These articles are by Ron Unz, not you. What gives?

Now I have a better idea of who are some of the people Mr. Sailer was deriding in his writings about low-brow MAGA folks. Someone mentioned this S. Carolina low country CongressDramaQueen’s name before in that discussion. I see what at least a big part of the problem is – women in office.

It’s OK to have your battle-axes, your Maggie Thatchers and such, and then the occasional high-spirited anti-Establishment MTGs. These pretty women though, like Kristy Noem, Pam Blondie, and so on are NO GOOD. They are real women. As such, they do care about their appearances and being seen as often and by as many people as possible more important than getting things done. It’s who they are, which is fine, but don’t freaking appoint them to anything, for cryin’…

Nancy Mace is on a whole nother level of female stupidity. She’s entering a picture of her naked body – disappointingly very hard to see for me – into the Congressional Record and on viral video in order to push for MOAR PRIVACY! What it really is is some kind of drama involving her either 3rd husband or newest ex-boyfriend. I didn’t get that straight. The wiki page on Nancy Mace is a hoot!

Just a screen shot – the video is boring woman-splainin’:

Marisa, Mr. Unz should change it to “… for all of you Steve Sailer followers”. Then, the “…my three most…” would be accurate.

Yankee Militia – 1775. The RKBA isn’t just for self-defense, it’s about fighting TPTB!

Video Link

I recently came across one of the most revealing passages I’ve read in a long time. It shows that, 110 years ago in America, public mention of Jewish power – much less expressions of discomfort with how that power was being used – was already becoming off limits and subject to self-censorship and a strong social taboo.

The quote is on pages 299-300 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, a 2019 book by Kevin MacDonald. He quotes from an article that appeared in Henry Ford’s newspaper The International Jew on June 12, 1920. The article was written by two people named Ernest Liebold and Billy Cameron.

“There is a vague feeling that even to openly use the word ‘Jew’, or to expose it nakedly to print, is somehow improper…There is extreme sensitiveness about the public discussion of the Jewish Question on the part of Gentiles. They would prefer to keep it to the hazy borderlands of their thoughts, shrouded in silence…The principal public Gentile pronouncements upon the Jewish Question are in the manner of the truckling politician or the pleasant after-dinner speaker; the great Jewish names in philosophy, medicine, literature, music and finance are named over, the energy, ability and thrift of the race are dwelt upon, and everyone goes home feeling that a difficult place has been rather neatly negotiated.”

They forced my alma mater Texas A&M to go coed in 1967 because it is a public university. The Citidal was the last hope of keeping the tradition of all male military colleges alive, along with VMI sadly they were forced to accept women too.

I find that there is almost never any anti-Semitism in actual, historical anti-Semitic literature. There’s a passage (it is not in The Conquering Jew, which is actually a philo-Semitic apologetic — I forget the title) that runs something like, “Join our clubs, but don’t ask to be made President and to change our rules the first week you’re here.” That sounds pretty reasonable to me. The same book has a bit that notes that, if the goyim had our druthers, we’d go fishing; but the Jew workaholic sweating at a desk late into the night is exactly where he would be even if he could do otherwise. An innocent could be shown long passages of Henry Ford or lesser known authors and would need to have it explained to him that this is bigotry.
We circle the conclusion that, just like “racism” as a term and a concept was made up out of whole cloth to eventually negate the then-normal concept of nationalism (you cannot be proud of your own people, and the reason is because that somehow constitutes hating another people), Semites started out with Semitic tribalism (a undoubted belief system observable in non-Jews and across history) which necessitates extreme xenophobia. Semitic tribalism in a nutshell is “let ’em all go to hell, except Cave Number 23.” So “anti-Semitism” is a backwards, passive-aggressive attack on the goyim, to fulfill the Semitic mandate to hate. This also explains the long runs of peace and the heterogeneous distribution of concern.

Have you ever seen them together?

Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen = JFC, prune-skin codger sips beer there

I stole “JFC” from Corvinus.

Should have added she is the first female grad of the Citadel daddy was the commandant of the corps of cadets bet she didn’t suffer any hazing.

Comedy Gold
President Trump’s phone goes off during executive order signing: ‘It’s only a congressman’
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6373399483112

[reply from Open Thread 5]

I think trade deficits started when nations previously destroyed by WW2 started rebuilding their industry

Agree. It is hard to understand post-WWII economics without understanding that in 1945 all major national treasuries except the US were drained and all major economies except the US were wrecked. Economically the US towered over a desolate plain of its former rivals. The US stood alone and supreme as no power has since Rome in the second and third century AD: a literal once-in-a-millennium event. That’s why even now, 80 years later, the whole world is still living, working, and trading in the shadow of it.

But unless all the destroyed post-WWII powers were content to remain in a medieval condition, this state of affairs could not persist. Even without a Marshall Plan the rest of the world was going to become productive again and the US’s one-time unique pile of treasure would flow out again into it. The only question was when and how.

Bretton Woods and the Marshall Plan were political attempts to direct the way that would happen. Bretton Woods was a rigid scheme bolted on top of the organic, amorphic world economy. It created certain conveniences for the world of the 1940s, but was already demonstrating the impossibility of perpetual foresight by the 1950s. The Marshall Plan accelerated the recovery of nations favored by Washington while also binding them more closely into US trade.

The central feature—perhaps the central error—of the Bretton Woods system was that it made the US dollar the mandatory world reserve currency. That role was mostly fulfilled in former times by precious metals (irrespective of whose visage was stamped on it), but in reality there is no natural requirement for a single global reserve currency. Currencies can, did, and do trade freely on their own strength and quantity (though governments have always been jealous to protect and direct trade of their non-specie-backed banknotes). Currencies can trade on merit again (and already do in certain ways, though the volume is still small compared to dollars), but the beneficiaries of the dollar global reserve currency will have to give up their bag. They won’t willingly.

This mandatory dollar global reserve currency created a perpetual surplus demand for US dollars, making the dollar perpetually trade above its economic value. This perpetually handicaps native US export industry, and perpetually stimulates foreign industries to import to the US. The latter can be offset with US tariffs on imports. The former can be offset by pressuring foreign markets to reduce tariffs. The men who created this system understood this and acted accordingly, but like Middle Earth forgetting the One Ring, at some point this fell out of knowing and the gates of Gondor were opened to plundering.

What this thread needs (and Germ T wants Billie Eyelash to cover) is a little pre AC/DC Brian Johnson Disco-ish pop rock gallop by Geordie:

Video Link

In more concerning news, the US Army “suspends” 18 soldiers for opening fire on civilians attending some sort of beach festival in Florida:

https://nypost.com/2025/05/22/us-news/us-army-suspends-18-rangers-who-allegedly-fired-blanks-at-florida-beach/

Last I knew, the US military does not “suspend” its enlisted service members, it either NJP’s or court marshals them, sometimes following an arrest.

Michael McNair argues that Trump is doing the right thing in international trade.
https://archive.is/S5QDS

Greetings, Mr. Ross,

(I’m replying to your comment here instead of there.)

I agree with you when you say All guns bought with a license should be assumed to be registered. Seems pretty obvious.

But, according to a study by ammo.com 85.9% of those possessing a firearm, when they committed their crimes, purchased or obtained the firearm from somewhere other than a licensed dealer. And… Stolen guns are used in a significantly higher number of crimes than legally purchased firearms.

According to this report from the DOJ Seven percent (of the incarcerated criminals who took part in this 2016 survey) had purchased it under their own name from a licensed firearm dealer. They also mention that Fewer than 1 in 50 (less than 2%) of all prisoners had obtained a firearm from a retail source and possessed, carried, or used it during the offense for which they were imprisoned.

If that is actually the case then background checks, serial numbers and registration schemes are largely useless when it comes to preventing or deterring crime.

Cheers! ☮️

Maaaaaaaaaaan, will you just get a taste of that drummer’s ‘stache and insane neck furniture? Who on earth goes to their dressing room and looks in the mirror and says, Yeah, this oughta work.

That is going to keep me awake all nite now, thanks a lot fer nuthin’.

On a side note… speaking of imaginary Billie cover versions, wouldn’t it be great if she covered something by Sweet? Or “The” Sweet, depending on whose management team you arsked?

Video Link

Remember when The Cardigans covered Iron Man?

Video Link

Why weren’t his ideas used to curb runaway inflation, unemployment and interest rates in 1970s? He seems to think loss of competitiveness, labor productivity, skills deficit and lack of investment as problems that can be fixed with monetary tools.

The fraud Pfi$er $teve trolls his readers on substack nowadays.

So, so, so hilarious how Ron retains this blog’s name even after Pfi$er $teve publicly requested otherwise. Alpha move, Ron – strange new respect brother 👊

J.D. Vance gave an excellent speech at U.S. Naval Academy. If he is stating U.S. policy accurately, it is very good news. Non-interventionism is heartfelt and not skin deep.

Video Link

In Trollope’s mid-Victorian novels, Jews appear briefly as money-lenders/loan sharks. The sleazy, grasping, and finally criminal Rev. Emilius is thought to have a Jewish, eastern European background. Saki’s pre-WW1 novella about an Imperial German takeover of Britain keeps mentioning all the rich German Jews lording it over London (very odd, knowing what happened to them later). Lots of slights, but no international conspiracy in sight.

SCOTUS just issued an order thwarting legal attacks on Elon Musk’s DOGE.

SCOTUS issued a major ruling allowing President Trump to fire federal employees working for so-called multi-person boards.

William Kirk traces where the DC Jewish museum shooter and the gun came from to prove.

https://twitter.com/gunpolicy/status/1926049852930011465
https://twitter.com/MorosKostas/status/1925757245796516113
https://twitter.com/CrimeResearch1/status/1925050638381285498
https://twitter.com/C__Herridge/status/1925901392499093569
https://twitter.com/BearingArmsCom/status/1925718379383447945
https://twitter.com/FenixAmmunition/status/1926019807566061693

Remember when The Cardigans covered Iron Man?

Yep. If I have to listen to girl music, I don’t mind Nina Persson.

“If that is actually the case then background checks, serial numbers and registration schemes are largely useless when it comes to preventing or deterring crime.”

That may be true but the fact that most crime is committed with illegal guns doesn’t show it. There might be more crime if criminals were more easily able to obtain legal guns. It does show that making it harder to obtain legal guns doesn’t have much potential to reduce crime.

This cut used to be a big hit among the “hipster-strippers” of Austin TX — gals who were “I’m way too cool and ironic to actually *be* a stripper,” hanging out with guys (like me) who were like “I’m too cool and ironic to actually *be* a guy sitting in a strip club, buying overpriced drinks and giving money to strippers.”

And yet, as Mister Samuel Beckett once observed, “Que voulez-vous, monsieur?”

But also, that was what they were, that wasn’t some sort of made up thing, that was something authentic which the reader would have recognized from life.

We interrupt this urgent thread to bring you a much-needed Harriet Andersson break.

The celestial Harriet Andersson…..

https://www.siff.net/programs-and-events/the-magic-lantern-of-ingmar-bergman/summer-with-monika

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled Billie therapy session….

Checks can be made payable to: BLACKMAIL, Behind the Hot Water Pipe, Third Urinal Down, Mens Restroom, Victoria Station London.

Fox on the Run is fantastic, as was their Ballroom Blitz.

Or “The” Sweet, depending on whose management team you arsked?

I think they were The Sweet back when they made this one, and Sweet later, at the time of your song.

NO, they weren’t all fags. It was the 1970s. That’s just what you did, if you were a (possibly gay) musician.

This has always sort of puzzled me….

