Resurrection Sunday Schedule

Update: cancelled.

Luke Ford will not be broadcasting tomorrow due to Passover. I will broadcast solo from my YouTube channel at the normal time, 9 AM Pacific.

The Foldin' State

Is it a cliche yet to contrast California's (old) Utopian aspirations with its dystopian present? It should be. The latest police shooting to be turned into a financial and political shakedown even raided the local NBA franchise with success. Protesters shut down two games and the team responded by partnering with BLM and something called the Build. Black. Coalition. Somehow that name perfectly sums up the movement, shutting things down over and over again. We stutter along.

A city council meeting was shut down by a grandstanding surviving brother. Apparently he also practically climbed into his brother's coffin at his brother's funeral-media event, reminding me of the old joke about the usher at the funeral who says "keep an eye on the widow, she looks like a climber".  The Washington Post's account tries to soften what you see in photos and video, but it's pretty remarkable the license being granted the enthusiastically bereft brother, who should probably be in jail.

  A broadening coalition of the fringes addresses the problem::

Sheikh Omar Suleiman, an adjunct professor of Islamic studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was the keynote speaker at a town hall meeting at the Salam Islamic Center. The event was co-sponsored by CAIR-SV, Sacramento NAACP, Sacramento Area Congregations Together and a coalition of 10 mosques from throughout the Sacramento region.
Suleiman is scheduled to participate in Thursday's memorial service for Clark, who had converted to Islam. During the meeting, he and a panel of local faith and community leaders urged an audience of more than 200 people not to let their fervor for justice die, but to fight against what they described as systemic injustice.
Too often, Suleiman said, people don't mobilize because they don't recognize that when one minority group is targeted, all are affected.

Clark's conversion is probably not being looked at too closely by the Imam, who seems to have carved out a sweet niche marketing himself as a moderate Muslim promoter of interfaith dialogue (with a death threat from ISIS to boast of) and Muslim advocate, which included leading a campaign to censor google searches to combat "Islamophobia". There's your interfaith dialogue.

It's notable not all immigrant groups produce religious leaders purporting to lecture us on "systemic injustice"; some take to it more easily than others. It--political activism--doesn't seem to be correlated with IQ. Higher IQ groups are naturally going to be more able politically, but I don't see Asian American groups yet allying with the left's fringe, focusing more on straightforward advocacy.  US Muslim groups look far more eager to ally with what Steve Sailer calls the Coalition of the Fringes. Somalis look from here like a low-IQ, high--let's call it Political Quotient, or PQ, measuring a tendency to purely political endeavor--group. Somalis are low IQ/high PQ. Compare to, say, Japanese Americans, who I would expect to be high IQ/low PQ. Yer IQ/PQ ratio is key, I tell ya.

Sheikh Omar joins Al Sharpton and Benjamin Crump on the scene. These things play out like a loosely scripted television show, where the actors improvise within a given scenario. Except here there's no desire for spontaneity, and the thing plays out with rigid predictability. They don't need no dialogue to stick to the script.

The State of the State

From a post-Iraq invasion paper, The New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: the Decline of the State and US Strategy (PDF):

National security policymakers are continuously challenged to ensure that the judgments and assumptions underlying policy, force posture, and provision are congruent with the international environment and the role the United States is playing within it. This has become problematic in the 21st century security environment characterized by complexity, connectivity, and rapid change.
This analysis offers key insights into what is a shifting security environment and considers how the United States can best respond to it. Dr. Phil Williams argues that we have passed the zenith of the Westphalian state, which is now in long-term decline, and are already in what several observers have termed the New Middle Ages, characterized by disorder but not chaos.
Dr. Williams suggests that both the relative and absolute decline in state power will not only continue but will accelerate, taking us into a New Dark Age where the forces of chaos could prove overwhelming. He argues that failed states are not an aberration but an indication of intensifying disorder, and suggests that the intersection of problems such as transnational organized crime, terrorism, and pandemics could intersect and easily create a tipping point from disorder into chaos.

The post-Apocalyptic scenario retains a powerful mythic charm that takes hold of men in their childhood and never completely lets go. We almost yearn for it. The political chaos, cultural degeneration and material comfort of the present mean it won't go away any time soon--or until the apocalyptic becomes reality.

