I am back

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Some browsers cached messed up data during the transition.

I am feeling optimistic about my safety, because I have taken some additional precautions, and the move seems to have taken me off the radar. About America, not so much.

After the Republic died in Rome, it took a long time for a new political order capable of cohesive action to appear, and even after Caesar Augustus took power, it took him twelve years to get things in some sort of order.

Elections and due process have gone down, and most of the civil service is in similar shape.

Sulla restored the Republic the only way it could be restored, at swordpoint with considerable slaughter.

The restoration lasted twenty one years, then the Republic died again of the same causes.

But for fourteen years after it died, until shortly after the assassination of Caesar, everyone acted as if the dead Republic was still alive, as if due process and free elections were still in effect.

Frequently with fatal consequences.

The politically correct story of the Roman Republic is that it died of ambitious generals with troops personally loyal to their general.

This just is not true. There was a terrible vacuum that demanded a general to restore order at swordpoint and enforce at swordpoint the cooperation that makes collective action possible, and that vacuum twice persisted for an extraordinarily unreasonable time before a general finally did. The Republic died twice, but things superficially appeared to keep happening as they used to for a while because of old people with old habits acting in ways that used to make sense, but were no longer sane or safe in the new reality.

Because the CEO, the sovereign, cannot be everywhere at once and decide everything he constructs a process that will generally produce an acceptable result if everyone follows it.

But, not everyone is going to follow it.

There is an interesting mathematical theorem from computer science that it takes at most one third of the parties engaging in Byzantine defection to subvert any process. It does not take majority defection, and unless the process is robustly designed to resist Byzantine faults, like the processes of the Venetian Republic in the days of its greatness, which requires immense amount of bullshit and heavy overheads, it takes far less than a third defecting.

The reason is that the people defecting from the process necessarily have a considerable advantage in getting their way over people who do not defect, an advantage that can be mathematically proven is always at least two to one, and is usually far more than two to one. Getting it down to two to one requires smart people designing the process.

A process that can resist one third Byzantine faults always has enormous overheads compared to a process that assumes no Byzantine faults.

If Trump’s people play by the rules, and other people do not play by the rules which is what has been happening, Trump’s people are going to get screwed.

So, by and by, everyone stops playing by the rules, as in the recent exposes of NSA misconduct, as in the recent election, as in the recent court decisions, and too many other instances to count.

But if everyone stops playing by the rules, then collective action becomes difficult. As the Russians complained of America under Obama, “America is not agreement capable.” Notoriously the State Department is owned by Israel. And by Saudi Arabia. And by China. And by assorted Hunter Biden type grifters. All the mutually contradictory conspiracy theories are simultaneously true.

Now in a private company, when you detect Byzantine faults you suspect Byzantine defection, and fire people till it goes away.

Obviously this does not happen in the public service. So the public service tends to become corrupt and incapable of collective action, incapable of serving its purpose.

If Biden gets in, then the people pulling his strings will find that the way they got in makes it impossible to get anything done. Until they start shooting judges and public servants, which I expect to start happening around 2026 or so if Trump fails to start shooting people sooner than that.

In the Roman Republic, the processes stopped working. Caesar incorrectly assumed that it was still impossible for respectable people to publicly murder other respectable people in public. And his assassins incorrectly assumed that after they assassinated Caesar, it would once again become impossible. He was wrong.

And they were wrong. Interesting times ahead.

463 Responses to “I am back”

  1. […] for "Jew." When I claimed that "Reserve banking system" is worse than usury on Jim’s blog, it caused an interesting discussion that revealed to me that we were not actually using the same […]

  2. Red says:

    A preview for tomarrow:

    https://twitter.com/TomasMorales_iv/status/1346656599025315846

    Cops shield Antifa/BLM while they beat Trump supporters.

  3. Pooch says:

    Well the Democrats are obviously stealing the Senate as everyone here predicted. I wonder if that changes the Calculus for the dumb fucking cuck Republicans tomorrow, including king cuck Mike Pence.

    • onyomi says:

      Although it makes me uneasy about the prospect of one-party Dem rule, I can’t help but feel it’s better for Trump and for the needed death of the establishment GOP. This is obviously McConnel and Kemp’s fault so hopefully they, along with Romney et al. will get the blame. Also urgency to keep Trump in office is greater as nonsense about “hold the line” with GOPe Senate is moot.

      • Red says:

        One party rule was given either way. The primary difference with the GOP hanging onto the Senate was how big the GOP pay offs were. With any luck, the Dems will shut the GOP out all together and those grifters will suffer for it.

      • Pooch says:

        Yes I agree, and if Trump loses I’d rather just have them do radical things so we can accelerate to war faster.

      • Pooch says:

        But if Trump does win I’m guessing he would need to flip all the stolen races as well to stop insta-impeachment.

        • Red says:

          If Trump wins going to going involved lots of people taking money from the ChinComs dead in the streets, probably including a good chunk of congress. The people “elected” to replace those traitors will be by necessity Trump’s men.

          • onyomi says:

            Yeah, I think Trump staying in office is the key thing, because doing so will necessitate and empower him to do a lot of other things that need doing. GOP losing the Senate, in my view, makes this outcome slightly more likely because a lot of normies still don’t understand that a thin GOP senate majority wouldn’t be a firewall on important issues like immigration anyway.

            The establishment GOP’s whole pitch for why you have to vote in GA runoff was “preserve our majority or unrestrained Dems will turn this country into a communist hellhole.” What will be their excuse for not supporting Trump now?

            • Red says:

              I’m interested if the Democrats will steal the whole thing tonight or wait until after congress tomorrow via extended counting. It’s a real power move to be blatant about the cheating and just dump the extra ballots in tonight but the smart move would be waiting for the big ballot drops in a few days.

              Of course, Mitch might have bought out the cheaters with a better offer resulting in a GOP win as the night goes on, something that happened a lot in Rome.

              • Pooch says:

                The votes outstanding seem to be mostly Dem and the election markets are favoring them strongly so I’d say that is unlikely. As the Jim has said in the past at some point the inner party would eject the outer party and realize they aren’t needed which it seems we are seeing now.

                https://electionbettingodds.com/

              • Pooch says:

                It was obvious to me that they wouldn’t back off the cheating when I saw Fulton County was still doing the ridiculous 10 ft shit with the poll watchers.

                • Red says:

                  The Cheating is a given and the only smart solution(besides arresting and executing the people cheating) is to pay the people running the cheating operation more money than the Dems are. Which is looks like Mitch didn’t do.

              • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

                Im willing to bet McCuckell did try to arrange a ‘deal’ in exchange for allowing them to rig the presidential election in Georgia; and im willing to bet they will fuck him anyways.

            • Pooch says:

              Yeah exactly. There were shockingly a lot of normies that thought a Biden presidency wouldn’t be so bad with a Republican Senate.

              • onyomi says:

                Yup, my dad included. I think they pattern match to Clinton-Gingrich days.

                • Pooch says:

                  Same. Normalcy bias, especially for those that remember those years.

  4. European Mutt says:

    https://ayavela.medium.com/china-and-the-great-reset-f111d297853c

    Despite the title, not primarily about WEF, rather about China’s export of the lockdown policy. Lots of interesting info. Save it before it goes away.

  5. Bert says:

    This is off-topic, but here’s another Jim. I’d like to know what this Jim thinks of that Jim:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbf9SkguA_w

    • jim says:

      I suspect you are asking if these two jims are connected.

      I enthusiastically commend the work of Dr. Jim Penman.

      • Really, Jim? He is saying we need two things, vigor, which strangely comes not from high T but high anxiety, adrenaline, cortisol, he is saying this creates the will to expand and dominate, and civilized, self-restrained behavior that he in the inital chapters linked to low T and in a later chapter to anxiety, adrenaline, cortisol playing a restraining effect on high T.

        So in these terms the argument is summarized as:

        1) High testosterone (low civilization) increases anxiety, adrenaline, cortisol.

        2) Increased anxiety, adrenaline, cortisol decreases testosterone or controls it (high civilization)

        3) Low T (high civilization) reduces anxiety, adrenaline, cortisol.

        4) Low anxiety, adrenaline, cortisol eventually enables T to rise (low civilization).

        I mean he is literally saying in Europe 1850 was peak civ, low T, low anxiety, and then T went on rising until 1914 everybody was just itching to fight. OK. Suppose it is true so far.

        But all the utter cuckedness I see all over today must be low T. Which predicts high anxiety. Yet he says high anxiety is to factors like patriarchy, social hierarchy and formality – and there is nothing of it at all. Both are low now.

        “All these indications paint a picture of Russia in the late nineteenth century
        as far more stressed than Western Europe or America. Like them, Russia
        too was experiencing a decline in C, as observed by loosening sexual
        morals. This decline in C and subsequent rise in testosterone were
        strongest in the cities, and so it is no surprise that Bolshevik support was
        strongest in urban areas.”

        Am I not supposed to see the same thing now? Loosening sexual morals are all around so men should be becoming high T, according to Penman. Are we seeing this? I am not seeing this. Nor am I seeing that increase in patriarchy, social hierarchy and formality that is supposed to be linked with increased anxiety and cortisol and adrenaline.

        • The Cominator says:

          “Loosening sexual morals”

          This is a moralfagging and ambigious way to describe the problem we have. And our problem is NOT that we live in an age of hedonism…

          • Sure, it is loosening *female* sexual morals. That is why I cannot make head or tail of it. Patriarchy is what can control female sexual behavior and he links patriarchy to anxiety, cortisol, adrenaline, social hierarchy and formality. So far I kind of agree.

            But at that point he links the loosening sexual morals (of women) to high stress, anxiety, patriarchy, social hierarchy and formality causing less civilized behavior, a reduction in civilizational self-restraint. This makes no sense at all.

            While in other points he says the very same thing is increasing civilized behavior by reducing high-T recklessness, which sort of makes sense, that formal patriarchial hierarchies are generally good for controlling behavior – but it is not supposed to cause a drop in T either!

            • The Cominator says:

              Saying morality even female morality confuses the issue.

              Russia Eastern Europe and probably much of Asia have a population of “whores”, the feminist West has something much worse than whores. Whores are happy to have sex and like the attention of ordinary men because the average man is higher status than they are.

              The feminist West has women who chastely await booty calls from men like Jeremy Meeks and despise lesser men, if they are forced to marry one will despise and divorce rape them…

        • So anyway the issue is I see a completely general theory that could explain everything and the opposite of everything. If you associate civilizedness with self-restraint, and anxiety with hierarchy and authority, of course hierarchy and authority increases self-restraint. If you associate anxiety with individual aggressivity, it obviously tends to reduce self-restraint.

          And it gets even worse when getting into hormones – baboons are ferocious in an organized way, which is explained by high anxiety. “Baboons are also low C, which helps to make them bolder” – low C is supposed to mean low testosterone, but how the heck does that make an animal bolder? And if C is self-restraint, how the heck does an animal or a human get more organized while having less self-restraint? Isn’t organization supposed to be linked with more self-restraint?

          I think he does not cut C and V at its joints. Civilized self-restraint should be associated with anxiety, neuroticism, hierarchy, authority, and a good ability to cooperate with the in-group. Individual aggressiveness should be associated with high testosterone, rebelling against hierarchy and authority because wanting power for oneself, and not cooperating that well in the in-group.

          Patriarchy should be seen as tending towards more civilized self-restraint than high-T individual aggressiveness as it should mean having a constant, orderly, disciplined, but fairly mild control over women, it should not mean not giving a fuck because you busy running around mugging people or busy trying to fuck other men’s women, and then chimping out in a fit of jealousy and killing or nearly killing your own. (Women, of course, prefer the later.)

          • European Mutt says:

            Civilized self-restraint should be associated with anxiety, neuroticism, hierarchy, authority, and a good ability to cooperate with the in-group.

            I’m not very familiar with Jim Penman’s work so I may be misinterpreting what you are saying but it’s obvious leftists are frequently (not always of course) highly anxious, highly neurotic, very inclined to follow authority at least on the surface (masks and lockdown piousness!) but they still suck at cooperation and are not very civilized or self-restrained at all.

            I don’t think there is much evidence for a correlation between anxiety, cooperation and self-restraint, absent other factors. On the contrary, reading the preceding paragraph again I think I have described a natural kind: an unowned woman.

            • And men feminized by unowned women. They are pathologicaly kinds. My civilized anxious cooperative authority following man is the good steak-grilling dad beta, the other is criminal cad alpha Jeremy Meeks, both healthier kinds – and of course the point is to find a middle between them.

              • European Mutt says:

                Ah I see your point. Misinterpreted the word ‘should’. Still have doubt about the role anxiety plays though. It is a rather fixed personality trait but the same man can play the steak-grilling dad and Jeremy Meeks… Anxiety is also a disadvantage/disability over a certain threshold that prevents you from even being a good dad unlike capacity for cooperation or self-restraint. I agree that finding a middle is the key although average testosterone would probably be way higher than it is today and anxiety probably lower.

  6. @TheCominator in the discussion about von Stauffenberg you sounded to me like you think all Catholics want the Pope to be a super-sovereign over national sovereigns. It is not so. Only Ultramontanists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramontanism want that. For example, Gallicanists in France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallicanism wanted in 1682 something that I think should consider acceptable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Clergy_of_France

    The problem is, was, that back then nationalism tended to go hand in hand with liberalism. So the Gallicans tended to be more pozzed than the Ultramontanists. Not in 1682, but later. You can get a hint of that in the second article: “Gallicanism tended to restrain the Pope’s authority in favour of that of bishops and the people’s representatives in the State, or the monarch.” So the monarch is an afterthought, democracy is a forethought… this pozzedness of Gallicans and other nationalist Catholics eventually led to basically Ultramontanism being equated with stauch, uncompromising conservatism. Serious conservatives had no choice but Ultramontanism. Back when the Vatican was a serious bulwark against liberalism.

    Today it is not so. Everybody seriously conservative in Catholic Europe is horrified by that creature Bergoglio and wants their national churches to distance themselves from the Vatican. Or at least from that creature on Peter’s Throne. Since the Vatican got pozzed, conservative Ultramontanism is dead.

    I mean, the Anglo countries should probably go with something like High Church Anglicanism, sure. But I think Catholic Europe cannot ever be anything but Catholic. But it can be Gallican and its other various national versions. And things are tending that way, with the Vatican getting pozzed.

    • BTW I have wondered if the term Gallican meant they are trying to do something similar to Anglicans. Well, formally no, formally it is just that where classical Latin used terms like anglicus or gallicus, medieval Latin tended to change it into anglicanus and gallicanus. But informally, I can imagine it.

      Just like how the term Nazi formally derives from Nationalsocialismus, as the t in this word is pronounced as ts, which would be written with a z in German. But informally, it is derives from that that just like US urban liberals often call a rural white man “Bubba”, the “Nazi” nickname for “Ignaz” (Ignatius) has been a similar derogatory nickname for German urban liberals for Bavarian peasants. So it was a sort of an in-joke for them to call National Socialists “Nazis” i.e. “Bubbas”.

      I can imagine a similar in-joke behind the term Gallican. Ultramontanists calling them so because it implied something like Anglicanism i.e. a complete break with Rome (which they did not intend) and Protestant heresy.

    • Pooch says:

      Anglicanism is thoroughly dead in America with openly and flagrantly homosexual or female priests with all female church leadership and Pride and BLM flags flying outside each church.

      The only two live/semi-live options in America are Catholicism or Southern Baptist. Right now Trump’s base is a coalition of those two religions. If Trump wins, it likely necessarily means the holiness spiral is halted and thus the Vatican becomes unpozzed and a true Catholic like Vigano becomes pope.

      • The Cominator says:

        If those are the only two needs to be Southern Baptists.

        • Pooch says:

          Hard to see Southern Baptism spreading outside the South but also hard to see them converting to anything else.

      • BaboonTycoon says:

        Ha. If only. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Vatican works. America has no influence on it. The pope appoints the Cardinals involved in electing the next pope as they die or leave the board. Over half have already been appointed by Francis as of now. Whatever pope comes next will likely by similar to him or worse. The only effect Trump could have is if he personally purged the Vatican, where it remains in doubt that he will even institute a purge on his own behalf.

        But regardless, what the Vatican says has little effect on the average layperson for the time being. They’re not changing canon law or shutting down TLM parishes. And, speaking from experience, the average TLM attending zoomer is about as radicalized as I am. Moved to a new parish in a blue state recently and suspect some of the friends I’ve made may have read this very blog. If the Vatican oversteps its bounds, they will probably have difficulty finding local bishops that will enforce.

        • Pooch says:

          America has no influence on it. The pope appoints the Cardinals involved in electing the next pope as they die or leave the board.

          Progressive agents of Harvard. If Harvard is dismantled by Trump, likely its agents will cease to matter but this project may very well take several years to complete after a Trump victory.

          • BaboonTycoon says:

            Even should Trump root out all the problems in the United States, the forces infiltrating the Vatican lay without as well as within. They are not so stupid as to have everything under one jurisdiction. I’ve even heard rumors that the Vatican accepts Chinese money. Wouldn’t be surprised. The pope is going all in on the corona shilling and is asking parishes to stay closed. This is obviously indefensible from a spiritual perspective, but it also means that there’s less people donating. The pope couldn’t take such a position unless he was assured of financial stability from some external source.

        • grumpy says:

          Last one will be Peter.
          Probably the Ozzy guy, a fag of course.

          • jim says:

            There will be popes for a very long time, though they will be a low ranking professor in Harvard or New Harvard.

            • grumpy says:

              [*deleted for posting from within the frame that you are a Christian*]

              • jim says:

                Affirm that Jesus Christ is Lord, born in Bethlehem, died in Jerusalem, that he is from before the beginning of the world, fully man and fully God, God is three and God is one, because I don’t allow people to post leftism from within the frame that they are Christian unless they can affirm Christianity.

                Which they seldom can.

                • grumpy says:

                  [*deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  I am not interested in debating scripture with demon worshippers. The devil can, and in your case does, cite Scripture for his purpose.

                  I will debate the old testament with orthodox Jews, and the old and new testament with those who can affirm the divinity of Christ.

                  People who want to talk scripture but are unable to affirm the divinity of Christ have a striking tendency to show fear that the name of Christ might cause them to catch fire.

                • Theshadowedknight says:

                  Which is ironic, given that once our people are in power, people who want to talk scripture but are unable to affirm the divinity of Christ will also have a striking tendency to catch fire.

        • jim says:

          > That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Vatican works. America has no influence on it

          The Vatican has become yet another letterhead of Harvard.

          When the tanks roll into Harvard, and senior professors are thrown out of high windows of Brutalist buildings on Harvard, and those building demolished not long after, the Vatican will instantly rediscover Christianity.

          • suones says:

            When the tanks roll into Harvard, and senior professors are thrown out of high windows of Brutalist buildings on Harvard, and those building demolished not long after, the Vatican will instantly rediscover Christianity.

            This amounts to a tacit admission that Christianity, or at least Catholicism, is dead. The Pope does not have spiritual authority, which authority is now possessed by Harvard, who use the trappings of Popery for their own evil ends. Even if we win, and we use our 100% genuine spiritual authority to force enable the Vatican to rediscover Christianity, the fact still stands that the Pope has no spiritual standing.

            Harvard killed Popery and wears its skin as a suit. Even if we manage to kill Harvard and obtain said skin for our own use, the original creature that was Popery still stays dead and cannot be brought back. This is what Alf was referring to when he bemoaned the death of Christianity. Your grand plan of “restoration” is actually Sol Invictus 2.0.

            There is no future for internationalist Christianity.

            • 1) I demonstrated how not all Catholicism is necessarily internationalist 2) other forms of Christianity are not that much better at being alive.

              Demons kill people and wear their skin as a suit. We are not demons because we have not killed Christianity, but I will admit wearing its skin as a suit is an idea that have crossed my mind. Because we need a religious weapon against liberal religion. Maybe use this dead skin lying around, we have not killed it, it was our enemies, so why not use it against them, let it have its revenge?

              But the better idea would be to try to fill that skin with living tissue, you know, building a Terminator that in subsequent iterations are more and more alive. Find real NRx-compatible Christian ideas from back there and use them.

              In Catholic Europe, it has to be *nominally* Catholic. It has to pay lip service to the Pope, as a figurehead, but it still can be 99% national.

    • The Cominator says:

      Not every Catholic but Franz von Papen was an ultramonatist and he had no loyalty to Germany, conservatism, nationalism or anything like that.

      Franz’s von Papen 100% WAS an agent of the Holy See (maybe not the pope directly but certainly some faction in the Curia) and that was his only loyalty. His career included working to make sure America declared war on Germany in WWI by launching freelance ineffectual domestic sabotage operations and then making sure he got caught and making sure that any right wing attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic that didn’t involve Hitler getting into power (and for some reason the Holy See REALLY liked Hitler the minute he attained any prominence in Weimar politics) failed.

    • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

      Ultramontanism would be a more elegant interpretation.

      When different powersources are are divided between different factions, conflict ensues.

      An Imperator must also be Pontifex Maximus must also be Chairman of The Reserve.

      Either a nation exists, or it is merely a province of a yet larger nation.

      • suones says:

        An Imperator must also be Pontifex Maximus must also be Chairman of The Reserve.

        This is impossible and invites a scenario where the King has all the theoretical power while actual power is wielded by faceless bugmen. Imperial China comes to mind, where the bugmen were literally eunuchs.

        Imperator must not be Pontifex, but must have the power to overrule Pontifex if they disagree on some issue, mainly to stop Brahmins from holiness-spiralling.

        As for the “Reserve,” this is a modern creation that deserves to be put to pasture. Even usury isn’t this bad. Minister of the Purse is fine, as has been throughout the ages. Imperator only needs to strike (crypto)currency and ensure fair dealing and enforcement of contracts.

        • European Mutt says:

          As for the “Reserve,” this is a modern creation that deserves to be put to pasture. Even usury isn’t this bad.

          The whole purpose of central banks is to facilitate term transformation. If you ban it they make no sense even from a non-capitalist perspective. The only definition of usury I can get behind is “lending borrowed money for profit”.

          Every other definition of usury includes either all debt (which is stupid because even a handyman sending you a bill is a form of debt and would need to be banned), all interest-bearing debt (which would include late fees on your handyman’s bill, so same effect as the former in practice), or is so vague as to be useless.

          • European Mutt says:

            For profit in interest/term difference that is (if it wasn’t obvious). Of course the bank is allowed to take a cut.

          • Nah. Read this on usury: https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/usury-faq-or-money-on-the-pill/

            This is one of the things Protestants did not 100% understand. Even a Neoanglican Protestant Church of America will have to borrow this from the Popists. Because this is is 100% correct.

            • jim says:

              The Christian rule on usury, applied to modern circumstances, means that if you borrow money at interest to buy a house, and the housing market implodes, the loan is extinguished by returning the house in good order and condition.

