Imagine you are interviewing for a job and during the course of the initial interview you learn that the future boss is a big fan of F1 racing. This grabs your attention because you are also a fan of auto racing, especially Formula 1. You mention this to the interviewer who then tells you he is also a big racing fan. He jokes that he got the job because the big boss is a F1 fan. Eventually you get the job and find out that many of your coworkers are race fans, weekend gearheads and so on.
Now, an interest in motorsports has nothing to do with the work of the company or any of the jobs in the company, but the culture of the company, driven in large part by the big boss, has a strong connection with motorsports. Over time, even those with little interest in the hobby get interested because so many people at the company have a strong interest in the topic and talk about it often. As a result, the selection pressure favors gearheads and boils off those who were not gearheads.
This is not an uncommon phenomenon. Every company has a culture, even the largest corporations, and it usually stems from the founding stock of the company. A big part of mergers and acquisitions is to assimilate the acquired company into the culture of the purchasing company. In the case of a genuine merger, one culture eventually dominates the other. Truly merging two cultures is impossible unless they are so close that the differences are superficial.
Something like a company-wide interest in motorsports is a useful way of understanding the much deeper aspects of organizational culture. The sorts of people who into car racing are going to have a set of common personality traits. Race fans will tend to be more risk tolerant and more interested in problem solving. If the big boss was a woman into her church, the company culture would reflect the nature of women who are active in their church. That company would be more conservative.
The culture of an organization is ultimately about how the organism as a whole goes about solving the problems for which the organization was formed. In the case of a company, the primary challenge is profit, but every industry has peculiar challenges when it comes to holding down costs and maximizing sales. The culture of the company evolved to meet those challenges. Successful firms have evolved internal processes upon which it relies to solve these daily issues.
This is important in understanding the nature of a crisis. In business, there are good years and bad years, no matter how well run the firm. The business cycle is immutable, it seems, and it is often industry specific. The firms with a good company culture are built to ride these waves, minimizing losses on the down swing, and maximizing profits on the upswing. The not so well run firms face a crisis in the down years, struggling to hold on, but party like rock stars during the good times.
There are two types of crises. One is the normal challenges that face every organization regardless of its culture. The down times feel like a crisis to the well run business, but they have the tools to manage it, so it is a situational crisis. Getting through it is simply a matter of execution. For the firm lacking a culture prepared to address the down years, the crisis is structural. Their survival does not depend on their execution, because they lack the necessary tools. Instead, it relies on fortune.
Put another way, the crisis that truly threaten the existence of the firm is one with roots that go back to its origin. If in the case of the well-run company the nature of the business changes dramatically, it will face a genuine crisis for which it may not be equipped to solve. It then has a crisis with roots to its founding. The crisis that threatens the viability of an organization is always going to be one that started long before it was noticed and is a symptom of a systemic problem.
This is a useful way of thinking about how the managerial elite of the American empire is prepared for the future. The culture of the elite is, in many respects, a product of a bygone era in the empire. During the Cold War it was a bipolar world, but in reality, it was a unipolar world from the 1970’s until the end. The Soviets had turned conservative and were no longer a realistic ideological threat. The party was just holding onto power by minimizing risk. America was the center of the universe.
What this means is that for a few generations now, the system has been selecting for people who will serve an established system. In the early part of the 20th century, the system selected for creative people, risk takers and those willing to reconsider the old way of doing things. The old order was giving way to a new order. America was on the cusp of becoming a global empire and it needed talent at the top to help reorganize domestically and solve the challenges globally.
In the present crisis, the culture of the ruling class is lacking the tools to address the problems, but it also lacks the sort of people who will look outside the system. It has been selecting for highly conservative people, with respect to the culture of the managerial class, for generations now. It is why the system violently vomited up Donald Trump and continues to dry heave over the memory of him. The culture of the ruling class is built around adversity to change.
The old Hemingway line about bankruptcy is overused, but it reveals the truth about the dynamics of a collapse. In retrospect, the signs were all there, but the modes of thought at the time made it difficult to detect. The collapse of the Soviet Union is a great example of the Hemingway quote. It was happening a little at a time starting with Khrushchev and then happened all of a sudden under Gorbachev. The culture of the system prevented it from meeting the challenges of the age.
This may be what we are seeing today. The culture of the American ruling elite began to adapt to the unipolar world in the 1970’s. That is when the great outsource of the industrial base began as part of the financialization of the economy. It was formalized in the currency arrangements of the 1980’s and has remained static ever since. It is an old system built for an age that no longer exists. The crisis is the conflict between their view of the world and the reality of the world.
It is easy to see that America has a culture problem, but it is not what people think of when they hear the term. It is much deeper than the bourgeois degeneracy we see in the mass media. It is the structure of the ruling class. Their understanding of reality is rooted in a world that no longer exists. Its culture of problem solving is no longer compatible with present reality. Like the poorly run firm hoping to weather a downturn in the business cycle, they are counting on luck to save them.
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For today’s outside reading assignment, I recommend:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-exodus-angelo-codevilla-oligarchy
The passing (tragically unexpected) of the author of this piece is a profoundly unhelpful occurrence. A great voice from our side of the political/social chasm has been lost.
Thanks SteveinPA.
Smart essay.
-JohnWayneinPa
It is easy to see that America has a culture problem, but it is not what people think of when they hear the term. It is much deeper than the bourgeois degeneracy we see in the mass media. It is the structure of the ruling class. It’s a lot worse than that. As you allude to it goes back to the beginning. People immigrated to the US for one of two reasons. Religious zealots came here to build their heaven on earth. And everyone else came here to get rich and quick. Those two founding cultures have reverberated through the… Read more »
Just remember this. Shit may be bad but think of the things you do have
Not serving a life sentence
Ability to walk see and hear
A family (at least I hope so)
Wow, now you’ve really bummed me out sitting here in my wheelchair in Supermax, man!
At least you have a Braille Display and Keyboard. Think positive, Man!
One of the corollary disadvantages of freelancing your way into the future is that confirmation bias always paints an overly rosy picture, e.g. never-ending goods & services for as far as the eye can see. In addition, the Comfort First Imperative prevents everyone from ever imagining just how bad things might get in a worst case scenario, e.g. the social safety net is perceived as being not only super reliable but a pretty cushy high bottom if you happen to hit it. We’ve reached the stage where whistling-past-the-graveyard is the default response to every problem. And yet, a collapse is… Read more »
In addition, the Comfort First Imperative prevents everyone from ever imagining just how bad things might get in a worst case scenario, e.g. the social safety net is perceived as being not only super reliable but a pretty cushy high bottom if you happen to hit it. Granted, I have a lot of trouble figuring out Normies, but what the he11 kinda personality type could have witnessed everything we’ve seen in the last three or four years – an utterly corrupt DOJ & Deep State inventing fake crimes & fake impeachments out of thin air [mirroring a Federal Reserve inventing… Read more »
Joe Normie lives in a nice 4 bedroom, 3 bath suburban home, 2 autos (SUV for the misses), 54 inch flat screen TV with surround sound, bass boat, 2 kids, and a dog. He earns low 6 figures, has a 401k, golfs several times a month, and spends about $5k each year on the family vacation, He simply cannot allow himself to believe that it could all evaporate in the span of a few weeks, He desperately needs to believe in voting harder because he knows that he would be utterly worthless to his family in a truly chaotic collapse… Read more »
He simply cannot allow himself to believe that it could all evaporate in the span of a few weeks
I’m telling you, that steadfast refusal to ponder the imponderable is a failure of an existential darwinian sh!t-test.
It absolutely boggles my mind that in this day & age, ostensible adults could live as psychological ostriches with their heads thrust so deep into the sand of The Narrative that they won’t even realize when their necks have been machete’ed.
tl;dr = Chicken Little got a bad rap.
Not My Usual Pen Name: Thank you for wise words – and for making me smile this morning.
Eschatologically we all start and end up in the same place, alive then not alive.
