The Panic Culture

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Note: There is the weekly Taki post. It is another take on the Covid panic and ties in well with today’s post. For the audiophiles, there is a Sunday podcast up behind the green door. Of course, if you buy me a beer, you get my secret writings.

Now that the Covid panic is finally winding down, it is a good time to look at how it quickly became a religion for many people. It is fair to assume that most people looked at Covid as a blend of public health and public policy. They do not know much about either topic, so they trusted what they were told. Others, however, embraced Covid and the rules around it like a new religion. The rituals and statistics quickly became the central point around which they organized their lives.

One of the first signs of this happening were the personal testimonials. By the late spring of last year, the Covidian had stories to tell. “I know of four people who have died from Covid this month” was a popular one. Despite the statistical improbability, millions were telling us about their personal war with Covid. The victims became younger as the age realty became apparent. Finally at the end, we are getting stories about the unvaccinated dying despite being healthy.

The joiner always personalizes her latest fetish. On the one hand, it lets her be the star of the story. We saw this after 9/11, where millions of people swore they knew someone in the towers. It is also a personal testimony to show how the believer has now given herself over to the faith. It is a show of piety. Of course, it also insulates the believer from having to explain herself. It is an appeal to authority in which her alleged suffering makes her the unquestionable authority.

Then there is the suffering that comes with every civic religion. Sacrifice is an important part of all religions. Membership is not supposed to be easy as the value of anything easily attained is always low. In the case of Covid, the goofy mask wearing, standing six feet apart and other nonsense was quickly and mindlessly embraced. It was a public sacrament, like taking communion. Of course, this gave the Covidian a chance to lecture the rest of us about the need to respect their piety.

The ascetic is an important part of every religion. The vegetarian makes a big show of not eating meat, because their role requires it. Similarly, the keto adherent will let you know she does not eat carbohydrates. Food-based cults are always popular with ascetics, because all of them require abstention. In the case of Covid, the constant slathering of hand sanitizer was the sign of their discipline. The Covidian never missed a chance to perform the ritual before every activity.

It is not an accident that the same people who tote grimy canvas sacks to the grocery store were the first to embrace the rituals of Covid. All civic religions in the modern age come with these piety symbols, usually with a corporate logo. Public television stations made millions giving members tote bags with the logo on them. Note that American sports teams quickly rushed out branded face masks. In a world of strangers, displaying your corporate overlord is important.

Hoffer famously pointed out that “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” He was wrong about this, in that our rackets and cults tend to come with a corporate sponsor. In our highly atomized and corporatized existence, the corporate logo provides legitimacy. The Apple logo replaced the Darwin fish, for example. The Church of Covid became a money making racket, a cult and it was sponsored by our corporate overlords.

Every religion has its apostles, and this was no different. The army of pseudo-intellectual poseurs that spring up in the media are always there to add authority to the latest narratives. All of a sudden, anyone with a connection to medicine or immunology was preaching from a digital street corner. The fact that none of them knew a thing about this disease or public policy did not matter. All that mattered is they were there telling us to repent or fear the wrath of Covid.

Probably the most obnoxious aspect of the civic religion is the martyrs. Because democracy turns deadbeats into civil servants and civil servants into priests, every politician quickly became a martyr to the cause. Every state with draconian Covid laws has a governor who publicly nailed herself to the cross. You see, they really hate passing these crazy laws, but they are suffering for all of us in this twilight struggle against the great threat to humanity known as Covid.

It is worth noting that Covid seems to have blended several strains of social pathology into a single event. We have the civic religion, but there is also the primitive fear of nature and nature’s wrath. Then there is the panic. This is what really gave the whole thing its juice. Like the satanic panics or the day care panics or the witch trials, the Covid panic caused most people to suspend their sense of disbelief. The lack of evidence became a weird proof of the danger.

Finally, what the Covid panic may indicate is that these ritualized panics will become more common and intense. If people will believe the flu is an extinction event, then they will believe just about anything. It is the old expression, people who believe in nothing will fall for anything. America and the West is now populated with gullible, deracinated primitives looking for a reason to exist. The future may be one crisis after another, each more bizarre and ridiculous than the last.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

A Lazy Return

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The show is back this week and fair warning, it is not a great show. Like a lot of people, I am now in summer mode. Last summer was cancelled by our rulers and their Chinese handlers, so I am looking forward to having summer this year. I am not a summer person, but I do like the slower pace. Here in Lagos, the masks are dropping and the bareface is running free again, so it is feeling very summery all of a sudden. Even the homicide rate has got back to normal. Past normal actually.

It has been interesting watching the struggle for normalcy. At the stores, about 60% of people still wears masks, depending upon where you go. The ghetto was hit and miss on the masks all along, but the beautiful people places were energetically compliant with the masking and distancing. That is where you see the strongest resistance to the dropping of the masks. I suspect the mask could become a piety symbol for these people, which would be a good result of the Covid panic.