              It means that if the bank is lending money on houses, it is apt to find itself in the housing business, and if the bank is lending money on cattle, it is in the cattle business.

              This discourages lending into a housing bubble, and discourages unproductive lending such as credit card debt and payday loans.

              It enforces a divine mandate for a fallen world of the productive and profitable use of capital.

              It gets creatively re-interpreted by communists, that usury=profit, and profit is evil. And they have a point, that usury is evil. The lie is that they just proceed to call everything usury. Not everything is usury. We are commanded to put capital to good use.

              • Jehu says:

                Yes, it means all loans must be ‘non recourse’ loans. From the point of view of the borrower, pretty much all loans are non-recourse except student loans, which are usurious, because you can declare bankruptcy and roll your own Jubilee. But the implementation is flawed because its not explicitly non-recourse, so the incentives aren’t aligned properly.
                Curiously, Sharia-compliant finance actually agrees with the idea that every loan must be non-recourse. It has to be colorable as a joint business venture with dividends and the like rather than as a traditional loan.

                • European Mutt says:

                  This explains to me finally satisfactorily the difference between Sharia and Western banking. I had always assumed the option of bankruptcy made them effectively equal but you are right there is a subtle difference, if only symbolic and psychological.

                • jim says:

                  I classify them as Jewish banking (the system wrongfully adopted by Cromwell and not properly reformed by Charles the Second), Christian banking (which regards profit on capital as legitimate provided it is derived from the wise and successful use of capital) and Sharia banking.

                  The difference between Christian and Jewish banking is far from merely symbolic and psychological when you borrow money to buy a house during a housing boom, and in the ensuing housing bust, the mortgage goes under water. It is also not in the least symbolic and psychological for payday loans and credit card loans, which encourage irresponsible and fickle use of capital.

                  Recourse against the person encourages lenders to lend to people who should not be borrowing, encourages irresponsible and unproductive uses of capital.

                  Similarly, “buy now, pay later”. Selling stuff on buy-now-pay-later to people who should not be buying stuff on buy-now-pay-later should result in loss to the seller, rather than being a major source of profit. The state should disincentivize irresponsible sales on the buy-now-pay-later system by denying interest on late payments enforceable against the person.

                  The Christian laws on usury are economically rational. The Jewish laws and Sharia laws are economically irrational, Jewish law favoring the lender to an extent that incentivizes the clever to target lending to the foolish and irresponsible, and Sharia law erring at the other extreme by preventing interest bearing loans for wise and productive applications of capital.

                • European Mutt says:

                  I have to admit again you are absolutely right.

                  By nature or by nurture very often Jewish morality gets the best of me. ‘If they did it they’re suckers’. But that’s not the appropriate ethos for the future.

                • suones says:

                  There seems to be much confusion of terms here. I’ll make a detailed post explaining the terms I used, such as “usury.” Rectification of names is hard!

                  Jim: I understood there to be two systems of banking, Aryan and usurious. The former was largely used in Antiquity, while the latter was pioneered by Semites. Arabs later largely repudiated their banking system and adopted parts of the Aryan system, leading to the resultant “Shariah banking,” while Semitic banking became “Jewish” once the other major Semitic financial power, Sumer, bit the dust. To me the “modern” Western banking system seems almost entirely “Jewish,” while I can see in The Merchant of Venice that it was hated as recently as Shakespearean times. I’d like you to expound on this “Christian banking” you speak of, and also why you find “Shariah banking” bad.

                • jim says:

                  I am preparing a post on the topic https://reaction.la/security/usury.html, but its final form will depend on happens between now and January twenty one.

                  Sharia banking’s problem is that it forbids fixed interest – so how do you have mortgage on a house?

                  Sharia banking is correct in spirit, but it goes too far, with the result that people keep creating hypocritical workarounds.

                  People will not honor wise and productive use of capital, unless over clever but unproductive use of capital is stigmatized.

                  Maybe I need to read your post before I issue my post.

                  Jewish banking gives capitalism a bad name. People will not honor wise and productive use of capital unless overly clever but unproductive use of capital is stigmatized.

                  Sharia banking is not sufficiently capitalist.

            • European Mutt says:

              @Dividualist: It’s possible indeed I have some Protestant mind worm there. But this is a topic you need to think long about and I’m not prepared for debating that angle. Maybe in a few weeks we can have a discussion on this and I’ll shut up about it in the meantime.

              Just a question to help me understand: Is Islamic banking usury according to your Catholic viewpoint? To me it always felt like a copout where interest was just charged in other ways, so probably it is.

              @Jim: Can’t find much to disagree there, payday loans, consumer debt and housing value collapses are just bad, period and the economy is not seriously hurt by those policies. For business to business transactions I assume you would look the other way most of the time though right?

        • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

          >must have the power to overrule Pontifex

          Exactly the point; nominally, he is in fact the pontifex maximus. If Mr. Fauci can tell bishops in america to say boo, then he’s the real pope. Formalism of sovereignty.

          A captain has direction over his company… except in cases where the colonel might over rule him. A colonel has direction over his brigade… except in cases where the general might over rule him. A general has direction over his division… except in cases where the imperator might over rule him. An imperator has direction over his army… except in cases where God might over rule him.

          The question as to how *prudent* it then is for super ordinates to be meddling in these or those affairs of sub ordinates is a contingent one; in order to have a profitable conversation on the subject, one must first be granting the frame that surrounds it.

          For any rule devised by beings within this plane, there will be exceptions; and the sovereign is he who decides the exceptions.

  7. […] read some discussion over at Jim’s blog about discrediting inconvenient truths by surrounding them with obvious and blatant ridiculousness, […]

  8. onyomi says:

    Any predictions for June 6th? I honestly have no idea. Could be anywhere from A. “Trump gives a speech whining about election fraud to some MAGApedes who disappointedly go home after Congress, with some perfunctory grumbling by Cruz et al., confirms Biden EC victory” to B. “match that lit Civil War 2.”

    I would guess somewhere in between, probably closer to A than B, but pretty unsure. And of course it’s also possible that A takes place on 1/6 yet we still see some fireworks in the following two weeks.

    My number one realistic hope for the day is that Biden EC victory is, by whatever means, delayed past 1/6. I think what Trump really needs is anything to puncture the wall of inevitability and orderly process.

    • Pooch says:

      Yeah it’s looking like it may very well go past 1/6 to just let all the objections be heard.

    • Mister Grumpus says:

      My prediction is that whatever I predict won’t happen. That Covid thing, goddamn, I was just completely outclassed by that one. And the BLM panic, or rather the first BLM panic.

      OK lynchings. I predict lynchings. Someone murdered on HD Twitter-cam and the guy never goes to court or jail. The poor sweet dears dragging white people from cars and stuff.

    • Red says:

      Just speculation: Unless Trump plans to use it to get congress to do the right thing, it’s going to be Charlottesville 2.0. The Cathedral wants a pretext for their rightwing purge and looting and they’re likely to manufacture events to make it possible. Antifa is going to be protected by the DC cops and they will have false flag actors beating people in the streets while trying to goad Trump supporters into killing people.

      • Pooch says:

        Meh there were a 1000 proud boys last time beating up Antifa and the cops didn’t seem to interested in protecting them. Charlottesville was a fake and gay op.

        • Red says:

          Sure, but I’m watching videos of cops protecting caravans of Antifa as they move into DC. They’ve been ordered to act as a shield for Antifa. Antifa is likely to use mass projectile weapons, then hide behind the cops to prevent retaliation while the cops are used on the right, as happened in Charlottesville and Salem, OR.

          • Pooch says:

            Maybe. Antifa/BLM freaks don’t come out until nightfall though because that’s when they wake up. The Trump rallies start at 9am, by nightfall it’s typically just the Proud Boys left who are looking to fight.

            • Red says:

              They came out early at Charlottesville. It’s the police active involvement that makes the sort of media ops possible and Antifa is a lot more active when they have the cops directly supporting them.

              Take a look at the video from Salem. Unless Trump has something actively planned to stop it, expect something closer to that.

              Having the proud boys around to expel the false flag actors with overnighted Nazi flags from Amazon will be useful, but expect the authorities to work directly with Antifa/BLM and act accordingly.

              • Pooch says:

                DC mayor now calling for national guard. Interesting variable.

                • Red says:

                  And they’ve arrested the leader of the proud boys. They’ve probably arranged for him to abused while he’s held jail for the foreseeable future.

    • Pooch says:

      My prediction is the objections go days past 1/6 and possibly weeks past as we get very close to inauguration day likely following the Tilden-Hayes precedent. The problem is Tilden and Hayes were agreement capable and able to reach a deal at the 11th hour. I don’t see how possibly Trump and Biden could do that.

    • European Mutt says:

      I agree it will be something in between, but rather closer to B. Which doesn’t mean it will work. I hope we can all agree that Trump is not an idiot and he knows that he needs to use the momentum of the protest.

      Trump has released additional evidence of fraud via Twitter and has ramped up the rhetoric. He’s now calling the fraud unconstitutional (subtext: the oath of office demands everyone to challenge the result). Depends on how you define whining, but to me that isn’t whining. Remember Trump is always dog-whistling on five frequencies simultaneously, he’s talking to mainstream conservatives, alt-rightists, leftists, people in foreign countries, foreign spooks etc.

      He has also tried to give people like Raffensperger a last out which they failed to take.

      The Biden campaign took down its podium which seems significant because they usually don’t do that because of China flu. They always celebrate openly despite the supposed killer virus. So this is a signal that something is going on behind the scenes.

      Trump has turned up the heat and it looks rather like he will turn up the heat even more, though maximum heat may come after the 6th.

      Do the Democrats or Republicucks have anything up their sleeve to deny a (lengthy) hearing of the objections? Filibuster is allowed right?

      • Pooch says:

        Filibuster is allowed right?

        It’s unclear but I believe since Pence has the gavel it will be up to him ultimately. Based on his statement, he welcomes any and all objections.

      • jim says:

        I am not blogging, because events that matter are happening too fast, and the meaning and significance of these events is likely to change radically in retrospect.

        If everything goes to hell in a handbasket, I will focus on building a counter economy and counter society on the blockchain. If things go well, focus on preparing a counter religion expecting it to in due course become the state religion.

        • European Mutt says:

          Yes it’s out of our hands now. Let’s see in a few weeks who was right at all. I’m doing the keyboard warrior thing because I can’t wait to go from passivism to activism when/if the namefag problem is either solved or I can be reasonably sure it will be solved in a foreseeable timeframe. Need everything to be ready for the counter religion here too. Looking forward to it although I’m pretty sure for your readers its doctrines will be rather recognizable.

          Your blockchain solution will immediately solve namefag in a different way but real life beats virtual. Taqiyya is exhausting.

    • European Mutt says:

      Transcript: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-transcript-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/2768e0cc-4ddd-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html

      They are already freaking out over obvious out-of-context quotes. I hope this is the time the deep state loses control over the radicals.

      • jim says:

        In Russia, the deep state thought they were using the Kadets, who were not all that radical (constitutional monarchy), and were quite content to be used, and it took a while for it to become apparent that the Deep State had no control over the Kadets, and the Kadets no control over the provisional government.

        It took one month for it to become apparent that the radicals in the provisional government had slipped their leash. The rapidly ever more radical government proceeded to destroy the old ruling elite, took them about about six months to destroy it, only to discover that they had successfully destroyed the apparatus through which they ruled.

        Kerensky, like Allende, tried to play both ends against the middle. Biden is not that smart, though probably he has handlers that are.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        I honestly wonder how many of Biden’s “gaffes” and goofy-posting moments are actually him being sabotaged and fucked with by the lefties on his own side.

        How many speeches and interviews did Biden give while his own handlers hungrily stared from off camera, unblinking, salivating cartoonishly and sharpening their chef’s knives like Daffy Duck.

        If the Ds know, or at least believe, that they’re never going to lose an election ever again, then that’s it. From here on out it’s just a desperate race leftward over there, slipping and sliding on each other’s blood.

        All the while their front door is wide open and newer crazier crazies just keep on rushing in. Parabolic turbo-entryism. At least Stalin kept a tight circle.

      • Pooch says:

        So looking like some leftists are indicating they are laying the groundwork to make this call impeachable if Trump wins, which I guess is a good sign in of itself, but also seems to indicate they definitely plan on stealing the Senate.

    • Joe says:

      I listened to the full recording.

      https://thedonald.win/p/11ROGtZNSt/trump–we-have-a-new-tape-we-are/c/

      They are not giving ground and they will never give ground. Trump alone must decide.

  9. European Mutt says:

    https://twitter.com/TheLastRefuge2/status/1345594887442485248

    How credible is this? Can Trump flip DPRK to the American empire? Maybe Korean reunification… Would be a middle finger to China.

    If Trump can:

    – snatch Chinese provinces
    – repudiate all Chinese treasuries
    – institute widespread trade embargoes

    … he can win against China without firing a single bullet. Chinese would be forced to either put a Dengist back in power or become irrelevant.

    • European Mutt says:

      Meaning treasuries of Western countries that China has bought, of course.

    • Pooch says:

      Sundance is highly credible so I don’t doubt it.

    • Red says:

      The Deal Trump was working out with the DPRK was let Korea be it’s own independent nation, not part of the America empire which is why meetings went well with North Korea. Of course China might invade if that happens. China considered Korea their tributary state, as it has been for most of Korean history.

  10. European Mutt says:

    Notoriously the State Department is owned by Israel. And by Saudi Arabia. And by China. And by assorted Hunter Biden type grifters. All the mutually contradictory conspiracy theories are simultaneously true.

    Is there any historical example of such an extreme situation? Perhaps pre-revolutionary France?

  11. Cloudswrest says:

    Hey Jim,

    Off topic (perhaps) but have you noticed the price of Bitcoin lately? It’s currently topping $33,000, and I remember when it was under a buck. Are people worrying about other forms of wealth storage?

    • jim says:

      Bitcoin is well on its way to replacing the US dollar, but it has inherent flaws that make it not a privacy solution.

      We are going to have to replace it – but it will likely replace the US dollar first. And part of replacing it is going to be replacing the equally broken Domain Name System, TCP, and QUIK. QUIK depends on a centralized solution (Cloudflare), to resist DDoS, which is stupid, and only in place to allow centralized monitoring (centralized resistance to DDoS is inherently broken) and it relies on a DNS subject to man in the middle attack by any of a thousand CAs.

      • The Cominator says:

        So you’re now bullish on bitcoin???

        What price do you think it will go to?

        • Pooch says:

          Or is the dollar just tanking relatively. Real estate seems to also be going up like crazy.

          • The Cominator says:

            Tanking dollar but the tanking will go into asset prices more than anything else.

        • jim says:

          Crypto currency will eventually replace the US$, though Bitcoin’s inherent flaws mean that it itself must and will be replaced, possibly before it goes all the way to replacing the US$. If it goes all the way to replacing the US$ before being replaced, as it quite likely will, will have a market cap of O(M1) or O(M2), which is about O($10 000 000 000 000), which corresponds to a bitcoin price of O($five hundred thousand dollars)

          As you can see, it is already within shouting distance of the way there, already in the same ball park as substantial nations.

          I was overly pessimistic that Bitcoin’s flaws would kill it off shortly after birth. I let the best be the enemy of the good.

          Satoshi was wiser than I. He knew what he was doing, but he left the job unfinished. He was a man in a hurry.

          Total bitcoins in circulation are 19 million. There will eventually be 21 million.

          Total bitcoin value, the bitcoin equivalent of M1, is 19 million by 33 thousand, which is of order one fifteenth of the total US$ in circulation.

  12. The Ducking Man says:

    Hi Jim,

    Sorry to bring up NWO conspiracy which is just technocratic movement which is just consolidation of wealth and power into few technocratic elites which is just modern version of communism. The same communism that has failed horribly in Russia and will fail again with certainty in future.

    In this regard, the Covid lie certainly fulfilled it’s purpose. Billionaires are 931B richer during plandemic and middle class are disappearing.

  13. Encelad says:

    New year’s Eve in China: facemasks, (I suppose made mandatory by the government just to pretend to go along the WHO narrative), but no lockdowns or curfews whatsoever.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3dwtsoOjh-E

    • The Ducking Man says:

      Beijing just had lockdown last week and still going on.

      As much as I loath wuhan pool party video, I have to admit that CCP still maintain totalitarian lockdown policy strong as ever.

      • Red says:

        I’m guessing the CCP is using it to gut small businesses in favor of large corporations that are easier to control?

        • The Cominator says:

          They wanted Biden to try to lock us down to finish us off for good (Xi seems to be a Maoist and doesn’t seem to appreciate that he wants the US as a market even).

          Xi’s existence as a Maoist when they were supposed to be gone is why if you get into power you hunt down EVERY LAST believing progressive, commie, maoist etc and helicopter ALL OF THEM. It is a crime to leave them alive if you have a chance to wipe them out.

          • Dave says:

            The Suharto solution is only possible when communists make the unforced error of assuming that history moves monotonically leftward, that its ratchet cannot be kicked rightward even temporarily, so they see no risk in publicly espousing excessively left-wing views.

            Exterminating hidden communists is much more difficult. Communists had a better chance of surviving the 1930s in Nazi Germany than Soviet Russia because they knew to keep their mouths shut.

            • This++

              I don’t quite know about your example of Commies surviving in Nazi Germany, although I think I can look into it if you can give me some leads.

              But I do know about a lot of international examples of Commies not espousing their views openly, but rather just pushing a “democratic” or “progressive reformist” agenda.

              • Dave says:

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin:_The_Downfall_1945

                In this book, I recall reading that many Germans saved their old Communist Party membership cards, which they proudly presented to Soviet officers when their towns were “liberated”. To which the Soviets replied, “If you’re a Communist, why didn’t you join the resistance?”

                “What resistance?” was not an acceptable answer.

                • The Cominator says:

                  The man who committed the biggest act of resistance to Hitler from within Germany (Stauffenberg) is always implied to be some kind of leftist.

                  When in reality his views were basically OUR views. He was a reactionary far right monarchist nationalist… the only thing I have against him is he was Roman Catholic.

                • European Mutt says:

                  In school Stauffenberg was presented as to us as a “Catholic conservative” and implied to be connected with gay leftist Bonhoeffer (which was a framing the Nazis used and has never been proven). The Cost of Discipleship is Labor Theory of Value applied to Christianity.

                  Catholic church was pretty intact then.

                  I think I figured out how Nazism should be taught: As a nationalist movement that did not fight leftist entryism hard enough.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Socialist in the name, leftist from its inception. Goering and the SS faction were rightist but Hitler himself was a leftist (though early on pragmatic enough about it). But his real sympathies in his heart were with the crazy left wing shit Roehm wanted to do.

                • clovis says:

                  Bonhoeffer was gay? It’s clear that he came from a family of liberals and that he was friends with Karl Barth who was a socialist. But I didn’t know that he was gay. Bonhoeffer’s “Life Together” (don’t remember the German name) is actually a good book. “Nachfolge” has some good sections but it is vitiated by Barthianism.

                • jim says:

                  Barthianism wound up in the pocket of the left – leftism wearing the clothes of right wing Christian conservatism.

                • clovis says:

                  Supposedly Bonhoeffer died a virgin, imprisonment preventing him from consummating his marriage to his young fiancee. I’m skeptical of Bonhoeffer although I have generally given him the benefit of the doubt for coming to something like orthodox Christianity despite being educated in the Adolf Harnackian school of liberal German Protestantism. He certainly was right to oppose Hitler’s attempt to co-opt the Protestant churches and make them into another outlet for NSDAP propaganda.

                • clovis says:

                  Jim:
                  Yes, Barth made waves in academic protestant theology because he tried to reclaim traditional protestant doctrine about the depravity of man and the necessity of God’s action in converting utterly fallen people. But he tried to do this without returning to old protestant orthodoxy about the authority of the Bible. He tried to avoid confrontation with critical approaches to the Bible that have become the norm in academic theology. Thus his school is called “neo-orthodoxy” because it tries to reclaim orthodox protestant doctrines about Christ’s incarnation, sin & grace, while skirting post-enlightenment critiques of the Bible’s reliability as revelation. It’s easy to understand why some traditional

                • clovis says:

                  I was saying: it’s easy to understand why some traditionalist Christians found Barth appealing because he appeared to allow for traditional Christian belief without requiring Christians to defend the inerrancy of Scripture. But I think Barth proved to be a dead end not only because he was a socialist but because his approach to Scripture allows you to leave out all the nasty patriarchal bits as culture specific and not part of God’s revelation, which Barth wants to limit to Christ. So the parts about wives being ruled by their husbands are left out just as 6 days of creation are left out as human ideas, not part of God’s revelation. The reason this failed–maybe–is because it is impossible to critique your own cultural norms this way. I found my way to anti-feminism and reaction because I was a biblical inerrantist and came to the conclusion that subjection of women and hierarchy are mandated in this world by God, and that God at least tolerates slavery. Once the Bible only contains God’s revelation rather than being His revelation you are no longer able to find your way out of many of the lies we are told are true in the modern West. I suppose maybe you could by reading other old books or simply by reason. But regardless Barthianism causes the church not to be able to witness to the truth of God’s law and order the way it ought to be able to do.

                • jim says:

                  Not traditional Christian belief.

                  Take all the nasty bits out, and there is nothing left.

                • The Conservative Revolutionary movement in Germany was certainly interesting, but there is a little problem. Consider von Papen’s Marburg Speech, https://arplan.org/2020/01/27/papen-marburg-speech/ which was mostly a praise of Hitler with some mild criticisms thrown in, yet he was worried that he might lose his head over it and indeed he got arrested and nearly killed, and many of his friends killed.

                  So the CRs, like everybody else, did not really dare to speak their minds. Because there was real terror. And for this reason it is hard to tell whether they were /ourguys/. You just don’t know it in such circumstances.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Papen was always (from the time he drew the us into the war against Germany to the time he made sure any right wing alternative to Hitler would fail) a snake and a papal agent. A patriot not of Germany but to the plots of the curia In Rome.

                  He is right to attack Goebbels (who more than the communist influenced the cathedrals method of propaganda of coordinating a theoretically private press to coordinate and constantly repeat the same lies, Goebbels was truly probably the most evil men in the Reich) but he is not and was not our guy as Catholics who reject westphalia and exult their church over nations cannot be our guys ever… they are at best untrustworthy allies who will betray us if it suits their inscrutable purposes.

                  I do not see stauffenberg though a catholic in the same light as Stauffenberg did not work in political and diplomatic circles and did not have close contacts at the holy see.

                • European Mutt says:

                  Bonhoeffer was gay?

                  Metaphorically gay. Maybe literally but I don’t know that.