Politically we all started out around the same edenic place. Young, immature, trusting, naive, gullible, patriotic. Now we find ourselves in a distant place. Mature, cynical, aware. Enlightenment.
When you reach enlightenment, that level of awareness, knowledge of good & evil, after having progressed at your own pace, that is when you begin to prepare. Prepare now. A reckoning is coming. Talking, writing, voting, hoping won’t fix things. We are leaderless. We have no Pericles. Make like the squirrel, collect acorns.
“Some problems don’t have a solution”. Does anyone believe enough Caucasians are going to move back to Chicago to elect white leadership again? Detroit? At first I couldn’t understand how George Floyd and Michael Brown could become cultural icons. But speaking of culture, I finally realized these thugs are perfectly appropriate cultural icons of the 13%.
Actually, Detroit finally wised up and elected a white dude who was a former prosecutor to the mayorship.
He, and the chief of police there, were the main reasons there wasn’t much BLM activity in Detroit last summer.
Yeah, come to think about it, Ted Wheeler of Portland is Caucasian. Hooray for our side?
They became icons because of the MSM and a black worshiping POTUS who rolled over as cities burned.
[…] ZMan does a deep dive. […]
Please forgive my ignorance as I am not well educated. Could someone define “financialization of the economy” for me? Z has used the term several times. A quick Google search did not clear it up for me. I
Alone in the northeast: Don’t use google. Search Zman’s own site. We don’t manufacture or make anything – junk bonds, hedge funds, leveraging, earning profit by borrowing against digital financial assets loaned to another hedge fund – it’s all a game and dirt people aren’t players. You are an economic unit of production, easily replaced by another.
You don’t write like a chick.
And I’m starting to be suspicious of your chick bona fides.
Not My Usual Pen Name: Now you made me giggle! And I called my husband at work to share your lovely compliment and he laughed, too.
See Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
Northeast, a switch from making things to making money by moving money around.
All those tall buildings in NYC used to house women on sewing machines making clothes.
Now they’re all ‘offices’ for one kind of paperwork or another.
“If the big boss was a woman into her church, the company culture would reflect the nature of women who are active in their church. That company would be more conservative.”
“Women who are active in church” sounds like a nightmare. Paul himself warned about such a thing. What would happen is that the church would, sooner or later, have lesbian priests and bishops.
And how many times have we seen this exact thing?
.And many things to unsensibly prepare for and fear: Lions, tigers, and Covid oh my. Bears, social media, and men oh my!
“And how many times have we seen this exact thing?”
The Rainbow Faith ™?
Every. Single. Protestant. Church. In. My. Town.
This is the point I was trying to make in the last couple threads: What you’re describing is known in the trade as a “T@rget Rich Environment”…
“And how many times have we seen this exact thing?”
I like John Knox’s 1550 or so “First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women”, preceded by 1800 years or so by Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae.
Nothing much of note of late.
Meanwhile, on the predictive programming front, the video game Deus Ex seems to have called…just about everything we are seeing now…way back in 2000:
Deus Ex Redpills (3:45):
https://gab.com/NeonRevolt/posts/106976042244702825
Deus Ex Truth Bomb Compilation (35:48)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46oDDnE1Z6o
Big advantage having a female CEO especially a poc Woman, government contracts. I’m a cog in the MIC. The ceo is a strong Woman. Caucasian and hetero. Company wouldn’t last six months without the .government trough. Dosen’t hold a real winning hand lol.
When I look in the mirror I have to grit my teeth & think bleed the beast & if it isn’t me it will be someone less competent. & more of our whiteboys will die for “our greatest allie” in the next hassle.
“Their understanding of reality is rooted in a world that no longer exists.”
A blinding statement of the obvious, but this is true to the 1000th power for the “conservative movement” with its worship of Lincoln and “equality” which invariably reduces humanity to an anthill of indistinguishable ants — who, however, each possess their Lockean natural rights. You simply cannot talk to or reason with those people. Their brains are imprisoned by Enlightenment anthropological and teleological fantasies. Perhaps they’ll get some Afghan neighbors. That might provide a wake-up but then again, probably not.
Even their picture of an anthill is wrong. If you want the ultimate in classism and racism, look to the ants.
Then again, maybe not.
Queens supported by mindless drones, until the colony dies in a genocide. They haven’t learned a damm thing in 160 million years.
I agree with everything here. And the degeneracy is a feature not a bug. It’s going to be quite something when this crisis does hit. One thing I’ve noticed with the older crowd, mostly recent retirees, is that regardless of politics, and regardless of education level, from top to bottom, they’re not even hard wired to conceive of a Soviet like failure of the country. If you find an old person who cares about this they’re quite an outlier and probably a dissident. The younger you get, the less shocked everyone will be. I’ve had many conversations with these people,… Read more »
Being 85 or older must be weird. You’re old enough to see the bookends of American civilization.
Being in your early seventies works too. I remember watching Fess Parker as Davy Crockett on TV and wearing a coonskin hat to school. Wouldn’t like to see the Disney remake of its Davy Crockett frontier fighter franchise.
Crockett would have a gay relationship with some Indian guy, and be fighting against White settlers on behalf of the Indians. Or he’d just straight-up be the villain.
And he’d be played by Samuel L. Jackson. LaDa’vius Brokeback Crockett.
Watching Samuel L. Jackson act is my guilty pleasure. Watching him fu@k his wife, is Ben Shapiro’s. Could anyone but a dissident construct this sentence?
“Watching him fu@k his wife..”
Watching him fu@k his grandaughter….
FIFY.
Me too, coonskin cap and all. I have videos of those to show my small grandchildren when the time is right. Have “Song of the South” too. PLEEZE don´t mention your remake idea to anyone who works for Disney! Just think of the possibilities!
Zippity doo dah. There is no bookend to the right. The books are just sliding off the tilting shelf.
Neither would I at 68. Crockett would be cast as a black lesbian in a wheelchair.
65 years or older would do the trick.
My great, great grandfather was born in England at the height of the Victorian era and died during World War II. I have wondered what he thought of what happened to the world and his country over the course of his life. How many of his generation understood they were on the path to ruin before their lives ended?
They would probably ask who we lost a war against, or who we got invaded by. It looks like we got invaded by India, here anyways. In California it might appear as if it was invaded by China or Mexico.
In a way we did, but it wasn’t by the typical war mechanisms. More like subversion from within, as well as spiritual weakness caused by prosperity.
The true invasions and wars haven’t even started yet.
I’ve noticed the total inability to grok a Soviet-style failure of the US among the Silent and Boomer generations.
I was shooting the shit with a typical Boomer at a bar a few weeks ago, and we dipped our toe into the political waters a bit.
His main point was, “Maaan, in the ’60s we all used to work together!”
I was on vacation, so I didn’t bring up the demographics of the US then versus now.
Lol, in the ’60s people worked together the way Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and Cathy Boudin worked together to murder people and blow them up! The murder victims did their cooperative part by dying. Teamwork!
When you hit 75 the brain usually gets a little less plastic Beyond that nothing much matters since you could die of the usual things for any reason at any time. Also the Boomers in particular caveat the Vietnam veterans really mostly had easy lives and have serious normalcy bias. There are exceptions but as you noted its only outliers, dissidents and outlaws., As a generation the Boomers don’t matter much any way. If things get bad, we’ll gladly accept the help of the clued in ones but the generations day is done and its not their fight now. Its… Read more »
People with a big fat wad in their 401K or IRAs are the most blind. They think the party will never end. See they were fed a massive lie by the MSM and Wall Street since the 80’s that the stock Market will go up forever. And those who embraced it back then made out like bandits. So with 40 years of market growth they cannot conceive of a bad ending. BTW they are also oblivious to the massive collapse of society and the country being invaded by human cockroaches. IOW they don’t notice all the ‘tells’ that the party… Read more »
Everybody is living in the past. I keep seeing white liberals complaining about how “drivers are so bad these days! i keep almost getting hit on my bike!” or “wow, how can men be rapists? just don’t rape, ok”. As if it’s white bread, normal guys parking in the bike lane and drugging women for date rape. They don’t seem to be capable of distinguishing between “our” people and “other” people. They’re living in the summer of love and there’s only poor black people and white oppressors. Conservatives keep blaming “urban libtards” for voting leftist. There are some of those… Read more »
It would be super hilarious if the controllers tried to draft young people and start a war with China or Russia as the Boomers and early Xers retire or age out of the workforce.