But how possible is that? Dr Williams' paper quoted above is about the decline of the state. But we all know now that doesn't mean a decline in the concentration of power or, forgive my disappointment, complete civilizational collapse returning us to a benighted state of nature.

Underlying the change from traditional geopolitics to security as a governance issue is the long-term decline of the state. Despite state resilience, this trend could prove unstoppable. If so, it will be essential to replace dominant state-centric perceptions and assessments (what the author terms “stateocentrism”) with alternative judgments acknowledging the reduced role and diminished effectiveness of states. 

This alternative assessment has been articulated most effectively in the notion of the New Middle Ages in which the state is only one of many actors, and the forces of disorder loom large. The concept of the New Middle Ages is discussed in Section II, which suggests that global politics are now characterized by fragmented political authority, overlapping jurisdictions, no-go zones, identity politics, and contested property rights.

There's hope yet I'll live out my fantasy of driving a Mustang around an abandoned LA a la Charlton Heston in The Omega Man.
But I suspect any dystopian future will be too crowded for that, for one, and technology has advanced too far.

Failure to manage the forces of global disorder, however, could lead to something even more forbidding—a New Dark Age. Accordingly, Section III identifies and elucidates key developments that are not only feeding into the long-term decline of the state but seem likely to create a major crisis of governance that could tip into the chaos of a New Dark Age. 

Particular attention is given to the inability of states to meet the x needs of their citizens, the persistence of alternative loyalties, the rise of transnational actors, urbanization and the emergence of alternatively governed spaces, and porous borders. These factors are likely to interact in ways that could lead to an abrupt, nonlinear shift from the New Middle Ages to the New Dark Age. 

This will be characterized by the spread of disorder from the zone of weak states and feral cities in the developing world to the countries of the developed world. When one adds the strains coming from global warming and environmental degradation, the diminution of cheaply available natural resources, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the challenges will be formidable and perhaps overwhelming. 

Order doesn't break down so much as it devolves.

States, having reached the zenith of their power in the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, are in a period of absolute decline. The challenges from contemporary globalization and other pressures are neither novel nor unique, but are more formidable than in the past— while the ability of states to respond effectively to these challenges is not what it was. 

In a sense, states are being overwhelmed by complexity, fragmentation, and demands that they are simply unable to meet. They are experiencing an unsettling diminution in their capacity to manage political, social, and economic problems that are increasingly interconnected, intractable, and volatile. States are also undergoing a relative decline, challenged in both overt and subtle ways by the emergence of alternative centers of power and authority.

The forces that are dissolving state authority are the forces that will replace it. Order, of one kind or another, is established eventually.
If you find yourself trapped in some Muslim-held canton of Europe in the future, you will submit to your dhimmitude, official or otherwise, if you can't get out. Police in Europe have already lost effective control over some neighborhoods. That doesn't mean there's no authority there. As this grows I expect eventually Muslims to gain control of official police duties in no-go zones, the white police having lost control of them, with subsequent problems issuing from them having a legally armed force.
Detroit and the black 'hood have provided America with some training for dystopia-they are in fact just that. If the US succumbs beneath the hordes, history will set our end as beginning with the black riots of the sixties.

Stateocentrism tends to blind its adherents to the democratization and diffusion of coercive power to these nonstate actors. This has more recently been evident, for example, in a growing tendency to dismiss 9/11 as simply a blip rather than an indicator of a major change in world politics.6 Skepticism of this kind about the terrorist threat is unlikely to be dispelled by anything less than another major attack on the U.S. homeland. Yet, even without such an attack, these stateocentric perspectives are increasingly tenuous. Transnational networks and forces of disorder are seriously redrawing the maps of the world—and the lines that demarcate nation-states are becoming increasingly notional, if not wholly fictional. At the same time power and authority are moving away from states to other actors. These trends must now be examined. 

You know what else is redrawing the maps of the world making borders "notional"? The European Union and powerful non-state allies such as George Soros, whose obsession with browning the West contributes as a necessary condition to most of the factors the author cites as "...mutually interlocking and reinforcing conditions which give [global politics] a neo-medieval quality":
"[m]ultiple or fragmented loyalties and identities";
"inequality or marginalization of groups";
"[t]he spread of geographical and social ‘no go areas’ where the rule of law no longer extends";
"[a] growing disarticulation between the dynamic and technologically innovative north and the south";
even "contested property rights, legal statutes, and conventions", of course, which is commensurate at least with the rise of autonomous slums and no go zones.

