The Hundred Years’ War laid the foundations for the modern state.  Exaggerating only a little for effect, when “England” and “France” went to war over some convoluted feudal nonsense in 1337, nobody not directly in the armies’ path cared.  By 1453, though, both sides had to clearly articulate just why they were fighting in order to keep the war going.  “National chauvinism” turned out to be a pretty good answer for the French — who, after all, were on the receiving end of most of the physical damage — but it worked ok for England, too.  Early Modern English history makes a lot more sense when you know about the Pale of Calais.

It took the rest of Europe another 150 years, but the Thirty Years’ War did the trick.  What started as another of the endless doctrinal conflicts kicked off by the Reformation ended with the creation of the modern nation-state.  Cardinal Richelieu really was a Cardinal — a prince of the Roman Catholic Church, a guy with a legitimate chance of being elected Pope.  This man brought Catholic France into the war on the Protestant side for “reasons of state.”  This made sense in 1631… and the war still had another 17 years to run.

Speaking of, the treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War, the famous Peace of Westphalia, is credited with creating the modern nation-state.  Which it did, but since we decided back in 1946 that nationalism was the worst possible sin, we Postmoderns forgot what everyone around the treaty table knew: That “nation” and “state” are inseparable.  The nation-state, which for clarity’s sake will henceforth be known as the ethno-state, is the biggest stable form of human organization.

“France is France because she’s France, and Vive la France!”  OK, sure — people will fight and die for that.  “But France is also Morocco and Ivory Coast.”  Non, monseiur, et plus non! or however you say “No way Jose” in French.  “Our ancestors, the Gauls” was a fun thing to make African children chant back in the heydey of the mission civilisatrice, but it wasn’t true and everyone knew it — especially the missionaries.  See also: France’s brutal colonial wars, which gave us such joy in Indochina.

But then a funny thing happened: France lost all her colonial wars, even the ones she got us to take over for her (we lost, too).  Britain actually won one, sort of (200+ years of practice will do that, I guess), but gave up the Empire anyway.  They could’ve just asked Bloody Mary, all the way back in 1558: Economics is what it is, and when the chips are down you just can’t find enough suckers willing to fight for places most of them can’t find on a map when times are good back home.

Economics is what it is, and in an increasingly globalized world, we started thinking that economics is all there is.  We forget this now, but Communism’s sales pitch was always economic — come the Revolution, comrades, everyone everywhere will be on Easy Street.  Note, please, how the Cold War ended: We outspent them.  But not on military hardware (the USSR devoted something like 40% of its budget to defense).  We outspent them on luxury goods. Life in the USSR was actually tolerable-to-pretty-decent, if you judge things solely by life’s necessities — the comrades all had food in the fridge, shoes on their feet, and toilet paper for their asses.  Americans, meanwhile, had 57 flavors just in their steak sauce… and that’s why communism sucks.  Cue the coup.

Homo economicus now reigns supreme.  When even the Chinese seem to be going all-in on consumer products, your spergy Libertarian (I know, I know, BIRM) can be forgiven for thinking that economics is all anything ever was…. and therefore, his conception of the minimal State is both workable and right.  What other purpose could there possibly be for a State, other than to police the contracts?

This sounds shocking, I know, but…. in yesterday’s world, the pre-Kung Flu world, they were right.  In a globalized world, where everyone has everything and nobody worries about where it comes from, we’re free to fret about “racism” and “xenophobia” and whether or not huge burly bearded dudes should be allowed to go wee-wee in the little girls’ room.  What role can or should the government possibly have in any of that?  Nation-states are anachronisms…

We need to seriously reexamine the Libertarian case, because it contains all the seeds of the present mess.  IS there a purpose to the State?  What could it possibly be?  All non-Libertarian, non-Communist political theory says, when you come right down to it, that the point of the State is the physical security of its citizens.  Hell, both Libertarianism and Communism say that too; they simply take it as given that a fully globalized world, free trade- or Workers’ Paradise-version, won’t have any interpersonal violence (no, really — they do.  Ask the Libertarians about their precious “non-aggression principle,” if you’ve got a few decades to spare).

The problem is, we have now collectively decided, as a species, that “physical security” extends to “not getting the sniffles.”  Since that’s utterly bugfuck insane, not to mention seventeen kinds of impossible, we’ve just torpedoed the foundations of ALL political legitimacy, worldwide.  To their credit, the Libertarians are the only ones who have been seriously thinking about what a non-Westphalian world would look like.  Whatever they’ve come up with is wrong, it goes without saying, but at least they’ve given it a go.  We need to do the same.

By about 1870, political types were starting to reckon with Darwinism.

Darwinism, as everyone back then knew, requires the unfit to be destroyed.  Nature makes “mistakes” all the time; it’s just that those mistakes don’t survive long enough to propagate themselves.  There are wolf pups born with club feet, for example, but no clubfooted adult wolves.  Nature sees to it — “natural selection.”

But that’s only half the picture.  Since nature ruthlessly destroys her “mistakes,” pretty soon you get a creature exquisitely adapted to its environment.  BUT: what if the environment changes?  Nothing in nature is static.  Darwin knew that, which is why he supposedly said “It is not the strongest of the species which survives, but the ones most responsive to change.”*  To be anachronistic for the sake of clarity: The dinosaur dies, but the wolf survives, because the dinosaur went all-in on bulk and strength while the wolf sacrificed a lot of that for a much better brain.

Humans, of course, went all-in on brains.  Indeed — and this is the dilemma that confronted 19th century politicians — our brains are grossly over-powered, at least from an evolutionary standpoint.  We’re so capable of adapting to our environment that we’re actually capable of adapting our environment to us.  Agriculture alone means that many more of nature’s “mistakes” survive among humans than in any other species.

They survive, which means they propagate, which means that as a species we’ve buried a giant quasi-Malthusian landmine for ourselves.  Malthus, you’ll recall, is the guy who said that population grows geometrically while food production increases arithmetically.  In other words, this:

On the one hand, this is perfectly obvious.  You could chart any population in a given environment this way.  We see it every few years in America, in fact, because some state or other is always giving in to the vegans and the anti-gun nuts and the eco-loons.  That state bans deer hunting, and in a year or two those self-same vegans and anti-gun nuts and eco-loons are out there crusading to save all the poor deer that are suddenly, for no reason, starving to death all over the place.