Ain’t no one going off to die for the alphabet soup bunch.
Ref Gab NZ is South Park Episode;
Can we do some ourselves?
The Woodland Creatures come to mind.
I’m just here to say F1 is awesome and if you’re not watching it, you should be
And I’m here as an aviation freak. We should be watching pylon races and acrobatics. Perhaps flying laser tag or even full-on laser drone shootdowns.
It used to be. Now it’s just a high-speed safety exhibition. The masculinity has been machined out of the sport.
We’ve hit the Catch-22. Racing is safer (or at least a driver will have a longer career with less change of death), but innovation has been legislated out of the sport. As with IndyCar, the days of a front-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, jet powered, Turbo 4 cylinder, Turbo 8 cylinder idea from out of the blue showing up to compete, maybe failing, maybe winning, but at least pissing off other teams is long gone.
Where’s my STP Turbine Car? Where’s my Lotus 79?
The increasing money to be had in high-level racing (beginning in the second half of the 60s) meant that specs had to be put into place to try to prevent the richest owners/teams from dominating totally. But with specs, and admittedly, more competitive racing, came a numbing sameness, and, as you say, a lack of innovation. And that goes for drivers, too, corporate shills selected for willingness to never say anything taboo rather than for their talent. Then again, when the cars effectively drive themselves, talent is unnecessary. You sure don’t have to be Jim Clark or AJ Foyt to… Read more »
F1 is gay and if you watch it you will turn gay.
F is for…
When they fired the “grid girls” it became the most homosexual little-fast-men-and-big-corporate-logos TV show.
“It is why the system violently vomited up Donald Trump and continues to dry heave over the memory of him.” Good one! It was the dry heaving that made the joke! But seriously, this is a great point about why the vast system (govement, media, etc) is so out of touch. They are in operating on an outdated system. Its interesting thinking about whether our problems are the products of a small group of brilliant, and psychologically advanced megalomaniacs, and incompetence. I do think there are people that hate whites and work toward our destruction, but its hard to believe… Read more »
“…the system violently vomited up Donald Trump and continues to dry heave over the memory of him.”
Brilliant!
I’m going to use that one in my personal communications. An analogy like that can’t be allowed to fade into the memory hole.
Holy smokin’ smokes. I found a real life example of dangerous fossilized culture, right here, late yesterday’s comments. This. Means. War. The Tale of Vizzini’s Daughter: “So, my daughter’s religious exemption at her hospital has been given it’s final denial and she’s on her way out. However, she also related to me very shocking story. A fellow tech has a variety of medical issues that make her ineligible for the vaccine, yet she was denied a medical exemption. Wait, it gets worse. The girl felt trapped. She couldn’t afford to give up her job, so she went to get the… Read more »
Thanks, I must of missed that.
Done without permission. I can’t imagine a more perfect real-life illustration of a Crisis of Culture.
There’s the personal, and also the physical.
There are no more OEM water pumps in North America for the most commonly used semi-truck engine, and no more OEM u-joints in the world for the driveshaft used in 95% of American trucks: on backorder until 2022. Not to mention the vehicular computer chip shortage.
The piper’s bill is in the mail, yet an administrative tyranny is pushing a massive shortage in medical personnel.
How far are these madmen willing to go?
Arrgh…Why didn’t I figure this out! Victim Politics rulebook. Should I need it I’m getting my Muslim jab exception letter and memorizing the pronunciation of the greeting I will hand it to my HR department with: “As-Salam-u-Alikum- wa -Rahmatullahi- Wa-barakatuh”
I have a good friend who was offered a gig with AT&T yesterday. The pay is quite good but they’re mandating a jab. He just had a bout of the Wuhan flu in August so there’s no need at all for it, but the only exceptions they’re granting are religion-based. Of course we know those are a farce as they’ll just pick apart his case until he has no choice left. He’s shown me the questions on the exception form and they’re all open to follow up questions along the lines of “If this is a concern of yours, why… Read more »
As an aside, the Bishop of our Catholic diocese recently instructed priests to *not* sign off on religious exemptions to the Covid vaccine as there were none under Catholic teaching. This is direct contradiction of teaching and history wrt using aborted fetal cells in the creation of the medicine.
And, the Anti-pope has forbade entry in the Vatican without a Vax FreedomPass.
Pretty soon, the unbelievers, err, unvaxxed, won’t be able to attend Mass or receive Communion in their own church.
Already happening. My parish told me not to attend Mass because at 68 I am “too old”.
The current Pope is openly an antichrist and as said so himself.
Given the dire conditions in the church , just revert to Matthew 18:20
Maybe someday a new church can be formed. A true Catholic Church even with the inevitable corruption could become the greatest source of good in the world. Well so long as they actually understood and heeded the Bible anyway.
Utterly sickening. Now I’m not Catholic, but I never before hated a pope because it somehow seemed wrong to do so. Kind of like hating a baby seal. No more. I hate Bergoglio and it feels so very right.
vivabarneslaw dot locals doc com has a free sample religious exemption request letter authored by Attorney Robert Barnes, well known for fighting mandates and other injustices. He also offers free advice in his livestreams sometimes about the religious exemption. Just my opinion but from his livestreams he would probably tell your friend that the company has zero right to question your friend about the legitimacy of his “faith” in any way, they are not his pastor, etc. They may keep bluffing, but your friend should win if the company is stubborn enough even to go to court. And Barnes has… Read more »
All he needed to do is walk into the interview wearing a Muslim beanie and carrying a Koran..It would also help if he knew some Islamic greetings, etc. to help make him look legit.
Then he could tell the ATT goon that his Iman forbades the jab at this time.
No white boss is going to contradict him because of what HR will do to him. A lot of companies are just terrified of offending Muslims because they know the EEOC and other groups will come down on them like a ton of bricks.
Vizzini: FreedomX law dot com, have your daughter call Bill.
I’m reminded of the “jump to conclusions” guy from Office Space, explaining to the Two Bobs that he takes the specs from the customer and delivers them to the engineers, he’s a people person, damn it, why the hell can’t you see that?!? One thing I noticed in my time in the corporate salt mines — which, admittedly, was a long time ago — was that “management” really is a people job… but because of stuff like Affirmative Action, “managers” have to prove that they, you know, actually DO stuff, so they’re forced to quantify it. A good manager really… Read more »
Reminds me of Qualtrics, that Google property that provides surveys to quantify the qualitative and does meta analysis on the surveys themselves. E.g., “it took customers on average five more seconds to answer question 4 than question 3.” These days any interaction with any level of a corporation might result in one of these surveys landing in your inbox. Are the results actually useful for the company? Perhaps the real purpose is to “generate papers” for the manager who ordered them.
For 90% of processes these days, the only point of the process is to measure compliance with the process. Z Man did a bit on it a while ago, but I remember in my time the fad was TQM — Total Quality Management. I went to all the meetings, got all the training, and all I could conclude at the end of it was TQM means “do exactly what you were doing before, but document the shit out of every single thing, and then measure the amount of documentation, such that you can document the documentation.” Those managers whose department… Read more »
TQM — Total Quality Management. I remember that. I worked at a credit card company back then, and everybody in my department knew what our biggest problem was – credit cards were embossed with the name on the contract, not the name that the customer wanted on his card, i.e. “Ebenezer Prudentia Jones” rather than “E.P. Jones.” And everybody knew how to fix it, a simple and obvious change of procedure for the keyboard coolies, one that we’d been pressing for six months to no avail. It took us two hours to get to the nub of the problem, because… Read more »
In the new world order, meetings count as work.
