The Book of Five Rings

Clausewitz famously drew the parallel between war and politics when he said, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Therefore, is makes sense for those engaged in politics to study the tactics of war and the warrior. It is not an accident that many of the great political figures in our history were also military men. Twelve U.S. presidents were generals. For a country founded on the principle of civilian rule, having a quarter of the executives come from the military is telling.

The Book of Five Rings is a book on martial arts written by a legendary Japanese swordsman named Miyamoto Musashi. He was also a philosopher, strategist and luckily for us, a writer. He became famous in 17th century Japan for his unique fighting style and his undefeated record in his 61 duels. He is known to westerners through his book on strategy, but in Japan he is still remembered for his great deeds. There is a shrine named after him, which is supposed to be his burial site.

Back in my youth when I lived in another country also called America, this book was popular among conservatives. Japan Inc. was clobbering American industry and it was claimed that it was due to their superior business strategies. This book was popular with Japanese businessmen, so it became popular with American businessmen who wanted to pretend to be learned strategists. Business tycoons like to imagine themselves as warriors, so it made perfect sense.

This week the show is about this book and the lessons that are contained in it which may apply to our age. Conveniently, it is broken into five sections, so there is a ten minute segment on each of the books that make up the whole book. It is a very short book in total that could easily be classified as a pamphlet. Musashi was not the sort for beating around the bush in his writing. The last book is just one page, a total of 311 words not counting the title and the salutation.

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
  • 07:00: The Ground Book
  • 17:00: The Water Book
  • 27:00: The Fire Book
  • 37:00: The Wind Book
  • 47:00: The Boom of The Void
  • 57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)

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199 thoughts on “The Book of Five Rings

  1. Great podcast, as alway! I gotta say, though, that I’m surprised you didn’t call this one the gong show.

    • At the time it seemed like there was some master Japanese plan but yeah in hindsight it was just Japanese people plus dumb luck.

  2. Every time & place has it’s wisdom, almost always hard-earned via the gauntlet of hard-knocks, and Musashi certainly qualifies as an able chronicler of his era’s best advise for a life well lived. And many of those same principles have held up through the ages as exemplified in the current Japanese philosophy of Igikai (life in balance).

    But for most of our specie’s evolutionary history, significant cultural change was very slow, often spanning dozens of generations or more. That is no longer the case. Major cultural changes are now occurring at hyperspeed (think acceptance of homosexual marriage and sanctioned child abuse via sex change operations imposed in near infancy). Soon we will be “manufacturing” our children with DNA manipulation.

    Most people innately understand that this is a catastrophic disaster happening in real-time, but everyone is being swept along in a tsunami of (dis)information overload and a faux-affluent lifestyle which bribes people into passivity.

    Computer-based simulation modeling of sociological phenomena has been a mature science for about 3 decades now, and the current models import huge amounts of data from vast EC source media. And still, prediction accuracy (at best) is comparable to weather forecasting (reasonably accurate in the near-term, effectively useless in the long-term). But some of the near-term modeling predictions are actionable, and we would be wise to consider this in our planning going forward. I have tried to highlight some of this “synthetic wisdom” in my prior posts.

    Perhaps I should go into a cave like Musashi and write a book that someone may read 500 years from now.

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    • “Perhaps I should go into a cave like Musashi and write a book that someone may read 500 years from now.” Cool. Do it.

    • the current models import huge amounts of data from vast EC source media

      “EC source media” == ?????

      Thanks.

      • It varies depending upon the study team and their area of focus. The teams that do market research & forecasting use cross-referenced purchasing histories & buying habits for various demographic cohorts. They also study how effective internet ads are in motivating purchases for different cohorts. The academics tend to be more esoteric and try to ascertain how behaviors are effected by mass media & other factors. Input for these studies is all over the map (for example, dating apps & associated actions can target very specific proclivity behaviors). And of course, political analysts look at voting patterns cross-referenced in many ways. Most of this data comes from government sources, augmented by their own canvasing. Facebook & Google tap into their in-house “customer” base for lots of business related analysis. And there are countless botnet firms that harvest everything under the sun and sell it to whoever will pay. And all this is just the tip of the iceberg.

  3. Weren’t the Japanese the source of a lot of really really *bad* industrial management philosophy? (Take your pick: 1. It works for them even though it’s insane, 2. It doesn’t work for them, but it’s hilarious to sell US management cultists snake oil, 3. They never had that idea in the first place, Japanification is just used as an excuse for US managerial types to indulge in their vices.)

    The just-in-time nonsense (now forced on us by our tax-code) sounds great to stupid MBAs who get to take the difference in “unnecessary inventory” home as a bonus. When the entire enterprise seizes up because there is no slack in the system, he’s already off in his country estate and can’t be bothered to care. When a supply shortage, or a backup, or an overturned truck brings an entire line to a halt … yeah, wonderful.

    Open-Plan offices destroy the ability for creative thought. They’re now being forced on the software world, along with a lot of other cultist micromanagement Taylorism that destroys the ability to actually write software. The authors of the Agile manifesto need to be shot.

    Creativity requires individual thinking. Individual thinking requires solitude. When there is a camera staring at your face with an AI monitoring your “engagement” and deducting your salary or zapping you with a shock collar every time your eyes wander, when your bathroom breaks are timed, your pager goes off at 3AM, and every possible boundary you could have is deliberately violated, you’re not going to be able to invent anything new, despite all the noises your hellish company makes about INNOVATION and EXCELLENCE.

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    • Apple Inc. is in just that boat now.

      The folks over at Tim Cook’s “pirate camp” (Steve Jobs wanted to be a pirate, not run with the navy) have been running out of ideas for a decade now. Their culture has grown more authoritarian with the disappearance of Jobs due to pancreatic cancer. At my blog (click on my name to visit) I go into this in greater detail in “The End of Apple’s Reign.” tl;dr: Steve Jobs 2.0 needs to come out of cryogenic freezing, return to Apple’s UFO HQ, and start kicking some serious ass. It was his newfound maturity after his bout with Pixar that allowed him to manage effectively the second time around — Tim Cook is no substitute.

      • Apple Inc. is in just that boat now… Their culture has grown more authoritarian with the disappearance of Jobs due to pancreatic cancer… Tim Cook is no substitute.

        Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder.

        On a long enough timeline, PAPD will eventually infect and destroy any & every possible human organization consisting of two or more people.

        VD’s recent critique of the weakness of the “Alpha” personality type might explain how a passive aggressive s0d0mite turd like Tim Cook was able to weasel his way into Steve Jobs’s good graces:

        https://voxday.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-alpha-weakness.html

        It would require an impossibly super-human resolve on the part of a titan of industry to keep his bidness largely free of the Passive Aggressives.

        [And of course the Passive Aggressive Psychopaths are the very worst of all…]

    • When the entire enterprise seizes up because there is no slack in the system, he’s already off in his country estate and can’t be bothered to care. When a supply shortage, or a backup, or an overturned truck brings an entire line to a halt … yeah, wonderful.

      All of the available psychometric data for the last few decades indicate that moderin corporate oligarchs are just about uniformly psychopathic in nature.

      [Which means they feel no empathy for the suffering of others…]

      • Society could in theory remove the psychopaths , sociopaths , narcissists and hard core Leftists if it wished.

        We have the tools to brain scan people, its just people that aren’t like this mostly find the idea revolting as they should.

        If such a thing happened , I haven’t a clue what the effects would be. I’d guess society would get rather hygge

    • i was working as a contract software engineer at a company that went whole hog for Agile. the meetings were so numerous and long that fully 20% of the work week was taken up with them. When I pointed out that the process being followed (Agile method) would have to improve non-meeting time productivity 25% to compensate for all of the meetings, it got me some mean looks and talk of negativity. And of course Agile doesn’t speed up the actual development at all, it is purely an administrative tool (that increases the amount of administrative work on a project).

    • I think the thing with JIT was that the Japanese saw it as a manufacturing philosophy where they would not needlessly manufacture stuff just to keep people busy whereas American took it to mean that they should use their supply chain as a piggy bank.

  4. What an enjoyable show. I am 55, just a few weeks younger than you, and the preface really hit home. I love being this age and have since age 50. I have described it as feeling “etched,” but I’m sure there is more to it.

    It’s a little embarrassing in that I majored in Japanese in college and I was supposed to read this book 35 years ago (in English translation). I couldn’t get through the preface though before I threw it across the room and took an “F” on the test. I’ll certainly have to try again, so thanks for that and have a great weekend.

    • It’s never too late!

      I should reread the Five Rings myself.

      I feel like I began removing my cranium from my rectum and adopting a more realistic worldview in my very late 30s.

  5. “It is best only to do what one likes. Do not tell this to young people, as they nearly always misinterpret it.”

    Nearing thirty, I’m starting to get it. I used to do things that were fun in the moment, but caused me suffering in the long run — sometimes for months at a time.

    I also like the story of the fat guy who crawled away on his knees because he had put his weight on them while playing guy. Some guys laughed at him, so he came back and killed them. There are consequences to publicly delighting in one’s embarrassment.

  6. This was a real treat. I’ve never read Book of Five Rings although I knew it existed. I also think focusing on general principles of how to succeed, win, subvert opponents and similar, is a lot more interesting than ‘and then Mumbly Joe did this and crazy fanatical feminist VP/congresswoman etc did such and such…’ They’re crazy, they’re nuts. How we succeed and resist them is a lot more interesting.