On the other hand, this is a Darwinian nightmare, because Malthus was wrong.  Oh, populations work like that, all right… for every population except humans.  Humans are capable of doing all sorts of things to avert the food crisis.  He didn’t live to see it, but Malthus would’ve torn his hair out at the spectacle of the Irish Potato Famine.  There really was a crop failure, no doubt, but the “famine” part was almost entirely political:

Records show that Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine.  When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests.  No such export ban happened in the 1840s.

Read the Wiki link for the gruesome details — massive, often increasing, food exports, and often from the most famine-stricken areas.  Prompt political action couldn’t have saved every life (life, math, and human nature being what they are), but it could’ve saved millions.  Ditto every other “famine” in the modern period.  The Bengal Famine of 1943 was a consequence of war measures.  So was the Ethiopian Famine of the early 1980s (“We Are the World!”).  There was plenty of food in Ethiopia.  The government wouldn’t allow it to be shipped to the people in need, because it was using starvation as a war measure against its Eritrean rebels (par for the course for commies like the Derg; see also the Holodomor, Mao’s great famine, daily life in North Korea. etc.).

Put a cold eye on this, and you’ll conclude that when it comes to food at least, Malthus was wrong.  There’s effectively no upper limit to the human food supply.  If there’s going to be a “Malthusian crisis” when it comes to food, we’ll have to elect some commies to do it for us.

Put an even colder eye on that, and you’ll start to wonder: Maybe we should elect some commies to do it for us?

This was the (slightly anachronistic, for clarity’s sake) problem facing the statesmen of the mid-19th century.  A few paragraphs back, I wrote that humans’ over-powered brains buried for us a quasi-Malthusian landmine… and here it is.  If there are no natural mass die-offs, then the main driver of evolution is removed.  Nature’s “mistakes” live, and propagate, and since the poor, improvident, and stupid outbreed the rich and successful — even Malthus knew that** — what you get, in pretty short order, is devolution, a.k.a. Idiocracy.  Our brains have so successfully adapted us to our environment that we’re going to adapt ourselves right into extinction.

This was a crisis of foundations, a new one in world history.  Mass government rests on the assumption that the great masses of the people can be persuaded to act rationally in their own best interests.  Cynicism says they won’t…. but Darwinism says they can’t.  Once you reach a certain inflection point — this is the quasi part of “quasi-Malthusian catastrophe” — you’ve got a population too stupid to operate the world its ancestors built.

The eugenicists of the Gilded Age thought they’d reached that inflection point sometime around 1890.  I think they were off by about 130 years.

Watching the Great Wuhan Flu Freakout, it’s obvious that no government, however intrusive, can protect its citizens from the sniffles.  The Chinese can do whatever the hell they want to their slave population, and they botched it.  Not even total, North Korea-style surveillance would work, because carriers don’t show symptoms for a few days.  The virus will always get through.

It’s also obvious that the treatment is going to be far, far worse than the disease, because it’s going to be both a) world-destroying, and b) more or less ineffective, because c) even if it works, and the vast majority of Boomers get to play one or two more rounds of golf on a Caribbean cruise before finally kicking the bucket, we’ll remember that for next time.  Corona 2.0 will be a lot deadlier than Corona 1.0, and our response will be to blow it off, because remember last time?  We put the entire country on the breadline so a few old fossils wouldn’t catch the “97% of people recover from it” sniffles.

Darwinism is a giant crack in the foundation of the modern world.  All our government, all our social control mechanisms, all our culture is predicated on an understanding of humanity that is not just wrong, but suicidally so.  We all agreed to forget about Social Darwinism in 1945 (thanks, Mustache Guy!) but Social Darwinism surely hasn’t forgotten about us… you know, biology being what it is.  Our society is moving heaven and earth to solve the wrong problem, one that can’t be solved anyway….

…. and in a few weeks all of that will be painfully obvious.  Time for a second look at Francis Galton, at the very least, before we throw Hobbes and Locke out on their ears and go back to the drawing board.

*As you can see from the link, Darwin didn’t actually say that, but it’s a pithy way of saying what Darwin was getting at, so it was attributed to him.  The Mount Vernon Association of Experts on the Expertise of Mount Vernon Association Experts really earned their paychecks on that one.

**It was his reason for writing, in fact, even though it entailed that his main thesis was wrong from the get-go.  Malthus was an important thinker; just not a real consistent one.

Like everyone, I’m tired of the Wuhan Flu freakout.  But I owe a debt to future historians to leave them a primary source, so I’m going to do this last brief post on it, then move on.  Unless something major happens, this is my final word on the subject:

We’ve written a lot here on the West’s “crisis of legitimacy.”  Well…. this is it.  Let’s break down some of the big factors in play:

The first, biggest, and in some ways only factor that matters, legitimacy-wise, is cognitive dissonance.  We spent a lot of time here back in the days arguing about whether or not it’s a real thing (check the archives!).  I finally took the position that it’s real, but only for stuff that rises to level of actual cognition… which you just don’t see to much of anymore.  Indeed, the whole point of Postmodern Leftism, when you come right down to it, is not having to think.  Identity politics gives you The One Right Answer for most every situation; it’s just a matter of filling in the Social Justice Mad Lib.  Any apparent conflict between One Right Answers is dealt with by ad hominem.

An example will probably help:  Trannies vs. Feminists.  Feminists, of course, are all in on The One Right Answer that “gender is just a social construction.”  But Trannies actually believe this — if you feel you’re really a woman, then you are, your twelve-inch wang be damned.  How, then, can impeccably #woke lesbians refuse to have sex with the aforesaid twelve-inch wang, since gender is just a social construction and Thundercock identifies as a lesbian?  Easy: ad hominem.  Oh, gender’s just a social construction all right… it’s just that any be-penised individual who “constructs” himself as a lesbian is lying for personal gain (#wokeness, as everyone knows, gives one the ability to read minds).

This isn’t a problem for the Left as a whole, much less for our entire society, because of the tiny numbers involved.  Despite showing up pretty much everywhere in popular culture, gays are a small fraction of the population.  Trannies are a fraction of a fraction, and since militant lesbianism is almost entirely political anyway (lesbian bed death is very real), about the only place this could possibly be a live issue is on the loonier college campuses.

But this coronavirus thing, now….

