I forget who said “History is but the biographies of great men,” but I largely agree with it. If you add the modifier “or the lack thereof,” I’m all but 100% on board. So many crises were only handled because a Great Man stepped up to the plate… and all of those crises became crises, almost universally, because there wasn’t some Great Man around to deal with them before they blew up. I don’t want to get lost on a tangent here, so I’ll simply mention Roman history, which is littered with both Great Men, and crises which fell to Mediocre Men by default. Study the latter.

But that’s the thing, here in our new GloboHomo world: Are Great Men even possible anymore? How would we even go about starting to identify a Leader, and, once identified, what is there for him to do?

There are two huge countervailing trends here in Clown World. The first is automation. We all know about the SS Dumbass stuck in the Suez, and I’m sure everyone has heard the saga of the Boeing 737, so let’s not belabor it. It’s sufficient to point out that pretty much everything, everywhere, is all-in on automation, and the trend is increasing. To take just one small example: thanks to the combo of Kung Flu and the totally legitimate, not at all fraudulent Cloward-Pivenite in the White House, fast food will be all-robotic within a decade. The only entry-level career in “food service” will be the guy who goes from store to store, lubing the robots’ ball bearings.

Against this, communication speed allows for ever-increasing micromanagement. Again, consider fast food. McDonald’s is set up in a very neat cellular structure that was perfect for the early 1950s, when the whole “franchise” concept really took off.* Most of the tasks are routinized, the org chart is clearly defined, and the areas of responsibility don’t overlap at all. I don’t know for sure, but I’d wager long money that before the bloat-for-bloat’s-sake ethos of the 1980s, the Mickey D’s home office was about twenty guys, all “regional director” types. The higher-ups would strategize regionally or globally, while the lower-tier guys were basically quality control, making sure everything remained standard worldwide. Everything else was left to the franchisees, but they had the training and structure to handle their own areas of responsibility.

Here again, I don’t know — not being an employee of the Golden Arches — but I’d bet even longer money that McD’s now has a zillion middle managers who don’t do anything but monkey in the day-to-day operations of individual franchises, simply because they can, and can’t figure out anything better to do with their time to justify their paychecks. If you want an example that definitely happened, look no further than the Bin Laden raid. The whole point of a special forces team is to operate independently — so much of the godawful stuff they do to their candidates is specifically designed to measure their ability to function independently when the pressure’s on — but Obama was there in the war room, watching the whole thing unfold…

…and monkeying around with the mission right up to the very end. Now, I’m willing to believe the very worst about the Kenyan Communist, but even I can’t imagine he believes his own bullshit enough to think he knows anything about running a commando raid. He wasn’t there to “help” the SEALs complete the mission; he was on the horn because, in his tiny little mind, that’s just what Presidents do. They make decisions, even when they know nothing about anything; even when everything is specifically designed to run without them making decisions.

See what I mean? You’ve got middle managers increasingly trying to micromanage systems that are increasingly automated. Worse than that, the middle mangers themselves are part of a micromanagement feedback loop. Worse, because the middle managers can’t be automated, because they don’t really do anything in the first place… but consider what happens when something unexpected pops up, something outside the Policies and Procedures manual. If the robots can’t handle it, the organization’s cellular structure kicks in, booting the decision to the next higher up. But they don’t know what to do, because all they’ve ever done is micromanage robots. So they kick it up the chain, and half the time the next higher up kicks it back down the chain, because hey, look, the P&P manual says this kind of thing is supposed to be handled at the district-manager level….

After the two micro-managing middle managers go back and forth with each other for a while, they kick it one level further up the chain, and now it’s really a problem, because by this point everyone is outside their wheelhouse. How do you deal with that? Worse, what happens when the original problem had to do with the automated systems themselves, as in the case of the Boeing 737? The problem isn’t (or isn’t just) the doohickey malfunctioning, or that the doodad isn’t properly interfacing with the gizmo. All of those are, theoretically, just engineering problems that can be solved with more engineering. The problem is that there are some things that simply can’t be automated…

…but who’s going to make that decision, especially when the entire corporate ethos — from recruiting to training to promotion — is, itself, almost entirely automated?

[Hey, hold up a sec. I know you’re tempted to stop reading at this point and jump into the comments, to tell me that the real problem with the 737 is that Boeing is Committed to Diversity(TM), such that the entire management is full of powerskirts and dindus, and all the actual engineering has been outsourced to Bangladesh. I know, and that’s exactly what I mean when I say that everything about the company has been automated. Their personnel decisions are on autopilot, too].

What’s needed in this situation is leadership, real leadership, and there’s simply no way anyone, even the most natural Napoleon, could step up and provide it, because he’s been automated out of existence. Leadership isn’t just “making a decision.” It entails understanding the situation, and if you’ve been following me — and I know I’m not expressing myself very well this morning — you’ll see that “understanding the situation” is literally impossible for micro-managers who came up via automation. To return to the Bin Laden raid for a second: what if it had gone wrong? What could Barky really DO in that situation?

He can’t scrub the mission – they’ve already breached the compound. He can’t assume tactical command — knowing him, that’s exactly what he’d try to do, but the SEAL team leader would simply turn off his radio. Imagine poor Hussein, running around the war room with his dress over his head, squealing out “orders” that the men on the ground couldn’t possibly comply with, even if they could hear him, which they can’t.

The point of this long exercise, y’all, is that in the state of inertia in which we find ourselves, it doesn’t have to be anything dramatic to set off the collapse. I don’t deny that there are real actors with real plans doing their thing in Washington, though we peons of course have no idea who any of them are. The problem is, all those nameless, faceless somebodies owe a lot of their success to automated systems, and — much worse — all their unknown schemes rely on systems running completely on autopilot. One power shortage, and you’ve got a huge container ship stuck in the Suez. One unexpected gust of wind mid-flight, and you’ve got a giant aircraft splattering itself all over a mountainside.

Even tiny, minor, seemingly inconsequential things can set off huge problems, because not only can the automated systems not handle them, but the human “backups” to the automated systems are, themselves, automated systems. How would a potential Leader even know where to intervene?