  7. Just ran across this t-shirt on Amz. Perhaps it could be our Zman “look” to signal each other when out and about?

    (Link is too long. Just enter the phrase below into Amazon search.)

    Fengstore Legend of Zelda t-shirt

  8. Regarding physical peak, which brings to mind tennis players like Federer. Anyone who plays tennis knows there are movements that are not natural, say the backhand, and you have to practice practice practice to make it second nature. Basically it takes 8-12 years to learn the physical techniques and skills. But that only gets you so far. There are game decisions that you can only learn through time. So if Federer can keep up his physical abilities, which he did, then he couples that with experience to defeat guys much younger. But now that his physical abilities are going, to my great sadness, even the experience isn’t enough.

    Tom Brady is similar. But he still haas the physical abilities.

    • Since this is the Japan thread, maybe we could throw in some Tokyo Olympics kkk0mmentary for the weekend???

      Personally, I’m very worried about Katie Ledecky.

      She looks like she’s 24-going-on-menopause.

      For years, I’ve heard rumblings & rumors & hush-hush-talk that Title IX wreaks havoc on the female endocrine system, and especially that the requirement for lowest-possible body weight in NCAA Div I female athletes leads to a loss of the ability to menstruate [once the body fat percentage gets too low], which results in lifelong implications concerning fertilititty.

      And let’s face it, after a chick graduates with an NCAA Div I bachelor’s, at the ripe old age of 22, she’s got barely another 10 or maybe 15 years of quality fertilitititty left in her [and G0d forbid that she goes to graduate or professional school after her bachelor’s].

      On the other hand, I’ve never seen any hard data in the way of a well-run study examining the statistics of it all [not that gl0b0h0m0 would ever approve the funding for a quality study of threats to White fertilititty rates].

      I hope I’m wrong; I hope there’s a Chad on the swim team who will knock up Katie so that she can become a Mommy and have lots & lots & lots of beautiful White children.

      But right now the physiognomy is rather troubling.

      [Katie, if you ever read this: IN THE REAL WORLD, THERE’S NO LAW AGAINST EATING A CHEESEBURGER W/ FRENCH FRIES & A MILKSHAKE EVERY SO OFTEN!!!]

      I’m at the point now where I’m thinking Willie Nelson needs to re-record his ancient classic as, “Daddies, don’t let your Little Girls grow up to be Title IX Athletes…”

        • Her receding hairline is a tell

          Ouch.

          If I were her father, and I read that kkk0mment, it would be like a dagger through the heart.

          Even as an innocent bystander, reading it makes me hurt for the poor girl.

          Moar & moar I feel like the correct course of action is simply to walk right up to these chicks and order them to get off their birth control because “we’re gonna make a baby just as soon as you ovulate again”.

          Don’t even tell ’em your name.

          Just announce to them that they’re about to become Mommies.

    • He still has the abilities because he not getting the living shit kicked out of him, like a Montana, Bradshaw, Unitas, Elway etc, Namith, for Chrisrtsakes they’re all cripples now doing tv ads for medicare.

  9. Great podcast! Go Rin No Sho is still one of my favorites. Interesting to hear the parts we agree upon (Book of Air is boooring) and to hear your insights that are different from mine. Thank youf for sharing. I think I’ll be re-listening to this one for years to come.

  10. Great job, Z! This is one of your best broadcasts; Ican listen to it multiple times and gain from each iteration.

  11. I lived and worked throughout Asia and Oceania during the Japanese boon of the Eighties. Even though the war had ended 40-plus years prior, the nation remained hated throughout the region, something not kept well hidden. The idea that a country so despised in its own backyard would become the dominant economic power was laughable, although Japan made a very good run at it (additionally, Americans lured the country into real estate and other investments that were scheduled for demolition; in some ways, today looks much like then only the targets now are domestic). In a parallel to China today, the Japanese also had a well-bribed Fifth Column in D.C. The primary difference was Japan had given up thoughts of anything other than world economic domination and still maintained a lot of respect for the United States.

    On one flight from Narita back to the mainland, the guy beside me was an automotive executive. Like many upper class Japanese he was elegant and eloquent. He was overseeing factory relocations to the South and Midwest, which were in part gibs to keep the American market open. He point blank asked me what I thought about the future of the United States. Even then, the demographic doom was coming into focus. I shrugged and he nodded and responded with a hand gesture that mimicked a plane going down.

    I didn’t visibly react, but it sort of angered me. I now would beat him to the hand gesture. Strange what 40 years of exposure to diversity will do to a man. To this day, when Japanese refer to “Americans” they still mean “Whites,” as do most Asians. Unlike far too many American Whites, though, they do not have a single doubt as to why the United States has become so dangerously unstable.

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    • Asians are all arrogant. It’s actually quite a weakness at times. However today, there’s no reason for them not to be arrogant, given the state of both the white populations in the West as well as the millions of low brainpower 3rd worlders.

      One thing of note though is that younger generation Asians (at least in the West) are now super obsessed about being “cool”, stylish, fitting into the mainstream, and of course the dream is to bang a white girl. The “study study study, work work work” attitude of their parents is being rejected.

      Basically they’re getting assimilated into the degenerate mainstream Western culture, even though they see it otherwise, as getting back at whitey for all the years Asians were seen as un-cool and sleeping with all their women.

      What does this mean overall? Not really sure, but my guess is that it will ultimately lead to less East Asian presence/dominance in American STEM going forward (coupled with affirmative action). With the Chinese, Japanese and Korean birth rates at rock bottom, both here and overseas (and half their woman are marrying white guys here), their influence is actually likely to wane in the coming decades. The South Asians are the main problem for our people, mark my words.

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      • Agreed. South Asians have a peasant cunning to offset their lack of intelligence and achievement. East Asians have picked up some really nasty habits from Whites, although when Japanese (in particular) act Africanized they remain shunned. Chinese won’t go down that road.

        Most Asians are arrogant and insufferable but when coupled with stupidity, as is the case with Indians and Pakis, it leads to even worse interaction. Those groups, as you already see in the United States, are such natural grifters they drift to politics almost immediately.

        They all should not be here, to belabor the obvious.

        • Yeah, but a lot of Europeans and Americans also have a peasant cunning. Which I would rather refer to as instincts borne of being around nature and animals, hunting, fishing, etc. How to cool one’s energy to feel unthreatening to a bird, say, so he gets comfortable and relaxed, then we release. It’s a devious and perhaps ungodly way to fight and kill animals. Why it’s important to say Grace after you kill something.

          You still see these ways in our people although they’ve been largely dormant

          When we ever decide to get serious, back to ourselves, we are going to be extremely formidable so these Asians of all types better hurry before the sun sets and Dracula is released and at peak form

    • Uncle Adolph said the same just that he was way off on the timing of our Africanizational decline

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    • When America existed, the only Americans were white. The Japs are right. And how could it be otherwise? Asians, Latinos and Africans have no ties to America. They didn’t build it, and it wasn’t built for them. America’s history, its language, its culture, its economic, political and legal forms, were European. It was our country in a deep and meaningful sense. For PoC it was merely a place to live well and comparatively opulently. Ask yourself this– how often did you see a genuinely patriotic black, Oriental or Latino? They may have existed, but they were scarce. American patriotism was the province of whites and so was the country.

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      • I sent a similar question to a professional civnat blogger that tolerates me.

        “Have you ever met a non-white who seemed to really love the Founders or desire limited government?

        His response: “Come on, man. I am sure you could name some yourself.”

        As a civnat, he believes that because he can think of a small number of counter-examples that he has answered me. Unfortunately for him, he grossly misunderstands reality. His argument: Thomas Sowell exists therefore ignore what’s happening in Chicago or South Africa.

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        • Unfortunately, most grillers are hopeless. For every Sowell there are 100K LeBoon Jameses.

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    • I have lived in Asia for years in three countries and find that, with the exception of the mainland Chinese, most uni educated Asians think that CNN and the NYT are the epitome of real news because America has a “free press.” They all buy into the racial Narratives and think that whites hunt down blacks for sport. When I have shown them FBI crime statistics they are astonished. It is easy for me to get them to understand what is going on because they hate their own media.

  12. The Japanese are in serious trouble.

    By 2100, they will be under 80 million. They were around 44 million at the end of the 19th century.

    Japanese tradition-rich historical trajectory coupled with strong ethnic cohesion unaffected by lengthy periods of being under foreign occupation couldn’t stem the tide of consumerist decadence.

    Obviously, it brings their traditions under serious scrutiny.

    How did the vices of modernity make such deep lacerations on their spirit that they now stand on the brink of extinction?

    • 80 million Japanese people.

      Germans will follow a similar aging path; their country will also be polluted with millions of hostile Mslim foreigners.

      Japanese will be fine (unless they foolishly open their borders). At worst they’ll get invaded by China. Germans will be genocided or race mixed out of existence.

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      • “Germans will be genocided or race mixed out of existence.”

        That’s how we ended up with India. The Dravidian abos are the same race as their Australian cousins.

        Global India or Global Africa.
        Great choices, there.

      • China is the society with the oldest population in human history and is a few years, if not already at the point of no return for demography.

        It could be described as “What if they had a three child policy and nobody cared”

    • The Japanese will be just fine if they don’t go down the path of immigration.