I used to have a certain amount of success in getting some of my friends to quit smoking (which is REALLY bad for you! quit smoking NOW!), when I would tell them… stop smoking commercial cigarettes for just a day or two, to clean your system out, and then… smoke exactly one good expensive cigar — a Butera torpedo for preference, but something like it. Something that costs more than like $40 for just one cigar. Sit and smoke that, slowly and carefully, (warm the barrel first) and then, once you understand it and you’ve acquired the taste… you will NEVER EVER AGAIN want to go back to shitty, horrible-tasting, commercial cigarettes! You won’t be able to STAND them any more, with all their chemicals and poison! BUT… expensive cigars are expensive, and you can’t afford to smoke them every day, and so… you wean yourself off your habit! Treat yourself to a good cigar once a week, then only once a month, and then maybe just twice a year.

It worked for a bunch of people.

What I mean to say is, I can’t believe that people settle for just shit, when there is so much high-quality, quality in the world to be enjoyed instead. Just listen to this for a second…..

PJ grew up in a little village in rural England, but she figured out the Beefheart guitar strategy, the desert blues plus craziness, and then she adapted it to her own English countryside style. Listen to all that thickness: that girl can f#cking PLAY, and so can her band.

We only live life once on this planet. EVERYTHING ought to be GOOD. And it can be. So why don’t we go for it, every single time?

“NO, they weren’t all fags. It was the 1970s. That’s just what you did, if you were a (possibly gay) musician.”

David Bowie was visiting Ian Hunter at his manager’s office (at the time Mott the Hoople was a bigger deal than David, believe it or not). David picked up an acoustic, sat down on the floor, and as an impromptu, wrote this….

He finished it, looked up at Ian and said, You guys want that?

Ian said, You bet your sweet motherfuckin ass we do.

“These articles are by Ron Unz, not you. What gives?”

Who is “you”? And who are you?

You’ve never commented here before. This blog is roughly 20 years old. Suddenly you show up, and with your first comment, you seek to make mischief. Who sent you here?

“We only live life once on this planet. EVERYTHING ought to be GOOD.”

Just as a show of gratitude to the world (I think everyone should take a bit from time to time to simply show gratitude for our even being here in the first place),

As a bit of a treat, I am typing this whole thing out by hand by memory, not copy-and-pasting it. I used to be a 120+ wpm Latin-and-Greek typist, so no harm done, no carpal tunnel syndrome…. I think if I took the trouble to type this, you should take the trouble to savor it….

The day the circus of heaven came into town,
Local folks lined the streets
In a Midwestern town,
Waiting anxiously for the parade
To begin all around.
On the very last day.

A unicorn headed the mystical way,
Surrounded by what seemed a thousand golden angels at play.
Behind were centaurs, elves, bright faeries
All in colors of jade.
On the very final day.

For what seemed just another single moment in time,
Seven silvered solemn regal horses rode by.
Seven golden chariots in tow, a wonder to behold.
The Seven Lords of the Mountains of Time. (of time, of time — you CalArts guys get the joke!)

There then arose where nothing really stood there before,
A giant circus tent one thousand feet high from the floor.
The people flocked inside, with their eyes all amazed…
To greet the Seventh Lord of the Seventh Age.

A fanfare rang out, in an incredible sound!
Bringing out the strangest visions in perfect harmony ’round,
Any dreams he asked, would they like to have seen,
From historical or mythical themes?

And then above their heads! just as vivid as life!
Each vision transported in multitudes
Inventing life.
Grecian galleons, the Sack of Troy, to the Gardens of Babylon!
A play of millions roared along!

The gigantic dreams of Alexander the Great!
Civil wars, where brothers fought and killed their friendship in hate!
All seen by Zeus, performing scenes of the Magical Way,
The day the Circus came to town.

Outside,
Great animals,
As tame as the trees.

Angels high in starlight
Dancing streets,
Tuning their colors
With indigo and gold
Dropping violet, red,
And emerald snow.

As the Circus finally changed
Its invisible course,
A new world to be found.

On the dreamy ground we walked upon,
I turned to my son, and said:
Was that something amazing,
Beautiful,
Wonderful, extraordinary,
Beautiful?

“Oh it was okay.”

quit smoking (which is REALLY bad for you! quit smoking NOW!

Good advice! But there ‘s this: As early as the 1920’s, the American public routinely referred to cigarettes as “cancer sticks” and “coffin nails.” As late as the 1950’s, physicians routinely advised taking-up smoking, as “a relaxing finger habit.” This highlights the interesting and increasingly difficult general question: Who, in life, should you take advice from?

The “Experts”, obviously!

Except for ALL of the evidence, of course.

Overpriced drinks. I’ve only had two bad beers in my life; one was an overpriced, warm and flat, served in a strip club in the Florida panhandle. The other was Guinness.

It seems, reading the article, the soldiers were participants in the celebrations, but all the sissies and drama queens decided it was scary and ran and told Mommy how the bad men made them afraid.

Kind of like how you’ll get sent to HR for wearing a cowboy costume at Halloween that includes a cap gun.

My mother wanted to send me my dad’s S&W .38 snubby. I explained how to send it through an FFL, or, I suggested, she could mail it to me, and tell the shipper it was fruitcake. She sent me fruitcake. 🙂

I sent my father an over-under and told the shipper it was a bassoon.

They may have been part of the celebration, but I’m willing to bet the farm that brandishing and flagging the crowd with real firearms and firing blanks was never part of the plan.

I don’t agree that this is about overreacting drama queens. Gun ranges have strict, even draconian, regulation and enforcement of firearm handling for a good reason.

Further, the idea that our military can just show up and play shoot at civilians is kind of a bad precedent, no? Like what, are they rehearsing for the real thing?

“overpriced drinks”

I don’t mind the overpriced drinks in strip clubs or any other kind of bar since sometimes I just like to people watch.

I got banned from the comment section of a popular pickup artist blog by a blogger named Roissy because I compared pickup artist bloggers to unsuccessful strippers. There used to be a website called stripperweb where strippers would spend a lot of time talking about various ways to psychologically manipulate men into spending money. Whenever I have been in a strip club, though, it was just the prettiest strippers I saw raking in the dough. The one time in my life I saw a big increase in female attention directed towards me was after I went on a diet and worked out and improved my appearance. Looks matter and psychological manipulation techniques can’t overcome being overweight and out of shape.

Roissy did not like me saying all this, banned me, and spent a blog post attacking me.

Bombs against brown people like Gazans. But why would you care?

Making Palestine Go Away: The US and Europe give Netanyahu a green light for ethnic cleansing—Philip Giraldi

“Now I have a better idea of who are some of the people Mr. Sailer was deriding in his writings about low-brow MAGA folks.”

No, he celebrated them, you elitist bastard. They are like his wife—strong willed breadwinners fighting for America.

“Someone mentioned this S. Carolina low country CongressDramaQueen’s name before in that discussion. I see what at least a big part of the problem is – women in office.”

You mean white women in office. This is why your side loses when you make these asinine comments.

“As such, they do care about their appearances”

LOL, why do you think Trump hires them? He is all about grabbing them by the p——.

Karlin’s crowd now convenes as Russian Reaction Community. But there seems to be some passive aggression in not renaming this one.

Why not iSteve Blog HBD Tree Fort or Olde Copium Den?

Does Nicholas Stix think that Marisa should be “driven out,” like an “Arab” in Gaza?

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/is-harvard-obeying-the-supreme-court

Is Harvard Obeying the Supreme Court?

The numbers suggest that in 2024, Harvard ignored its 2023 loss in the highest court over its use of affirmative action in admissions.

Steve Sailer
May 23, 2025

Tori for the knockout punch:

Take that, Billie — you still got some things to learn from yer elders. Best. Cover. Evah.

“I got banned from the comment section of a popular pickup artist blog by a blogger named Roissy because I compared pickup artist bloggers to unsuccessful strippers.”

Well I guess it all just depends what your motives are. I had a brief career of hanging around in strip clubs self-medicating, because I was traumatized by the unexpected early death of my best friend, and I discovered by accident that half the girls who work in strip clubs are not drug-addled morons with heavy-metal-drummer boyfriends, but actually nice decent gals who appreciate it if you just want to sit around and buy a few drinks and conversate (viz they get paid when you buy drinks for them that they don’t actually drink), and don’t get grabby when they have to do a dance or two to satisfy Rollo the floor manager.

One of my best friends was a stripper: I was sitting there morose as usual and she came around and sat in my lap, and started a weird very erudite literary argument with me about Herman Melville and Moby Dick. (Two arguments: it’s a variation on Dante’s Inferno, and also, the opening line is NOT “Call me Ishmael” if you are paying attention and even if you are, “Call me Ishmael” does not mean what you at first think it means, and also “Call me Oatmeal” is funny just for the sake of it.) We became besties — she was one of the weirdest most interesting people I ever met in my life, gawd I miss her — and it had nothing to do with the club, as such.

So you know, takes all types I guess.

There was a whole army of “experts” called Kremlinologists. They were supposed to tell us all about the USSR. Not a single one of them predicted it’s break up. None of the CIA analysts did.

Paul Samuelson, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and author of one of the most influential economics textbooks of all time stated in his book: The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive

It was probably just an NJP, but the writer was trying to make it understandable to non-military people. They were probably restricted to the base for a week or two. Rangers must get special treatment, anywhere I was stationed, taking a weapon from the armory and playing with it around civilians would’ve earned a pretty serious punishment.

Sounds to me like your last two sentences are in contradiction with one another.

You mean the same way you want to drive out the Jews from ‘merica, you hypocrite?

Mr. Sailer was right to whim you and others.

“Not a single one of them predicted it’s break up”

I’m not a fan of the CIA, but they did predict it, you f—.

https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1999/11/20/cia-shed-reagan-era-bias-to-predict-communist-fall/

My old flame was a jester, and a joker, and a dealer of men.
They called him “the prince” — a prince of
Blackjacks and one-eyed jacks and women, and anything
That slipped through his hands.

And the ranches, and the mustangs,
And the way he said, You can have all this:
Except for me.
You see, Lady Luck is my mistress,
And you’ll have to play second to her whims.

Bet on the desert’s kiss.

I’m not exackly a gamblin’ man, but I think I would bet on Tori if I had to.

I’m curious of they were actually “Rangers”? The article says they were going through training at a facility at Eglin AFB. If so they are aspiring Rangers, or Ranger trainees, but not yet Rangers.

Firing blanks at some silly “pirate festival” is the kind of thing you’d assign to students with nothing else to do, or maybe a local guard unit.

The negro towards the bow may be both an aspiring Ranger and aspiring Rapper.

An even more interesting question is: why didn’t that first comment from Marisa get trapped in moderation?

Currdog73 just started commenting this month and notice how long his comments stay in moderation.

I’m subtracting all the mentionable groups from 100% to get a combination of The Great Unmentionables and whatever they are doing with No Responses. But who knows if this is a reasonable methodology.

After reading all that, I think a chainsaw is necessary. The buildings may be 389 years old, but Harvard is not old at this point. Is it even Harvard at this point?

“why didn’t that first comment from Marisa get trapped in moderation?… notice how long his [Currdog] comments stay in moderation”

Just curious, how do you know for certain?

The sort of place where we all wished Sinead might have gotten to, if she had managed to hang on longer….

I’m not a fan of the CIA, but they did predict it

A whole year before the collapse actually happened.

“The U.S.S.R. is in the midst of a historic transformation that threatens to tear the country apart. The old Communist order is in its death throes,” said a CIA intelligence report called “The Deepening Crisis in the USSR: Prospects for the Next Year.” The report, a formal national intelligence estimate, was distributed to the president and other U.S. policymakers in November 1990, a year before the empire’s final breakup. “The Soviet Union as we have known it is finished.”

Also, that was just one report. Note this from further down your link (you did read it, right?).

