Clown World

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Loretta Lynn died this week. She was 90 years old, so she had a long run, if not necessarily a good run. Like many of the country stars of her era, her personal life was often complicated. Most were people who lived hard lives and their music was often about the consequences of living a hard life. Of course, their audience was mostly people who also had complicated lives.

It is trite to say upon the passing of an icon that they are not making them like that anymore, but in the case of these old country stars it is true. They really are products of a bygone era. Pop music stars of all genres are now manufactured products, created by a system that selects for stability and predictability. The days of the gonzo rock star or wild living country star are long gone.

In the case of Loretta Lynn, she is also the last of the alternative feminists that flourished in the country scene into the 1970’s. We think of feminism as the increasingly deranged nonsense that comes from the harpies on the college campus, but for a long time there was an alternative to the left-wing feminism. This alternative conception of the strong women turned up in classic country songs.

Probably the closest thing today to that old right-wing image of the strong female is the trad-wife business, but that is more of an internet meme. It is also more about what it opposes than what it proposes. Like so much of what passes for right-wing now, it is mostly a reaction to the excesses of the culture wreckers. Perhaps in time it will mature into a genuine alternative to the lunacy of feminism.

Of course, when one of these old legends dies, and there are not many of them left at this point, it is a reminder that they came from a world that has been entirely replaced by something different. The world that produced someone like Loretta Lynn is gone and the audience she appealed to is also gone. There was a clean break somewhere in the last few generations and that old world is fading away.

It is most obvious in the case of someone like Loretta Lynn. She grew up in what we call grinding poverty. Fifty years ago, everyone knew someone who came from such conditions because we still had lots of genuine poor people. A young person today will expect to live their whole life never having met a poor person. That is poor as in no food poor, not as in not the newest gaming console poor.

It is not an accident that the collapse of authenticity and realism in the popular culture tracks with the elimination of want. Those old country stars like Lynn could sing about the troubles of the human condition because they lived them and more important, their audience was living them. In a world where the hardest choices are on the menu, people are not interested in the human condition.

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230 thoughts on “Clown World”

  1. Z, I really appreciate the David French segment. I’ve been thinking it’s about time. Thanks.

    If you think Lizzo is bad look up ‘declononizing ballet’. Yep, it’s exactly what you think… twerking in ballet shoes. Very vibrant.

  2. Nothing screams conservative buffoonery quite like the article on Lizzo’s shenanigans. “True, her performance was vulgar. But she showed a real reverence for American history.” “Not exactly Thucydides but closer to him than anything I have ever heard at a concert.”

    Where to begin? The epitome of lowbrow mid-wittery is to cite a distinguished figure of the past and then pretend he is being invoked during a burlesque concert. It’s the conservative version of virtue signaling – an empty display of pseudo-intellectual cultural posturing. I defy the journalist to explain what Thucydides wrote and how he influenced Western civilization. Previous generations would have been as much mortified by this poser’s pompous self-importance as Lizzo’s vulgarity.

    • Conservatives, especially politicians, who are vocally anti-abortion yet secretly insist on abortions in their personal lives are the worst hypocrites in the world. It’s worse hypocrisy than even anti-gun Liberals with armed bodyguards.

  4. Unless super necessary in the heat of all-out war, damaging or blowing up a bridge is one of the dickiest moves in the book. It’s like when you’re gonna fight the neighborhood tough guy and agree on the parameters: “OK, ground rules. No pulling hair, eye gouging, or kicks to the balls. Say “uncle” and we break.”

    First thing he does is kick you in the balls. Gets in his Camaro and drives off.

    Worst thing is your friends staring down at you don’t even sympathize.

    “He broke the rules. He lost!”

    “He lost? Who’s the one squirming around on the ground right now?”

  5. Z Man mentioned the Ace of Spades blog. I realized that I hadn’t thought of or visited that blog in years. That blog was interesting because the writers know that Republicans are useful idiots, useless cowards or paid traitors but the writers absolutely refuse to acknowledge racial reality.

    In doing a bit of catching up on the blog, I found this claim from 10 years ago that Ace is a woman: https://www.breitbartunmasked.com/2012/03/29/ace-spades-hq-unmasked/. Anyone know if this is true?

    Anyone who follows Ace have any comments on the current state of the blog?

    • The comment section at AoS is what I imagined goes on inside the mind of someone on meth.

      • I find the disappearance of your 3 hour podcast/interview quite remarkable.
        Surely common decency would require some explanation. Pissing away 3 hours of your time would seem to be more typical of the Wokels than the Right.

        • It does not go unnoticed. Look around our space and find anyone that mentions me. I promote their stuff all the time, but it is a one way street. I just do what I do and try not to notice the lack of reciprocation.

          • zman: You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din. I still get $ requests from Counter Currents, months after they banned me. Amren banned me as well. White privilege, I guess.

          • There’s something funny about a site that endlessly bangs on about how awful blacks are, but won’t tolerate even the slightest mention of Jews even in the comments.

          • Ploppy, I agree with your judgement on a theoretical level but on a practical level comparing the blacks and the tribe is a false equivalence. The tribe is very wealthy and powerful, the blacks, not so much.

            In my view, one’s stance on this issue of the tribe depends on your personal guess as to the likelihood of winning the support of some members of the tribe who are willing to go against most of their group. For me, I think the chances of this are small and my outlook reflects that.

          • @LineInTheSand: It’s a virtually impossible sell as you’re asking them to relinquish their privileged status, especially when most of them are convinced that it’s a slippery slope that leads into a cattle car.

            The only convincing argument I can think of would be to a middle-class Jew, pointing out that once the rich Jews finally pissed the Germans off enough it was the middle-class ones that ended up taking the heat after their rich co-ethnics got the hell out of there.

    • “Anyone who follows Ace have any comments on the current state of the blog?”

      I don’t follow the Ace of Spades blog but Severian and the guys on his Founding Questions blog refer to it as both:

      Ace of Grillers
      and
      Ace of Normies

      Guess that says it all.

  7. Off Topic: Not to claim this is equivalent re blowing up of the Crimean bridge, but . . . just a warning for those who feel they can totally rely on their local sheriffs to protect them from fed overreach. Found the following comment today at an open forum on a blog:

    However at a recent gun show in Great Falls Montana the ATF agents and Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigators were
    seen recording Canadian license plate numbers.
    The Constitutional Sheriff was more than a little pissed off since neither agency had informed him of their presence.He was so
    mad that after making it clear that he was the top LEO in the city and the county the ATF agents were escorted from the
    property and the RCMP were escorted out of the USA.
    *********************
    After much searching I was able to confirm this. Per newspaper story, local Sheriff was never informed of this operation or of the fed/Canadian official presence. Supposed purpose was to combat ‘gun smuggling.’ No matter where you are or what you do or what you buy, you are being monitored. Just more fuel for the fire.
    https://www.montanarightnow.com/great-falls/canadian-police-found-in-undercover-operation-at-great-falls-gunshow/article_faa71f0e-3f84-11ed-8331-23bd335a2466.html

    • But he didn’t then impound their recording equipment as he would have done for ordinary people?

      Especially as the RCMP were acting as ordinary citizens not being in Canada.

      • I hope any Canadians planning to transport firearms across the border fully comply with their laws. I know that bringing firearms into the USA (without proper paperwork) is quite a serious offense. I doubt Canadia would be any looser.

    • For what it’s worth, ATFE gun show antics have been going on for decades. Witnessed one myself perhaps 10-15 years ago. I even went back to the show organizers and explained what was happening—illicit buys by agents at the show. The organizers then broadcast the details to the show retailers and audience. Not sure what happened after as I went home.

  8. Large explosion on the Kerch Straits bridge, fuel tank cars, I suspect sabotage. Damage on one side of the bridge, other side being assessed, fatalities reported. Ukrainian government officials gloating.

    Oh, boy, here we go, as this was an attack on Russian soil. Now the gloves will come off big time.

    Maybe a little early to say, but ladies and gentlemen, just in case, it’s been nice knowing you.

    • Further report from RIA, that the explosion was in a truck alongside of the freight train. Whole bridge is under video surveillance, so the bomb was not in the train, but the fire is a result of the detonation next to the fuel cars.

      • If that was the case it was either a suicide bomb attack, or a remote detonation of a payload that the drivers of the vehicles were unaware of and probably told they were delivering the explosives to a place inside Crimea.

        Suicide bomb seems unlikely in the west.

    • Alongside that, Deep State tool Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney pal, wants Elon Musk investigated for Starlink failures. There is a coordinated push to have Musk stripped of all his companies by the Woke, who seem him as an enemy. Musk noted he lost $80 million running Ukranian Starlink terminals. Very likely the loss of Starlink terminals is related to Russian electronic warfare which is generally good. But I do not think the Deep State will allow Musk to buy Twitter, and that presents a challenge as our only ability to launch satellites into space at SCALE is Musk. Not Bezos and not the US Air Force. That would fit right in with one-step thinking. Blow up the Nordstream pipelines and prevent Germany from making deals with Russia — at the predictable cost of the falling apart of the EU as without German money from the Mittelstand there is no subsidies for the periphery.

      And, the CIA has now been outed in the Intercept of running a massive covert military operation. The things I did not understand are now somewhat clearer, the “Ukranians” advancing are really US Special forces and elements of US armored divisions. Putin and his people are saying and doing nothing to growing frustration in Russia. Either Putin suddenly took stupid pills or something is up for sure. Putin’s relative restraint has been to get the Global South on his side which he generally has: the Saudis are joining the BRICS, India is neutral, so is Indonesia, Africa is mostly pro-Russian as is Latin America and Oceana. China is his partner facing Regime Change as well.

      • For those with Telegram access, the AZGeopolitics channel just posted still images from a GoPro purportedly taken from a dead Western mercenary.

        In the posted images, one can see German, English, Polish, and even American flags and insignia.

        If these images are real, they wpuld seem to confirm the idea that there are significant numbers of NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine.

  9. Hey gang, here is a thought that just zoomed in to me from left field.

    Be grateful. Had this evil demented satanist in the White House been our ruler in 1962 instead of 2022, we probably wouldn’t be here today bemoaning the sorry state of affairs.

    I have a feeling that that feeling of gratitude won’t be repeated 60 years hence, in 2084, when the glory of Western Civilization has long since been forgotten.

    • Cause and effect. Demented ruler could not have occurred in ‘62 as the populace was White and the morale underpinnings still intact.

  10. Hahahaha

    That barking oaf Kanye, just now on Tucker:

    “We’re all God’s chirrun.
    We’re all sons of Abraham.”