      Nature will fix the population problem. The people having kids will be more conservative and family-oriented, which means that their kids will be – on average – more conservative and family oriented.

      The people who aren’t family oriented will have their genes removed from the Japanese gene pool.

      In addition, land will be come cheaper.

      In a few generations, you’ll have all the ingredients for a higher birthrate. Japan will be fine.

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      • At the current rate, the world will be much poorer, and fossil fuels (the fuel of the modern world) will be much more expensive, due to scarce supply or stupid legislation. Z has also mentioned the increasing loss of white technical expertise to keep things working.

        As first world living standards continue to decline, people might no longer see the value in putting off childbirth. Or, the global supply chain breaks down and birth control pills are no longer available. Most people will just say “whatever” and keep having sex. Birth rate goes up.

        It’s kind of a self correcting problem. The problem that won’t correct itself is demographics, as the parasite groups will never ever let go of us on their own.

        • People went below replacement in the 1930’s back when reproduction was a cultural norm nigh a mandate and there was basically no birth control.

          What I think will happen is many decades of low fertility , cities being abandoned, starvation disease violence and poverty will cause massive population decline.

          Upwards of 60% or so over a century I’d guess

          US here the first area hit will be the West which will be decimated even if the water issue is resolved. Its too costly in term of energy to survive

          Net effect will be a highly religious, highly agrarian much less urban population with a schizophrenic tech base, some pretty modern a lot of 1910-20 .

        • Every time I see some clown use “fossil Fuels” to describe petro-chemicals I want to ask the dipshit how the oil companies got all those dinosaurs to Titan and the Horse Head Nebula.

          • how the oil companies got all those dinosaurs to Titan and the Horse Head Nebula

            Apparently the engineers on the deep rigs see some seriously bizarre shiznat, and many of them will insist that abiotic oil is the only possible explanation.

            Although this new theory of plate tectonics [with “old” continents being subsumed back into the mantle, and “new” continents emerging from the mantle to replace them] does offer the intriguing possibility that we’ve already had several different iterations of “Life on Earth” [the evidence for which would have been crushed and pulverized into nonexistence somewhere in the mantle].

    • They’ve been ‘westernizing’ since the 19th century iirc. That it took this long for the rot to set in speaks well of them.

      Also, since we in the west have been ‘westernizing’ even longer and are still kind of standing speaks very well of us.

      • Japanese ‘traditions’, ‘wisdom’ etc. turned out to be overrated.

        Mere decades of cultural decadence spiritually massacred a people who had not been physically occupied by a foreign power in their history but for once; [US occupation officially ended after 7 years].

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        • Mere decades of cultural decadence spiritually massacred a people who had not been physically occupied by a foreign power in their history

          Two thoughts.

          1) Our ancestors knew what they were saying when they warned us about the dangers of iniquity, and

          2) The Frankfurt School knew precisely what it was doing when it unlocked the door of the cage and unleashed iniquity upon the entire world.

    • Japan is in far better shape than the United States or any other Western country. Its main problem is the American occupation gives a false sense of security, but I expect to see United States bases expelled worldwide as soon as things get bad enough here. Japan eventually will excise the cancer and, to some degree, has in Okinawa in no small part due to rape proclivity of US blacks.

    • Everyone voices concerns when the population is predicted to turn down. I’m not convinced. For example, China is now concerned and they have 1.4B. Geez. With only 3-400M in the large urban industrial zones, I think they’ve got labor to spare.

      Japan, ditto. Germany, the third largest economy after China and the USA has 84M. They became #3 even when East Germany existed separately. The USA imports our population growth with third world losers. And yet some of the same voices decrying population decline also sound the alarm of automation creating surplus (unemployed) labor. So which is it?

      My suspicion is that Japan—if kept ethnically pure—will do just fine into the next century, while our multicultural paradise will decline into a third world hell hole. But we will be 500M or so *strong*! 🙁

      • More than half of Chinese are past reproduction age , huge numbers of women that would have been of fertile age now were aborted in the 90’s and even with a three child policy, the real fertility rate is at an all time low, approaching one or lower in a few areas.

        They will age out very rapidly and will have rampant population decline. Trying to force babies to be born won’t work, they’ll starve and go without care since both parents work 72 hours a week (its called 9-9-6)

        Most nations will face somewhat similar problems, California for example now has the demography of a retirement state do to low fertility and until the super religious/super fertile become dominant, this will continue.

        The healthiest fairly nation fertility wise is India. Its about at replacement more or less. It will drop below that but its already rather poor to the adaptation won’t stress that society much.

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        • Most of the Chinese live on farms at the subsistence level. They basically contribute nothing to a 1st world country. The typical “farm” is less than an acre. Those folks may indeed have one child, but that one child goes off to the city, while mom&pop die on the farm. Their land can then be combined into larger and more efficient holdings—like an area that can use a tractor and modern equipment in place of stoop labor.

          Bottom line is that, IMO, China has more labor than it currently needs or will need—even if the replacement fertility figure shows a decline for the rest of the century.

          Not much different here, except that we need better folk, not more folk. Infinite population growth is not a long term answer.

        • This is what remains to be seen in a modern, aging society. One theory is that everything will work out, another is that being old-age top-heavy never gets go away (society is expensive due to old age, making kids too expensive, rinse lather repeat) and the population collapses to nothingness. To the extent everything works out in East Asia it will because they’ll be cold enough to figure out that the pillows need to come out.

      • “And yet some of the same voices decrying population decline also sound the alarm of automation creating surplus (unemployed) labor. So which is it?”

        Chicken or egg, doesn’t really matter, it seems to be what the market god demands.

        I say more babies, fewer machines. For humanity’s sake!

        Otoh living closer to nature would mean more hardship, more infant mortality, etc. So the question is which is preferable: a difficult life or a comfortable death for our people, our species, even. Could we split the difference, or is it either/or at this point?

        To come this far, working for generations for a better life, only to find that better life is a kind of euthanasia— “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” That’s what come to mind, anyhow.

        There’s one I’ll be pondering over beers tonight.

        • more babies, fewer machines… To come this far, working for generations for a better life, only to find that better life is a kind of euthanasia…

          I originally thought the final episode of the BSG reboot was a total cop-out, but there are aspects of it with which I now strongly agree.

          If the choice is between technology & extinction, then technology has to go.

          https://files.catbox.moe/ri0b8u.mp4

          Katie Sackhoff, the actress who played Starbuck, is in real life now 41, and has never had any children of her own.

    • Given likely advances in genetic and other sciences in next 60 years, I’d take any long range population forecasts with a mine of salt. 😠

      • I agree on the population forecasts.

        However the fertility numbers are not going up and the more complex tech you add, the lower they will go.

        The purpose of human life is propagation of tribal identity and technology demands destruction of identity for interchangeability.

        On a less philosophical note I suspect the US and possibly Europe will have a civil war or collapse well before that.

        This will put progress on the back burner globally.

        Also you do know that COVID 19 was a direct product of progress right? Its a rate of gain experiment that got released. Things are no so brittle that a nasty flu nearly took out the global economy and may still .

        This will get worse.

        As for life extension. It won’t happen. We will be lucky to have antibiotics in a few decades

      • The important question to ask is, if you could optimize for anything through bioinformatics and genomics as far as humans go, what would it be and what do you think the downstream effects would look like.

        All that happened with reduced infant mortality was mass abortion and that reduction has been the single greatest influence on the average human lifespan increase since the 19th century.

        So while waxing eugenics here it is par to discuss demographics and racial variation, I don’t think the world would be any better place with any of the super duper genetic magic anyone can conceptualize today, much less practice in a theoretical 60 year time horizon – or ever.

        This is as good as it gets.

        “Everything is meaningless.”

  13. How well I remember the “Japan will replace us” period. I think the problem was best encapsulated in the mid 90s by Mystery Science Theater, when they were mocking a promotional short from the late 50s, “Design for Dreaming”, which brings together new cars, designer dresses, kitchen appliances (I think GM still owned Frigidaire at this point) and ballroom dancing in one big ball of avarice. At one point, as the housewife is dancing up a storm at the auto show, one of the crew observes, “While she’s dancing, the Japanese are building great cars.”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVuthG4f2oc

    • RISING SUN was sort of the coda for the Nippophobia, basically an elongated version of that MST episode, although the humor is unintentional.

      • The main issue with Rising Sun, the book and the film, is that they both came out about five years too late, in 1992 and 1993, IIRC.

        Both would have come off far less dopey if they had been released in say, 1986 and 1987.

        In the early ’90s Japan’s wonder economy had already imploded, and it was obvious that they were never going to manage to buy out the US.

        This was compounded by the brief, “peace dividend,” the US experienced from the end of the Cold War and the first wave of the SUV boom, which invigorated large portions of the US Rust Belt during that time period.

  14. Great Podcast this week.

    To add an antecedent regarding Japanese business techniques being applied here in America, the funniest one tried (and still in effect) is Lean Six Sigma and Toyota Kata for the military.

    To believe these management and process improvement concepts have any chance to succeed in a military setting is laughable.

    Imagine office desks with thin tape strips to corral staplers, phones and scotch tape dispensers. Dry erase boards with impossible goals for turnaround times and operational assets due to a lack of parts.

    While 6S did help in a few work centers, most of the techniques are useless due to the structures in place that control asset procurement and OEM contracts. These ironclad agreements between companies and the military ensure that grift and waste are just a part of the system, forever dooming any benefit of 6S execution.