And only an incidental mention of immigration late in the paper.

Monday Night Alt Right

Livecast from last night talking about Hollywood's crisis, the Parkland Posse and the Cofnas thing.
Wherein the question is asked: "did Hollywood become pozzed in 1997"? I take a look at the films of that year and rate them according to their poz content and try to answer.

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Hooray for Hollywood's Demise

Political radicalization includes cultural radicalization, and just as we abandon old political institutions now seen as corrupted and hostile, we abandon similar cultural institutions.

What child of post WWII America would have thought he'd find himself rooting against Hollywood and the movies? Against football? Yet here we are. It's not just schadenfreude that makes this a feel-good news item:

Hollywood is suffering one of the worst domestic March downturns in its recent history, according to the latest comScore box office figures. By Sunday, the month’s total box office intake was approximately $722.5 million, a 27 percent fall compared to the same period last year, with releases such as Pacific Rim Uprising and Tomb Raider failing to bring in audiences relative to their large budgets.

The month’s figures have also been significantly boosted by carryover revenue from February’s Black Panther, which has generated in $200 million this month alone and since become the highest grossing superhero film in history.

Hollywood and Poz-land's all-hands on deck effort to promote Black Panther absorbed a lot of ticket dollars that would have went to other films. It of course generated much more of its own interest, which means this month's numbers would be worse if not for the remarkable push to promote Panther.

Great efforts at uplifting blacks distort our politics, the economy and the culture. Panther has had a negative effect on the industry as a whole, even if its studio is making a killing now:

“A reliance on one title — namely Black Panther — to do the heavy lifting while a host of newcomers over the past few weeks have faltered to one degree or another has resulted in a deficit situation that will take some time to reverse,” box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian of comScore told The Hollywood Reporter.

More, because, after all, we're at war.

More Cofnas, alas

Soapboxing with Luke Ford. Next Sunday is Passover, so we'll be back the following Sunday with a special guest.

Let's Fake a Deal

A lot of analysis or opinion in the media is a sort of veiled negotiation about what we the unwashed are allowed to believe.

That's the impression I get reading this New York Times piece from David Reich, acknowledging race realism while denouncing "racism" (which is arguably impossible):

Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

The negotiation begins with the concession that a previously obscured reality has come into light and new terms are required.

I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. 

I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

Is there another subject that is so deliberately hamstrung? The scientific method demands we ignore the social pressures on us, even the overwhelming pressure to avoid racism. A true scientist would come at the subject of human biology with a deliberate detachment, as if he was a spaceman descending on an alien scene.

But the fear of exposure has become palpable. Here the author frets over whatever discoveries may come, for fear they'll upset an increasingly delicate social construct holding race trivial. He even puts out the call for the "well-meaning" to prepare to refute these as of yet facts--to protect the status quo we must be ready, no matter how much it is contradicted by the challenge. Indeed, the more the status quo is challenged the more prepared we need to be whatever may come. It's astounding to me that the educated and intelligent class of people Reich represents don't see the absurdity in that "whatever" part. We are not to stand ready to accept the truth, but to repel it.

If Reich is representing liberal conventional wisdom here he could provide a mea culpa for its deliberate repression of this reality heretofore, but there's still no incentive for that. So the concession that the respectable have been wrong this whole time is coupled with the demand we do nothing about it, that we ignore any implications of it that might upset the worldview that, still, represses this reality.

The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

Acknowledging the reality of race while leaving the scare quotes around "race" is quite a contortion, but it's essentially what Reich wants us all to do.

Oy J

Travis LeBlanc at Counter Currents:

Recently, FOX aired a program entitled “O. J. Simpson: the Lost Confession.” The program showed clips from a 2006 interview where O. J. Simpson talks “hypothetically” about murdering his wife Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. The interview was originally intended to promote Simpson’s book If I Did It, his clumsy attempt to profit from his crimes without technically admitting to them. In between clips, FOX had assembled a panel of experts who offer horrified reactions to O. J.’s blunt confessions.

 The murders happened in 1994, about the time the first wave of political correctness was receding, and the old model of race relations promoting racial reconciliation rather than the current war of all against white was still in effect. All in all, the eighties appear as an innocent idyll compared to what we have now.
The trial and its result came as a shock to many if not most white Americans--specifically the obtuse and emotional way blacks reacted. At that time more white people had less experience with blacks than now; what they "knew" about them came mostly from television and film. The culture had carefully constructed this image of white and black as essentially the same and reconcilable. The vision and expectation was that we'd come together eventually, Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed sharing a soul-brother handshake before saving the world from the Russians, or whoever would take their place.