In the space of a few weeks, you’ve got the same people

• screaming that Trump’s a racist for instituting travel bans
• screaming that Trump took too long instituting travel bans
• cheering for two guys, Biden and Sanders, who have explicitly stated they won’t close the borders no matter what, even for infected “immigrants;” and
• screaming that the entire country should be in lockdown to enforce “social distancing.”

Nobody avoids the obvious like a Leftist, but this is a bridge too far. (In case you don’t want to click, that’s Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez calling you racist for not eating at Chinese restaurants on March 11, then ordering everyone to stay away from all restaurants on March 15).  We can’t even give AOC the benefit of the doubt here, i.e. that she’s had a sincere change of opinion in the light of new information, because she started by calling us all racists.

It’s important to recognize this:  She wasn’t taking to the airwaves to encourage us to patronize Chinese restaurants for the economy’s sake back when the true extent of the problem was unknown.  Had she said that, changing her tune in four days would seem not only ok, but wise — we want our leaders to be able to adjust on the fly in the light of new information.  But that wasn’t the point of her post.  The point was to call us all racists, to advertise her own (and by extension, her social media followers’) superior virtue, and everybody knows it.  Her followers most certainly included.  They’re deeply invested in this stuff…

….and they’re wrong.  And they know it.  Now it’s in their forebrains, completely unavoidable.

Adios open borders, am I right?  Again, it’s easy to dodge the cognitive dissonance when you’re calling other people racists.  Hell, just for the sake of argument, I’m willing to stipulate that I, personally, want the borders shut because racism… but that’s not why you want the borders shut, and either way — pay attention now — the borders get shut.  Call me a racist all you want in our new, blissful isolation, but close the damn borders.  Right?

It’s not theoretical at this point, y’all.  There’s simply no way to dodge the dissonance this time.  This time, it’s personal.  And again, sorry to keep repeating it but y’all have to get this, future historians: It’s an emotional thing.  Our early 21st century Leftists don’t think, they feel.  Thinking makes them feel bad; calling us racists makes them feel good.  But now the main thing they feel is fear.  Does that outweigh the goodfeelz they get from calling us racists? Time will tell.  Of course there will always be the hard core who are so committed to their self-concept as open borders Goodwhites that they’ll keep on keeping on as before…..

But for lots of other folks, it may well be a sea change.  I’ve been saying for a long time that today’s SJW is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer.  This may well be the event that kicks the process off.  All that anger and fear they feel is directed at President Trump, because that’s their default.  But consider this: They can still be mad as hell at President Trump, because he didn’t do enough fast enough.  I know, I know, it makes my brain hurt too, but I’ll say it as many times as I have to: These people don’t think, they feel.  It makes zero sense logically, but emotionally, it makes perfect sense to criticize Trump for not doing fast enough today what you were totally opposed to him doing at all yesterday.  Why isn’t there a Big Beautiful Wall?  With machine gun nests and minefields and shit?

Be on the lookout for this.

Which presumes, of course, that the USA survives all this as a coherent nation.  As the cooler heads around here have pointed out ad nauseam, if this thing isn’t Bubonic Plague 2.0, then every halfway civilized nation on Earth has effectively declared war on the common cold.  That’s a battle we’re destined to lose, because despite what the Leftists insist, biology is actually a real thing that exists and is important.  Every political response on the spectrum is in the process of being tried right now.  Italy has socialized medicine; to hear the news tell it, it’s The fucking Stand over there.  (I know, I know, but somehow lots of people still trust the Media.  Be patient; that’s point #3).  China is a brutal dictatorship; they can do whatever they want, and even Leftists are now admitting that they really screwed the pooch.  If you’re going to put the foundation of your very government on the line for a battle, you damn sure better win.

We’re not gonna win against the common cold.  Lots of people are going to get it, and lots of people are going to die.  A million deaths is just a statistic, Stalin said, but each one is personal for everyone who loses someone.  I don’t expect The Government to move heaven and earth to save my 99-year-old grandma… but I’m a dissident.  Your average Liberal does expect this, and — crucially — your Basic College Girl not only expects it, she demands it.  Ain’t gonna happen.  Any guesses as to how that’s gonna work out, long term? (Future historians are exempted from this quiz, as y’all already know).

Finally, and always: The Media.  They’ve been openly cheering for this thing to turn into Bubonic Plague 2.0 from day one, because they hate you.  They hate you personally, they hate America, they hate Western civilization, and they really really really really really hate Donald Trump.  All their other efforts to get him have failed, so if it takes plunging the world into a nightmarish depression by scaring everyone to death about the sniffles, then they’re willing to take one for the team.  But see above: If you’re going to put the very source of your legitimacy on the line in a battle, you goddamn well better win.

What happens when the vast majority of people recover?  What happens when most of the dead are old people with bad lungs?  What happens when the final tallies are made, and we realize that more people died from the associated stupidity (e.g. diabetics not being able to get their insulin due to supply chain disruptions) than were killed by the Wuhan Flu?  The Media is responsible for all that, and when people are feeling the very real pain of a major global economic depression, they’re going to remember it.  Unless this thing really is Bubonic Plague 2.0 — that is, direct death tolls in the double digits — they’re gone.

And they know it.  Predict their behavior accordingly.

Interesting times ahead, future historians.  Stay tuned!

Sigmund Freud was a perverted old cokehead, but he had some useful insights.  One of them is that anxiety works like a spring (my paraphrase).  You need a spring to have a certain tension in order to work, but if you compress it too tightly, it breaks.  Anxiety that can’t be discharged (his term) in healthy, socially beneficial ways instead gets discharged in unhealthy, neurotic ways.

That’s what happened with Anna O., history’s most famous psychiatric patient.  She had a very turbulent love/hate relationship with her father, as tightly wound girls do.  When he became deathly ill on a family vacation, the unresolvable tension caused a whole host of physical symptoms, including hysterical paralysis.  Pioneering psychologist Josef Breuer “talked her through” it, finally resolving the emotional conflict and “curing” the patient.

All this would’ve been interesting, but largely irrelevant, were it not for World War I.  The world at large didn’t care about the problems of overprivileged Jewish girls, but they did care about their soldiers suddenly going crazy in the trenches.  Once military doctors finally ruled out a physical cause*, they were left with Freudian explanations: A soldier can’t stop fighting, because he’s an honorable, dutiful soldier.  Yet that soldier must stop fighting.  The only honorable way out is a wound.  If the enemy doesn’t wound him, then, his subconscious will.  Hence the bizarre “conversion disorders” — hysterical blindness, paralysis, mutism, etc. — characteristic of “shell shock.”