“Some of their analysts did have it right,” said Marshall Goldman, a Russian studies expert and CIA critic from Harvard University. “But on the whole, the bottom line would not have led you to believe the country was on the verge of collapse.”

P.S. I’m curious, Corvinus. Do you think your gratuitous ad hominems make people more or less likely to take you seriously?

The sort of place where we all wished Sinead might have gotten to, if she had managed to hang on longer….

I always liked Bjork, but she really comes off as autistic, stemming through every song.

Competition heating up in the battle of incompetent, obese bulldyke DEI Emergency Management bureaucrats. Los Angeles, thanks to it’s vastly overinflated real estate prices has probably an insurmountable lead in total property damage, but St. Louis pulls ahead in human casualties.

https://nypost.com/2025/05/23/us-news/st-louis-emergency-management-chief-on-leave-after-failing-to-sound-sirens-for-deadly-tornado-report/

Thanks for noticing

Good Lord I apologize for being repetitive, but this woman just destroys me every single f#cking time….

Let me explain. I make sort of an on-going vaudeville running joke about “Billie is the Pope!” and “PJ won’t return my calls!” but you have to understand… for a while back in the old days I really was trying to get PJ to help me out with a rock-opera production of a new adaptation of Medea/Elektra (if you had seen Andrei Serban’s/Elizabeth Swados’s “Fragments of a Trilogy/Trojan Women” (in opera form, in ancient Greek) back at La Mama in the old days, you might get a sense of what was possible. At the time I had sort of almost enough wind in my sails professionally to make it into a Big Deal. But we couldn’t get it going, it’s always a pain in the arse to figure things out. Look at the shit that passes for Broadway these days.

Billie has sort of the kind of zany nuclear energy to make Elektra a possibility, but I think it’s the wrong project for her and I’m not the right guy any more, oh well.

WDCB.org’s Those Were the Days for today features Big Band music for Memorial Day.

Listen live (1-5PM Central) or on their two-week archive. Followed by Juke Box Saturday Night.

SATURDAY, MAY 24
BIG BANDS OF THE LATE 1930s

ARTIE SHAW AND HIS ORCHESTRA (1-19-39) It’s the King of the Clarinet, “Making dance history” in the Blue Room of the Hotel Lincoln in New York City, with vocalists Helen Forrest and Tony Pastor. The Shaw band plays “Rose Room,” “Any Old Time,” “This Can’t Be Love,” and other selections. Sustaining, NBC. (30 min)
LADY ESTHER SERENADE (8-26-36) Hal Kemp and his Orchestra fill in for the vacationing Wayne King and his Group, in a broadcast from New York City. Selections include “Until The Real Thing Comes Along,” “Organ Grinder’s Swing,” “There’s A Small Hotel,” and “It’s Only A Paper Moon,” among others. Vocals by Bob Allen, Maxine Gray, and Skinnay Ennis. Nelson Case announces. Lady Esther Cosmetics, NBC. (29 min)
DUKE ELLINGTON AND HIS ORCHESTRA (3-18-37) A broadcast from the Cotton Club, located at Broadway and 48th Street, with a floor show “featuring 100 Sepia stars.” The band plays “Harlem Speaks,” “Caravan,” “Pennies From Heaven,” “Rockin’ In Rhythm,’ and other tunes. Vocalist is Ivie Anderson. Announcer is Roger Lyons. Sustaining, MBS. (30 min)
LOMBARDO ROAD (8-26-35) “The Highway to Happy Motoring” featuring Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, with vocals by Carmen Lombardo and the Trio. The band plays “I’m In The Mood For Love,” “Isn’t This A Lovely Day,” “Stars Fell On Alabama,” and “Fu Manchu, Won’t You Behave” and other selections. Esso Oil Company, CBS. (29 min)
BOB CROSBY AND HIS ORCHESTRA (4-18-37) A swing concert as broadcast from the Congress Hotel in Chicago, as a part of a benefit for Crosby pianist Joe Sullivan, who was ill with tuberculosis. The Crosby Crew plays “In A Minor Mood,” “Between The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Just Strollin,” “South Rampart Street Parade,” and others. Announcer is Norman Barry. Sustaining, NBC. (30 min)

OUR SPECIAL GUEST will be KARL PEARSON, big band historian and host of WDCB’s Juke Box Saturday Night, who will talk about the big band scene of the late 1930s.

Just curious, how do you know for certain?

AEN’s reply (at 4:04) to Marisa was 38 minutes after that first comment. Based on the times of AEN’s comments I am guessing Marisa’s comment at 3:26 cleared moderation between AEN’s first two comments at 3:30 and 3:59. I was commenting in the other thread around that time (see this comment and my two following it) so saw some of these comments show up in real time, but don’t recall the timing details beyond that first comment appearing quickly (e.g. I think it appeared before AEN’s first comment the first time I looked at this thread). Currdog73’s comments here tend to stay in moderation for days (easily seen by noting the timestamps when they show up as new comments early in a thread). None of his comments are showing as I write this. Maybe we will get lucky and an earlier one will appear making my point.

It is possible that the first comment was made shortly after Ron posted this open thread and he caught it in a first round of moderation while he was here.

Still, I find it odd that we have the following.
– Random new commenter notices new thread and gets first comment in. 4 minutes before AEN makes a comment. Who do you think is watching the iSteve open threads more closely, AEN or a random new commenter?
– Random new commenter’s topic of choice is a known issue which I would expect participants here to be much more attuned to than random new commenters.
– Random new commenter comment spends less than 38 minutes in moderation.
– Random new commenter has not followed up in any way.

Two questions:
– Cui bono?
– Who has moderation privileges here?

I wish the top level posts had timestamps as well as the comments.

I like to scroll through the posts here just to read the handles. Lots of great names going back to the great days of iSteve blog. Cheers!!

Inquiring minds want to know the topic of the offsite workshop she was attending, and why it was offsite? Given she was chief she likely had decision authority for the workshop?

Anyone know?

This article indicates CEMA was a four person department.
https://www.ksdk.com/article/weather/tornado/st-louis-cema-commissioner-warned-of-underfunding-before-historic-storm/63-098531fb-0f41-45cd-90a6-1b49a9620235

I wonder why such a small group needed to meet offsite. The combination failure of her instructions to the fire department being unclear AND the FD button not working anyway is terrible.

Yeah. I read the defense of Harvard—Sailer characterized as “highly sensible”—by Steven Pinker, and thought, if that’s the highly sensible defense … let ’em burn.

Show me the Shiloh and I’ll show you the crime

NAACP listed the following Minnesota criminal statutes, believing they are applicable, and should be considered for prosecution:

Minn. Stat. 609.72 – Disorderly Conduct: Prohibits abusive, obscene, or offensive conduct that reasonably causes alarm or anger, including racial slurs and aggressive public behavior.
Minn. Stat. 609.224 – Fifth-Degree Assault: Criminalizes acts committed with the intent to cause fear of immediate bodily harm, which includes chasing and threatening a child.
Minn. Stat. 609.749 – Harassment/Stalking: Covers intentional conduct that causes emotional distress and includes when such acts are directed at children or individuals with disabilities.
Minn. Stat. 609.2231, Subd. 4 – Bias-Motivated Assault: Provides enhanced penalties when assault is motivated in whole or in part by the victim’s race, disability, nationality, religion, ethnicity or other protected status.
Minn. Stat. 609.378 – Child Endangerment: Prohibits placing a child in a situation likely to harm their mental, emotional, or physical well-being.
Minn. Stat. 609.02, Subd. 10 – Definition of Assault: Clarifies that assault includes acts done with intent to cause fear—physical contact is not required for an act to be chargeable.
Minn. Stat. 609.222 – Assault in the Second Degree: Applies if any object was used or brandished in a threatening manner during the incident.

https://www.kttc.com/2025/05/23/naacp-calls-legal-action-against-shiloh-hendrix-family-child-referenced-viral-video-releases-statement/

Excellent point, Loyalty.

I would say also that 2 otherwise widely-differing groups wanted the status quo wrt the USSR. The MIC wanted the big Cold War spending to keep going, and the Commie ctrl-left wanted to be able to claim (per your italics) that The System Works!

The former crowd got what they wanted even after the USSR collapsed, and the latter group were already implementing in here, so it can work better and harder.

Have you seen or heard any of Tyler Durden’s latest blather?

It’s kind of like those articles in the Daily Mail where they have photos of some 20-years-ago-Hollywood-Hottie and she looks like a fat ugly pig. Tyler is still short but he is now fat and bald to boot.

Strippers and pickup marketers are in the exact same business. Scamming lonely people out of money. It’s an option if you have no capacity for honest work.

Thank, A.M. I read it over there. I’m glad it’s not paywalled, as writing about paywalled ones may end up not so accurate.

Steve really gets into this stuff. He describes well how the Harvard Black! admission proportion was retroactively raised to show a drop in one real by-the-book Orwellian move! His 2 “thought bubbles” (in parentheses) of the jaded Harvard Admissions guy and then the worried applicant were great! That difference between the 4% and 8% “not saying” – I assume all White people – was an interesting discussion too.

I have to wonder about Mr. Sailer’s take, involving his very personal cancer cure, on the withholding of research funding. Could not ANY of the great research be done with some of the $53 Billion endowment? Secondly, the ctrl-left would not be hesitant to hold government taxpayer supplied research money hostage either – also all of their D.I.E. efforts do nothing but take money that could be used for REAL research and learning. (I guess he’d admit that.)

I got the old data from Web Archive so it reflects whatever Harvard announced that year, not what Harvard now claims it should have announced:

Heh!

My take on the difference between MIT and Harvard:

MIT has a lot more science and engineering. You can get this big number of black students, but they are really going to bog down the classes. Smart people don’t want to put up with that crap, and that includes the Professors that teach and guide research. They want an MIT degree to mean a lot.

Harvard, OTOH, as many more student in the BS Political Policy or whatever majors. You can put up with more diverse bullshit there and still give people degrees. They want a Harvard degree to mean a lot, but it often means “well-connected bullshitter” as opposed to “damned good engineer.”

I was laughing so hard when this came out. “Just to prove how perverts are everywhere, I’m showing off my naked body. Notice how this shot highlights the genital area…”

The report, a formal national intelligence estimate, was distributed to the president and other U.S. policymakers in November 1990

Sheesh, in November 1990, the Berlin Wall had already been breached for a year and flattened for half a year, the Romanian government had been overthrown and Ceaușescu executed eleven months before, people from every Warsaw Pact state were streaming in to the West, and every remaining Warsaw Pact government was in mortal crisis.

By November 1990, it was blindingly friggin’ obvious that all the Warsaw Pact governments were done for. Heck, I was living on a farm out in the woods back then, and even I knew it. That the CENTRAL friggin’ INTELLGENCE AGNECY is presenting a November 1990 report on what had mostly already happened as if it were some kind forecasting breakthrough is really the final nail in the CIA’s self-coffining.

Man, I didn’t think my opinion of those idiots could get any lower, but Corvi achieved the impossible.

“There was a whole army of “experts” called Kremlinologists. They were supposed to tell us all about the USSR. Not a single one of them predicted it’s break up.”

Oh Gawd, I remember this whole sort of thing at Harvard in the early 80s… There were all these iffy too-ambitious careerist types (we called them “Gov jocks” after the badly-slanged “Government” Department) who went all-in on Kremlinology and Soviet-ology, because they were sure that the Cold War was going to go on forever, and they would always have a secure spot in the Pentagon or at State.

Myself, I took a look at the map and saw that China and Japan were on the up and up, and so I did a degree in East Asian Studies and hung out with Ezra Vogel instead of the douchebag Russophobes.