We didn't know we whites would take their place as the great global enemy.

The trial killed that optimist arc, or just revealed its falsity. What whites saw, though few of them would admit it then, and certainly no one with a microphone, was that blacks weren't interested in reconciliation and aren't really up to it intellectually or morally. Evidenced by the sight of a class of Howard law students erupting in cheers at the verdict--the best and brightest of black America were revealed as children with a mean streak and an utter lack of self awareness.

This reaction was universal in black America:



Counter Currents continues:

But what was mind-boggling for white Americans is how immune to evidence black Americans can be. The same New York Times article reported “The trial has had little effect on the public’s perception of Mr. Simpson’s guilt or innocence. In a Gallup Poll taken in July 1994, 62 percent of the adult Americans surveyed said the charges against Mr. Simpson were probably true and 21 percent said they were probably not true. In the recent CBS poll, 57 percent of those surveyed said Mr. Simpson was probably guilty and 18 percent said he probably not.” In other words, the more evidence of O. J. Simpson’s guilt blacks saw, the more convinced they became of his innocence.

Blacks' view is that equality is when rich and poor trade places, likewise, justice is when we trade places and they stick it to us for a while. Of course both operate on the fallacy that racism, personal and systemic, cause black poverty and criminality. We retain this convention with a Soviet-level of resistance to empirical, historical and logical evidence. Objectivity. It's a white thing. Whether a function of intelligence or just an innate behavioral characteristic of whites doesn't matter. Black Americans will never embrace true equality of opportunity or the equal dispensation of justice:

Either blacks honestly and genuinely believed that O. J. Simpson was innocent and/or being framed for the murder of his wife as part of a racist police conspiracy, in which case they were dumb. Or blacks secretly knew O. J. was guilty but professed a belief in his innocence out of tribal solidarity. If that were the case, that would make blacks liars. Try to think of another explanation that does require blacks being one of those two things. You can’t do it.

The trial came like a fire bell in the night, and we went back to sleep. Now here we are.

Six Degrees of Literally Hitler

So far the clampdown on right wing speech continues to expand, with virtually no resistance from elected officials, including the president.

Not only are platforms shutting down political content, the old-fashioned means of chilling speech through public shaming has become more aggressive. Guilt by association gets more invasive and tenuous at the same time guilt gets easier to acquire and alternative right wing views spread. The Narrative holds.

Guilt by association lands easier and harder when the association is "literally Hitler". Consciously or not the left now places a lot of energy on first identifying someone as beyond respectability, and then going out and picking off anyone who can be associated with him.

Thus, Vox calls out National Review for not applying the ideological scarlet letter to an article by the notorious Jason Richwine whose unearthed "Immigration and IQ" dissertation (PDF) got him fired from the Heritage Foundation:

On Monday night, the conservative magazine National Review published an article coming to the spirited defense of a University of Pennsylvania law professor who proclaimed that she had “rarely, rarely” seen a black student finish in the top half of her class. 

But the defense not only dramatically misrepresented what took place at Penn; it also neglected to include the author’s ties to that very same law professor, to the alt-right, and to his own racist views and past work for a website formerly run by white nationalist Richard Spencer.

Amy Wax testified to her personal experience teaching law:

During her remarks, Wax said, “Here’s a very inconvenient fact ... I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.” In his response, Ruger said that Wax’s views about black graduation rates at Penn were not factual.

We have a curious situation. Professor Wax is something like an accidental whistle blower. Ruger's response was comic: it's not true that few blacks graduate high because some do. Some reporters seem genuinely incapable of seeing the fallacy, but many must be silently accepting it. So a transparent fraud plays out with a wink. Note the mushy construct above: Wax's "views" (not her first-hand experience) aren't true or not, but "not factual". Graduation rates remain closely held, the first-hand account of a professor is refuted with what is almost certainly a lie and the professor is demoted for snitching.

Vox recounts the case against Richwine and, since we're talking about National Review, segues into, who else, John Derbyshire and his brilliant re-casting of the black slander that is known as "the Talk" about how to deal with dangerous white policemen.