The workplace is where things are getting weird already. I was on a call with a client the other day and they are still doing the work at home thing. The boss wants everyone back, but he has been getting a ton of resistance. The plan is everyone has until the fall to get back to the office. I know a couple of women who are quitting rather than go back to the office, as they like being home with the kids. They realized that extra stuff and having a career was not a good trade-off.

In my office building, I would say close to half the tenants will not renew. Some went out of business, but others figured out that they could save the rent and let their people work from home, so that is the plan. There is a lot of vacant office space in this part of the world, so commercial real estate is heading for a long recession. That is a cyclical business anyway, so it probably does not matter. A few years ago, we were the only tenant in our building for a few months.

It is easy to see why the Covidians are fighting the return to normalcy. There will be no way to do pull this stuff again after people drop the masks and go back to living relatively normal lives again. They can scream themselves hoarse about variants and new waves, but there is no going back to masks now. The fact that Florida exists has discredited this forever. The Covidians will have to find a new reason to justify tormenting the public so they can feel like heroes.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a 15-percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/d8wYbF-q9nw

Electric Elite

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Most everyone has looked down at the fuel gauge and suddenly realized the tank is very close to empty. Maybe it is the idiot light going on as you pass the sign that reads “last stop for food or fuel for X miles.” The worst one is when this happens in a rural area or at night. The prospect of being stranded on the side of the road for a very long time quickly crowds out other thoughts. It is a terrible feeling. Almost all of us are conditioned to make sure this never happens.

Running out of gas used to be a common thing in America. In the early days of the automobile, care did not have a gas gauge and gas stations did not always have gas, so it was a common scene. The first “gas gauge” was a marked stick the driver would stick into the tank. Until very recent, gas stations used this method to test how much water was in their tanks. Eventually, more sophisticated solutions were invented and then manufacturers install them at the factory.

Running out of gas is not very common these days. For starters, we have gas stations everywhere people live. They are about 120-thousand gas stations in America. If you live in an urban or suburban area, finding a gas station is not a challenge. The cars are also vastly more efficient today than the old days. Even sports cars get over 20 miles per gallon, so when the light comes on, you have about 40 miles to find gas. It is why it is very rare to see someone walking down the road with a gas can.

This old concern will become a feature of life shortly. Every car maker is determined to abandon the internal combustion engine for electric in the next decade. All of them have a five year plan to ditch the IC engine. Even the sports car makers are planning to drop the old engine and use electric motors. The roar of the engine will soon be replaced by the high pitched hum of the motor. Whether we wanted or not, the electric car will be forced onto American roads over the next decade.

The problem is that electric cars need to be charged. Right now, there are about five thousand fast chargers in America. The term “fast charger” is a little bit of inside humor the EV people enjoy. It takes about forty minutes to charge a car on a fast charger, so the word fast here is sarcasm. There are more slow chargers available, but slow should be interpreted as glacial. Those slow chargers take hours to charge. They are only useful as at-home options or at office parks.

Replacing the gas stations with fast chargers is no easy task. There is the cost, obviously, even if one assumes they could be profitable. That is not an assumption you can make at this point. The economics of EV charging stations are wildly different than those of a normal gas station. You do not need a lot of space for cars pulling into the pumps, fueling up in five minutes and then pulling away. You need vast spaces for cars pulling in and parking for an hour as they charge up the batteries.

Then there is the power grid. The current estimates say the cost to upgrade the power grid for electric cars is between four and ten trillion dollars. That is not money to be spent all at once, but it is real money. In modern America, most streets look like the surface of the moon and our bridges are literally collapsing. Like all aging empires, America is struggling to keep the plates spinning. How realistic is it to think we can upgrade the power grid over the next decade for electric cars?

Like the automobile makers, the nation’s utility companies have five and ten year plans for upgrading their part of the power grid. One cannot help but appreciate the Gosplan nature of this project. Like the car maker’s five year plans, the utility company plans always has a line in there for free money from the Federal Reserve. Unlike the car makers, the electric companies have not secured their free money. Slipping tax breaks into the code is a lot easier than printing trillions of dollars.

As with the Soviets, the central planners in America just assume whatever they dream can become a reality. The Soviets were sure they could find the right math to replace the role of prices in the market. Once they conquered that problem, the system would literally run itself. American central planners are sure they can find the right moral language to make their dreams pop into existence. If electric cars become who we are then all of the problems will solve themselves.

The electric car fetish is a good example of how markets are an illusion, at least in the broad sense the Austrian school economists argued. There never was a market for electric cars and there is not one now, at least in the organic sense. Instead, the market has been manufactured by government policy. Massive subsidies to the production side and subsidies to the demand side have created the market. Take those away and Elon Musk is back selling monorails to midsized cities.

It is also a good example of how elites have the dominant role in society. As with other things like immigration and the Covid panic, your opinion is never solicited, and it is never wanted. These are decisions made by a small cluster of policy makers at secret retreats and over cocktails at parties you will never attend. The American elite has decided the electric car is the future, so that is that. The fact that it could turn out to be another disaster like Covid is not a worry.