                  @Cominator: Hitler was non-ideological, he would have been a very effective propagandist for truly right-wing ideas too. Problem is left-populism always works better than right-populism until it’s obvious to normies that the leftists are batshit insane. Trump also played with it (save our great Social Security!) but he didn’t make the mistake of turning it into actual policy.

                • suones says:

                  @European Mutt

                  I think I figured out how Nazism should be taught: As a nationalist movement that did not fight leftist entryism hard enough.

                  This is the truth. It is also how Nazism is seen in India. We know that most of the Nazis’ “crimes” resulted from them losing WWII. Hitler is a great nationalist hero regardless, and Mein Kampf is a best-seller.[1][2][3]

                  I share von Stauffenberg’s opinion that Hitler was a degenerate and “Nazism” was not a plausible basis for a lasting State, but I’m also not autistic enough to try to kill Hitler while he was in the midst of fighting much larger wars. Our ideological differences need to be sorted out (possibly violently, I admit) AFTER we defeat the explicit enemy.

                  [1]: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/hitlers-hindus-indias-nazi-loving-nationalists-on-the-rise-1.5628532
                  [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-41757047
                  [3]: https://www.mic.com/articles/120411/how-hitler-s-mein-kampf-became-a-bestseller-in-india

                • Pooch says:

                  Hitler was non-ideological, he would have been a very effective propagandist for truly right-wing ideas too.

                  Hitler seemed awfully like a leftist to me from the start. Although excluding Jews and foreigners, his original 25-point plan reads like a Bernie Sanders campaign.

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

  14. Red says:

    Like does anyone step to Alex Jones, hand over an envelope of cash, and say “OK you’re doing great, kid, the John Roberts thing is good, but you need to work in the reptile people on the moon too, like preferably in the same sentence.”

    I have no idea how the payoffs work, but it’s quite clear that absurd conspiracies are created to hide the more mundane and plain conspiracies that go on everyday.

    For example Hillary Clinton had Epstein, Epsteined probably with Barr ensuring that no real investigation into his death happens. That’s a pretty obvious conspiracy. The people who are paid or encouraged by their government handles are soon spouting crap about how Epstein is still alive based on low res pictures of ear lobes while ignoring who would have motive and opportunity to murder him.

    This is known as mudding the waters, and it’s a great way to discredit and hide actual conspiracies.

    One of the most famous examples of this was Oswald killing JFK. The KGB pushed insane conspiracy theories about the killing, to deflect from the fact that Oswald was a committed Communist who actually defected to the USSR for a while and they didn’t want to be blamed for it. The FBI probably put out their own share of insane conspiracy theories to hide their incomitance in dealing with Oswald, since the Fairplay for Cuba group that Oswald was part of was an obvious FBI entrapment/monitoring origination that failed to stop him.

    • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

      Oswald wasn’t acting alone, there were more than one shooters, even if he did take shots of his own.

      • Red says:

        “Oswald wasn’t acting alone, there were more than one shooters, even if he did take shots of his own.”

        The Soviet Archives showed the KGB actively running a disinformation campaign to that effect. Hey guys, it wasn’t us Russians who had Oswald in the USSR for 10 months! It was the FBI! No it was the mob! No it was the CIA and the 1992 Denver Broncos who really killed JFK!

        They must get a chuckled out of people still believing their bullshit if any of them are still alive. Oswald was a decent shot having been a marksman in the marines, had a slow moving target, and he murdered JFK. JFK was the second president murdered by Commies, the first being President McKinley. Suffer not a Communist to live.

        If Oswald was a patsy he was a poor one. An overt Communist who previously tried to murder a retired rightwing General in a dark ally who then murdered the president has a good chance of triggering war. Oswald was probably murdered in order to stop him from ranting and raving about Communism during his trial because the Media, the Warren commission, and the FBI and the Dems did everything possible to play down his motivation and his links to Russia. He would have been the prefect patsy if they’d wanted war with the Soviet Union, but since they clearly did, he wasn’t a patsy.

    • The Cominator says:

      LBJ was probably behind Oswald.

      • Red says:

        A) No evidence of it, though LBJ was quite capable of it.

        B) Oswald is the wrong sort of guy to kill JFK. You want a crazy like the guy that Bush tried to kill Reagan with, not a Communist who spent 10 months in Russia and who came home with a Russian wife.

        Oswald was going to get the US into a war if he’d gone to trial, so I’m sure someone gave the order to have him killed.

        • The Cominator says:

          LBJ had to do it, Bobby (though a cunt otherwise) had a redeeming hatred of LBJ and planned to prosecute him also knowing LBJ the only reason he gave up his powerful Senate position for a worthless vo slot is he intended that Kennedy would die. It was on his home turf too.

    • Thing is Oswald did shit like no professional KGB operative would do, like handing out pro-Castro leaflets. An obviously fanatical, headstrong and super unstable man, someone professionals do not like to work with. I could imagine that is precisely why they used him, precisely because of deniability, because the CIA would be disinclined to believe KGB pros would use such an unprofessional loose cannon type. After all, Mehmet Ali Agca who shot at John Paul II was as a similar type. But it is still weird. Most of the time pros don’t like working with unstable, uncontrollable amateurs.

      • Red says:

        The KGB tended to farm out their assignations to the Bulgarians who often fucked things up but gives them lots of deniability.

        With Oswald, actual living in Russia for a while was way too close for the KGB to use. LBJ is more likely a suspect than anyone else. But it seems far more likely Oswald was the only person involved and the FBI or CIA was watching him as evidence by their “Fair Play for Cuba” op that Oswald became involved which in turn led them to burry that the government knew all about Oswald but did nothing because they protect leftwing nut cases and terrorists just as do today.

  15. […] Source: Jim […]

  16. stanon says:

    So, the shit hitting the fan in under a year now is the shit hitting the fan within 6 years. Will the goalposts be moved again in that time?

    • Red says:

      Jim’s been predicting a civil war between 2020 and 2030 for at least 10 years now. 2026 is just a medium guess when it starts. Of course civil wars don’t always happen. Look at Venezuela. The US might well be in the same spot by 2025 with the opposition never fighting back and the military neutered as the nation descends into Democide.

      And the shit has clearly hit the fan. 3 star generals railroaded by the FBI on fake charges, 17 year old attacked by a faggot rapist is charged with murder for defending himself after trying to run away, and an entire countries locked down under the Democrats version of martial law that they to keep forever. If Trump refuses to fight then the can just gets kicked down the road for a few more years and the war is likely to come when we are in worse shape to fight back.

  17. stan says:

    Are you guys following the Lin Wood story?
    https://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/12/bill-gates-is-going-down.html#comment-form

    Great new year’s eve entertainment. Epstein is alive!

    • Red says:

      That’s just cements that Lin Wood’s either a loonytoon or an enemy agent, like Alex Jones. A common way to hide an ordinary conspiracy is have a loonytoon embrace it and then put out utterly ludicrous conspiracy theories on top of it, in order discredit belief the rather obvious conspiracy that’s plane to see. Lin Wood is performing this function.

      • Pooch says:

        Lin Wood is not an enemy agent. He’s been on a propaganda campaign recently against Chief Justice Roberts who is an actual enemy agent.

        • Mister Grumpus says:

          Wait a minute. Isn’t that a great way to protect John Roberts from scrutiny, by mixing truth-telling about him with BS?

          • Pooch says:

            If it was all bullshit it should be an easy defamation lawsuit but Roberts is silent. Wood knows what he’s doing. He and Alex Jones help us much more than hurt us. They correctly identify our enemies in ways plebs can understand. Who cares if they are labeled as conspiracy theorists by the fake media? Nobody on our side is watching fake news anymore.

            • Yup. The QAnon shit, which smells like bullshit if your IQ is over 120, is basically just NRx diluted to a plebeian level of understanding. The fundamental narrative is “the elites are evil and corrupt, they hate your guts and are trying to destroy you, and we need a conspiracy of good elites to throw them in jail (to restore the original republic of course)”.

              In reality, the evils of the elite are petty and banal, and they are evil because holiness spiral, not because they are sacrificing little children on an altar to Satan, they are actually fairly incompetent at running and building things, rather than mind control via microchips and 5G. But the tranny shit is just about as evil as sacrificing a child on an altar to Satan, and media-academic brainwashing not all that different in effect from 5G zombie mind control. If the plebs need a dramatic and fantastical interpretation of their evil, let them have it.

              • Theshadowedknight says:

                The sacrificing little kids to Satan actually has something to it. I see spirit cooking and I instinctively want to set everything in the vicinity on fire. They consider it a great time. The Satanic imagery they always seem to use, the horrifying Satanic art, the way their positions always seem to ben to match the descriptions of the ancient Christian demons; it all seems to point towards an honest belief in Satanism that is common among the elite. Whether they actually rape/murder/eat/whatever little children is debatable. What is not is that they would, and if they don’t the only reason is because they don’t want to. That’s just as evil and horrifying in its own way.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Yes good evidence that there is at least some faction around Podesta which is as sinister as the qtards claim.

                  The problem with Q is it promotes passivism among rightists (being passive is the right move sometimes but the wrong move other times, until the 20th anyway its a time to fight, should things go bad it will be a time to run and hide) and harmful misinformation (trust Sessions).

                • Red says:

                  Whether they actually rape/murder/eat/whatever little children is debatable. What is not is that they would, and if they don’t the only reason is because they don’t want to. That’s just as evil and horrifying in its own way.

                  John Roberts rapes the little boys he adopted and Joe Biden’s family commits incest with their grandchildren. If the elites are not murdering and eating children as part of satanic rites, they will soon be doing so if for no other reason than to create Demonic religion cohesion among themselves.

                • Bilge_Pump says:

                  There is truth to the talk of Satan worship. I have an aquaintance whose brother runs a Satanic congregation in my town. Was arrested in “protests” in my town which were not major but still should have led to some beheadings.

              • Pooch says:

                The QAnon shit, which smells like bullshit if your IQ is over 120, is basically just NRx diluted to a plebeian level of understanding. The fundamental narrative is “the elites are evil and corrupt, they hate your guts and are trying to destroy you, and we need a conspiracy of good elites to throw them in jail (to restore the original republic of course)”.

                Exactly this. A very small percent of the population can actually digest all the Red Pills of Moldbug and Jim. The masses of commoners need people like Alex Jones to point out who we are fighting against and who we should support. Like you said, in the end he tells his audience to support Trump against our evil elites.

                Shills and real enemy agents give us reasons not to support Trump because of Israel, Zionists, evil jewish mind rays, etc.

                • Pooch says:

                  Go to any Trump rally and you’re bound to say a ton of people wearing Info Wars shirts and MAGA hats. They are our people.

                • Pooch says:

                  see*

              • European Mutt says:

                NWO is not very accurate and to the extent it is it’s only thanks to the Chinese, but I’ve come around to not arguing it. If they need to believe there is a giant plan to enslave mankind then so be it as long as Trump is the savior.

                Some of them peddle a theory where Trump’s in on it but those are ineffective lunatics and not enemy agents.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        OK talk to me people. I’ll believe the “enemy agent” meme, but not in the sense of “explicitly instructed and paid to serve as an enemy agent.”

        Like does anyone step to Alex Jones, hand over an envelope of cash, and say “OK you’re doing great, kid, the John Roberts thing is good, but you need to work in the reptile people on the moon too, like preferably in the same sentence.”

        I can’t get my head around that. Can you?

        What I certainly can get my head around is the idea that some people get high on attention, do another figurative line, go on a freestyle roll, and start throwing out all kinds of ridiculous stuff, just to keep the party going. Because they’re not so concerned with the truth anymore, but rather with keeping the party going. Journalists.

        And some very cunning people have some money to work with, and make various laundered donations to those people, for the effect they’re having of dropping obvious BS into the punch bowl of uncomfortable truth, and scaring off the respectable.

        Is that how you see it? Something else?

      • jim says:

        Nuts

        Roberts is an enemy agent, and Lin Woods is calling him out.

      • European Mutt says:

        Lots of people labeled ‘conspiracy theorists’ are enemy agents. For example those who keep saying covid is caused by 5G or 9/11 truthers etc. both of which Alex Jones no longer endorses afaik. And he never went for the truly crazy stuff like reptilian shapeshifters etc. (but that is not really disinformation more the same niche as fantasy literature)

        Look at Infowars, Breitbart and Epoch Times and they all have very similar stories, no stories on top of it in sight. He is on our side. And the Cathedral is now labeling anything that contradicts their narrative as a conspiracy theory anyway, especially if not endorsed by a shill.

        I’m only 90% convinced Lin Wood is not crazy but he is 100% not an enemy agent. I’ve never seen enemy agents come out with a narrative from a single, traceable source as Wood has just done. They always use what Jim calls ‘a thousand megaphones’ instead.

        • The Cominator says:

          Some people are just nuts but not enemies… I know some of these 5G types personally… they all support Trump (though generally did not in 2016) but have been taken in by misinformation (I’m certainly not against 5G I own a lot of Inseego stock).

          The sad thing about David Icke is he right about a lot of stuff (one of the only other people who realized as early as I did what a bunch of total bullshit covid was and I don’t follow him regularly but someone told me this and it was true)… but he had to say that shit about Boxcar Willie (lol) and others being a shapeshifting reptile.

          • European Mutt says:

            People who believe 5G are not enemies but many who peddle it are. It was crystal clear in Germany; the main organizer of the anti-lockdown protests said two weeks ago he wanted no more protests until spring, and suddenly all the protests that happened anyway had a curious lack of reich flags, anti-5G signs and a curious presence of Trumpist vocabulary like ‘The virus from China’. At the same time, surprise, surprise, the spooks announce they want to crack down on the movement and warn against radical ‘lateral thinkers’ attacking vaccine deliveries, meaning they are preparing a false flag. All according to the old East German playbook.

            If that isn’t evidence for astroturf/enemy disinformation I don’t know what is. I don’t know if it’s the same with David Icke, he’s probably more of a stopped clock.

            • TimothyS says:

              David Ike is certainly onto something with the shape-shifting reptile bit. Can you think of a more fitting description of politicians. “What would an evil, shape shifting reptile do?”

              In 2018, I’m told, Alex Jones was ranting and raving about the release of a bioweapon which would be used as a pretext to curtail freedoms.

              People rolled their eyes. Now they’re wearing masks in their cars.

              • The Cominator says:

                I like to joke that I don’t believe in lizard people but if there are lizard people than Kamala Harris is a lizard person.

                I also wrote a paraphrase parody of Gilbert Gottfried roast of Bob Saget (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezM95_Y9ABk) that there is no evidence that Kamala Harris is a lizard person.

              • European Mutt says:

                It would make for a great movie. Like Iron Sky which is based on another ridiculous theory that could be true and that some people actually believe in (it’s a very proggy movie but still funny). Politicians being reptiles makes emotional and also physical sense, McConnell, the Clintons, this archetypal bugman etc. they don’t look like normal people do.

                People like Soros and Schwab even look reptilian/fish-like in a literal way.

                I happen to know quite a lot of permanent government people and interestingly they look much more normal in comparison. There definitely is some biological background to all of this…

                In 2018, I’m told, Alex Jones was ranting and raving about the release of a bioweapon which would be used as a pretext to curtail freedoms.

                I still don’t think it’s a bioweapon in the narrow sense of the word but an Arab cab driver recently told me, unprompted, he thinks it is. Very probably their mosque networks are aligning them against China. Can’t have another invader competing.

                There is almost nothing that Alex Jones hasn’t ranted and raved about. He’s smarter than people give him credit for so he can identify potential strategies by the enemy that will work for them. So it was only a matter of time till one prediction of his came true.

        • The Ducking Man says:

          As much as I’ll call anyone with “covid is caused by 5G” as lunatics. Some things are bothering my mind till this day that I can’t 100% disagree with those lunatics.

          1. People dropping dead like flies in Wuhan were very real. People literally drop dead on street and hospitals, people who otherwise were still able to walking and stand before spontaneously dropped dead.

          2. Covid patients outside Wuhan certainly don’t drop dead like flies. Even patient with severe pneumonia don’t spontaneously dead but rather sustained agony before being killed by ventilator.

          There were certainly missing factor which is none other than Wuhan in 2019 was the only city with 5G full blast even till this day.

          • Red says:

            2. Covid patients outside Wuhan certainly don’t drop dead like flies. Even patient with severe pneumonia don’t spontaneously dead but rather sustained agony before being killed by ventilator.

            They dropped “dead” because the CCP staged the videos.

          • The Cominator says:

            The 5G stuff is fake and gay and so were the videos.

    • REd says:

      As I was saying about Lin Wood:

      http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=391922

      Either an enemy agent designed to drive away support or a loonytoon. My guess is enemy agent. Yes I know Joe Roberts rapes the young boys he adopted just as most young boys adopted out to elites are thus raped, but he’s going so far overboard that it’s designed to make basic claims about fraud become low status by being associated with this stuff.

      • The Cominator says:

        Hes probably hoping Roberts is dumb enough to launch a defamation suit…

        • Red says:

          I don’t buy it. Discovery no longer means much as General Flynn discovered, and Lin Wood wouldn’t get the dirt he’d want from it.

          This is the old Alex Jones play to cover obvious things like crisis actors from that school shooting, with insane crap no one wants to be associated with.

  18. Icon says:

    There wont be a war with China or Russia. The military is still freaking out over the flu.

    If Biden gets in, greater than 90% chance, he will be told to make war in Syria by his Jewish handlers. Trump will be on the golf course enjoying himself.

    You will still be here.

    The rest of the world will roll along.

    • jim says:

      Allowing this through, because you presuppose a claim worth debating, and I want to debate it.

      You assume that America can conquer Syria without getting into war with Russia.

      America wants to conquer Syria, because Syria affirmative actioned women into exact mathematical equality in academia, but failed to continue affirmative actioning them into total domination of academia, with results that the Cathedral finds embarrassing. It has the effect of undermining their domination of academia in the rest of the middle east, and Academia is their primary power base in the American hegemony. Syria threatens American domination throughout the entire Middle East.

      America’s capability to conquer Syria requires airsea domination. Russia has been working hard on weapons intended to defeat American airsea domination. They are certainly thinking about not allowing America to conquer Syria, and are working on the capability to prevent it.

      Whether the russians will allow it is unpredictable, depends on whether their new superweapons work, and how many of them they have, but it clearly involves a high risk of great power war, and a great power war involves a high risk of discovering whose nuclear weapons still work.

      America is likely to drift rudderless into great power war the same way Serbia did in World War I. Because the elite is incohesive, some factions are likely to start wars in the hope that other factions will finish them.

      An American great power war will depend on high tech. And American military high tech is being maintained by Shaniqua. The generation that built nukes and built Apollo has retired.

      Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia leading to World War I was that Serbia should remake its social order to that the Sovereign was capable of making war or peace. But the Sovereign was not capable of complying.

      Obama’s America was not capable of making war or peace, was not “agreement capable”. If Biden is elected by the media and inaugurated by the deep state, America will be even less agreement capable.

      • Icon says:

        [*deleted*]

        • jim says:

          You are, as usual, not presenting evidence and argument, but presupposing supposedly self evident truths.

          On this blog, I and others have made contrary claims. I will allow argument against those claims. I will not allow argument by false consensus. I will not allow you to sail on as if those arguments and claims had never been made, as if no one would ever make such claims, and no one ever had made such claims.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        This contributes nothing intellectually, but it absolutely burns me up how D’s just don’t give two fucks about war with Russia, over Syria, or anywhere else. They just don’t care.

        “Let those hillbillies get shot.”

        Couple spinsters were sniggering about Trump being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize like it was so absurd. And I swallowed it as skulked off like a fag, yet again, thinking “Not one new Middle East or Asian war in four years, and not one regime change in South or Central America, and you bitches just don’t give one fuck, do you? Because Orange Man Bad.”

        Nope they don’t give a damn because they want Saint Holy Dindu Thanksgiving instead, every Thursday of the year, forever.

        I came to hate them.

      • You are right, but I think it needs to be stated in simpler terms. Tribe A and B are at war. This means that upon their respective chieftains orders, warriors go to the other tribes territory and kill people. Then the chieftains make peace, which means they will no longer give such orders. Now if a group of warriors from Tribe A still go to the territory of Tribe B and kill people, the chieftain of Tribe A must execute them all and generally do whatever he can so that it does not happen again. If he does nothing and the raids continue, from Tribe B’s perspective they are not at peace, they are somewhere between war and peace. The chieftain of Tribe A is not agreement capable, because he cannot or will not enforce a peace treaty upon his own people.

        (Effectively, the only thing Tribe B can do is to treat it as war. They have to find and execute the perpetrators themselves, which implies invasion, implies establishing their own sovereignty over Tribe A, hence war.)

        (AFAIK it is a known problem with e.g. Islamic fanatics and others dubbed as “non-state actors”. You reach an agreement with a high-ranking guy, but all the others just then denounce that guy as a traitor and go right on attacking you as before.)

  19. European Mutt says:

    Looking at Trump’s latest tweets, sounds like Showman Trump has taken the stage just as the (hilarious) GA meeting took place. Hoping for and expecting steady escalation until at least the 6th. He needs to get the militia into a frenzy after all. I think he’s back in the game (if he ever was out).

    • Pooch says:

      The absurdity exposed in the GA hearing and the Hawley statement is a good step toward at swaying Pence to do the right thing. Trump will still need Insurrection Act but if the Democrats openly defy the Electoral College process the case to use it grows even better.

  20. Mister Grumpus says:

    Guys talk to me about normalcy bias, and who has it worse. Or what kind.

    Even Berea died in his own torture prison, right? And he was supposed to be a cynic.

    Jim once wrote that it was far safer to be a communist in Nazi Germany than in post-revolutionary Russia.

    I’m probably just trying to cheer myself up with schadenfreude, but doesn’t the cynical and isolated woke-woke rightist have a certain survival advantage? I can’t fight or outrun an elephant, but I have seen one and I know they’re fucking dangerous.

    How do you make sense of this?

    • Sam says:

      Because leftism is about seizing power via backstabbing. If you aren’t in the competition, it reduces your odds of being knifed.

      But I assume your question is more ‘how do we deal with the pressure from the looming mess that we can do absolutely nothing to change’? All I can recommend is to remember this feeling of helplessness has come before; before a famine, before a battle, before a revolution time and time again. They survived it then, we will survive it now.

      • European Mutt says:

        The highest risk for right-wingers is probably having more stuff or being more successful than the average left-winger. Because the other way leftists seize more power is via stealing more than the other leftist.

        It’s hard to predict whether the pendulum would swing more towards “managerial bugman corporate communism” or bioleninism. The second would probably be far more nasty to survive in but also more short-lived (any white MtF has incentive to become a Stalin). In the first you just do what the Russians and the post-war Germans did: agorism. Slack off at your normal job, work for the real money on the side. Even easier with crypto. They can’t spy on everyone.