“It is why the system violently vomited up Donald Trump and continues to dry heave over the memory of him.”
Poetry. Pure poetry.
I’ve been aware for some time now that we are stultifying, smart phones are not really innovating, just adding more pretty apps, we actually haven’t made any great strides in EXPLORING space, just marking time with the same old same old, American ingenuity and innovation on any meaningful level is so hamstrung by rules, permits, patent infringement (beat the innovator to the patent office or steal it, buy them out and sit on the patent), no innovative solutions to housing because the county and city planning and zoning departments are all staffed by either good ole boys who won’t make… Read more »
This. Especially in re: the medical bureaucracy. India has their covid thing essentially beat thanks to the pioneering work of that famous Dutch microbiologist, Eye VerMecten. But that doesn’t make any money for Big Pharma, so… how many “boosters” are we up to now? Five? What a wonderfully, amazingly stupid time to be alive. If you’re amused by suicidal human folly, as I am, you’re constantly at risk of developing a hernia from all the gut-busting laughter. Hey, remember when the Left was always going on and on about how Big Pharma never cures anything, because if they find a… Read more »
I’ve had progressives complain that Eye VerMecten is a plot for Trump’s buddies to get rich by selling that off patent drug that any lab can make for pennies per dose.
But…but…but… it’s FREE in Canada! Why can’t we get all our drugs FREE, like they do in Canada!
–also the Left, until the wee hours of Jan 19, 2021.
Well, they’re certainly conflicted—even now on “big” pharma. Everyone needs a shot, they are our salvation, perfectly safe and efficacious…yada, yada.
Yet, in another presentation, Biden talks about legislation to reign in drug prices and make pharmaceuticals “affordable” to people. Legislation now in Congress regarding mandated generics and purchasing/reimport into from other countries.
The AW Left is transitioning from socialism to the free market, but still has one foot in the former camp. And for many of them, particularly their Boomers, the transition is very painful. It’s not easy to jettison what you’ve believed all of your life and to adopt what you’ve always vilified.
The DR, interestingly enough, is composed of former conservatives who’ve become deeply skeptical of capitalism, and while hardly socialists, readily countenance extensive regulation of the market.
Strange times, to put it mildly.
Yes! I often see in the Covid-19 underground, the observation — accurate so far as I know — that the Democrats were highly opposed to the Trump Vaccine until, as you note, November 4, 2020 or perhaps Jan. 21, 2021 — now it’s the solution to all problems plaguing civilization! 😀 If Trump had proposed slavery reparations, the summary executions of all possessors of Confederate insignia, the welcoming of any foreigner, with all expenses paid and an instant Green Card, the abolition of all private property or free legalized drugs for all, the Dems would have opposed it because —… Read more »
This! “What a wonderfully, amazingly stupid time to be alive.”
I’ve been saying for several years that all the low, mid, and even some of the high-hanging technological fruit has been picked. We are bumping up against the physical limits of current semiconductor/transistor technology. I don’t see any breakthroughs coming in AI, fusion, or similar potentially game changing tech. A lot of the claimed advances in AI are simply due to how powerful and how cheap computing hardware has become, thus permitting the algos to run that much faster. We are living in a Golden Age of how much CPU, GPU, memory, and storage one can buy per dollar. Then… Read more »
I am obviously NOT a STEM guy, but I’ve been wondering about those algorithms for quite a while. For instance, I listen to the streaming music services – Pandora, Spotify, I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. And… their algorithms are terrible, and while I’m willing to bet that for mainstream music it’s all payola, the stuff I’m looking for doesn’t make anyone a dime. It’s just that they still have humans tagging things for the algorithms, and those tags are things minimum wage H1B drones come up with. Example: So you hear some composer and you think “gosh, that’s an… Read more »
What made the catalogs of old so glorious was the curation. Everything had a flow, product placement and groupings made sense, etc. This is something every online retailer has done a crap job of. Amazon’s whole algorithm seems to be #1) “Here’s a list of stuff we’re paid to list” and then #2) “If you don’t like that, then here’s a non-sensical, unordered list of 4000 things that also meet your description”
Evil Sandmich: God yes. I can’t search for something escapist to read by specifying male authors only, or no heroines of color, or pro-White fiction. If I search TEOTWAKI fiction, or time travel fiction, I get nothing but strong womyn, usually brown, or same-sex couples. Whether Amazon or my damned grocery store, I can choose categories to include, but never exclude (such as show me coupons for everything except pet food or baby items). And try to compare some home appliance – looking at Amazon and various big box store websites. Or mattresses. No two items at any two places… Read more »
Speaking of curation, places like B&H Photo and Crutchfield do a far better job curating their electronics selection versus the sea of junk on Amazon.
Hello! Try this: https://www.rtve.es/play/radio/radio-clasica/
Great variety of programming!
The modern mantra is do the same stupid, mindless stuff, but faster and more conveniently.
I see this with construction stuff: New Thing is faster to install? Sure, it falls apart in 10 years instead of the old way that lasts 100 years, but it saves you 10 minutes on install!
The early Pandora algorithm was the best. Its deductions about what you wanted to hear were based on actual musical qualities of the music you’d favored—often qualities you didn’t consciously recognize. For a while you could even look at what it had decided about your taste and tell it to ignore any mistaken inferences. Then, supposedly at the request of “advertisers” (always a lie) and “partners” (hmm…), the system was changed in a thousand ways that add up to merely favoring more popular music. So your station that was based on *repetitive dissonant Nick Cave-influenced small-group non-coastal American rock from… Read more »
Or diesel-powered locomotives for that matter, in these intermodal times.
Or diesel container ships, too. They’re all diesel or diesel electric.
That “electric” part is what sets their pair of brain cells spinning: if the train really runs on electricity, then surely there is some way to replace that nasty fossil fuel with some combination of wind, water or sun power🤣
Replying to Ben: yeah, just imagine the wildfires when every train grade has a live 8 megawatt power line strung above it like some San Fran trolly car.
Part of this too is the limits of human understanding. The guys who started HP could be generalized engineering geniuses, but their descendants now have to train for years, if not decades, to get a breadth of understanding required to advance their field a tiny bit. And it of course doesn’t help that we’re producing less and less of the people who can even do such a thing.
And we see our limits with stuff like the Hadron Collider and Quantum Computing: enough brains to put the thing together, but not enough to apply it to anything.
Everytime I hear some dipshit mention “Fossil fuels” I ask the dipshit when the big bad oil companies shipped all the dinosaurs, trees and cow fart to Saturn’s moon Titan to it could have hydrocarbon seas and Methane rain. If they ever give me an answer we can address the inter-galactic space travel that got them all to the Horse Head Nebula. Oil is abiotic. I like the story that Stalin, after the unpleasantness with Adold realized the importance of energy, and especially oil and sent a couple of scientists in the v late 40’s. They came back (I guess… Read more »
We have made giant leaps in space exploration the last twenty years. The Hubble telescope alone has taught us more about the universe than all the Apollo missions put together. I don’t understand why going back to the moon is such a big thing with people. The era were human astronauts made sense ended about the same time Armstrong stepped off the lander and we’ll not see serious manned flight again until the prices allow for mass tourism. There’s not unlimited cash for space exploration and wasting them on ISS has been the biggest disaster for us desktop space cadets,… Read more »
And no, shitlords, the solution to America’s race problem is not sending all the Tyrones to Mars.
Heheh. Nah, the solution is TELLING all the Tyrones that the capsule is going to Mars, so they need to get in. Where it actually goes…. ymmv.
Why space?
Cuz guys doing guy stuff.
But, but, we could feed Haiti’s childrens!
Or…we could refertilize depleted soils *ahem ahem*
I’m not against space exploration, but it’s about how to spend limited space resources. For the price of one astronaut, we could launch fifty robots that’d stay in service for ten years.
