Terrible Choices

Posted on August 4, 2023 by thezman

Most online political commentary is either analysis of what is happening in the world or dire predictions about where things are heading. The response is often some form of “Well, what can we do about it?” On this side of the great divide, this is usually a rhetorical question, as the person asking knows what he wants to do. He wants to get himself and the site on an FBI watch list.

As we see with the lawfare against Trump, the regime is determined to do what it likes and there is nothing that can be done about it. The best Republicans are cowards, while most are sociopathic criminals. The former mews about what is happening, while the latter claps and cheers on their friends across the aisle. The two-party system is just two faces of the same monster we call the regime.

That means the formal tools citizens have to affect politics are useless. You can vote yourself silly but the system gets worse. In fact, this is exactly what has been happening the last couple of decades. The system gets worse, so more people get engaged in elections, but that makes things worse. Record turnout in 2020 gave us a deranged old men run by the Kagan cult.

Even so, people still think in terms of elections, so the show this week dives into what would be required to use the system to reform the system. Then we get into the informal tools that can be used to effect change. These are not great choices. There is not a lot of joy to be found in the options that are available to us. The reason is a system in crises is one that leaves open only the terrible choices.

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Contents

The reality of current society
Solving the easy problems
Systemic social problems
The Terrible Choices
The Inevitable

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Diet And Superstition

Posted on August 3, 2023 by thezman

A paradox of the modern age is that the average person in the West knows more about the natural world than the most learned man of prior eras, but people remain as superstitious and irrational as ever. This is true even in the human sciences, where doctors continue to tell patients that they should make sure to eat plenty of vegetables and avoid fatty foods. Much of what people experience as medicine is the same old oogily-boogily that has been with us since forever.

The carnivore diet is the latest bit of nonsense to make the rounds. Search the topic on YouTube and your recommendations will suddenly be packed with videos of men wearing lab coats or standing in front of dry erase boards, explaining how this diet is based on the science of cavemen. They claim that humans are made to eat meat, not bread or vegetables, so we should only eat meat. This will cure the things that ail you in the modern age, like obesity and unhappiness.

This is pure nonsense. Modern humans are the product of a long process that continues to this day. That process is called evolution. The ancestors of modern humans survived on what they could find. We know that species that can survive on a varied diet are more adaptive than species hooked on a narrow diet. If you can eat anything, you can live anywhere. If you can only eat bamboo shoots, then the only place you can live is in a Chinese zoo.

Modern humans inherited this ability to eat just about anything, which is why modern humans were able to spread across the globe. Anyone who says humans were designed to eat meat is either ignorant or crazy. Humans certainly adapted to the food that was available, but the reason they could do this is our ancestors were able to eat just about anything. In some areas, humans lived primarily on fish, because there was a reliable supply of fish for them to eat year-round.

Adaptation is important. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued in their book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, that as humans settled down and learned to cultivate animals and plants, adaptation accelerated. As grains became a bigger part of the diet, people adapted to the new food and lifestyle. If our caveman ancestors were meat eaters, it does not matter because our direct ancestors evolved to be omnivores living mostly on grains they made into bread and beer.

Now, this does not mean you cannot lose weight or lower your glucose levels by changing your diet. People in the modern age get fat for the same reason people got fat in the Middle Ages. They consume more calories than they need to perform their work, so some of the excess is stored as fat. That is another useful adaptation of humans that gets treated like magic. Storing fat is what helps us be so adaptive. Carrying emergency food around under our skin is a huge advantage.

This is why being fat was looked upon as a sign of success. Look at old photos of rich people and they are often quite fat. Women dressed in a way that made them look plump, even if they were slender. Fat people had extra food and time to eat it, which meant they were prosperous. Skinny people spent their days laboring thus burning lots of calories, but they had only the food they needed to keep laboring. In this age, Indians still regard tubbiness as a sign of prosperity.

Modern Americans, of course, view fat people as moral failures because they cannot control themselves at chow time. Chris Christie is an object of scorn mostly because he is a big fat slob. He even had his mouth stapled shut in an effort to lose weight and give his family some peace and quiet. Somehow, he managed to get around it and he remains a big fat noisy slob. In this age, the only fat people we like are the fat comics who make fun of their own fatness.

This probably explains the superstition around diets. The sales pitch of the carnivore diet is no different from what preachers during the Great Awakening were selling or social reformers of this age are selling. The subtext is always the same. We have strayed from the proper path, and we must return to it or else. In the case of diet, it means returning to some imagined time when we ate a different way. In the case of social reforms, it is getting back to the righteous path.

It is not just fad diets where we see superstitions about food. Many YouTube videos are sponsored by companies selling some sort goo in a jug that is supposed to give you energy and vitality. “Hey, you are a busy and important person, who just happens to be laying on the couch watching YouTube videos. You don’t have time to have a proper meal, so have a jug of green slime instead. It will not only give you the electrolytes plants crave, but it will also give you energy to watch more videos.”

These companies selling meal replacement and ready-to-cook meals delivered to your door are not really selling food. These companies are selling lifestyles. They are no different from the people selling perfume or ripped blue jeans. The people selling gourmet food kits are promising you a lifestyle if you adorn yourself with the accoutrements of the people who supposedly live that life. Fashion is a cargo cult and food fashion is not an exception.