    Dafuq I been tellin’ you

    Keep feeding him the rope, Tuck.
    You one slick-ass subversive f’sho

    • We need as much help as we can get. If a schvartzer celebrity shakes up clown world with a White Lives Matter T-shirt, bring it on.

    • The lesson of Kanye is that among our supposed leaders only Trump ever approaches the lucidity of this brutally traumatized quasi-schizophrenic idiot.

  11. ZMan mentions poverty.

    There are still plenty of poor people around. They congregate in public libraries during the day and on the street at night. In my city, Vancouver, there is an entire section of the city–the Downtown Eastside–dedicated to living the poverty life. There, cheap drugs and ruinous lifestyles combine to make life OD-short. The city tolerates it because it is a Left-Wing institution through and through. Any other basis for reality would clean it up at once as the disease-infested blight it is.

  12. There is good creative music out there. Give King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard a try. Australian neo-psychedelic prog metal band with a vast output considering they’ve only been around a dozen years. A bit too heavy for my tastes but most definitely not cookie-cutter.

    On another end of the spectrum there’s Billy Strings. Amazing young (just turned 30) guitar picker, singer, and songwriter from rural Michigan who has definitely lived it. Hottest thing in bluegrass music.

    Yes there’s a lot of crap out there but also plenty of creative music of all types if you know where to look.

    • There have always been a thousand great lesser-known bands/composers/etc. What’s changed is that there are no great (or even strongly competent) famous ones.

    • Brandon Lasko: “There is good creative music out there.”

      Serious Question: What is the last charting song you can remember which had a definable recognizable repeatable singable melody to it?

      A few years ago, I got very interested in music edumakashun for youngish children [pre-teens and early teens], and I went looking for “Pop” tunes which kids could play on their band instruments.

      I listened to about twenty years’ worth of Billboard Top 10 hits [about 200 songs in totum], via their j00t00b videos, and at the end of the exhausting exasperating frankly embarrassing and dadgum near about excruciating experiment, I found precisely ONE song which had a clear and unambiguous melody to it, with lyrics which you could decipher and re-create with your own voice [not to mention your band instrument]:

      “Hey There Delilah”
      by Tom Higgens
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_There_Delilah

      It was number one for two weeks in 2007:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_number_ones_of_2007

      Two closing thoughts:

      1) The vast majority of “music” now being played by school bands in this country is heavily-rhythmic non-melodic non-harmonic non-contrapuntal pseudo-african noise with no connection whatsoever to the musical legacy of classical Western Civilization.

      2) Despite having written the only serious love song in two decades, Tom Higgens never managed to get within a country mile of Delilah DiCrescenzo’s nether regions.

      THOTs gonna THOT.

      And coal burners gonna burn coal.

      • I don’t get adults going on about pop music. Its similar to adults and sports it seems to me.

        Its music to infantilize that should be put away later on in life and one should recognize that the vast majority has been used as a weapon to undermine western tradition.

        However much one tries to expand on and alter the pushed africanization you still end up swallowing poison and the removal of melody and replacement of your own roots.

        They repeat this pattern over and over, and no one ever seems to learn the lesson.

  13. By Padraig Martin, from the same perspective that gave us Louretti-

    “Interestingly, since Kiev has been tied up in a war within Ukraine, European populist political parties are gaining strength and winning elections. Sweden, Italy, and now Bulgaria all elected conservative parties.

    Kiev was the headquarters for almost every subversive American political manipulation operation in Europe – from George Soros’ Open Societies Foundation to John McCain’s brain-child, the International Republican Institute.”

    https://gab.com/PadraigMartin/posts/109127437898795144

    ****
    PS- bless Sissy Spacek for that wonderful movie of Loretta Lynn.
    Loretta once laughed onstage and told my mom, “Oh you hush up, Marie!”, as she bantered with the audience.
    RIP, Louretti dearest

    • Alzaebo: “Interestingly, since Kiev has been tied up in a war within Ukraine, European populist political parties are gaining strength and winning elections. Sweden, Italy, and now Bulgaria all elected conservative parties.”

      BREAKING NEWS: Neil Cavuto just referred to Biden as O’BIDEN
      https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4099014/posts

        • Well, “Cavuto” does end in a vowel.

          Do you suppose that gives him enough of a fig leaf to survive the coming character assassination?

          [And for the record, I hope they limit the assassination to merely his character, and don’t extend it to his ackshual physical corpus.]

  14. Well said. Something worth noting is the Youtube reaction video trend. It might seem trivial, but watching someone listen to a great classic for the first time – invariably an audience recommendation – is oddly compelling and can make old songs feel almost new again. Some of these channels have hundreds of thousands of followers and reach millions more. Those people are having an impact.

  15. Why, thank you, Zman.

    “But I’m old!” he cried.

    Old enough to remember when the light of Christ was still honored as the highest law.

    The young only know the Antichrist.
    They are taught to worship it as the highest, even as the Creator.

    How are they to learn of something they have never known, without you to tell them?

  16. Well written article. I think you missed a subsequent generation of musicians who were true artists – that is people reporting fundamental human truths about their human experience. There were the GenXers from Seattle. I speak of the leading talents of the early 90s grunge scene. In order of talent:
    Chris Cornell
    Lane Staley
    Kurt Cobain

    The GenXers did experience poverty and something else. In the previous generation, divorce and broken families were an exception. For GenX it bore the brunt of the experiment with no fault divorce. There were many stable families turned upside down when Mim got bored. There is another experiment they and their fathers bore the brunt of – deindustrialization. It was a tweezer generation for those like the aforementioned who were wayward and with broken families and Dads whose lumber and labor jobs who disappeared. They were supposed to go to college to succeed except the rules of tue world changed without wall st and the coastal elite telling them.

    The angst of them and those they spoke to was real – not this ginned up carny act from kids who spent life since they were 3 on a lot at Disney.

    There is one more person from this generation of import – Maynard James Keenan and Tool – the same GenX angst plus child/sexual abuse. I think of all of them MJK is the most significant artist until he became desperate for relevance after going off to make wines and now he is a clown with TDS singing Imagine covers with a talentless guitar tech who he helped make famous.

    In any case. They were so angst ridden and forlorn that the first three died long before their generation will. If you have been to even late 90s Seattle you would understand. The cover for Soundgarden’s Superunknown is a great image for tue burning angst of throes kids whose lived in the shadow of the forest and whose lives were turned upside down by post 1960s American decline and attack on Heritage working class American men.

    Now country and metal are total carny acts. There is some talent here and there but country is a bunch of Nashville Disney lot kids and metal spoiled gamers pretending to have angst. There are a few diamonds in those roughs, but very hard to find.

    I think exciting times lay ahead for laying to rest the dead 60s counter culture detritus and creating an art that will express the rage in response to White Replacement, the race war and constructing a new regime with an aesthetic that is worthy of the higher.

    • Agreed on Keenan reaching for attention, but you think Billy Howerdel is talentless? Have to disagree with you there, the feel and tone of A Perfect Circle is definitely mostly him. Guessing you don’t like them?

      • I think 13th Step is brilliant, but only as a text and the vocal performance. Without MJK’s genius for melody, dramatic form and a multi-layered dialectic I think Howerdel’s little nothings would be – little nothings.

    • PeriheliusLux: “I speak of the leading talents of the early 90s grunge scene.”

      Arguably no one realized it at the time [no one having foreseen the existential tone-deaf malaise & noblesse-oblige treachery of the Bush family, nor the outright licentious lascivious perversions & gluttonous larceny of Hillary & Slick Willy & Algore], but the 1980s were the final [and frankly the only] attempt at a serious top-down elitist-inspired clean-up & white-washing of the cultural excesses of the 1960s & 1970s.

      There were three major government initiatives of the 1980s designed to stem the tide of cultural filth & nihilism & despair:

      1) The 1986 Meese Commission on Pornography

      2) The 1987 initiative to add “Sadistic Personality Disorder” to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [the “DSM”].

      3) Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” to drugs advertising campaign.

      As much as people hated her, Nancy Reagan made real progress in altering public perceptions of narcotics use, and changed the prevailing cultural tenor concerning the use of narcotics, and for a very brief while, it looked like narcotics use was ackshually DECLINING.

      Then this radical young genius, named Kurt Cobain, burst onto the scene, and made heroin cool again, and inspired equally brilliant luminaries such as Heath Ledger & Philip Seymour Hoffman to mimic him.

      Fast forward about 30 years, and the Sackler Family Crime Syndicate’s synthetic opioid poisoning of Middle Amurrikkkuh is now** the leading cause of death for young White males.

      And the combined efforts of billionaire sanhedrin Peter Lewis & George Soros to legalize marijuana in various states has led to an explosion in Cluster A schizophrenia.

      ===============

      **One could argue that the relentless public pressure to immunize children against d@mned near infinitely many different diseases [which the children would never have been in any danger of ackshually catching, nor suffering from] was part and parcel of a larger psychological warfare campaign being waged by the Medical Industrial Complex & the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex & the Georgia Guidestones Depopulationists, which resulted in the 2021 COVID V@xxines of Death, and one could even argue that in a different [counter-historical] timeline, if Kurt Cobain had NOT been a junkie, then tens of millions of Amurrikkkun children might never have grown up to be adults acclimated to multiple purposeless hypodermic-needled inoculations every year, and, as adults, those tens of millions of Amurrikkkunz might have refused the COVID V@xxines of Death.

      Instead, in the timeline of ackshual Reality as it ackshually exists, we get ever more schizophrenia, ever more victims of the Sackler Family crime syndicate, ever more pericarditis, ever more myocarditis, and of course SADS.

      • I always enjoy reading these arguments about ROCK ‘N’ ROLL and how — depending upon the age of the commenter — the music from when *they* were young was still authentic and real.

        1990s? Step aside, junior. The ’80s were the last decade of real music.

        Hey, kid, step back — the 1970s are here.

        All of you — remember me? I’m Jimi Hendrix, and I’m from the 1960s. Real talent, real ability, real impact.

        It’s all garbage and it all led to what we see around us now. Let go of your youth and realize that the original comment has it correct.

        • I agree. The vast majority of 60s plus music is garbage. It has too low of a barrier to entry and is too easy to corrupt.

          The new forms we will create out of the wreckage are latent with something worthy of our past and our future.

          Imagine the latent talent of MJK and Cornell fused with the harmonic and rhythmic sophistication of western classical music and infusing say karnatic rhythm with our sensibility and taste with a message of conquest and dominion for our people’s glory. It will be magnificent. The sooner we can leave the vaudeville of rock and blues in the dust the better.