But a funny thing happened.  While everyone now acknowledged the real power of the subconscious mind, we sort of… forgot… about it.  Psychology, particularly psychotherapy, went back to being a ghetto Jewish preoccupation.  Bored, over-privileged housewives might go to a shrink to talk through their “issues,” but as for the rest of us, well, if we weren’t going into combat anytime soon, why bother?  Outside of a few crusty old reactionaries (like yours truly) making fun of SJWs, when was the last time you heard the word “neurotic”?

But that’s the thing: either the subconscious is real, or it isn’t.  When we say “neurotic” (the few of us who still do), we usually mean people like Anna O. — rich, cosseted, politically active human toothaches who try to force the entire world into the all-encompassing drama of their Daddy Issues (see also: Virginia Woolf).  But that’s not how Freud meant it.  According to him, we’re all neurotic to some degree or another, because that’s just how anxiety works.

We all have strong emotional impulses that run counter our self-image.  Hence the entire panoply of pop-Freudianism: The preacher who constantly rails against homosexuality from the pulpit is secretly gay (“projection”).  The strict, controlling, everything-in-its-place type is a sadist (“anal-retentive”).  The player who can’t settle down with any woman is actually trying to find a Mommy figure (“Oedipus complex“).  And, of course, the — ahem — daddy of them all, the crippling Daddy Issues that make feminists such fun.

But that’s just the thing: Either anxiety works that way or it doesn’t.  Just because we don’t see a specific syndrome in ourselves doesn’t mean we don’t have a whole bunch of anxiety we need to discharge.  Just because it’s subclinical, in other words, doesn’t mean it’s not real, or unimportant.  See for example the legions of keyboard commandos who show up in the comments of any blog with more than fourteen readers.  Yeah, sure, it’s possible that those guys all got kicked out of SEAL Team 6 for being too badass… but it’s probably classic identification.  They’re deeply uneasy about the world and their place in it, so they construct themselves an identity as the Rambo of Evergreen Terrace.

With me?  And now, at long last, to the point: The Wuhan Flu.  This is that.

Everyone who has thought about it for five minutes knows that something’s not right.  Scroll through the comments here and here.  As y’all have noted, actual hard information on the coronavirus is hard to come by.  Is it fully air-transmissible?  What are the infection rates?  Hell, what are the death totals?  And speaking of the death totals, even if you trust China’s figures (which no reasonable person can possibly do), they seem…. low.  Like, really low.  I actually trust Italy’s government to deliver some vague approximation of the truth, and even there, where they’re in full-blown freakout mode, it seems to kill off old folks with compromised immune systems and lung problems at a fractionally higher rate than your garden-variety flu.

So, you know… it’s the flu.  Not great by any means, and more infectious (possibly) than some other flus in our recent past, but for all that just the flu.  The ongoing sky-is-falling global freakout has next to nothing to do with the actual bug.  We live in a deeply anxious age, and that anxiety has to discharge somehow.  It’s global hysteria — classic hysteria, Freudian hysteria, an excess of stress that must be discharged by “converting” it into behavior.

The people who are freaking out about it aren’t worried about dying from it.  No, really, they’re not.  Nor should they be — no reasonably healthy person under age 70 has any reason to be worried about that.  Instead, what they’re worried about is powerlessness.  We’ve all long suspected that we’re ruled by idiots and grifters.  We’ve all long sensed that our “leaders” hold us in deep contempt.  And we’ve long known that none of our problems are worth anything to the global pirate capitalist class.  The only reason those bastards care if we all drop dead from the plague is that they can’t sell enough iCrap to each other to keep the company stock price up.

We know this.  But we can’t say it, and we can’t act on it, because doing so goes against our self-image.  Our media, our education system, our “culture” (such as it is) has spent the last half-century telling us what special and unique snowflakes we all are, even as it’s forcing us into ever-greater conformity.  We’ve broken all the taboos, transgressed all the boundaries, liberated all the oppressed.  If there ever were to be such a thing as “social justice,” then truly we’ve achieved it, here in this best of all possible worlds where you can lose your job for not addressing your co-worker as a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin and 6’2″ dudes with beards down to their collarbones can go wee-wee in the little girls’ room….

….and yet.  And yet.  And yet feminists (just to stick with a theme), despite running everything for the last 30 years, still can’t get that lousy 25 cent raise.  Seven out of every five college girls are sexually assaulted the minute they step on campus, despite boys being as rare as sasquatches on most campuses (and despite the ever-growing clamor for free college for everyone).  You’re free to — hell, you’re practically required to — make up your own pronouns, but you’re not allowed to ask just how a degree in “gender studies” could be worth even one dollar in student loan debt, let alone one hundred thousand dollars.  We keep agitating for change, keep voting for it, keep tweeting about it… and nothing happens.

That profound sense of powerlessness is exactly, and I do mean exactly, what screwed up Anna O.  She hated her father for not allowing her any personal agency.  In her heart of hearts she wanted him dead.  And yet she knew herself to be a loving daughter, so that overwhelming sense of relief — indeed, of joy — she felt when he kicked the bucket sent her around the bend.

And so it goes with us.  We can’t get off the college / McJob / debt / frivolous consumption treadmill… and yet we must.  Life can’t go on this way…. so it won’t.  We can’t consciously stop working, stop buying, stop watching sportsball, stop running our kids from daycare to soccer practice to SAT prep to study dates… so we’ll do it unconsciously.

The question then becomes: What happens when the anxiety is discharged?

The reason psychoanalysis works — and it does work, though not in the way Freud thought it did — is because the patient brings all this unconscious stuff into her conscious mind.  She commits to small, meaningful changes, which themselves form the basis for a new, changed identity.  Are we going to see that?  Are the obsessive sports-watchers (classic transference, obviously) going to wake up and realize that hey, I didn’t die after 48 hours of no sportsball, maybe I should think about that?  Or will we go back to the same pattern?

Hysterics are hysterical because it works.  All that psychic energy has to go somewhere.  The key is bringing the conflict into consciousness.  If we really want to affect meaningful change, my fellow Dissidents, now is the time.  Be ready to “help” your friends and neighbors once the panic burns out in a few weeks.