    I still wonder how much the Navy pays for the full-time lean six sigma black belt. 🤔

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    • Ha. I was a 6S black belt back in the day. There were some things I liked, but mostly it was an excuse to party on the company dime.

      • It was a requirement to get the Greenbelt qualification, even when most participants could only seem to understand the concept at a white bracelet level….

    • If the military were anything but a Keynesian stimulus (its literally called Military Keynesianism in some circles) it would either be 30% smaller in budget at least or we wouldn’t be trading with China.

  15. Trying to study the Japanese language myself, would have been interesting to see Japan during it’s peak economy in the 80’s. I’m not convinced their ideas on productivity and work ethic are too hard to decipher, most just seem to be pretending to misunderstand it. Or avoid it because they refuse to well… do some hard work.

    • They didn’t help Japan,

      The level of efficiency that is created by the “best processes” of Japan creates conditions of hugely surplus production and savings Japan doesn’t have the babies , really any children to buy all that and can’t. Its too small.

      If America got any more efficient it would end up with more State just to keep the velocity of money alive.

      Our economy pre COVID 19 was 40% State spending already. This is caused by the efficiency trap, not enough jobs that pay well enough for family formation without huge sacrifices that most people will not make.

      Our economic processes are too inflexible to allow for changes like shorter work weeks that inject inefficiency into the system so we trap ourselves into extinction.

      In time, decay puts an end to it and the society collapses to a sustainable level. Amish Paradise if you will.

      • Ignoring how the Japanese government and Bank of Japan is run and influenced by America. If you read some material on the base ideals and structure of the average Japanese lifestyle. They do present some interesting ideas on the mastery of skills and attention to detail.

        However your argument about population size is selective in it’s application. On a tiny island the population is always going to reach hard cap where having children isn’t feasible due to overpopulation. You’d just have that be by extreme famine or disease instead of willing choice.

        • The US is in essence a tiny Island.

          Huge chunks are marginal for habitation, lack key resources and so on .This is as much a constraint as anything can be.

          Humanity itself has a social carrying capacity too. Each group tolerates different levels of crowding and privation and this will correct at a certain point.

          Even India is at or near replacement fertility.

          At a certain point, enough is enough and the population will decline even if the resources are there.

          Its only when psychopaths in powers interfere for short term profits or whatever scheme they have in kind that this is a serious problem.

  16. With the exception of the one knockdown of Douglas, Tyson lost every minute of every round. Douglas beat him from pillar to post. That was most certainly the best performance of Buster Douglass’s life.
    In some ways, it was a very interesting fight. Douglas was supposed to be a tomato can and easy payday in Tokyo Japan to fuel Tyson’s international star. There are no excuses either. Tyson was at his peak. He was not an aging champion gifted the last fight he was in by Don King’s personal property judges. He was in his early 20s with all the resources of the unified heavyweight champion. Douglas simply fought a much better fight. Tyson was never the same again either. Probably his best performances post Douglas were against Ruddock and even in these fights he was not his former self.
    Despite all the post prison opportunities gifted to him, he could not pull an Ali out of his hat. I guess he hadn’t mastered strategy.

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    • In prior fights, Tyson showed he was vulnerable to the jab and he could be made to waste energy trying to get under it. Tyson was not a big man for a heavyweight. Bonecrusher Smith and Tony Tucker took Tyson the distance in previous fights, by keeping him from getting inside their guard. The trouble is, they had nothing else. Douglas had a great jab when he was motivated to use it and he could throw the right behind it. He was just a lazy fighter, so he never fulfilled his promise until that fight. It was like seeing a young Larry Holmes.

      It is why I would never put Tyson on my list of great heavyweights. He beat a bunch of bums in spectacular fashion, but when faced with a great challenge, he revealed his lack of spirit, as Musashi would put it

      • I disagree. Tyson 1986-1988 was an invincible machine. His performances during those few years were enough to put him in the category of “great heavyweight”. It was ridding himself of Kevin Rooney that seemed to spell the end of his dominance.

        • Somebody who is great is great over time and they face and defeat adversity. The very first time Tyson was ever in kind of trouble, he folded and blew it. This was not a fluke. Holyfield was a dirty fighter, I absolutely give that to Tyson, but what he did revealed (again) his character. He had none.
          It is not Tyson’s fault he was fighting really, in a dead time for heavyweight during his prime and he rose to the occasion even with this mediocre competition. He could have been on his way to greatness. But then it would should have been an easy payday, he blew it.

          People wanted to see an animal. Unfortunately for them, that is exactly what they got.

      • Funny you mention Holmes. I have watched the Holmes Norton fight several times and every time I watched it, I had Norton winning. Still, it is better that Holmes won. He was a very good champion and I don’t think Norton would have been. Still, that was a great fight. I agree about Douglas.

      • Teddy Atlas says he considers Tyson to be 0-5 in real fights, which seems a bit unfair.

  17. I loved the segment end sound. It made me laugh. Consider it for regular use. Good show, Z. My brother sent me his copy in my 20s. I remember some passages well.

  18. I remember the Japan uber alles economy back in the late 80s/early 90s. It was funny watching American businessmen trying to figure out what made them so good and also watching the American government try to deal with the Japs in trade talks.

    They just couldn’t understand that the Japanese ran system that would never work in the United States. Their keiretsu system, which integrated a bunch of businesses around a big bank, was completely foreign to the Americans. Businesses within the keiretsu would buy from one another but never leave a paper trail. Everyone just knew what to do without having to be told in writing.

    The Japanese would close off an industry to outsiders to allow Japanese companies to develop their own products. In the United States, that would result in crappy products, but in Japan, the various keiretsu would fight tooth and nail against each other, so the Japanese got the benefit of protectionism and competition. Once Japanese companies were producing world-class products, they’d start to export them. What other country could manage that?

    The Japanese also had a ton of small and medium-sized banks to provide financing to small and medium-sized, regional companies. A very good system.

    The story of Japan’s economic demise is interesting. A great book is Richard Werner’s Princes of the Yen, which argues that Japan’s Central Bank more or less deliberately sabotaged the Japanese economy to force the country to reform economically along the lines of the Americans (the power players at BoJ were all trained in the states) and gain power. You can also watch a documentary of the book.

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    • Btw, Princes of the Yen isn’t just about Japan. It’s also about how central banks around the world manipulate economies, politics and society in general.

      Full disclosure, I’m a fan of Werner. He’s an economist who understands banking, something very, very few economists even look at, which is insane. Also, let’s not forget who controls the banks, so understanding the full power of central banks and banks in general (especially the big banks) is pretty useful.

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      • Richard Werner was a guest on the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast a few year ago where he discussed his findings from his studying of Japanese economics (quantitative easing, money creation, capital flows, et al — see link below):

        https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-weak-recovery-in-japan-can-teach-us-about-re-igniting/id1056200096?i=1000475293752

        Very interesting episode. Werner sounds like a smart guy and the things he had to say are interesting though I have a hard time evaluating whether his understanding of things is correct.

        I believe that that macro economics in general suffers from the problem of verifiability. Its easy to propose a model or a theory. Much harder to prove that the theory/model works, or in what cases or situations the model is appropriate. Here people often think they understand something or can predict something when in actuality they can not. Thinking about this in terms of Donald Rumsfeld’s logic and epistemology, perhaps macro economics may fall into the category of “unknown knowns”. Things/systems where people think they generally understand something, but actually don’t. IMO, these are some of the most interesting problems (unknown knowns) because they fall outside of experimental testing (this is how they remain unresolved) and have a natural ability to blind side decision makers in society. Macro economics response to crisis is one example. Governmental response to corona virus may be another example that falls into this category.

        • Lots of this seems to be from people who theorize about complex systems. but have never actually built one.

          I often feel reading economics or politics, or human behavior theories that I am listening to a novice programmer who has spent 6 months reading fad blogs and copy and pasting a crappy solution of JS libraries pontificate about how complex software systems function and how to structure things.

          The certainty of their own ignorance is astounding. You can see it all around as software quality is getting worse and worse, as ritual knowledge replaces concrete goal orientation from the earlier programmers.

          The issue as you point out is the same ignorant certainty is leading to the same problem on a vast scale, but instead of a program, its “lets remake all of society out of some shitty political and economic libraries I can cobble together, because all the cool academics assert this is the way to do things”.

        • I agree that macro economics is mostly (completely?) BS. It’s a bunch of overly complex models with questionable at best assumptions.

          That’s actually why I like Werner. He actually tests models/theories. It’s why his main area is banking. You can look at the banks’ books and banks’ impact on the economy. You can empirically test theories, at least to some degree.

          This was a nice explanation here.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXCMifLZsjs

          Also, looks like Werner is suing Cambridge from retracting a job offer to him. He claims that it’s because he’s a critic of large banks and the concentration of banking into the bank banks – as well as (and this is interesting) his Christian faith. I also noticed that Werner is a big-time sceptic of the reaction to Covid.

          I’m beginning to suspect that Mr. Werner is a bit based. I think that we might have found our homeland’s central bank chairman.

    • I remember the Yellow Menace-scare of the eighties, which is why I am rather sanguine about the Chinese Scare of today. I don’t know about the Japanese central bank, but my take is that once the Japanese caught up to the West, when it was time for them to pull ahead and bury us, they stagnated, unable to develop unless they had the blueprints handed to them from the West. Today, the number of Japanese Nobel Prize winners is smaller than Denmark’s.