The argument against central planning has always been a simple one. It is impossible for the planners to account for all of the variables. Even the most basic of human systems is maddeningly complex. The truth of this is never a deterrent to the elites, especially those who are sure they are on the right side of history. The comically insane outcomes from the Soviet system never deterred the planners. The metric system did not teach American elites a lesson either.

Finally, the electric car fetish is a good example of what happens when an elite class enters into decline. They become rapacious and impractical. On the one hand, they seek to enrich themselves as quickly as possible, because no one in the elite feels a loyalty to the elite class or the society over which they rule. Everything becomes a smash and grab. On the other hand, they have become so insulated from the society over which they rule, they can no longer see their own folly.

America probably needs to spend five trillion over the next ten years to get the infrastructure back to first world standards. We need a Marshall plan for the roads, bridges, and utility systems. An aspiring elite would focus on that, rather than frivolous nonsense like electric cars. It would also be more scrupulous about who gets the money for the projects. That is not the future. Instead, it will be abandoned EV’s next to massive potholes and collapsing bridges.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Autumn Awaits

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One of the most fascinating things about any revolution is the mistakes made by all sides leading up to the revolution. The errors of the people in charge tend to be the most obvious, as the winners focus on them as justification. “The king did this, so we had no choice but to do that” is the formula. Objective analysis usually reveals that the motives of the ruler and the revolutionaries were far less coherent. In retrospect, revolutions tend to look like a series of massive blunders.

The reason, of course, is that both sides of the fight tend to see the other side as a black box. They only see the actions of the other side, without understanding the motives or reasoning. With limited evidence, they fashion explanations that tend to be self-serving and petty. The aristocracy in France could have done a lot of things to head off disaster, but instead they made one error after another. From the outside, what was driven by ignorance appeared to be driven by malice.

There is a cascading effect in revolutions. The initial conditions that lead to general unhappiness soon give way to anger over specific events. One group gets angry over something, and they no longer see the ruler as reasonable. Then another event triggers different people and before long every event adds to the avalanche of unrest. In between, there seems to be some calming, but in reality, it is just the energy building up for another burst of anger and frustration at the next event.

We may be in one of those periods of calm. The dropping of the Covid nonsense and the start of summer has people thinking of things other than politics, despite the signs that this summer will be ugly in many ways. Soaring prices for food and fuel are always bad omens, bit so far people seem to be ignoring them. Similarly, the building crime wave is not getting much attention. Antiwhite violence is already a problem, but white people seem to be looking past it for now.

Even if the revolution takes a holiday this summer, there are a couple of big storm clouds on the horizon. Both are Supreme Court cases. The first one is an abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This will take up the question of the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi state law that bans abortions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. People who claim to know about these things believe the court could overturn or sharply limit Roe v. Wade.

The other case is a gun case. The court, in NY State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Corlett, will review a New York law that requires individuals to get a license to carry a concealed gun outside the home. In District of Columbia v. Heller the court ruled that the Second Amendment provides an individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense but did not address the carry issue. Many think the courts will rule that carrying a firearm is equally protected by the Second Amendment.

If one were to identify two key beliefs of American civic nationalism, one would be faith in the courts to enforce the Constitution, if we get the right judges in place. The other is faith in the Second Amendment as the ultimate backstop. The whole purpose to voting for so-called conservatives is to eventually get a court that will strike down many of the left-wing programs, like abortion. Along the same lines, that same court will affirm the Second Amendment, thus ensuring people will never fear their government.

There is a good bet that the court rules against the civic nationalist position on both of these issues in the fall. The abortion case is the most likely shock to the system, as this was the reason to support Trump. He stacked the court with his people and now they are supposed to deliver. The Christian conservatives ignored Trump’s rather obvious personal failings because he promised to deliver judges. He did his part and now the judges have to live up to their end of the bargain.

History says they will find a way to fink on the people. In theory, it is a 6-3 court, but John Roberts has miraculously transformed into Ruth Bader Ginsberg, so it is really a 5-4 court again. Gorsuch is the most likely to find a reason to vote with the far-left. He has already found a way to fink on his side. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion granting men in dresses special rights. It is not hard to image him flipping to the far-left on this abortion case as well.

The gun case is a bit different, as the court could find some technical problem with prior rulings and send it back for rehearing. It is also not the radical change that the abortion case presents. Extending Heller to include carrying a firearm outside the home will have no impact on most of the country. Still, given the nature of Washington, it is not hard to imagine a similar dynamic as the abortion case. This time it would be Barrett siding with the far-left, sighting some nonsense about black victimization.

The regime has already begun to let the court know that they better rule the correct way, or their will be consequences. Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut is the first out of the gate threatening the judges. It will not be long before he is joined by other prominent Democrats, as well as the media. Then you have the extortion rackets run by the FBI and other players. The odds of the court ruling in favor of the civic nationalist position are very low, but their expectations are very high.