Of course, the root here is happiness. The leisure classes in ancient Egypt had codes of conduct that were designed to give meaning and purpose to life. Cicero and Ovid wrote guides on how to live happy lives. People in comfortable lives have time to worry about abstract things, so there are people there to supply them with satisfying answers to the vexing questions of existence. Idle hands do the Devil’s work and the buying and selling of self-help books keeps those idle hands busy.

Getting back to food superstitions, not all of it is nonsense. If you are a big fat slob like Chris Christie, the carnivore diet will result in weight loss. It may put cows on the endangered species list, but that is a different issue. Cutting out carbohydrates does funny things to the body. It is why people feel like they have the flu for the first couple of weeks on all of these no-carb diets. Lacking carbohydrates for energy, the body begins to burn fat for energy, which takes a couple of weeks.

Weight loss comes mostly from the reduction in calories. If you eat a big fatty ribeye steak, you will not be hungry in a few hours. If you eat five donuts, you will be starving before the next mealtime. You consumed the same number of calories, but one was fat and protein and the other was all carbs. People who go on no-carb diets end up eating far less than they used to eat, so they lose weight. If you are a fat person, the trade-offs, at least in the short term, probably make sense.

In the end, the cold logic of things like the carnivore diet are no more appealing than the cold logic of fashion. Imagine ads selling ripped jeans that say, “go in debt for these and you will feel better until the credit card statement arrives.” Instead, these diets are sold to people as magic elixirs. The sales pitch works, because we are not so far removed from our primitive past that we are immune to abracadabra words that promise to make the gods happy and therefore make us happy.

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By Any Means Necessary

Posted on August 2, 2023 by thezman

There are many theories for why the Roman Republic became unstable and eventually collapsed into what we think of as authoritarianism. Given America’s republican history, the collapse of the Roman Republic has been something like Banquo’s ghost, especially for those who call themselves conservatives. Each new innovation is a threat to the republic. The progressives have the same fear, despite their obvious disdain for the republican concept. Caesarism haunts their dreams.

The funny thing about the fall of the Roman Republic is that it was largely the result of trying to save it. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he did not think of himself as the destroyer of Rome. He was saving Rome. Sure, he was violating important rules of the Republic, but Rome was too important to worry about petty things. While the idea of a republic assumes that the means justify the ends, saving the Republic was based on the ends justifying the means.

Caesar could not have existed if not for the example of Sulla. He became the key figure in the struggle between the optimates and populares factions. The former backed the supremacy of the senate, while the latter supported the popular reforms of Sulla’s former mentor, Gaius Marius. Sulla marched on Rome in an unprecedented act to defeat the populares and then did it a second time to deliver the final defeat at the Battle of the Colline Gate.

Interestingly, Sulla was made possible by the man he eventually defeated and who he once served in his own efforts to save the Republic. Gaius Marius was a general and a statesman who won the Cimbric and Jugurthine wars. In doing so he held the office of consul an unprecedented seven times. Prior to Marius, the custom was to retire from politics after reaching the position of Consul, but the Republic needed the skilled Marius, so to save the Republic exceptions were made.

Of course, the reason for those extraordinary circumstances was that the opposition in the Jugurthine wars had been able to bribe Roman senators. Jugurtha was a king of Numidia who claimed the entire kingdom of Numidia. This was in defiance of Rome, but he was able to first bribe some senators to get favorable terms and then he bribed Roman generals when war started. Rome needed to make exceptions for Marius because the best Roman citizens were no longer trusted.

You can probably start with the founding of the Roman Republic, the day Brutus stood and watched his own sons be executed for their role in the Tarquinian conspiracy, and chart the exceptions made until Caesar crossed the Rubicon. At first it was mostly personal corruption, small things that were overlooked to keep the peace. Over time it was exceptions to the rules for expediency’s sake. Each time an exception was made, it laid the groundwork for the next exception.

In the future, the robot historians will do the same thing charting the arc of the American republic as it made exceptions here and there, all in the name of expediency to save “our democracy” from some evil. In each case, the people breaking the rules or violating custom have justified what they were doing by claiming that they were breaking the rules in order to save the system. As with the Roman Republic, the American republic has fallen victim to those who claiming to save it.

We are seeing this with the latest batch of indictments of Donald Trump. In fact, the Donald Trump story arc is a microcosm of the process. It started with the so-called conservatives openly siding with their alleged opponents. You see, they were breaking their word because the greater good demanded it. This was the start of a process by which each new violation of the rules and customs is normalized and justified, thus making the next more egregious violation possible.

That process kicked off by Conservative Inc. has led to the last batch of indictments of Donald Trump, which now come with the promise of a rigged trial. The case has been assigned to one of the more corrupt and partisan judges in the system. Unlike the previous charges in Florida, which came with a judge that maintained the façade of impartiality, this judge is a crook and lunatic. This case may as well be held in the Oval Office with Hillary Clinton has judge and jury.