*The history of fast food really is fascinating. You could spend a long time down the Wiki rabbit hole that way. Check the history of McD’s, for instance, and you’ll see that it got started by two guys who learned the tricks of the trade from White Castle — yeah, the slider guys. Clicking on that link, you’ll see what an innovative operation White Castle was, with its own internal house magazine and everything. It seems that White Castle was the Xerox of its day — it had all the cool shit that would enable later companies to get huge and dominate their markets, but they never could figure out what to do with it.**

**Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) had optical mice, graphical user interfaces, etc. as early as the mid-1960s, if I recall correctly. Their R&D was second to none, but the marketing boys really fell on their faces.

Some exempla (because we’re just that highfalutin around here) that didn’t fit into the previous post, in case you need or want them:

“[A] vibrant and expanding content universe.” According to The AV Club, that’s a statement from an official press release by AMC Studios, the big media conglomerate behind the tv show The Walking Dead, which is somehow still on the air, and does everyone see what I mean? The reviewers rightly mock this abominable corporate-speak, but that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about — by mocking the suits, the reviewers (and by extension we, the viewers) think they have agency. Hahaha, look at those MBA-tards! And yet, you still watch the show.

The proper response to a phrase like “a vibrant and expanding content universe” is to throw your tv out the nearest window. The only sane thing to do, upon learning that this summer’s biggest blockbuster is going to be Iron Man vs. Thor, Part 7: And This Time, Darth Vader is a Girl!!! is join a monastery. I’ve given this a lot of thought — way, way too much thought for a guy who doesn’t watch tv and hasn’t seen a movie in years — and I’ve concluded that the real reason they keep “gender-swapping” franchise characters is, quite simply, that they can’t think of anything else to do. Yeah yeah, it’s an insult to the Normies, and that’s great and all, but again, this is the equivalent of giving the grade school kid a gold star and telling xzheym xhey’re a good organism — it gives an illusion of agency to learned helplessness.

Moviemaking, like sailing a giant container ship through the Suez, is one of those things that can be put on autopilot for 99% of the journey. The most striking thing about any “true Hollywood story” is that it’s a teeny tiny world, where all the same people do all the same things over and over again, like clockwork. For instance, I recently read a guy’s tale of life as a roadie. Not “a roadie for [band X],” because he wasn’t — he spent a lot of time on [band X’s] tour, yeah, and by the middle of the book he’s talking about what good friends he is with [famous frontman], but then the tour ends, and he goes to work for *NSYNC.

No, really — [band X] was the kind of hard-rockin’ outfit that opens for Metallica and regularly loses key personnel to heroin overdoses, and this cat loved being part of that show, but without a second’s hesitation he signs on with a fucking boy band, because that’s just what roadies do. That’s the show; that’s the life; and running a stage for five flouncing prettyboys and their battalion of backup dancers is no different than running a stage for the Collapsed Veins Quartet. And hey, speaking of Metallica, have y’all seen Some Kind of Monster yet? If you have, you’ll recall the scene where they audition for a new bass player. He doesn’t end up getting the gig, but the band happily jams out with a guy whose main touring credit is listed as “Alanis Morissette.” He’s a long-haired, tatted-up dirtball, just like Metallica, because they’re all like that. It’s just the life.

That’s the “99% on autopilot” stuff. I truly would not be surprised to learn that most movie scripts are literally written by computer, and that “screenwriting” credits these days work like “songwriting” credits used to (and perhaps still do) work in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third,” because that’s how producers funnel money to their lackeys and butt boys. Did anyone actually even greenlight Wonder Woman vs. Spiderman 4: James Bond’s Revenge, or did it just kinda happen, because the machine keeps on rolling? Again, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was the latter, and the “gender swapping” is just a way for the “producers” to feel like they’re actually doing something.

So too with The Walking Dead and its “vibrant and expanding content universe.” The machine squirted out a script, and the execs just plugged in “properties” to make it work. Those spinoffs could’ve easily been filled with “characters” from The Golden Girls as easily as The Walking Dead. It’s just the system.

Last one: Here’s the top fiction bestsellers from 2020, according to the New York Times (according to Wikipedia). Being the highbrow that I am, I haven’t read a “fiction bestseller” this entire century, and even I recognize 90% of those names… and the ones I don’t, like Delia Owens, are obvious products of the Oprah’s Book Club hype machine, soon to disappear down the memory hole with Elizabeth Wurtzel and Charles Frazier and the rest of the MFA wunderkinden whose second-person, present-tense quirkfests now go for a buck fifty used on Amazon. John Grisham! James Patterson! (I thought he was dead). Nora Roberts! J.D. Robb! Danielle Steele, for Christ’s sake, and I honestly thought she was a hologram. Would you truly be surprised to learn that these were all written by computer, too?

The other day I went to cancel my gym membership.

By “went” of course I mean “logged on,” since my state governor, though not one of the high priestesses of the Church of COVID like Gavin Newsom, is still angling for a slot in Tha PrezzyDizzle’s third term. I’m sure online yoga and whatnot work great for some people, but there’s no such thing as “Zoom curls” or “virtual bench press” and I’m not gearing up in a goddamn hazmat suit just to hit the weight rack.

It was an eye-opening experience. I’ve had an easier time assembling IKEA kits using the Swahili instructions. This went way beyond incompetent website design; this was active malice.

Which makes sense given the “villain decay” we talked about yesterday, I guess. Just as Spotify, Pandora, etc., seem to have decided that they can annoy you into subscribing to their premium service, Globo Gym evidently believes that if they just make cancelling your membership enough of a chore, you’ll give up and keep paying them $100 a month for the privilege of not working out there.

And I hate to say it, but they’re probably right, at least in the short term, if for no other reason than every other institution in this pathetic excuse for a “nation” has bet the farm on the same business model. They’ve worked very hard to set up a world in which “not doing anything” is far, far easier than “doing something.”