        Post-Soviet countries skew right-wing largely because socialism selects (both gene-wise and meme-wise) for tight in-group and family preference (what Hajnals call clannishness) and for a high degree of cynicism (It’s not really hard times create strong men, it’s hard times create cynical men). At least everyone here is already sufficiently cynical. Really, I’ve never understood the distinction between cynicism and realism. If someone calls you a cynic he probably wants to stab you in the back.

        • suones says:

          Thank you for this informative post. I see many parallels within my own, Hindu, society.

          The highest risk for right-wingers is probably having more stuff or being more successful than the average left-winger.

          This needs to be repeated more often. We need to conceal our prosperity. Wealth, even when honestly earned, is subject to envy, and the “democratic” polity runs on the mass envy of vote banks. This phenomenon has also occurred in the USA — witness how 50s luxury cars are so much more flamboyant than their 70s successors. Obama got a lot of votes for telling small businessmen “You didn’t build that!”

          It’s hard to predict whether the pendulum would swing more towards “managerial bugman corporate communism” or bioleninism.

          Yes! In our priestly discussions we often lose sight of the fact that both major factions are in fact our enemies. They might have internal struggles too, but they’ll kill us first.

          In the first you just do what the Russians and the post-war Germans did: agorism. Slack off at your normal job, work for the real money on the side.

          This is the real economy in India, and the reason our GDP or other bugman indicators are so low. There is an entire parallel banking, investment, manufacturing, transport and sales infrastructure for everything from grain to firearms, completely outside the purview of the State. There is an entire book about this phenomenon, India Grows at Night. Our actual financial might is much, much more than the official statistics will have you believe.

          It’s not really hard times create strong men, it’s hard times create cynical men

          It’s not that hard times create strong or cynical men, but that hard times cause the weak or credulous to perish.

          If someone calls you a cynic he probably wants to stab you in the back.

          He’s probably selling some new utopian formulation that will ultimately result in us getting killed. It is very interesting how old-world societies work, more alike than different!

          • European Mutt says:

            We need to conceal our prosperity.

            This is crucial.

            They might have internal struggles too, but they’ll kill us first.

            They’ll kill us if we don’t conceal our prosperity, that is. Our ideology is totally incomprehensible to them. It just becomes a matter of time till we outbreed them. In the bugman scenario I think it’s likely that Islam in western countries will end up pozzed so they are no long-term competition (immigration will massively decline when the economy sucks).

            It’s not that hard times create strong or cynical men, but that hard times cause the weak or credulous to perish.

            That is to an extent true, but the most important aspect is the meme level not the gene level. Bad memes are adopted too quickly and kill too slowly. Some of my older relatives are Cathedralites now even though they grew up in an agorist system where the official market had gay price controls and food stamps and you could only get enough to survive through child labor (which is a good thing if not overdone!) and barter. Germany later developed an officially sanctioned free-market system (named, propagandistically, ‘social market economy’) which led to enormous prosperity within the span of 10 years, and also a state media. People associated their prosperity with the government and associated media and they ended up believing the media, to this day, so they got infected with evil memes.

            They never integrated them so tightly into their own ‘hardware’, for instance I can generally explain at least partly my side to them without them freaking out or disowning me. But they always keep coming back to what the media is saying like a rubber band was around their feet. Young leftists, if they are true believers and not just opportunists, don’t have that rubber band, their feet are planted in concrete.

            bugman indicators

            I’m stealing that if I may.

            There is already massive black market activity even in the ‘old world’. Taxmen ignore a large part of it because they know revenues would decline if they earnestly cracked down on it. Western countries tax massively above the Laffer limit. Of course this allows anarcho-tyranny because ‘randomly’ they do crack down.

            • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

              In America, during the second war of internationalist aggression (everyone’s favorite example of command economy), one out of every fifteen businesses of all types were prosecuted at one point or another for ‘black market’ dealings, and it is estimated that as much as one in four of all market transactions that ever took place were illegal.

              Presently sinecured historians one might hear this figure from tend to of course frame it in terms of ‘how wicked these peons were, to selfishly ignore the collective spirit of rationing mandated by our beneficent rule for the sake of the war effort’. In reality, what such fantastically dramatic numbers like that show more than anything is just how deeply dysfunctional the price fixing in effect was, that the measures necessary for the ‘arsenal of democracy’ to function properly did not prevail, except when in secret, or when those nominally charged with enforcement studiously looked the other way; that which was required for work to actually get done routing around impediments out of necessity, like water flowing through the contours of the land.

            • >I think it’s likely that Islam in western countries will end up pozzed so they are no long-term competition (immigration will massively decline when the economy sucks).

              Their economy will suck more. There is no way the Western economies tanking would not tank the economy of say Egypt or Pakistan even more. No tourists, no market for exports, no aid etc.

              And when they start killing each other competing for resources, the trouble is by current international law and practices that makes them entirely legal “asylum seekers”. That is how it works. Two bunch of Arabs or Afghans start shooting each other, one bunch loses, the winners want to finish the job so they will persecute the survivors which makes them entirely legal refugees in current practice and law.

              • European Mutt says:

                The law hasn’t mattered since 2015. Everyone can come, throw away his passport and stay to live on crime and welfare. There’s an opportunity cost to migrating which means at some point it won’t be worth it anymore especially if you need sons at home.

                The not-so-terrible economies like Egypt and Pakistan can probably trade with China quite a bit. Would probably actually boost their economy because western-style aid makes them lazy much like welfare makes people lazy.

        • >and for a high degree of cynicism

          The oddest thing about the Soviet kind of system was that apparently they really wanted people to care about global politics. To follow the “news” what are the comrades in Vietnam or Africa (Patrice Lumumba) or wherever are doing fighting the imperialists. So the narrative was that e.g. France is not a sovereign country, rather everybody in the world is either a puppet of Washington or a brave communist fighting them. Once you realized that the brave communists fighting them are the puppets of the Politburo, you actually had a quite realistic picture about what is going on in the world. The only unrealistic part was the idea that Washington itself is a puppet of industrialists. This is not so.

          But the idea was that you listen to the Commie news and know they are liars and you also listen to Radio Free Europe (CIA) and know they are liars too and then it is up to you to figure out what might be true.

          “At least everyone here is already sufficiently cynical. Really, I’ve never understood the distinction between cynicism and realism. If someone calls you a cynic he probably wants to stab you in the back.”

          Cynics are right. But all open cynicism is not a good social technology. Open cynics tend to not trust each other much and for good reason. Consider Machiavelli. He starts with saying he wants a science of politics, facts instead of value judgements. And then turns around and tells the prince value judgements like it is OK to lie and all that, because everybody is doing that. Would you trust that guy? Why would cynics trust each other? How does a cynic demonstrate he is a good guy? Why, indeed, should he be a good guy?

          The reason I am personally a not-bad guy is that I have basically zero ambition. I just laze around in the lukewarm comfort of middle-class existence, do work, play with my daughter, just enjoy life. I don’t even dare getting my T levels looked at. But high T men are ambitious. And how does an ambitious cynic demonstrate he would not lie in order to achieve his ambitions?

          • European Mutt says:

            But all open cynicism is not a good social technology.

            Cynicism is not necessarily a belief that cheating and lying is justified, it’s just an expectation that other people are typically going to do exactly that. Which can be falsified by evidence.

            So you try to get little social clues from other people and the more clues you have, the more you know to which degree you should trust them. You have a lot of clues in your family, you don’t have a lot of them with a random government worker.

            Trump is pretty good at this, it’s an essential skill in business, but even he was betrayed countless times since 2016 by people he trusted. This is a messy process and social technology, i.e. religion, is definitely needed. It used to be that you could trust someone because he was a good Christian.

            Trumpism already works a bit like this though for social signalling, it is turning worldwide into a litmus test for right-wingers. If people are pro-Trump I know I can probably trust them.

            Why would cynics trust each other?

            By revealing to other suspected cynics a small part of his degree of distrust. If the cynic gets a positive response he has already built some trust and has socially bolstered his viewpoint. This is of course very very slow, but it’s probably how every social system that extends beyond the family got started.

            You are right, to a degree you need to conceal cynicism but if someone tells you to your face you are a cynic you should probably be more distrustful, not less.

            • “Cynicism is not necessarily a belief that cheating and lying is justified, it’s just an expectation that other people are typically going to do exactly that.”

              Which means if the cynic is not going to do that because it is not justified, it sounds like he is much better than other people. He is holy, full of virtue. Now just what exactly that reminds me of? 🙂

              This is a very difficult problem, and the reason the usual Christian conservatism was ineffective was that they could not find a solution to it. They knew we are all damn sinners. But yet, in order to have anything like a reasonable discussion, we have to act as if we both are trying hard to fight our sinful inclinations AND mostly succeeding. And if there is no reasonable discussion, there will be war. All decent political theory is based on the idea that men are generally knaves (Hume) but one cannot have a discussion from the viewpoint of “you a knave, me a knave”.

              So when the Christian consersative was there, and someone he generally knew to be a decent man but more liberal, came up with a moderate idea of liberal reform, what does he do? Go to war? If not, then a discussion. And when having a discussion, cannot have a discussion from the viewpoint we both are damned sinners. Has to assume the other is sincere and so on.

              This was the problem they could not solve and I am trying to think hard about how could we solve it.

              • Karl says:

                Of course we are all sinners, but as long as we are Christian we strive to avoid sinning. So the discussion and negatiation with another Christian is done with the tacit understanding that we honestly intend not to cheat and also that we might fail and cheat.

                This means we enter into a contract only with a man who we believe intends to honour the contract. As we know that this man might fail (and as we are all sinners so might we), Christians bring in third parties, like courts, trustees, to either reduce temptation and to resolve a breach of contract.

                The assumption is that individuals might fail, but not a Christian community.

                The solution to the problem with cynics, defectors and such is “peace to all people of good will”. Don’t cheat them as that would be sin. If you are alone or part of a weak group do not deal with them. If you are part of a strong group, deal with them and -as soon as they cheat- make war against the heathens.

                That is the traditional Christian solution as I see it.

                • This is not about that kind of honesty. Look, the very same Karen in HR who would report me for a slightly homophobic joke – I think I would still buy a used car from her, lib dishonesty is not of that kind. The orcish Serb guy whom I bought my used car from was not entirely honest about its faults, but he would laugh at my homophobic jokes. He is more dishonest in business but more reliable and honest in that sort of, more political way.

                  It is about political proposals intended sincerely vs. being a power grab.

            • Red says:

              Cynicism is not necessarily a belief that cheating and lying is justified, it’s just an expectation that other people are typically going to do exactly that. Which can be falsified by evidence.

              In a cooperative environment where people know each they generally don’t cheat and if they do cheat they get fucking killed for it. Violent revenge is the basis of cooperation. If my close friend slept with my girlfriend, I’d put him and her 16 feet under and he knows it.

              This break downs on a larger scale between people who don’t know each other. In such an environment cheating is expected. Which is why religion is such a valuable social technology. It promotes the gods as the people who inflect harm when someone cheats. This creates an environment where you can largely trust almost everyone, even if you don’t know them as long the gods and the rulers punish people harshly for cheating.

              In America I generally expect non whites who are not my close friends to try cheat me almost every time. Whites I can trust more, but trust levels are declining. No one is punished for cheating.

              Lying is a different issue. Humans wouldn’t know the truth if it hit us in the face. Bearing false witness is a sin but promoting an false idea that results in good outcomes that has been timed tested as tradition is just how we work. Our brains do not function in reality because reality is just too complex to understand and fully grasp. Time tests ideas codified as tradition and custom is the way the to go.

              When I encounter and idea I ask 2 questions: What are the result of this idea when used elsewhere and what is the desired result this idea exists to create. I find this to be a good guide when testing the value of a given idea.

              • Yes. We are an intelligent species, so it would be more logical to solve our conflicts via fraud, not force. Why do we even have force on the menu card, why haven’t we evolved out of that? And the answer is that fraud threatens the internal cooperation of a group far more than force does. A ritual challenge to the chieftain for a fight to death is less of a problem than undermining him. And the only way to keep fraud down is to punish it with force.

                This is what Pareto’s four-volume Mind and Society cashes out to. Elites always have a tendency to become foxes, relying on fraud to win conflicts, thus they become incapable of using force, because they do not trust each other to back them up in a fight. And this elite distrust of each other, elite defection and so on is precisely the root of everything Jim or Spandrell or others were talking about. E.g.

                Pareto’s solution is to recruit lower-class lions into the elites, manly men who do not use fraud because they punish fraud by force and they are capable of using coordinated force because they can trust each other because they do not use fraud. It is not circular logic, it is elements that reinforce each other in a positive feedback way.

                Jim’s warrior rule idea is taking it one step further, not only recruit the lions into the elites but make them the top ruling elites. Pareto said two important things we must consider, one is that they have to come from the relatively lower classes, and second that one thing that makes the cooperate well is strong religion. That is, he is basically saying it should be the rednecks, not the overly foxified priesthood or intellectuals who should be making the (old-)new religion. For example, Pareto generally approves of the Protestant Reformation. Sure sola scriptura and a literal interpretation of the Bible is all kinds of dumb, but it is something very easy for lower-class warrior types to coordinate around. Sticking to a simple common-sense interpretation, they can hit the foxy elites with a stick every time they start twisting words this way and that way.

                Seems you and your friends already function as lions. That great, but that is also rare, because we are ruled by foxy priests so most believe violence is to be abhorred while some fraud is forgivable.

          • jim says:

            A cooperative elite wins political power.

            A cooperative corporation makes a profit.

            The earthly job of the Christian priesthood is to maintain cooperate/cooperate equilibrium.

            If the prince lies, he lies to the people close to him, and the elite is detached from reality.

            It is easy to fall into defect/defect equilibrium, and hard to get out of it.

            Reagan’s solution, trust but verify, works.

            In a hostile world, it is often necessary to be economical with the truth. But discovering the truth is important, and is necessarily a collective endeavor. On the other hand, sometimes the truth is so precious it must be guarded by a bodyguard of lies, but you need to keep the people who are lying for you at a distance, with the connection between them and yourself hidden, or at least plausibly deniable.

            Machiavelli’s solution, that the prince simply himself lies, is a bad solution for the prince, for no man rules alone.

            And no man does business alone. You have your agent lie – but if he lies for you, he will lie to you. Hence the saying that real estate agents are pimps. Anyone you are connected to by one of your agents, you need to establish a more direct, and more trustful, connection, to avoid your agents $(%@!^& you over. This is also a huge problem in bookkeeping and accounting. Your official books are always detached from reality, which is apt to result in you flying blind. You need trustworthy bookkeepers keeping unofficial books that are kept separate from the accountant’s books. Your accountant serves two masters. You need a bookkeeper who serves you. And it is hard to find a lawyer who is loyal to his salt.

            Kennedy was not a right winger, but he was way out on the right in resisting communism, which was at that time still seeking world domination.

            The simplest theory of the Kennedy assassination is that Oswald was communist, an excellent marksman and a Russian agent involved heavily in Cuban affairs who had already murdered one right winger and, because of the Cuban missile crisis, proceeded to murder another. He or his Russian masters were pissed off and alarmed by the Cuban missile crisis.

            There was and is a large faction of the elite that wanted Startreck Next Generation style capitulation to Russia, because they envied the power of the Russian nomenklatura. They might well have assassinated him also. We will never know. But Lee Harvey Oswald and the Russians had motive and opportunity.

            Both the Russians and the capitulationist faction of the elite had motive and opportunity to spread disinformation.

            • The Cominator says:

              LBJ was much more of a communist than the Russians post Stalin ever were…

            • I think you raise good points, but it is a stream of thought, I don’t see any solutions. I don’t have any either yet.

              “Your official books are always detached from reality, which is apt to result in you flying blind. You need trustworthy bookkeepers keeping unofficial books that are kept separate from the accountant’s books. Your accountant serves two masters. You need a bookkeeper who serves you.”

              Yes, we who do it in practice call it management reporting or management accounting. It is not really a secret, the university textbooks call it financial accounting vs. management accounting.

              The official books are generally honest about sales, about prices, because the government demands that. What they are not honest about is costs. Real costs tend to often not appear as costs, but tend stay on as just assets, you know? Last time the best we could do was that the boss just manually estimated the total cost of every product, we had salespeople estimate the side costs of doing business with every group of customers, and then I used those figures to run reports via scripts agaisnt the sales figures from the official books, seeing if selling that product to this or that group of customers is profitable or not.

              “Oswald”
              Basically you mean that the KGB had two kinds agents, the professionals controlled directly, and the loonie loose cannons supported but not quite controlled, mostly doing stuff on their own ideas, because anything they do would result in “political destabilization”?

              • The (financial) accountant does not serve two masters. His job is to defend his masters ass from the government, from the tax men happy to lob big fines onto them. It is not his job to provide useful data to his master, that is management accounting / management reporting. I know perfectly honest accountants who understand this as their mission, who brag of their greatest success as having negotiated a €200K fine down to €20K by demonstrating they have bent over backwards to comply with the demands of the government. They are not serving two masters, they are more like the diplomat from a small country in a big Emperor’s court. He serving his own country, saving it from invasion and destruction, and the only way he can do that is being maximally cooperative with the Emperor’s demands.

              • … and another part of this management reporting I did was that yes, salesmen are lying to their bosses. They want to maximize their commission, so they will 1) lie about extra costs incurred by a sales to a given customer, a classic example being some customers mostly buying cheap but bulky goods that cost more to store and ship 2) lie about the customers ability or willingness to pay. They were not happy when I managed to generate reports that showed at least some of the real costs of their sales and how much of it was paid late or never.

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              BTW, speaking of Russians…

              Has Cathedral even once stopped to explain WHY Russia is so bad, and why Putin is such a bad guy?

              Something about Pussy Riot, gay pride parades and 80’s-vintage domestic violence law? Is that all?

              • I think it is “bipartisan”. Libs dislike Putin for being obviously not a lib, but I also think establishment conservatives simply see Russia as a rival power with national interests fundamentally different from American national interests. That is, they have an empire, like Georgia or Ukraine, and the American empire obviously wants to take them away.

                I also thing this “bipartisan” combination of liberalism like human rights stuff with conservative national interest logic is a pattern that has been going on for a long time. Libs saw Iraq as a human rights crusade sending girls to schools (condom, banana, yeah), conservatives saw this as a national interest thing. This goes even way back into the Cold War, at least its later stages when anti-Soviet rhethoric was not so much anti-Communist as more like anti-authoritarian and pro-human-rights.

                I mean, I was growing up on the receiving end, where the Soros types pushed their pro-human rights and anti-authoritarian propaganda against the Soviets in the Radio Free Europe. Sure, American conservatives, to the extent they knew about that at all would have found that rhethoric disgusting, but they would of course not object to bashing the Soviets, whatever weakens them, so I think it is something a “bipartisanism” has formed around. It’s also something I think Neocons have forged.

                • European Mutt says:

                  American conservatives, to the extent they knew about that at all would have found that rhethoric disgusting, but […]

                  It’s even more insidious. Human rights is something that the left and the right have had a completely different understanding of, and almost nobody noticed it till about 2010 and it did not become broadly obvious till 2015. Except for Hayek, who warned about it in the 40s.

                  Rightists and normies when they used to hear about human rights they mentally translated it to natural rights. Negative rights. Right to education sounds innocuous enough, and all the stuff about right to work,right to a standard of living, right to social security etc. just sounded like pious fluff to them* because obviously unrealistic. And afaik Radio Free Europe didn’t even focus on those points. So they would have supported whatever Radio Free Europe was broadcasting.

                  Leftists unbeknownst to the rightists had always interpreted the Declaration of Human Rights as endorsing affirmative action, unlimited immigration into the welfare state etc. They only really showed their hand recently.

                  Many such cases!

                  It’s also something I think Neocons have forged.

                  Neocon is not a coherent ideology. It’s the ‘right-wing’ arm of the Cathedral and they use whatever arguments they have to further its aims. Hence progs rushing to the defense of John McCain against Trump which they don’t do with any never-Trumper.

                  Georgia

                  Sakashvili tricked the Cathedral into giving him anything he wanted (lots of foreign aid, new police cars, actually working economic reforms) while knowing the 2004 Cathedral would not go into war with Russia over his country. There seems to not be that much pro-West propaganda in Georgia. Actual Georgians are mostly neutral or pro-Russia from what I’ve gathered from them.

                  Ukrainians on the other hand are schizophrenic. They are strongly anti-gay, strongly anti-immigrant but pro-EU and pro-NATO. I think they imagine they can become like Poland or something, which will not happen in the current circumstances.

                  *Even to me, as a new-age type leftist. It was sort of an ideal to aspire to, not an instruction booklet to follow.

                • jim says:

                  > Neocon is not a coherent ideology. It’s the ‘right-wing’ arm of the Cathedral and they use whatever arguments they have to further its aims.

                  Neocons are worse than that. It is an entryist heretical sect from the great father of religions, Judaism. They were commies, are commies, were Trots, are Trots, but split with the regular Trots over the issue of Israel. The Trots, who all Jewish, as near to all of them as makes no difference, hate Jews more than anyone, and the Jewish commie trot faction that became the Neocons thought that this was a bit crazy.

                  Neocon is a coherent ideology. It appears incoherent because, being entryists, they lie about what it is.

                  You think that the Nazis hate Jews? The regular trots, who are as Jewish as a Bar Mitzvah, really hate Jews. Except the Neocons of course. They love Jews.

                  It is unclear whether Jews love them back. If they do, they are mistaken. Commies always murder their friends and allies.

                • European Mutt says:

                  This angle on neocon presumes though that it was possible for Judaism to divorce itself from the ethnic factor. Almost all religious Jews are ethnic Jews, about half of Marxists are ethnic Jews, most publicly visible Neocons aren’t ethnic Jews though.

                  Are pro-Israel open leftists neocon too or is this another sect?

                • jim says:

                  Are there pro-Israel open leftists?

                  Not familiar with that lot.

                  My understanding of pro-Israel open leftists, for example the Israeli Supreme court, is that they favor solving the Palestinian problem by Israel ceasing to be Jewish – which will result in annihilation.

                  The prog plan is to convert everyone, Jew and Muslim alike, to progressivism. If you don’t notice that the plan is failing with Muslims in Israel, not all that pro Israel.

                  Which does not strike me as particularly pro Israel.

                  Israel has not won a war since it had a gay parade. Sooner or later the Arab states are going to smell weakness.

                • European Mutt says:

                  They don’t seem to be a thing in America. There are a couple in France, most I know are in Germany (the most well-known specimen is probably Jutta Ditfurth who is decidedly not popular and needs to beg for money on the internet but it’s a comparatively popular splinter group inside the German permanent government). They are the types to call anything anti-semitic especially if you criticize Israel for defending itself against Palestinians. But in practice for everything. According to them somehow there is a right way to criticize Israel but they never tell you what that is. Your supreme court argument could be fun with them although they would probably engage in protective stupidity.