          Agreed W. Corliss

  18. French is a loathsome creature not even worthy of our contempt. A Cuck’s Cuck, both literally and politically. Being a Cuck is the only thing he is good at. He is a pathetic worm.

    • I honestly think being despised and held in contempt is some sort of sexual fetish for him. I know it’s also his actual JOB for the regime but he’s simply too enthusiastic for it to be all an act.

      I’d bet cash money he films his wife with other men or she crushes his testicles (nuremburg witness style) or makes him wear dirty diapers at home. There’s no way a psychologically and sexually normal male rushes to debase himself to THAT extent.

  19. For as Happy as I am that the likes of Goldberg have been sent to the Internet badlands it seems to have been done due to costs more than anything, i.e., they can get an East Indian Robot to write what he writes, so that’s what they do. The downward slope of quality in regards to normie-con content hasn’t been arrested with their departure unfortunately.

    • You shouldn’t complain. The easiest way to be outstandingly good is for others to become outstandingly bad.

  20. Of course modern feminism was pushed by the deep state in order to lower wages, increase taxes, de-stabilize the family, and gets kids in government schools earlier.

    But there is ONE fair point that feminists had: Women *should* be paid a handsome wage for being a stay-at-home mom. Taking care of kids is more labor intensive/stressful/boring than most jobs. Most parents are relieved to get out of the house and get to work when there are kids at home; it’s like a vacation.

    A healthy and wholesome society would richly reward married women who stay at home to raise healthy kids. It should be highly subsidized through taxes and housing.

    • I think I mentioned this on another thread, but here in Switzerland we just voted for women to retire at the same age as men and not a year earlier. The feminazis are having the vapours. What, us? Work the same as men? When you explain that this is what equality actually means – the rough and the smooth – they get ever angrier. Of course, they never wanted equality at all; they wanted power and privilege.

      • Yep. Same thing with the blax. Once they realized how hard life is for the rest of us, they quickly labeled it as oppression.

    • That’s just pandering. It’s not that hard of a job. Doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable, but as a single dad taking care of kids is pretty easy.

  22. I suppose it’s always hard getting old and realizing you come from a world that is no more; that is being forgotten. Has happened to every generation.

    It double (and triply) upsetting realizing the new world hates the world you knew, is erasing it, and will be much, much worse.

    • How long has this been the case though, really? If I was born in, say, 1700, was the world I moved in that different in 1760? I know on a geopolitical level, sure, things changed as always, but I think my children would have had more or less the same life I had.

      Today, people with 10-year age differences essentially live totally different lives. This trend is just accelerating rapidly, and the System encourages the division of people like this. The System also encourages people to hate the world that existed so it can refashion in its own image. Our minds and our civilization are not designed to handle this and the consequences are severe. A certain recluse wrote about this.

  23. Lovely intro on Lynn. The difference between Lynn and modern feminism is the femininity. Lynne’s feminism emphasized the resolve a woman needs to have to deal with a crappy husband or hopeless times. There was no attempt to usurp the role of man. Her feminism was still defined in relation to masculinity – just often with a simultaneous attraction yet repulsion. She still loves the bad boy (as any real female does), but she hates his drinking. Modern feminism has nothing to do with femininity.
    This same reason is why I can enjoy Terminator 1 and 2 with a strong female lead. Linda Hamilton is still a woman, driven by that desire to protect her child. She is not stronger than the male component, but the love of her child drives her in a manner relatable to any good mother. The circumstances are fantasy, but the underlying core is still feminine. Plus, she looked like a tough mama – but still a mama.
    Now, we have these 95 lb waif females that are on screen doing battle and defeating men twice their size. Think of the newest star wars crap (which I have not seen but have heard). This tiny chick is as strong as a 200 lb dude. You have to believe in magic like the force to swallow that crap. When I watch Linda Hamilton defend her baby, I can believe a momma could do that. When I hear Loretta sing about hard times, I know she was there. When I see some modern, empowered woman slay the evil man, I puke.

    • I was just thinking how in first two terminators, Sarah was saving her son, who would be the savior. Kind of an empress Matilda or Eleanor of Aquitaine role. Very feminine. The male savior had to go, which is why they replaced john in the most recent movie with some androgynous beast. Sigh….

  24. Jennifer Brown is one of the many reasons we are so damned unproductive. If you want to know why we are incapable of building our own computers, something we invented, it’s all of the various hands in the pockets of companies who could make these things.

    Conservatives always get freaked out about Welfare. But Ms Brown is far, far worse than any welfare recipient could ever be. Ms Brown’s racket is you pay her a fortune to poison your company and make it far less productive. There is an enormous army just full of people like Mx Brown making war on us at our own expense. They are a cancer on society.

    • I had to look up Jennifer Brown. And I agree. The corporate cancer that she spreads is far worse than any welfare recipient.

      https://jenniferbrownconsulting.com/jennifer-brown

      Jennifer Brown (she/her/hers) is an award-winning entrepreneur, speaker, diversity and inclusion consultant, and author. Her work in talent management, human capital, and intersectional theory has redefined the boundaries of talent potential and company culture. Her bestselling book, Inclusion: Diversity, The New Workplace and The Will to Change creates the case for leaders to embrace the opportunity that diversity represents, for their own growth and for the success of their organizations.

  25. Peak clown world is going to be when some mentally ill man pretending to be a woman who’s had fake boobs put in starts complaining about men looking at them

    • You don’t need hypotheticals…peak clown world is in fact upon us, as that little whigger tart rapper who was on that stupid show (Dr. Phil) got invited to speak at Oxford Union. I don’t think anything can top that. Not even the obese twerking flautist.

      • There was also the case of the babbling sheboons from Towson State “winning” some collegiate debate tourney. Happened several years ago.

        • Watching that debate ‘competition’ a few years ago, was, I think, my cold water / slap in the face wake up call that we had officially entered the circus clown world phase of ‘our democracy’.

          • Right up there with tranny madness as the leading indicator of America going off the rails and sailing into AINO.

      • You’re not the bightest; the union is a students’ union ie a place where entertainments or debates are put on for the enjoyment of the students. The activity can be intellectually enriching or mindless enjoyment for a bunch of mostly teenagers.

        The flautist was abusing herself at the Library of Congress with a historical artifact.

        These two are not the same.

        • It was a collegiate debate competition with faculty judges, and the gibbering sheboons, who couldn’t speak a coherent sentence in English, let alone construct logical arguments, were given the fig. In this case and the case of the twerking flautist, western norms of rationality and beauty were insulted, mocked and debased in the most flagrant manner. The two are very much the same.

          • I read (but didn’t look into too much) that this is actually a standard tactic for debate teams from black universities these days. They essentially ignore the topic and put on a vulgar rap show about muh racism and muh oppression, and the cuck judges give them the award more often than not. I really wonder if this is redpilling any of the other debate teams, of course they won’t say so publicly.

    • The dystopias of the last hundred years fell far short of how bad things are today… today’s dark dreams fall far short of how bad things will be where and IF the bad guys win.

      There will be the brutal murder of millions, routine publicly broadcast rape of virgins and children routinely being sacrificed to demons.

      Without God there is no bottom of the barrel to hit, except that of physical possibility. Anyone who fails to see this today simply doesn’t understand what’s already happened. At what point do you think these people will say enough? They won’t.

      • I was reading a an account of 1897 expedition against Benin in Nigeria.

        “As we neared the city, sacrificed human beings were lying in the path and bush—even in the king’s compound the sight and stench of them was awful. Dead and mutilated bodies were everywhere ”

        this is what the west has put into itself and nearly everyone is blind to it from the hypnotic song of the control media.

  26. Canada is a great example of the immigration/refugee racket gone out of control.

    The biggest pathway at the moment is “international students”. There are something like 700,000 “international students” currently in Canada, mainly from India, Pakistan and Nigeria. Some of the colleges are real institutions, some of them exist for the sole purpose of ripping off international students and are a straight up cash-for-PR operation.

    The “students” pay some insane international fee, indebting them for life. They’re allowed to work for only 20 hours a week or something, so they usually work under the table for somebody from their own ethnic community – working for less than minimum wage and more than 20 hours.

    They cheat their way through the program and learn nothing – but their primary goal is to get Permanent Residence, not learn. Somehow at the end of this they get Permanent Residence which turns into citizenship 3 years later. Once they graduate there’s a flood of un-skilled grads who barely speak English. They either can’t get a job or end up working at Amazon warehouse. Enough do find a job that it’s cutting wages for Canadian skilled workers.

    Of course they need somewhere to live, and they’re broke. So they end up renting out flop houses 10 per house, usually owned by another person from their ethnicity.

    Look at the list of grads from a master’s program in any university. It’s not 30% international students… It’s 100% international students. 500 Indians in one classroom.

    End result? Race to the bottom, directly to a third world country. Lowered wages, extreme housing costs, destroyed neighborhoods, degraded educational standards. A few landlords (most not even Canadian), banks, and colleges benefit in the short term. Long term, we all lose. This is just one facet of the “free market” immigration flood.

    • Much the same in the states where “STEM grads can get citizenship if they score a job for ‘x’ number of years with the fix being that they get a STEM job at Uncle Hue’s Import/Export business which is just a Chinese restaurant in an iffy part of town.

    • This immigration flood has devastated my former hometowns in California. Not long ago, there were an estimated 5-6 million Trump voters in Cali. I can tell you that having been away from cali for 2 years, and visited over the summer, that there are almost no white people left in the bay area.

      They all left. The retail theft has gotten so out of control there that in just two years, I lost count of how many businesses got completely plundered and put out of business in my old hometown. The gangs are out of control, completely overwhelming the police force’s ability to do anything, so small crimes like retail theft go on almost un-checked.

      I moved to a major city in Utah, and- literally every single day- I meet several, fresh-off-the-plane Californians like myself who have fled the shitshow that progressive politics inevitably produces. Darn near all of these Californians are right-wing like myself- maybe 95%+ of them.

      So you can hate us- your new Californian neighbors- for our stylish clothes, our pretentious attitudes, and the fact that your women hound us RELENTLESSLY, and we become instantly popular (i’m sorry, I just wanna be left the shit alone, myself)… But without us, many of your communities would succumb to the brown/blue waves MUCH faster. Plus, we know what that looks like, and will assist you in what we all know is coming. I’m your cannon fodder, your communities newest and best “white blood cells”.

      Sure, hate the progressives that mistakenly try to plant roots in your communities. I hate them more. But if you hate Right-wing Californians more than you hate juan, tyrone, and the asian leftist “locals” of your community- you are retarded, and your community is already lost.