*”Shell shock” was originally hypothesized to be a result of spinal trauma from the constant vibration of heavy shelling.

Just recently I had some fun with one of my nephews, who’s unexpectedly home for “Spring Break.”

Let’s take this Wuhan Flu thing seriously, I said.  But since that hits a little too close to home, let’s pretend it’s a zombie outbreak.  I want you to take it 100% seriously.  The zombie virus has made it to our shores.  It’s not too bad yet, but there’s definitely a walking dead situation.  So… what do you want the government to do?

Nephew of course starts rattling off all the Chuck Norris fantasies young college guys have.  Close the ports, call out the army, firebomb the streets wherever infected are sighted, yadda yadda. All of this is translated from the teenager, but you get the gist of it:

Me: Ok.  Now, since we’ve stipulated that we’re taking this 100% seriously: Do you really want to give the government the power to do all that?

Nephew: Of course!

Me: Ok.  Well then, do you really want to give Donald Trump the power to do that?

Nephew:  Oh my god no!!!  Orange Man bad!!!

Me: Now wait a minute, Nephew.  You just said you’re taking this 100% seriously.  You just said you want the government to have the power to set up flamethrower checkpoints on all major roads.  Well, who is the current head of the government?

Nephew: But…but…but…. Orange Man BAD!!!!

Me: Remember, Nephew, you promised to take this 100% seriously.  So are you seriously telling me that the first thing you’d do, in the event of the zombie outbreak, is call an emergency presidential election, in the hopes that someone — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, somebody — would win, so that the right kind of person could take all those measures you said were so very, very, very immediately necessary?

Nephew:  Uhhhh…. no, I guess not.

Me: So you do want to give Donald Trump that power, since he is, in fact, the current head of the United States government?

Nephew: Oh my god no! Orange Man BAAAAAAADDDD!!!!

Me: Well then I guess you’re just not serious about this zombie outbreak, are you?

Now of course my nephew, being a college kid with an American public school education under his belt, didn’t learn a damn thing.  But maybe the rest of us can.  What would a reasonable, prudent, serious government do to respond to the Wuhan Flu, if it were in fact as serious as it’s being made out to be?

Here again, since we’re all agitated about the way our completely sober-minded, totally objective, utterly nonpartisan media is covering Wuhan Flu, let’s think in zombie terms.  Closing the borders is a great idea, of course, to prevent further infestation from overseas, but we need containment measures inside the borders.  Canceling sporting events, closing college dorms, and the like are also good ideas…. but pretty far down the list from the one internal containment measure that really matters:

Shutting down the interstates.

Can you imagine the damage a single infected delivery driver could do?  Well, if you believe the news coming in from non-MSM channels, that’s exactly the case in Italy.  You’re stopping Mass at St. Peter’s during Easter (not that the goddamn godless commie who calls himself the “Pope” needed much of an excuse), but you’re letting delivery drivers zoom around on their appointed rounds?  With, like, no medical checks or anything?

But, of course, in that same comment thread, Pickle Rick alludes to the reason that would never, ever happen: stop the flow of “necessaries” into the ‘hood, even for a day, and every sizable American city goes up in flames.  And since that’s the Democrats’ key voting demographic…

Personally, I think this thing is way overblown.  As great as it is to blow off some psychic steam — since everyone on this side already acknowledges we’re living in The End Times — I recognize a gaslighting when I see a ridiculously inept one.  I’m not trying to say it’s nothing — it’s a legit public health crisis, and I wouldn’t wish even the regular flu on anyone — but whatever happens, if we survive it, the main takeaway from the Wuhan Flu will be the seemingly unfathomable depths of our own frivolity.  We are simply not a serious country.  We’re a circus, and the clowns are in charge.

UPDATE: Didn’t mean to step on Philmon’s post, below.  Please read that for an excellent take.

I know this is hard to believe, but the Dems screwed up again.

For lots of schools and colleges, this upcoming week is Spring Break, i.e. the week that reminds parents why they’re so very glad to be able to send their kids off to school on weekdays.  With everything closing, suspending, etc., those kids are going to be home an additional week or two… and there’s nothing to do.

The panic over the Wu Tang Flu will last exactly as long as the righteous high suburban soccer moms get from freaking out about it outweighs the annoyance they experience of actually having to interact with their kids.  So… you know… for about three days after Spring Break.

Election’s not til’ November, geniuses.  You should’ve released the virus in late July.

It’s been a while since I’ve taken Legal Procedure 101, but I seem to recall that juries get briefed on the “reasonable man” standard before they begin their deliberations.  Like the related “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the “reasonable man” standard lets jurors reject out of hand the defense’s wilder hypotheses.  What was Peanut, a known shady character with a long list of drug offenses, doing in MacArthur Park at 3 am with the equally shady Jimmy?  Maybe they were just exchanging cake recipes in the rain, but no reasonable man could buy that.  It’s still on the prosecution to prove that something bad went down, of course, but no one is obliged to seriously consider the more implausible hypotheses.

It’s fun to apply the reasonable man standard to American politics.  Consider one of our less contentious elections, 1996.  As hard as it is to credit the Republicans with a shred of good sense, they actually did what a reasonable man would do.  Faced with an incumbent in a hot economy, they had no realistic path to victory (this was pre-Monica, in case you don’t recall).  So they gave the nod to one of their venerable old warhorses, Bob Dole, so that he could get his name a few notches higher in a few of the more comprehensive history books.

It’s even harder to put “reasonable” in the same sentence as “Democrats,” but they did something similar back in 1984.  Walter Mondale was the centrist’s moderate, or vice versa, from way back.  The Dems knew they weren’t going to beat Reagan, so they ran the least objectionable candidate they could find.  In both cases, the idea was to protect the brand.  No one could say that Dole or Mondale lost because of some zany, extreme position, since they were the definition of forgettable.  If it’s just not gonna be your year, run a milquetoast and start prepping for the next election cycle.

And… this is gonna seem even weirder, but the Dems actually seem to be trying to do something similar today.  A reasonable man would conclude that you’re simply not going to beat a sitting president in a good economy.  If history is any guide, you’re not going to beat an incumbent in a bad economy, either, absent some catastrophic handicap, on the order of “finishing out Nixon’s post-Watergate term” or “being Jimmy Carter.”  Look at 2012, for pete’s sake.  Mitt Romney was a terrible candidate, I agree, but he wasn’t quite as obviously a weasel back then.  Obama was unpopular, the economy was terrible… if it were possible to beat an incumbent in the modern era, Barack “Jimmy Carter’s Second Term” Obama was the man to beat.  But it wasn’t even particularly close.