This now paves the way for the Republican Party to change their rules in order to keep Trump off the ballot. They will no doubt claim they are doing this to save the party or save the republic. You see, they are not succumbing to corruption or merely breaking their own rules. No, they are sacrificing in order to save the system from something they say is much worse than breaking the rules. In this process, there is always something worse than breaking the rules.

It is one of the ironies of the human condition. All human societies begin with the question, “who are we?” The answer is a set of rules that define who is in and who is not in the society. Inevitably, there are people who slither in seeking to undermine those rules by looking for loopholes and exceptions. Before long, some people start to see the rules as an obstacle. As the rules give way to this process, the only way to save the rules is to abandon the spirit of them entirely.

Of course, we have the expression “crossing the Rubicon” for a reason. When Caesar made the decision to march on Rome, the Republic was over, as there was no way to put it back together, even if Caesar was defeated. We see this happening with the political persecution of Trump. The people doing it are not going to be talked out of their next brazen violation of the rules. The only way to stop them is to physically remove them from society by any means necessary.

The Religion Of X

Posted on August 1, 2023 by thezman

Imagine if Elon Musk decides that he is a messenger from “Old Ones” sent to earth to start a new religion based around technology. The “Old Ones” are the spirits of Martians who have transcended this plane of existence. They have gifted Musk with certain abilities that have allowed him to become the world’s richest man, thus freeing him from all social constraints but also leaving him with the understanding of how normal people relate to the world and one another.

Musk’s new religion, the Church of All Worlds, combines the hedonistic elements of libertarianism with incomprehensible elements from Western epistemology to give the new religion a mysterious quality. Initiates learn the insider language of the religion and how to use the new phrases to signal their status in the religion. Most important, they learn that they are an elect chosen to ruthlessly rule over the rest of mankind and punish the weak for their weakness.

You see, in Musk’s new religion, he is the holiest of holy because he is the richest and most powerful man on the planet. Everyone’s holiness quotient is measured against the standard of Musk. Therefore, weakness and vulnerability are considered the worst sins and punished by the Church of All Worlds. This is not a religion promising salvation for the oppressed, but a religion promising the believers salvation from the oppressed by licensing violence against the weak.

For those sure that the word “religion” means only what they believe, this will not sound like a real religion. After all, the definition of religion is exactly what they believe, so by definition anything calling itself a religion that does not exactly match their beliefs is a false religion. Others might point out that Musk’s new religion lacks the essential elements of a religion like a liturgy or a holly book. Others will argue that the “Old Ones” business is just warmed over paganism.

Most people, however, will be troubled by the fact that his new religion seems to justify kicking people while they are down. This religion of the elect, or “master race” as Musk prefers to call his followers, is providing a justification for the strong to attack the weak, which is the opposite of what people think of with regards to religion. Thousands of years of conditioning have taught us that religion promises the weak salvation from the torments of this world, especially from the predation of the strong.

Sensing that his new religion is not working, he changes the name of the new religion from the Church of All Worlds to X. Atop his megachurch he has installed a giant neon X that you can see from space. He changes the definition of weak to include those who choose not to join the new religion. Their doubt is their weakness. The weak can enjoy earthly power if they give up their old ideas and join X. Those who refuse remain fair game, but the door is always open to them.

That sounds a bit better, even if the new name strikes everyone as stupid. His new religion still celebrates the abuse of the weak and vulnerable, but it gives them a path out of their condition. All they have to do is stop fighting the tides of history and they can enjoy the benefits of being on the winning team. Musk and his lieutenants will still be at the top and the material life for the convert will not change that much, but they will avoid having mobs of black-clad street activists attacking them.

In this way, Musk’s new religion incorporates that old Christian concept of salvation but retains the Nietzschean notion that the strong must dominate the weak. The believers still get to demonstrate their superiority by attacking the weak, but they get to view it as salvation from the wicked. The weak now have a clear path out of their condition, so if they remain in their condition, they must secretly reject the new religion. Their condition is proof of their rejection of and attack on the elect.

This new configuration also opens up whole new areas of scholarship for otherwise useless people to explain why the weak persist in their weakness. Weakness studies leads to weakness experts, who make a living explaining to the faithful why the weak are actually a threat to the strong. In fact, the weak are proof of a conspiracy against the strong, thus making the weak a public display of violence against the strong. It is a matter of self-defense for the strong to attack the weak!

Probably the most important innovation in the religion of X is that it turns success within the new moral order into proof of strength and moral fitness. Those at the top are free to think poorly of those below them, who are thankful for the reinforcement, as it justifies their own shabby treatment of those below them. In this way, everyone in the religion has a sense of moral superiority over someone, but also a strong motivation to maintain the rules of the new moral order.

The trouble with the religion of X is that it could run out of weak people, so it has to create a mechanism to make sure the supply of weak people is steady. This is where the weakness studies people really show their stuff. They police the lower ranks of the religion for troublemakers, declaring them weak while focusing the attention of the lower ranks on them. This maintains the supply of weaklings and serves as a reminder to the faithful that the price of strength is eternal vigilance.

Eventually, a schism develops between the wing of the faith that is in it only for the debauchery and those who are in it to destroy the world. The latter camp is actually stronger than the former camp, but they continue to insist they are the weaker party, which triggers a mob from the former camp to attack them. Musk is killed and the church collapses, leading to a civil war. This ends when a new powerful group, led by a man claiming to be a descendent of Musk restores order.

