principals make about $180k I think. Your pension after twenty is 40% of your final salary.
          Of course, working twenty years will suck the life out of you.

      • I grew up in Northern Virginia, and what you say about it is absolutely true!

        In 1955, when I was 5 years old, my Dad bought a house in a subdivision in McLean, VA— 5 miles from Chain Bridge— which at that time was the outer edge of the DC suburbs. Across the street was a working tomato farm— the land our house was built on had been a cow pasture 2 years previously. A few blocks east was a woods and a stream that you could (and we often did) follow all the way down to the Potomac River.

        It was a working class neighborhood: $19,000 1300-sq-ft homes on 1/4 acre lots. My Dad was earning $2000 a year at the time, and worried whether he’d be able to make his $90 a month mortgage payment.

        I left at 18 in 1968 to head off to college and make my own way in the world. But I returned to the house in McLean in 2014, to take care of my father in the declining years of his life, and lived there until 2018 when he died.

        And boy! what a difference 46 years can make!

        The ‘new’ McLean has Muslim women walking down the streets in full hijab…. Asian women driving huge new Mercedes…. clerks at the CVS drug store who I couldn’t understand due to their foreign accents. They were knocking down the original homes in our subdivision, and building huge 3-story-and-a-basement McMansions in their place; the last one on the end of our street sold for $2.2 million!

        It ain’t a working class neighborhood anymore! Nobody working on their cars in their driveways…. no kids out playing flashlight tag on summer nights…. no more woods and fields for kids to run in: every single square foot developed into expensive homes and condos; I don’t know how far a kid would have to go to find a patch of woods.

        And politically, the area— which had been reliably conservative when I was growing up there— is now deep ‘blue’— Fairfax County went overwhelmingly for Obama, Clinton, and Biden— due to the influx of Federal Government workers and immigrants. While the southern portion of the State is still rural and conservative.

        I see the same thing happening in Colorado where I now live: the eastern Slope with Denver and Boulder becoming ever-more ‘blue’, while the western 2/3s is still rural and sensible.

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        • Thank you. The struggle at the bottom, right now, is trying to hang on to the bits and pieces left of our parent’s and grandparent’s assets.

        • I lived in NOVA for 30 years. Alexandria, Round Hill, and places between. Loudoun went from a weekend get-away for DC’ers, to the wealthiest county in the country. I still remember the “Don’t Fairfax Loudoun” bumper stickers. My son went to Seneca Ridge Middle School, where parents were recently doxed for complaining about the CRT being taught. Moved twice since then, keep heading south.

          • The locals are going to have to do more than put bumper stickers on their cars or run. They have to make life hard for the those toxic “good whites” and their foreign allies. .

            That’s how the Mexicans deal with blacks when they move into a neighborhood. They usually have some local gang chapter put the hurt on the noggers and viola they move out.

            The thing is those “good whites” hate us and want us dead and our culture eradicated. We either start treating these professional whites as the enemy that they are or they will simply force us into ghettos and eventually sent on one way train rides.

            This is a fight to the finish and if our side doesn’t get this then we are doomed.

        • Bill, great story. God bless your dad, and you for taking care of him in his twilight years. It’s funny how no matter how many times you visited the old neighborhood over the years, you only realize fully how the place has transformed by actually living there. What happened to NOVA and many other parts of America is nothing short of tragic.

          I live in an area with lots of woods nearby and which overall is a pretty safe and quiet suburb. However, lately I’ve seen some joggers pass my house on occasion. There are low income apartments a half mile away, and I suspect many of these youths walk from the nearby bus stops past my house and through the wooded shortcuts to their homes.

          I try to treat people as individuals and not judge, but some of these types just look plain hostile and aggressive. They always seem to take their sweet time walking through, on occasion peering through car windows, looking around, staring at the odd passerby with an air of arrogance (‘I’m here and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it’), think gentle giant Michael Brown’s grad photo multiplied by 10 in air of hostility and entitlement.

          My wife still thinks she’s in Mayberry and neglects to lock doors or worse even close the garage door. I insist on not letting my kids play anywhere except on the property.

          Will monitor the demographics closely and move before it’s too late. The problem is this is already an outer burb, the next step is the country.

      • Not so long ago the mantra about government employment was the pay wasn’t so hot but you had good benefits and relatively secure employment. My, my. Fst and rich administrative state whores are a huge chunk of the problem.

    • “…I’m sure now it’s well over 20 times…”

      “In 2019, CEOs of S&P 500 companies received, on average, $14.8 million in total compensation. The average S&P 500 company CEO-to-worker pay ratio was *264-to-1*…

      What happens when America finally admits its middle class is a phantom of feel-good fantasy? We may well find out in the next four years…”

      https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec20/phantom-middle-class12-20.html

    • Talk about insane wealth: I’m an office drone living in a nice 1970 suburban home (quarter acre lot) in a leafy suburban paradise. The home was built by the CFO of Zenith, which was headquartered a 10 minute drive down the street.
      Zenith is obviously long gone, but, I can tell you there are not any CFO’s of global technology/ manufacturing companies living on my block or in my neighborhood these days…

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      • Zenith made quality stuff. My parents bought one back in the mid-70s (one of those big “furniture types”) and after dad passed after a bout w/ cancer a few years ago we bought mum a big screen even though the old one still worked fine. That thing was 40 years old!

    • My grandmother used to tell me how I the ’50s, every one in her Amoco knew each other and there was little distinction between the different levels.

      Now, when the C-suite visits the corporate division I work at, security forbids us plebes from entering the main lobby and meeting areas they use.

        • C= Chief.
          As in Chief Executive
          Chief Financial Officer
          Chief Legal Counsel etc etc

  32. I thought the Z-man was notoriously single. Yet, he has a very cool wedding ring named after him. Life is full of wonderful irony.

    Makes we wish I didn’t already have a cool ring, but I don’t think the wifey would approve.

    • The only way to improve theZman ring is to have “TINVOWOOT” engraved on the inside of the band.

    • Are any of our lady commenters match makers? What can we do to get Z a nice lady?

      The world needs little Zs running around. Burly little boys with precocious Rasputin beards enacting the battle of the Cloud People versus the Dirt People with plastic Army men.

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