The Dems, then, should back off and punt in 2020.  And as weird as it sounds, it seems that’s what Joe-Mentum is all about.  The Dems aren’t against Bernie Sanders because they disagree with his positions.  Quite the opposite, obviously.  Nor are they against him because they think he’ll lose.  Rather, they’re against him because they think he’ll lose, and his loss will irreparably damage the brand.

Consider what would’ve happened had Bob Dole said “screw it, we’re going for the gusto!” back in 1996.  (Not that Dole was actually capable of doing this, but suppose).  If he’d said, in other words, “since I’m gonna lose anyway, let’s go down big.  Elect me, my fellow Americans, and I’ll end welfare entirely.  I want a corporate income tax rate of zero.  Hell, I want a personal income tax rate of zero.  I’ll ban abortions, mandate school prayer, force Americans to carry bazookas in order to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights, and rename the Fourth of July to Ronald Reagan Day, brought to you by NASCAR.”  How could any Republican object to this?  And yet…. how could any Republican ever vote for it, either?  Politics is the art of the possible.  A campaign like that is a kamikaze mission.

Cf. Bob Dole’s actual campaign, which was something along the lines of “pretty much what Bill Clinton is doing, but without the chicken-fried grifter vibe.”  I remember making lots of fun of the guy back when (I was a liberal back then, as all callow youth are), but I can’t for the life of me remember why.

That’s what Joe is going to do — indeed, what he’s been doing the entire time.  I don’t think Joe honestly knows where he is half the time, but he’s got his lines and he can remember at least half of them, which is all the “reasonable man” Democrats require.  His loss won’t damage the brand too much… provided he doesn’t have to break out the big guns in the primary fight.

That’s the Donks’ nightmare.  I don’t know how they can avoid doing some serious damage in their upcoming “debates.”  What, exactly, do Joe and Bernie disagree on?  The timing of The Revolution?  Like every other clown in their circus, they’re both campaigning on “free everything for everyone, especially illegals.”  Bernie, to his credit, has admitted once or twice that his plans will end Wall Street, destroy the middle class, and generally turn America into a Worker’s Paradise.  For the rest of the field, that’s a feature, not a bug; the “Biden plan” just takes a few years longer.  A Bernie victory — hell, a Bernie surviving-to-the-convention — means their entire agenda gets discredited when whoever ends up as the nominee goes down in flames in November.

A Biden “victory,” on the other hand, means less damage, provided he wins outright.  The longer this farce goes on, the more likely it is that Sundown Joe or his people will have to bust out one or all of Bernie’s many, many, many, many, many sucking-up-to-commies moments.  How in God’s name are the folks who spent the last four years screaming about “Russia interfering in our elections!” going to ask their people to get behind a guy who went to the USSR on his fucking honeymoon?  

…or maybe not.  Perhaps the “reasonable man” is actually the coldest-blooded cynic imaginable.  Since you know Donald Trump would hammer him with it, perhaps it’s best to torpedo Bernie now.  To purge him and his influence completely and ruthlessly, the way the party should’ve done with the Clintons back in 2008.  They’ve called everyone else on earth a Russian sleeper agent at this point.  Why not bust it out on Bernie, who was objectively pro-Soviet right up to the minute the USSR ceased to exist?

The question then becomes, is anyone in the Democratic Party a reasonable man?

or, you know, rising Joe-Mentum!!!

I love Cracked.com.  No, seriously, I do.  If you want to know why I quit academia, look no further.  If your bog-standard, know-nothing, narcissistic, borderline-sociopathic Basic College Girl were a website, it’d be Cracked.com.  This is the worldview of pretty much every American under the age of 40, presented (theoretically) in humorous listicle form.

The headline, in case you didn’t care to click, is “5 Reasons Why Presidential Debates are Pointless.”  And yet, I could swear that just four short years ago, everyone on that side of the fence was assuring us that no matter how well Trump did in various polls, Hillary would just crush him in the debates… and that’s why she was bound to win.  No, really: They said that.  I was there.  Weren’t you?  I know I sound like a broken record, but am I the only person in America who remembers shit that happened just a couple dozen months ago?

But just as the Electoral College becomes a pointless relic of the feudal past anytime a Democrat loses an election, so debates become meaningless whenever a Dem is set up to lose one.  I expect we’ll be seeing a LOT of this type of thing in the next few months…. for some reason.

In the comments to the Bernie post, new commenter texinole writes:

I’ve really enjoyed going through your archives recently and have noticed the stark difference in commentary from the pre-Trump era. Namely the dearth of Obama and other prominent figures’ names being mentioned and a stricter focus on the philosophy and principles underlying issues of the day. It seems all contemporary discourse MUST invoke the Orange Man, regardless of where on the political spectrum the conversation is taking place.

I appreciate the compliment, but alas, the near-constant invocation of the Orange Man can and must continue, for the simple reason that we’re living in the End Times.  Should our great-great-great-grandchildren decide to give stuff like “music” and “art” and “indoor plumbing” and “living past 35” another go, they’ll need some primary sources on how we got here.

The main lesson I hope our distant descendants draw from the Orange Man Era is: The rage heads ye have always with you, so ye must find a way to channel them into something as non-destructive as possible.  The story of modern politics can be written in a sentence: The weaponization of rage heads, combined with the inability of any society to properly dispose of said WMDs.

Set the Wayback Machine to the turn of the 20th century.  Lenin’s great insight is that “the masses” will never achieve the proper revolutionary consciousness without a dedicated cadre of hardcore, professional revolutionaries to lead the way.  Lenin recognized the prevalence of incipient rage heads in his society — how could he not? — but realized that, absent some guiding hand, they’d flounder around incoherently.  At best (from the “furthering the Revolution” point of view), they’d do what his, Lenin’s, idiot brother did: Try to knock off the tsar, and get himself hung for it.  Thus, the Bolsheviks.