      Don’t hate us. We are allies, like it or not. And we are deep. So, you’re welcome for the assistance, turning your red states even redder. Some appreciation would be cool, mere tolerance appreciated by us, and the Californian hatred can just fuck itself. You don’t diss, or mistreat third-world commies in public. So why am I- as your natural ally- so despised, more than any other? It makes no sense. I don’t want to change your communities one tiny bit. I just want to keep my head down, and live a very quiet life like you have had the luxury to.

      It’s not our fault Cali went to shit. Would you despise South African Boers fleeing the monkey hordes? No. You’d be like BROOOOO you are cool, plz letz be frendz! I don’t want to be your friend, and I don’t care that your supermodel-tier women literally stalk me. I just want to be left completely the hell alone, to live a quiet life, while making fun of/mercilessly ridiculing your NPC neighbors, who are now my bullshit neighbors. I’m trying to get them to move to frisco or portland. Maybe humboldt.

      Back me up. Or, at least don’t slap me up. We are your communities new white blood cells. It would be stupid for a body to attack itself, you know? I’m here, you’re welcome. We don’t have to be friends, but that doesn’t necessarily make us enemies.

      • Well, that’s one point of view—but not one shared by all. The assumption you’re making is that the CA refugees you speak of are valiant fighters who, in the end, through no fault of their own, lost their fight against Leftism and now need a place to regroup and begin again.

        The other thought is that these CA refugees caused their own unhappiness through their history of political choices and when the chickens came home to roost, fled—and further, they will again make the same political mistakes in their new residence.

        The second thought above is the one most commonly bemoaned by our local citizenry *and* political leaders. I tend to be sympathetic to it myself as I don’t see much of a strengthening of conservative thought with the influx of former CA residents. Could be their numbers are swamped by minority growth, I can’t say.

        • Frankly, I wouldnt want californians moving to my neck of the woods either. But we’re all part of the same country, been part of the same country, at the mercy of federal border policies, which is the reason most to blame as to why californians are flooding your states.

          You’d do well to remember that California WAS America, and not within the span of a single generation went from a 90% white utopia to the horror show it is today. I repeat : WITHIN A SINGLE GENERATION.

          If you think that can’t happen to you- or that it won’t happen to you- I know of a fantastic bridge with toll rights for sale.

          The fact is Californians are more of an asset than a problem.

          I myself am a broke-ass, landless farmer, millenial. Not exactly the type to drive up real estate prices. To get to the point… what happens in the quiet of your neighbor’s house does indeed effect you.

          If californians ARE SUCH A PWOOOBBLEM then you guys shouldve seceded beforehand, or helped the rest of your countrymen to secure the border. INSTEAD, you did exactly as the dipshitlibs of California did, and pretended like immigration would never come to bother you, even via its ripple effects…

          You’ve been barking up the wrong fuckin tree.

          • CA has been a weirdo State for longer than one generation. In support of this assertion, I simply point to the effect—outside of CA—of their regulations. Example, years ago, more than one generation (25 years) to be sure, auto manufacturers were making all US cars to meet CA standards—the toughest in the land. Ditto on food products. Simply read the labels on products you buy in the stores. And don’t forget your institutions of *lower* learning where you were doing your siting and protests long before the cancer spread to other States.

            No, you can’t lay *your* guilt on us, nor avoid your share of blame for your shithole of a State. That we might follow in your footsteps does not negate that you led the way and now seek a place to hide—you are not allies, but refugees—at best a “good example of a bad example”.

            That said, I wish all refugees a safe haven. I am not vindictive, it serves no purpose. However, that I have an innate distrust of new, former CA’s taking up residence here is understandable. Indeed, this State has several now running for political office. They won’t get my vote.

      • We had a bunch of conservatives from Philly/NJ move to my neck of the woods in the 80s and 90s. Things got fancier, COL went up, some farms disappeared. Guess who followed those people in the last 20 years, and guess who’s moving out.

        I hope that wave breaks and recedes but I’ve yet to see evidence. In the meantime I expect to have a mess to clean up in my dotage.

        • Although in fairness I’ve met a few recent arrivals who don’t like what’s happening to the place, but they don’t seem equipped to deal with it.

      • A big part of the Cali hate is not your politics — you can wear your MAGA hat without fear. It’s your f**kin’ home equity. You drive up the local real estate and price out the locals’ kids. You cry about your lost utopia all the way to the bank. Maybe you didn’t intend to disrupt the good thing the locals had going, but you did. And calling your buddies back home and telling them you’ve found an oasis where they need to follow along just drives more of the original folk out into the desert. So, it ain’t personal; it’s just self-preservation.

      • Agree. I live in a big city in Canada probably similar to SF (without the “groid crime, although that is rising too). It’s all Asians, East and South. And Arabs, and Africans, and Latinos.

        The city seems cleared out of White people since the pandemic. The only White people left are insane, ugly, skinny, dysgenic mask wearing weirdos. There are also some young White people from other cities looking to live the “city life” for a bit. And a few rich White enclaves.

        I think the politics of California changed because demographics changed. That’s the case everywhere. There just aren’t as many White people anymore in relation to the overall population. 2 million Californians might move in, 60% R 40% D, but also 5 million aliens move in, 99% D. The area tilts D but Californians are blamed.

        Blaming White people is just another cope by conservatives who can’t face reality. It’s not white people doing anything, it’s open borders and mass immigration.

    • Yes, indeed. Every word you’ve written rings true. It’s a racket unfettered by logic or principle.

      • Idk if you’re actually Pakistani, but the “South Asian” community is fuming at this point. They know better than whites do, the unlimited stream of immigration has dumped millions of low class third worlders right in their backyard. None of them can afford families due to rocking house prices. They have turned hard against mass immigration which is surprising.

        They all voted for Trudeau in 2015 because the Conservatives be rayciss but ended up screwing themselves over. “Brown flight” of 90s generation immigrants is currently happening in “diverse” areas.

  27. Music wise a lot of people are mistaking “I hear garbage on the radio” with “all music today is garbage”. There’s a tremendous amount of great music being made, it just doesnt get distribution through the corporate (((music industry))) and takes little more searching out. If you’re a music casual you might not know about it, but then again if you’re a casual you probably don’t care that much anyway because music isn’t really something you care that much about.

    Small related white pill

    ” The world that produced someone like Loretta Lynn is gone and the audience she appealed to is also gone.”

    That’s not quite right. Jack White (of White Stripes fame) who is kind of an interesting guy in his own right was a big fan of Loretta Lynn and actually produced and even did a track on her last big album “Van Lear Rose”. The album did really well, maybe partly on the same trend that saw Johnny Cash get rediscovered by a new audience and have a lot of late life success. Also welcome counter evidence, by the way.

    Point is, good art and good culture is GOOD first and foremost. There will always be an audience for it amongst people with taste, and try as tiktok might, there will always be at least a notable minority of these people.

    Most young people are garbage now, but not all are, and the better ones are mining our shared past for better alternatives to (((today’s corporate garbage))). Young musicians and music lovers exist just like young artists and writers exist, but they’re dissidents like the rest of us and mainly lack platforms.

    Dont let the (((corporations))) convince you that everything is slop just because slop is all they put in your trough. Also don’t become convinced that *everyone* loves the slop as much as the machine insists they do. This is just more gaslighting.

    • True. There are exceptions. But the number of exceptions is painfully small. Prior to the mid-90s, the majority of pop music one heard on the radio was at least decent, and much of it was quite good. One needn’t search through haystacks to find the rare golden needle. In other words, pop music has declined with alarming rapidity over the last three decades, and the vast majority of young people wouldn’t recognize a good album if it alighted on their bedreaded heads.

      Personally, I simply tuned out of the culture in 1992 and haven’t looked back. I listen exclusively to art music, don’t watch movies (James Bond excepted), and the only TV I watch is DVDs of old shows–currently watching the original Twilight Zone episodes. Maybe I’m missing some good stuff, but I doubt even today’s good stuff compares with the good stuff from the past.

      • Rick Beato, the popular youtube music guy, talks about the decline in modern music that’s played on the radio often. Multiple producers on single albums, the same four chords used, playing it safe with the same old formula, etc.

        I try to keep up with current music and there are some gems, even though it takes effort. I hate the idea of being a cranky oldster who only listens to the music of my youth, but there was so much great stuff years ago, there’s no comparison with today. It seems like around 1995 is when things changed drastically.

        • Yeah, I hear ya’…so to speak. When I tuned out in 1992, however, I was only 24 years old, so not quite what you’d call a crotchety old graybeard. Crap is crap, and if you’re capable of recognizing it, you do so.

        • My two cents: Beato is right. When I taught myself guitar, I did so by learning chord progressions to various songs, and it is definitely the case that older songs were more complex (both in having more chords, and more movements), and in a wide variety of keys (a lot of modern songs are in C, G, A and D, rarely in minor keys or flat keys). Modern songs don’t use dissonance as much either, both in terms frequency and variety. Lyrics have become simpler too.

      • We’re just growing older. I watch a lot of the old stuff (as compared to new) as well. And I never cease to be amazed as to “how could I have watched that crap”. Watching some of the old stuff gives one a sense of nostalgia and perspective, but as entertainment, in the main it was, as is, terrible—poor writing, acting, hackneyed, and what have you. Not much different today, albeit perhaps somewhat worse in that every plot line—new back in the day—has been beaten to death over time.
        Twilight zone was pretty good for it’s time, but it’s really hard to separate the show from its writer and producer, Rod Serling, who did some of his best work outside of Twilight Zone. What I have found interesting are some of the modern stuff coming from overseas. Originality is hard to find in the US.

      • One often overlooked reason why (in my opinion) much in media changed — not necessarily for the better — in the 1980s onward was, perversely, Reagan and the Republican move to deregulate radio, TV and (I think) other media markets. Applicable to radio: prior to the 1980s there were anti-monopoly regulations in place. The intent and the result of this was that there were more local, independent stations, often with interesting programming serving local markets. Come deregulation, there was much consolidation. As a result, today you can drive 1000 miles and you’d be unable to distinguish their “smooth jazz” station from the one in your home city, at least until you heard the call sign or local advertising. The situation is much the same for TV. Much the same happened in print media and (later) the quasi-monopolies of the internet. The past few years have shown how pervasive is the censorship, even aided and abetted by government at times.

        If anything good can be said, it’s that yes alternative media is available but finding it isn’t easy. The major media, however, have consolidated into relatively few hands with the predictable homogenization and hive-mind consequences.