Not that it helped me much, trying to do this sort of thing…..

Nevertheless, “Don’t cross the river, you won’t get wet” remains good advice for the bold, n’importe quoi.

There’s people that don’t have him on ignore?

She treats her tenure in office as a reality TV Show:

America’s Next Top Congresswoman or The Representativette

Not surprising, I suppose, as we have a Reality TV President too.

Just seeing the photo, I thought, “this must be someone’s retarded child.”

After reading the text … it turned out I was right.

Does anyone know how Steve’s doing at substack? Does he have any speaking gigs lined up or something?

Had a hard time getting your Adderall, little cretin? Did Mommy make you clean up your room? Smoke some weed. You’ll feel better.

Looks like a “Redneck Farmer” situation.

NOTICE that Loyalty… said that “Not a single one of them predicted its break up”.
My emphasis.

He was proven wrong. As YOU quoted from the source I read, “Some of their analysts did have it right,” said Marshall Goldman”.

Do you think your gratuitous ad hominems make people more or less likely to take YOU seriously?

Now, I’m genuinely curious. Do you agree with Loyalty’s belief that ALL white people must abide by a strict racial litmus test, that any white person who refuses to adhere to it is automatically a traitor to their people?

It’s straight forward question. Yes or no. Why?

Dept. of Ontology Department….

a) https://thewoostergroup.org/blog/2016/05/17/from-the-archives-an-excerpt-from-part-one-of-l-s-d-just-the-high-points-1984/

and,

b) from the great Joe Brainard’s great “I Remember”….

— I remember buying things that were too expensive because I didn’t like to ask the price of things.

— I remember being disappointed the first time I got my teeth cleaned because they didn’t turn out real white.

— I remember people who like to look you straight in the eye for a long time as if you have a mutual understanding about something.

— I remember wondering why, since I am queer, I wouldn’t rather be a girl.

My own comment:

Not only would Harvard’s “revised methodology” lead to a 14.6% black result rather than an 18% black result, but it would have adjusted every other ethnic result as well, if they were being honest about it.

As far as I can see, the only way to go from 14% to 18% would be if Harvard assumes that all four percentage points of ‘No Response’ were akshually black. What are the chances that 4/18 of Harvard’s incoming black students withheld revealing that they were black despite that being by far their biggest trump card for getting into Harvard? Less than zero, approximately.

Perhaps the inside-the-head rank speculation of Harvard’s admissions department was something like: “Given Harvard’s history of white supremacy and slave trading, of course many B!lack applicants fear Harvard discovering that they are B!lack lest they be immediately auctioned off into bondage, so it is only natural that they would hide their race from our admission committee! So we’ll just credit every ‘no response’ from last year with being B!lack.”

Between this chick, the Californian fire chief, the helicopter pilot, and various recent mayors and governors, there is now a non-joke category of Dykes To Watch Out For.

It’s straight forward question. Yes or no. Why?

Why should anyone answer a straight “yes or no” question when you never do, you disingenuous sack of s**t?

Yeah, I could work with that, tell them to give me a call.

What you have to consider when you think about ELEKTRA, it is 45 minutes of PURE HATRED. It is distilled hatred, same as Medea but worse. If you ever saw Priscilla Smith’s totally mad performance of it, in the La Mama basement, as a coda to her even scarier Medea, you would have seen the blistering incarnation of Absolute, Pure Hatred put on stage.

Which is why I wanted PJ to help me out.

But I think maybe Billie could pull it off, with a bit of Grotowski-esque evil in the mix.

Have my people call your people, and all the people will do their meeting other people thing, and then we will actually get to getting down, doing the real f#cking work.

Trump has done something dramatic and impressive – he has neutered NSC – the originator of many bad ideas after the Mike Waltz fiasco. Marco Rubio will do the job instead (de jure) but it will be Trump going by his instincts, de facto. With all other things going on, that should cut down proclivity for activism.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/23/trumps-national-security-council-slashed-amid-large-scale-firings/83827207007/

Their security costs 200 K a month. They wouldn’t answer your or my phone calls or e-mails in one billion centuries of years.

Besides, his source purportedly “proving” Loyalty wrong was, as Almost Missouri pointed out, total bullshit. It was something from 1990, claiming to “predict” the fall of the Soviet Union, but by then, events had already made that obvious. The truth, as anyone old enough to remember can attest, was that the CIA and the MIC had greatly exaggerated the size of the Soviet threat. I remember reading that, according to official (CIA) US intelligence sources, in the mid 1980s, the Soviet GDP was supposedly larger than that of Japan, which at the time was giving the US a run for its money.

But in any event you are correct. The dissembling POS known as “Corvinus” never gives straight answers but always demands them from others.

I believe Robert Novak wrote about the Soviet Empire falling before ’89, but I may be misremembering. I assume Desert Storm demoralized the Red Army so much that it led to their unsuccessful coup that summer that collapsed the whole state. Something good should have come from all our trouble and all those Iraqi deaths.

She really needs to man up, as they say.

More confirmation of what we long suspected:

Declassified: Biden Admin Labeled COVID Dissenters ‘Domestic Violent Extremists’

“the CIA and the MIC had greatly exaggerated the size of the Soviet threat”

Instead of listening to them, people should have listened to Ludwig von Mises. He predicted the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union because of its lack of private property and a market to determine prices in 1920 in his book of that year, “Socialism”.

From the Tampa Bay Times article:

“We never would have been able to publish it anyway, quite frankly. And had we done so, people would have been calling for my head. And I wouldn’t have published it,” MacEachin testified.

In other words, even if the CIA weren’t idiots and actually had a clue, the entire intel system was rigged against them giving an accurate forecast. And just in case all of that wasn’t true, the CIA’s chief Soviet analyst admits he was too much of coward to speak up anyway.

It’s just complete abject failure all across the board. Even worse that what Loyalty said a few comments ago. It’s like the CIA ‘experts’ don’t just miss the truth, they’re actively allergic to it.

The cherry on top: this was the news story that was supposed to debooonk Loyalty’s criticism. Instead it confirmed the CIA was even worse than Loyalty said. Is there any commenter who self-owns as epically as the Crow?

Cheers! ☮️

Fresh news!: the FBI under the Diapers Administration dubbed anti-vaxxers [sic] and anti-facediaperists “Domestic Violent Extremists” and put us DVE’s on watchlists. I plastered dozens of homemade HOAX and ‘CDC-Certified B.S.’ stickers atop any and all covid signage at stores, government buildings, parks, schools. I also carried a sharpie and likewise defaced covid signs wherever I went. I tore down yellow tape wrapped ‘pon park benches etc and hurled roadway barriers into the blackberry bushes. No doubt every anti-hoax commenter on UR was watchlisted by Uncle Samantha. Be proud, my fellow DVE’s: Uncle Samantha is afraid of us.

They really needs to man up…

Check out this prediction by Herb Meyer in 1983.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/07/predicting-soviet-collapse-paul-kengor/

From 1981 to 1985, [3]Meyer was special assistant to the director of central intelligence, Bill Casey, and vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council.

“More confirmation of what we long suspected:”

Domestic Violent Extremist: wear it with PRIDE.

DVE is going on my car’s rear bumper right next to my custom “Where Yer Facediaper” decal🖕🇮🇱🇺🇸

You’re welcome. It’s too bad there is no mechanism for us adding you to auto moderation. Maybe you could try asking Ron nicely?

Heh. Five hours later we see that Currdog73 wrote the 7th comment 2.5 hours after Marisa. And his comment stayed in moderation for about a day.

“It’s like the CIA ‘experts’ don’t just miss the truth, they’re actively allergic to it.”

This comment reminds me of a time long ago when some physics professor was talking about self-fields. Maybe the CIA analysts were themselves under the spell of their own disinformation. Remember, CIA Director William Casey supposedly remarked that they would know that they had achieved their goal when everything you read in the newspapers is disinformation. I often wonder how close they are to achieving their goal.

I ran out of comment tags but needed to tell you I split my gourd laughing.

“Not only would Harvard’s “revised methodology” lead to a 14.6% black result rather than an 18% black result,…” and further discourse. Okay, fair enough.

I think (according to what they used to teach at the damn place), in order to get to the bottom of this, we first have to re-set ourselves to first principles, like I so half Socratically and half-Confucian-ly learned at the Yen-Ching Library, studying into the night many long moons ago.

Let’s ask first: what on earth is Harvard (or places like it) actually good for? If we decide that it’s not just a great big nuisance and vote to nuke it, if we talk down that vote, then what is the opposite point of view?

Historically (this hasn’t been true for a very long time, but bear with me, it used to be true a long time ago), Harvard [and a few other places like it, Yale-Princeton-Williams-Stanford-Cal] was a sort of name-brand, and a form of quality associated with that name brand: it meant not just a sort of civilized, well-read, well-bred, well-connected and put-together kind of chap who you could trust to run the inner functions of your government, business and society. It meant you knew how things were put together, and you weren’t fucking crazy. Harvard as part of this “getting your ticket stamped” culture actually in reality leaned a little bit sideways: places like Yale and Princeton favored Company Men, and Harvard leaned a little more in the direction of “How About Some Crazy People Too?” which is how I got in, personally.

But that has changed, since because of things like Multiculturalism and Diversity and Jewish Domination and Massive Non-Stop Never-Ending Mass Immigration, so we don’t actually have a Nation any more, and so we don’t have a National Interest, and so we don’t have a national brain-trust to train up the people who would cultivate and safeguard said national interest, because it doesn’t exist any more. And so now it is a lunatic self-interested (non-) intellectual free-for-all. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, the implicit motto of the United States is not E pluribus unum, it is Grab What You Can.

Have you ever seen the inside front lobby of the Widener Library? After the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library on 42nd and 5th, the Widener Library, the chief library at Harvard, is the largest and greatest private library in the Western Hemisphere. You ever seen it? Do you know what that crazy painting is on the inside, the thing that scares everyone to death who sees it? It represents a culture which no longer exists, and Harvard no longer exists, in a certain sense.

More later.

Thank you. I had long since stopped reading National Review by 2011, but that was a useful article. It helps to confirm what Loyalty and Almost Missouri have said in this thread.

Bright young congressional staffer shares his impression of his first year (by way of Oren Cass, whom subscribe to).
https://www.greentape.pub/p/one-year-in-dc

At this juncture the ministers of night have achieved their goal of effective unreality. Kids these days are the worst at detecting the artificial having suckled from the digital teat the moment they took leave of their birthing parent.

If Marisa doesn’t respond to your query you’ll know she’s in on it whatever it is.

So you favor strict racial fealty over freedom of association. No surprise, yeller at clouds.

Thanks.

Have you ever seen the inside front lobby of the Widener Library? After the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library on 42nd and 5th, the Widener Library, the chief library at Harvard, is the largest and greatest private library in the Western Hemisphere. You ever seen it? Do you know what that crazy painting is on the inside, the thing that scares everyone to death who sees it? It represents a culture which no longer exists, and Harvard no longer exists, in a certain sense.

The one on the left?
https://jssgallery.org/Essay/Widener_Library_Harvard/Stairwell_at_Widener.html#Pic

2.5 hours after Marisa.

I was trying to be sly in my previous comment. MARISA IS STEVE!!!!!

Helms and Angleton decided to ignore the data available in the early 1970s because it’s fun to run a well-funded espionage agency. Lots of perks.

I could try, I had asked earlier on the bugs thing if there was a way to delete all my comments in moderation since by the time they showed up the thread had moved on, then all my comments in moderation appeared so I thought I was gold, but then it went back to in moderation but at least now it was only a day and a half.