The Antiracist White Nationalist

Posted on July 31, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the rise and fall of Nick Fuentes, a review of the classic buddy comedy Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

With some obvious exceptions, the people who use the term “white nationalist” use it to mean “people they do not like.” These are people who imbue their language with emotional meaning, rather than descriptive meaning. Just as Eskimos supposedly have a long list of ways to describe snow, the people fond of using the term “white nationalist” have a long list of words for people outside of their cult. The term has no meaning other than “danger! danger!” to the rest of the cult.

Before the term became a cult signal, it used to have meaning. A white nationalist is an American term for a white person who wants to live in communities free of nonwhites, especially black people. Having lost the fight over “civil rights” in the middle of the last century, and not understanding the implications of it, these people organized around the idea of separate lands for people of European descent. They want intentional communities organized around race.

Of course, the people who use the term “white nationalist” as a slur acknowledge that the people calling themselves white nationalists primarily want a white homeland exclusively for white people, but they also claim the reason for this desire is an irrational hatred of nonwhites, especially blacks and Jews. In this way, the term “white nationalists” is shorthand for people who hate nonwhites. It is why you can be a nonwhite white nationalist now.

Putting aside the bizarre claims by the usual suspects, if we assume that white nationalists want to live away from nonwhites, then it makes sense that the areas with the least number of nonwhites are the areas with the greatest number of white nationalists or at least white nationalist sympathies. In fact, this assumption is a cornerstone of civil rights law. Diversity is a moral good, so it is the standard against which people and organizations are judged.

For example, if you want to find the state that like black people the least, you will look for the state with the smallest black population. A state with few black people is, at the minimum, unwelcoming to black people, so they do not move there. The most likely reason for the unwelcome mat is the locals do not like black people. By this reasoning, Montana is the most racist state in America. Look at this map and you see ten states that have a black population below three percent.

Interestingly, half of those states voted for Joe Biden in the last election and half voted for Donald Trump. Eight of the ten states with the highest black population voted for Donald Trump and are reliably Republican. This is often pointed to as proof that white nationalism is all about hating blacks, because these states are where we tend to find people who call themselves white nationalists. They say familiarity breeds contempt, but it may also breed white nationalism.

A more granular way of looking at this is by congressional district. The most far-left district in the country is New York’s 15th Congressional District. It is ninety-seven percent diverse, but the largest group is Hispanic. The second most left-wing district is New York’s 13th Congressional District, which is fourteen percent white. Number nine on the list is Nancy Pelosi’s old haunt. It is just four percent diverse. There are many such examples on the top-50 antiracist congressional districts.

Interestingly, when you do the same exercise for Jews, you find that the states with the smallest Jewish population vote Republican. The one exception is Florida which is number eight on the list, but trends Republican. That said, there are many solidly Democratic states that have a tiny Jewish populations. Outside of a few states, the Jewish population is so small that they go unnoticed. You are more likely to meet an alien abductee in Oklahoma than meet a Jewish person.

What this tells us is that if you are a white nationalist, you want to move to Montana, Wyoming, or Utah. These three states are in the bottom ten in terms of black population and Jewish population. Mitt Romney is the face of white nationalism. Of course, if you set the Jewish threshold at one percent, then the world is your oyster, as long as you do not mind the daily antiracist lectures from your all-white neighbors in places like Oregon, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire.

This runs counter to the official narrative, but it is something people have observed for generations with regards to antiracism. The higher the percentage of blacks in any given area, the lower the percentage of antiracists and the higher the percentage of accused white nationalists. On the other hand, the lower the percentage of black people, the higher the percentage of white antiracists. If you want to live like a white nationalist but sound like an antiracist, move to Oregon.

When you look at the data, something else becomes clear. The states that are most reliably Republican are those with the highest black populations. It speaks to the racialization of white politics. If you are black, you vote Democratic no matter where you live or how you live. Whites, in contrast, vote Republican if they are in close proximity to enough blacks to form a community. Maryland and Delaware are the exceptions, but there are larger factors at play in both states.

This is something that drove the flight of white people from the cities into the suburbs in the last century. As black populations grew in American cities, there reached a tipping point where whites began to abandon the city altogether. The legendary quantitative blogger La Griffe du Lion analyzed this with regards to urban crime. Once the black population in a city reached twenty percent, white crime victimization soared and white flight to the suburbs soon followed.

The great paleoconservative writer Joe Sobran said, “In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan.” This was true in the sense that they talk like MLK but live like the KKK. The thing is though, the people labeled as the KKK tend to live closer to the antiracist ideal. The typical “white nationalist” will meet more black people at her grocery store than the typical antiracist will meet in his lifetime.

What all this tells us is that the racialization of politics has resulted in a bizarre cognitive dissonance among the most active participants. The most race aware white people live in the most diverse places. The most antiracist white people live in places that are so white they glow in the dark. What this suggests if you are worried about becoming a white nationalist is you should move to Oregon or Vermont. The surest way to not become a white nationalist is never meet a black person.