It starts in grade school. In his very interesting memoir The Molding of Communists — get yours before it’s banned — Frank Meyer discusses his time as a “cadre,” one of the hardcore infiltrators. Being a smart guy eager to flex his intellectual muscles, very early on he tried doing some “theoretical” work and got his ass kicked by the higher-ups. Never do that, the bosses told him. You can’t write a single page without committing some kind of deviation; leave the “theorizing” to the experts…

…by which was meant: the guys more wired into Moscow, the keepers of the official Party Line. Since the Party Line changed unpredictably, without warning (except to the very, very clued-in), “deviations” were inevitable for anyone aiming above his station. Some of these Party Line changes were just politics — e.g. the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — but lots of them weren’t. Stalin was an evil genius, and one of his best tricks was to suddenly flip the Party Line every now and again, seemingly just for shits and giggles. This induced learned helplessness in his slaves. Note that Wiki finds a way to quote the CIA — as if Commie torturers, especially the Chinese, didn’t write the book on this stuff (get it before it’s banned!) — but whatever, please note:

learned helplessness is characterized as “apathy” which may result from prolonged use of coercive techniques which result in a “debility-dependency-dread” state in the subject, “If the debility-dependency-dread state is unduly prolonged, however, the arrestee may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him.”

“A defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him” is a perfect description for life in the USSR, 1917-1991, and if you know anyone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, you can still see the scars. You don’t have to torture a guy to induce learned helplessness, though. Indeed, the best “defensive apathy” is the kind where the “arrestee” thinks he’s neither defensive nor apathetic. So what you do is, you change the catechism without warning, Stalin-style, between iterations of the same standardized test.

Since it’s an issue I’ve had a lot of experience with (anecdotal experience, you goofs, get your minds out of the gutter), let’s talk homosexuality as an example. If you remember the 1990s, the One True Way to be Gay back then was to have as much anonymous unprotected sex as possible. The merest suggestion that settling down into a committed relationship might have some benefits was a hate crime. And then… suddenly…. just like that…. “gay marriage” was all the rage, and it was now a hate crime to suggest that all gay men everywhere might not want to settle down in the suburbs to raise lhasa apsos together. See what I mean? If you don’t want to get in trouble with the Lavender Mob, the best thing to do is just avoid the subject entirely.

Take that down the line, for every item of the SJW catechism, and you’ve got No Child Left Behind. The good students are the ones who can parrot today’s catechism flawlessly. The best students, the ones who get the scholarships to the Ivy Leagues, are the ones who can not only parrot it flawlessly, but who can, Khrushchev-style, anticipate the changes and get out in front of them. In their minds, they’re neither defensive nor apathetic — no no, they’re good little boys and girls (or whatever they identify as today). Be sure to post your gold stars on all your social media accounts!!

Alas for the world, they actually are defensive and apathetic, as you can prove to your heart’s content by merely suggesting that they turn the fucking phone off. Even older folks, who should damn well know better, will start giving you every excuse in the book. What if an important client calls? What if one of my grandkids is attacked by a bear?

“Well, ok then,” should be your reply. “Then just uninstall Facebook and Twitter.”

Go ahead. Watch what happens.

And that’s grownups. Try that with a kid — meaning, these days, anyone under the age of 35 — and they’ll look at you the way your dog would if you asked it to factor quadratics. Arf? Woof? It just doesn’t compute.

Which suits the Powers That Be just fine, but the problem with betting the farm on this state of affairs continuing indefinitely should be obvious. Consider Nuke1776’s analysis of what happened to that cargo ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal. Nothing seems simpler than sailing a giant-ass ship in a straight line, but it’s actually a very complex endeavor that requires a lot of systems working in perfect sync… or it requires a lot of quick-thinking people with real knowledge making correct decisions on the fly. The crew of the SS Clown World decided to roll the dice and just assume that everything was hunky-dory, because hey, why not? When has a complicated electronic doohickey that requires constant maintenance by highly trained technicians ever failed in a critical spot before?

Some systems have a lot of “give” in them — a lot of redundancy, wide margins of error. Some have very little. Some are so huge and complex that we can’t even guess as to how much “give” they might have. I’d say that “society” falls into that latter category, but we seem determined to find out. There’s nothing like installing an obvious dementia patient as our totally legitimate, not at all fraudulent “president” to signal to the world that you’ve decided to say fuck it and just roll the dice, assuming everything’s hunky dory because as some Dead White Guy once said, objects in motion tend to stay in motion….

…unless something something something, oh who remembers, I’m sure it’s fine, and anyway physics be rayciss, yo. Inertia for the win. What could possibly go wrong?

Take it from people who watch way too much tv — after a while, even the most brilliant villains get stupid:

[Villain Decay is] the process by which a villain who is extremely scary on first appearance becomes a joke after a few more appearances.

In most shows, Failure Is the Only Option for the Villains, because success would mean that the villains Take Over the World, kill or imprison all the good guys, and otherwise do things that make future episodes impossible. However, this eventually results in a Foregone Conclusion and a predictable plot, since it makes the audience wonder why The Hero is so concerned about an enemy that they’ve beaten six times already.*

Here again, as with my 1500 words on Boss Hogg, below, I realize that tv is too fluffy to hold up discussions as heavy as the current world-historical crisis requires, but I think it was Averroes who said that all approaches to truth are valid so long as they’re pitched to the hearers’ level of understanding, and… you know what? I’m just rolling with it. Check back next week; I’m sure I’ll have more highfalutin’ stuff then.

Anyway, Villain Decay: Anyone who has spent ten seconds contemplating the Stalinism for Idiots our ruling caste is trying to impose on us must have noted that these people are catastrophic screw-ups. That’s not to say they’re not dangerous — they are, absolutely, and they will kill you if given the chance — but they’re also feckless incompetents of the first water. Say what you will about Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky (to say nothing of a thousand lesser lights), they were smart guys who played for keeps. They learned politics in the hardest school — the Okhrana might’ve been bush league, but the Bolsheviks’ intra-party fights were all-star.

When a Bolshevik screwed up, in other words, it was because he was committing a category error. No one can make Communism work, because it’s antithetical to human nature and basic physical reality. The Commies’ unforced errors, then, were strategic. Tactically, they usually performed well, and often brilliantly.