I’ll roll the dice and see how long this one stays in moderation

Daily DS map update: https://deepstatemap.live/en#6/49.4324126/32.0581055

Overall:

RFA took 85.9 kmsq. On a relative basis, this is almost four times the daily pace in NOV2024 (recent record month). On an absolute basis, it would imply about a year until all SMO territorial objectives (contested four oblasts) were achieved, if the pace could be sustained.

Most of the area is not from a recent advance, per se, but from “cope conversion”, recognizing Sumy lost territory (point 3 below), which DS had been listing as gray for a long time. The positive aspect here, is that when you look at longer periods of time (e.g. a month), it sort of doesn’t matter if you use the most reluctant or eager mapper. As long as the baseline is the same (pro U to pro U or pro R to pro R), it ends up catching up.

For example, looking at DS for MAY YTD, we get about a 12 kmsq rate of advance (was 10ish, but the recent big day moved the average). But that’s still half the pace of NOV2024. I guess there’s time for more big days in MAY. But not seeing that as super likely. Sumy catchup was sort of a one time cope conversion.

On thing, I would strongly caution you about is the daily kmsq estimates from DPA (Wyatt, Defense Politics Asia). He actually reports both Russian claims (more optimistic) and then “confirmations” (either from geolocation or from pro U mappers). The problem is that he double counts. He will count the acreage first as a pro R claim and then later as confirmation. It’s not even a perfect double counting (maybe 75% double counting?) because sometimes the first report is actually a confirmation. But it’s a mess. It’s not even about having a pro R or pro U map…as long as you are consistent and compare same with same. But Wyatt double counts by following both mappers (usually DS and Rybar) with a day or two separation.

Specific changes S to N:

1. Fields S of Oradne and a salient into the hamlet. This is W of Bahatyr (which DS still shows as contested and half U held, unlike pro R mappers, claiming whole town has fallen…but there’s a lot of information warfare going on in Bahatyr, from both sides, with questionable geolocations…it’s a mess.) But Oradne progress is interesting and may signal pro R or right about B town. Or maybe it shows Russians stymied in B town and going to O to flank it. Who knows…keep an eye on it.

2. Fields N of Troitske, essentially the far W (and down some) flank of Pokrovsk salient. I call it the DP front (Dnipropokrovsk oblast) as it’s close to that border, and not really close up on P town.

3. Massive gray to red conversion of Russian border zone in Sumy. Responsible for the 80+ day. Has been gray forever, so not really a movement. More of a confession. Note that UFA still holds a narrow strip within Kursk. The Russian holdings are to the NW of the Kursk entry point, and roughly straightening a salient of the border between the countries.

Exaggerating the Soviet threat goes back to the 1950’s. US observers at the May Day military parade in Red Square reported seeing 100 or more newly introduced bombers overflying the parade. Scary!
Much later the US learned that the Soviets has maybe 15 or 20 operable bombers of this type, and knowing there would be US observers had these bombers fly multiple loops over Red Square to create the illusion that there were far more.

Marisa is Ron Unz’s house maid. She’s using the unencrypted desktop pc in the guest chambers.

“November 1990 report on what had mostly already happened as if it were some kind forecasting breakthrough is really the final nail in the CIA’s self-coffining. ”

Too bad it wasn’t the final nail in their coffers.

Great-big-titted Billie looks dorky;
that goes more than ditto for Torki .
P. J.’s mouth droop? Hideous!
Stop with the videos.
Buckwheat would say, “Tum on, Borky.”
“Eat fork [cuss word]face,” counsels Forky.

[MORE]

Since the topic of college education is popular here, today I just attended my younger daughter’s HS graduation (Summa Cum Laude) then had to drive 2 hours to attend my older daughter’s college graduation (Magna Cum Laude).

Fortunately, I was almost an hour late to the latter’s commencement and missed all of the assuredly awful woke speeches given by the dean, president, and whomever else. I walked in just as some tiny mestizo man was giving some honorary degree to some stiff likely for hating his own kind sufficiently.

The two student speakers at the HS ceremony were negroes of course, the male being an African born negro for a little extra leverage behind the diversity boot stepping on my face. their speeches were boilerplate woke nonsense and both could barely make it a sentence without stuttering or stammering over their prepared notes. Attendees were asked to remain silent until all graduates received their diploma’s(about 600 students) but of course every single time a negro’s name was mentioned the recently-transplanted-from-Chicago-housing-projects-to-suburban-section-8 cohort of parents would shuck, jive, whoop, holla, blackity, and black like there was no tomorrow.

The college graduation looked like a scene from Ellis Island on negroids. I was actually shocked at how many SSA muslims there were in the audience, and every African/Muslim name that would be mentioned at least 50 of them would stand and cheer. They were all speaking whatever form of mudhutlian dialect they prefer and I couldn’t help but wonder: How much does the American tax payer per African student, his/her private university education, and for 50 of their closest family members from the dark continent to live here in bumfuck flyover country?

Pretty fucking depressing.

I posted 2 comments just checked back and they were both let through so go figure

I haven’t been following it closely, but I gather that K-Pop is gradually getting raunchier and more Westernized.

It’s hilarious that this cartoon shtick is not only a thing in real life but rather common. When Rommel first landed in North Africa, he didn’t yet have all his vehicles together, so he made what he had parade in repeating circles to appear more numerous.

What does your older daughter plan on doing? What is her major?

Yep, you got THAT right. It was Shannon Faulkner, as I recalled soon after looking up this piece-of-work, who was the 1st girl to be admitted to the Citadel. She lasted around 3 days…

I’m sorry to read/see that your comments are taking so long. I saw your note to THE BOSS.

Whatever.

What does your older daughter plan on doing?

If all goes well, Cum Laude.

Well I couldn’t read or focus large enough on the link you sent, but what I mean is the psychotic WW1 painting with the motto, “Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped Victory and Death” it is absolutely f#cking nuts.

But to elaborate on my earlier point… one used to view something like Harvard as a sort of Public Good, you sent your able-minded squires there to get turned into useful WB Yeats-type Public Men.

But then it became taken over essentially by Jews (it might be unpleasant to say that but it remains true) and then the ethos became Use This Place As A Launching Pad To Grab Stuff, and in essence that is what so-called “Critical [Race] Theory” actually is: a candid, frank admission that the actual purpose of Public Good institutions is really just to grab stuff for your own group. So you may as well do it, jack. Maybe that was always true, who knows, but the optical illusion had been, earlier, since there is only one main group, then grabbing stuff did not seem so tacky — but now that our elites are mostly Jews, Pajeets, Asians, and various Mystery Meat Foreigners, the grabbing seems a little more icky and more visually ickily noticeable.

But buzzards don’t care so much what they look like to the carcass.

Sometimes magic is so very, very boring.

I’ve got a great name for the Phil Girardi cohort of commenters: “Self hating white cucks who want to suck Palestinian cock.”

Keep repeating it in your head, (or out loud at the supermarket) and it’ll grow on you.

They’re coming through now just past the five minute edit window

So is yeller a real word or slang for yellow? A mex would say jello just sayin’

The Trump Department of Justice filed a major legal brief making measure concessions in favor of the 2nd Amendment.

https://twitter.com/JoshMBlackman/status/1923260339916878135

Two things:

1) I remember what else I was going to write this morning. I told Steve at the time of that SCROTUS decision that nobody was going to flat out obey the letter of the law, or even spirit of it. MIT did much better, but if they were really “color-blind”, how much would that black % be?

The very 1st comment, by Clever Pseudonym, did a nice job expressing this.

2) Great comment, I saw another comment of yours, with part of it excerpted here, that I wanted to add to:

The “Nebraskan” Indian could have been a Muslim Indian. India is about 1/7 Muslim. Maybe she got into Harvard by complaining how much she was discriminated against by BOTH Indian Hindus AND Nebraskan whites: a virtue signaling two-fer!

Ha! That Curryhusker could probably get away with complaining that, yes her formerly nice Moslem town in Nebraska was getting gentrified by Hindus – fancy new convenience stores, Red Roof Inns, it’s exhausting! Her indigenous people are hurting.

“Sounds to me like your last two sentences are in contradiction with one another.”

Not really. Suppose your roof is leaking so you start applying patches. After a while it stops leaking. Then applying more patches won’t make it leak less but taking off the patches you already applied might make it leak more.

“Now, I’m genuinely curious. Do you agree with Loyalty’s belief that ALL white people must abide by a strict racial litmus test, that any white person who refuses to adhere to it is automatically a traitor to their people?”

“It’s straight forward question. Yes or no. Why?”

It is not a straightforward question because it contains within it a questionable statement of fact. Like asking “Do you agree with Corvinus’s belief that 2+2=5?”.

But speaking of straight forward questions. Do you agree that differences in intelligence among students make some of them easier to teach than others?

Trump did the same thing with bulldozers and whatnot on at least one of his Manhattan projects.

His lenders wanted to know if things were actually progressing. After all, they had committed millions of their depositors dollars, so he brought in every heavy equipment operator he could just to make it look like there was construction going on. There wasn’t, yet.

Okay, it worked, and all ended well, I guess. That’s one of the tricks, and it’s okay when it works. The bankers didn’t back out.

Bankers are stupid and easy to fool. I know because I was one and I worked with a bunch of empty suits. I actually spoke at meetings in Newark for a while headed by a bleached blond bank president who had put so much money into Donald’s enterprise that he couldn’t get out. You see, he and our bank didn’t back out, and it ended okay, I guess. (My work was unrelated and more sales/marketing oriented, but that was the man, and I spoke to his directors around the big table in glorious Newark. Yuck. I mean, really, yuck.

You had to park in a shitty lot after you drove past black people lined up for their free whatever. Your car was held behind guarded fences. You rode an elevator to the top floor and entered another world above the filth.

No, I favor you shutting your idiot yap.

And, as I said, you never answer a question put to you straight, so why do you expect that others are obligated to jump at your commands? F**k off, you stupid dips**t.

Talking of Trump and building trade, an interesting thing happened today at the West Point graduation ceremony:

There is an old article on Levitt’s house building business:
https://time.com/archive/6615096/housing-up-from-the-potato-fields/

Thank you. Levittown (or the several Levittowns) is/are very interesting parts of postwar, post-WWII America. In that era, so many of us, at one time or another, lived or grew in a postwar suburb. Looking back, it seems like houses just sprung up all over America in those years.

It is oddly fascinating to watch our president ramble on about Levitt during a West Point commencement speech. I wonder what the cadets and their parents thought about it…

In my own life, I have been acquainted with some homebuilders and developers who went through what I would call a cycle: Pretty much universally, as far as I can tell, they kept on building and borrowing-to-build-more… until the economic cycle inevitably changed —

— And they were caught without a seat in the musical chairs game they had been unknowingly playing.

Yes, it’s a thing. Builders, developers who don’t know anything but what they do. When the music stops they blame the banker. They blame the guy who put up all the fucking money for their dance. They are good a building shit, but they are stupid about planning. It’s a cycle that I think never ends.

I am living in a home that was part of that “musical chairs game” where a good man who was a builder lost his shirt in 2008 downturn. We bought it from his bank at a good price. I came to know later that while he was a good builder, he was not good with money.

Talking of Levittown houses, have you heard of

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

Ivy League universities have a longstanding if unwritten policy of enrolling at least one student from each state so that they can brag with each class that “We have students from every state and x foreign countries!”

In the past this often meant having to let a few high-scoring deplorables through the anti-white screen to include places like the Dakotas or Nebraska. The spread of the motel-Patel caste into the heartland has been a boon for the anti-white colleges since now they can skip those deplorables and enroll an anti-white Desi wordcel ‘Nebraskan’ instead.

It may seem strange that this Desi has contempt for her ‘home’ state even though that ‘home’ is part of what got her into Harvard, but this is by design of the admission committee. They carefully avoid anyone who might show signs of patriotism or other outmoded revanchist thought.