                  Everyone I am familiar with from that group is not ethnically Jewish (Ditfurth for example is descended from German nobles). It may just be an artifact of the ethnic guilt narrative they push in schools and in the media according to which all Germans/Austrians and to an extent all Europeans are guilty of killing Jews, forever in perpetuity.

          • The Cominator says:

            “But all open cynicism is not a good social technology. Open cynics tend to not trust each other much and for good reason.”

            I don’t trust hardly anyone much and for good reason, I would tend to think an extreme open cynic was like me likely a fundamentally honest man who got redpilled hard on what treacherous liars people are by life.

            Open cynicism is good and should be encouraged, leftism cannot thrive if denied its oxygen of idealistic bullshit. Men should be cynical about the Fallen world and anyone who isn’t is either a con artist or a fool.

            • jim says:

              If you believe everyone is a treacherous liar, you will not find good people, and you need good people.

              Leftism is treacherous lies. Leftism is defection.

              Trust but verify. To create cooperation, to get into cooperate/cooperate equilibrium, you need to be on the alert for defection, and insist on testing for defection. Honest people are happy that their cooperation is subject to verification. The guy that gets offended, is the guy who knows he may not pass.

              • The Cominator says:

                Not all are treacherous liars but this is an age of lies and too many are. I am also something of a paranoid…

        • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

          Cynicism doesn’t really mean realism, so much as it means chronic negativity.

  21. Starman says:

    Looking at the discussion about Antony’s troops deserting to Octavian.
    I must reiterate just how significant this passage is:

    “Trump’s military intelligence gave the Biden team, and only the Biden team, some fake intel. And within 24hrs, that same fake intel showed up in CCP intelligence traffic. After that, intelligence briefings with the Biden team were stopped.”

    Imagine being a crew member of a US Submarine in the Pacific, a SEAL team in the Pacific/Asian sphere, or a Recon Marine in that area. Imagine the thought of Biden giving your location away to the Chinese Communist Party. Think of the personal danger these warriors feel if Trump allows CCP Biden to win…

    • Pooch says:

      Where are you getting that from?

      • Starman says:

        @Pooch
        Good thing Octavian didn’t take your advice when it came to presenting Antony’s Will to the Roman Senate.

        It’s a fact that President Trump suspended military intelligence briefings with Biden (the link shows Biden complaining about it), and it’s a fact that the Biden family raked in cash from the CCP (see Hunter’s Laptop).

        Now just add something from someone named Mark Littrell (there’s alot of “Mark Littrell’s” on FaceBook and the original post and account probably got deleted by FaceBook) that matches the facts and is probably true… and abracadabra! The Donations of Alexandria!

    • Starman says:

      Trump’s use of the “Donatives of Alexandria” is spreading… Of course the primary audience for Trump’s use of the “Donatives of Alexandria” is the military.

      https://twitter.com/_YvonneBurton/status/1343940937291063300

      • Starman says:

        Choice comment from the video:
        “CVS is working with communist China. Love it!”

        Yes. Present “Antony’s Will” to the Roman Senate!
        “Woke Capital is CCP”
        “Social Justice is CCP”
        “Black Lives Matter is CCP”
        “Antifa is CCP”
        “Anarcho-Tyranny is CCP”
        “Drag Queen Story Hour (in American schools, not Chinese schools) is CCP”
        “Weakening US aerospace with Apefirmative Action is CCP.”
        “FBI responding to a garage door pull instead of an actual terrorist bomber is CCP.”
        “Critical Race Theory (for Americans, not Chinese) is CCP.”
        “Green New Deal is CCP.”
        “Eternal COVID19 lockdowns are CCP.”
        “Masks are CCP.”
        “Allowing TNB to be rampant in US cities (but not Chinese cities) is CCP.”
        “Child Protective Services is CCP.”
        “US courts are full of CCP assets.”
        “US politicians fuck CCP spy whores.”
        “California wealth tax is CCP.”
        “Woke Star Wars is CCP. (the CCP cut out the Woke parts before showing neu-StarWars in China)”
        “Attempting to stop SpaceX reusable rocket development with Apefirmative Action and ‘Safety’ (such ‘health and safety’ is ignored by China’s rocket industry) is a treasonous and seditious CCP plot against America.”

        Just tell the military members these things over and over again. Anything that harms Americans is CCP. Any American official that collaborates with CCP (including giving US military intel to the CCP) is a personal threat to every American Praetorian.

        • Starman says:

          Oh, I forgot.

          “The Biden family is CCP!”

        • The Cominator says:

          I suggest limiting it to where evidence and credibility exists for claims.

          You can claim Biden is on the payroll, you can claim covid was hyped up by them, that they helped the dems in other ways… that they above all wanted to get Trump out of office.

          I do not think we can pin woke progressive cathedral fanatics on them per se (especially since woke progressives also hate China)… and its not credible to do so.

          • Red says:

            I do not think we can pin woke progressive cathedral fanatics on them per se (especially since woke progressives also hate China)… and its not credible to do so.

            Pretty sure the CCP has been funding them. Anything to weaken America.

          • Starman says:

            @The Cominator

            “You can claim Biden is on the payroll, you can claim covid was hyped up by them, that they helped the dems in other ways… that they above all wanted to get Trump out of office.”

            They are not “claims,” those are facts.

            “I suggest limiting it to where evidence and credibility exists for claims.”

            “I suggest limiting…” You can stop right there. Knock it off.

            Imagine if Octavian took your advice and didn’t read “Antony’s Will” to the Roman Senate and his legions. He probably would’ve lost a land war to Mark Antony or just had a mere 50/50 chance.

            That mindset is one of the reasons why the modern Western conservative has been losing to the Left for 500 years. Now contrast that L with Octavian’s winning. Octavian’s mere name (Caesar) and his participation trophy (Augustus) became the great monarchical titles of Roman Emperors for 1,500 years. I’ll follow Octavian Caesar instead.

            “I do not think we can pin woke progressive cathedral fanatics on them per se (especially since woke progressives also hate China)… and its not credible to do so.”

            Not credible to who exactly? Cubicle farm office workers? Lawyer pundits with no callouses on their hands?

            Let’s step out of the office environment and into the environment of the warrior, especially the environment of American warriors in the Pacific.
            When I was talking to my family and friends (most of whom are military, police and veterans), I suggested that China might copy (not steal) SpaceX Starship and produce an el cheapo inferior zhing zhong version (with open-cycle methalox engines instead of FFSC engines). And that China could spread its civilization across the Solar System (again by copying Starship, not stealing), they were quite angered by the idea of China spreading its civilization across Sol instead of America.

            Their reaction to Biden giving US military intel to the CCP was absolutely visceral.
            (because Xi doesn’t give away millions to Biden for charity)

            • Pooch says:

              The only problem I see in leaning that hard into anti-CCP is that it necessarily has to end with war against China even after Biden is defeated, right?

              • Starman says:

                @Pooch
                That’s the risk of course. That probably went through Emperor Xi’s head when he had to decide to help Democrats against President Trump when Trump was rolling up Chinese assets in American STEM academic positions (this started a couple years ago, I wasn’t sure then why Trump was targeting those assets, now I know why. Because Biden and other US politicians, judges, corporates, and bureaucrats were on the CCP payroll. A convenient opportunity for President Trump). Helping Democrats in a US election theft attempt is very risky for China, but Trump was rolling up and undermining China’s influence in the US. Xi had to act.

                • Pooch says:

                  A risk he’s willing to take with actual working warheads I suppose.

                • European Mutt says:

                  It’s possible a lot of Trump’s efforts in his first term were actually targeted on rolling up CCP. The trade war was just the tip of the iceberg and the public justification. In 2016 Trump voters would not have been ready to hear that Democrats and bureaucrats are in the pocket of CCP. Now on the other hand…

                • Starman says:

                  @European Mutt

                  ”It’s possible a lot of Trump’s efforts in his first term were actually targeted on rolling up CCP.”

                  Yes. As Onyomi noted:

                  ” Also, ‘traitor’ is more effective than ‘leftist radical.’ The Rosenbergs were executed.”

                  Cominator: “Oh warrior, slaughter this shadowy cabal engaged in a purity spiral.”
                  Warrior: “What? Slaughter my fellow Americans engaged in a woke ritual dance? Slaughter my fellow Americans?”

                  Yeah, not going to work.

                  Now listing specific traitors who betrayed Americans to a hostile foreign power, CCP, that’s much easier. Easier to execute these vermin. The worst execution methods were reserved for traitors for a reason (Drawing and quartering).

                • C4ssidy says:

                  Has Jim and his followers yet noticed that deaths in war are a rounding error compared to birth rates? Likewise with its effect on technology growth. Yet we all know that it is a good mechanism for social mobility, and with that, eugenics. I’ve seen no one put forward a good reason why war with China is something worth avoiding, yet for some reason you are taking this as an unquestioned presumption

                • jim says:

                  > Has Jim and his followers yet noticed that deaths in war are a rounding error compared to birth rates?

                  War is bursty and fat tailed. Sometimes it is not a rounding error. And now, nukes.

                  World War I wiped out a generation. World War II killed a very large proportion of a generation of Germans, and was very far from being a rounding error for Russians.

                  War between China and America is likely to go nuclear, and we will see how Shaniqua’s maintenance has been on nukes and aircraft carriers, and see how a floating democratic party vote bank performs in war.

                  The Senate Lunch System rocket is largely made of parts made a very long time ago by elderly men who worked under Wernher von Braun. Which were refurbished and maintained by Shaniqua. It does not fly, and looks like it is not going to fly ever. I doubt the nukes are going to work any better.

                  There is a rule in place that America’s nuke force needs a presidential term between the president commanding a nuclear test, and the test being carried out, which suggests an awareness that such a test would fail.

                • European Mutt says:

                  War with China may turn into 1-sided nuke war. If American nukes don’t work Trump needs the backing of Putin to pull this off.

                • The Cominator says:

                  “Has Jim and his followers yet noticed that deaths in war are a rounding error compared to birth rates?”

                  Depends on the war. You didn’t want to be of military age in World War One for instance generally… if Russian or German you didn’t want to be in World War Two.

                • Pooch says:

                  Depends on the war. You didn’t want to be of military age in World War One for instance generally… if Russian or German you didn’t want to be in World War Two.

                  And that was without nukes.

                • C4ssidy says:

                  Germany is 4 mil from 80 mil, or Russia 17 mil from 170mil. So 10% fatality as a worse case. What is that relative to exponential growth? Total fertility rate had dropped from 5 to 2 for Germany in the years running up to 1939. Looks to me that even a slight application of Jimian doctrine, spanking in TV for instance, would give Russia or Germany the numbers to run a Second World War perpetually

                • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

                  The important thing isn’t how much die in war, but who is doing the dying.

                • Red says:

                  The important thing isn’t how much die in war, but who is doing the dying.

                  That’s how the socialist French government viewed their mostly Roman Catholic army during WW1. The late war German strategy was to bleed the French white so they would come to terms. Little did they know the Socialist French government was fine with getting every last Roman Catholic boy killed in endless frontal assaults, rendering the German strategy pointless.

                • C4ssidy says:

                  Of an army of 14 million, 4-5 million is about a 30% casualty rate for young men. War is very good at elevating status of warriors. As long as the surviving warriors have a proportional boast in fertility relative to the non-combatants, you negate whatever effects come out of this “specificity”

                • jim says:

                  It is the boost in fertility – which is to say warrior status, and the acquisition of land and women, that is the hard part.

                  Your argument would be compelling if we had a society that granted warriors appropriate status.

                  If a reactionary society, in which women were under control, and warriors honored, was conquering some place, that might well work out well.

                  If progressives go to war with China, work out very badly.

                • jim says:

                  Has frequently failed in the past.

                  For victory to be worth it (and victory is always chancy) you need a regime that is on your side. Otherwise victory just makes your enemies stronger, and the warriors weaker – Starting with the Crimean war we have had no end of victories where victory was a disaster for the warriors who won it. Which victories depressed fertility.

                • Red says:

                  War is very good at elevating status of warriors. As long as the surviving warriors have a proportional boast in fertility relative to the non-combatants, you negate whatever effects come out of this “specificity”

                  It is when the warriors are not blamed for the slaughter their political leaders induced on them.

                  My knowledge of French history is limited, but from what I can gather the French warriors were despised and shit on after the war, leading to the total collapse in WW2. Worse the sort of men who became future military leaders were mostly cut down on the orders of Socialist Generals who regularly arrested and court marshaled French officers who were not feeding their men into the meat grinder. This left me who hate their leaders who were intent on murdering them and being low status for being warriors.

                  This would have been different if they’d been allowed to march to Berlin and conquer it, but their political leaders robbed them of victory and set the stage for WW2 in doing so because the Germans never felt like they’d been fully defeated.

                • Red says:

                  “This left men”

                • Starman says:

                  “and we will see how Shaniqua’s maintenance has been on nukes and aircraft carriers,”

                  “There is a rule in place that America’s nuke force needs a presidential term between the president commanding a nuclear test, and the test being carried out, which suggests an awareness that such a test would fail.”

                  “Having Shaniqua maintain US nukes instead of a qualified White man is CCP.”

                  Coup plotting Colonel A, “It’s high treason that the civilian government demands affirmative action instead of meritocracy in America’s nuclear arsenal!” “This helps China over America!”
                  Coup plotting Colonel B, “This seditious civilian government works for the Chinese Communist Party, Traitors!”

                • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

                  @C4ssidy

                  What needs to be understood is that the pharisaical hate their countrymen in general, and their manlier peers especially.

                  Progroids love war because it gives them an excuse to send civilized men to their deaths in foolhardy excursions of their own devising, while also projecting blame onto them for it at the exact same time.

                  You can bet your unborn grandchildren that in any conflict instigated under the auspices of a leftist regime, all avenues will be explored to ensure that you and your peers will be the first one’s to die.

                  Their neighbor’s lives have no value in their eyes, so what cost is there in spending them? Less than nothing; a bonus, even.

            • The Cominator says:

              “They are not “claims,” those are facts.”

              Yes that is my point…

              But China funding the woke stuff… seems to me the US permanent government and Soros funds those things. I see the connection to one but I’m not convinced of the connection to the other…

              I’m advocating sticking to where we truly have the truth on our side.

              • onyomi says:

                Just take everything in Starman’s list and add “plus their enablers at Harvard.” Increases the truth value and kills two birds with one stone. Also, “traitor” is more effective than “leftist radical.” The Rosenbergs were executed. Ayers and Dohrn are tenured professors.

                • Pooch says:

                  Wasn’t Harvard caught taking in Chinese money? Might as well say Harvard is CCP.

                • Starman says:

                  @Pooch

                  ”Wasn’t Harvard caught taking in Chinese money? Might as well say Harvard is CCP.”

                  Shout, “Harvard is CCP!”

                  Then drive tanks into Harvard Yard and turn it into a Trump Casino hotel.

                • Anonymous 2 says:

                  Tenured traitors.

              • jim says:

                Correct. China does not fund the woke intentionally.

                But the woke have a lot of power, and China funds a lot of people who happen to be woke, even if China wishes otherwise.

              • Starman says:

                @Cominator
                If Octavian took your advice, he would’ve died in a land battle with Mark Antony.

                ”but I’m not convinced”

                I don’t need to convince you. You need to convince the warriors. And you will fail.

                I take what Octavian Cæsar advocated, which lasted 1,500 years… not advocacy that has been a demonstrated failure for 500 years.

                • Red says:

                  @Starman

                  Spergs naturally dislikes propaganda, which is why Cominator doesn’t like your propaganda frame. It took me a very long time to understand that almost all humans need propaganda and ideas that are often not 100% true but produces good outcomes. I much prefer being told the truth and debating facts, but after years or study, it’s obvious that good propaganda is both necessary and useful.

                  The best propaganda is of course based in truth, the Chinese infiltration at every level in America is quite evident, even if our foes are driven by their ideology more than their payoffs from the Chicoms.

                • The Cominator says:

                  I agree with you on everything except the blame for the woke crap, China has to answer for the awful events of 2020 but I think in going beyond what China is actually guilty of

                  1) we risk going into idiotic NPC hysteria like the leftists and muh Russia

                  2) we let lots of our non Chinese enemies off the hook.

                  The covid hoax, conspiring with the dems to create lockdowns rig the election and subvert the government against us etc. That is quite enough without tacking on outright falsehoods. I was probably the 1st one here to notice a dem china conspiracy in regards to covid and the election (though I falsely thought the margin of fraud was much lower than it was and falsely thought Trump would win) I’m not defending China just advocating the truth be used.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Oh I’m sure Biden will leak milint like a sieve to China… so if you want that to sway the warriors fine with me.

                • European Mutt says:

                  Many options there. For example you could call the woke stuff communist and at the same time emphasize it’s the Chinese Communist Party. Would be as close to true as makes no difference and perfect propaganda. Muh McCarthyism is as useless for them as muh racism at this point so that is probably not a risk.

                  Also matches Trump’s current rhetoric. Trump never technically lies (accusations of lying are projection like muh Russia), he only insinuates in a certain direction and it has always worked so far. You don’t get far in the business world if you can’t do that.

                • @Red also @R7

                  It is not just spergs dislike propaganda, it is more like spergs tend to think every lie or half-truth will cause future hidden costs that gonna bite you in the ass, because feeding false information into system will make it act in a way that is not entirely fitting to reality. Exaggerate a threat type of input into a system, what’s gonna happen?

                  In this case it is obvious. When Octavian framed the conflict as not Romans vs. Romans but Romans vs. Egypt and Roman traitors to Egypt, it meant it is not enough to defeat the traitors, he also had to go to war with Egypt. But that was okay because Egypt was weak and conquerable.

                  So yeah, I think this absolutely would work, but it carries a risk of nuclear WW3 with China. This is the obvious potential future cost. Once everything is blamed on the CCP, the CCP has to be fought.

                  What would have Octavian done, R7, if Antony’s links were not with Egypt but Persia?

                • Starman says:

                  @TheDividualist
                  It makes it easier to execute Octavian’s opponents as traitors while allowing Antony’s troops to desert to Octavian.

                • The Cominator says:

                  European Mutt exactly, lying can be useful sometimes but also creates problems. I fear that laying the blame for the woke cult entirely on China will result in much of the woke cult’s domestic supporters to escape destruction in the end. It sure helped the communists escape in the 50s when the domestic ideological roots were downplayed.

                  Tying the leadership of the democratic party to China and corrupt elements in the deep state, the election conspiracy the covid conspiracy etc… that should be enough and the truth is on our side.

                • European Mutt says:

                  Cominator: They’re all coming out of the woodwork now. They may slither back so time to make lists. Collaborator is enough of a charge.

                • Red says:

                  So yeah, I think this absolutely would work, but it carries a risk of nuclear WW3 with China. This is the obvious potential future cost. Once everything is blamed on the CCP, the CCP has to be fought.

                  Lets back up and see the big picture. China spread COVID hysteria in order to help the Dems get mail in voting fraud in order rig the election. The Candidate the Dems selected though this fraud is a Chinese puppet who has already promised to give the CCP leadership everything they want. War with China is inevitable for that alone. They committed the crime and war will be the price they pay if they fail. That’s a dangerous situation that China brought on it self probably because it feels entirely safe from American nukes.

                  I don’t want war with China, but war we shall have because of what they did.

                  @Cominator

                  The reason Communism didn’t get purged in the 50s was because the people in charge protected it. They used the pretext of freedom of speech to do so. Our pretext for removing wokeness is it’s a Chicom funded fundamentally anti-American movement and anyone who supports it needs to take a helicopter ride for the good of the Republic.

          • jim says:

            The laptop and witnesses reveal Biden is on China’s payroll.

            Biden panders to the Chinese, because they pay him off, and he panders to radicals who want holy war with China because China is insufficiently progressive and the wrong kind of progressive.

            The Chinese notice that paying Biden off works, and fails to take the radicals as seriously as I do.

            • BaboonTycoon says:

              And why should the Chinese take them seriously? They will burn America to the ground long before they think about fighting open war with China. They may try to infiltrate their infiltration tactics, as they are prone to doing, but the structure of the CCP is such that they will have an extremely difficult time in doing so and the CCP will have no qualms about quickly and forcefully removing them the minute they are deemed subversive.

              The way I see it, all the China hawk business is nothing but sheer astroturf by the military industrial complex. Progressive elites care about destroying foreign countries, but their attempts at doing so are unable to outpace the rate at which they destroy their home country. And once they destroy their home country, their ability to destroy anything else drops to nil.

            • The Cominator says:

              Leftism in the CCP is also Maoist not progressive (unfortunately Xi who did this to us seems to be a partial adherent), Baizuo ideology is despised outside of Hong Kong.

              • jim says:

                Maoism is an evil and dangerous religion. Fortunately Deng neutralized the poison with “Learn Truth from facts”, tossing the dialectical method and Marxist epistemology overboard, producing a reasonably innocuous variant of Maoism. Unfortunately, Xi seems to be going weak on “Learn Truth from facts”. Dialectics is creeping back.

      • Red says:

        It’s the right message, at the right time.

  22. Of Rome and America… Cicero says in de Officiis that Caesar tended to quote some old Greek proverb, saying “The only excuse to violate the law is to grab supreme power, every other reason the gods forbid.” Cicero hated this exception, but I think Caesar had a point.

    • The Cominator says:

      Grabbing power successfully is always legal…

      • European Mutt says:

        Insurrection act or no…

        You were right on the China flu, you might be right on this too.

        • Red says:

          Having legitimacy makes it easier to gather support both elite and warrior based. Which is why having the law on your side is important to reduce the amount of fighting required, but in the end, might makes right.

          I’m actually rather the glad the supreme court punted now. Not even taking the case gutted their legitimacy. The basic fairness in our system was both sides having their day in court and they denied it, robbing them of the chance to whitewash the steal. People on the right are being told yes they stole the election, but shut your mouth and accept it. Systems like that don’t have legitimacy.

          The rule of judges is coming to an end one way or another and I couldn’t be happier about it. Judges are fucking awful people and they well deserve everything that’s about to come their way.

          • Pooch says:

            Legitimacy of the old system is also easier for people to accept after victory. Augustus had it by having the support of the Senate against Mark Antony, the traitor and enemy of the Republic. Caesar didn’t.

            • The Cominator says:

              The Republic had no popular legitimacy after the assassination of Caesar at all. Antony is the one who demonstrated it by gaining total control of Rome with a rioting funeral mob.

              Not how Octavian/Augustus ultimately got rid of Antony though…

              Octavian (who was not taken super seriously at this point, which is why Cicero and the other cuckservatives were building him up) reconciled with Antony after that to destroy Caesar’s assassins and the Boni/anti Caesar faction in general.