What we are seeing is a complex society which has reached that point in its evolution such that continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return. All of the facile ‘solutions’ our increasingly bloated hierarchy of heterodoxy puts forth are flimsy sops that do nothing but, at best, maintain the status quo. “When this point is reached,” when a system faced with diminishing marginal returns addresses [ineffectually] stresses to the system out of the social or economic operating budget, “society enters the phase where it becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse….When marginal returns decline, the advantages… Read more »
Someone really ought to do one of those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books out of The Collapse of Complex Societies. It’s technical academic archaeology, so lots of it is dry, and I imagine few of us are qualified to judge the details… but the stuff that isn’t should be required reading (and when I’m dictator, everyone entering government service will have it tattooed on them, like in that goofy recent Mad Max movie).
I’ve felt that Jared Diamond’s Collapse was the sort of book you’re describing relative to Tainter.
I’ve read both. I found Diamond’s book decent. I wasn’t as impressed by Tainter’s as people said I should be.
having read both, I feel just the opposite. Tainter is dispassionate and analytical, Diamond prone to hyperbole.
My problem with Tainter was simply that it’s an academic book. A good academic book, but because it’s a good academic book, it’s aimed at a specialist audience, and unless you’re in the intended audience — I’m not — a lot of it will seem boring and forced. Same deal with James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which I’d consider required reading if there were a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book version of it out there. Also Shafarevich’s The Socialist Phenomenon, etc. (though Shafarevich, being both a mathematician and a guy used to writing samizdat, put summary sections in at… Read more »
I’ve only read Guns, Germs and Steel – entertaining and well written, but scientifically it’s woke garbage.
Guns Germs and Steel waffles between handwaving away the giant gaps in his theory that archeology is not history, and emotional hysterics about being on the Right Side of History. I literally threw it away, not worth burning.
Tainter’s book is a good one but the premise has already been delineated more completely in Spengler’s Decline of the West, although Spengler is a tougher read.
There actually IS a “condensed book” version of The Decline of the West out there, but… still pretty tough. I never managed to slog through it, myself. Spengler has to be right up at the top of the list of guys much better read about than actually read. E.g. Kant and all the rest — unless you’re a professional academic philosopher, you don’t really need anything more than the “for dummies” version. (You just don’t need to read The Critique of Pure Reason. Not in translation, and certainly not in the original. You just don’t. Life’s too short. Read the… Read more »
Lets not forget Suicide of the West by Burnham, IIRC.
I believe that text tends to address the cultural degeneration of the West.
One, perhaps the only purely valid (?) philospohical truth I learnt from Nietzsche is his valid (based on my quick fact-checking) denunciation of Kant’s claim that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. Now don’t be scared off by these terms. The meanings are relatively simple: If Kant’s assertion were true, it would mean that a mind could know from first principles (a priori) a “synthetic” fact ( = requires additional knowledge not implicit in the statement — as would be “analytical” knowledge), without having to recur to the real world (empirical) for the missing information! Restated: Kant is claiming that… Read more »
Most management in large companies are now following the same modeling for legitimacy that we see in our government. Instead of a general edict of a leader who will succeed or fall on his sword, a consensus model is created. The purpose of the consensus model isn’t to find the best ideas from the companies talent, but to manipulate the process through putting one’s finger on the scale and using mass propaganda directed at the employees. Most workers will see where the wind is blowing, roll their eyes, and assent to whatever management clearly wants to do. As long as… Read more »
Let’s speak in plain language and call this what it is. This ‘management by consensus and mass propaganda’. This is feminine natured faggotry. Full stop. This is how women lead and crisis solve. Check with the ‘group’ to see which way all the dim vacuous other herd animals are about to bolt, which is generally AWAY from danger. Hence why every company is also so risk averse and ‘conservative’ (read: fearful) even though they preach how ‘progressive’ they are. When companies were run by men, real men, of which there are a vanishingly small minority anywhere near upper management that… Read more »
I read a quote a while back, that supports your post.
“When a woman is promoted to the position of CEO in a company,(it was about a Fortune 500 place, think HP), the smart money has left the building”.
And this is why all major corporations are insisting on face panties and clot shots for all….
Big advantage having a female CEO especially a poc Woman, government contracts. I’m a cog in the MIC. The ceo is a strong Woman. Caucasian and hetero. Company wouldn’t last six months without the .government trough. Dosen’t hold a real winning hand lol.
When I look in the mirror I have to grit my teeth & think bleed the beast & if it isn’t me it will be someone less competent. & more of our whiteboys will die for “our greatest allie” in the next hassle.
Even small companies are getting to be like this. Taking the State’s dollar has become taking the Ticket. You thought you were selling kneepads to the Dept. of Transportation but no, you were actually signing up for diversity training and regime change.
All must be Converged.
That trough and incipient collapse of the economy is part of why we have the issues we have now. When DJT came along he figured he could get a larger middle class which would benefit them and his family interests as well. Poor people aren’t buying the Trump brand after all. No way were the parasites going for that. They way they see it its a near zero sum game and if workers get anything, they don’t . This happens when your economy gets fake and fiance driven, The solution is of course regulation (or extermination but we’d rather pass… Read more »
Apex: Spot on. This tension between individual risk-taking and innovation versus group-think/being a team player is ever present. And while I used to be fully on board for the individual over the group, as I’ve grown ever more genuinely conservative, I’ve come to appreciate the benefits of the community. But it’s still a delicate balance, because while a particular population group can maintain traditions and stability (and infrastructure), only a risk-taking individual can conceive of new strategies or technologies or ways to solve emerging problems. What works in small business won’t work in a multinational corporation, and what works in… Read more »
If these people had to drive through the “bad” part of town even once it might disabuse of them of the notions that they carry*. Instead they hid behind their walls and devices so that their delusion cannot be interrupted.
*(And even that might not be enough. When I was in Portland once I went to a Catholic religious shrine of some sort and right outside of it was a Vietnamese “ghetto”. I mentioned this to some locals and they remarked about how that was the “bad” part of town. Obviously these people have never seen Detroit).
Evil Sandmich: Husband’s buddy (a very smart guy, good looking, married, lifts regularly) sees some of the chaos occurring where he lives, hears DR perspective regularly from my husband, and yet still got the clotshot. And only last year did he finally – and reluctantly – purchase a firearm. Why I’m so pessimistic and won’t waste my time trying to convince anyone of anything.
Yeah, I bet a Vietnamese ghetto is the height of danger to a White. Why, they might sell you a bowl of spicy noodles or some other assault.
On a more serious note, I grew up in the suburbs of DC. We got plenty of the “boat people” 1975 and later. While you’d occasionally read about a Vietnamese gang incident in the local papers, that was pretty rare.
I can assert first-hand that they were damned good soccer players despite their short stature. 😀
People are either delusional or scared. What can be done? We have no leaders!
You think businesses are badly run by women try volunteer organizations. Groups of women are good at getting things done, eventually, but woe unto you if you’re not inclined towards micro-management, incessant second guessing, and pettiness. And all this without even getting a paycheck for your efforts.
Anyone who trots out the line “the world would be a much more peaceful place if women ran the place” has never observed an all-female office setting. The pettiness, back biting, and tribalism is off the charts.
Your post caused me to contemplate something… In current American corporate culture, would it be possible for a clone of Lee Iacocca to rise to the top? You know, a working-class white boy from Allentown, PA that would actually be admitted into Princeton for graduate school? A manager that would push big, audacious risks like “56 for ’56” or the Mustang or winning LeMans or the Minivan? A white man who would move up the ranks based on ability, aggressiveness, and merit? A manager who would have the self-awareness to not pay himself a salary while his company was receiving… Read more »
I see it in the language.
“As of today Karen is no longer an employee of GloboCorp”. The English translation means she got fired.
But she didn’t get fired. She just happens to longer be employed by GloboCorp. The same way that shots were fired after an altercation started between two groups of youths.