    • Can you please give some examples of good music produced in this age? I can only think of Greta Van Fleet. Thanks.

      • I second that. I am a gentleman of a certain age, weeks away from 70, but always receptive to being exposed to new creations.

        My own musicality, being an oboist, English hornist, and in recent times, a player of the oboe d’amore, has been classical. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schuman, Brahms, Ravel, Vaughn Williams, Britten, Copland, Tschaikovsky, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Shostakovich in orchestral forms. Danzi, Taffanel, Roussel, Milhaud, Poulenc, Françaix, Hindemith, Nielsen in chamber forms. Etc.

        But always alive to vernacular forms, as well as Western early music, and non-Western, too.

        Thanks.

      • Wrote a big giant reply with tons of youtube links to songs, many different artists… and got booted by the spam filter.

        Just to prove my point though I might point you towards youtube and 1) Polyphia and 2) Billy Strings

        Both are young kids, virtuoso musicians recording musically sophisticated stuff (in extremely different styles, so check both). Both are currently releasing new music and have solid (if niche) followings including among zoomers. Both have obvious affection and inspiration for older artists and forms of (white) music but also take those influences in very new and fresh directions.

        Not saying theyre the end all by any means, tastes vary so maybe you hate both. But its just an example that there’s a LOT of good stuff out there in very different styles. The radio is not the real music scene today anymore than real crime today is white robbers breaking into the homes of intact suburban black families like they always do on ADT ads.

        • Now there’s a coincidence. A buddy of mine turned me on to Strings just this Tuesday. It’s good stuff. I can appreciate bluegrass and bluegrass-influenced music when it’s done well.

          • Wow! Furthur downthread I mentioned Billy Strings. Glad to see I’m not alone here.

    • Most people don’t really listen to music, they tend to focus on the vocal of the singer, take Jack White for example, excellent guitarist, good song writer, decent singer, but listen to his best albums WTF Meg White can’t play the drums, point this out to any White Stripes fan and they deny it, but it clear as day the woman just cant play the drums, she’s holding him back

      Sometimes if I’m listening to the Pogues or a similar band, I’ll ask someone how many instruments can they hear behind the singers voice, most people can only hear half of what going on

      • Meg White is a horrible drummer and they both knew that… and intentionally went with it to create the crazed exploding garage sound of their (especially early) albums.

        He’s worked with a lot of really excellent other musicians since then and created really different sounding music in other bands… but white stripes is electric blues on a crazy old garbage guitar through a half functioning pawn shop amp OVER what sounds like an enthusiastic 8 year old playing george of the jungle drums on trash can lids. That’s the sound and its like nothing else.

        You’re right though that musical normies barely notice instrumentation of any kind, except perhaps subconciously.

      • It’s satisfying to hear someone else say the unsayeable about Meg White’s drumming. She can’t play at all but you can’t say that because any criticism of any woman, except traditionalist women, is hate.

        I remember when I first heard “Fell in Love with a Girl” on the radio. It tore my head off.

    • Much as i miss the possum imo Alan Jackson, George Straight, are keeping it breathing. But yeah murder was commited down on music row.

  29. Regarding Mr. Scalia’s essay on “The Conservative Case for Allowing Vulgarians of Color to Play With Historical Objects of Our Shared American Heritage,” perhaps he forgot his /sarc tag or his editor removed it? Otherwise, I got nothin’.

  30. The Better Man Conference sounds like a carbon copy of another organization called the “Good Men Project”, to the extent I originally thought it was the same people involved. Everything about the message they are sending is exactly the same, and they both have the exact same target.

    https://goodmenproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Good-Men-Project-DI-Overview.pdf

    It would be interesting to see the donors of these projects, as it’s clear they have a boatload of money to spread the message with very few normal people actually paying to read them. One has to think the strategy is to saturate media with all these nonsense organizations to create the illusion of consensus and to drown out more grassroots male movements that might actually make lives better.

    • And people wonder where all those trillions of dollars that get lost in government accounting go.

    • “to drown out more grassroots male movements that might actually make lives better.”

      Speaking of which, whatever happened to that Bronze Age Pervert guy?

      • Partly banned, entirely invisible. He’s still funny and has some unique insights, but he doesn’t influence anyone anymore. Paywalling too much material after you’re established is basically declaring a war of attrition against your audience.

        I’ve encountered his name exactly twice this year, including your comment, and I’m almost always in /ourguy/ media world. Four years ago he was probably the best-selling self-published author in (approximately) English, and *the* cultural authority on alt-man stuff. Now, nothing.

        The rhetorical phase is over, maybe.

        • The dissident right moves further rightward and guys like BAP are astroturfed in order to be gatekeepers. Eventually the flood of people on the rightward shift are too much to hold back and the gates are knocked down. Guys like BAP are no longer valuable and the powers that be find other gatekeepers.

          Long story short, BAP was no longer valuable to his promoters and that was that.

      • The TRS guys speculated that BAP was funded by libertarian homosexual Peter Thiel to make the dissident right homo-friendly. They based this speculation on the fact that Michael Anton reviewed BAP’s book and in the review acknowledged that Thiel had commissioned the review.

        Just like tribe members try to infiltrate the dissident right to steer it away from antisemitism, it also may be true that homos follow a similar strategy.

  31. This all got me thinking about the material conditions we live in. I helped my grandfather clean out his basement once and was amazed at the things he had saved, that HIS father had saved, who had lived through the Great Depression. Bits of string, pipe, old knives, old cigar boxes full of miscellaneous screws or bolts which still had my great grandfather’s writing still on them. Today I go to our local rural transfer station (dump) and the place is full of furniture, and bicycles, chainsaws that still function, TVs, refrigerators.

    I think we’ve forgotten where we came from and how this prosperity may not last forever. The vise as well as other tools my great grandfather used through the Great Depression I still use now.

    • I know what you mean. I was raised on a farm. My dad grew up during the depression. I was 16 years old before I knew there was such a thing as new nails–believed they stopped making those things about 1931. The only nails I had seen up to that point were corkscrewed, rusty ones kept in a bushel basket in the tool shed.

      • My mother’s side of the family hails from Iowa. She and two other siblings grew up on a farm there (1920-30s). I’ve visited several times in my life, but hardly know that side of the family, never having lived closer than about 1,000 miles away. During my last visit there, ~1988, it’s worth noting that while “the family’ still lived on the farm, the farm was in the agriculture program and few/no crops were grown there. In the ten or so years earlier, that had not been the case, but in 1988 there were no longer any live stock there either. I’ll probably never visit there again: the closest kin I would have would be 2nd or more distant cousins, again people who I’ve probably seen half a dozen times in my life, even if that. I have nothing against them, but they might as well be strangers. They probably can’t even be called real farmers any more.

    • Not a real handy guy, but I hang on to the tools rhat have come down to me from my paternal grandfather and father.

      Got a little collection of books on the uses and maintenance of hand tools to get me up to speed. Will pass all this along to my stepson comes the time.

    • Hear, hear! When I moved to my current home, I began setting up a shop in the basement and I was in need of a few things. I check online and as luck would have it, there was a machine shop that had just gone out of business and the owners kids were selling a lot of his gear. Two items for sale were these forged vises that were built in Brooklyn around 1900, weighed around fifty pounds apiece and they wanted $300 for both of them. Done! I’ve used these things to hold a door while painting, a bike frame also while painting and dozens of other things and they’ve never disappointed me. They also have the built-in semi-circles under the main jaws that will hold pipes steady for cutting as well.
      I asked them why they were parting with them and was told that their mother was suffering from cancer and they needed every last dime to pay for her treatments. Sad, very sad, but unfortunately it happens. Old shit is built to last and I will willingly shell out more in payment if it means getting my hands on something that I can hand down to my children!

  32. Regarding the strangeness of keeping the receipts for your abortion for over a decade, that’s exactly what you’d do if you thought there was a chance the Baby Daddy might be worth more someday in the future than the monthly check you’d get if you had the baby today

    As one of our great Negro crooners, I think it was Sammy Davis, Jr., reminded us: “I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger. But…”

    • Is Herschel Walker the smartest black Republican they could find, or is he the only black Republican they could find

      • It’s Georgia.

        Walker is the only black Republican who ran the Bulldogs to a National Championship.

        • Bingo! HW is the only “supposed” Black conservative with a chance to draw off enough of the Black vote to win election in a Black State such as Georgia.

          Here in my State and Hispanic County, the Rep’s only run Hispanic surnamed candidates if at all possible. The one running for Congress in my district has 6 kids, and the family could pass for White, but he’s got the name, Juan Ciscomani, AZ 6th district.

  33. Things will suck harder and be increasingly insane until people are forced to be serious and practical again. I’m convinced, in the aggregate, we can be hardscrabble human beings or high tech animals, but not the best of both. No way around it, unfortunately.

  34. Yeah, bygone era for sure:

    “The girls in New York City, they all march for women’s lib
    And better homes and garden shows the modern way to live
    And the pill may change the world tomorrow, but meanwhile, today
    Here in Topeka, the flies are a buzzin’
    The dog is a barkin’ and the floor needs a scrubbin’
    One needs a spankin’ and one needs a huggin’
    Lord, one’s on the way

    Oh gee, I hope it ain’t twins, again…”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFO6SsDQ9nk

  35. Ed Dutton says IQ in the US has declined 2 points since 2000. So 1 point a decade. The slide downward cannot be stopped. Hard times again soon. Maybe we’ll get some decent music from it.

    • Years ago, before coming to this side, I kept hearing about the Flynn Effect, which goes against what Dutton says. What of the Flynn Effect?

      • I think the idea is that the Flynn Effect reversed at some point during the late 20th Century. What I’m wondering is if losing 1 IQ point on average per decade would even have a noticeable effect in the short term. It seems like we’ve lost 15 to 20 average IQ points in the last five or so years alone. Obviously, no such dramatic decline in intelligence could occur so rapidly. My own suspicion is that technology not only makes us dumber — by enabling us to be more intellectually lazy — it also makes us seem dumber than we actually are. Twitter alone gives off the impression that ours is a culture of blithering imbeciles.

        • To be fair, the lower it gets the less anyone is going to notice until Dunning Kruger is the only intellectual position remaining.

        • Perhaps extensive use of Twitter is itself indeed a proof of blithering imbecility.

        • Intelligence? There are still people walking around my leafy suburban paradise wearing face masks.
          It is sunny and 70 degrees outside.

          • “There are still people walking around my leafy suburban paradise wearing face masks.”