Our Neo-Stalinists — let’s call them, provisionally, the Stolenists — are obviously not like that. I’d love to say that their errors are both tactical and strategic, and hell, maybe they are, but the sad truth is: I can’t figure out what the fuck they’re doing. And that’s why “Villain Decay” is the best I can do to describe them. I mean, all previous revolutionaries — Bolsheviks, Nazis, the Jacobins, pick one or all of them — were equally hateful, equally bloodthirsty, equally committed to the idea that everything before them was one long catalog of error. But they had an actual ideology, such that you could sort their mistakes, and even to some extent predict what they’d do, or at least the kind of thing they’d try to do.

This crew, though? These murderous carny folk? I have no idea. Most people in Our Thing would say that they do have an animating ideology — anti-White racism (henceforth, AWR) — but while they certainly do hate White people, the key fact is that the worst ones are themselves White. And not just any White, but uber-White — products of two-parent homes in the suburbs, who aced all the standardized tests and went to all the right schools, where they got all the right degrees. In other words, their cursus honorum, the only thing that gives their life meaning, is the very same thing they say is the most saturated with hateful Whiteness.

And they don’t give themselves a pass for it, the way the Bolshies did, by being a “vanguard party.” The only time you’d hear a Bolshie admitting he’d made doctrinal errors was at his show trial, i.e. about ten minutes before he was taken to the Lubyanka’s basement and shot in the back of the head. Our Stolenists routinely abase themselves in public. No one carries on more theatrically about how “White supremacist” higher ed is, for instance, than a university president. That Robin DeAngelo twat is whiter than Vanilla Ice climbing the Matterhorn, and so forth. Tom Sowell once wrote a book subtitled Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. That was 1995, and a quarter century later we’re up to self-loathing as a basis for social policy. It’s pure, shit-flinging nihilism — our rulers hate that which they rule only slightly less than they hate themselves.

And it’s not just politicians who suffer from Villain Decay. I listen to lots of music on my commutes, and around the house. I used to listen to that music on streaming services like Spotify or Pandora. But now those services are so junked up with ads, I’m going to have to go back to the old fashioned way, downloading them Joe Biden style — you know, totally legitimately and legally, with no fraud whatsoever. And it’s not just any old ads, comrades. Of the ads you hear once every two or three songs — and it really IS that bad, at least during peak listening hours — more than half of them are the service itself begging me to “go premium,” in order to get away from the ads.

See what I mean? They’ve decided that they’re going to annoy me into paying for their service. I mean, it’s not like I can just turn the fucking thing off or anything…. right?**

And so it goes, even with huge corporations. You’ve probably heard that there’s a ship wedged sideways in the Suez Canal. Maybe ex-Navy man Nuke1776 can enlighten us on this point, but I’m pretty sure most seamen back in the days could tell when they were sailing fucking SIDEWAYS. Alas, GloboHomoCorp, being #Woke, has to hire the kind of captain who doesn’t know his port from his starboard. Pick any business above mom-and-pop size — it’s 100:1 that “moving product” is way, waaaay down on their list of corporate concerns . Of course, you can’t pick a mom-and-pop business, since the Kung Flu has killed them all, and do you see what I mean?

Since we started with tv, we might as well end there, too:

Villains who have gone through this process usually have three possible outcomes.

1. They can begin the transition to Anti-Hero or Villain Protagonist, as did Warcraft’s Orcs, and Star Trek’s Borg ultimately did in isolated examples.
2. They can become a Butt-Monkey or source of cheap comedy.
3. They can be retired from use completely.

I’m hoping for #3, obviously, and while I’d definitely characterize the totally legitimate, not in any way fraudulent Biden administration as a source of comedy, it’s a very, very expensive source, both in treasure and — soon enough — in blood. It’s the “anti hero” or “villain protagonist” stuff that gets me, though. As narcissists, they all obviously believe themselves to be the star of their own movie… but what’s the movie about? We’ve never seen a “revolution,” for lack of a better term, from above before. We’ve certainly never seen one where we can’t even tell who the revolutionaries are, much less what set of beliefs might be motivating them.

It doesn’t work on television, but I suppose there’s a fourth option for a rapidly decaying villain: He finishes decaying. It all falls apart through sheer stupidity, because the competent ones — even the competent revolutionaries — are simply overwhelmed by the incompetent flailing of the idiots “in charge.” Looking at the Stolinists, I ask myself who’s really in charge, and what do they really want. As it stands, I’m forced to conclude that the answers are “nobody” and “nothing.” Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

*n.b. the odd capitalization is [sic]; they refer to hyperlinks I have removed as unnecessary.

**Even “conservatives” fall victim to this. I used to go to Ace of Spades a lot, to see what the NormieCons were freaking out about today. I can still do it on a desktop, but the site is so kludged with ads, embedded videos, etc., that it crashes my phone and tablet. No big loss, I guess — be sure to vote harder, guys! vote harder!!! — but still sad.

Much like the mushy brain of our totally legitimate, not at all fraudulent “president,” Zhou Bai-den, today’s Elite knows they’re supposed to be there — wherever “there” is — but have no idea why.

Back in late 2015 or thereabouts, I opined that while a Hillary Clinton presidency wasn’t ideal, America could survive it, since Hillary at least had some idea why she wanted to be president other than “it’s my turn.”*  Those reasons never rose above the pecuniary, and of course she would’ve gotten eaten alive by the real sharks out there, but her astounding venality at least made her predictable. As a politician, she was Boss Hogg — she should’ve topped out as a county comptroller back in Toad Suck, Arkansas, but The Swamp has long experience working around the Peter Principle. “Incompetent but predictable” is often the very best we can hope for in a mass democracy. Have you noticed?

Alas for us — and y’all, I’m really starting to think “alas” is the right word — we got Trump, which got us, totally legitimately and not at all via massive and bum-rammingly obvious voter fraud, Joey Cabbage. That’s like putting Roscoe P. Coltrane in the big chair.