              Antony was ultimately destroyed by the implication that Cleopatra had unmanned and bewitched him, that he had gone native in the East, and the supposed will (maybe it was real maybe it wasn’t) saying that he agreed to leave Caesarion Rome’s Eastern provinces in his will.

            • Red says:

              Augustus had the support of the Senate because he murdered everyone who opposed him while pretending to be merciful. The Senate voted his way because they were his men. The people who murdered Caesar were men he’d forgiven, which singled weakness.

              Augustus propaganda campaign against Antony was about removing warrior support based on his unroman and unmanly behavior, which was quite effective. Augustus was no military man so he needed a compelling reason to get the troops to side with him and not Antony.

              • The Cominator says:

                I’m not talking about after Actium when he became Augustus I’m talking about when he 1st came to Rome…

                “Augustus propaganda campaign against Antony was about removing warrior support based on his unroman and unmanly behavior, which was quite effective. Augustus was no military man so he needed a compelling reason to get the troops to side with him and not Antony.”

                It was more about his legitimacy as a needed permanent head of state with well everyone, Augustus despite a lack of the physical courage (Antony was known for being almost psychotically brave, the type of guy to be into a breach in a wall or 1st on a ladder) or military aptitude his “father” had shown seemed to have no trouble attracting troops. He had had troops desert to him before (not so much from Antony but from Lepidus and the assassins).

                • Red says:

                  @Com My reply was to Pooch. You posted while I was still typing. I agree with everything you posted.

                  He had had troops desert to him before (not so much from Antony but from Lepidus and the assassins).

                  His entire basis for victory against Antony was desertion, which hadn’t happened to Antony in previous battles. It’s was an amazingly effective propaganda campaign, made all the stronger for having been true.

                  Back on topic, do you think Trump has the balls to kill his foes?

                • The Cominator says:

                  Antony wasn’t going to win after he had most of his veteran troops destroyed at sea. Of course the remainder deserted after that.

                • Red says:

                  The whole reason he ended up returning to sea was massive numbers of legionnaires defecting while he sat around at Actium waiting for better weather and the rest of his troops. He basically lost the battle before it started.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Octavian also (the Rome HBO series wasn’t entirely historically accurate but it kind of got this right) tricked Antony into letting Octavian be responsible for governing Italy…

                  Antony had figured the Eastern Provinces were better because of more money and no responsibility for the Roman mob… whereas Octavian via holding Italy (most of the troops were still from Latium or at least “Italian Gaul” at this point) put himself in a better position to create desertions. Troopers who wanted to go home… well it was better to desert to Octavian.

                • Red says:

                  I think letting Octavin have Rome was more Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact type situation where each side made a calculated risk that the other side would be made weaker by it. Antony found governing Rome to be impossible and he was spending lavish sums to bribe officials to further disrupt Rome from his income in the east. I think he expected Octavin to fail and then he’d swoop in and take sole control of the empire and probably move the capital some place else.

              • Pooch says:

                It was my understanding that Augustus would not have garnered the support of the legions against Antony if it wasn’t for the backing of the Senate. In that respect, legitimacy of the old dead Republic did matter. I could be wrong there.

                • Red says:

                  The Senate did whatever Augustus told it to do and soldiers hadn’t respected the Senate since the days of Sulla, when he marched on Rome with exactly zero support from the Senate. Building legitimacy by appealing to the old system was necessary to control the Roman government, not the military.

                • Pooch says:

                  Got it.

        • The Cominator says:

          Trump should try to seize power since they’ll prosecute him anyway… but I have no idea.

          I’m not sure he’ll try to use the insurrection act even if he does… The China Flu was a matter of factual certainty, this is about analyzing people.

          • Mister Grumpus says:

            @Cominator:
            “I’m not sure he’ll try to use the insurrection act…”

            Dude I thought you were the hardass and I was the softie.

            Who gives a crap about the law now? Oh that’s “legal” but that’s “not illegal”? Oh there’s a law for this but not for that? Oh well that changes everything. Like when they were beating up truck drivers and burning woke crosses in people’s lawns, and the guy who ran at Saint Kyle with a gun on camera didn’t get in trouble but I cynically presume did get a bag of GoFundMe. Shit. They don’t need no steenking badges.

            Even Tim Pool the half-based hapa is confessing his “normalcy bias” now.

            I know I know. Legitimacy. OK. But how many more “I want blood” posts from Hollywood people do we need to see before they’re happy to look the other way? Taking power successfully is always legal.

            • The Cominator says:

              “Who gives a crap about the law now? Oh that’s “legal” but that’s “not illegal”? Oh there’s a law for this but not for that? Oh well that changes everything.”

              Exactly my point what exactly are we arguing about?

              • Mister Grumpus says:

                Nothing. Just piling on. I’m so exasperated at this point that my reading comprehension and writing skills have regressed to “irritable badger tier”.

        • The Cominator says:

          Analyzing and predicting people is much more difficult than spotting a lying Democrat narrative and it was very clear that is what covid was from the very beginning… I just really don’t understand how people didn’t see it.

          • Pooch says:

            Normalcy bias.

          • Red says:

            I just really don’t understand how people didn’t see it.

            People believed the Chinese wouldn’t fake it. The other day on a normie conservatives site people were talking about how the Chinese staged the fake and gay public COVID deaths. They not talking about the Chinese working with the Dems on it, but I’m sure they’ve made the connection. That’s just to conspiracy theory-ish to say publicly right now.

            COVID is dangerous, the pastor of the Church I grew up in died from it a couple of weeks ago because he didn’t have it aggressively treated, but properly treated it’s just a nasty flu.

            • The Cominator says:

              “People believed the Chinese wouldn’t fake it.”

              LOL why would they believe this…

              A culture of truth is a thing in Japan (I’m not really sure exactly what the Japanese cultural religion is but they don’t like dishonest people) and South Korea…

              Its becoming somewhat more true in Russia as Russia gets more genuinely Christian…

              You can’t trust anything out of anywhere else… if you smell a rat its probably there.

              • European Mutt says:

                It was somewhat of a genius move from the Chinese to report LOW infection numbers starting from May, in order for Westerners to make a leap to “the Chinese (and Russians) are hiding infections and only the honest and moral West reports them” instead of “the Chinese faked it”.

              • Red says:

                LOL why would they believe this…

                Because the economic hit they took from locking things down was huge. Of course that was before western governments wreaked our own economies with lockdowns. That’s something few expected to happen.

                I think Xi used COVID has his justification to pivot to 3ed way socialism.

              • The Cominator says:

                “Because the economic hit they took from locking things down was huge. ”

                It was one city… and people could leave if they left the country.

                • Pooch says:

                  Didn’t they shut down all their factories country-wide for a period of time.

                • European Mutt says:

                  In March someone told me there were trains running again between Wuhan and other cities. Apparently the extreme version of the lockdown only lasted through Jan/Feb. Airport was always open though which alone is criminal.

                • Red says:

                  Xi touts his response to COVID compared to what happened in the west as his greatest success and has used it as his justification to gut small businesses as they move back to socialism.

            • Pooch says:

              I’m not sure I’ll go as far as the Dems and Chinese actively conspiring on Wu Flu yet, but while it was only spreading in China, it clearly was hurting China’s standing in the world badly. China had every incentive to let it out to the West for opportunistic reasons and like all crisis’s the Democrats and Progs didn’t let it go to waste.

              • Red says:

                I’m not sure I’ll go as far as the Dems and Chinese actively conspiring on Wu Flu yet, but while it was only spreading in China, it clearly was hurting China’s standing in the world badly.

                I’m convinced. The Democrats and by extension China needed a reason to have mass ballot fraud and COVID was it. There simply no other reason to stage those videos of the Chinese people dropping dead in the streets or filming the Chinese locking people in their homes and then leaking those videos’ to the west.

              • The Cominator says:

                Some leading dems got their whole elections fraud and covid strat from China probably through the medium of their spies, the Democrats are not smart enough on their own to do this.

              • Pooch says:

                The thing is wasn’t Biden at that time threatening war with China in the primaries over Hong Kong? Jim made a post about it. Why would Xi help the Democrats against Trump knowing full well it may lead to nuclear war?

                • jim says:

                  Trade – Xi thinks he can manipulate Biden and the state department.

                  And he can. But some of the people yanking on Biden’s puppet strings, I doubt his ability to manipulate.

                  Xi does not take that speech seriously. Biden was pandering, and Xi, if he is aware of the speech, thinks it is just more pandering. But recent events make it likely that the people Biden is pandering to will be in power.

          • European Mutt says:

            Exactly, he may not even use IA. If the senate passes the defense bill he may not even be able to. But it doesn’t make a huge difference, mostly in legitimacy like Red says where not using IA or using it late might be better.

            I don’t know about the others but until the end of March I wasn’t worried at all. Dismissed the Italians as nutcases and didn’t believe the media one bit. Actually told people this was only a heavy flu and kept shaking hands (I actually at no point stopped why would I) etc. with near-universal positive reactions. Then the gay lockdowns started everywhere and I came upon Yarvin’s fearmongering. And virologists* who were rather saying the same things as Jim back then before completely doing the bid of leftism. I only realized in September again, shortly before I began commenting here something didn’t add up.

            Every time I don’t listen to my gut I get screwed. Should have listened to my gut on China flu. My gut feeling about Trump the last two weeks was very bad, but now I’m feeling pretty optimistic.

            *Virologists are not natural progs, they need to understand Darwinian evolution

            • lambda x says:

              I am soooo upset about the defense bill. It seems to be a cruel distillation of everything that is wrong with the country. It is almost preposterous, something from Idiocracy, Written by the donkeys on Pleasure Island. As a joke. The authors of this travesty are entitled to the “salt” it produces.

              I wonder if any of my friends here are familiar with the novella “Seven American Nights.”

              • lambda x says:

                Actually I meant the Covid relief bill, description-wise; I’m losing track of the madness—I beg your pardon. The two million to study base renaming is foul enough though.

  23. Starman says:

    A reminder that the original Cæsar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49BC was a covert military action.

    • onyomi says:

      This is mildly encouraging:

      https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1343709566622720001?s=20

      “Right now, my team isn’t getting all the information that we need from the outgoing administration in key national security areas.”

      Verbal slip at 45 seconds is also kind of funny.

      • Starman says:

        Don’t know if this is confirmed or not.

        Trump’s military intelligence gave the Biden team, and only the Biden team, some fake intel. And within 24hrs, that same fake intel showed up in CCP intelligence traffic. After that, intelligence briefings with the Biden team were stopped.

        Shades of the Donations of Alexandria indeed.

        • Red says:

          I’d wonder if Chinese catching and killed our entire Chinese spy network during the Obama years was because Joe Biden sold them out. Having confirmation that Joe Biden is pretty much a Chinese asset is deeply troubling. The Neo-Cons & Dems are lining up for a unwinnable war with Russia while literally selling out the country from top to bottom to China is the perfect storm that will destroy this country. All while the sword of civil war is hanging over our heads and we don’t know when it’s going to drop.

          We are cursed to live in truly interesting times. I prey Trump or the Military does the right thing.

      • Gestahlt says:

        There’s an outgoing administration? 😕

    • pyrrhus says:

      Apropos is this tidbit from American Thinker…An example would be Secretary of Defense Chris Miller speaking to Vice President Mike Pence, thanking him for “his steady hand and leadership” during “some of the [most] complex military operations this country’s ever conducted.”

  24. BaboonTycoon says:

    I doubt Trump invokes Insurrection Act regardless of what happens. Should he make a power play, everyone already expects IA and Congress is already trying to limit it. If he does invoke it, I expect it to be supplemental to whatever other op he’s running. Blackwater pardons have more significance to me, particularly the timing. Smells like behind the scenes quid pro quo. Then again, can’t expect PMCs to support Trump when they would easily have more business under Biden unless Trump intends to wage all out civil war.

    I also wouldn’t rule out some Russian involvement. They have vested interest in Trump staying in office, and foreign interference would be the easiest way for Trump to walk away with his hands clean in the eyes of the general public. With all the Chinese patsies in US government, Russia probably feels need to have at least one of its own. 2016 leftist memes may come true.

  25. simplyconnected says:

    Apologies if off-topic, please delete as needed.
    Do you think that who ends up in the white house on Jan. 21 will have an effect on the possible end of the pandemic insanity?
    More specifically, if Trump is in the WH on Jan. 21, do you think life (at least in what relates to health policy) will go back to actual normal within a reasonable time?.

    Even Roosh thinks that the pandemic insanity is the biggest problem, and will continue regardless of who is in the white house. I dread being injected to be able to travel, and waiting means hoping that a Trump second term comes with an unrolling of the pandemic insanity, which is not very clear to me either.

    • Red says:

      The Pandemic Panic will continue as long as they can maintain it. They’ve gained an enormous amount of power from it.

    • Pooch says:

      I believe Trump will make steps to make it wither and die by firing people like Fauci. Roosh thinks Trump won’t be arrested if he loses so he suffers from normalcy bias. If Trump invokes Insurrection Act to end election fraud, it’s a stretch for him to invoke Insurrection Act to stop forced business closure.

      If Trump wins, after he wins is going to be a different world. Hopefully it means many Democrats are fired and in jail.

      • Pooch says:

        It’s not a stretch*

        Also, Trump has said he doesn’t want vaccines to mandatory.

      • simplyconnected says:

        So you think that reversing the pandemic insanity is another in a long list of coup-complete problems?
        Makes sense.

        • simplyconnected says:

          There was no sarcasm there btw, it does make sense that ending pandemic panic would be a relatively minor problem once an autocoup was successful.

          • Pooch says:

            Yes exactly. Covid insanity is really no different than climate insanity. Just different apple carts. A Trump autocoup is necessary to stop both. Besides the vaccines, which Trump has said shouldn’t be mandatory, Trump has signaled strong support to end all lockdowns and mask mandates.

        • Red says:

          Nothing short of arresting the Governors for murdering the elderly is going to stop it.

          • Pooch says:

            If Trump wins, Biden will be arrested. If Biden is arrested, arresting governors is not a big deal.

      • The Ducking Man says:

        I saw videos Trump endorsing Fauci and Operation Warp Speed along with Bill Gates funded Moderna and Pfizer.

        Maybe I still suffer from normalcy bias or I don’t know Trump well enough. But I don’t see he’ll turn 180 against Fauci and friends after his reelection.

        • European Mutt says:

          Actions speak louder than words. Big rallies with no masks.

          And why not tout the vaccine if you have one? Russia does the same thing.

          I am not as sure as Jim that Bill Gates isn’t a snake, but I agree with him insofar as him funding those Covid-related projects, or WHO, is a classic example of attempting to buy status. There is no indication he has any influence on what the organizations he funds actually do.

          • jim says:

            Bill Gates is a snake, but he was also a classic Randian hero engineer CEO. It is quite common for Randian hero engineers to be very bad people, and when the state religion was purged in 1660, quite a few Randian hero engineers popped up from the formerly excessively holy members of the former priesthood.

            Now that management is getting purged by an ever holier priesthood, we see the reverse process. These are people who always have an eye for the main chance.

            But while Bill Gates succeeded mightily at his previous career, his efforts in his new career are not doing too well, and as a result his capacity to cause damage is insignificant.

            If he had been a good boy and completed Harvard, would probably be doing better and causing considerably more damage.

            • The Cominator says:

              https://news.yahoo.com/bill-gates-backing-plan-to-stop-climate-change-by-blocking-out-the-sun-183601437.html

              Well he does seem to be causing some independent trouble…

              Was he inspired by Charles Montgomery Burns?

              • jim says:

                Bill Gates proposal has the immense benefit of not knocking over applecarts – it diverts the Climate Change religion into harmless activities.

                Actual Climate change is well within the range of past natural variations in climate, and is changing in the direction of a world with milder climate that is beneficent to humans and plants. Within my lifetime, the world has become markedly greener, destructive storms have diminished, and the deserts are getting substantially more rain.

                Forests are following the increased rain into former semidesert, and following the milder winters into former tundra. I have not seen the newly forested tundra with my own eyes, but I have seen new forests of young trees on land that was semi desert when I walked it as a lad.

                Over the past few thousand years, there have frequently been periods of climate change that were far more rapid than today’s, for example the climate change that drowned Doggerland under ninety meters of sea, the little ice age two centuries ago, and the cold period that led to the barbarian invasions. Further, stopping climate change is rather like stopping the tides – requires immense effort for doubtful benefit.

                But if we are going to stop a mild and beneficial change in our climate, high altitude sulphate aerosols are the cheapest and least damaging way to do it.

                His proposal requires a fleet of very high altitude cargo planes. We have lost the technological capability to produce high altitude cargo planes, but if we were serious about accomplishing the proposal, recovering that technological capability would provide jobs for real engineers, as carrying the useless Shaniqua and useless cargo to the useless space station provides jobs for real engineers at SpaceX, enabling SpaceX to create real and useful technology.

              • The Cominator says:

                Except this will actually make the earth colder.

              • simplyconnected says:

                Bill Gates may not be very relevant because not sufficiently priestly, but I have to mention the obvious, that he just comes across as weasely and creepy when he starts laughing while telling you there’s no chance to have your normal life back any time soon.

            • European Mutt says:

              OK, thanks for clarifying. That makes a lot of sense.

              He really hasn’t been too successful at attaining any kind of clout among progs; they don’t even seriously defend him against ‘hate’ like they do even small-time feminists or politicians.

              Steve Jobs in the position Bill Gates is today on the other hand, the thought makes me shudder…

        • Pooch says:

          Not sure what videos you are referring to but at more than one of his rallies he criticized Fauci badly followed by the crowd chanting “Fire Fauci!”

    • European Mutt says:

      do you think life (at least in what relates to health policy) will go back to actual normal within a reasonable time?

      Not only that, it will also have a profound symbolic impact in the entire American empire.

  26. Red says:

    Trump just passed over into pathetic territory with this COVID bill. Great way to depress your followers right before Jan 6th.

    • onyomi says:

      It seems another case of Schrodinger’s Trump: he’s either incredibly cunning (because he triangulated Dems against RINOs and struck some kind of deal wrt his election) or incredibly stupid (because he gave up his powerful pocket veto leverage for only vague promises).

      • Red says:

        A deal without a way to compel the other party is no deal at all. Congress doesn’t have to do shit. Trump would have to sue them in the supreme court to compel compliance and we all know how that would play out.

        • onyomi says:

          Sure but we don’t know all the details yet.

          • Red says:

            The details are that this is prefect timing to give Trump’s most ardent followers an out to to stop supporting him. Trump spent a week whining about the bill and then he signs it. Massive morale hit.

            • jim says:

              Worrying about the bill is normality bias. Legislation does not matter any more.

            • jim says:

              Impoundment control reveals you are prematurely black pilling.

              Wait for events to resolve. Nothing is revealed until it is revealed. The fat lady has not yet sung.

          • Pooch says:

            Trump is invoking something called the Impoundment Control Act whole signing the bill. Read this thread: https://twitter.com/Maximus_4EVR/status/1343371587911704576?s=20

            • pyrrhus says:

              Presidents used to be able to rescind spending items, until the SC stuck its nose in against Nixon…Now Presidents can only suggest rescissions to Congress, which is one reason spending has exploded..But Trump would have looked bad vetoing even the measly 600, and probably getting overridden, so smart move politically…

    • onyomi says:

      A potentially interesting tidbit revealed by the timing of this announcement:

      Seemingly hours after Romney and co. release this:

      https://www.romney.senate.gov/bipartisan-bicameral-group-908-coalition-president-trump-sign-relief-package-or-veto-it-immediately

      McConnell is tweeting this:

      https://twitter.com/senatemajldr/status/1343365527851429888?s=20

      This suggests to me a degree of division among even the more RINOy GOPers.

      Of course, I’d trust him about as far as I can throw Stacey Abrams, but assuming a useful deal exists to be struck, I’d rather have McConnell on my side and Romney clueless than the other way around.

    • The Cominator says:

      The law does not matter at the high level even a little anymore.

    • Reziac says:

      From the WH statement:

      https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-from-the-president-122720/

      =========
      As President I am demanding many rescissions under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The Act provides that, “whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which it is provided, or that such budget authority should be rescinded for fiscal policy or other reasons (including termination of authorized projects or activities for which budget authority has been provided), the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress a special message” describing the amount to be reserved, the relevant accounts, the reasons for the rescission, and the economic effects of the rescission. 2 U.S.C. § 683.

      I will sign the Omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed. I will send back to Congress a redlined version, item by item, accompanied by the formal rescission request to Congress insisting that those funds be removed from the bill.
      ========

      I’d say he’s been working overtime trying to clean it up as much as he can, given the bill is effectively veto-proof. Better some control over how it goes than none at all.

      • lambda x says:

        Trump’s fans drew strength from his rejection of the pork bill. Having AOC draft a clean one was a clear victory for him. Imagine how bracing it would be to hear him announce that, henceforth, he would not sign ANY bill whose text could not be read and understood in an hour. Signing the pork bill under any circumstances sends the message that we might as well have Biden so our kids can go back to school, if we also have to pay for gender in Pakistan and democracy in Venezuela. The bill was a slap in the face.

        One can glimpse the reflection of a whitepill in the sense that doing as he has done only makes sense if he expects continuity. If he had given up, the pocket veto would have been a much more satisfying way to leave matters.

        • jim says:

          If Trump has not given up, then at least considering calling out the militia, since that is the only way out.

          • Pooch says:

            Is there any scenario where only the military is necessary for Trump without needing the militia?

            • jim says:

              Trump has the rank and file. He needs loyalist officers. He does not need very many loyalist officers, so, maybe.

            • The Cominator says:

              3 people need to have either renounced their citizenship publicly by the 20th or be otherwise um permanently incapacitated.

              Trump can then ambigiously stay on in a sort of perpetual emergency as long as he uses the emergency to make sure either no new House Speaker is elected, or that the House elects him House Speaker.

          • Karl says:

            It is getting late. What could Trump call out the militia to do?

            He needs to show strength. At present, state representatives are scared that they or their relatives are murdered if they move to uncertify Biden electors. I do not see how the mulitia could help here. They can’t provide security for a few hundred persons. The military could.

            Soon congress will face the electors. Members of congress have more protection than state representatives and are therefore harder to intimidate, but in the present situation I assume that the attempt is made. How could the militia help here?

            In short, I do not see how calling the militia might help Trump, or at least not unless he also uses the military.

            • The Cominator says:

              This is not overturned via a legal process…

              This is overturned via a violent coup where all the alternatives heads of state go away and then anyone in the government who doesn’t say good job I totally love that you did that real quick goes away…

              • Karl says:

                Well yes, but how is that possible without heavily relying on the military?

                • The Cominator says:

                  You only need specops for three people… after that there can be no resistance because no clear alternative head of state.

                • Karl says:

                  I doubt three people would be enough, but anyway specops is not what the militia can be expected to provide. The military can

                • The Cominator says:

                  You misunderstand what I’m saying… you only need the military for 3 people is what I mean.