            Plot twist: it’s the local Sceptic Society.

        • You are forgetting the theory of the “Smart Fraction”. The concept that there is a percentage of the population—higher IQ types— necessary for good things to happen, like keeping the lights on. That percentage may not have been reached yet despite the average lowering of the population IQ.

          Eventually however, that percentage will be reached and the decline begins. One might argue (I have) that the percentage has been reached and we are experiencing such signs. Dutton has in any number of his videos.

    • I hate to have to say this but Dutton totally cucked on Covid, like a long time ago, and so he should never be mentioned again, except mockingly, and then forgotten. See for example Dicky Dick Spencer.

      • I dunno. I still like Eddy. But yes I was shocked by that. I put it down to him working like a fiend constantly writing his books and doing his shows and giving talks. Ron Unz also seemed to drop the ball there, but he has been redeeming himself.

        • Edit: By that I mean Dutton simply was not paying attention. He is deep into the stuff that interests him and it seems missed the political angle behind the plague.

          • It seems like dissidents who are especially data-driven showed a depressing tendency to fall hook, line, and sinker for the Covid bullshit. Steve Sailer and Ed Dutton would be two of the most prominent (and therefore saddest) examples. My suspicion is that Covid had huge appeal for those who love data. Since establishment media mouthpieces were constantly throwing out numbers about the apocalyptic event they claimed was happening, data fanatics couldn’t get enough of the insanity. Those fanatics allowed their love of numbers, even numbers that no sensible person would have relied on, to completely overwhelm any skepticism that they might have harbored toward the entire fraudulent affair. It’s a good lesson to the rest of us that we should never let a particular hobby horse/obsession prevent us from seeing the bigger picture.

      • Why should Dutton have paid the least attention to your favorite hobby bourse, Covid?

        Did Dutton even speak on Covid, or mention the “need” for any of the political/medical interventions undertaken? I’ve not seen such in my following of him during the scamdemic. It is possible he had not the slightest interest—and for that I’m grateful. There were any number of others with excellent backgrounds and knowledge to keep us informed.

        • You got it backwards buddy. Covid wasn’t my hobby horse it was HIS.

          Dutton mocked those who refused to get “vaccinated.”

          You can take my internet word for it or do your own research: that was his take on it.

        • Did you take the experimental gene therapy injection, Compsci?

          I can’t imagine having being that gullible and naive, can you?

          Dutton otoh, was. That’s why he should never be cited as an authority, on anything, ever again. His instincts are fail. He is like Sailer and Cochrane — smart guys but something missing, like intuition or an instinct, or good sense, or whatever u wanna call it.

          Letting any of those guys have a pass for their failure, on the most crucial litmus test, of the modern world?

          Not a chance in hell. If that doesn’t clue you in, to their overall quality, as thought leaders, than nothing will.

          So I repeat my question: did you get the experimental gene therapy, or are you worried about it, and biased, perhaps over the fate of loved ones? Everyone is more or less in that boat, but that’s no reason to pretend it wasn’t a huge huge huge fail, on everyone’s part. How many kids’ lives, have been wrecked, by the clot shots, and you wanna pass it off as a “hobby horse.”

          Dude — get ur head outta the sand.

          • Total nonsense. You obviously are new here. Before you spout off, perhaps you should follow the comments and commenters a bit more. You’d make less of a fool of yourself.

            I’ve never had the vexxine, nor promoted such. I have always denounced the false modeling in support of the Covid scamdemic and discussed at length my interactions with doctors and local health personnel wrt Covid and Covid restrictions in my area.

            I have had Covid twice and related at length the effect of such. I am also in the high risk category of age, so there is skin in the game.

            If I’ve missed something wrt Dutton, then point me to one of his video’s wrt his position on Covid. I’ve read most of his works as well—have you? I maintain he’s never had a position on Covid.

            It is ridiculous to attempt to cast Dutton into the void for not living up to whatever position you think he should hold wrt to a position that he has not—or rarely—spoken about.

            Dutton holds any number of views supporting HBD as per common discussions on the DR. This is why I stated Covid is your “hobby horse”—there is more to the DR than a single cause, like the recent Covid scamdemic.

            Keep this up and you’ll soon be able to talk only to your mirror. Learn to differentiate friend from enemy. You friend is not always one who agrees with you 100%.

  36. Regarding women in the workforce, a few observations.

    1. The competent, very attractive women who have to deal with aspie level guys like engineers learn to wear loose clothing to keep men’s eyes on the right place. The ones with a reasonable personality understand that’s a minor price to pay for all the advantages Nature has given them.
    2. Incompetent women from the range of 4-10 on the looks scale learn how easily they can get thirsty men to “help” them with an issue, which usually involves the men doing essentially all of her assigned work.
    3. Unattractive, incompetent women still get the sympathy factor where a few good tears with a good story makes them much harder to fire.

    The fact is, life is not fair, which is why attractive men and women move up the chain even is they are a little less competent than their unattractive peers.

    • “Of all the times that I’ve been burned
      By now you’d think I’d have learned
      That it’s who you look like
      Not who you are”
      — Jackson Browne, “Rosie”

      “What’s Good? Life’s good, but not fair at all.”
      — Lou Reed

  37. My spouse would get a kick out of the boob thing. When she was younger, worked for two firms that basically had a lot of short Jewish guys. She’s 5’11”, Nordic looking blonde and let’s say “blessed”. Problem was in heels is well over 6’, so any time she was talking to any of these guys they were basically looking at her chest. She always got a chuckle out of the stammering and sweating and the fact many had to crane their necks up to look at her. Plus was fresh off the national rowing team and had bigger biceps then most of them. Used it as an intimidation tool.

      • And banged out four kids in 7 1/2 years like she was doing deadlift sets. Works part time as a landscape designer and sometimes will pitch in unloading trucks of plants and other heavy materials. At 55 leaves the little indefatigable Squatamaleans in awe by out working them…

        • I say hell yeah. Good for both of you women with common sense are made, same as men.
          I suspect whats coming will winnow wheat from chaff with a quickness.

          God bless Loretta, we are diminished.

    • You just caused a flashback to uni many eons ago. Going back to the cafeteria serving line to get something and seeing this girl from our residence who was the same type as your wife and yes a total knockout standing there with her tray and nearby a poor little j-guy seemingly catching sight of her for the first time: he was absolutely gobsmacked/mesmerized/deer in the headlights. It was more than a little pathetic. And a little creepy. I think that’s why the memory stuck.

    • When I moved to NYC I was dating well out of my class because the city was crawling with chinese and jews and @ 6’3″ I had my choice of the 5’10” plus women who abounded.
      The English speech didn’t hurt.

  38. I haven’t listened to the podcast yet — just wanted to say that the written piece that goes along with it is fantastic. I was listening to some Patsy Cline several days ago and it struck me that such music came out of an entirely different world than what we’re living in today. Most of the songs Cline performed (I don’t believe she wrote many of them herself) dealt with simple heartbreak, yet they come off as genuine, wholesome, and maybe even a tad naive. Today’s culture is so much more cynical and debased than the one that spotlighted musicians such as Cline. We’ve lost something . . . and very few seem to realize that we’ve lost something. And how could young people figure that out if they themselves have never experienced what we’ve lost? My desire to connect with a past that predates my own existence only by a decade or two increases the more I watch everything deteriorate.

    • Modern culture can’t even do cynicism well. I grew up in the heyday of grunge, which, whether you like it or not, really spoke to the nihilism and frustrations of youth, while creating a very unique sound that made these bands instantly recognizable. The music done by corporate boards can’t be cynical in the music, as they don’t really feel the alienation. They can only be cynical in their marketing of the slop they dish out.

      You can see the creation and dissolution of countless music styles from as long ago as the classical era to about 10-20 years ago, then popular music suddenly became homogenized within only a few distinct genres and no new creativity seems to be capable of breaking out of the mold in the mainstream.

      • “Modern culture can’t even do cynicism well.” That’s a hell of a good quote! You’re also right about grunge. While I’m more of a classic rock guy, I would much rather listen to grunge than the mindless twaddle produced today. Grunge at least sounds authentic; everything today comes off as a pose concocted by some soulless marketing department. To borrow a phrase from those snarky kids on the Internet, all of pop culture has become “fake and gay.”

        • This jumped out at me recently as I was bombarded with MTV Video Music Awards advertisements while watching something on Comedy Central (either an old movie or old South Park reruns).

          I noticed all the acts promoted in the commercials were solo acts, typically various shades of brown. Obviously cranked through some corporate management machine.

          I recalled that in my youth, there were typically actual bands of white dudes headlining the MTV VMAs. Guns & Roses, Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Nirvana, etc.

          I struggle to believe that there aren’t groups of white dudes somewhere in the US playing guitars somewhere. But the (((corporate talent people))) can’t find them anywhere?

          Yet another vector in the great replacement and cultural genocide.

        • Yes, already mentioned were the White Stripes. Amateur drummer, garage band sound, but that was part of the image. Even I recall a few of their songs (I heard them in my 40s). Of course a lot of it is in the production: I’m enjoying the recommended “King Gizzard of the Lizard Wizard” which I assume is a modern band, yet their sound is pure 60s psychedelic.

      • Chet-

        Have you listened to any of the recent neo/echo-grunge groups?

        Some of them are quite good, but their subject matter is light, almost trite compared to the original groups.

        I also agree about the death of distinct musical genres. That was one of the best things in 80s and 90s music. It seemed to get snuffed out around the early to mid 00s.

        • No, but I’m open to recommendations. Would be interesting to see if the music style holds up to me now without the nostalgic lens.

          • A band from that era you might have missed were the Pixies, 4 perfect albums in a row, very few band mange that

            Also, not big in the US a band from Manchester called the Stone Roses, their first album is great, second pretty good too. they were YUGE in the UK and Ireland

    • Wkathman: “I was listening to some Patsy Cline several days ago and it struck me that such music came out of an entirely different world than what we’re living in today.”

      Willy Nelson [born in 1938] is one of only a handful of fellows still living who witnessed [the very last days of] the Golden Age of Country.

      In 1961, at the ripe old age of 23, he wrote “Crazy” for Patsy Cline.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4Bs8kSz4pY

      Listening to it all these many years later – and my goodness was Patsy Cline a once in a century talent – I’m kinda shocked that a 23 year old boy could have written such tragic [and frankly almost cynical] lyrics.

      I wonder if Whit Stillman could do an historical movie along the lines of “The Last Days of Country”?