      I had a friend working with SIM-card cryptography and he related how he’d once been in a bar with some colleagues. The conversation turns to Orientals and their inability to think in the abstract, and one of the Chinese in the party protests vehemently.

      “Very well”, one American guy says, “tell me what a computer is.”

      The Chinaman ponders this for a few moments, then points to his laptop: “That is a computer!”

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      • Yeah, whatever other shenanigans were going on with the BoJ, it’s hard to argue that Japan’s rapid economic growth curiously ended as soon as no longer had a path to follow.

        A boss of mine warned the Japanese about this. Their culture simply doesn’t tolerate individualism, the character trait needed for risk-taking and creativity. And since culture is downstream from biology, you can’t change that.

        China will become a powerhouse, but it likely won’t innovate much. It also has the problem of corruption. It’ll be lower-class version of Japan. That said, Japan is highly successful economy. If China can attain half of Japan’s GDP per capita, it’ll be a beast.

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        • Japanese are pretty creative IMO. And very hard workers. Perhaps they don’t have the Nobel Prize count of the US and western Europe, but the Japanese do good work — even things that I think we are not capable of innovating in the US anymore.

          Case in point would be invention of the blue LED. This invention was the result of a ~15 year research program. Plenty of researchers and companies in the US knew about the promise of the eventually successful research approach in the early 1970s but gave up on it after a few years of lack of success. Conversely, the Japanese team at Nichia stuck with the project for over a decade (roughly 1980 to 1994) until it paid out.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura

          IMO, we don’t see this long term vision and dogged pursuit of excellence in the US anymore. Why would anyone plan for anything that may or may not happen 15 years from now when we don’t even know if the company (or country) will exist? Better to borrow some cheap money and speculate on real estate or bitcoin, hope to catch a break on a meme stock, try for bust out etc. Long time span R&D, like functional mass transit systems, are something that can’t be done in unstable societies.

          • I know nothing of LED production, but reading the Wiki, it appears to me that he did not in fact invent the blue LED rather than a commercially viable method of producing them.

            Very Japanese.

          • You are correct. IMO, realization of the commercially viable product was the impact in the innovation though. So credit to the Japanese team for doing this. They deserved the Nobel for this work.

            Notice also that Nakamura ended up settling at UCSB. So even when America doesn’t innovate, we just buy the innovator and move him to a university here. Everyone wants to live in Santa Barbara I guess.

            Also, incidentally, if anyone copied the tech, it was Cree, Inc. Worked around Nichia’s patents and now have a $10B market cap:

            https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/cree

          • If it takes 15 yes to make a commercial product, was it financially a good idea? Or just a halo project, or pride?

          • @acetone

            realization of the commercially viable product was the impact in the innovation though. So credit to the Japanese team for doing this.

            Yes.

            They deserved the Nobel for this work.

            Hmmm… Again, I don’t know anything about LED production, but the Nobel Prize?

            Mass production of blue (and by extension, white) LEDs have changed whole industries, but the Nobel Prize isn’t given for industrial impact, but for a new understanding of (in this case) chemistry.

            Whether the Japanese team achieved a new understanding of chemistry is beyond me, but just because the market for white LEDs is a gazillion dollars, it doesn’t follow that it’s a result of revolutionary science.

            Nobody ever got a Nobel Prize for inventing the internet, and rightly so. Nobel Prizes are for people who invent solid-state transistors.

          • To Felix: quoting from the linked article below, “Meanwhile, Akasaki and Amano worked tirelessly to solve the problem that stumped Maruska and his colleagues: growing a p-type GaN that could lead to an efficient blue LED.” So different process, different innovation (p-type GaN, that delivers the efficiency) merited the Nobel. As shown in link, nobody disputes it.

            https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/tech-history/silicon-revolution/rcas-forgotten-work-on-the-blue-led

            “…just because the market for white LEDs is a gazillion dollars, it doesn’t follow that it’s a result of revolutionary science.”

            Market size doesn’t win a Nobel but impact of scientific break through does. The break through here was the development of the solid state LED that allows for trimming several percent of global electric power consumption (via switch from incandescent to LED). Not all Nobels have such big real world impact (mostly impact is scientific), but I like the ones that do. Kerry Mullis invention of PCR technique is one example that has similar huge scientific and real world impact, meriting the award.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

          • To rdz: if the payoff is big enough long time horizons can make sense. IMO, Japanese like hardware development projects and are extremely stubborn and patient people. Paid off for Nichia.

            Hindsight makes the gamble this project look good. Not knowing the outcome, I think most companies/investors in the US would not have attempted this work.

          • @acetone
            I see, thanks.

            And I now notice that the DID in fact get a Nobel Prize for inventing, in fact, a solid state transistor, so I stand very much corrected.

      • “Orientals and their inability to think in the abstract,”

        I was talking online with Michael Hoffman (not the conspiracy theorist, who’s conveniently named Michael Hoffman II) about his research on drugs and religion, and I noted that he talked a lot about early Christian, Hindu, Moslem, even Jewish sources, but never Chinese. He said he couldn’t stand reading them, everything as “and the golden dragon rises above the koi pond” etc. and never just telling him what was going on.

      • No water, fewer women, little farmland, aging population- China and Japan lack depth in resources. Bottleneck coming.

      • Chinas a bigger threat than Japan ever was because the have ten times the population.

      • “Today, the number of Japanese Nobel Prize winners is smaller than Denmark’s.”

        It’s not. There are over twice as many Japanese Nobel laureates as Danish ones. The last year Denmark won a Nobel Prize was 1997. Japan has won 19 – 20 since then.

        Counting Nobel Prizes results in a common fallacy by Amren(esqe) IQ nationalists: Asians aren’t creative. That’s totally wrong as such calculations almost never take into account the following:

        1) East Asian nations haven’t been industrialized as long as most Western European nations; Japan was just a few decades removed from Medieval feudalism when the first Nobel Prize was awarded.

        2) Most of the low-hanging fruit had already been picked by the time those countries had the institutions and resources to compete.

        This is proved by the fact that Japan, supposedly unable to innovate, has won around 20 Nobels since 1997 when previously they had only won a handful in all the decades prior. Starting from a more primitive point really hampered them (the war didn’t help), but now they’ve been around long enough where they can finally compete on even terms.

        One day China will reach that level and watch out when they do. Your copes about Asians only being able to copy will come to a dramatic end when China bankrupts nearly every advanced American industry from commercial aviation to computer technology.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country#Denmark

        Europe and China vs. Japan since 1997, discounting Peace, Literature, and Economics (too subjective and culturally biased) and counting only those born in their respective countries:

        UK: 28
        Japan: 18
        Germany: 11
        France: 7
        China: 4
        Denmark: 0

        East Asians are no pushovers. Believing otherwise is nothing more than a cope. Give them enough time and they’ll catch up. I wouldn’t be surprised considering how far Japan has come in the last 20 years if they exceeded all European nations in new Nobel laureates since 1997 by sometime in the next decade.

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        • To Paper Clip: big difference between Japanese and Chinese. Japanese have something like the european Faustian Spirit while the Chinese do not.

          Look, for example, at your list of Chinese Nobel Prize winners. Of the four Chinese winners you list three of them won their Nobels only after being educated and working on problems in the West. Yes they are Chinese born in China, but would they have achieved their excellence if they had been trained in China and worked to solve these problems under Chinese direction? No, of course not!

          The fourth winner (Tu Youyou) seems more like witch testing herbs and extracts on mice than an actual scientist. Does she even have a graduate degree? Is she even intelligent? Frankly, the Nobel committee was trolling the Chinese nation by giving her a Nobel. To be clear, here is the Nobel committee troll: a proud nation of >1B people, high IQ, second highest GDP, no real Nobel prizes, lets give first Chinese Nobel prize to a witch! Its actually surprising that the Chinese government allowed her to accept the prize. If I were them I would have returned this dishonorable prize to sender unopened!

          From the data you show, if the Chinese hope to achieve true excellence, they need to do this under the leadership of other people from other cultures. Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere when? For the good of China, bow to Japanese master now!

    • Japan should have been an example of how you could not open up a Western market to 2nd world producers. It was impossible to compete with Japan on price. We couldn’t compete with the Yen and we couldn’t compete with Japanese laws. America was burdened with endless regulation like environmental and affirmative action and with a valuable dollar, it just could not compete.
      Of course all those dollars going into Japan and the Japanese central bank printing of Yen to keep the Yen low against the dollar blew up a real estate bubble that puts anything we ever had to shame. The “lost decade” in Japan is now in its 3rd decade.

      I heard several years ago that Japan now sells more adult diapers than baby diapers. According to that same guy, Kyle Bass, Japanese industry is even more hollowed out than American industry if that is even possible.

    • It’s another example of whites idolizing the out group – this time from technical people/conservatives. In STEM school we were supposed to regard the Japanese with reverence and awe. They were the super geniuses with amazing manufacturing.

      I’ve never even met a Japanese person (other than a few old ladies), but they are the kings of engineering.

      Anyways, it rings hollow when the manufacturing giant of all time was/is the United States of America. All white guys. I have nothing against Japanese people and they are clearly intelligent with a nice country – but it’s silly to sit there and praise them while the West is in serious decline. We need to stop living vicariously through other groups and roll up our sleeves.