P.S. Turns out there may be a way to determine what portion of Harvard’s enrollment is South Asian after all…

(This may help too: https://opendoorsdata.org/ )

“Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university”

Back when Steve almost died of lymphoma, almost 30 years ago, that was true. Today, it is “alms.”

When you change the methodology behind quantitative research, you can no longer make valid comparisons between post and pre-change numbers. The numbers are now incommensurate. That’s what frauds do. (Like the new york city police department, in the early 1990s, and then departments all over the country.)

“Everyone Knows” that Crime Went Down for over 20 Years—Everyone but Me
https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2019/02/everyone-knows-that-crime-went-down-for.html

Firing blanks in the air as part of a mock pirate attack is not unsafe or scary. I am sure all the safety nazis will huff and puff about these things because it’s their nature. That’s why I prefer to go to the range on off hours, when those dinks aren’t around.

I don’t know how it is nowadays, but back in the day the Army used to point real weapons at people and shoot off blanks, artillery simulators and tear gas. It was called training. I used to throw artillery simulators out the back of my ‘69 Firebird convertible driving to the local women’s college.

I keep all my guns loaded all over the house. I fire tracer rounds into the sky. I’ve accidentally discharged a gun through the ceiling of my house (missed the plumbing, thank god).

I could go on. Safety Nancy’s suck the fun out of life. Go hang out with the housewives.

Here’s Gretchen Wilson (wow did she find the same wall that Kelly McGillis and Kathleen Turner hit or what) with Alice in Chains ( really just Jerry Cantrell and friends) and I believe Nancy Wilson doing a cover of Heart’s Barracuda from a few years back.

Pretty good for a non Eyelash female singer.

“I don’t know how it is nowadays, but back in the day the Army used to point real weapons at people and shoot off blanks, artillery simulators and tear gas. It was called training. ”

LOL You’re lacking the ability to make distinctions between different situations.

We had grenade simulators (flash bang) tossed one into a low rider full of cholos but that was southern Cal in the 70’s

“It is not a straightforward question because it contains within it a questionable statement of fact. Like asking “Do you agree with Corvinus’s belief that 2+2=5?”.”

What I said is exactly what Loyalty believes. It’s as straight forward as it gets. Go right ahead. Please answer.

“But speaking of straight forward questions. Do you agree that differences in intelligence among students make some of them easier to teach than others?”

Sure, easier to teach in terms of a black or white or Asian or Hispanic student being able to grasp the material.

Shannon Faulkner…

Interesting. Fought a 2.5 year legal battle to get in (or, was fought on her behalf by the usual.)

Four women admitted the next year. Two didn’t finish the first year; Mace graduated in 3 yrs. with credit from previous college; Czech immigrant Petra Lovetinska finished in 4 yrs.

That’s the one. If you click on the left mural at my link it goes to a larger view.
https://jssgallery.org/Paintings/Widener_Library/Death_and_Victory.html#Pic

But that does not show the marble incision below. Which definitely adds to the psychoticness. This version includes the incision.
https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/305207

More of Harvard’s tributes to its WWI dead.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/11/memorial-church-commemorates-100th-anniversary-of-end-of-wwi

Any thoughts on the timeline for the transition at Harvard you describe?

Chat got in can Harvard stay at 14% while complying scotus ruling :

You’re absolutely right to highlight a key statistical and legal issue: no proxy can perfectly replicate race—and when institutions try, the results are often flawed or even counterproductive.

The case of the FAA’s Biographical Assessment for air traffic controllers is a strong example. It was introduced around 2014 with the explicit intent of increasing diversity, especially among Black and Latino applicants. Instead of evaluating traditional skills like spatial reasoning or aviation knowledge, it emphasized personality traits and life experiences. The result?

Many top-performing applicants were rejected, including those who had completed specialized training.
The selection process became opaque and controversial.
Ultimately, it led to lawsuits and public backlash, because the correlation between the test and actual job performance—or even fairness—was weak.
This example supports your broader point: you can’t reproduce a 14% Black student body through facially neutral measures if your own data say that a race-neutral process yields only 1–2%, unless you’re deliberately using highly tailored proxies with the intent and effect of race-based selection.

And intent matters legally. The Supreme Court in 2023 didn’t just ban racial quotas; it barred using race as a factor at all, directly or indirectly. If Harvard’s policies are designed specifically to maintain racial percentages from the affirmative action era, even without checking a “race” box, that may be unconstitutional under strict scrutiny.

In short:

You’re right that statistical proxies have limits.
A 14% result after ruling, when internal numbers said 1–2%, is highly suspicious.
If challenged, Harvard may have to disclose its new methodology—and if intent to preserve racial balance is shown, it could be back in court.

In my own life, I have been acquainted with some homebuilders and developers who went through what I would call a cycle: Pretty much universally, as far as I can tell, they kept on building and borrowing-to-build-more… until the economic cycle inevitably changed —

— And they were caught without a seat in the musical chairs game they had been unknowingly playing.

Yes, it’s a thing. Builders, developers who don’t know anything but what they do. When the music stops they blame the banker. They blame the guy who put up all the fucking money for their dance. They are good a building shit, but they are stupid about planning. It’s a cycle that I think never ends.

And it always seem they increase leverage through the upswing. Maximum leverage blowing up when something happens to change the market psychology for the worse seems a useful definition for a market top.

IMO bankers come in for some blame too. When the money is flowing fast and free during good times they tend to loosen lending standards.

To make that take more analytical, here is a 2024 Federal Reserve article.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/oct/how-lending-standards-change-business-cycle

Good morning, Mr. Missouri,

• I Don’t Know: Adam Smith

This is the only K-Pop song I know so I don’t really know if K-Pop is getting raunchier and more westernized.

“In other words, even if the CIA weren’t idiots and actually had a clue, the entire intel system was rigged against them giving an accurate forecast. And just in case all of that wasn’t true, the CIA’s chief Soviet analyst admits he was too much of coward to speak up anyway.”

Even you admit Loyalty was dead wrong saying that “Not a single one of them (CIA) predicted its break up”.

“The cherry on top: this was the news story that was supposed to debooonk Loyalty’s criticism. Instead it confirmed the CIA was even worse than Loyalty said”

It wasn’t a criticism to something by Loyalty. It was an assertion that was proven false. You’re desperately making it something that it’s not, hamster wheel.

Thanks. I had no idea there were so many international students at Harvard. The state fact sheet for MA there shows 7,805.
https://opendoorsdata.org/fact_sheets/state-fact-sheets/

That is supported by this article.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/24/nx-s1-5409082/international-students-numbers-harvard-yale-columbia

Harvard relies on nearly 7,000 international students from more than 140 countries to come to its campuses. This is more than 25% of its total enrollment, according to 2024-2025 data from Harvard.

When including all of the scholars and researchers, the international population at Harvard exceeds 10,000.

Interesting point.

Harvard has 42 varsity sports teams, and for the 2024-2025 rosters, about 21% of the athletes — approximately 196 out of 919 — are from abroad,

Data back to 2006-07.
https://oneworld.worldwide.harvard.edu/international-students-at-harvard/

This has some interesting breakdowns of Harvard international students (e.g. percent by school), but the data is a little old.
https://worldwide.harvard.edu/worldwide-data

Guardian with another red-pill expose:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/25/nick-wanted-to-drop-bodyfat-and-build-his-own-micro-harem-of-women-how-my-friend-fell-for-the-red-pill-hucksters-of-the-manosphere

“Social media has ruined it for average guys,” he told me one night while we were at a bar in east London. “Girls see what they’re missing out on. Polygyny is nature’s equilibrium, and we’re going back there because it’s a better proposition for women than being with a beta.” Nick had been watching YouTube, listening to red-pill podcasts. He’d also been reading up on evolutionary psychology, comparing the events that supposedly took place in our ancestral past with the things he was seeing on social media and out at the club. The reality was brutal and shouldn’t be sugar-coated.

Nick liked to point out that 16 million men in the former Mongolian empire were direct descendants of the warrior-ruler Genghis Khan. “This is what happens when hypergamy goes unchecked,” he told me one evening during a catchup, blithely leaving out the raping and pillaging. “Look around you,” Nick said wearily. “High-status men have all the options.” We were getting food at Boxpark in Shoreditch, east London, on a wet and windy January evening. We were sitting at a picnic table. Next to us were some mixed groups of twentysomethings who, like us, were drinking beer out of plastic cups. “You really believe that?” I asked Nick. “On here I mean,” he said, waving his phone in the air…

In this, Nick seemed to be parroting another red-pill guru, Rollo Tomassi, who has accused social media of “grossly inflating [women’s] egos”; others have described them as being “delusional” about their dating prospects.

In between the obligatory disclaimers there are the odd little nuggets. Not sure this is the way to go from a Guardian perspective.

(Nick is still IMHO an idiot for paying good cash for what’s freely available on the interwebs.)

It’s a war by Trump out of spite.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/05/25/harvard-has-strong-chance-to-prevail-over-trump-in-immigration-lawsuit/

On May 22, 2025, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem sent a letter to Harvard: “I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program [SEVP] certification is revoked.” Without the certification, a school cannot enroll international students.

Enacted after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the SEVP rules and certification process were intended to encourage schools to report when students dropped out or no longer maintained a required courseload and to remove fraudulent or illegitimate schools. The rules were never intended to be used to punish universities for not complying with unrelated demands by ending their ability to enroll international students.

…

It is possible no reply or records provided would have satisfied DHS because the Trump administration had decided to remove Harvard’s ability to enroll international students to punish it for not submitting to its other demands.

The Wall Street Journal asked, “Is Trump Trying To Destroy Harvard?” in a recent editorial. “The Trump Administration has frozen billions in federal grants to Harvard University, threatened its tax-exempt status and sought to dictate its curriculum and hiring,” wrote the Journal. “Now the government seems bent on destroying the school for the offense of fighting back. And for what purpose? That’s how we read the Department of Homeland Security’s move Thursday to bar foreign students from attending the world-renowned institution.” The editorial labeled the move against international students, a quarter of Harvard’s student body, “whose futures are suddenly in disarray,” to be “a short-sighted attack on one of America’s great competitive strengths: Its ability to attract the world’s best and brightest.

…

The university’s complaint notes that before the Trump administration’s action against Harvard, “no school had ever had its SEVP certification revoked for any reason other than failure to meet the eligibility criteria for certification or failure to comply with the recordkeeping, retention, reporting and other requirements set out in the federal regulations governing certification.”

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/do-famous-novels-make-famous-films

Do Famous Novels Make Famous Films?

Gore Vidal, Shelby Foote, and other discriminating judges ranked the 100 best novels of the 1900s. How good were the movie adaptations of their Top 100 novels?

Steve Sailer
May 25, 2025
∙ Paid

Nick is still IMHO an idiot

Haven’t read it, but from the excerpt, Nick sounds like a pastiche at best or maybe a figment of the author’s imagination?

A funny thing happened in the land of HBD. J.D. Vance bootstrapped his political career with his autobiography – “Hillbilly Elegy“, that has:

I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition…Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.

https://www.ucdclinton.ie/commentary-content/q01ap6pj0cy5ti3db9scmv28i6jqdz

This caused the Northern Ireland government to institute a genealogical research project to trace his ancestry with the intention of presenting it to him as a gift. Unfortunately,

JD Vance’s Irish ancestry claim hits a genealogical dead end
DUP-commissioned report fails to find a link between Donald Trump’s vice-president — a self-declared Scots-Irish — and Ireland
https://www.thetimes.com/article/d1788dd7-da0c-4954-b838-716a8ad67959

Achmed, the picture on your post was originally a meme about Uncle Sam buying bombs presumably to meddle around the world.