      Listening to the artistry of the early Elvis Trio [Elvis & Scotty Moore & Bill Black], you’ll hear a subtlety & resonance of guitar picking like nothing anyone has produced in decades, and Elvis had phenomenally good diction as a singer.

      Here they are for the 1954 Louisiana Hay Ride:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLaPnpjw-pc

      I don’t know whether we even have the proper microphones and sound stages anymore to reproduce such a delicately perfectionist approach to musical performance.

      The second half of that video had Elvis’s rendition of “Blue Moon of Kentucky”; here’s Patsy Cline’s version:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk4UrBymboA

      PS: I defy anyone on this board to sing “Blue Moon” at the tempo that the 19-year-old Elvis sang it for the 1954 Louisiana Hayride; we would completely garble the song.

      Elvis was incredibly talented.

      And we 21st Century cretins can barely even mumble our way through conversations these days.

      Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any performer or person of public notoriety with that perfection of diction in their speech, much less their singing at allegro/presto tempos.

  39. A lot of people who are mourning Loretta Lynn are doing so for the same reasons that so many people mourned Queen Elizabeth II, as different as they were – they are not so much mourning the people themselves as they are mourning the passing of the world that produced them. It’s not possible to lament the passing of that world as a world, because that would be allegedly racist, sexist, transphobic, pedophobic, and Lord knows what else, so people mourn the loss of the people that world produced. It’s at least partially a displacement activity. Camille Paglia said a few years ago that our society is becoming obsessed by grief and loss, and this might be one of the reasons why.

    FWIW, I’m the same way. I did not particularly care for Lynn’s music, and Elizabeth was actually a pretty mediocre monarch, but I hated to see both of them go. Yet another part of the old world gone. But as Benet said in “By The Waters of Babylon”, “We must build again!”

    • It’s an ending of an era. We are definitely entering into a new “weak men create hard times” era where large swaths of the population have no choice but to live as hard of a life as Loretta Lynn’s songs.

  40. Looks like we could start a competition here with what the Irish call poor mouthing. Personal stories on who suffered most from poverty growing up.

    • No heat or indoor plumbing, living in an unfinished house my dad built every day after work, wearing hand-me-downs from my cousin. But space: big garden, orchard, chickens, geese, turkeys. Also a rusty BMX bike; a BB gun; friends; plenty of woods, meadows, and corn fields to explore; forts to build and guard from rivals.

      Screw that— growing up ‘poor’ kicked ass. Wouldn’t have traded places with the suburbanites for the world, because as far as I was concerned, I already had it.

        • Right??? My family had ups and downs as a kid. My friends always seemed to be rich tho. Idk why.

          You wanna talk about poor? How bout waking up next to the dumpster, limping a mile and some change in the dark to get to work, losing your job because you broke the shit out of your arm and cant do the work, climbing into and out of dumpsters with a badly broken arm to eat garbage, not having any insurance because you’re homeless and the welfare system hates whites so your dominant arm “heals” incorrectly and is basically crippled for life, and sleeping on the concrete in winter behind the library amidst drunks, tweekerz, and fbi informants watching your every breath.

          “I was poor! Woe is meee!!” Boohooooo.

          If I told you HALF the shit I’ve survived, you’d freak the fuck out.

    • We had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an hour before we went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty nine hours a day at the mill, pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our mom and dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing ‘Hallelujah ‘.

    • Does growing up house-poor count? We couldn’t even afford HBO like our bougie friends could, and certainly could not afford a country club membership. Our most expensive vehicle was a new Chevy Astro van with pilot seats in the back. The only box seats I ever sat in were gifted from my dad’s work. Going to a non-chain Italian restaurant was the closest thing we had to a gourmet meal.

      My parents tried hard to live upper-middle class, and eventually failed. That is a unique kind of poor: you look reasonably comfortable and well-off, but still living paycheck to paycheck, and a layoff, a divorce, or a bad stock market deal could send us down multiple economic brackets. At least when you’re poor, you stay poor and the only way is up.

      • Marko: Sounds a bit like our circumstances when all our income (and most of our debt) went to paying Christian school tuition. Our children never lacked for love, food, or clothing, but they were never the first to have the ‘latest’ anything. They might get it eventually, by which time their classmates had moved on to something else. We had no money for vacations, while their friends traveled around the US or Europe.

        My husband always said we weren’t poor; we were broke. There’s a distinct difference.

        • Precisely. Looking back at childhood I can now see that my mother and I were “poor”, but at the time I had *no idea*. What did I need, that I lacked? Well, nothing. Food, shelter, clothes and an occasional dollar and I was on my own to do as I liked. I played with friends and went to school. Can’t remember any jealousy of others’ economic status, nor do I remember any discrimination as to my means and status from others.

          However, I can see now the “benefit” of such a start in life—there’s no place to go but up! 😉

      • “That is a unique kind of poor: you look reasonably comfortable and well-off, but still living paycheck to paycheck, and a layoff, a divorce, or a bad stock market deal could send us down multiple economic brackets. At least when you’re poor, you stay poor and the only way is up.”

        The majority of Americans are now poor or thinly camouflaged poor. The latter are those living in suburbia but up to their back teeth in all kinds of debt — mortgage, student, cars, credit cards. The glittering prosperity is brittle and faux. The mood is desperate and verging on hysterical.

        • When you are poor, but pretending you are rich, I can see the problem you describe. I admit, it’s a societal situation I missed in my youth, but seems de rigeuer today.

          There was a time, you have to be in your late 60’s or 70’s to remember, when there were *no* credit cards. Well, not for the average person. If you wanted to “own” a home, you needed 20% down. In short, you could not live in a fantasy world of upper class opulence, nor was such promised.

      • My parents both grew up in the Depression and were frugal their entire lives. While it hardly qualifies as Loretta Lynn, Marko’s hand-to-mouth experience, much less Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” poverty, fact is I grew up with a black and white TV and years-old vehicles in neighborhoods where color TV and new cars was the norm. My folks were not quite cheapskate but parsimonious to the point where Dad’s executor remarked upon it. My parents’ niggardly ways were not without their advantages, however: Each left a decent nest egg. Which is largely why I was able to retire in my early 40s.

  41. Odd to read this, because I was thinking this morning about both Loretta Lynn and the disappearance and possible reappearance of widespread poverty in our lifetimes. I did not tie the two together at all, though, and it did not occur to me. Thanks for doing so.

    Compare and contrast the people who lived in Lynn’s hometown of Butcher’s Hollow, West Virginia, in her lifetime with those who live there today, and it is readily apparent the latter live grimmer, emptier lives even though the prospect of hunger and homelessness is not ever-looming. Moonshine vs. opioids, traditional folk music vs. Africanized rap, pregnant teens forced to marry early vs. hos dropping little bastards and paid each month as a direct result. Lynn was dinged by wealth and abundance later in life but recovered. How will those who tweak all day listening to rap fare when food and shelter no longer magically appear? The question answers itself.

    The loss of Queen Elizabeth at the extreme end of one spectrum and Lynn at the other mark our passage into a long night of illusion, fraud, and learned helplessness.

    • Our previous generations went from poor to wealthy. Gonna be a lot harder to go in reverse.

    • Loretta Lynn was from Kentucky, but one side of the Tug Fork looks a lot like the other, and is pretty much how you describe it. A lot of poor white people driving ATVs to their court appearances.

      • Thanks for that, Vegetius. I would have lost Jeopardy if that had been the final round (would have lost anyway, but still…).

  42. “Perhaps in time it will mature into a genuine alternative to the lunacy of feminism.”

    When it was pushed and peddled in the early ’70s by the media establishment, there was an underlying economic logic to it: it brought millions of relatively low-paid female workers into the workforce and feminized that workforce. That is to say, it helped to create a lower-paid and more docile workforce.

    “Fifty years ago, everyone knew someone who came from such conditions because we still had lots of genuine poor people.”

    I recall that in the late ’70s I would still occasionally run across people who had lived during the Great Depression and had even ridden on freight trains at that time looking for work. That experience shaped a generation that died out decades ago.

    • On a side note, I wonder if anyone here has read “Hard Times” by Studs Terkel. One of USA’s great oral historians.

      • Yep, Studs is my go to guy. I loved his “Working” book. He definitely was the precursor to the TV show, “Dirty Jobs”. We’ve touched upon this subject in this group before and I’ve taken to heat the comment on over glorifying Blue Collar work, but you’ve got to appreciate how hard some people work to support their family and how good most of us have it in comparison. The depression is still real for a lot of people out there.

    • The long term cost of cheap female labor is second only to the long term cost of imported cotton pickers.

  43. To further your point, I was listening to an interview with this guy from the music industry. He was talking about how they use advanced analytics in music now, just like they do in sports. For example, in baseball, managers no longer make in game decisions, an Ivy League mathematician in the front office creates spread sheets on how to handle every situation. The manager then just looks at the spread sheet and picks the provided answer.

    Well in music, it’s similar. This man was saying that through the data collected on these streaming services like Spotify or apple music, the music industry knows exactly which beats and rhythms correspond to more repeat listening. Thus, in 1970, songs could have any number of unorthodox formats, while today there’s less than a dozen or so formats.

    • This, when you’re saying “music today all sounds the same!” You’re not just being an old timer yelling at the moon. You’re factually correct.

      • You must think this is a modern phenomenon. Apparently you didn’t listen to pop in the 70s/early 80s and/or ever attend a Boston concert 😀

        Perhaps that’s an unfair example, since it’s a single pop group. But it’s a fact that most groups have a signature sound. Sometimes so much so that a fan can identify a new song from its first few seconds, as was my experience with (say) Van Halen. I consider it a mark of artistry that a group could be very versatile. For example, the varied output of Queen or even the Beatles, among many others. Some artists even deliberately tried their hand at diverse genres of music, Elvis Costello perhaps for one.

    • It’s the stealth victory of the data scientists, working with large data sets and looking for subtle statistical patterns.

      • Its also the seeds of its own destruction in some ways (at least as a creative function if not commercially speaking).

        One can only model previous data, which parts of are selected for and amplified, and the same analysis applied ad infinitum.

        In the end you will selectively generate only a single type of output with 100% listening as no other variation will exist.

        • There is a large Puerto Rican demographic where I live and in the summer months one is inescapably exposed to their music. They have already reached this point. Every single song sounds identical. They all use exactly the same beat, completely eschew melody, and use heavily processed vocals delivered in a staccato rap. It really is astounding how similar they are.

          • We have plenty of those types around here.

            They’re doing a bang up job in the plant, lemme tell ya….

          • Oh, we must work at the same place!