Reparations

Posted on July 27, 2023 by thezman

One of the things to look forward to in the next election will be Gavin Newsome lecturing Tim Scott on the importance of reparations. This assumes Tim Scott will be told to oppose the idea by the party. By next fall reparations could be an ancient conservative principle so we could see a contest between the two parties over who is promising the bigger reparations check.

Either way, it is a safe bet that the subject will be mainstream by next year. The effort to normalize the idea has been going on since the George Floyd riots. California is working on a reparations report. The idea is to release a big official looking study that will be the basis for the following debate. This was popular back in the middle of the last century whenever the progressives were plotting shenanigans.

Part of the plot will be a role for white people to play in the manufactured drama that will play out on cable television and the internet. Sean Hannity will take a week off for a new firmware update and come back with a new set of lapel pins and a new vocabulary to oppose the idea of reparations. It will be the old Washington Generals routine that is the defining feature of the so-called conservative movement.

Despite having a compliant opposition, it will not be easy for the regime. While most blacks support the idea of robbing their white neighbors, a large percentage oppose the idea, probably sensing it is a bridge too far. It is one thing to send whitey off to a reeducation class every year. He is still being paid to attend the DIE training. It is quite another to take food off his kid’s plate.

The bigger problem is it will put the lie to the race issue. If you demand money from whites to make blacks whole, then whites are going to assume this either closes the books on race or it is just an act of vengeance. Either way, it means unshackling white people from the guilt of racism. White people either pay the debt, so no more demands, or they see that the debt can never be paid, and it is time to move on.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Reparations Talk
Compensation
Distributive Justice
Reparations
Racial Vengeance
The Justice Of Peaceful Separation

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Bad Science

Posted on July 27, 2023 by thezman

Americans have always been skeptical of science, mostly because Americans are naturally skeptical about extravagant claims. There has always been a paradox at the center of the American identity. Americans assume there is a solution to all of the practical problems of the world. On the other hand, Americans suspect that the people offering those solutions are not on the level. As a result, American can marvel at scientific progress but hold science in low regard.

This turns up in popular culture. Watch old films and you often see scientists presented as overconfident in their abilities, unethical in their pursuit of knowledge or foolish in how they ignore the risks of the work. In popular culture, the scientist is Dr. Frankenstein, a mad scientist, or a naïve fool. These movie tropes are common because they appeal to the cultural framing of science. While scientists may be our smartest people, they are not the most trusted people.

Probably the biggest driver of this is medicine. Despite trillions poured into the medical establishment, we do not know that much about the human body. The three main drivers of health and longevity in the West are antibiotics, nutrition and sanitation, not great scientific breakthroughs. We have gotten better at treating things like cancer and heart disease, but we are a long way away from curing them. Medicine is still not sure why cancer exists, much less how to prevent it.

This persistent ignorance, however, has not stopped the medical profession from lecturing the public on health. Public health officials have spent the last fifty years anathematizing tobacco use. The claim was it caused cancer. Therefore, eliminating smoking should lower cancer rates. Smoking rates have collapsed in America, but cancer rates have remained the same. Lung cancer rates have not changed much at all, which is where we should have seen the benefit.

Something like smoking is where you see the problem most clearly. Science has figured out why smoking causes emphysema. The ash builds up in the lungs. People figured this out long before we considered medicine a science. We still have no idea what it is in tobacco that causes cancer. There is no honest answer as to what is in cigarettes that gets people hooked on them. People who smoke pipes or vape do not display the same dependency that we see with cigarettes.

Given the trillions spent on medicine and medical research, one would think by now that we would have unriddled the whole tobacco puzzle. Even if our libertarian impulse would prevent the banning of tobacco products, we should be able to ban the highly addictive additives put into some of these things. The best we have is nicotine supplements designed to keep the addict hooked on nicotine. You cannot blame people for thinking this is not entirely on the level.

Of course, there has been no bigger blow to the reputation of science than the army of grifters and conmen shouting “trust the science” during Covid. People with impressive credentials in medicine told the public that you must wrap your underwear around your head and stop drinking after a certain hour to prevent Covid. They also invented a vaccine that does not inoculate you against the infection and has some chance of killing you with myocarditis and blood clots.

It is not so much that these cranks and lunatics were all wrong about Covid, but that there have been no consequences. The seriousness of a profession is determined by its willingness to maintain its own standards. No one trusts lawyers because crooked lawyers rarely face punishment. The one profession with less policing of the ranks than the law is medicine. The same people making bizarre claims about Covid will be out doing the same act during the next manufactured crisis.

Another blight on science and related to medicine is the area of nutrition. There are two sides to the nutrition debate. The official side promotes the Standard American Diet, which is designed to boost agribusiness. The other side is the army of grifters and snake oil salesmen pushing supplements and fad diets. Nowhere in American life is the old “heads they win, tails you lose” dynamic more obvious and pernicious than in the realm of human diet and lifestyle.

Start with the official side of things. Everyone reading this has probably got a lecture from their doctor about cutting out fat and salt from the diet. The food pyramid tells us to eat more grain and minimize red meat. Generations of Americans were told to replace butter with margarine. None of this is based on science. In the case of margarine, we know this crackpot idea was pushed by agribusiness looking for a way to make money off what at the time was a waste product.