The problem, though, is that rage heads by definition suffer from poor impulse control.  The tiny subset of them that are pure sociopaths (like Lenin), and thus have the icy-veined self-control to hold their fire, have to maintain the very tightest discipline over the Party, or all hell breaks loose.  See, for example, the massive street battles in Weimar Germany between the KPD (German Commies) and the SD.  Hitler, like Lenin, had to get his rage heads on a tight leash, so he channeled the disciplined sociopaths from the SD into the SS, cooled out the coolable in the SD by buying them off, and shanked the incorrigible remainder.  See also the almost-exactly-contemporary Moscow Show Trials.

Note please that this is your best-case scenario for a purely ideological revolution.  From Robespierre to Kim Il Sung, the first step in consolidating the Revolution is killing off a large fraction of the original revolutionaries.

The worst-case scenario (again, from the “furthering the Revolution” standpoint) is what the American wannabe-bolshies did / are currently doing.  Knowing that you can’t shank or show-trial the dreadlocked poetry majors that make up your goon squad, you try to channel them into academia, the Media, the “arts.”  Which fails egregiously, because whatever tenuous contact with reality they once had gets completely severed by those institution’s social bubbles.  They never were very good at holding fire, and now they can’t, literally can’t, see any reason to — life is great here on campus, so why can’t it be that way everywhere?

Thus, Orange Man.  As we’ve noted, the Media could’ve led Trump by the nose.  They’re experts at churning out those “good doggy!”-type articles they use to rehabilitate dead Republicans.  It’s obvious that these work on living specimens, too, e.g. one Willard “Mitt” Romney.  That guy would cut off whatever passes for his nuts live on network tv for a few more hosannas from the Washington Post.  They could’ve done the same thing to Trump — praised all the ways he’s “growing in office,” your standard Media stuff.

But they didn’t.  Instead they freaked out, because academia and journalism are effectively the same thing now, and they’re both guild professions stocked with three generations of cushy, coddled rage heads.  (Seriously, take any reporter or professor.  It’s 10 to 1 they have at least one other professor or reporter very close on the family tree).  So instead of leading Trump by the nose, they punched him in the face.  Bad idea, and now we all have to pay for it.

Should Our Thing ever get off the Internet and into the streets, job #2 is going to have to be channeling the rage heads.  Until then, though, our #1 duty will be to chronicle the decline and fall.  The lessons are here, great-great-great-grandkids, should you choose to learn them.

Before we get into it, can we all just pause for a second to savor the delicious irony of the Democrats suddenly discovering, after all these many many many years, that Socialism is bad?  I almost feel sorry for poor ol’ Bernie.  For going on four decades now, the Dems have treated him like the little kid at the grown-ups’ table.  Who hasn’t been there on Thanksgiving?  “Mommy, Uncle Henry’s breath smells really bad.”  We’re all thinking it, kiddo, but you can’t say it.  They’ve been silently agreeing with him about the need to turn America into the USSA all these years, and now they’re gonna take him behind the woodshed for it?  Really?

This is point #1 in the argument, increasingly common out here in the political badlands, that Bernie Sanders is Bizarro World Donald Trump.  Back in 2016, the weirdest thing for those of us not wedded to Team Republican — for that vanishingly rare breed, that is, who regard politics as politics, not sportsball in neckties — was how normal Trump sounded.  This guy is supposed to be the ultimate anti-Establishment candidate, right?  So why is he saying stuff that has been GOP orthodoxy since the 1970s?  And why are they hammering him for it?

Take away Trump’s signature in-your-face style, in other words, and you’ve got what sounds like your typical Rotary Club Republican Boomer goober.  The only difference was: He actually meant it.  As I’ve written before, Trump wins with one simple tactic: He jukes every which way in the backfield, but always ends up running Right.  Whereas every other Republican always “grows in office” — as they say, the easiest way to elect a Democrat in a center-Right country like America is to elect a Republican and wait a few months — Trump remains consistent.*

So does Bernie.  Bernie doesn’t fake — he just heads straight for the Left sideline.  If the rest of the Party weren’t there to stop him, he’d just keep running, Forrest Gump-like, straight out of the stadium.

This is where he’s most dangerous.  Like Trump was in 2016, Bernie 2020 can be seen as a pure protest candidate, a giant “fuck you” to The System.  Hell, in my increasingly frequent black-pill moments, I contemplate voting for the guy — we’re not voting our way out of what’s coming, as Z Man always says, so we might as well get started.  A few years of life under the Septuagenarian Stalin will give us some valuable prep for when things get really interesting under La Presidenta por Vida Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Moreover, there can be great power in being the only guy in the room who’s willing to state the obvious.  In this case, it has been obvious for a long time that the Democratic Party are a bunch of godless commies.  Literally commies, or at least Bolshie-curious.  Obvious, but always verboten to say… until now.  Sanders has a rabid base that, even if you assume the “official” numbers are all lies, can’t be much less than 20% of the entire Party.  Those hardcore Bernie Bros can’t possibly have any illusions about who he is and what he wants.  That’s what they want, too, and again: twenty percent.  The Media paints anyone to the Right of Rachel Maddow as a “white supremacist,” but can you imagine how different American politics would be if 20% of the GOP were open, avowed Klansmen?

Those are the “positives,” for lack of a better term, of Bernie being the Democratic nominee.  If this is what The People really, really want — and it’s crystal clear that a lot of them do — then we should at least have a good, long, hard “national conversation” about giving it to them.  Cuba, as Bernie keeps informing us, does after all have 100% literacy and free health care, and the Chinese are great at lifting people out of poverty.  Let’s talk about that, live on national television, and see where it takes us.

Add to this the fact that the same yahoos who gave Hillary Clinton a 93% chance of winning the presidency back in 2016 are all doing the Chicken Little routine at the thought of Sanders’s nomination, and it seems like the guy is a legit threat.

But just because those yahoos were and are yahoos doesn’t mean they’re wrong again.  I think they’re right.  Not in the way they think they’re right, mind you, but right for all that.  They think that having an open Socialist up there on the debate stage, wearing a Mao suit with a “¡Viva Fidel!” lapel pin next to the hammer-and-sickle, will be rejected by most Americans.  Those people are idiots, not least because they’ve forgotten that most people are idiots, and American voters are idiots even by those standards.  Remember, I taught college for many, many years.  You can take it from me: Most American “college” “graduates” can’t even spell “communism,” much less tell you anything about it.  All they hear is “gibsmedat.”