            But seriously, it’s criminal how upstate has been used as a dumping ground for PR’s. We had a few in town when I was growing up in the 80’s, but now they’re a majority. I noticed a huge increase in their numbers after hurricane Maria. I suspect there was a very quiet placement program that accomplished that, much like the importation of Somalis and Hmong into the twin cities.

          • I’ve listened to it on buses in Central and South America (Panama, Ecuador, Peru). All sounds the same. But at least it’s not gangsta rap.

          • KGB-

            For over a decade we had a Cuban in HR that made it her life’s mission to pipeline Boricuas from the university in PR to our firm.

            My favorite is the guy who, during his interview out of college, admitted to my black co-worker, “Yeah, I cheated on my exams.” My co-worker stated this to a dozen people at the internal group follow-up.

            Of course they hired the guy. Then they mentored him. Now, we have engineering managers that are totally incapable of composing a two-sentence email using proper English.

            I hate this timeline.

          • Oh god, about a decade ago we had a Jamaican in a reasonably important position. He’d graduated from Arizona or Arizona State on a track scholarship, but had obviously not bothered with his courses. The guy’s emails were appalling. I compiled a Word document with his most unintelligible excerpts. In meetings he would sit on his phone and text relatives in Jamaica about a flop house they were building on the island, paying no attention to the goings on around him.

            So of course he was promoted up and last I heard was in a managerial position at another facility.

          • I believe PR—as a territory/protectorate—has no immigration restrictions. They come and go as they like—which is why they don’t take independence seriously. They get all the benefits, little of the responsibility of a State.

  44. “In a world where the hardest choices are on the menu, people are not interested in the human condition.”

    Quite a turn of the phrase Z! One of your shiniest pearls. Gonna have to borrow that and reuse when dealing with the enemy.

  45. It’s an amazing qualitative difference, enough to make generations mutually unintelligible. I wasn’t poor as a kid (early 1970s), but you could see poor from my trailer (yes, really) with a pair of binoculars. I sometimes think about that, and how different my perceptions are because of it. You get a much different perspective on life just by wearing hand-me-down clothes. I spent most of elementary school dressed like a surfer, for instance, even though we lived a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, because my aunt in California mailed my mom a box of hand-me-downs every six months. Nowadays, of course, those clothes would be “vintage” and I’d be the most expensively-dressed kid in school… just bizarre. I wonder if that, even more than “social media” on the Pocket Moloch, is the real difference.

    • I have an old Fortune magazine from my late grandmother’s house and they had pictures of southern blacks before the welfare ramp and oof:
      https://www.toadlickgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/F3827BE6-BE6B-4DDC-A498-36E9CF98C6ED-scaled-e1665154369853.jpeg

      Off topic, but that magazine, published in 1970 straddles the fault line of the glorious industrial apex of western civilization, and downward slope that, in hindsight, we can clearly see . After all, in the early seventies who didn’t want to get in on the next Hong Kong, i.e. Kenya:
      https://www.toadlickgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/0DC843D5-BF62-4E0C-92C2-A8719CC22F82-scaled-e1665154961803.jpeg

      • And that’s why a certain type and level of welfare has never bothered me all that much. In a vastly rich society like ours was, no kid should have to live like that. (The aforesaid type and level of welfare being along the lines of “staple food and basic clothing, along with decent school facilities.” After that, you’re on your own. With strict caps and no cash for any reason, obviously, except if you agree to trade in the inflation-adjusted value of twenty years’ worth of staple goods for the renunciation of your citizenship and a one-way ticket to Wakanda. At that point, we’ll cut you the check and the ticket, and happy trails to you).

    • Severian: ‘Nowadays, of course, those clothes would be “vintage” and I’d be the most expensively-dressed kid in school…’

      DO NOT THROW AWAY YOUR OLD CLOTHES.

      Especially if you still have anything made in the USA from circa the 1980s or early 1990s [prior to NAFTA and MFN for China].

      Those old clothes are dadgum near about priceless.

      Made in the USA long-sleeved “Champion” college sweatshirts from the 1980s now go for $400+ on eBay.

      And you can fuhgeddabout LL Bean for flannel shirts [it’s all turd world garbage now]; you have to pay $150+ to get a proper flannel shirt from Filson.

      !!!!! DO NOT THROW AWAY YOUR OLD CLOTHES !!!!!

  46. There really isn’t any authenticity anymore – everything is so freaking generic these days. Music all sounds the same, regardless of the genre. A few days ago we went to the see the Doobie Brothers. I was never a big fan, but the wife and some friends wanted to go. It actually wasn’t a bad show and those guys could play guitar a lot better than I remembered – especially for 70+ year olds.

    • If you cut out the lyrics, every genre of today’s music is nearly indistinguishable. Modern country, Christian rock, conventional pop, they all sound the same with Africanized beats and overly-emotive vocalizing. The only difference is the subject of the lyrics. It reminds me of when Homer Simpson toured the Duff brewery and there was one giant pipe that branched into three smaller pipes that fed into vats labeled Duff, Duff Dry, and Duff Lite.

      • That is why I drive around blasting classical music with the windows down.

        Its a shock for most people to even hear it.

        Think of it as reclaiming the streets.

        • I recall G Gordon Liddy relating a story like that about his Corrvett and blasting the 1812 Overture to a bunch of loud punks.

          • Its all about repetition programming. I am serious, I do this a lot.

            If more people did similar in their cars and work as a push back to the vomit pushed commercially, then at last people would have a yardstick to measure against.

            Its why shops and everywhere else drowns the world in dogshit from loud speakers 24/7. It occupies the mindspace until people have never heard anything else.

        • You da man, Trumpton!

          A little Johann Christian Bach, or Hector Berlioz (Le Damnation de Faust, any part or all of it) is good for the soul. Or how about Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610? Ah.

        • Some truth to that. I’ve read articles where certain public areas found that by putting classical music on the PA it discouraged “youth” from loitering 🙂

          That allows a segue into today’s awful pun. Did you know that Blackety-Black is even reaching into the world of opera? There’s currently a move afoot to produce Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” with an Afro-American cast: “Ni-ga-ro, Ni-ga-ro, Ni-ga-ro….” 😀

    • There’s a reason. Lived experience is variegated and therefore music based on such experience — and on the vagaries of personal style — is similarly variegated. And it goes without saying that music based on such experience sounds authentic. The stuff today — I can hardly call it music — comes from on high (corporate boardrooms and data scientists trying to distill what will sell). It’s all synthetic, trite, and soul-deadening. It is anti-culture. The devil works through economic imperatives.

      Thinking about it more deeply, it strikes me that so much of life today in the West is so synthetic and trite that even music based on it may not be much better.

  47. It’s interesting to look at country in the 60s. I feel that before the British invasion, that there was a strong possibility that Nashville could be a mainstay on the pop charts. Patsy cline, Jim reeves, Marty Robbins etc were on the pop charts on a semi regular basis.

    Cline and reeves died 17 months apart and when you combine that with the change in music tastes – the Nashville sound was mostly over.

    • Don’t forget Hank dying in the 1950’s. He reached an audience far outside traditional southern country listeners. I didn’t realize until I was much older that a lot of the songs my grandmother used to sing to me were Hank songs. And we were a blue collar New England family.

      • Similar to pat Boone covering black music – the trend in hanks time was to have crooners such as jo Stafford or Tony Bennett cover his music.

    • It’s not the sound of modern country that bothers me so much as the lyrical content. Drink beer, drive a pickup, high school football, pine for your small town, lather, rinse, repeat. It’s likely that gangsta rap, despite its focus on drugs, sex, and violence, tackled a wider range of subjects.

      It’s clearly intended to fixate normie on the most superficial aspects of his people and to never think about how to preserve the more profound bonds of culture and community.

      • Because its fake.

        They just key in the symbols they profile the target audience politically identify with.

        They do similar for all the spin off genres. Its no different than TV or movies, or newspapers, or all the other manufactured stuff.

        ProleFeed is not just an Orwell invention.

      • Pickup trucks, catfish blue
        Grampa pappy and gramma too
        worn out work gloves and old engine oil
        all day long, every day until the suns goes down

        Christian values, and front porch on a Sunday
        old high buddies never made it back from Nam
        their pictures on the wall aint comin’ down
        until i leave this land

        I was born country
        and country I will die
        Hank Williams was the best America
        and Chet Rollins too (tho not sure about him)

        I am thinkin the key of C, for this one.. you can use it, just rearrange the above lines in a different order, and maybe add a brass band.

      • I really wanted to like modern country music. There a few country stations on the radio where I live and I like the idea of me being a guy who listens to country music on the radio, as superficial as that sounds. But I can’t stand it.

        KGB said that the sound of the music is tolerable but the lyrics are intolerable.

        I agree about the sound, although it is quite processed and there are some regrettable hip hop and arena rock influences. But it’s still one of the only contemporary forms of music with actual melodies.

        I agree about the execrable lyrics too but KGB didn’t mention what I most can’t stand. More than the other topics that KGB mentioned, the lyrics of country music songs are mostly simping to women. “You’re the only woman for me.” “I’ll do anything for you.”

        Nauseating. You can tell that the song writers begin their writing by asking, “What lyrics would make women open their wallets?”

        • I agree with the simping, but I didn’t mean to imply that modern country is musically interesting. Worst of all, as you mentioned, are the hip-hop/arena rock influences that are all the rage.

          Mind you, I only hear country during the roughly 5 to 10 minutes a day I’m in the can at my job, and that may be affecting my opinions.

  48. “In a world where the hardest choices are on the menu, people are not interested in the human condition.”

    Well, we all still gotta die, and that’s a big one. At least, I’m pretty sure we all still have to die. SF writer Ben Bova had an interesting if slightly wonky bit in his nonfiction book “Immortality” about lengthening telomeres indefinitely to stay alive forever. That’s definitely one program where you don’t want to be an early adopter. Biden and Pelosi and especially Feinstein are walking horror shows, and they’re only in their 80s. I don’t want to be the first one-hundred and fifty year-old man. Then I suppose Bill Gates and some Chinese lunatics are looking in to uploading their consciousness onto some kind of vitrified substrate, and who knows what else. Cryogenics is still problematic because of cell death. Freezing’s easy. Thawing isn’t.

    Sucks about Loretta Lynn. I dedicate her song, “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” done as a duet with Conway Twitty, to the parents of Chelsea Clinton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFq6eZBS1iM

    • Uploading you brain into a computer is one of the dumbest ideas ever, you still die, the program running on the computer is not you

      You get one shot at life, so do your best

      • You would wind up like the Dixie Flatline in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, wishing to be erased.

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