The response to this oogily-boogily is just as insane. Fad diets used to promise weight loss with minimal sacrifice. Now they come up with nonsense claims about the science of health and fitness. The latest is the carnivore diet, which claims we need to eat like our ancient ancestors. That means just meat and some dairy. Our ancient ancestors did not live on meat and dairy. They ate whatever they could find. More important, for ten thousand years we have survived on bread, not meat.

When someone with “MD” after their name is often seen pushing crackpot ideas like the carnivore diet or some witch’s brew promising to make you smarter, it is no wonder that we call doctors “quacks”. When your doctor says you have high cholesterol and need to take pills, you want to trust her, but then you find out that there is not a lot of evidence that the pills make a real difference. You start to wonder if she is just another type of sales rep from the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

When you combine the conflation of medicine with science and the shoddy reputation of medicine, it is no wonder that Americans have a negative view of science. How can anyone “trust the science” when the people screaming “trust the science” on social media are both wrong and crazy? Replace the phrase “trust the science” during Covid with “trust the crazy homeless guy who screams at people in the middle of the street”, and you would have the same effect.

That raises the other big problem for science, the expert. America is plagued with people claiming to be experts. Pick any noun and search for it along with the word “expert” and you will find someone claiming to be an expert in the noun. Of course, all nouns are equal in the expertise game, but some nouns are more equal than others, so you will have better luck finding a “racism expert” than someone who can tell you a good way to keep the squirrels out of the attic.

The modern age is now flooded with experts whose expertise ranges from the annoying to the ridiculously impossible. Diversity experts, for example, are not experts in the sense they have a mastery of the subject. They just repeat the magic words from the catechism in a hectoring tone. The extremism expert is claiming to be knowledgeable about a subject that does not exist. Extremism is undefinable. How can you be an expert on something that is no more than a moral signal?

It is no wonder that Americans are skeptical of science. The main ways they interface with science are horribly corrupt and stupid. Granted, medicine is not science and the people claiming to be experts in social causes are crackpots, but they are presented to Americans as the product of science. Science has now become the authority for all things annoying and offensive. If science gives us the carnivore diet and the racism expert, maybe science is more trouble than it is worth.

The Great Dilemma

Posted on July 26, 2023 by thezman

Imagine one of your friends tells you that the governor of your state was caught on video robbing a liquor store. Not only that, his brother pistol-whipped the clerk during the commission of the crime. Most likely, you would want proof. Your friend then sends you a link to a Twitter thread on the subject. Knowing the volume of nonsense on Twitter, you then go to mainstream news sites looking for something on this incredible story, but everywhere you look you find nothing but silence.

This would present a dilemma. On the one hand, you trust your friend and the story does seem legitimate. Upon further inquiry you find some stories tucked away here and there that confirm the tweet. Independent news sites are howling about the crime and the refusal of the mainstream media to notice it. The dilemma is not about believing the story is true but about trusting your own judgement. If all of the serious people are ignoring this story, why should you be outraged by it?

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is daily life in America. Events that should warrant national coverage go unmentioned, while trivial nonsense gets wall-to-wall coverage from all of the regime media organs. Compounding it is the fact that the stuff getting covered comes with truckloads of official lies and narratives designed to trick the audience into viewing the facts presented in a way that leads to an inaccurate understanding of the event in question.

We are in one of those moments today. Hunter Biden, the crackhead son of Joe Biden, is due in court to plead guilty to some minor crimes. Not happy with a sweetheart deal that is an affront to the idea of the rule of law, one of his lawyers called the court yesterday, pretending to be a lawyer for the Republicans, who had filed a brief with the court contesting the sweetheart deal. This fake lawyer successfully convinced the court clerk to withdraw the Republican filing.

This is not a small thing. The massive corruption involved in this plea deal should warrant Watergate level coverage. Instead, regime media and the volunteer army of online toadies pretend it is normal. Putting that aside, no one would know about this outlandish effort to mislead the court if not for people on Twitter. The Drudge Report has no mention of it. Memorandum, the news aggregator popular with media content creators, has no mention of this event.

In fairness, there is a CNN post on it, but you have to dig around to find it. The three primary media organs of the regime are silent. There is no mention of it in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. Putting aside the Nigerian levels of corruption in this case, the absurdity of this stunt warrants attention. Calling a court clerk the day before an appearance and pretending to be a lawyer for another party in order to trick the court is Hollywood comedy stuff.

As an aside, think about the sort of people who look at an event like this and conclude it is not worth mentioning. It is a good reminder that partisanship is not primarily about rooting for your side, but a hatred of the enemy. The regime’s media organs actively participate in these coverups because they hate the people they imagine are on the other side of the hive walls. They are not covering for the Bidens because they love these people, but because they hate you.

Putting that aside, what compounds the media silence on this story is the outrageousness of it. The law firm involved is not a fly-by-night operation that represents drug cases. Jessica Bagels, the lawyer who pulled the caper, is Director of Litigation Services at Latham- Watkins. This is what they used to call a “white shoe” law firm that represents power players in politics and finance. These are the sorts of people Hollywood uses in conspiracy thrillers like The Firm.