No, the real reasons I think Bernie is toast are threefold (fourfold, if you count the nonzero-and-rapidly-rising possibility that he’ll be Epsteined by the Party elite, but for decency’s sake we’ll go with three).  First, though he’s portrayed, Trump-like, as The Ultimate Outsider by people who first heard of him last week, he’s actually been in Congress since 1991.  That’s a year shy of three decades, folks.  Ace of Spades types had a lot of fun dunking on one of the Cucks — Rich Lowry, I think — who tweeted out something about how he just discovered Bernie Sanders has three houses when one of Sanders’s debate opponents brought it up.  Lowry was (is?) the editor of National Review, i.e. a professional political jock-sniffer, so he has no excuse for not knowing this… but in fact a lot of people don’t, and Bernie’s outsider appeal depends on them continuing not to know it.

How long is that ignorance going to last, do you think, after The Lil’est Tyrant Mike Bloomberg drops another $20 million in attack ads?  Will Donald Trump drop that on him in his opening monologue at the first debate, or will he wait a few minutes?

I know, I know, rank hypocrisy doesn’t bother Leftists at all, but Bernie already has them in the bag.  He has to appeal to centrists, especially young centrists.  Bernie is, in fact, counting on huge voter turnout from college kids.  Democrats always do, and they always come up short, because college kids.  Alas for him, he hasn’t “expanded the electorate” at all — voter turnout in the recent primaries barely increased at all over 2016, and was way below 2008 levels.  If college kids really are feelin’ the Bern, they aren’t feelin’ it enough to actually get off their lazy asses and go vote in primaries.

And again, I’ll remind you that I taught a lot of college for a lot of years.  I couldn’t even get a lot of these stupid brats to come to class on exam day.  They’ll fire off a text message about a sick grandma on the off chance that you’ll give them a pity C, but they won’t get off the couch for anything, and not even California allows you to vote via Instagram… yet.  If they’re not willing to put their iCrap down long enough to go vote in a primary now, how likely will they be when they find out he’s the worst kind of hypocrite, flying between his three houses on a private jet while talking about “the rich” and “climate change”?

The Ultimate Outsider is actually one of the slimier swamp creatures.  That’s knock #1.  Number two is closely related: Trump will flense him in the debates, because Trump can run on his record.  Look, I take a backseat to no man in my disdain for Orange Man’s complete sellout on the only thing that matters, the Big Beautiful Wall… but the fact remains that the economy is great, at least on paper and increasingly in reality.  The Ninth Circus is actually majority-conservative.  Gorsuch has a tendency to cuck, but though Kavanaugh might well have if they’d left him alone (see footnote 2, below), now he’s fighting mad.  And Satan’s going to have to call in his markers on Ruth Bader Ginsberg sooner or later; fetal grindings and goat-blood transfusions can only stave off death so long.

Two Supremes, and undoubtedly a third by the end of his second term, a hot economy, a draw-down in the endless wars, a summit with Lil’ Kim, the Chinese trade deal… we can debate how good, bad, or indifferent these really are all day long, but they play like real, serious accomplishments out in the sticks.  Bernie Sanders, by contrast… well, you’ve doubtless seen the memes.  Here’s an attempted debunking of the memes, by someone trying really, really, really hard to give Bernie credit for some legislation.  Are you ready?

Those three bills [sponsored by Sanders, which became law], according to Congress.gov, are:

S.893 Introduced 5/8/13. The Veterans’ Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act of 2013 which became law in November 2013

S.885 Introduced 5/7/13. A bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 35 Park Street in Danville, Vermont, as the “Thaddeus Stevens Post Office” became law in November 2014.

H.R.5245 Introduced 4/27/06. To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 1 Marble Street in Fair Haven, Vermont, as the “Matthew Lyon Post Office Building” became law in August 2006.

Chew on that, h8rz!!!  A whopping three bills, two of which renamed post offices in Vermont.  This, in all its glory, is Bernie’s legislative record after three fucking decades in Congress.  Again, do you think Trump’s going to wallop him with that right out the gate, or wait a few minutes?  He’s not just a jet-setting, three-house-owning Swamp Thing — he’s a ludicrously ineffective jet-setting, three-house-owning Swamp Thing.

Finally, there’s the (((elephant in the room))).  Y’all know how much I hate this “special people” shit, but if Bernie’s going to have a shot in the general, he’s going to need the brown side of the Democrat electorate to come out full force… and they are not kosher, to put it mildly.  This, too, is related to his “Ultimate Outsider” routine — so many people who think they support Bernie Sanders have never seen, or, crucially, heard Bernie Sanders.  He looks and sounds straight out of a Mel Brooks caricature.  Anti-semitism is rife on the Left; it’s endemic, and often violent, on the dark side.  I can’t see Trump making significant gains with the Black vote — like most folks out here in the wilderness, I think the brothers are pretty much a lost cause by now — but I can see an awful lot of Blacks and Hispanics staying home in November if Bernie is the nominee.  He’s got to get all of them, and I just don’t see that (((happening))).

That’s not to say it’s a sure thing, of course.  A million things can, and undoubtedly will, happen between then and now.  Saying “if present trends continue” is a sucker bet, but if present trends continue, I can see Trump beating the margin of fraud in November pretty easily if Bernie is the Dems’ nominee.

Your thoughts?

*I know, I know, for certain values of “consistent.”  And “consistent” sure as hell isn’t the same as “effective.”  But I’ll take it, if only for the vanishingly-small chance it gives that we can get through the 2020s without another civil war.**

**Not really a footnote to the previous, but there’s no other place to stick this: The truly sickening irony, when you think about it, is that Trump absolutely would’ve “grown in office” if they had let him.  The man loves flattering press coverage more than anything in the world.  What they really should’ve done is let him follow his natural limousine-liberal instincts, then hit him with a barrage of those “good doggy!”-type articles they trot out to rehabilitate any recently deceased Republican (yeah, y’all were calling John McCain Literally Hitler back in 2008, but now he’s the moderate, reasonable one).  Y’all could’ve led him by the nose… but you didn’t.  Instead you punched him in the nose, which got his Irish up, and now we’re gonna get Gettysburg II: Electric Boogaloo, and This Time It’s Personal.  Thanks, motherfuckers.  Here’s hoping the new Quantrill’s Raiders get you, and get creative with it.