Of course, there was a time when such views and background might have gotten one summarily removed from National Review (a publication for which I have written), which has long positioned itself as a leading conservative publication and was outspoken in its criticism of the white nationalist alt-right during the 2016 election.

In fact, that time was in 2012.

That’s when longtime National Review contributor John Derbyshire (a writer with a long, long history of racism who had even openly described himself as a “mild and tolerant” racist back in 2003) wrote a piece for the far-right outlet Taki’s Magazine titled “The Talk: Non-Black Version,” which one writer described as “kind of unbelievably racist.” In it, Derbyshire argued, among other things, that intelligent black Americans are “something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets.”
That’s because, he wrote:

The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

Somehow the Narrative holds, despite the point-and-sputter method's reliance on quoting verbatim ideas that sound eminently reasonable. Of course Vox is recounting an episode wherein National Review toed the line when editor Rich Lowry quickly cut loose Richwine. Not enough. With each new firing a new baseline is set; you're certainly not going to go out and hire someone now who's further right of someone you just fired, are you? Thus "progress" ratchets along.

Six years later, similar views are being espoused by another National Review contributor, who has previously written for a site dedicating to promoting the views of the alt-right and whose views were too extreme for the very conservative Heritage Foundation.

So Rich Lowry is called upon to be conistent:

I’ve reached out to Lowry, National Review’s editor-in-chief, and National Review Online editor Charles C.W. Cooke for comment and will update if I receive a response.

Social justice on the line, Mr Lowry.

Bush's War on its Quinceanera

Matt Taibbi on the Iraq War fifteen years on:

But that's not how our rulers sold the war to themselves. They weren't overcome with emotion, or some post-9/11 yearning for vengeance. They knew what they were doing.

The Iraq invasion, one of the great crimes of this or any age and destined to be a crossroads event in the history of America's decline, was instead a cold, calculated, opportunistic power grab, aimed as much at future targets, and even our own population, as at the Iraqi "enemy."

As citizens, we haven't started to reckon with any of this. We write it off rather than deal with it. In fact, when we think of Iraq at all, we often describe the invasion as a mistake. Embarrassingly, even I did this a few weeks back, talking about how we "blundered" into Iraq.

It's understandable. There are superficial plot elements from the Iraq narrative we lean on to soothe ourselves that the invasion was caused by an unlikely confluence of accidents and errors, not the inherent venality of our system.

The mainstream's embrace of Bush's absurd and criminal invasion of Iraq bears for me a striking resemblance to its embrace of "diversity" or the problem of "racism" or any other element of the poz. It's as if there's a silent agreement that no one will challenge the operating assumptions because the end goal has been successfully framed as a moral imperative.

Taibbi goes through the well-known litany of US invasions and abuses of weaker countries (which from this vantage looks like one long squandering of the remarkable power and wealth the US held relative to the rest of the world at the end of WWII). For him all roads lead to a right-wing impulse behind this. For me, now, they all lead to the Land of Poz, where militarism is now quartered, and I see the affinity between them in the similarity of their methods:

The consistent thread throughout all of these foreign policy losses was our relentless, stubborn belief that would have succeeded, if only we'd been allowed to use more force and violence.

Likewise, diversity and equality are only failing because we haven't tried hard enough. The Iraq War could only go on as long as people were willing to endure the cost and carnage. The Diversity War conceals its damage--indeed, recasts its negative effects, such as racial hatred, as proof of its necessity (like WMD)--and will go on.
For the time.

Luke Ford Interviews Richard Spencer Live

Luke Ford interviews Nathan Cofnas

Luke Ford interviews Nathan Cofnas, author of That Essay critiquing Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique.

Cofnas Confab

The Torah Trio on That Essay.

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Which Way, Whitey?

The Torah Trio talking about Cofnas' essay and the alt right's leadership quandary.
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We'll be talking more about Cofnas and the recent challenges to and within the alt right this Sunday at 9:00 AM Pacific.

Homeless and Hopeless

James LaFond has a brush with the future:

On my way into the supermarket today, I got to thinking about how the bottle return areas of large supermarkets remind me of what an ancient slave market might have looked like. The dregs of society, conquered and diseased, standing in line, awaiting an uncertain, but sure to be unkind future. The number of homeless seems to be growing exponentially, to such a point that, given the current trend, we’ll all be homeless one day.