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      • I’m not claiming that the Japanese are better than whites. While they have many wonderful attributes, they have a number of drawbacks, not least of which is a lack of a sense of humor.

        I’m simply saying that they developed an economic system that maximized their capabilities and, frankly, took advantage of a gullible West. But they hit the wall when they had to start being creative and the West stopped letting them take advantage of the system. (China will hit a similar wall.)

        I don’t think that whites should idolize or try to emulate the Japanese, though I’m always fine looking at other peoples and seeing what we can adopt to our own culture/people that improves our situation but doesn’t change who we are.

  19. Ya know, planning for a duel to the death might not be such a bad idea right now, once the rest of the world figures out what “the Americans” have done to them.

    Thrombotic organ failure tends to boil people’s hams. Even better, another doc claims ‘mad cow’ prions are in the mix, so we might even get Rage zombies in a real 28 Weeks Later scenario!

    Too bad we did it to our woke Army first, though, that might be a bit of a weak spot.

    • HA Covington wanted to bring back dueling and he included it in his Northwest Constitution. His offhand justification was that dueling puts a very high price on being an asshole.

      Jim Bowery has included combat to the death in his Sortocracy plan. He worries that the bigger guy will always win so he includes some ground rules that allow the smaller and smarter guy to kill the bigger guy. See point 6 of http://sortocracy.org/the-state-of-nature.

      I don’t want to live in a world where the strongest or best shooting dumb guy is always the ruler but I instinctually feel that we need something like the above in our and affluent and therapeutic culture. There is a vitality in naked natural selection.

  20. One of Musashi’s most famous encounters was with a staff fighter. The staff fighter beat him in their first encounter but spared him. Musashi got a rematch, won, and spared the staff fighter. Another was with a very famous swordsman who was known for his long sword that gave him superior reach. Musashi baited/trolled him with messages to work him into a fury, and was whittling a boat oar on the beach when the opponent approached Musashi in a fury. You guessed it, Musashi beaned him on the head with the boat oar, which was heavy and could not be blocked by the opponent’s sword.

      • Tars made the kung fu brother- endless black belts, 50 years of martial arts- roar with laughter.

        Thank you Whiskey and Tars
        Tarkas

        • See?

          I told you guys Whiskey is fun.

          Judging from the local bars, he is also correct about the dating predilections of young white women.

  21. A lot of this dovetails with my own observations about the current overall lay of the land

    During covid I noticed, we all did, that normie whitey was becoming a little more critical of BLM and black misbehavior in general. He was home, not at work, by himself, and the mind began to wander.

    I work at home by myself and have the luxury of not having to share space and my time with people I don’t want to, say black or SJW co-workers, so from my perspective it was always easy to simply tune it out. If I turn off the tv and internet, these people cease to exist in my world. And there are ways to avoid them when out in public, Add it all up, I can be critical of these people in private and in my life because I don’t have to actually deal directly with them.. in short, being a dissident is easy.

    My point was, that lots of normie whites WOULD be more receptive to our views and would start to drift our way if they simply had jobs where they didn’t have to deal with blacks — or whatever group. But they have to train their minds to be empathetic and considerate of, say, BLM because they have to merge their private face with their public face. Very hard to separate the two. Very hard to be a dissident while if you peep a dissident idea at work by accident you can get fired. So they train themselves to be the good white person open to the views of others. “Oh Jim? Yeah he’s white but he’s cool. He gets it.” So many white people make it their point in life to be THAT mythical white personal loved by the POC and the gays and everyone else.

    Moral of the story. Not until whites can find some independent means of survival will they be in a position and also able to detach themselves from the liberal orthodoxy and see things clearly and honestly and begin to get to know who they are.

    So if any of you are struggling with a work life at odds with your personal life and personal beliefs and ideas, it’s time to make a decision. No?

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    • A lot of the antiwhites and SJWs are “woke” on race. You really cannot live in a multicultural city and not know the truth about race. You simply couldn’t survive. But they will pretend to not notice that the more the vibrants show up to something and the larger percentage the crowd is vibrant, the less enjoyable something is and so it falls out favor and they move on to something else.
      In my yoof, South Street was a big place in center city (Philadelphia) for all the freaks and weirdos and was quite a spectacle. You’d see the punk rockers and people with tattoos and piercings on their face while dressed in leather…..
      Though it still has some of the vibe, it’s mostly gone and really only during the day. By night time there are groups of vibrants hanging on every corner, fighting and just doing the stuff vibrants do. Meanwhile, the freaks and weirdos just found other places to go.

      I think they think we make them act this way. They just cannot accept that it’s not socialization or not enough gibs or not accepted enough. Whatever the problem is, whitey caused it. More importantly, whitey can fix it.

      • The problem is that they are feral animals that can’t be trained to live in a white society.

        It’s just not gonna happen.

        Dogs sure look like cats, but no one would mistake the two.

        Separation (ill avoid the peaceful adjective as it appears that it’s not gonna happen), is the long term solution.

    • Excellent comment. It is for this very reason I do not expect Boomers and to a greater extent late X’ers to remain very long in the work place.

    • Totally agree Falcone. I see the “cool white guy” every day. Among athletes in particular, but also just regular guys. It goes the other way too though. When blacks or other ebonics speaking minorities see that I’m not one of the cool white guys they switch to the “educated Negro” dialect. This shows (in their opinion) that they are one of the good ones.

      I’ve been in a room with the cool white guy and a bunch of blacks. We ended up having the cool white guy speaking ebonics while the blacks were speaking in the “good ones” dialect to me. Everybody pretends not to notice anything.

      To the other point, I’m surprised they let the lockdowns go on this long for just that reason. It’s pretty clear looking around that more than a few middle aged white guys have had too much to think these past 18 months.

  22. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Book of Five Rings

  23. You see that in the Indian Wars. At first we were showing up in troop formation with drums and banners and of course the Indians just scattered into the plains. It wasn’t until the Texas Rangers started stealth fighting that we started winning.
    Super excited about the show. Never even heard of this book

    • The Texas Rangers started winning because acquired six-shooters, the first firearm with a firepower comparable to the Comanche longbow. Before the six-shooter, they had to climb off their horses to re-load. Now they could fire 12-24 shots before they had to cease fire.

      And the Rangers weren’t sneaking about taking pot shots, they rode straight at them at full gallop to break their formations open and send them scattering, so they could kill their spare ponies, of which each brave would travel with five to ten.

      https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Empire-of-the-Summer-Moon/S-C-Gwynne/9781416591061

      • An interest book to read is “Scalp Dance”. A compendium of scout reports from the plains Indian wars. Basically Sheridan took over after the Civil War ended and began a war of extermination. He fought in the winter, raided Indian winter encampments, drove them into the snow, killed all ponies, burned all food stocks.

        Those Indians that were fortunate to reach reservations survived—but it wasn’t many. He broke their backs within a few short years. Another thing to note is that the Indians worse enemy were themselves. Without Indian scouts/guides from other hostile camps, the war could not have been waged.

        Sounds familiar?

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        • Thanks. I really loved Empire of the Summer Moon and have been looking around for something similar, only to discover that most histories of the Indians are written by Mother Earth-loving liberals.

          • Try something different than the Plains Wars of the 19th century. The natives of the Eastern Woodlands in the 18th century are almost never mentioned and that’s crucial to the history of how the Anglo-French wars in America turned out. There’s more than the Little Big Horn.

          • @Moe Noname
            James Fennimore Cooper

            I was hoping you wouldn’t say that. I never managed to get more than 100 pages into The Last of the Mohicans and I’ve given it three tries.

            It is a bleak testimony to our degrading reading skills that such a ponderous, philosophical tome was a bestseller 100 years ago while few today would read it cover to cover unless forced to.

          • Try these- won’t post the links so it doesn’t get thrown in spam jail.

            Karen Ordahl Kupperman-
            “Indians and English-Facing off in Early America”

            Richard White-
            “The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815”

            James H. Merrell-
            “Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier“

            Michael N. McConnell-
            “A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774“

            William N. Fenton-
            “The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy“

            Unlike the Plains Wars, which happen after the industrial revolution totally changes the balance of power, the 18th century is a very different story, where men like Sir William Johnson are adopted as natives and he marries a Mohawk woman who is treated exactly as a English lady by other Englishmen-something unthinkable in 1876, but barely raised an eyebrow in 1756, or 1776, as shown below.

            “Captain Carleton
            of the 31st English Regiment and first aide-de-camp to his uncle, the Governor and General, has lived with the Indians a number of years in this manner. He went through all the severe ordeals they subject themselves to in order to show their fortitude, and had himself tattooed with the signs and totems with which they are accustomed to decorate themselves. He even went so far as to take a wife from among them, and he asserts that the hours he spent with them were the happiest of his life. You cannot imagine a more refined, gentle, friendly, well-mannered, and, at the
            same time, a more unaffected man than Captain Carleton ; and although his constitution has become wrecked and delicate, he still continues to command the Indians who constitute our advanced guard, and by whom he is greatly beloved…”

            From a letter of a Brunswick officer in Canada, 1776.

      • @Pickle Rick

        Thanks, I’ll definitely see what I can pick up.

        I’ve been offline for the last few month, and my ebook was running on fumes.