I realize that I’ve got a lot of overseas readers — howdy, guys, and would you mind checking in? I’m worried about y’all, seeing as how you’re somehow going even more insane about Kung Flu these days than we are — so here’s a brief recap from the (unintentionally) hilarious wiki entry:**

Rosco’s mentality is that of a clumsy, somewhat slow-witted buffoon. He speaks often with a childish vernacular and repeats his favorite catchphrases constantly…. One aspect of Rosco’s personality that was well-loved and became synonymous with him was a choppy and excited chuckle that was produced from the back of the throat (“Kew-kew-kew-kew!”) and became one of the most recognizable aspects of the character…He is easily excitable and genuinely enjoys law enforcement, especially chasing criminals, which he refers to as “hot pursuit”.

More importantly, Roscoe is more of a hindrance to the aforementioned Boss Hogg than even them Duke boys, since the Boss has to rely on Roscoe to carry out vital tasks and Roscoe, being dumb, excitable, and — worst — prone to independent “thought,” always cocks them up.

I realize this is putting way too much weight on a goofy tv show from the Seventies, but that’s the only realistic thing about The Dukes of Hazzard — the fact that guys like this used to know their place. Even Boss Hogg’s big schemes are penny-ante — he wants to sell the Duke boys’ farm to a crooked developer from the city who’s going to put in a mini-mall or something. We never see them — again, because this is one of the most “Seventies” of Seventies tv shows, which is really saying something — but there’s a whole informal, but very real, infrastructure above Boss Hogg making sure his fat little fingers never stray beyond Hazzard County.

That used to be SOP in America, and everyone, most importantly including Boss Hogg himself, knew it and was ok with it. Indeed, a guy like Hogg knew it so well — and had enough going on upstairs — that he’d take himself out of contention if his name ever came up in a bigger league (since we’re doing fiction here, I suggest consulting the novel All the King’s Men for an example of what happens when a guy isn’t smart enough to figure out that he belongs in the minors). He’d live and die as the big cheese of Hazzard County; leaving the local party machine in the hands of his son Cletus was his loftiest long-term ambition.

This is not to say that Bogg Hogg was a good guy (and yes, I know this is getting a bit embarrassing, but stick with me). He wasn’t; he was as venal as they come. But that’s just it — he knew his lane and stayed in it. His reach did not exceed his grasp, because he understood that the lifestyle he wanted was there for the taking, provided he aimed no higher. Unlike Joe Biden, he knew where he was, he knew why he was there, and he knew what to do with that information.

Our modern Elite, by contrast, doesn’t know any of that. Follow any of their careers; read their CVs. They have no idea what they’re doing, and I don’t mean that as a slam on their “policies.” They’re true apparatchiks, in the full Soviet sense of that word — they go from Third Assistant Kommissar for Grain Procurement at Khabrovsk, to Second Assistant Kommissar for Quality Control at the People’s tractor factory in Vladivostok, to First Assistant Deputy Kommissar’s Assistant at the Office of the Five Year Plan in Magnitogorsk, because that’s the next-higher slot that happened to come open when it was time for them to move up.

They don’t know squat about any of that stuff, but it doesn’t matter — they’re connected, so they can’t be shuffled off into some kind of permanent make-work job.*** Nor will they voluntarily step aside when their name comes up. Why should they? They’re connected. They went to all the right schools, checked all the right boxes, aced all the standardized tests. If that doesn’t qualify you for anything and everything, what does? Whether you’re Sheriff of Hazard County or Foreign Secretary, you’ve got your dog-eared copy of Marx and Engels tucked under your arm, and that’s all you could ever possibly need, comrade.

To circle all the way back, Boss Hogg would step aside if his name came up, but Roscoe P. Coltrane wouldn’t, because he’s too stupid to know better. Hell, you could make that guy president, and not only would he take the job, he’d think he was doing terrific at it, even when his patrol car ended up in a pond again.

This stuff matters, y’all, because Roscoe is everywhere. It’s not just our beloved, totally legitimate leader, Joey Cabbage. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Bill Gates… they don’t know what they don’t know, and they’re certified geniuses compared to the self-righteous moron whiz kids who are coming up under them. They’re busy trying to impose honest-to-God Stalinism on a First World country. We’ve never seen a flat-out coup in the West before. They’re carrying on like it’s Moscow, 1937, and they’re doing it in a country with more firearms than people, in the Internet age.

*Recall that in late 2015, everyone including yer ‘umble narrator was convinced that the Republican nominee would be Jeb Bush, or possibly Marco Rubio, aka “the dumber, gayer Jeb Bush.” I got on the Trump train a lot earlier than most — yeah, that sound you hear is me patting myself on the back — but certainly we all can forgive ourselves for thinking !Yeb! and his hundred million dollar war chest were going to run the table.

**It’s been a while since I’ve seen a wiki article as lulzily pedantic as this one, and as y’all can imagine, that’s a really high bar. Wiki wants us to be absolutely certain of the proper spelling for a fictional character on a tv show from forty years ago. It’s Rosco, no -e. No less an authority than James Best, the guy who played the character, has informed us of this on his personal website. But hey, this is my website, and all due respect to James Best, I’m gonna live my truth, and spell it with an -e. Now if Catherine Bach says it, that’s a different thing entirely.

***”Elimination by promotion,” it’s called in the dreaded Private Sector, which is one of the big reasons you see so much Diversity in places like HR, “public relations,” and the like. You’ve got to hire them, but they’re utterly unqualified to be anywhere near the core business functions, so you make them “Assistant Director of Community Outreach” or something, and never mind why Amalgamated Widgets should even have such a department in the first place.

Year-round school. The Z Man really knocked one out of the park today. The column isn’t about Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, per se, but since he does feature prominently someone in the comments brought up Duncan’s big push for year-round school. Duncan wasn’t the only dumbass pushing the idea, of course, it comes up every few years or so like clockwork, but he was the latest. Anyway, the mere mention of “year round school” gave me another little zap of that “let’s do [something stupid] again, but this time somehow even dumber!” vibe that’s been the signature of our totally legitimate, not at all fraudulent President’s reign thus far.