The worst is when, instead of firing a bad manager, they move him to a position with no responsibilities, expecting him to see the writing on the wall and leave on his own.
Even worse is when they rotate a marginal or bad manager through a series of positions with some responsibility so he can sow chaos throughout the company.
You have just described perfectly what many of my friends who were then employed by the Federal government, said about problem employees. It was difficult to impossible to fire them, so the best that could be done was transfer them elsewhere. I saw the same thing in the Army, during my short enlistment.
That’s my dream. I would love to spend my twilight years sucking every last bit of sustenance out of Globohomo, while providing no return on their investment.
You’re a white male lol. If you want to sit around being useless you at least have to be a female, preferably a non white as well.
We’ve already dumped two strong wimmin managers into this useless department to do nothing in the past year.
What you describe, and this excerpt in particular: “…assent to whatever management clearly wants to do..”-is happening at the ultra-professional level on the response to COVID. The syndicates that own the hospitals (my local hospital is now one of many spanning a geographical area of hundreds of miles-its own borg) give the talking points to the freshly minted and early career doctors. These professionals were captured by debt and influenced by the lowered integrity standards of the Higher Ed Borg that hatched them. They are going to say whatever they have to say or stand around in faux solidarity as… Read more »
It’s probably worse than people think. The Boomers who run the system are from a bygone era — one where the country was overwhelmingly Caucasian and had high social trust, competence and a common culture. But the Millennials waiting to take over are also from a bygone era — the 1990s where America was still majority White and desperately wanted to shed all traces of racial differences. “Wouldn’t it be boring if everybody were the same?” — that’s a line I heard endlessly in middle school back in the 90s. The diversity dogma was strong back then, and those kids… Read more »
A side note on this subject: As a Millennial myself, one of the more fascinating things about talking to Boomers, no offense intended, is noticing how much of the culture they missed back in the day. They were adults when I was just a kid. So, they didn’t see what their children were being taught; they’re often shocked when I bring it up. Take the stuff I listed above. It’s heavily multicultural, even moreso than some modern television shows. Sometimes older Americans comment on how diverse commercials have become, but the programs your kids and grandkids grew up watching were… Read more »
Worse than the destruction of old franchises, is the lack of talent in creating new franchises that can capture the imagination of the general U.S. population. The last one was Game of Thrones, which predictably fell apart once they lost material from the author and now is probably permanently ruined. The rise of mass cable use created a renaissance of smart shows that one could watch if you could ignore the other filth those services were serving, but they seemed to have petered out within a decade. There’s a cultural void now, and the strategy seems to be to fill… Read more »
I don’t see much of anything truly new or original these days. Even Game of Thrones was based on a book series started in the 1990s … by a White male, obviously. Everything is a reboot, a remake, or a Westernized version of a Japanese property. People create things that interest them personally — characters, concepts, settings — and the most creative demographic by a huge margin is the Caucasian male. That demographic is not longer free to create things that intrest them, or even associated groups like White females. Like British period pieces? Well, now all the male characters… Read more »
Good comment. To them, and all Goodwhites, “diversity” is a place with a solid 70% white majority – all with liberal values. 30% of the population are happy, smiling, people of colour. So much spicy food and so many tasty restaurants! Lots of colourful dresses, and wise old men with beards and turbans – always happy to share their advice with young people. Most importantly, these “diverse” people will be eternally grateful to the moral white liberals, making them feel like Good People. And will especially prove that they are Not Racist. Obviously they don’t think it through to the… Read more »
Banana Boat: Astute comment. My sons used to complain that my strict limiting of their tv, movie watching, online content, etc. left them at a social disadvantage at times. They were never the first to learn of the latest fad or get a cell phone (they thank me now). Even at their Christian schools there were mothers whose kids saw every new ‘kids’ movie, regardless of content, and many of them were concerned that my boys played with toy guns. Boomers were lousy parents and raised their kids via tv while they were busy ‘finding themselves.’ Millennials raised their kids… Read more »
You let then play with toy guns? Softie. How are they supposed to learn without practical application?
On a serious note, white millenials’s kids are by and large in the teens at latest right now. There are still millenials that cant buy their own beer, folks. If you were born 1981 and had your first at 26 (current avg age of female’s first birth) he would be 14 now. But, most millenials had to delay kids bc debt jobs etc. Most millenials’ kids are preteen or younger.
Banana Boat, that’s a broad brush stroke. As the father of two millennials, I can tell you that it’s not 100% across the board. One child in medicine, other engineering. Both have become much more aware of race differences and resulting AA in their own way and manifestations as pertain to their areas of employment. But the one thing in common is that such discovery came upon interacting with such “diversity” on the job. I still maintain this must and will win out in the end—and I maintain it will be even worse (more apparent) for follow-on generations. Whether this… Read more »
I too grew up in the nineties and can remember watching all the shows you linked to. It’s only after all these years that I can appreciate why my parents used to forbid my siblings and I from watching many of the musical acts, especially if it was hip hop or rap acts. They were adamant about protecting us from nog-culture.
Millennials are of two types. You have the bubble boys who grew up under the shadow of their hover parents, and the patient sufferers who spent the last 20 years fighting Hajji and getting blown up for the entertainment and profit of the folks back home. When things fall apart the bubble boys will have a psychotic break, the sufferers will endure and do what they need to do to survive. Some bubble boys will harden up, some sufferers will be swept away. At the end of the tragedy will be a fit and hardened remnant capable of overcoming the… Read more »
This reminds me of a radio spot I used to hear quite a bit, around 20 years ago. It was yet another of those Ad Council* spots that were intended to pump up vibrants at the expense of heritage Americans. The gist of it was that a young white girl came home after spending time at her friend Maria’s house and began grousing to her mom that at Maria’s house it was so lively. Everyone was always talking and laughing and sharing meals together. Why couldn’t their family be more…vibrant, like those Hispanics, who are surely more American than any… Read more »
Banana Boat: your timing is off. Most millenials (81-99) were toddlers or not yet born when those shows were aired in the early 90s. Im an older millenial, and have never heard of them. The formative adult experiences of millenials are the opposite. In college and entering the job market (98 at earliest for entering college, 2002-2022 for job market entry). By then the mask was off, and we knew the deck was stacked against us non-diverse for every college and job application. Most if not all white male millenials in a white collar or professional role have a personal… Read more »
“Most millenials (81-99) were toddlers or not yet born when those shows were aired in the early 90s. ”
“Most”. A huge cohort were. I’m one of them, so obviously the timing isn’t off. I speak from experience. And those were only representative examples anyway. All of those shows ran in reruns for years and were seceded by similar shows. Nick News is still on the air all these years later.
But I agree with the larger point that some Millennials can be reached due to their negative experience with diversity, unlike their parents who were sheltered from its consequences.
Millenials got the we’re all one race – the human race kumbahyah shtick, but that’s not new. Every cohort has had that pressed on them, e.g. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Millenials both faced the results in a uniquely personal way with ever-increasing AA etc., and got to experience the narrative shift from equality and tolerance to “bake the cake, bigot.” There is a wellspring of resentment that the boomer cohort overlays. Call it the Woodstock caldera. Once the “Image” ge-ge-generation moves on, the white position on race in politics should see huge changes.
Many take comfort in the notion that the Elites have some sense of self-preservation and won’t obliterate themselves. One need only remember World War I and the self-immolation of the old aristocratic order. It can happen again. The three foundations of the modern order – social, democratic welfare systems, fiat money and Us military hegemony – are all under threat now, having been exposed as unsustainable. An entire class of Elites will defend all three to the death it seems, taking a lot of us with them. What comes next is anyone’s guess, but the old Elites aren’t going to… Read more »
The reason I love the Great War as an area of study is it reveals how mental structures are what guide human action. In the narrow context, the old mental structures had to be mowed down with machine gun fire. In the broader sense, they had to be obliterated along with the system that produced them.