        • It will be quite different than what you expect. The first thing most fail to understand is that native nations here are not monolithic “Indians” anymore than Europeans are monocultural. (I do believe you are European, correct?) They have very different languages, histories, territories, enmities and cultures that varied as much as the differences between an Englishman and a Russian in the same time period.
          The biggest thing is the technological and civilizational gap between the Europeans and the natives was much narrower in the 18th century. A backcountry Ulster Scot came from a cultural milieu not very different than a Mohawk. There’s a reason that Haudenosenee sachems regularly came to London and were treated with respect- respect that never was extended (deservedly so) to Africans, who were never invited to London to meet a Hanoverian King.

          • Yes, I’m from Denmark, but I’m aware that there were hundreds or even thousands of quite different Indian tribes, some of them even frowning at the genocide, slavery, cannibalism and recreational torture that most plains Indians practiced.

            But to tell you the truth, it’s the bloodyminded savagery that most fascinates me about Indians; it’s like a window into early Stone Age culture where, according to archaeologists, upward of 50% of all males died a violent death.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1y_0NfhF9c

      • Might want to look at _Captured by The Indians: 15 Firsthand Accounts_, edited by Frederick Drummer. Getting captured was a bad day, but it wouldn’t be your worst day. That came later.

        • It depends on who you were in Woodlands culture and the situation.
          First, you had to be able to keep up with the war party on their way out from enemy territory. Those who couldn’t were killed. If you made it back to the town, you ran the gauntlet, which differed in severity based on sex and age.

          For women, it was simply touching them, because women were always adopted into a matriarch’s family. Fully grown men were almost never adopted and got the full beating in the gauntlet, then the torture to dry the tears of a matriarch mourning the loss of a male. Boys and girls were adopted because they could adapt to growing up with a native identity.
          Contrary to some Plains nations, sexual assault on female captives was strictly forbidden in Woodland native cultures. Because females were literally adopted as blood relatives, raping a female captive would have violated the incest taboo. However, escape was punished with death.

  24. What’s the old Mark Twain quote? The greatest swordfighter in the world need not fear the second-greatest swordfighter. He need fear the man who’s never held a sword in his hands… That seemed to be how a handful of meme-making youngsters and a real estate baron with a twitter account accidentally did an end-run around the two most powerful dynasties in America, the Bushes and Clintons. But the thing about the element of surprise is you seem to only get it once, and the electoral system has “fortified itself” and literally fortified its imperial capitol to prevent an army of white peasants and some lesser noble like Trump from trying again. Now our best hope is for the thin blood lines of our rulers to work against them, for the young Bidens to smoke their lungs black with crack and the young Kennedys to drive their cars into the cold waters of Martha’s Vineyard (hopefully with no dirt people secretaries in the passenger seat), and for their decadent, enervated billionaire backers to destroy themselves before us. Good spiritual and mental health are more important than ever. No porn, no junk food, no junk culture.

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    • It is why I support an open boycott of the next election around election reform. The elimination of mail-in ballots, voter ID, pubic audits of elections, etc. The Contract With Democracy campaign. If you want our votes, you must reform the voting system first.

      The system has no good way to deal with this yet.

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      • Why would they do that, Z? As you say – get inside their heads. They profit from the status quo and their sole interest is to keep it that way. Indeed, they intend to, through the use of force if necessary. The troops, concertina wire and tanks are proof of their resolve. The fighting tips are going to be needed in the days ahead. We will not be voting our way out of what’s coming.

        • Resolve my skinny patootie. Those troops (National Guard, weekend warriors), concertina wire (wasn’t really, but for the masses who can’t the difference between a foxhole and a latrine ditch, who cares), and tanks (National Guard, so shit only gets PCMS’d on the weekend) were also security theater. It did its effect successfully on you and lots of other people while the commander of the Washington D.C. NG figured out a way to blow off some that two week annual training time.

          Nah, the real threat and force came from the cops, whome murdered a woman protester IIRC.

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        • Someone here recommended that “revolutions” podcast and although the presenter is a total tool, his character driven narratives keep in engaging. Anyway, in his relating of the tales it seems like a consistent generator of crisis in aging empires is when those who interact with that empire think that the rulers might be signing checks that their populations won’t cash.

      • I say boycott electoral politics, period. Outside of falling on its own sword–a particularly apposite metaphor today–there is nothing the Power Structure can do to make the system amenable to our side ; the forces of anti-whiteness are far too entrenched. The only real choice is between separation from the Power Structure and subjugation followed by slow-motion genocide.

        • Ostei: I agree, and in support I offer an exceptionally good article today at Counter Currents from Nick Jeelvy: https://counter-currents.com/2021/07/in-defense-of-echo-chambers/
          And to others here – whether you still vote or not, I cannot recommend this article highly enough (probably because it conforms so well to my own viewpoint!). I would be interested in your riposte, Zman, because I don’t think it mirrors your own views as closely.

      • Well, as with alcoholics, the first step to rehabilitation is to admit you have a problem. Conservative Inc has, for the most part, not admitted such. For example, Hugh Hewitt will hang up on callers who bring the subject up—simply calling them “nutters” and proclaiming the election was “won” by Biden and there is no evidence of significant cheating. This hypocrite even wrote a book 20 years ago entitled, “If it’s not close, they can’t cheat” which decried Leftist election cheating at the time.

        He also was the first to promote masks and now vaccines with the tired old refrain about “killing grandma” if not done. All negative comments wrt the current vaccine are hung up on. He screens calls, so there are few.

        He is the epitome of what we’ve termed a “gatekeeper”. He always, of course, returns to the Conservative Inc, neocon war drum beating against the Chinese and a call for more military spending and a greater belligerent stance to all enemies of Israel. There is also plenty of time spent on the theme of working harder, voting harder, and we’ll get them next election. The only upside thought wrt HH is that his audience is definitely composed mostly of Boomers who will die off with him. None-the-less, his show is probably in line to replace Rush in number of listeners in the not too distant future. I believe it’s number two now.

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        • Compsci: I actually called into Hugh Hewitt and got on the air once – in 2008 before Obama’s coronation. I recall that whatever it was I commented on, I disagreed with the host – I was well on my way off the ConInc. reservation by then.

        • I went through a period of listening again to Con, Inc., talk radio immediately after the election for a few months. My take was different (although I did not listen to Hugh Hewitt, to be fair). They really seemed lost and confused that what they believed was a lie and a grift. They would mouth the same platitudes but it sounded quite insincere.

          It may not have been admitting there is a problem but it was a close relation.

        • I’ve never listened/read the guy.

          I’m glad to see my time wasn’t wasted. There seem to be a bunch of carbon copies of the guy you described each with some minor issue to distinguish them.

    • “Good spiritual and mental health are more important than ever.”

      This does seem to be the one area that hardcore wokists are always losing on. However, poor mental health and lack of spiritual strength seems to be taking a hold in many normal types, too. It is the demoralization – or attempted demoralization – of whites that is the most insidious weapon.

      I made this point to a co-worker yesterday. The shamdemic has helped him see how daft and evil the state actually is, and I’ve also pushed a it of race realism his way, but I pointed out that we must fight to stay strong in the mind, because there are (certainly at my workplace) True Believers and GATGAs (Go Along To Get Along) galore.

      He was telling me of the company BBQ, held a couple of days ago, in which one colleague – in his sixties – went around asking people “So, have you had the vaccine?”. I didn’t attend because I knew something like this would happen. It must always come up because people either don’t have anything to talk about, or they think nobody wants to hear about their love of Shakespeare.

      At this point, I’ll take the tedious Shakespeare over Covid small-talk. It’s simply all so tiresome.

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      • These npc people just talk about whatever they are programmed to follow in their targeted marketing vectors (TV, radio,papers etc).

        At the moment its the pox, at some point the coverage will be something else and they will barely even remember they spent every walking moment banging on about it.

      • I’ve said it before, it is nobody’s goddamn business what medicines I choose to take or not take.

        My response when asked this question is to ignore it the first time. If the interrogator persists, I respond that it is none of his business and let him know that the question he asked was rude.

        • Why not just tell them that you’re taking antipsychotics as a result of your aggravated assault conviction, and they’ve promised to expunge the records when you complete your probation. 😃

      • “So, have you had the vaccine?”

        I give them the chad “no” – that usually ends the small-talk.

        Granted, I didn’t get along with my colleagues to start with and can afford a ZFG attitude at work.

      • My response to this sort of thing is usually
        Thanks for being concerned for my health, hows the syphilis cure going?

        the response to their flustered denial?

        Oh, I’m sorry, look around over his his shoulder, I must have misunderstood him…

        He’ll be leaving you alone from now on.

    • the young Kennedys to drive their cars into the cold waters of Martha’s Vineyard (hopefully with no dirt people secretaries in the passenger seat)

      Gotta give credit where credit is due: RFKjr has been simply outstanding on the question of pediatric vaccines.

      We don’t need him drowning at Martha’s Vineyard, we need him on the front lines of this war.

  25. After WWII, Germany was divided between the four “winning” powers. Japan’s future was determined by a single opponent, the US, with virtually no input from any of the former colonies and dependencies exploited by the Japanese. It’s purpose was to create a democratic, peaceful entity that could occupy a place on the world stage. Forgotten were the victims of Japanese imperialism and they remain basically ignored by the US even today while the Japanese economy and standard of living rank near the top of the world.