I just wish the term “Karen” had been around back then, because I never could quite put my finger on a good word to describe one side of the “year round school” “debate.” Karen, of course, thinks of schools as nothing more than public daycares. She’s not wrong, so her position makes a twisted kind of sense — since our “teachers” are really just (very very shitty) babysitters anyway, why not have schools open in the summer? That way, Karen doesn’t have to cast around for “enrichment” programs and whatnot into which to dump her kids while she self-actualizes on Twitter.

Unfortunately for Karen, the teachers’ union runs so deep in the Democratic Party, they could probably literally get the Army deployed against their enemies if they really put their backs into it, so they win. And since the whole point of being a “teacher” is so that you never, ever have to put your back into anything, schools will continue to be closed for the summer until the planet is overrun by superintelligent apes. They’re the laziest bastards ever to draw breath, and if you want proof, start digging into who’s really behind the “masks now, masks tomorrow, and masks forever!!” mafia in your locality. It’s 1,000:1 it’s the teachers’ union, since the masking and social distancing rules are such that no school district can comply while still holding classes, so gosh, gee whiz, golly, darn, I guess those poor put-upon “teachers” will have to keep drawing their nice salary and gonzo benefits for sitting at home on their asses….

….for another entire fucking school year. (Hey, speaking of, I’m sure you know we recently passed the one-year anniversary of “fifteen days to flatten the curve.” How did you celebrate? I sent an email reminder to all the liberals I know, but they were still too busy cowering under their beds to read it).

Speaking of lazy, brain-dead Liberals, that’s the real reason they keep pushing for endless lockdowns and masks and social distancing: Because they like it. Morgan’s latest got me thinking about this. We assume that the Left keeps pushing for ever more idiotic, ever more draconian restrictions because they hate freedom, or because they’re sexually aroused by bossing people around, or because they’re making money off it somehow. All those things are true, of course, but there are lots of folks — the vast majority of the Branch Covidians, in fact — who can’t boss anyone around and haven’t made a dime off it. These folks hate freedom, all right, but it’s crucial to realize that the freedom they truly hate is their own.

When this nonsense started, I kept getting this weird feeling I couldn’t name. But then an errand took me down to College Town — this was when a few things were still open — and it finally hit me: It’s deja vu. Unless you’ve been in the ivory tower recently yourself, I guess you’ll just have to trust me on this, but the most fundamental difference between living like the most timorous Covidiot in existence and living like an egghead is: Nothing.

Massively online, terrified of any human interaction, living on delivered food… in the ivory tower, that’s called “a day ending in Y.” Binge watching Netflix, spending the non-Netflix hours hyperventilating on Twitter… that’s what they call “time off.” Kung Flu finally gives them an excuse to do that guilt free. It’s not that they’re pathetic shut-ins afraid of their own shadows. No no, they’re saving the earth!!

The anti-culture. Continuing with the theme from below, I’m running long, so real quick: Since we’ve decided to give Stalinism another go (see above; “do __ again, but dumber!” could be the Biden admin’s motto), those of us who know* ought to consider how various folks in the Soviet Union made out. I think we should especially look at the refuseniks. These were originally Jews who were refused permission to emigrate to Israel, on the theory that they might somehow take Soviet state secrets with them. So it will be with White people under the Bidenreich — we’ll never be allowed to go our own way, because we might take state secrets like “how indoor plumbing works” with us.

There won’t be any international pressure coming to help us, of course, but note how proudly the refuseniks maintained their culture despite it all. There’s a lesson there. We don’t have to wallow in filth, y’all. We don’t have to give in. Just say “no.” Here, listen to this Grammy-winning… No! Watch this Emmy-nominated… No! Call this person by xzhyr preferred… NO! Do what you have to do to keep the NKVD off your back, nothing more. And trust me, since they’ve decided they’re going to do the Democrats’ traditional “destroy the economy” thing while simultaneously doing the Neocon “invade the world / invite the world” thing, they’ll soon have a lot bigger problems than a few old codgers refusing to watch “Black-ish,” or whatever the fuck it’s called now.

Refuse. Just say no.

*It occurs to me that “those who know” might be a good nickname for… well, those who know. “Neo-gnosticism” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but there’s got to be a catchy name to be made there somehow.

Since talking about Blackity Blackity Blacks is depressing and horrifying in about equal measure, let’s talk about a slightly less quarrelsome group: The Scots. (Damned Scots! They ruined Scotland!!!). Specifically, the fact that there’s no true Scotsman.

Everyone knows how that one goes, right? Jock tells his English friend Nigel that no one in Scotland butters his toast. When Nigel points out that he has a lot of friends in Edinburgh who put butter on their toast, Jock shoots back “Well, no true Scotsman puts butter on his toast!!”

Those of us who enjoy the carnival freakshow that is politics seem to have a similar attitude about cynics, but in reverse — we assume that the carnies are much more thoroughly cynical than they actually are. No matter what their motives appear to be, they only ever act out of cold, calculating, power-hungry cynicism. Call it the “No True Swamp Thing” fallacy. This shows up in Z Man’s latest, which seems to imply that the White-as-a-polar-bear-at-Klan-rally Foreign Service planted a story in Politico, bemoaning the lack of Diversity in the Foreign Service:

When a left-wing site like Politico starts bellowing about the lack of diversity in the ruling class, it is intended to distract, not spawn a dialogue. Since thinking about who is really in charge of the country is anathema to the modern conservative mind, they are more than happy to chase the diversity stick tossed by the people in charge. The result is more mewing about the lack of diversity, as if anyone cares.

But that’s just the thing: They care. The Foreign Service cares, deeply. As Z points out earlier in the column, it’s the children of the elite, the all stars of Andover-Prep-to-Harvard pipeline, the ones who have made acing Standardized Tests their life’s mission, who end up in the Foreign Service. See what I mean? To not accept the easy explanation — that kids who have spent their entire lives drinking the Kool Aid are, in fact, full of Kool Aid — requires assuming that little Jackington van Pelt VI has been gaming the system since he was in short pants. And that just doesn’t compute.