This is shaping up to be one of those unforced regime mistakes that seem to characterize every revolution. The abortion case in particular is the one that could radicalize a lot of civic nationalists. Christian conservatives are already on the edge, given the overtly anti-Christian pogroms run by the ruling class. If the court finks on them in the fall, it could be the last straw. They will conclude that there is no path forward in conventional politics and begin to organize outside of the system.

Predicting the future is always a mugs game, but history says that the regime does not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The combination of paranoia and partisan hatred keeps leading them to the wrong decision. The wise move would be to give the people a win in the courts on these issues, but wisdom requires wise men, and the ruling class is desperately short of them. Instead, the regime will be dispensing truckloads of red pills to civic nationalists when the court returns in the fall.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Partisan Minds

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A fetish of the modern Right in America has been complaining about and denouncing partisanship in Washington. In fairness, the Left will indulge in this on the rare occasions when the Republicans do something for their voters. Mostly it is a conservative fetish, as it is the Left that drives the debate. The Right needs to maintain the fantasy that republican virtue still matters, so they regularly complain about the Left acting in their narrow interests, rather than in the interests of the country.

In theory, the conservatives are correct. Partisanship is the great bane of a republic, as it subverts the very basis of a republic. What is necessary to maintain a republic is what Montesquieu called republican virtue, the willingness to put the interests of the system ahead of personal or factional interests. For example, you must respect the office, even if you have no respect for the man holding the office. This shows up in our military culture where you do not salute the person, you salute the rank.

The trouble with the conservative approach is we have not lived in a republic for a very long time, so they are playing make believe. We live in a liberal democracy that is decreasing liberal with each turn of the wheel. In democratic systems, the ends justify the means, so partisanship dominates. It replaces republican virtue in favor of subjective moral certainty. This is one of the reasons that conservatism is worthless in a democracy of any sort. It prohibits victory as defined by the rules.

A good example of how partisanship works is in this conversation on the Daily Wire program, which is part of a series they run call Backstage. It is one of those round table deals where the stars chat about issues of the day. The highlighted clip is the discussion of Israel and their attacks on the Arabs last week. The people behind the Daily Wire are hyper-Zionists, so the conversation follows predictable contours. Israel is heroically fighting attacks from those evil Arabs.

Matt Walsh tries to point out a true fact, which is that Americans do not have a patriotic duty to support Israel or any other country. Immediately, the rules of the show are suspended as Boreing, Shapiro and Klavan leap to attack Walsh. It is an amusing bit of mask dropping, given the title of the show. The rules of decorum stop mattering to the partisan, as soon as his interests are in play. They cut off Walsh a few times and make sure he cannot get his point across to the audience.

An example of how rules are meaningless to partisans is when Shapiro claims that patriotism means love of ideas, while nationalism means love of country. This is laughable nonsense, and he surely knows it, so it is also a lie. The word patriotism comes from the Greek for “of one’s fathers” or fatherland. Of course, nationalism means a devotion to one’s own people. Both concepts have been attacked for obvious reasons, but their etymology is never in dispute.

In other words, Shapiro does not feel bound by truth when it comes to these topics, because what matters is his partisan interests. He wants conservatives to think they are duty-bound to back Israel, so he feels justified in making crazy claims like Americans have a patriotic duty to blindly defend Israel. This is an instinct that exists in the lizard brain, so he does not think of what he is doing as dishonest or immoral. It is just what he does, like pulling his hand away from a hot item.

Another aspect of partisanship is on display with Andrew Klavan. In that clip he makes the case for exterminating the Arabs. He does not put it like that, but that is the implication of his argument. In his view, the Arabs will never behave, and the Israelis are justified in using lethal force. The logical leap from those two statements is that the final solution to the problem is the liquidation of the Arabs. His excitement at the thought of exterminating the Arabs is an insight into the partisan mind.

Partisanship, like ethnocentrism, places group loyalty at the top. The first thing the partisan does when encountering people or issues is place them on one side of the partisan lines. “Is this person on our side?” is always the first question. In the case of issues or events, the question is, “how can this be turned to our advantage?” Since the partisans swaps his own individual identity for that of the group, these questions always feel deeply personal. They are life and death.

In a sense they are life and death. Since who Ben Shapiro is, from the perspective of Ben Shapiro, is his membership in the Zionist subculture, any questioning of it is a questioning of his very existence. It is why Klavan starts to salivate at the thought of killing Arabs. He cannot see them as human, as they are opposed to his group, so they are his mortal enemies. One is always justified in using any means necessary when defending your life from a threat.

You hear this in the left-wing justifications for violence over the last year. When they say “silence is violence” they are not being cheeky. To the partisan mind, you are either on their side or against their side. Words and violence are the same to the partisan mind, as anything that opposes the group is seen as a lethal threat. That is why silence is viewed as violence, as not declaring your support means opposition and the partisan is free to use any means necessary to end a threat.