    Of course memories eventually fade but surely there remains in Asia not only a resentment of the Japanese return to an element of power but also the role of the US in consciously creating it. Chinese, Filipinos, Indonesians and others must wonder what the advantage might be in allying with the US when the Yankees plant what the Japanese harvest.

    6
    3
        • You’re right. Investigating and analyzing US foreign policy that affects the lives of all Americans and millions of others is a fetish. On the other hand, worrying over the internet presence of faux conservatives that most people have never heard of makes perfect sense.

          5
          5
    • nailheadtom: Very few on the dissident right believe in American imperialism as a good thing; why on earth should we want to ally with the “Chinese, Filipinos, Indonesians, and others”? We sent all our manufacturing to China and they hold most of our worthless currency and bonds. The Philippines sent a lot of its thots to America, where they pop out rather unattractive hapa-beaner babies. Indonesians are Mohammedans; their interests and future are not ours.

      Since you appear to be driven by anti-American animus rather than logic, your comments often contradict one another. White Americans should not and do not seek to ally with alien cultures on the other side of the world. What you want, precisely, is unclear, except that it appears to subordinate the interests of White people in the Anglosphere to various third-world non-Whites.

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      2
      • Maybe the US has never made a mistake in foreign policy, correct? Doesn’t the US have a nearly immaculate record in its dealings with the rest of the world? Of course ignoring history is the very best way to avoid repeating it and accepting mythology as truth is the surest way to a successful future.

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        3
      • “why on earth should we want to ally with the Chinese, Filipinos, Indonesians, and others?”

        Because we face a ferocious enemy here at home that’s on the verge of completely defeating us and we have practically no allies, resources, or even a viable strategy to fight back (and no one would follow it even if we did). Whatever you’ve been doing for the last half century clearly isn’t working. Besides, why should you care if we ally with people who can help us beat back our mutual enemies? Isn’t that better than total defeat?

        “Since you appear to be driven by anti-American animus rather than logic”

        Just go ahead and keep waving that flag. Hobble yourself by pledging loyalty to the symbols and institutions of the people who hate you. Any day now that’ll work. … any day now.

        “White Americans should not and do not seek to ally with alien cultures on the other side of the world.”

        THIS is why we lost. And I do mean “lost” not “losing” because it’s all but over now. Whites are simply too individualistic to survive in this world. Groups, and those capable of forming alliances, always defeat the lone wolves, no matter how capable those wolves think they are. Ask Rome. They beat back Germanics with similar, perhaps superior, cognitive and physical abilities for centuries because they worked together as a unit and had a keen understanding of politics.

        American Whites are hopeless and doomed. Boomer Whites will just go their own way, grillin and chillin — dispensing bad advice and repeating the same mistakes until it all collapses.

        • Besides, why should you care if we ally with people who can help us beat back our mutual enemies? Isn’t that better than total defeat?

          That’s the epic mistake Cromwell made in 1656 – and it was precisely that mistake which put us on the road to the disaster we’re experiencing today.

          Never assume that the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

          It’s far & away the worst mistake a statesman can possibly make.

    • Oh, get off it. The US fought the Pacific War near single-handedly. Not too figuratively, either, given American forces were deployed in Europe as well. Yes, the Aussies assisted and the Brits contributed a thing or two (why they even bothered is beyond me since ended up giving up everything later on), but the Americans bled the most in that theatre. Any division of Japan post-war would’ve been completely arbitrary and at the pressure of the Soviets, why not demand and see what happens? As such, they were politely told to shove off given they had done all the heavy lifting in Europe and already gotten all they wanted there.

      And all these victimes are forgotten. Oh ho ho lol, no. The Chinese and Koreans and every other country in the region never waste an opportunity to remind the world they were a victim. Any excuse will work too. Some Nippon business executive got caught railing a Chinese prostitute while on business? Suddenly protests start and Japanese-owned businesses in China are getting trashed. The Emperor visits the Yasakuni Jinja to commemorate *his own country’s* fallen, the Koreans fall over themselves to whine about colonialism and put up stupid bleeding heart statues near the Japanese embassy. 25 years ago all these grievance mongers had a legit claim, when the victims were still alive, but today it’s just all political cudgels to use.

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    • With the exception of the Chinese and Koreans, all the other countries Japan shit on had the opportunity—post WWII—to make something of themselves, but failed to do so. Why? Could it be they have room temp IQ’s and they, themselves, are the problem? Could Japan simply be their scapegoat for their own failings?

      If these countries think an alliance with the US is a guarantee of security in perpetuity, then they are dumber than their national IQ would indicate. A country such as Indonesia has a population double that of Japan, yet a national income per capita of about $4K—Japan, $40k!

      Get your act together and you need not fear Japan. Until then, be thankful you have common interests—and enemies, Japan will handle them for you.

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  26. Z – most of us hit that point of wisdom and purpose after the responsibilities involved with kids and family land on us. Unlike yourself, a lot of bachelors and divorced guys seem completely feckless and inspired. They act like big kids collecting whatever toys catch their attention.

    13
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    • Naval Ravant has a good quote about how the most successful people in the future will be those most able to resist addiction.

      Porn, social media, drugs, alcohol, endless electronic amusements, etc. So much time wasted to no lasting effect.

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    • Reminds me of those childfree people (mostly women) online.

      “Today I SLEPT IN, and me and my partner had SEX. Then we went for lunch at a SPICY restaurant, because we have SO MUCH MONEY. I love being childfree!!!”

      Like wow, good for you, cool story. Then everybody clapped.

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      • “Today I SLEPT IN four weeks’ unwashed sheets, and me and my fourth partner of the week had SEX. Then we went for lunch at a SPICY restaurant, staffed by illegals and dirty people and with a poor hygiene rating, because we have SO MUCH MONEY from whoring ourselves to GloboCorp. I love being childfree!!!… and dependent on cats, wine, multiple sexual partners and The State.”

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      • Ask them what their plans are for end of life—alone, no family to care for them or advocate for them, in terminal care surrounded by third worlders who make and post videos bragging of their abuse of them in their most vulnerable moment.

        One has to have a whole lot of great memories to ease that pain. No thanks.

        • Even the expensive nursing homes are now staffed with third worlders. Just nicer Filipinas instead of blacks and mexicans.

          Wait till 2050 when todays 20 and 30 something’s start getting old and sick (if we even have a healthcare system by then).

    • If they tend towards incel or are the nerdy type, you will know them by their Star Wars T-shirt.

  27. Book 1, The Ground
    In reprise of Socrates.
    Gnothi Seauton, “Know thyself”
    What is life like outside my cave?
    What is my life strategy?
    Am I a poet, a warrior, a priest, a sage?
    40 years about right.

  28. Sadly, I have not read Musashi. But I grew up in the same strange, faraway country, so I remember a lot of those “Confucius say” jokes from back then, so if you need some cheap chuckles on a Friday…. “Confucius say, man who walk sideways through airport turnstile going to Bangkok.”

    (I guess I should also have a real comment, so here goes: that’s why Whitey came to dominate the planet, right there. Some other group is doing better at something than we are? Let’s figure out what it is, then do it if we can. Other groups reject that approach as not in keeping with the holy book, or the ways of the forefathers, or whatever. Whitey had no problem admitting that some other group had superior ways… and then incorporating them. (As opposed to, say, blacks, who would have started yelling about how Musashi was *really* African)).

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    • I think we can credit the Romans for this. “What? Our style of war does not work in rough terrain? No problem, let’s invent a new one.”

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      • Yes the Romans were completely willing to adopt superior weapons and tactics used by their enemies. For example, the broad bladed gladius was adopted from a tribe in Spain they conquered and replaced the Roman sword with a thinner blade. The legion was based on and an improvement over the Greek phalanx.

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        • The Romans changed their style of fighting entirely when confronted by the Samnites, who were a mountain people. The Roman style could not work in that terrain, so they studied the Samnites and adapted. The Romans were implacable and always focused on their larger goals. Musashi would have appreciated their tenacity and commitment.

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        • Things really amped up when Russell Crowe made an appearance at the front lines. He was stabbing, decapitating and pommel-smashing every bearded Germanic in sight.

    • Confuscious say man who go to bed with itchy butt wake up with stinky fingers.

      Oh the timeless classics.

      Wanna here my Jo Mamma jokes? Jo Mamma so fat she ….

      • Confucius say, man who stand on toilet bowl get high on pot.

        Ahh, the good old days. I know the younger generation will never believe this, but I learned the very best “Confucius say” jokes from the Asian kids I hung around with. I’d tease them about eating dogs and knowing Kung Fu, they’d tease me about sending a rocket to the sun at night and building submarines with screen doors, and then we’d all go play basketball. God I miss that country I grew up in, the beautiful Land of Nod, just to the east of Eden…

      • “Wanna here my Jo Mamma jokes? Jo Mamma so fat she ….”

        Why not, it’s Friday. “Yo’ Mama so fat, she’s on both sides of the family!”

      • Jo Momma so fat her car has stretch marks. Jo Momma so stupid she thought quarterback was a refund. Jo Momma so ugly, when she little, they made her trick-or-treat by phone.

        I’ve spent much of the summer in the wilderness. About to head out next week for the terrain beyond the mountains and east of Juneau solo. With my sense of humor, root for the bears to get me.

        • Try the Chilkoot Trail all the way to Whitehorse. I did it on my honeymoon back in 1983 and still have fond memories; plus picked up the best wool cap I’ve ever owned.

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