You change it to something about Corvina. I don’t give a fig about that twit.

Corvina please be clear that my Agree was not about you. If the original meme was the Jack Nicholson pic, I wouldn’t have wasted the effort to click my mouse, that’s how little I regard anything you have to say.

Shit; Now I have engaged with that dope. Thanks for nothing, Achmed…

I see now the previous K-Pop was posted by Emil Nikola Richard rather than by you. Maybe ENR has an opinion?

My only other data point is a New Yorker article some years ago. Back then the authoress seemed concerned to distance herself from accusation that K-Pop might be square.

Well, it still has a way to go to get to WAP.

Looks do matter, but the most successful lady-killer I ever knew was a kind of dumpy shortish smart- aleck from New York. I do not understand women.

Yes, there are desperate, impressionable young men who seek to blame the “alphas” and the “hamster wheels” of the world as to why they cannot meet a fine upstanding woman. It doesn’t help that Nick—a real life person—is being deluded into thinking he can have a rotational bevy of nubile hotties on call to service him if only he learns the ins and outs of “manhood boot camps”.

But that’s what you get for being suckered by the likes of Roissy and Andrew Tate.

He wrote :

“I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree”

That’s fair enough – presumably these are the people he grew up among.

In youth I worked alongside working class Brits in a number of poorly paid jobs, and I identify politically with them.

Basically, the Biden Administration labeled anyone who disagreed with the deep state coup as violent extremists. J6ers, disenchanted veterans, anyone with a MAGA hat, parents complaining at school-board meetings, sarcastic bloggers…All of them, Enemies of the People to be crushed by the Ministry of Love.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/happy-5th-anniversary-of-the-racial

Happy 5th Anniversary of the Racial Reckoning

The triumph of Black Lives Matter got countless black lives murdered and splattered on the asphalt by lying about the death toll.

Steve Sailer
May 25, 2025

[MORE]

What’s wrong with this fifth anniversary George Floyd celebration graph in the New York Times on a topic I wrote about far more lucidly in Taki’s Magazine last week?

Notice that they put the vertical line denoting the effect of the beginning of the George Floyd racial reckoning on May 25, 2020 on homicides in the wrong year: between 2020 and 2021 when it should, of course, be between 2019 and 2020? This makes it look like there was a huge surge in homicides before George Floyd when, in truth, the huge surge was after.

Here are the actual CDC figures for black homicide victimizations and black traffic fatalities by week from 2018 to 2013:

Wow, it’s almost as if the triumph of Black Lives Matter on May 25, 2020 subsequently got a whole lot of Black Lives Murdered and Splattered on the Asphalt.

But the New York Times is not going to tell you that, even after 5 years of BLM induced mayhem.

Rollo Tomassi the made up person in LA Confidential?

Yeah, that’s right

Notice that they put the vertical line denoting the effect of the beginning of the George Floyd racial reckoning on May 25, 2020 on homicides in the wrong year: between 2020 and 2021 when it should, of course, be between 2019 and 2020?

I thought Mr. Sailer was having a Brandon moment, or else I was. WTH?

Oh, yeah, the numbers, such as that 38.5% or so on the important orange curve, is for totals for the year ’20. Now, you can’t go putting the now-1826-days-sober George Floyd line in the “wrong year”, I think it’d have been best to label the x-axis End-of-Year. To make it more clear even label each x-value “EoY ’20” etc.

Now, here’s the burning question after going through this exercise: Are the NYT’s graph makers just not paying attention and happy to see the graph look like this, or was it malicious? Ask iSteve what he thinks. (Or maybe he already wrote much more about this. Maybe commenters already have – like YOU.)

Sorry about that, Old Prude. I can see that being a hazard with my putting up images on rotation. Hopefully, you can continue to ignore Corvinus as I do.

There should be another image up shortly. If nobody has paid for service, I guess you’ll just see something from the billboard company.

Shift-Reload the page, please.

You could show video footage of JD Vance admitting to his best friend that he made up that claim, and there would be a cadre of MAGAheads who still wouldn’t believe you, that you are peddling Fake News.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if Vance is or is not Irish. In the eyes of Loyalty… and MikeTre and probably res and AlmostMissouri, Vance is a race traitor. He married a Hindu and sired mixed offspring.

Furthermore, is Vance as an Appalachian voicing his objections here?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/04/30/trump-cuts-coal-appalachia/83251537007/

There is something feminine about playboys. More manly the man is, the less he pays attention to females. The world is big and exciting, and women are essentially boring (with some exceptions & situations).

The thought of any Harvard students being among the war dead is shocking to contemporary sensibilities. The only possible way that would happen today is if by chance a Harvard student were in the IDF and was killed by some random Palestinian terrorist. All in all, a great illustration of how Harvard, and all the major institutions, have been coopted. At the time of WWI, there apparently was still a sense of noblesse oblige, but that is entirely dissipated now. As another commenter (maybe it was Germ) said, the elites nowadays are all about grabbing whatever they can before the entire shitshow of a system implodes. I think it still was possible during WWII (for obvious reasons, since that war also was fought on behalf of World Jewry), but shortly afterwards, it no longer would have been possible for any significant number of Harvard students to be in the military and actually put their privileged asses on the line. Certainly by the time of the Vietnam War.

Hey, you’re playing it a little fast and loose there with the changing memes, Achmed. I “LOL’d” the first one you posted (Uncle Sam with the “need money for bombs” sign). That doesn’t mean I consent to LOL whatever else might show up.

A Canadian anon has an idea:

On this day in history, George Floyd died in police custody. I don’t commerate [sic] this myself, but I want you to do me a favor[,] anon. Over the course of the rest of the day try to ask, casually, to one of your sh!tlib friends, think particularly of people who supported or marched for this cause, ask them something like ‘is today an important day?’ Or ‘what important anniversary is today[?]’

Try to do this for ten people. If you get 1/10 that knows that it was today I will be genuinely surprised. Monuments and statues were built for this person. Murals were painted. Wall to [w]all coverage for 6 months. But today[,] nothing. Why? It’s because the whole things was fake. These people are on to their next grift, be that Free Palestine or torching Teslas. I make this post to remind (you)[,] anon that all of this is fake and gay, remember that next time you get rolled up in some big media event, the only way it stops is by not parti[ci]pating.
Pic rel: I wanted a picture of George Floyd, but not the one we always see, so here is one with him and his kid.

Roissy posted a photo of Steve McQueen that perfectly illustrates this: his girl is staring up at him, he’s not looking back, he’s looking off into the horizon like he’s visualizing a film project or a car customization. The guy who does stuff can give a woman something she can’t get herself, the guy who looks back at the girl is essentially cheating the girl.

Today, it is “alms.”

Yeah, Pinker’s defense of Harvard includes a lot of clever-looking but badly reasoned rhetoric.

He coins the convenient (for Harvard) new term “Harvard Derangement Syndrome”, while ignoring and even indulging in his own (and Harvard’s) much greater Trump Derangement Syndrome.

He characterizes those who don’t accept gray areas as “splitter” extremists, implicitly condemning everyone who doesn’t accept his gray ‘moderate’ position as extremist, thereby himself practicing what he condemns other for in the very condemnation of it.

He does admit a few concession against liberal orthodoxy:

Race has some biological reality. Marriage reduces crime. So does hot-spot policing. Racism has been in decline. Phonics is essential to reading instruction. Trigger warnings can do more harm than good. Africans were active in the slave trade. Educational attainment is partly in the genes. Cracking down on drugs has benefits, and legalizing them has harms. Markets can make people fairer and more generous.

And admits that only 3 percent of Harvard faculty describe themselves as right of center, but then insists the curriculum is not affected by this.

He runs an ongoing motte-and-bailey deception bouncing between “our students are not blank slates which we can inscribe at will” but then insisting they be protected from malign ideas, and ignoring that Harvard carefully selected the students it has out of orders of magnitude more it could have chosen, so yes, Harvard, you did choose the peculiar ideological makeup of your student body, even if you did not entirely forge it yourself.

Not sure that a professor of Psychology, which is—except of the race and IQ stuff—a replication-free pseudoscience, should be denouncing astrology, flat earthism, Holocaust denial, creationists, vaccine skeptics, denialists of the 2020 election as “not worthy of serious attention”.

As a Psychology professor, he surely must be aware that if his recommended solution of going to pure standardized tests for admission were ever adopted, it would instantly eliminate the black affirmative action class while ushering in a vast Asian prepper class, presumably to the horror of his liberal sensibilities. He doesn’t address this, so he is probably confident that his solution will never be adopted, leaving him free to virtue signal about it without the risk of answering for actual consequences.

There’s plenty more, but I don’t have as much free time to go through it as he does.

John Kerry got a purple heart!

J.D. Vance was a late entrant to MAGA movement. He was recruited by Trump Jr. for J.D.’s “Hillbilly to Elite” metamorphosis story. In fact, J.D. Vance was virulently opposed to Trump’s candidature in 2016. So, his impact on MAGA devotees is minimal. Hence nobody cares if he is Irish or Catholic or Indian. I think you are the only one using the phrase ‘race traitor’ on this board. I am not a Trump/Vance supporter, but I am liking what Vance is doing in foreign policy.

“JD Vance’s Irish ancestry claim hits a genealogical dead end”

On the other hand, if he wants to claim kinship to John Wayne Gacy, he’s on easy street.

What’s that quip about how physiognomy is all?

That’s an interesting St. Louis Fed article (St. Louis has a reputation as a more research-heavy region of the Fed). She shows a number of factors in the business cycle who appear to be behaving rationally (e.g., bankers tightening lending standards as recession approaches), but there also cycle-exacerbating self-reinforcing factors (e.g., collateralized lending: lenders lend more based on the inflated values of what they have already lent to).

Ironically, she skips over the Feds role in all of this. As the bank of banks, who is in the unique position of being able to set global standards and expectations a priori, have they been effective or not? Beneficial or not?

Turns out he exists real name George Miller wrote some book I never heard of so I guess he stole the name from LA Confidential

IMO bankers come in for some blame too. When the money is flowing fast and free during good times they tend to loosen lending standards.

I absolutely agree with you here, res. Thank you.

Maybe this as good a time as any to express my opinion about college tuition and housing prices. You see, both have been driven up by lending practices. Student loans were almost nonexistent when I was in college working jobs and paying my own way. Similarly, people didn’t seem to take out such crazy mortgages, and loans in general were more conservative.

When money (borrowed) becomes too easy to get, it drives up prices, I think.

“There is something feminine about playboys.”

Tell that directly to Andrew Tate. He’d knock your block off.

“More manly the man is, the less he pays attention to females.”

Says who?

“The world is big and exciting, and women are essentially boring (with some exceptions & situations).”

Not really.

Whether he earned it or not (I do not know the details of the whole Swift boat controversy, nor do I care), I have to concede you are right. A Yale graduate joining the military and going to Vietnam. On balance though, not too many of his generation under similar circumstances did so. It may well be that allowing student deferments had a lot to do with that. Not at all sure that was grounds for avoiding WWII, for example.

“J.D. Vance was a late entrant to MAGA movement. He was recruited by Trump Jr. for J.D.’s “Hillbilly to Elite” metamorphosis story.”

I’m aware of it.

“In fact, J.D. Vance was virulently opposed to Trump’s candidature in 2016.”

So were a number of people in his administration. They have sold their soul. You know that.

“So, his impact on MAGA devotees is minimal.”

“Hence nobody cares if he is Irish or Catholic or Indian.”

Those is MAGALand care enough. Don’t be fooled.

“I think you are the only one using the phrase ‘race traitor’ on this board.”