There is not only no reasoning with a partisan, but there is no appealing to their better nature or their sense of virtue. Their chief virtue, the thing that matters the most to them, is their loyalty to the cause. Everything is warped to fit that moral framework, even the very definition of words, as you see with Ben Shapiro. Everything is viewed as a tool that can either be used against opponents or can be used by opponents. Facts and reason have no more resonance than clubs and guns.

This is why moral appeals against partisanship fail. It is like making the claim that pork is healthy to a devout Muslim. He does not share your morality, so your morals appeal sounds weird and offensive. Your good intensions are proof of your bad intensions, which defeats the point of making the moral appeal. The only counter to partisanship is more extreme partisanship. Once that genie has been let out of the bottle, the only way to put it back in the bottle is through any means necessary.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

A History of Failure

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One of the enduring mysteries, one that is rarely explored, is why all right-wing movements in America have failed to make a dent in Progressivism. The first iteration of conservatism in America was washed away by Progressive reformers in the first part of the 20th century. When political crisis struck, conservatives had no political solutions, just theoretical analysis. Progressives, meanwhile, had a program.

In response to the success of New Deal politics, the American Right reorganized in the middle of the last century around more practical items. Buckley-style conservatism was about winning elections and implementing policy. Like its predecessor, it failed to do much to stem the tide of Progressive innovation. In the end it was corrupted by the system it sought to reform, becoming just another node on the managerial state.

The reason for this long track record of futility is that American conservatism has always been dominated by bourgeois objectivism. Unlike Randian objectivism, bourgeois objectivism is the assumption that the world runs by a set of immutable laws and that the point of politics is to adapt to those laws. Discovering the right answer is the point of all political activity as once the answer is clear, everything falls into place.

In the realm of politics, it means that all political actors, individually and in groups, are acting from rational and discoverable motives. This naturally leads to a reductionist interpretation of Progressive politics. Whatever the Left proposes is feverishly analyzed by conservatives to discern “real motives”. Further, it is always assumed that the Left is driven by the same desires as the Right would be driven, if the roles were reversed.

Read the rest here…

Lost Hoppe

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Libertarianism comes in for a reasonable amount of criticism on this side of the great divide, mostly for its tendency to side with the Left on cultural issues. Libertarianism, at its best, is low-tax liberalism. The common and well-supported form of libertarianism is the version that functions as lipstick on the pig of corporate excess. The people who claim to champion individual rights always seem to be defending those rights being trampled by massive global companies answerable to no one.

There are some exceptions within the libertarian fever swamp. Ron Paul is still remembered fondly by many on this side of the great divide. He was their guide into the world of political realism. He was always careful to avoid taboo subjects, but there were plenty of paleocons in the baggage train to help guide those swept up in the Ron Paul moment toward sensible politics. The Ron Paul moment turned out to be a waystation for what is now the dissident right.

Another exception is the libertarian theorist Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Greg Hood and Chris Roberts from American Renaissance have posted a new podcast on Hoppe and his most popular work, Democracy: The God that Failed. It is a good discussion of Hoppe, his brand of libertarianism and the arguments in his book. This podcast is part of a series on various writers relevant to dissident politics. The show on Wilmot Robertson is especially good, as few remember him.

One thing that was missed in the review of Hoppe’s book is that he was one of the first people to notice a peculiar feature of democracy. That is, as soon as the idea of democracy is planted in a society, the franchise expands rapidly. Societies can reject the core idea of democracy, but still have limited participation through elections, which was the case in early America. Once the society accepts the idea of democracy, all limits on the franchise quickly give way to democratic zeal.

Hoppe observed this in his book, but he offered no explanation for it. He just accepts it as a force of nature, noting how the franchise expanded in every Western country as soon as democracy was introduced. We saw this in America. In the 20th centur,y as the country transformed from a republic into a social democracy, the franchise quickly started to expand to include all men, then women, then blacks. Now we are extending the vote to criminals, foreigners, and the imaginary.

One reason for this is the very nature of democracy. In a world of fifty percent plus one there will always be a large minority unhappy with the result. In order to avoid conflict, the natural elites form parties, which allows them to form a consensus around a set of compromises on the important issues. This is something that was the norm in the 20th century, whether it was in multi-party parliamentary systems or the two-party bicameral system in America. Liberal democracy was about consensus.

While that greatly reduces the number of people who feel left out of the result, it creates a new problem. Reformers now need to break the consensus in order to get the changes they think are required. That is difficult, so they instead look to increase the number of those outside the consensus. Put another way, the reformer looks for new voters, rather than trying to challenge old voters. Get enough new voters and the outsiders can challenge the prevailing consensus.

In America, expansion of the franchise parallels reform efforts. The social reformers of the late 19th and early 20th century were also the driving force behind expanding the franchise to women. Extending the franchise to blacks came with social reforms like the elimination of free association. Today, the people chanting about democracy are also demanding the vote be given to foreigners. Open borders are a way to create a permanent revolution against the prevailing consensus.