Of course, this casual acceptance of corruption speaks to the general rot that has become the defining feature of the ruling class. It is not that these people are breaking the rules for personal gain. It is that they no longer have any respect for the spirit of the law that is supposed to animate our society. These lawyers think nothing of tricking a court clerk because they have no respect for her or the system. In fact, these lawyers hold the legal system in contempt.

The only reason anyone knows about this latest Hunter Biden caper is that there are still people in America who respect the spirit of the law. They are outraged enough about this case to follow it and post what they learn online. There are still millions of Americans who feel the same sense of outrage, so they follow these people on places like Twitter. Despite the best efforts by regime media, this information still makes it into circulation and people are rightly angry about it.

This returns us to that dilemma at the start. The choice between trusting yourself or the weight of official media rests on a more important conflict. The people who think it proper to trick the court operate from the belief that any means necessary is acceptable in order to achieve their goals. The ends justify the means. The other side of the dilemma are the people who reject this. They think the means justify the ends and that we must always respect the process.

Therein lies the problem. The process no longer has the means to control these corrupt forces in the system. The only solution is to abandon the rules and use whatever means are required in order to remove the rot from the system. What this example shows is that the people who think the end justifies the means will always defeat the means justify the end unless the latter makes an exception and embraces the ethos of the former in order to restore order. That is the great dilemma of this age.

Nature Finds A Way

Posted on July 25, 2023 by thezman

Despite being our greatest ally and an obsession for Republican party leaders, few have noticed that Israel has been in disarray for years. Politically there is a battle between two main factions that see no room for compromise. This has now spilled into the streets in mass protests over a new law curbing court power. Internationally, Israel has never been less significant. Its main patron, the American Empire, is busy trying to start a nuclear war with Russia and China.

At the moment, tens of thousands of Israelis are rioting over plans to overhaul the legal system, limiting the power of the courts. This plan is championed by the conservatives, led by Bibi Netanyahu. The point is to give the parliament more power by limiting the courts’ ability to annul laws passed by the parliament. Israel is a single chamber parliament where the prime minister is the leader of the ruling coalition, so it means two thirds of government are run by the prime minister.

There is a bit of the familiar lunacy in these protests. The people setting fires and destroying things claim the other side is committing acts of violence. This is the old “your speech is violence; our violence is speech” business we have come to expect from the regime toadies throughout the empire. They also claim that limiting democracy through the courts is the only way to defend democracy. Democracy means rule by the permanent ruling elite, contrary to the public will.

What is really happening here is demographics. For generations, liberal Ashkenazi Jews has ruled Israel. Liberal in this case means pro-Western. They aligned Israel with the West, primarily the United States, turning it into a beachhead for the empire in the region and a staging ground for Jewish activism in the West. The reason Republican presidential candidates swear allegiance to Israel is because of the massive amount of influence Israel has in Washington.

This is changing as the number of ultra-orthodox and non-Western Jews grows relative to the population as a whole. The simple fact is the pro-Western population has not been having babies, while the very conservative population has been producing around six births per female. The guys with the fur cylinders on their heads have been winning the most important political battle, the fertility battle. Netanyahu now represents this very conservative demographic in Israeli politics.

These ultra-conservative voters are not particularly interested in courting Western opinion or in buying influence in Washington. They are focused on making Israel a Zionist paradise free of non-Jews, especially the Palestinians. They are also not interested in the endless political intrigue that defines the Middle East. Imagine if the Amish were hyper-violent and they seized control of Pennsylvania. That is what is about to happen to Israel as the ultra-orthodox take over politics.

Of course, the political turmoil and civil unrest should be making Israel more vulnerable to Arab attacks, but no one is worried about it. The reason is the surrounding Arab countries do not care that much about Israel, other than as a source of Western shenanigans in the region. Officially, the Arab world remains opposed to Israel, but unofficially they have other concerns. The Arab-Israeli wars were a long time ago and much has changed since then.

This reality is reflected in the population. The typical Arab in that part of the world is indifferent to Israel and Jews, but there remains a minority that obsess over the topic, so everyone just ignores it. The truth is Jews and Arabs are fine doing business with one another and living in peace. The exception is in the Palestinian territories, but the truth is no one likes the Palestinians. They are the least sympathetic party in the region and their only supporters are on the American college campus.

The subtext to the unrest in Israel is the declining influence of the Global American Empire on Israel and the region. Twenty years ago, Washington would have stopped this legislative agenda in Israel with one phone call. Today the Netanyahu regime has no fear of the Biden people. They see what is happening in the world and are thinking about the world that comes after the American empire. Israel in the post-America world will not have the luxury of indulging in liberal niceties.

The post-American Middle East may be more stable for the simple reason that Washington will not be pitting one group against the other. China and Russia are ready to fill the void left by America and they care only about business. The Russians are poised to become the dominant energy power in the world, while China is the manufacturing base of the world. Neither country sees unrest in their interests, so they could be a calming influence on regional politics.