Both the bottle return station--probably not as bad here as in his neighborhood, but inspiring the same feeling of dread--and the increase in homeless people are depressing realities here. Hobos crawl through downtown scavenging up recyclables along with anything else they can use at night, sometimes angrily leaving piles of garbage around dumpsters they've broken into. The trash cans on the street are locked in little cages so they won't be turned over. I've seen more than one homeless man furiously pulling and kicking away at one of these.

A little while later, as I walked back out to my car with half a cartload of groceries, I see someone sitting on the hood of my car. I’m a easy going type, so I cordially observe, “You’re on my car, dude.”

Like a flash, he hops off to face me, and I notice the hunting knife in his left hand. “So what about it, huh?” he inquired, while moving within a couple feet of me. His eyes tell me that he’s tweaked.
Wait a second. “What’s up Mike? I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.”

He smiles and tells me he lost them during the last snow storm. While we talk, he keeps the knife behind his back, blade pointed outward, tilting it back and forth, rocking on his heels, and craning his neck this way and that to get a better look at his surroundings.

“What’s with the knife?”, I ask.

It’s so motherfuckers know. Keep away! Danger! HaHa.”
His mental state has deteriorated since the last time I saw him. We used to be neighbors.

Mike’s in his late 40’s, and looks older. He talks with the sibilant “S” that is indicative of long term meth use. He’s become what I call a TOM. Tweaker On Mountainbike. I actually witnessed the moment he joined the ranks of the city’s homeless population.

In the late seventies PCP was introduced, and flowed into my Norwalk neighborhood by way of Compton. The drug is devastating, and long abuse left users with slurred speech. They became known as "mush heads" locally.

More homeless appear better outfitted with tents. They can pitch them right on the sidewalk overnight downtown. One remarkably elaborate construction, combining tarps, umbrellas and other things, last I checked, appears each night and is gone each morning on the same patch of sidewalk near a church.
A small encampment on a plot of land across from a church that feeds them will appear and grow, and then grow menacing, before being taken down by the police, and starting the cycle anew. The night belongs to the homeless in downtown Portland, and in the day they move about with visible frustration and difficulty, having to navigate the normies. Crazies walking down the middle of a boulevard mid-day are fairly common; people barely react.

The next political movement to challenge the status quo, whatever it is, will have to be some part therapeutic. It must seek to reclaim and heal some part of those lost to degeneracy, sloth and foolishness.
Won't be long til summer comes.

The Picture of Alice

The porch was a concrete block with steps formed into it and a visible tilt, or so I thought, like some chunk of brutalist architecture that had fallen out of the sky. It was about five by five feet. Young people were crowding there to smoke, despite the rain having lapsed into the faintest trace, with individual drops coming like random stragglers.

She stood on the corner of this grotesque pedestal facing me on the lawn below. She was a standing shadow shrouded in the halo from the bare porch light behind, a white trash Birth of Venus, and, I knew, no less beautiful behind the dark there, mercifully hidden from my searching eyes.

The outline of her hair was the only discernible, familiar thing about her--otherwise it could have been anyone there--but it was undeniably her. This minimalist sketch evoked the full light of memory, the memory of her still compiling that final version to take her place when she's gone, the dead thing to replace the living, the trace of her arc across my life, documented and filed away on paper already yellowing.

That was Alice up there on the porch, looking down on me with--what? I couldn't see. Was she talking? I couldn't tell. Was she talking to me? Was she smiling at me? Did she see me, finally? See my desire?

That was Alice, midway through her ruin, long after mine.

March or April 2017

Hillary's Legacy Meme

Via InfoWars, this is genius.
I just wish they'd included Hillary riding a nuke like a rodeo cowboy, a la Slim Pickens:


"Hey, what about Hillary?"
 Probably a copyright issue.

Luke in the Frame

Frame Games Radio opens this postmortem on his Warski appearance with a clip of Luke Ford expounding (to me) on the Warski phenomenon.

Vlad the Buzzkiller

Vladimir Putin lays into Megyn Kelly regarding foreign meddling in elections. Vlad puts on quite a show. Earlier, when Megyn is opening with the Russian hackers accusation, he's grunting and snorting like a bull in the chute. At some point you can see Ms Kelly gulp as he gores msm hypocrisy.

Striker v Kiker

Luke Ford talks to Eric Striker about Nathan Confas' critique of Kevin MacDonald.