Now, I’ll allow for the possibility that Ivy Leaguers are a different breed than they were in my day, which was both brief and long ago. But I’ve had very long, very deep, very recent experience with every other kind of college kid, and the idea that any of them is that cynical just won’t wash, for a very simple reason: Cynicism requires an ability to empathize, or at least to assume another’s perspective. You have to be able to step out of yourself in order to be cynical about the other guy, and from my experience — which, again, is both extensive and recent — Generation Selfie is barely capable of realizing that there IS another guy, much less divining anything about what he might want. Philosophers have long debated over whether solipsism is logically possible, but as a practical matter the Basic College Girl manages it just fine…

….and she’s the one filling all the junior, and increasingly many of the senior, slots at State (and everywhere else).

We all tend to fall victim to this “No True Swamp Thing” fallacy. Even Machiavelli, the most cynical fucker who ever lived, once marveled that people just aren’t capable of being consistently, thoroughly evil, even when it’s in their own best interest. Even the most objectively evil of us — Stalin, Mao, the guy who invented the Designated Hitter — is hardwired to think of himself as basically a good guy. No one glories in being evil; no one self-identifies as an evil SOB. So if a Swamp Thing proclaims herself concerned about something, especially if being concerned about that thing would make her a good person in her own mind, the likeliest explanation is: she’s actually concerned about it.

The only way I’ve discovered to tamp down this tendency to the NTST fallacy is to try to imagine what a real cynic would do in a given situation. For instance, I still marvel at the fact that no one, even the people who point out all the obvious parallels between The Current Year and Brave New World, has explored the obvious possibility of better living through chemistry. Why bother with all these ham-handed, half-assed attempts at White genocide? We seem perfectly willing to do it to ourselves. Just legalize fentanyl (after the St. Floyd trial concludes, of course); we’ll take care of the rest. The Last Psychiatrist has scads of articles on how psychiatry is basically an excuse to tranq out the unproductive, and trust me, universities would be hurtin’ for certain if we got rid of bullshit like “ADHD” (which is just an excuse to keep obviously incapable students paying full tuition for a couple semesters — oh no, little Khaleesi isn’t a fucking idiot who never should’ve passed third grade, let alone freshman year; she’s just got A Learning Disability).

Put “Ghetto Affective Disorder” in the DSM-VI, and get the Pfizer whiz kids on it. Might as well go ahead and put “sluggish schizophrenia” in there, too. Like “systemic racism” and “White privilege,” the only cure is to remain doped to the gills at all time. We’ve already legalized pot, and bellwethers like Oregon are well on the way to legalizing pretty much ALL drugs. Give Pfizer some subsidies and let them cook up some extra-strength Fukitol, available at a Walgreen’s near you….

See what I mean? That’s what a truly cynical ruling class would do. But they don’t, because they truly believe this shit.

texinole brings up a good point in the comments on the previous post:

Part of the way forward is going to necessarily involve leaving people behind, and the acceptable ways to deal with the resulting fall out. All this talk, from all political persuasions, about the role or plight of blacks, for instance, ignores *their* demographic destiny. Ie, they are a *shrinking* proportion of the US population (though the world pop is a different matter), so whatever solution to whatever problem one perceived about blacks could very well become moot….

All this WAP talk reminds me a little of the Boomer obsession with Amerindians and westerns. Something like a subconscious need to focus on endangered species as they fade away.

“African-American” demographics are indeed interesting. If nothing else, they’re another example — as if we needed any more — that Leftists can’t see even the simplest, most obvious consequences of their actions. “Amnesty” 10 million Squatemalans, and you don’t get a world full of sunshine and rainbows and Social Justice and Skittle-shitting unicorns, where Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell still get to play at being best frenemies at the top of the political pyramid.

What you get, of course, is Guatemala, and while the ruling caste in Latin America does indeed look whiter than Taylor Swift eating a mayonnaise sandwich in a blizzard, 500 years of history went into that. The Democrats’ tried-and-true “rile up the Negroes for fun and profit” strategy ain’t gonna work on groups that don’t give a rat’s ass about Negroes, as the #BLM dumbasses who tried to monkey with the Essays in Chicago found out to their dismay last summer. See also: Compton. All that gangsta rap from the 1990s is hilarious now, because all the hardcore homies who were straight outta there are now outta there, literally — it’s now a barrio. Turns out the weakest pussy La eMe ever patched in, is harder than the hardest Crip ever dreamed of being… or, at least, is 10 IQ points brighter and better organized, which is functionally the same thing.

In other words: Blacks might dutifully vote for geriatric White Democrats because goofs like Louis Farrakhan tell them to, but our little brown brothers from south of the border will insist that Luis Farrakhano have a seat at the table proportional to his voting strength. Imagine La Presidenta por Vida Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but a little bit smarter and with some actual clout behind her. That’s “our” future, and as for the Negroes… well, I hope y’all enjoy your lurid fantasies of “systemic racism,” because homies, you’re about to see the real thing. And as much as life in El Salvador del Norte is gonna suck for us honkies, it’s going to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short indeed for you guys. Whitey’s not going to be bailing you out this time…

But those are just facts, and as such are uninteresting. To return to texinole’s point: I can’t speak for anyone else, but the reason I’m fascinated by “African-Americans” is that they seem to be the lowest common denominator, culture-wise. I spent some time in the former territory of the Raj not long ago, and it was frankly bizarre, watching all these subcontinentals carry on like Ali G. I suspect there’s some of that “cultural imperialism” stuff going on here — America is thoroughly Negrified; American culture is worldwide; therefore Pajeet al-Wazam in Allahabad carries on like he be gangsta, yo — but that can’t be all of it.

It’s so widespread, it’s fully meta. I read somewhere that Steve Sailer once called Barack Obama “the world’s first Black wigger,” and that’s the kind of thing I mean. There’s just no pushback against this stuff, absolutely none, even though it’s obviously stupid and self-destructive. It’s like acid; it burns through anything and everything. I’ve met Leftists who’ve repented of their Leftism, but even they still get weak-kneed and panty-twisted at the sight of some brutha keepin’ it real. Figure out why that is, and you’ll learn something important about the pathological altruism that is destroying the very possibility of civilization.