Putting that aside, the critics of the Israeli plan to limit the courts are right to say it is an erosion of democracy, as long as you use the managerial definition of democracy, which means rule by the managerial class. What these changes represent is a frontal assault on one of the main sources of power by their managerial class. The other power center for them is the secret police. American-style liberal democracy is on the retreat in Israel because it is on the retreat everywhere now.

What is happening in Israel is an example of the great chain of causality. Politics are downstream from biology and culture. Israel is a land full of people who like wearing strange headgear as they furiously argue with one another over what John Derbyshire once described as “elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” Israeli politics will not resemble Western politics because Israeli is full of non-Western people.

In the larger sense, the happenings in Israel are another chapter in what will be a haphazard and often chaotic retreat of the Global American Empire. The war in Ukraine is one of those chapters. There is a good chance that a war with China over Taiwan will be another chapter. Like weeds growing through a sidewalk, however, the nature of the world is slowly pushing through the cultural and political norms imposed on the world by the Global American Empire and returning to its natural state.

Who, Whom?

Posted on July 24, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the rather boring Amazon movie Air, which is about sneaker pimps, a review of the classic comedy, The Philadelphia Story and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Imagine you are suddenly thrust into a world where you and everyone else in this world has a unique religion. Everyone has their own moral code, and everyone has a unique way of demonstrating that moral code. There is a finite number of moral principles, so there can be a lot of overlap in this area. On the other hand, there is an unlimited number of ways to exercise your beliefs, so everyone can easily see the differences between themselves and the rest.

This would be a rather strange world, but it would also be an extremely dangerous world as soon as everyone figured out that some of the people had within their religion an extreme intolerance of other religions. Some people may have as a part of their religious practice the forced conversion of non-believers. Others may look at everyone as fair game as far as murder. Some could be cannibals. Quickly everyone would realize they are in an extremely dangerous world.

At the same time, some people would figure out that their moral code is pretty close to the code of some other people. They may have different practices, like feast days and which animals they sacrifice on those days, but when it comes to the important things they are on the same page. While these people may not want to change their practices, they will quickly see the benefit in cooperation and compromise. They can team up to defend themselves against the cannibals and killers.

While mutual defense is one reason to cooperate, another reason is to create a mechanism to identify those with whom they can cooperate and those who must either be avoided or defeated. You cannot get anything done if you are never sure if the guy coming down the road is harmless or dangerous. Quickly this new world would sort itself into tribes of people with similar moral codes cooperating with one another in order to avoid being prey to other people.

At this point, these loose associations for mutual defense will undergo a transformation in order to work. Some will fall into disarray and the members will be picked off by other groups through conversation or predation. Some groups will reorient themselves into a unified organization in order to convert the rest. Others will do the same in order to resist being converted by others. In other words, the world of individual religions will quickly give way to a world of group religion.

It is not an accident that this religious model follows the same pattern as urban street gangs in the last century. Organized crime was not just based on ethnicity. They relied on a moral code to hold them together. It was not enough to be Italian, Jewish, or Irish to be a gangster. You had to adhere to a way of life. The reason these people thought of their fellow gangsters as family is they shared the same moral code. It is also why they would kill one another. The code was bigger than men.

Morality in any human society tends toward monopoly. In our fictional world of individual religions, the first thing to happen is compromise for mutual benefit resulting in a consolidation of moral codes into moral tribes. Those tribes, if they could not physically separate to prevent conflict, would inevitably come into conflict until one tribe was able to dominate the other. Barring geographical barriers, in time this imaginary would have one moral code and one way to express it.

There is another thing going on here other than mutual protection. A moral code only works if you believe it is correct. This means you must think other moral codes are incorrect or you are leaving open the chance that your code is wrong. Intolerance of competing morale codes and religious expression is a requirement of faith, for no other reason than to reinforce your own faith. By definition, a moral code must be intolerant of other moral codes in order to remain a moral code.

At this point it is tempting to think this is wrong because in the real world you get along well with the Hindu guy across the street. You are not a Hindu, but you are fine with him being a Hindu and he seems to be fine with you being Jewish. In reality, the reason you two get along is you are both sublimating your religion to the moral code of American society which says you must accept different secondary religions. One part of your primary religion is pluralism, whether you know it or not.

It is also why the people in charge aggressively hunt down people who hold beliefs that they see as dangerous to their beliefs. They automatically view white nationalists, for example, as violent, because from their perspective, people with such contrary beliefs must be violent. The beliefs of the white nationalist are incompatible with the moral code of the new religion. As we saw in the example above, the inevitable consequence must be confrontation between the two camps.

This is what makes the present situation so dangerous. The moral code of people putting child molesters and crossdressers into the schools is incompatible with the moral code of parents. As we saw in our simple example, they must always see one another as hostile because there can be no compromise. There is no middle ground between those who think men should be allowed to mutilate children and those who think children must be protected from those men.

It is also what makes the new religion so aggressive. Much of what defines it is the belief that it must conquer the moral codes of other groups. To tolerate dissent is to question the one true faith. To aggressively stamp out dissent is a public act of piety that reinforces belief. Not only is peaceful coexistence not possible, but peaceful separation is also not acceptable to the new religion. In this clash between moral codes, the only question that matters is who will overcome whom?

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