                  The militia is street muscle… for after that is done because after it’s done trump wins if he moves quickly.

                • Pooch says:

                  Biden has a large Secret Service detail already. I don’t know if SF could get to him without a significant firefight.

                • Karl says:

                  Ah yes. I agree. If Trump uses the military to do what soldiers do best, he will win

                • The Cominator says:

                  “Biden has a large Secret Service detail already. I don’t know if SF could get to him without a significant firefight.”

                  In the hypothetical scenario that a team were ordered to remove the three… well nobody is taking a bullet for any of those three. That includes fanatical leftists.

            • The Cominator says:

              STOP THINKING LIKE A LAWYER!

            • Red says:

              In short, I do not see how calling the militia might help Trump,

              The same way Antifa helped with the steal.

              • Karl says:

                Antifa helped with the steal by intimidating normal people and low level officials who do not have much protection and lack body guards.

                Sure, the militia could intimidate some normal people and some low level civil servants. That would have made a difference 6 weeks ago, but now?

                • Red says:

                  Cowardly people like the Republicans tend to Kowtow towards the most immediate threat. 100,000 angry Trump supporters outside of the capitol, with some of them armed might have that effect. Worked in Germany.

                  But it is very late to activate the militia. I’m quite black pilled on the idea that Trump will do it.

  27. Karl says:

    Do have a historical bais for your remark about shooting judges and public servants in 2026?

    Do you expect that date because the normality bias of the left coalition would be shattered by the next “election”?

    I expect them to start killing Trumpists and suspected Trumpists within a few months after Trump is out of office, simply as part of the escalating holiness spiral. Some of those killed will be judges and public servants.

    • jim says:

      It will be slower, more complicated, more messy, and less predictable than that. Took quite a while for the $#!& to hit the fan in the Roman Republic, because everyone, including Caesar, and indeed his assassins, continued to act as if normal was still in effect, even though it quite obviously was not.

      I think they will forget about Trumpists for a while, and concentrate on each other – though Biden’s people want a list of Trump’s twitter followers.

      In Rome, for most people, the new reality only sank in when Caesar was assassinated in the forum – with the assassins themselves being the last to know.

      • Red says:

        The Uniparty/Deepstate will target Trump supporters for persecution and long jail sentences for non crimes, including Clinton style raids like WACO/Ruby ridge. No pretense of due process will be given.

        The left will target liberals and Kulaks with terrorism, area take overs and rig the shit out of the 2022 primaries.

        I’m not sure what the right’s going to do, but I expect it’s going to start getting violent after the 3 letter agencies repeat their their murder women and children bit they were doing in the 90s, but that might take them a few years to ramp that up.

    • Anonymous 2 says:

      My current impression is that, on one hand, the Biden group has put together a very conventional cabinet and they now want everyone to simmer down. On the other hand, the BLM and Antifa people seem somewhat put out that they’re not getting their place at the table, so there is some potential for infighting. Depends on how tightly the POCs are leashed, I suppose.

      The republican voters seem somewhat upset (75% consider the election stolen) but probably not sufficiently to be a dangerous force. When fed a media mixture of cynical history about how many elections have been stolen over the years and some calming and diverting techniques, they may settle down for the next round. The republican establishment appears more than ready to assume its old role of principled losers. As a small upside, I think there is some potential for sustainedly red pilled states.

      In summary, I wouldn’t expect the democrats to want to spook the republicans too much at this time. Maybe later. It could be sufficient to just let things grind on for a while, naturalize immigrants, reverse the Trump policies that have been annoying, start refilling the coffers of their NGOs and orgs with tax money, etc.

  28. Dave says:

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-jobs-breakingviews/breakingviews-china-inc-will-recycle-used-white-guys-idUSKBN28V23T

    Here’s a white woman speculating that a great many white men presently being affirmative-actioned out of American companies might end up working in China and turning it into the next Silicon Valley. It’s not like white men owe any loyalty to a country that hates them.

    Do you think significant numbers of white male engineers will learn Chinese and emigrate to the Middle Kingdom? And how did this article get past the censors at Reuters?

    • European Mutt says:

      They deleted it already.

      A lot of engineers have been and are doing that already, mainly because Chinese women are much more pleasant. Tightening the screws of affirmative action might increase that trend. But it’s mostly a genetic dead end for various reasons. They sure won’t allow white colonies. So you shouldn’t do it.

      When it comes to software engineering Russia is already a fairly big player and I think that will accelerate as the US falls and the pay will rise accordingly. Russian is a lot easier to learn than Chinese and the culture is far less alien. Housing is CHEAP. Best of all you can express pretty much every right-wing opinion you want unlike in China. And your babies will be white.

      Their advances in biotech make me hopeful that they may pull ahead in other areas too. But too early to say.

      • Bilge_Pump says:

        They deleted it? I was able to read it just now…

        The tone was slightly insulting. The title refers to “used white guys”. Also there’s this sentence:

        “Webull Financial, a Chinese-owned trading app that competes with Robinhood Markets, hired a white American dude as chief executive.”

        Couldn’t give us his name? Seems somewhat juvenile to refer to a chief executive as a “dude”, but then again I don’t expect anything more from these writers.

        • European Mutt says:

          Consistently gives me a 404. Weird. From that quote it sounds like an intern wrote it.

  29. The Cominator says:

    Trump pardoned the blackwater guys en masse…

    Don’t feel so much in despair, that is another big indication that the Rubicon is an option.

  30. European Mutt says:

    Many of you probably saw it, but nevertheless, for morale. A tiny whitepill, suggesting Trump is on his way in, not out.

    https://www.dezeen.com/2020/12/21/trump-executive-order-beautiful-classical-architecture-news/

    Aesthetics are important. I myself always underestimate them.

    • suones says:

      Ugly architecture is an assault upon the senses of the enlightened, and being surrounded by ugliness is a continuous downer. Proles, are least affected by it. Priests, the most.

      Commie architects commonly deflect criticism by either claiming to espouse “functional architecture” or recommending that architecture not be made “political.”

      In reality, “functional” does not mean “ugly.” There is an entire school of design focussing on functional minimalism, and some products are strikingly beautiful. Apple products come to mind, like the original iMac, or the iPod.

      The second deflection, that architecture must not be “politicised” only comes into play when anti-Leftist forces are in power. Nazi megastructures? Bad! Soviet megastructures? *crickets*. “Politicisation” is itself an anti-concept.

      https://mitsap.medium.com/visions-of-alt-berlin-in-man-in-the-high-castle-no-spoilers-b3beaba77984

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germania_(city)

      • European Mutt says:

        There is ugly architecture in general and there is the American/Harvard sort of radical brutalism. The latter is pure point deer make horse. “Call it beautiful, bigot.”

        https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lampartners.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F09%2F15062_N97_medium.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

        Not even post-Soviet countries have buildings that are that purposefully grotesque. This building in Berlin looks like a tank or a bunker, at least that is a little cool: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.YRfCkKduuGKcQAG-PckaEQHaHa%26pid%3DApi&f=1

        Classical architecture alone is explicitly anti-Harvard. Even their old buildings look rather like socialist housing projects: https://s3.amazonaws.com/thumbnails.thecrimson.com/photos/2016/05/19/212427_1315659.jpg.1500x997_q95_crop-smart_upscale.jpg

        Politicization is indeed an anticoncept because anything is potentially political (or more precisely, a matter for the state religion), and the left knows this better than anybody.

        The best thing the Nazis had going for them was their aesthetic by far. Their architectural plans were a little megalomaniac especially those for Linz (a tiny city which Hitler wanted to turn into a second Berlin) but better to err on that side than the opposite.

        I wish there was a right-wing Apple. Yes Apple products are beautiful (except the Mac Pro) and minimalist but they keep the leftist sensibilities in mind. There is no “classical architecture” equivalent in tech yet.

        • simplyconnected says:

          Classical architecture alone is explicitly anti-Harvard. Even their old buildings look rather like socialist housing projects: https://s3.amazonaws.com/thumbnails.thecrimson.com/photos/2016/05/19/212427_1315659.jpg.1500x997_q95_crop-smart_upscale.jpg

          Well, that’s one of the dorms so it’s understandable.

          Best argument proving that modern architecture is awful is that ugliest buildings are often the architecture department buildings:

          harvard design school

          berkeley architecture department

          • jim says:

            Classic architecture provides a path between the human and human scale, and the building and the building scale. A classic house has a veranda providing a path between the garden and the house.

            Harvard architecture says “I am mighty, you are insignificant, I will crush you”. It is inspired by demon worship.

            Classic architecture rings small variations on what is old and familiar. It respects the past. It is both familiar and different. Russia’s great Cathedral. Classic architecture is inspired by old type Christianity, which provided a path between mortal and divine.

            A Chinese water garden is an imitation of the wilderness with human presence.

            Recall the stubborn resistance to Windows gui innovations. They kept creating new and different guis that people did not like and did not want. Similarly, Gnome 3. When we have classic software, it is going to look a lot like the old windows gui. And it will have a path between the computer meaning and the human meaning, which the linux guis tend to be bad at. Making such paths is hard, and it is not made any easier by the fact that people neglect to copy the paths that other people have beaten.

            • European Mutt says:

              Here are some Nazi era homes, Germany and Austria are still chock full of them (they are pretty solidly built):

              https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fais.badische-zeitung.de%2Fpiece%2F08%2Fe4%2F45%2F9a%2F149177754-h-720.jpg&f=1&nofb=1
              https://www.haus.de/sites/default/files/styles/1_1_1_spalte_desktop/public/d6/bauideen/bilder/WS_04_04-01_0.jpg?itok=iC9CbGDK
              https://i.pinimg.com/736x/46/59/cc/4659cc8d52d317e52157ed3642307f26.jpg

              It’s clear they were attempting to go for an echo of this:

              https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.W9aH2HmFvpKt2hMDv9wi3QHaGt%26pid%3DApi&f=1

              They still had a lot of of the socialist bunker aesthetic going but they did somewhat attempt to use the high foundation and small porches (big verandas are not a thing in Germany) as a gateway into the house. Probably they would have hit their stride after another 10 years. I just realized how the old house (last paragraph) uses optical illusions to the same effect which the Nazis hadn’t figured out how to replicate.

              Russia interestingly is going through a similar phase right now: http://www.intebconstruction.ru/wa-data/public/shop/products/39/00/39/images/105/105.970×0.jpg

              • clovis says:

                My relatives, who are from another country, used to say that American homes are “prefab”. I don’t know why our housing is so shit.

                • jim says:

                  Health and safety regulations. Houses designed by bureaucrats who do not intend to live in them or even to sell them.

                • Dave says:

                  Anything you build in America today will be a nigger-infested slum in twenty or thirty years, so beauty and durability are not worth the extra expense. White people have been forced into a semi-nomadic lifestyle to stay away from diversity.

                • red says:

                  It’s mostly safety regs and inspections in America.

                  People are not factoring in the white flight too much when it comes to building homes. My parents lived in a all white area surrounded by spear chucker central. I told them to get out the first time I saw a large of blacks come walking through like they owned the area, but my parents went ahead with large upgrades to their home. They lost money when they finally sold. Very few whites react in a manner they should because even thinking about it is racist and most lose their shirts when they finally move.

                • suones says:

                  Health and safety regulations.

                  Those are good things. We don’t have them in India, and as a result hiring a builder for home construction is a total crapshoot. I’d take ugly but safe and functional any day.

                  I think a lot of first-worlders think that since ugliness seems to be regulation-mandated, it must be that regulation is bad. No — bad regulation is bad. Even extremely obvious things like plug and socket size must be heavily regulated for things to work together, else you get Indian “jugaad” quality.

                  Any IT-guys should visit an Indian “server room” at least once just to see the sheer stupidity with which Ethernet runs are laid, and everything is “up-to spec” because there is no “spec” at all.

                • European Mutt says:

                  Regulation is usually pointless, especially if you need to seek multiple permits from different agencies and have overlapping laws. For example it is not allowed in Germany to weld any load-bearing part of a car chassis for ‘safety reasons’, i.e. if there is damage or rust to the chassis in such a place you legally have to scrap it. BUT at the mandatory vehicle inspection they are not allowed to remove any screws and therefore cannot look at the chassis. So millions of Germans weld their old cars in places the inspectors are legally not allowed to look at. Or have brown mechanics weld their cars and not tell anybody. Or just go to a brown mechanic and buy a positive inspection report for a reasonable fee 😉

                  Nobody can tell me that isn’t pointless (except for being a covert, anarcho-tyrannical version of affirmative action, of course).

                  Standards are needed, like for plug and socket size, but they emerge anyway. Industry standards. For example the molex connectors that old hard drives and fans use was never standardized and yet they always manufactured them to sufficient tolerances that they fit. Or most file formats.

                  I’ve never been in an Indian server room, but western server rooms do not have many regs to follow either except of course for general building codes. To the extent they are ‘up to spec’ or professionally wired it’s due to the sense of craftsmanship of those who set it up, a very old western social technology that has never quite gone away.

              • jim says:

                > Russia interestingly is going through a similar phase right now: http://www.intebconstruction.ru/wa-data/public/shop/products/39/00/39/images/105/105.970×0.jpg

                Rather nice.

            • simplyconnected says:

              I can see how modern architecture becomes the modern monstrosity it is simply by appealing to the architect’s desire for status.

              Creating a beautiful building using classical patterns relegates the architect to the status of a technician, whereas making a monstrosity designed to be different and stand out makes him an “artist”.

              • suones says:

                I beg to differ.

                “Architecture” as a profession has been hijacked by the Frankfurt school and its offshoots for almost a century now. It consciously selects for bad architects, because they’re the ones who are reliably politically compliant.

                “Modern” does not equal bad, or at least didn’t do so until the 60s. Art-deco products from the 1920s, to the later Streamline Moderne (a uniquely “American” aesthetic), to the later mega-towers, can and are all considered beautiful by many. It is telling that Al Qaeda chose to destroy the WTC twin towers (60s design) as emblematic of the nation they wished to attack.

                In fact, I posit that the “radical” designs of Tesla Motors vehicles or even SpaceX rockets/Starship are actually echoes of American pulp from the 30s-50s. Streamline Moderne, especially, looks futuristic even today, and it is totally believable that a Starship would follow this design, even though there is no air in space. The sheer aesthetic force of Falcon Heavy’s vertical landing is absolutely galling to Marxists.

                What is necessary, always, is to have a benevolent dictator as sponsor, whether Steve Jobs to Apple’s Jonathan Ive, or Musk. There is a reason why “Taj Mahal” is remembered for the Emperor that had it built rather than the architect who designed (Ustad Ahmad Lahori btw) it. Similar with the Sistine chapel — it was an honour for Micheangelo that he was commissioned to paint it, not an honour for the Pope.

                • restitutor_orbis says:

                  Amen. Art Deco and Streamline Moderne are epic styles and, to my mind, the only 20th century schools of design that are worthy of being built.

            • suones says:

              A classic house has a veranda providing a path between the garden and the house.

              You sound like my dad lol. He was really big on verandas too! Love ’em.

              Harvard architecture says “I am mighty, you are insignificant, I will crush you”. It is inspired by demon worship.

              Architecture that looks mighty and awe-inspiring is suitable for devotional purposes, to remind Man of his spiritual smallness before the Almighty, and also suitable for the Royal Court, to remind the subject of his temporal smallness before The Most Sublime. Old cathedrals and palaces really do follow this principle. Harvard architecture isn’t bad because it’s monumental, it’s bad because it’s monumentally ugly. The demon-worshippers have better aesthetics. Even Cthulhu has his non-Euclidean geometry.

              Recall the stubborn resistance to Windows gui innovations. They kept creating new and different guis that people did not like and did not want.

              Would that be the Windows 3.1 GUI or Windows 95-2000 one? I distinctly remember being less than impressed when I used Windows 95 for the first time. Especially galled by the Exploder-style file management (that may have been 98, or in an update to 95). I’d say the UNIX CDE was much better, although I never got to use it much. I soldiered on with Windows XP in classic mode, and foreswore Microsoft software after Windows 7/Office 2003 (the last non-Ribbon Office).

              Similarly, Gnome 3.

              I used Ubuntu Unity, liked it very much, and now use Ubuntu’s GNOME3 that works a lot like Unity. The completely smooth, tear-free window management and resizing are a sight to behold, animations are snappy and fast, keyboard shortcuts are everywhere. The last time I was this pleasantly surprised was when I first saw hardware-accelerated Mac OS X around 2004 or so. Considering the sluggish mess that is current macOS GUI, I’d consider that a much valuable accomplishment. Now the GNOME applications are not very useful, but I have my own habitual stuff that is only an apt away so I use that. Before that, I used GNOME2 with compiz and wobbly windows. And even before that, fvwm with all bells and whistles enabled (hello, gkrellm!). What can I say? I’m an Eastern man, I like excessive excess!

              • simplyconnected says:

                What is necessary, always, is to have a benevolent dictator as sponsor, whether Steve Jobs to Apple’s Jonathan Ive, or Musk. There is a reason why “Taj Mahal” is remembered for the Emperor that had it built rather than the architect who designed (Ustad Ahmad Lahori btw) it.

                That’s my point exactly, if the architect designs to glorify himself, we get pretentious monstrosities. Like you said the architect of Taj Mahal designed for his emperor, and Bach composed for “[…] the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.”

                I’m no expert in this field, but I do know art and architecture prizes are given consistently to degeneracies.

                I’m an Eastern man, I like excessive excess!

                Opulence you has it?
                That orthodox military cathedral looks wonderful.

                • Red says:

                  Windows 7 was pretty much the prefect GUI interface. Windows 8 was a huge downgrade and 10 was a disaster until they reverted a lot of features back to window’s 7 interface. The only positive things that came out of windows 10 was the improved search functionality. Windows explorer is still criminally broken 10 years later. Try navigating a folder with a lot of files, it just doesn’t work.

                  The worst part of windows 8 and 10 is they made server versions of which made basic navigation pretty much impossible. In Windows it isn’t really possible to revert back to the command line when the GUI sucks like you can in Linux. I was longing for windows NT after having dealt with those monstrosities.

                • jim says:

                  The linux command line is vastly more powerful than the windows command line, but its syntax and semantics is random and illogical, having grown by accretion.

                  Horrid things happen if you have a filename with a leading dash, or internal spaces. Each command takes its input from the next and passes its results to the next as text, and each command has its own parsing conventions. Needs to have a consistent syntax for mapping a text stream into a text tree.

                  Linux has umpteen guis, each one different and inconsistent with all of the others, and as a general rule the mapping from the graphical representation of object and the graphical behavior of objects is unpredictable and fails to correspond to command line behavior, forcing one to frequently su -l root. For example Mate’s equivalent of windows explorer does not allow you to drag and drop to and from the file tree. It also has different and inferior file access privileges to user.

              • European Mutt says:

                I recall 3.1 being somewhat rough around the edges. Minimized programs on the desktop etc. was a bit stupid. 95, 98 and 2000 was pretty great, inexplicably intuitive except for the file manager. Explorer itself was OK but the decision to have two file managers (Explorer and “My Computer” with less features) is something I never understood.

                Win XP kept the core of it but made it really ugly. But I think there they fixed the explorer vs. my computer dilemma. Windows 7 was OK and I actually used the default theme there but 8 and 10 were just an exercise in innovation for the sake of it.

                Ribbons were I think a solution to everyone having his menus and toolbars arranged differently which could have been solved in a much simpler way. I don’t actually dislike them much but they were an unnecessary invention.

                Ubuntu’s Unity is something I don’t like. It’s a cheap bad copy of current Mac OS. Maybe this Gnome3 version is at least faster, I don’t know. I found Unity very sluggish. KDE2 and to an extent 3 was on a good run. KDE4/5 went into a wrong direction UI-wise and was entried by leftists, so dead now. For linux I now always end up with minimalist window managers (fluxbox/openbox/ironically compiz back when it was a thing) that don’t crash on me regularly. Very sad state of affairs.

                • Reziac says:

                  There was only one file manager — Explorer. “My Computer” was just Explorer without Folder View enabled, tho one click on “Folders” and there it was. Just a setting, which you could change in the shortcut. No idea why they thought that was a good default, but some people don’t like seeing the folder tree.

                  Myself, I consider WinXP’s interface, usability, and behavior to be the pinnacle, and it’s gone downhill from there. Win7 could be made prettier (tho not as easy to make everything look exactly as you wish) and had some good features, but the broke the file manager and networking in new and interesting ways, and is not nearly as stable as XP64. Win8/10 make my eyes bleed and produce continual frustration at normal things I can no longer easily do. The ribbon prevents me from finding what I want as I have to paw through everything to get there. If I wanted a Mac or a cellphone as my desktop, I’d use a Mac or a cellphone!

                  So while I have the newer Windows to use at need, I still use XP and XP64 on the everyday boxen, and one of the less annoying linux variants (PCLinuxOS/KDE, set up to look retro) on the streaming box.

                • European Mutt says:

                  “My Computer” was just Explorer without Folder View enabled, tho one click on “Folders” and there it was. Just a setting, which you could change in the shortcut.

                  Yet another of life’s mysteries answered on Jim’s blog. I knew it was also “explorer.exe”, but so is the entire shell of Win 95/98, maybe 2000/XP too, I honestly don’t remember.

                  Win 8/10 I don’t even know if it is brutalism or any other ‘style’, it looks like the designers just gave up.

            • Reziac says:

              I’ve often described Windows 10 as “Brutalism for Computers”. Ugliest thing since… well, Gnome 3. Tho KDE/Plasma 5 is similarly hard on the eyes until I change it to look more like WinXP.

  31. kawaii_kike says:

    Jim’s return is a great Christmas present. Merry Christmas everyone!

  32. European Mutt says:

    Merry Christmas everybody!

    Just found out the blog is back. Really happy to see you again.

  33. pyrrhus says:

    Trump can win on the 6th by the simple process of Pence selecting the alternate Trump electors from 7 States…Pelosi and co. pitching a fit won’t matter and can be met with force if necessary, but of course Trump cannot cuck during this process..

    • Pooch says:

      Pence seems like a Natural cuck to me. He doesn’t seem to be fighting very hard and likely suffers from normalcy bias that if Trump loses he can go back to his GOPe role. Unless the state legislatures decertify Biden electors and certify Trump electors then Pence May follow their lead. In the end this come down to one man…Trump. I seriously doubt the GOP or the courts will do anything extraordinarily.

      • pyrrhus says:

        Well, if Pence is that dumb and betrays Trump, Trump will need to move very quickly to mobilize the fighters before there is a coup against him…It just seems to me that Pence can’t be that dumb, since he has a reasonable chance of becoming President if he sticks with Trump…

      • yewotm8 says:

        I do hope he is calling upon the entire country to be in DC on the 6th with plans to open the doors of Congress and have the people “urge” the cucks in there to certify his electors. Having your own armed guards in the Senate is one thing; having your own militia in there is an entirely different level of legitimacy, considering the US’ founding story. It will look powerful while at the same time awfully 1776.