The sad thing is they took millions of better men down with them – quite possibly what we have to look forward to as well.
Or rule by the worst will take the worst with them. Not certain, but I’m pretty sure that’s not baseless optimism.
Ernst Junger said something similar, about his time in the trenches. Now there’s a guy we all should read, if he weren’t so… Teutonic… about everything. (Meaning: Not an easy read, at least in translation… and, I suspect, in the original too). My impression (on limited reading) is that he’s what you would’ve gotten if Nietzsche had actually gone to the front. (Another reason Junger is such a tough read is: He’s all in on the idea of war as the great cleanser and uplifter of the human race. And yet, he has to know how random and pointless it… Read more »
Like many things, the poison is in the dose (the French in WWI), and also, the medicine will not work if the dose is too low (without some grand existential threat a standing army is little more than a grift operation).
“A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Both world wars, especially the 1st, were examples of Darwinian evolution in reverse. The best and brightest of the generations fighting were destroyed. In the WWI your officer corp was composed of the highly educated, elites and they were expected to take the lead in all actions. They were wiped out in higher proportions than the common “grunt” soldier. WWII was not much different. Veteran’s in the Pacific will tell of losing officers until the platoon was directed by a Sargent. Americans, being fairly independent and prone to take the initiative faired fairly well. But when the Japanese lost their… Read more »
Why I listen to Sabaton while lifting: “Great War” Where is this greatness I’ve been told? This is the lies that we’ve been sold Is this a worthy sacrifice? Great War And I cannot take more Great tour I keep on marching on I play the great score There will be no encore Great War The war to end all wars ************************ “The Price of a Mile” Thousands of machine guns Kept on firing through the night Mortars blazed and wrecked the scene Gone is the fields that once were green Still a deadlock at the frontline Where the soldiers… Read more »
As the 20th century English poet Roger Waters put it:
“Forward they cried, from the rear, and the front flank died.
The generals sat and the lines on a map, moved from side to side.”
I hear it said — even Tucker says it — that the ruling class is looking to import a new demographic to gradually replace the old and to ensure the dominance of the Dems. I’m not so sure. I’m inclined to see the new arrivals as the tip of the Trojan Horse (to mix a metaphor) whose occupants will turn on their benefactors and, to further their own ambition to rise in status and power, will seek to attack what they perceive to be the weakest identity. Right now, that’s white America but should a collapse come, that may change… Read more »
I’m going to talk about this on the Friday show, but I think there are signs the ruling class is curdling on immigration. Rhetorically, they support open borders but we are seeing a shift on policy that some have predicted.
I don’t see it. Looks like the Regency is all in on all 33 Million Haitians coming here just to start. Latinos don’t like it, they have issues with Salvadorans coming over (if they are Mexican and particularly Nortenos) and being ruled by Haitians was not their goal. They don’t like it … But the power of voting fraud means the Regency and Hereditary Ruling Class can do what they want when they want without any issues. Even if some Dem Congresscritters don’t have great fraud operations and get wiped out, the Regency will make the Special Assistant to the… Read more »
It’s all fun and games until the Obamas move to Martha’s Vineyard.
And I’ll raise you some optimism: white flight is unsustainable, society will have to retreat to the cities, and that means the cities will have to be made liveable again. No more real estate Ponzi schemes. I think Kunstler (yeah, yeah) is right. None of this garbage (and admittedly a lot of good things) would be possible without cheap oil. Especially the part about saving the world. As for the high tech overlords, how would they power that tech? Wind farms and solar panels, portable fusion generators? Nope, they’ll be burning American coal. Carbon is king, and without the spoils… Read more »
The ruling class doesn’t have that much foresight. If they did, then we wouldn’t be in this mess. They definitely see the short term benefits of importing a new, so far compliant, demographic who’ll ensure their absolute power. These people are so without honor, so without loyalty that’d they’d happily live in comfort in the present even if they knew their policies would ultimately destroy the country generations from now. What’s it to them? They’ll be long dead. That’s the kind of people you’re dealing with.
Ahhh. Banana Boat does it again! Thanks BB.
The problem isn’t just the ruling class but the contagion of their culture that has permeated even the ranks of the dissidents. The elite culture is THE culture that effectively drives all the cows into the milking barn, then on to smithfield. Thinking about the future is a lot to ask of a culture that has no heritage – or at least one that exists for anything other than a generator of perpetual sin that must be cleansed by progress. By the time the unmarried childless 30-something strong independent womyn holding the “refugees welcome” sign learns any number of the… Read more »
100% agree. I’ve heard that sentiment from friends and family for decades. “I’ll be long gone.” “That’ll be your generation’s problem to solve.” “Why didn’t you didn’t you get a Master’s and a career at X corp like your friends?” Not so much these days, though!
As for the sacrificial generation(s), there’s a love of the cross but an unwillingness to take it up. That’s what kids are for, apparently.
I think some of the white Dems among our rulers are starting to figure out that the POCs want their jobs too. AOC, the Uncle Fester black lady in Boston, and soon the black lady NY AG will replace Cuomo.
If they’re just figuring that out they deserve the gallows.
I think that at some point it’s inevitable. We see this with the Muslims in Europe. They don’t “assimilate” nor do they contribute anything financially to society. They create powerful enough enclaves that are scary enough so that the weak liberal ruling class leaves them alone. They now have no-go zones. It happens slowly, then all at once, but one day we will wake up and find out that one of these zones has been declared part of a caliphate and no longer part of Europe. The same situation will happen with Mexicans in the Southwest, and Chinese on the… Read more »
imbroglio: As far as “gradually replace the old,” that’s already an established fact. Whites of European, Christian descent are perhaps 54% of America’s population. For children under ten, it’s officially 50%, but official stats always lie and they also count Jews, Persians, and various others as White, so it’s realistically more like 45%. If you truly consider those “just now transplanted” to be Americans, I’m not surprised you think it’s “the powers that be seem to be spoiling for a race war.” Do you also post comments saying that “they are trying to divide us”? Certainly the elite will use… Read more »
Angelo Codevilla died yesterday. He was one of the first intellectuals to spot the corruption of our ruling class and to describe it in detail. Just before he died, he wrote, “…the ‘War on Terror’ advanced the ruling class’ perennial objective to limit the freedoms of Americans outside its orbit, and perhaps shut down domestic opposition. ” Precisely right. Z’s instincts have corroborated and expanded upon what professor Codevilla has been writing about for several decades now. Here is Codevilla’s last article… https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/21/angelo-privilege/ Z Man is the latest iteration in a line of thinkers beginning with Sam Francis and Angelo… Read more »
Not a comforting thought, realizing our ruling elite are wishing on a star to get through the latest crises. I don’t know if rigor mortis has officially set in, but we have to be close to everything locking up. At any rate, I agree with glenfilthie that it all needs to be burned to the ground.
I wonder if we’re in the 1970’s American Motors mode of crisis culture: – We need new money for new products / we need new ideas to solve problems – We can’t get new money for new products / we won’t accept or allow new ideas – We refresh our existing models around the edges with what money we have and hope they generate money for new product / we restate old ideas as new with hope they solve the problem – Refreshed product doesn’t generate more money / old ideas expressed as new fail to solve issue – Return… Read more »
What you described was money laundering not mergers and acquisitions. Or are they really the same?
AMC was originally a merger to survive. Post WW2 the “Independent” car makers (Not Ford, GM, or Chrysler) were completely unable to go toe to toe with the Big Three. They just didn’t have the volume. Originally AMC was to be Nash, Hudson, Studebaker, and Packard. Studebaker and Packard thought they knew better, merged, and then read each other’s balance sheets. The best analogy would be a man with two broken arms partnering with a man with two broken legs aiming to make one healthy man. Hence why you can’t buy a new Studebaker or Packard. AMC focused on small,… Read more »
Best description I’ve seen so far of our leadership class:
“Their understanding of reality is rooted in a world that no longer exists.”