Again, this is not something Hoppe addressed, but it does suggest that the primary reason libertarians favor open borders is they share the same reformist impulse that exists on the Left. They instinctively seek to break the consensus, which in their case is their idea of statism. The fact that libertarians never try to think through the ramifications of open borders suggests they are not acting on practical considerations, but rather on an instinctive sense that it is good for them.

Of course, there is a natural limit to democracy’s expansive tendency. Once every human on earth can vote for the next American president, there are no more worlds to conquer for the democrats. Long before that, however, democracy becomes too unstable to maintain a consensus of any sort for any duration. That seems to be happening now, when half the country in unhappy with every election result and the consensus that is implied in the result. America is shaking itself to pieces.

Hoppe is a good reminder that even the most ridiculous ideas can be useful in the right hands, if only as a warning. In the case of libertarianism, its utility was always in its use as a critique of liberal excess. Libertarian economics was an excellent antidote to central planning. Natural rights are useful in challenging authoritarianism. In the case of Hoppe, his economic defense of monarchism is useful in understanding the inherent dangers and defects of liberal democracy.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Sunset Of The Neocons

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One of the more interesting developments of the last half dozen years is the collapse of the old neoconservative order. By the Bush years it was no longer possible to question the presence of these people at the heart of conservativism, but a little over a decade on and the neocons are happy to exclude themselves from the Right. More important, they seem to be unambitiously antiwhite now. That was always the subtext of paleocon criticism of them, but now they are happy to confirm it.

It is as if someone blew a whistle that only the neocons could hear, and they abandoned their former friends on the Right. Look around conservative media and it has been like a weird form of the rapture. One by one they have disappeared from Fox News, National Review, and other conservative outlets. They have quietly tapped into hidden wealth to start up new outlets like the Bulwark and the Dispatch. Others have moved onto the pages of far-left scandal sheets like the New York Times.

The thing is this departure has not just been a change of direction for them or an adaptation to new reality. These new sites are not an effort to build a better mouse trap or find new intellectual freedom. In fact, they are not trying to influence right-wing discourse at all. Instead, they are at war with their former friends, desperately trying to prevent anything like a right-wing from emerging from the tumult. They are anti-Trump, anti-populist and most important, anti-white.

Again, this was always the claim from critics. The first generation of neocons started out in life as Trotskyites and transformed into conservatives when the Left started saying nice things about their ancient enemies. There was also the Israel question. The Left was siding with nonwhites, like Palestinians, while the Buckley crowd was happy to side with the Israelis. The neocon phenomenon was a marriage of convenience for the first generation and has suddenly become inconvenient.

Neoconservatism has not collapsed, of course, as they are like a drug resistant virus or an invasive species. Short of a nuclear holocaust, there appears to be no way to eradicate them. Given the track record of the neocons, they should have gone to the trash heap of history a long time ago. They are responsible for the worst presidency in modern American history. Somehow, as if by magic, they have found new hosts and carry on as if everyone else is to blame for their failures.

What is most amazing about all of this is the mask dropping. Back in the Trump years, Jonah Goldberg amplified every left-wing criticism of Trump. He was also enthusiastic about calling Trump voters every left-wing epithet he could remember from his days working for Ben Wattenberg, the old Bolshevik TV presenter. Bill Kristol, of course, sounded like one of screeching harpies from the Daily Beast. His bizarre outbursts and predictions suggested he was having a psychotic break.

It was not just an over-reaction to Trump. The mean old orange man is gone and there is no rapprochement between the neocons and their former friends. If anything, the neocons are getting more aggressive. This post from Cathy Young is a good recent example of the neocon war on the conservatives. She manages to weave together the familiar paranoid delusions about antisemitism with left-wing conspiracy theories into an indictment of conservatives as hypocrites.

It was not so long ago that Cathy Young pitched herself as a right-libertarian, posting at Reason, National Review, the Federalist and so forth. Everything about her was a fraud, including her name, but she was able to fool Conservative Inc. The fact that she warms herself on a large rock every morning should have tipped them off, but conservatives are not known for noticing these things. Still, her shifting into an antiwhite bigot at war with conservatives is a telling transformation.

The question that naturally arises is why have they suddenly abandoned the old host, despite not having a new host? Perhaps the assumption is that after a clear separation they will be welcomed by the Left. This is something a pupa stage for them. The next stage is the imago when they will mature into left-wing warmongers. Many of them do still pose as conservatives at left-wing tabloids like the Washington Post. Jennifer Ruben and Brett Stephens are two examples.

Of course, there is the possibility that intellectual decline has hit them hard. Read the first generation neocons and there is no missing their intellect. These were smart and shrewd men with the animal cunning of revolutionaries. Their descendants, in contrast, are obnoxiously dull-witted. Bill Kristol spent his life as a freeloader, cashing in on his father’s reputation. Jonah Goldberg made armpit noises as the house jester for National Review, before declaring himself an intellectual.