        • yewotm8 says:

          I wish they made Congress people shit themselves harder than they did, at least.

    • Pooch says:

      Sry wrong thread

    • jim says:

      Trump is not going to get away with that unless he first proclaims the insurrection act and calls out the militia. And it is getting a little late.

      • Pooch says:

        It’s not too late until Biden is in the White House. I’m worried he won’t ever do it but the fact he is having audiences with Flynn and Powell who want to activate the military gives me reason to be optimistic. It seems he has two camps of support currently. Giuliai’s lawyer camp and Flynn’s camp. My sense is He is giving Guilani time but if he fails, Flynn will be called upon, but in the mean time he must make it seem both camps are unified to prevent division of support by the press.

        • neofugue says:

          No administrative process will allow Trump to rectify the election, as the behavior of the Supreme Court demonstrates.

          Trump will not read the Insurrection Act until he has no other option, just as Caesar did not cross the Rubicon until there was no other option. When, not if, Pence fails to select the alternate Trump electors, only then will Trump make his move.

          When all options are exhausted after the 6th, we will know.

          • European Mutt says:

            Well it does further the Great Clarification as someone put it. Shows how deep the rot goes to anyone with open eyes. Allows normies to understand why he had to do this. And allows Trump to do away with most pretenses of the post-1790 system. It looks unnecessarily risky and heart-wringing to us but it does discredit the enemy completely, if successful. And leaves some scorched earth if unsuccessful.

            Reality is currently redpilling Trump into something that exceeds the Jimian NRx of a month ago. And looks like he’s having some trouble swallowing it so fast. He was indeed redpilled on the fraud and, in my analysis, redpilled on the non-agreement-capability of the nominal left, but he did not expect the SC to reject him, insultingly, twice. Neither did Jim.

            The question is, can we be confident that he has swallowed or will swallow the red pill? At least he stopped whining about being treated ‘unfairly’.

          • Pooch says:

            Exactly my sense.

          • Pseudo-chrysostom says:

            >No administrative process will allow Trump to rectify the election

            Since, every functionary that would be nominally obliged to follow the merely written rules of administrative processes in favor of Trump against systemic fraudulence believe force of arms would be against them if they do so.

            Before people feel safe in doing the right thing, he must show his own force of arms first.

            Each and all of them have a sense, more or less conscious, that if they take that further step in this matter, it will cause the balloon to go up; and hence, the need for the feeling, that if the balloon does go up, it won’t be a one sided affair.

  34. Jatt Arya says:

    Your blog is still the same feed on feedly.
    I got a notification on it despite only having blog.jim.com added.
    Not sure if intentional,

    As for militia, there’s just Khalsa. 🤷‍♀️

    https://youtu.be/7ck48u8Tfqg

    • jim says:

      What do you do to see the feed?

      I decided to redirect the old blog, rather than just abandon it. What you are seeing is probably the redirection propagating through the system, and eventually into your browser cache.

      • jatt arya says:

        blog.jim.com gives a 403 error.

        This is off feedly.com

        https://imgur.com/a/WGzN9rx

        Screenshots here. You can see the weirdness, where some recent posts are all considered posted yesterday, while the rest of the archive is normal.

        Hope this helps, LMK if anything else send an email to the comment one. 🙂

        • jim says:

          In the course of moving I fouled up no end of things, and though I could fix things at my end some of this fouled up data is in caches all over the internet. The mess should sort itself out eventually.

          • Jatt Arya says:

            As far as initiation, I found something interesting.

            In Sikhi there are 3 types though generally 2.

            Kirpan da Amrit & Khande Da Pahul.

            Nectar of the Sabre and Double Edge Broadsword respectively.

            1 Singh administers the former to women & Brahmins
            5 Singh furnish the latter to warriors seeking immortality।।

            ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾ।।ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ।।

          • lurker says:

            The RSS feed weirdness is expected and nothing to worry about. It was caused by your blog software regenerating the feed with new URLs for each post. I don’t think any software handles this situation gracefully, and it’s just a one-time issue so /shrug. Better to have a couple duplicate posts than to not redirect the RSS feed (in which case I probably would have forgotten to check the new domain and wouldn’t have seen this post)

        • Reziac says:

          The all-same-date thing is completely normal when a feed moves from one server to another and sends out a new feed listing. Most will also send you another copy of absolutely everything still listed in the feed. I’ve had some send me hundreds of duplicates that way, often multiple times, relisted as of whatever date they moved to that new server.

      • Reziac says:

        I added the new site’s RSS to my feed (handled by my browser) as soon as you announced it. It is evidently working properly.

        I don’t allow browser cache (mainly because I don’t like the constant disk fragmentation) so none of that here. However it’s possible some people are being served cached copies from various internet servers.

  35. onyomi says:

    Any thoughts on how helpful/unhelpful Pence is likely to be? It seems a point of disagreement right now among MAGApedes, but I have little sense of his character, motivations, and relationship with Trump.

    • onyomi says:

      I had figured their interests were aligned and that he seemed a loyal sort, but Trump tweeting random ideas at him doesn’t seem to bode well.

      • ~loclun-midwyt says:

        Probably not directed at Pence, but designed for the normies to understand what Pence is able to do.

        What does everyone here think of Bannon? His CCP stuff is pretty gay, but he’d likely have inside info on Trump’s admin. Months before the election he predicted everything so far and said it would go to a contingent election with a narrow Trump win on the 20th.

        • Pooch says:

          He’s very plugged into the Guilani camp of Trump’s support. He has criticized Flynn and IA which tells me he suffers terribly from normalcy bias. His reasoning is it will make Trump look bad in the press and the Republican state legislatures will eventually come around.

        • Reziac says:

          My personal opinion is that Bannon is a snake who fancies himself a kingmaker and as the power behind the throne. He was the leaker early in the Trump administration (funny how the leaks stopped the moment he got the boot).

          Thought that even before I came across a couple of interesting articles:

          https://www.madcowprod.com/2020/08/28/bannon-badolato-bust1/
          https://www.madcowprod.com/2020/12/04/steve-bannon-guo-wengui-worlds-expensive-selfie/

          • The Cominator says:

            Yeah I don’t trust Bannon for that reason. I don’t think he was responsible for ALL the leaks (I think the WH was bugged, thats why Trump had to keep going to Mar A Lago early on) but he was for a lot of them.

            • Pooch says:

              I thought he was mostly fine up until now where he is seemingly opposing Insurrection Act with reasoning that seems to only amount to “he can’t because he’ll look bad in the media!”. He’s also insulting Flynn calling him a nutcase for even having the idea. So now I’m wondering where his loyalities really are.

            • Reziac says:

              Not all the leaks (as you say, WH had to have been bugged) but those leaks intended to force Trump to change or abandon policy? I expect those were all Bannon.

    • Pooch says:

      Pence seems like a Natural cuck to me. He doesn’t seem to be fighting very hard and likely suffers from normalcy bias that if Trump loses he can go back to his GOPe role. Unless the state legislatures decertify Biden electors and certify Trump electors then Pence May follow their lead. In the end this come down to one man…Trump. I seriously doubt the GOP or the courts will do anything extraordinarily.

      • European Mutt says:

        There are two sorts of cucks, aren’t there? Those who cuck because afraid and those who cuck for no reason.

        If he’s a cuck, he’s probably in the first group.

        • Pooch says:

          He just seems like he’s part of the establishment. He’s tweeting the old tired GOP lines mentioning everything but the fraud. Trump should absolutely not rely on him to do anything extraordinarily (like the rest of the GOP) and it seems like he’s correctly not because Trump’s recent meeting of loyalists did not include Pence.

  36. Anonymous says:

    This blog and other neoreactionary blogs made the largest contribution to my worldview in the latter half of the last decade out of any written material I had been taking in. Thanks for not taking it down permanently.

  37. hcm says:

    A comforting light in dark times.

  38. suones says:

    Welcome back, Jim.

  39. waxing.cerval says:

    Welcome back Jim.

  40. Upravda says:

    It works!
    Nice to see you back so soon.
    And by the way, greetings from a long time Croatian lurker. I’ll continue to lurk instead of commenting. 🙂
    Merry Christmas and happy New Year.

    • European Mutt says:

      Nice to see people from other European countries here. If Trump makes it it becomes vital for us to make sure the inevitable rising right-wing protests and landslide votes here will lead us down the correct path — national capitalism.

    • suones says:

      Hello, friend.

      Is the Croatian “right wing” as fucked-up as this[1] indicates?

      Who is the current Croatian president? Kolinda Grabar Kitarović, who enjoys a wide support from the Catholic Church and the nationalist right as a “right wing conservative candidate”:

      Grabar-Kitarović […] is one of three Croatian members of the Trilateral Commission. […] As a high school student, she entered a [U.S.] student exchange program and at age 17 she moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, subsequently graduating from Los Alamos High School in 1986. […] From 1995 to 1996, she attended the Diploma Course at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. […] In 2002–03 she attended George Washington University as a Fulbright scholar. […] She also received a Luksic Fellowship for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and was a visiting scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

      [1]: https://sceptremag.com/2017/11/22/eastern-europe-and-the-swine-right/

      • European Mutt says:

        I’m not upravda, and he can correct me on this but her party HDZ is afaik the “respectable” RINO party like Merkel’s CDU, deep under Blue Empire control. No actual conservatism allowed there.

        Looks like another party, Domovinski Pokret, is pretty based though, they mention private property and Croatian national interests and anti-PC pretty much immediately (thank you slavic skillz):

        https://www.domovinskipokret.hr/pdf/Kljucne_tocke_programa_Domovinski_pokret_Izbori_2020.pdf

        Upravda, do you think they are the real deal and do they have a chance?

        • Upravda says:

          I did vote for them, and they have presence in parliament, about 10%. Their problem is that they are “uncool”. Like, Le Pen vs Macron. Or Reps vs Dems in the USA, if you wish. And they will stay uncool unless some (foreign?) forces change the perception of “coolness”.

          Their other problem is that they, effectively, are trying to pick the same voters as HDZ, and HDZ still has all the charisma of “party that established Croatian independence” among a lot of common folk. “Normies”, as commenters here would say.

          And last, but not least, they did not succeed to attract enough voters who otherwise don’t vote (approximately 40% of all voters in Croatia don’t go to elections).

      • Upravda says:

        Ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) is one of the cuckiest of all the quasi-conservative cucks in EU.

        Miss Grabar Kitarović is not Croatian president since the beginning of this year (2020). She was succeeded by Mr. Zoran Milanović, a lefty and an alpha-male, though, who has just recently discovered, probably, that he *has* enemies on the left. It was pretty much hilarious when he started verbally bullying those lefter than him, which unfortunately includes prime minister from supposedly conservative ruling party.

        Anyway, miss Grabar Kitarović… while better than her predecessors, she did send her daughter to Harvard. ‘Nuff said.

        We are so integrated into Atlantic empire (entity that Jim calls American Hegemony) that all political thoughts here are just an echo of EU and, transitively, Harvard. While there is still something of a common sense present, probably because all that globo-homo stuff is still not completely installed into Croatian hardware, Ctulhu swims left here too.

        Domovinski pokret is the only political party that is somewhat red-pilled (and the only which publicly expressed they’d like to see Trump in second term).

        • European Mutt says:

          Interesting. I find that some Croatian leftists are often oddly PC on some things and then freely talk about how gays are disgusting or something like that lol. Very unpredictable. Even those who lived for most of their lives in Germany or Sweden.

          Also interesting about DP that they support Trump. That is a rare thing among European “populist” parties.

          I love you guys. Hard workers AND great to party with.

          Is your name a play on uprava + pravda?

          • Upravda says:

            @European Mutt: “I find that some Croatian leftists are often oddly PC on some things and then freely talk about how gays are disgusting or something like that lol.”

            As I said, typical for people on whose hardware globo-homo programs were not installed 100%. For now.

            Regarding hard working, yes, we like to think of ourselves as successful abroad, and unsuccessful at home. While there was some truth to that (especially during communist period), it is actually very sad line of thinking (and nowadays mostly untrue nevertheless) because it shows a lot of a… provincial mentality.

            Regarding partying, I guess we are okay at that. 🙂 While I’m becoming an old fart, and partying less and less, when I was younger it was good to see people, my people, who drank because they were jolly, and not the other way, binge-drinking trying to achieve happiness (as I very often observe among Brits, Swedes, and even Germans). However, I don’t know what’s the situation about that today.

            Upravda is old Slavic name for Greek/ Romaioi/ Eastern Roman/ Byzantine emperor. It *is* in modern Croatian vocabulary, but very rarely used. It is related to verb “upravljati” (to manage, to rule), and it means, simply, “The Ruler”.

            “Zrinski” and “Frankopan” were already taken in Proton Mail so I had to settle for the next big thing. 🙂

            • European Mutt says:

              Thanks for the explanation. I don’t know nearly enough about Croatian history though. I can piece together most Croatian from other Slavic languages but that doesn’t always succeed 😉

              The binge drinking culture is just the flipside of the Protestant Work Ethic. Catholic countries don’t do that. Russians do, but drinking lots of (real) vodka is actually very easy to get used to and then you don’t get nearly as drunk as you would from other stuff.

  41. Red says:

    It appears all but certain than Trump is going to cuck. His utter failure to put his people in charge in most key areas of the Government and getting suckered by Barr the Traitor indicates he doesn’t have the right sort of instincts to rule.

    According to Jack Posobiec, the primary reason most state GOP members cucked out on the stolen election was the death threats there families had been receiving from Antifa. They even sent threats in the form of cookies with a note to kindergartens where they named the children of the GOP members. Trump lost this election when he failed to unleased the insurrection act and the military on Antifa. For the life of me, I don’t understand why he didn’t do it. Normalcy bias perhaps.

    Trump had an opportunity build his own paramilitary forces in 2017 with the Red Hats, but he told them to go home because the media was calling him Hitler. Such a force could be put fear into his foes and gotten the cucks to cuck his way, and they certainty would have pounded Antifa into the dirt. Instead he tried to rely on official power that the Presidency, but not the President has. This led to most of the younger people who initially been on the Trump train switching sides as they saw the power of the left in the streets and in the institutions.

    • jim says:

      Yes, looking like we are screwed

      Trump needed a militia, and failed to build one in time.

      When push came to shove, the fact that they had a militia and we did not meant they won and we look like we are going to lose.

      Clodius had a militia, and Marius had a militia. In the collapse of a Republic, you go through a phase where you deniably use militias, before you get to the phase where regular armies clash, and the left always goes into the militia phase faster.

      • neofugue says:

        Trump has the Proud Boys.

        However, Trump does not have a faction of loyalist judges.

        If Antifa are to be neutralized, Trump needs judges to pardon or overlook militia-related extralegal initiatives. Kyle Rittenhouse went to prison, yet his attempted killers are let loose.

        Assuming the Supreme Court or the State Congresses would be of use was normalcy bias on our part. Caesar avoided crossing the Rubicon until all options were exhausted. Why would Trump cross the Rubicon before Caesar crossed his?

        If Trump cucks after all legal options fail, then you may say we are screwed.

        • jim says:

          Trump has not cucked yet.

          But he has not taken action to activate a militia yet.

          • The Cominator says:

            You are not optimistic about the 6th?

          • Eli says:

            But, of course, Trump cucked. He cucked at least from the moment that he went along with Fred Flinstone’s inaction at the ballot boxes in the swing states, even though the latter himself kept on talking about likelihood of fraud. He might have cucked even earlier, as per your statements above.

            It is not because that Fred Flinstone is a traitor. I think he’s quite a good guy, actually. It’s just that he obeys the system, being a good boy. He would make an excellent, strict school Principal, just like what his father was (a headmaster). But he is not made to be an AG in these days.

            Trump cucked further when he allowed the electors to proceed with their votes and not forcing the other electors to be allowed to enter for their vote.

            And he is still cucking, every day that he FAILS to act.

            I will, in fact, unfollow him, if he does not stop cucking by the next day after New Year, for it has become increasingly depressing to read his whining at this point.

          • Dave says:

            Extinction events happen when the environment suddenly changes, and species that were highly adapted to the old environment fare poorly in the new one. Our politicians, lawyers, and judges are delicate orchids bred in the hothouse of liberal democracy. They will not do well in the coming illiberal Darwinocracy, and Trump is probably no exception.

            Darwinocracy favors rough, savvy men from uncivilized tribal societies, where politics is naturally more local and Darwinian, men like the Kartveli. Where will our Stalin and Beria come from?

            • jim says:

              Stalin and Beria were thugs – this was rise through the militia. If we get a Stalin, he likely will come through antifa.

              Oliver Cromwell and Sulla were superior quality. They came through the army. General Flynn is the ideal candidate.

              Pompey was cucked and failed to establish an order viable in the face of routine Byzantine defection from process. But he came through the army also, when it became apparent to the old cucked establishment, threatened by the new thugs, that they needed extraordinary means to restore order. As a purely temporary measure of course, but nothing is so permanent as that which is temporary.

              • The Cominator says:

                Pompey like Marius was considered a foreigner he could never be accepted as king in bloodline obsessed Rome, this is why the boni/optimates were way more tolerant of him. Sulla could have but he believed in the Republic.

          • Pooch says:

            Reports indicate Trump has two camps of support. One faction is Guilani and his other lawyers who want to keep pursuing the legalese, state legislature path. The other is Flynn and Sidney Powell wishing to use force to seize Dominion machines. My gut tells me he is giving option 1 some time but will eventually will use option 2 when it is clear option 1 won’t work. It is still too early to tell.

            • The Cominator says:

              Neither path works… he needs to seize power by force that isnt seizing dominion machines.

              • Jehu says:

                If you start by seizing the machines, you don’t stop there. If you’re really lucky, they resist with force and you have an excuse to go full autocoup. But early on you need to seize all the media…emergency broadcast system I guess, preempting everything else.
                But it’s way easier to get soldiers to buy in on seizing machines than telling them up front, we’re going to shut down the media entirely and go full martial law. Just like the Covid thing was sold as ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’.

                • Pooch says:

                  Exactly. Having armed men seize Dominion machines is the start on a long path that ends with armed men kicking in Biden’s door, just as Caesar having armed men cross the Rubicon was the start of a long path that ended with Caesar holding Pompey’s head.

                • The Cominator says:

                  The VERY FIRST act of force should be putting the three fraudulent successors underground…

                • Red says:

                  Successful “restorations” require going after the leadership first. Otherwise you end up like the men who killed Caesar, but failed to take command of the legions and arrest all of Caesar’s top commanders.

                • onyomi says:

                  >If you start by seizing the machines, you don’t stop there.

                  Yeah this is why I keep hoping for one of two things: either Trump gets kinetic in some way by e.g. having the military seize some voting machines or else he wins some significant victory at the legislative level, like AZ GOP voting to decertify Biden electors.

                  If either one of these happens it could easily start a chain reaction of increasing justification for use of the kind of force that’s necessary since Antifa would inevitably react explosively to either, justifying further crackdowns.

                  Clearly the Dems’ game is just to stymie either of these happening and run out the clock. On this score I have to admit a certain grudging respect: there are seemingly so many dominoes Trump could knock over to start the chain reaction he needs and, thus far, they’ve managed to hold them all up.

                • Anonymous 2 says:

                  Speaking of which, what happened to that possibly seized machine in Germany?

                  Agreed that the leadership has to go first. Seizing the NYT building and similar should also be near the top of the list. Detain the top layers of the FBI, CIA, DHS, DOD, NSA and so on. Arrest all journalists. There is quite a long list of people to be arrested of course. And prepare seven pillows for SCOTUS.

                  Also, glad that you’re back, Jim.

                • Pooch says:

                  Disinfo probably.

                • The Cominator says:

                  The first three people force is used against should not be “arrested” at all…

    • Bilge_Pump says:

      On the side of optimism, he did post this the other day :

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABYC7ikFIuY

      “… or else the next administration will have to deliver a Covid relief package, and maybe that administration will be me, and we will get it done”

      Not the Covid communism package, but the fact that he hasn’t given up yet and is still entertaining the possibility of a second term.

      I don’t like the fact that workplaces are shut down. If that wasn’t happening the fuckin communism money wouldn’t be necessary.

      • Red says:

        and maybe that administration will be me

        That’s the line that indicates to me he’s getting ready to cuck out. Trump’s MO is endless irrational confidence. That’s not it.

        Congress can make the insurrection act illegal by a 2/3s majority if Trump vetoes the COVID relief bill. Calling out the troops without a law to back it up is more difficult and it’s even harder if the Troops don’t believe that Trump believes he’s righteous in his cause. I’m not a big fan of Hitler, but he was right about the triumph of the will. One only becomes king if one has the will for it and I’m currently not seeing that from Trump.

        Jim has talked about Trump being caught in the forces of history, just like Caesar was, but Caesar truly wanted to be king. What I’m seeing from Trump is a man who wants a legal way to restore the dead and decaying body of the Republic.

        • The Cominator says:

          Sulla was like that though… he didn’t want to be king.

          • Red says:

            This is true. And Sulla acted without legal authority to do so. Almost all of Sulla’s subordinates refused to march on Rome, but the legionaries were with him. White pilling.

            • The Cominator says:

              OTOH Sulla was probably an unusually bitter man in the Roman ruling class… its got to be frustrating growing up an impoverished ambitious Patrician (with probably a very high IQ) but too poor to enter the Senate or even the legions as a ranker… with all means of advancement by tradition beneath your dignity.

              He also probably knew after his army hailed him Imperator and awarded him the blockade crown (which had to come from acclimation of the army as a whole to a general who saved them against heavy odds) would follow him no matter what…

              Trump probably doesn’t have this mentality or the surety of being followed… but he does have Caesar’s fear of being prosecuted the second he leaves office.

            • European Mutt says:

              In the last week Twitter was overflowing with Rubicon this or other tweets. My interpretation at the moment is also that Trump is still playing by the rules and not really ready to cross the proverbial river. But his followers are increasingly demanding him to.

              I hope and pray this will force him to act. Maybe Rosen can help him by arresting key people, and maybe the 6th will happen as planned, but only if Pence and everyone else involved is absolutely physically safe which will very likely require measures before the 6th, not after.

              On the other hand, why tweet “Martial law = fake news”? He could just have ignored it and it would have disappeared from the media much more quickly. He may still be trying to bait the radical left to attack and put a wedge between Antifa/BLM and the deep state. I too thought that could work but it hasn’t so far. The swamp is surprisingly, cohesive enough to not give Trump a reason for calling IA. Cops killed another nigger I think yesterday so maybe it will work this time? High time to abandon that strategy otherwise.

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