Frame Games Radio on Warski

Video-auteur and friend of Luke Frame Games Radio is killing it on Warski.

Growing Pains

The current Hollywood sex abuse hysteria follows a pattern set in American universities during the first wave of political correctness in the late eighties and early nineties, wherein charges of sexual abuse by men are encouraged, accepted unquestioningly and quickly leveraged into some form of institutional loot--departments in colleges, board seats in the corporate world, parts in Hollywood.

Hollywood gets to come late to the appropriation phase of American history that it's been so very instrumental in bringing about. That is, it gets its turn now to be shaken down by the fringes, starting with the fringiest of all, actresses.

Therein lies part of the problem. Unlike universities, where captured tax dollars provide a haven for theorists who might starve in the gutter without them, Hollywood is a serious business about serious money and much closer to the sort of meritocracy it too has been denouncing as racist, patriarchal, etc.

The universities can endure, apparently, thousands of intellectual mediocrities, whereas Hollywood can't. The universities manage to get away with replacing solid academics with crap theory, but Hollywood is a business. You don't replace good directors with bad and get away with it for long. And there aren't enough female directors and producers to replace the voracious Harvey Weinsteins of the world.

So just who appropriates what and how remains a difficult question. At some point women might long for the quaint custom of the casting couch, and its relative simplicity.

The Hollywood Reporter:

A leaderless group "became a brand overnight," say insiders, but the anti-harassment crusade now seeks structure and a real leader amid skepticism about CAA's role and "movie star cliquey" meetings. On March 1, members of the Time's Up anti-harassment organization met the media to deliver a 60-day progress report on its campaign for "basic fairness in the workplace," as Bad Robot co-CEO Katie McGrath put it.

The timing was right. Hollywood being what it is, and people being what they are, there has been speculation and some suspicion about where Time's Up came from, who gets to participate in the group and what its priorities are. At the meeting with the press, A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay assured that even though Time's Up "started so splashy on the red carpet, there's real work being done."

 Ava DuVernay is going to want some of that Time's Up largess after her weird-looking Oprah film fails.

 Some of the distrust around Time's Up can be traced to its beginnings in late 2017 in the crisis atmosphere that prevailed after accusations against Harvey Weinstein became public. Early meetings took place at CAA, with the agency's chief innovation officer Michelle Kydd Lee and agents Maha Dakhil, Hylda Queally and Christy Haubegger among the founders. When certain A-list actresses (such as Kristen Stewart and Emma Stone) and major players repped at other agencies (such as Shonda Rhimes, handled by ICM Partners) were invited to meetings while their agents were not, some suspected that CAA might use the gatherings to try to poach clients. "There are people cynical enough to say it's about getting Shonda," says a producer who is a member of the organization.

The great unappreciated irony of Hollywood's self-inflicted sexual hysteria is that it's hard to imagine it without the Pussy Hat protests against Trump. Weinstein's exposure was like ripping a hull in Hollywood's side in this increased pressure. Further irony in that Trump was boasting of celebrity sexual advantage and speaking frankly of a system most working Hollywood women were as complicit of or indifferent to as similarly situated male colleagues--who generally don't have the opportunity to trade on sex if they desire.

Mighty interesting times.

Optics and Exposed Cleavage

Luke and I talk about alt right feuds, "optics" and stuff.

Learning from Higher Learning

The ground for Hollywood's current sex hysteria was being laid decades ago in higher education, where, like Hollywood, rampant messy sex presented feminists first with a crisis, and then with an opportunity: to leverage sexual abuse accusations into the loot of professorships and programs. So far the crisis it presents, to feminist theory, which no one cares about, even the feminists, has been no barrier whatsoever to that.

The very real crisis for young women wading into this sexual chaos is likewise ignored. But, give the feminists credit, they are trying, unaware, to bring sex back under control.

At least the universities once promoted moral virtue; Hollywood not so much. So the specter of that beast consuming itself in this fashion makes me think this is feminism's inevitable end every time, hectoring impotently the sexual abandon it continually produces. But the pattern in Hollywood follows that set in the schools and boardrooms, where charges are quickly converted into seats or sinecures.

So if this practice migrated out of the same place as critical theory it's only fitting that the prosecution of individual assault accusations should migrate out of the university and into the courts where they belong, where accusations have to meet some burden of proof.