This is something that cannot be dismissed. David French is the house intellectual at Goldberg’s Dispatch. Tucker Carlson nailed it when he said, “David French is a buffoon, one of the least impressive people I’ve ever met. Only in nonprofit conservatism could he have a paying job.” This is true across the neocon spectrum. Recall this is a crew that seriously considered running Evan McMullen for president. For those in need of some clown horn, here is more on that topic.

The other possibility is that neoconservatism was always a long con, but it has finally run out of road. The disastrous Bush years brought this reality to the fore and the neocons had no willingness or ability to answer for it. Eric Hoffer pointed out that mass movements in America end up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation. In the case of the neocons it is just a racket now. They are happy to run the pro-Israel racket as long as it keeps them in the lifestyle they believe they deserve.

Regardless of the the causes, the slow death of neoconservatism is a net positive for right-thinking people. The reason conservatism was a disaster is it cloaked anti-Western sentiment in liberal principle. The neocons were always the quintessential wolf in sheep’s clothing, so their departure offers clarity. That is, the people on the Right can now think in terms of their own interests, rather than the interests of esoteric principles or carefully cultivated and ennobled outsiders.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Social Reform

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One of the mistakes conservatives, variously defined, have always made when analyzing modern politics is to assume purely rational motives to all actors. Today this combines a form of reductionism. The motivations of groups are reduced to the sorts of motivations that you can assign to an individual. The “cancel culture” stuff is now about power, as if the people behind it are powerless. Other events are reduced to the quest for money or maybe leverage over others in the pursuit of money.

In reality, the culture war has been driven by people who have all of the power and money they could ever need. The Left in America controls everything and lives like royalty, so power and money are not primary motivators. They are motivated by the same sort of religious zeal associated with fanatics. Theirs is a secular religion, but it is salted with plenty of mysticism. The reason that Gaia worship and now the Covid stuff endures is it satisfies their need for the supernatural.

This is why the mass media has started to look like a flock of birds or a school of fish, seeming to act in coordination on every story. A year ago, every respectable journalist knew that Covid came from exotic meat markets. It was the provincial rubes and their taste for bat meat. Similarly, it was provincial rubes in America and their conspiracy theories that thought Covid was possibly man-made. Now all of a sudden, the media fish are schooling around the lab leak theory.

They are not doing this because they got a memo from HQ explaining how the official narrative has been updated by the committee. The journalists are not getting an e-mail explaining the revision to the official narrative on Covid. “Please be advised that the new truth on the origins of Covid have been changed. Be sure to update your opinions accordingly comrade.” Instead, one heavy from the party signals the change and the rest, like fish, instinctively respond.

This is also why the media is oblivious to their own change in direction. Like fish in the school, their focus is always on the members around them. They go where they go, which means they are always reacting to those around them. Since there is a strong social hierarchy in all human organizations, the humans in the media hive are always looking up for direction. Biden says something, then the media lackeys in the press pool react, which causes the rest of the media to react.

The way to think of the media is not so much as a sentient organicism playing a complex game of politics, but as a mindless organism that responds to the stimuli applied by a small group of people. This is the part missing from this otherwise excellent post about CIA manipulation of the media. The CIA can influence the media narrative by simply turning a relatively small number of journalists. They do not control it in an absolute or direct sense. They just control some influencers.

The CIA is not the only part of the managerial state playing this game. The major Wall Street players use access journalism to promote their interests. The FBI sends dozens of retired people into media jobs every year. The corrupt agents involved in the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election landed in the media. The cable channels alone have over one hundred retired FBI people employed. Then you have the revolving door between the media and presidential administrations.

That is one of the reasons official Washington despised Trump. Thousands of people in Conservative Inc spent the final years of the Obama administration angling for jobs in what was assumed to be the next Bush administration. Jonah Goldberg’s wife hit the gym and got a makeover assuming she would be in the Jeb Bush White House, but then Trump came along and ruined it all. For “conservative media”, Trump represented thousands of lost book deals, speaking gigs and so on.

The way to think about the managerial class is like a small town. It is really a collection of small towns, linked together by government think tanks, elite universities, and sinecures at nodes in the system. Newcomers are evaluated like the new family in a small New England town. If they fit in, they become part of the community, with all the benefits and responsibilities it entails. Who they are is linked to their membership in the community, so their loyalty is tangled up in their sense of self.

In the case of the media, it works a lot like any industry. There are small players and big corporate players. Some people start at a small player and eventually get called up to the big leagues by one of the big players. Others start at the bottom at a big media player and work their way up. The control is not just the threat of being blackballed by the media, but also the threat of being sent to a minor media outlet. Going from Fox News to YouTube, for example, is a horrible humiliation.