EDIT: I suppose I should add, for the record, my view on, as our future Chinese overlords put it, “managing the barbarians.” I truly wish no ill on American Blacks, and while I’m no saint — I’m going to thoroughly enjoy the schadenfreude when you try to pull that “___ be rayciss” shit on them — I can’t find it in my heart to “hate” anyone other than the cat ladies and their soyboi enablers who brought us to this point.

I really wish you’d find a better way. No one deserves to live like that, where “WAP” is lauded as some kind of authentic expression of “your” “culture.” I have a hard time thinking of anything more demeaning, frankly, but all that is above my pay grade. So yeah, if you want to call my attitude “White Man’s Burden” or whatever, fine, I guess, go ahead, but look: History is what it is, and while I wouldn’t want to be ruled by aliens either, it’s far better us than them. If you think it’s bad now, guys, you have no fucking clue what you’re in for when first the Guatemalans, then the Chinese, fully take over. Those guys think King Leopold’s Ghost was a how-to manual. I wish you’d get with the program, I really do… but it’s too late now.

While Kung Flu has, in general, been good for misanthropes like myself, for some reason I felt like wasn’t getting the full flavor of social breakdown from here in the bunker, so I decided to run some errands. I flipped on the radio to the oldies station, and heard this:

(Soon) Soon we’ll be married
And raise a family, whoa yeah
A cozy, little home out in the country
With two children, maybe three

Note that everyone — singers, writers, producers — was Black. That was 1971. For contrast, here’s a recent Grammy-winning performance with the same demographics:

Whores in this house
There’s some whores in this house
There’s some whores in this house
There’s some whores in this house (Hol’ up)
I said certified freak, seven days a week
Wet-ass pussy, make that pullout game weak, woo (Ah)

Apologies for that, kameraden, but I really wanted to rub your faces in it (that is NOT a double entendre). 50 years and the “Great Society” later, and look how far we’ve fallen. Words like “talentless” and “vulgar” and “awful” are too weak for “songs” like “WAP.” But in some sense, so is the word “evil” — “evil” implies a certain cunning, a baseline self-awareness, that I doubt the performers are capable of. If you pressed them on it, I doubt they could even come up with the knee-jerk justifications the “critics” belch out for stuff like this:

“the detailed play-by-play in the verses doesn’t aim to impress guys—and that, the song suggests, is why Cardi and Meg’s expertise is credible,” as they “center themselves as women in order to freely celebrate their coveted power, sex appeal, and A1 WAP.”

Which doesn’t mean such “criticism” isn’t valuable. Note especially the blather about “power.” Much as I’d strangle the guy in the crib if I had a TARDIS, Nietzsche was right about a lot of things, including the blind, dumb “will to power.” Perhaps the fully-realized Nietzschean ubermensch can continually overcome himself in his quest for power after power, but for us mere mortals, alas, the feeling of “coveted power,” in our rock critic’s phrase (and whatever the hell “coveted” is supposed to mean there) always seems to boil down to grunting near-solipsism like “WAP.” If a very explicit recitation of their sexual expectations “doesn’t aim to impress guys,” then what, exactly, is it for? What indeed is power for, under these conditions?

I’m not expressing this very clearly, I realize. That’s mostly because I don’t really understand what these bozos are trying to do here, and that’s mostly because I don’t think there’s ultimately anything to be understood. I wanted to write that “WAP” is ugliness-for-the-sake-of-ugliness, and contrast it to the laughably quaint (by our “standards”) aspirations of the Temptations in “Just My Imagination,” but even as I’m writing this, it’s falling apart. They’re not even trying to be ugly. They just are ugly, in every way, and “WAP” is some kind of Neoplatonic emanation of that essential ugliness — if, again, you can even use terms from one of the old mainstays of human thought to describe a song that describes vaginal secretions. It just IS. “Wet Ass Pussy” is like some kind of negative Zen koan; the more you ponder it, the lower your consciousness.

Despite my slick little rhetorical plan collapsing, though, the larger point I wanted to make stands, and it’s this: We are still free to choose. Most of us, even on the dissident side, still accept the basic premises of Great Society-style social engineering — tweak the economic incentives, and the desired behavior inevitably follows. The Z Man has a piece on something like this today, on how we’ve all assumed a renter’s mentality. He’s right, of course, in that you can tell rental houses just by looking at their lawns, and people who drive beaters or rental cars tend to drive like maniacs.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

We don’t have to accept the universal ugliness. It’s one hell of an uphill battle, I realize, but we’ve got one ace up our sleeves: People are belief machines. Whether or not you believe in any kind of higher power, a higher power believes in you, in the sense that humans are simply hardwired for belief. (Yes yes, I know you’ve overcome it, Evangelical Atheist, because you Fucking Love Science (TM) and that’s totally not like religious belief in every single way, but for the rest of us, that’s just how we’re built). Organized religion ain’t making a comeback — if the past few decades have taught us anything, it’s the recursive introversion of bureaucracies — but we’re long overdue for a Great Awakening, of the type that happens in any period of massive, rapid social upheaval.

I’m just going to leave this here, I think. It was hippy-dippy crap back in the Temptations’ day, but something similar to this could easily be repurposed in the fight against universal ugliness. All it takes is an alternative, y’all. Normies aren’t ready to break free, because no one has offered anything other than “we’re not Leftists.” That never works. Aesthetics is one of the most powerful movement-building tools, as the Commies and especially the Cat Fanciers knew very well. Waking a lot of people up could be as simple as offering something that isn’t deliberately wallowing in bilge.

Hell, forget the lyrics; “Just My Imagination” is a pretty song as a song. Start there, then work through the lyrics. Elevate your human potential!

Someone in the Swamp can still play the long game. I see, via Ace of Spades, that the government is set to declare that UFOs are real, or some such.

I am now more certain than ever that non-illegal aliens are bullshit.

I wouldn’t trust a government declaration that the sun rises in the east. I’d assume the earth’s rotation suddenly reversed overnight, before I’d believe that a government pronouncement is on the level. The vast majority of real Americans feel the same way. The government knows this. By declaring that UFOs are real, they’ve convinced every wannabe Fox Mulder in the world to drop it.

Nice move, Smoking Man. Well played.