Also, the best case for a turnover of that class, who no longer deserve the appellation “elite”
Thanks Mr. Z
There’s always a change on the horizon when the Church’s Holy men are not holy, the French Nobles are no longer noble, and the american Elite are no longer elite.
You aren’t going to fix American system by thinking outside of the box, Z. It has to be burned to the ground with the people that subverted it.
Trump was the last shot for the establishment to have any legitimacy. The writing is on the wall now.
I will never understand why the DS didn’t lay low for 4 to 8 years and let the Trump populist movement just burn out. They control everything that matters in the Western world. Why are they acting so hysterically and destructively?
Remember the fable of the frog and the scorpion? You can put it on Western Civ’s tombstone: “Can’t ‘elp it. It’s me nature, mate.”
If they were capable of laying low, thinking ahead, etc., then they wouldn’t be who they are. Having been coddled all their lives, they are now shit-flinging nihilists who want to burn the world down just for the hell of it, because they’re bored. There’s only one solution to that problem, which is to give them the excitement they so desperately crave.
Exactly. As I’ve always said, our saving grace is that they always over-reach. We praise them for playing the “long game”, but then they over-reach when at the end point (as we see it).
The “they” is contextual. The private, the major, and the general all have a common cause, but have different goals in mind for the outcome of a battle. The Nuleft and the entrenched imperial Elite may have common cause in defeating Heritage America, but the enemy JV members individually and sub-collectively want to make varsity, and they want it yesterday not tomorrow. Napoleon started the Revolution as a lieutenant, not as emperor.
Met a guy who worked at Apple once. Said that the whole company has an asshole culture, because of the original asshole Steve Jobs.
Apple is a good (not perfect) example. Steve Jobs, pain in the ass that he was, got products produced that changed our way of working and interfacing with technology (cell phones and tablets without buttons, iPods, Macs), and built the “aura” of Apple.
Tim Cook hasn’t really added any new products like Jobs had. Apple has moved from innovator to establishment.
Another company that reflects it’s owner’s personality: FaceBorg.
Steve Jobs was the first to monetize managerial culture. Apple came close to bankruptcy trying to be a tech innovator. When they switched to being a lifestyle brand company focusing on urban managerial strivers, they became a colossus. Technically, the iPod was not great shakes. What was new was the marketing. It was a display item and positional good in one. Everything since then has been the same, a devise for the user to show the world they are one of the smart set.
Depending upon your focus, Apple is either a leading or lagging indicator of managerial decline.
I don’t know man, the iPod was effen great and none of the lesser models I was able to afford were any good. People still seek out those original HDD models.
Astralturf: We gave away the iPod we were given as a gift. I still use an old Sansa and my older son has thousands of songs on various Zunes he bought, both new and used.
Yeah I still have 3 working iPod classics, still use them regularly, have a few nanos too. but then again I’m strange, I still use Minidisc
I actually preferred the click-wheel model where I could manipulate the controls w/o looking at it.
Apple is brilliant. We all should study how they managed to make it happen, turning products into identities like that. It happened ad hoc with sportsball — I’m old enough to remember when team logo baseball caps first became widely available, and whoever created the first “replica” jersey deserves some kind of Mad Men medal — but Jobs did it consciously. We could all seriously benefit from creating a distinctive (but, of course, plausibly deniable) “dissident” aesthetic. Have the Minter and Richter guys come up with a discreet, yet flashy, “Z” pendant or something. 90% of movement-building is showing others… Read more »
Jobs became the Silicon Valley version of L. Ron Hubbard. Those shows where he would be on stage with the turtleneck both affirming the audience’s sense of identity and promising a brilliant future was right out of science fiction. Leni Riefenstahl Sergei Eisenstein would have instantly recognized what he was doing with those shows.
Z in a black turtleneck, jeans, deck shoes, stubble beard and a ponytail.
Nah, can’t see it.
Expanding on mmack’s point a bit, I think the key insight Apple had upon Jobs’ return was that they could reach a wider demographic by appealing to them via improved product designs, warmer user experiences (UX), and simpler user interfaces (UI). The first real example of improved product design I can remember were the pod-shaped iMac G3s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3 Young women absolutely loved those things because they were simple to set up and use, they looked, “cute,” and they didn’t look nerdy. You couldn’t get them to acknowledge the existence of any other computing device when those things hit the market,… Read more »
L. Ron Hubbard was the man, too. That’s another thing Jobs doesn’t get enough credit for — creating his own lexicon. Slapping an “i” in front of everything makes for cheap and easy jokes, but those jokes are also hellacious brand reinforcement. Reifenstahl et al wish they’d come up with something that good (although the Nazis did have a distinct lingo, of course). Hubbard gets a lot of grief for the “thetan” business, but everything before that is master-class manipulation. Let us learn from the master.
Would it be that Jobs hit on the “Tech for ‘Non-Techies'” aesthetic first?
Sort of like GM beating Ford with the concept of cars should be styled, and not just stamped out?
They’ll probably have been the last large corporation ever to succeed by making and selling anything, by finding and exploiting a real “gap in the market,” rather than via financial manipulation or collusion with (or secretly being) the state.
What you describe is at least as much how Apple’s competition advertised itself to you as how Jobs-Apple actually behaved. Ugliness is a display of degeneracy, not utility.
At the peak of their “lifestyle” phase, Apple forced Unix into every non-nerd’s home. Enjoy that, at least.
Most people who own a Macbook don’t even know they’re running a variation of Unix. To the extent that its even Unix anymore is practically irrelevany and has more to do with his historical roots.
Oh no no. The iPod was a genuine game changer for portable media, much the same the Sony Walkman and to a lesser extent, the Discman, were. Frankly, pretty much all MP3 players before that sucked.
That’s what the marketing said, but in reality the technology was all there. Jobs wrapped it up in a design that appealed to trend setters and they did the rest. The iPod was nothing more than a display item to tell the world you were smart, which was another way of saying you were a member of the elect.
If Apple never existed, no one would have noticed. If Oracle never existed, our world would be very different.
Same thing with smart phones. Microsoft had been making OK smart phones for years but Apple blew them out of the water when they concentrated on actually making the platform usable to everyone instead of just tech-nerds who liked goofing around in the registry and file manager.
@Zman – Sure, Apple did a brilliant job at both presenting and establishing their stuff as “premium”, but with the classic iPod line the marketing also did deliver a superior product. Build, studiness, usability, actually-good quality DACs; the whole thing was simply better than what came before it. I know I’m right about this because sound fidelity noticeably depreciated in models post-5g (not the “Classic” series of crap that came after). Apple switched to an inferior DAC and I didn’t bother with the line after that. You’re not completely wrong here – Apple made being a douchebag cool, but there… Read more »
You would have loved Minidisc
@TheyLive – You know what, bud? I’ve got one. Somewhere around in a box in my attic. I’ll dig it up and play something in your honor just because you mentioned it.
Exact same argument with the Macintosh. Apple was a moderately successful PC maker from the late 1970s with their Apple II. But they really took off in 1984 (?) with the Mac. Little innovation, except the software. Microsoft, for all its success, did not have anything comparable until Windows 3.1, 7 years later. Apple also donated or sold cheap their PCs to schools — a brilliant marketing move I’d say. At least for the rest of the 20th century, Apple had a better rep for software than Microsoft and based on my limited experience, I would say that is a… Read more »
Somewhat disagree on that one. Apple was the early leader with the II in computers for business, and being user programmable. But it let MS get most of its business while pushing the Macintosh. Which was ground breaking — the first with actual usable fonts, a WYSIWYG interface, the ability to do desktop publishing which let them survive in that niche into the 1990s. People forget how revolutionary that machine was. Yes Xerox PARC did it first, but Apple was the first to make a (very expensive) consumer machine Joe Average (if he saved up) could buy. Then you had… Read more »
I’d agree that the iPod was the best MP3 player, but no way was it the first usable player, iriver, creative, ect all had decent players