This is why reform is probably impossible. A reformer is immediately swarmed by flocks of angry insects from the various subgroups in the managerial class. We saw this with Trump, who set upon on all sides. The genuine reformer must battle with many hives of bees attacking at the same time from different angles. Before long he is solely focused on defense, which is what happened with Trump. He spent most of his tenure defending himself from one attack after another from the system.

According to Livy, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus received a messenger from his son asking what he should do now that he was a powerful ruler. Tarquin went into his garden, took a stick, and lopped off the heads of the tallest poppies. The messenger got tired of waiting for an answer, so he went back and told Sextus what happened. Sextus realized that his father wished him to put to death all of the most eminent people of Gabii, the city over which he was now the ruler.

This is probably the only way to reform the managerial state. A strong leader will need to behead the main institutions. New people with loyalty to the leader will be installed and they will purge the ranks. This is what happened in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin and the installation of Khrushchev. The problem is the American version of the corporate state does not have a strong party leader. Therefore, reform of this sort may be impossible, which means reform is impossible.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Alien Reboot

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Note: There is a new movie review up on SubscribeStar. For those looking to support my alcoholism, it is also up on Buy Me A Beer.

For reasons no one has bothered to explain, the government went on a strange public relations tour, informing us that it has for years been documenting unidentified objects in the air and sea. These events have been captured by cameras mounted on military ships and aircraft. They released a bunch of these videos, some of which had audio of the people recording them. Those voices in the videos tell the viewer that the cameramen are baffled by the blurry images they are seeing.

Along with the videos, the Pentagon provided some background. They claim they have data going back a long time suggesting these events are not illusions. For example, they claim the appearance of unidentified flying objects near a nuclear weapons battery caused the facility to shut down. They did not state it directly, but the implication is the entity behind the unexplained objects was also able to turn off the nuclear weapons facility or at least disable it while they were flying around it.

Despite the comically bad video that was released, the claim is that these objects, in the air and the sea, operate in ways thought impossible. They move faster than any human built craft and they maneuver well beyond our capability. In one case, an object was claimed to have been in the air then it went into the sea, moving at speeds well beyond any known seagoing vessel. The video for that one shows what looks like a piece of fuzz moving around on a grainy black and white video.

Supposedly the government is releasing this stuff because Congress passed a law requiring them to come clean on the UFO question. Marco Rubio, one of the Senate’s most brilliant thinkers, got something passed last year that requires the Pentagon to issue a report to the public on what they know. Presumably, these videos are part of prepping the public for whatever the official word is on UFO’s. Who knows, maybe they will roll out a little green man along with the report.

Of course, the right way to view this is with lots of skepticism. After all, the people putting this into the public domain lie to us every day. They were sure that invisible Russians using mind control somehow altered the 2016 election. Amazingly, those invisible Russians were able to do their dastardly deeds without ever having been caught on camera, so maybe the space aliens flying around US navy ships could learn a few things from the those invisible Russian mentats.

Then we have the evidence itself. Maybe the military really is using 1970’s technology on ships and aircraft, but those videos look suspiciously primitive. The only thing missing was Mulder and Scully from the old X-Files series. If Rod Sterling were narrating the video, it would have made more sense. Again, given the government’s compulsive lying, the voice overs were less than convincing. If this is all they have, then we have to assume this is just more bravo sierra from the state.

The biggest problem with all UFO claims is that we know some things that would have to be true about alien visitors. One is they would have to be orders of magnitude smarter than humans in order to master interstellar travel. We are not even sure we can return to the moon, much less travel the stars. This super smart species that has conquered what we currently think is impossible, that is travel beyond light speed, would surely have figured out how to evade our primitive cameras.

The claim about the nuclear missile facility is the most amusing example of the paradoxes in the UFO story. We are told they were able to detect these entities on radar, but the entities seem to have disabled the nuclear weapons. That means these super intelligent space aliens can shut down our most advanced weapons from their ships but could not figure out how to shut off the radar and cameras. It is a good thing they did not come here to rob bank vaults.

Despite the outlandishness of these whoppers, it fits a familiar pattern for how the state disseminates bogus information. Andrew Anglin pointed this out in his Unz Review piece on the UFO story. He wrote, “Journalists and people who claim to be journalists regularly come up with things that seem plausible or likely, then claim that they have an insider source”. Those sources are imaginary, or they are the government contact that is dictating the fake news item to the “journalist”.

The question, of course, is why are they putting this nonsense out into the public domain after years denying any of it was real? There are plenty of theories ranging from the mundane to the conspiratorial. One possible answer is that these people are compulsive liars who just like lying. Generations of selection pressure in favor of sociopaths have resulted in a ruling class full of them. They think it is funny to mess with the rubes in flyover country and this just another gag.

The good news is that the public seems to be more than a bit skeptical about these new UFO claims. The story did not get much traction and the commentary on it from independent sources has been mostly negative. The American public may have reached the point where they view all official stories as just new productions from the same theater group. The new real-time X-Files is like the latest Star Wars offering, in that the public has seen enough. The thrill is gone.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.