From the New York Times:

A Yale student who had been suspended by the university was found not guilty on Wednesday of sexually assaulting a fellow student, in a rare college rape accusation to be tried in the courts. The verdict laid bare seemingly gaping divides in the national reckoning around sexual consent and assault.

Those "seemingly gaping divides" are between higher ed's guilty-until-proven-innocent model and due process, of course, and probably don't indicate a true divide in public opinion. Even the dependably liberal readers of the NYT were skeptical of the article's (naturally) bias for the prosecution.

Over several grueling days on the witness stand in a New Haven courtroom, the woman described what she said was her rape by the accused student, Saifullah Khan, 25, on Halloween night 2015. The testimony, in open court, offered a glimpse into the kinds of encounters that are more often described behind closed doors, to university panels or among friends.

Indeed. Any rape allegation on campus should be treated like a rape allegation off campus; it should be reported immediately to police. Real police.
How is it universities aren't required to report serious sexual assault allegations to police immediately any way? Because they're not providing due process in the first place? How do they get away with that?

That the trial was happening at all was already noteworthy. Statistics on how many college rape cases go to trial are elusive, but experts agree that the number is exceedingly low; the Department of Justice estimates that between 4 percent and 20 percent of female college students who are raped report the attack to law enforcement.
But unfolding as it did in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the fierce, unresolved debate over whether campus rape cases are best handled by universities or law enforcement, Mr. Khan’s trial also took on political significance, with defense lawyers accusing Yale of making Mr. Khan a scapegoat for its own poor handling of previous sexual assault claims. Representatives from Families Advocating for Campus Equality, a group that has criticized university hearing processes as skewed in favor of accusers, attended the trial in support of Mr. Khan.
In an interview after the verdict, Norman Pattis, a lawyer for Mr. Khan, said he had tried to challenge “the outer limits of the #MeToo movement,” which he called “a form of mass hysteria.”
“Sex happens, especially on college campuses,” he said.
After a two-week trial, the six-member jury deliberated for about three hours before returning a verdict. In an interview afterward, a juror, Diane Urbano, said the #MeToo movement had not figured in the panel’s decision.
“It was not part of the case,” she said. “We put it aside.”
Instead, she said, they considered the evidence. “There was sufficient doubt on every charge,” she continued. “So we came to the verdict we did.”

Luke Ford's Torah Talk Live with Frame Games Radio

Frame Games Radio

Babylonian Hebrew

Frame Game Radio on Torah Talk

Joining us tomorrow on Luke Ford's Torah Talk Live is the video-auteur behind Frame Game Radio on YouTube and Twitter.

9 AM Pacific, noon on the East Coast. Go to Luke's channel, join the chat to ask us questions. Subscribe while you're there. We're getting more viewers all the time and the chat is occasionally brilliant, like the show.

FG's remarkable video on a favorite theme of mine--the betrayal of the Boomers by the Narrative--should be required viewing for everyone over a certain age, or for anyone wondering what it feels like to have come of age before the Poz Age:



Blame the Boomers all you want, but know that they were deceived and betrayed. Being older still myself, I can recall an America that went to the moon and celebrated Daniel Boone as clearly as I can see the present through the film of my tears.
Here's FG on the Megaphone and us.





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Tonight in Bloodsports

Scottish white nationalist Mark Collett versus alt right fighter Halsey English was tonight's matchup. Luke interviewed Halsey a bit after (Luke and I chat some beforehand):

Racial Communism

Frame Game Radio on the current clampdown.

Before the alt right and this new paradigm, whatever it is, words like "Nazi" and "communist" had already lost some meaning to overuse, so a phrase like "racial communism" now might not get the credit it deserves. It's not just that the racial identity politics of the present are analagous to communism, but that they're becoming a variant of it. Wealth is deliberately redistributed along racial lines, and that becomes more and more central to the Democratic Party's existence.

It's probably inevitable for any welfare state experiencing demographic diversification that incidentally racial redistribution eventually becomes explicitly racial redistribution. That's why Obamacare was openly touted by some as a "civil rights" measure: it's a redistribution of white to non-white wealth.

Much of that redistribution is effected by an enthusiastic private sector going well beyond government's mandate, and the two are bound by Current Year culture that makes the present in America if not full racial communism just yet (which would be, oh, South Africa say) at least a soft racial socialism. And that's bad enough.