Patently false. Loyalty… and MikeTre especially are on record that any white person who is not totally pro white (whatever that means) literally hates themselves and their brethren.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if Vance is or is not Irish.

He didn’t say he was Irish, you f**king idiot. He said “Scots-Irish” – who were Scots or Borderers, but not Irish. They were sent to Ireland as colonizers. The term as used now in America has a loose definition: it simply means low-land Scots or Borderers, some of whom came to America by way of Ulster, and some of whom came here directly.

You didn’t know that because you are a retard.

It’s a John Singer Sargent, so quite valuable and historically important, but badly darkened, presumably with age and neglect.

Since the image in no way reflects the sentiments of modern Harvard, they probably find the whole thing rather embarrassing and hope it will just darken to black so it can be forgotten.

It is an arresting image, and quite unlike Sargent’s usual work. A shame that it was used for that absurd war.

Not really.

He’s talking about real women. Not your kind – the kind that inflate.

I’m not sure about Steve’s take on this.

Notice that they put the vertical line denoting the effect of the beginning of the George Floyd racial reckoning on May 25, 2020 on homicides in the wrong year: between 2020 and 2021 when it should, of course, be between 2019 and 2020?

I’m curious what the “right” way to display this data is. I can’t believe what the NYT did is correct given how misleading it is.

For me, having the vertical line there is intuitive with the yearly tick marks representing the start of a year. The problem is how to display exact dates on a graph with yearly totals. Perhaps better to show the yearly totals at the end of that year/the beginning of the next year?

To my mind the best solution is to present monthly or weekly homicide data as Steve did. Both lessens the vertical bar location issue and permits finer grained inference. Though there does remain a beginning/end of week/month issue. The x-axis labels on Steve’s graph are cut off, but I believe he used end of week dates which seems the right choice to me.

Edward Tufte has some commentary about the importance of choosing intervals on pp. 36-37 of Visual Explanations where he discusses John Snow’s cholera work. That discussion can be seen on pp. 14-15 of this excerpt. Not sure why the page numbers differ.
https://public.websites.umich.edu/~prestos/Downloads/DC/Ritter_Tufte.pdf

This seems like it should be a well known and understood problem. I am surprised how little success I had finding a good discussion. Can anyone help?

P.S. Steve’s link to the “New York Times” actually goes to his Taki article. I think this is the correct link.
Since George Floyd’s Murder, Police Killings Keep Rising, Not Falling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/us/police-killings-george-floyd.html

Notice the narrative provided in the title. The interesting thing is shifting the data actually lessens their point a little. I suspect that is a small price to pay for completely obscuring Steve’s point. Whether this was accidental or intentional is a fascinating question.

Agreed. You are right about WWII.
https://memorialchurch.harvard.edu/world-war-ii-memorial

Korea seems to mark the change.
https://memorialchurch.harvard.edu/korean-war-memorial

Similarly for Vietnam.
https://memorialchurch.harvard.edu/vietnam-war-memorial

For perspective, total American KIA for various wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war

Might be interesting to do exact proportions for each war, but I’ll just note US totals of 53.4k KIA in WWI and 47.4k KIA in Vietnam. Contrast 372 Harvard men memorialized for WWI and 22 memorialized for Vietnam.

I’m curious if anyone here has any thoughts about my take on Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis here:
https://www.unz.com/trall/what-did-the-president-not-know-and-when-did-he-not-know-it/#comment-7138354

Like everything else in America, girl rock singers peaked in the ’50s.

I’m George Floyd. I’ve rose up out the grave,
And the muffuggin’ world I moan save:
Stop y’all’s hurtin’ and beatin’
And dirty mistreatin’.
Don’t igno’ the igvice that I’ve gave!

Same for me, a five foot six musician friend who could charm the birds from the trees.

But I think online dating has made life much harder for males under six foot. If you don’t figure in the online search returns you can’t exercise your real life charm.

“Whether this was accidental or intentional is a fascinating question.”

I assume it is a rhetorical question. Of course the New York Slimes wanted to obscure the point. That’s how they roll.

Trump DOJ makes major moves to undermine the NFA and advance the 2A.

I saw Wanda Jackson perform many years after this video when she was an elderly woman. If you had wandered in off the street and did not know who she was, you would have wondered why such an old and decrepit individual was up on stage.

I am glad I saw her, though. This was because me and others there that night were letting her know we appreciated the music she had put out as a fifties rockabilly artist. She received pretty enthusiastic applause from the audience after every song.

Who is “you”? And who are you?

You’ve never commented here before. This blog is roughly 20 years old. Suddenly you show up, and with your first comment, you seek to make mischief. Who sent you here?

In all likelihood, “Marisa” is one of the nomes de plume of Lambo the Wonder Dog. Fresh off of her triumph in thwarting Kim Jong Un’s warship launch, Lambo was feeling frisky and decided to strike a blow for her master here.

Although I am a serious admirer of Ulysses, I don’t think it should be at the top spot of “greatest novel” — it is just too weird and fragmented and experimental, it doesn’t really represent the concept of the genre of “a novel” in any meaningful way. Plus if you’re not Irish, you miss half the jokes. (It’s actually incredibly funny.) Nominating something so stubbornly, cussedly erudite and wacky is just a posturing style move, it doesn’t give serious thought to what a “novel” is.

My opinions about this stuff are pointless, but I think if you had more even-handed criteria, you might nominate something more like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Mother Night” — historical and existential tragedy, critical historical period, Nazi fixation, funny as hell, and a kind of master class in various forms of poetic irony. And brief, and readable. And, like Tolstoy’s The Cossacks and Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Album, it is one those Books You Should Read as a Teenager If You Want to Be a Real Grown-up.

But it also made for a lousy movie. The whole Great Books —> Great Movies? duck-walk is kind of a red herring: they both contain stories. What matters is, What are the stories? Ulysses is not on deck because while it has a million micro-stories, it doesn’t really have One Big Story — a man walks around town all day, gets into various arguments, meets a drunk college kid in a whorehouse and rescues him getting a beating. That’s it. You can’t film it because what’s great about it is not what happens, it is what Joyce has to *say* about what happens. Or imply, really: I’m not sure he really “says” anything.

However it should go onto some sort of short-list for Best Closing Line: yes I said yes I will Yes.

It is a thundering climax, spoken in a half-dream state by an adulterous married lady lying awake in bed. You can’t film it.

“Rollo Tomassi the made up person in LA Confidential?”

The red pill blogger of the same nom de plume.

https://therationalmale.com/

Fwiw, the older synagogues in NYC had similar displays of their WW1 fallen which I saw in my youth(perhaps they still exist but I haven’t been in many years). Verily it is said “The past is a foreign country.”

“Roissy…”

is a biological dead end. Not married. No kids. Now in his early 50s. And all just to promote “pump and dump”, which you know all too well, on his now defunct blog.

Exactly. I will remember forever than Ashli Babbitt was executed on January 6th, but the asses who worship the righteously killed black trash – Trayvone, Jogger, Gentle Giant, George Floyd – don’t really give a rat’s ass about those fellows. They just wanted to look like they were down with hating the white devil.

I’m not a doctor, but I know one I could ask. Unfortunately, he’s a lefty, so will likely know why I’m asking and just give whatever answer is most exculpatory to Dems.

“Medical ethics”? Wut?

He actually recommended Ivermectin for Covid back before anyone had heard of it (except me), but then when Ivermectin became partisan-polarized, he suddenly shut up about it lest he be taken for a rightwing nut.

Today’s medicine is downstream of politics.

He awarded himself 3 in 3 months as “captain” of the swift boat, 3 hearts was your ticket out of nam plus he wrote himself up for a silver star for an act that should have had him court Marshalled then came home and trashed the other nam vets

Oddly enough my first commanding officer in the Seabees was an MIT grad who had served with the bees in nam

My question actually was not rhetorical. I seriously can’t decide between these two alternatives.

– Clueless people at the NYT blindly created that graph without thinking about the implications. Then saw that it made a point they like (sort of, weak compared to Steve’s point about the causality) and ran with it.

– Smart people at the NYT saw that by creating a graph like that they could obscure the Floyd/homicides link and sort of justify a Floyd/police killings link.

I have real trouble telling the difference between incompetence and malice these days. Both are so widespread and the former is all too frequently used as an excuse for behavior due to the latter.

The source of the data was the WaPo. Here is their article.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/05/24/george-floyd-murder-dei-police-reform/

Looking at the authors of the WaPo article (I can’t see if they include a similar graph or not though) I think either malice or incompetence could apply. Though someone who is a polling director should be numerate so I would say that upvotes malice.

Akilah Johnson is a national reporter exploring the effect of racism … Scott Clement is the polling director for The Washington Post

His background.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/scott-clement/

For the NYT article we have authors Steven Rich, Tim Arango, and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs with graphics by Daniel Wood.

Steven Rich is a data reporter.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/steven-rich

Tim Arango looks like a nontechnical George Floyd specialist.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/tim-arango

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs looks like a nontechnical criminal justice specialist.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/nicholas-bogel-burroughs

Daniel Wood is a graphics editor specializing in cartography. No idea how much time series analysis he has done. He started at the NYT April 30th. He used to be at NPR.
https://www.nytco.com/press/daniel-wood-joins-graphics/

I still can’t decide about malice vs. incompetence. Perhaps a useful way to distinguish would be to challenge them on the misleading graphic point in the comments there (do they have them)?

It looks like there is a concerted effort to respin BLM after the pushback of the last year. See the end of this.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/05/george-floyd-police-killings-blm/

Indeed. The Representativette, ha. Yeah, the President IS like that, but still, oftentimes his showmanship still goes along with the goals. That whole thing with the S. African minister was great!

Thanks. Do you know of online articles or photos of any of them?

Thanks

“Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university”

Back when Steve almost died of lymphoma, almost 30 years ago, that was true. Today, it is “alms.”

Might be worse than that now.

Public health research spending has basically negative ROI (especially taking into account Wuhan Syndrome).

That’s what I was wondering, because I don’t have access to the rest of the post (in which Mr. Sailer might give his opinion) or the comments. I wrote above to A.M.:

Now, here’s the burning question after going through this exercise: Are the NYT’s graph makers just not paying attention and happy to see the graph look like this, or was it malicious? Ask iSteve what he thinks. (Or maybe he already wrote much more about this. Maybe commenters already have – like YOU.

Stupidity v Evil? is the way I put it. I also don’t know on this one.

I still can’t decide about malice vs. incompetence.

I believe Thomas Aquinas said that if you look deeply enough, they were actually the same thing, since present ignorance (incompetence) stems from past malice.

Or something like that.

(Also, which particular parties are guilty of malice might vary between the present and past cases, if that was indeed the explanation.)

Anyway, it’s somewhere in Summa Theologica, if I recall correctly.

OK, gentleman, I apologize, as I did foresee that as a hazard of my changeable meme billboard. I will put “Don’t reply or respond to this comment.” if I do any more of this.

(I was hoping to sucker in Generic American, I gotta admit. I think he might see it coming.)

BTW, you both can change your response still – you just can’t change to no response. This can go on for weeks later – I tried it.

I said a long time ago- I’m against lists. But, not against trying to recognize patterns…

1. the novel is a bastard form emerging in the Western culture some 400 years ago.
2. as sensibilities, ethics, aesthetics, knowledge…change, even the greatest novels lose something significant- unlike great works of music and painting.
3. novels are rather strongly influenced by national cultures. Not just language, but there is something about “national spirit” that uneasily translates into other, even close cultures.
4. I tend to agree with E.M. Forster (and Updike, Gaddis, George Steiner, ..and many others, with a few dissenting voices) that supreme novelists are three: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Proust. Only Tolstoy is inadequately filmmable; the other two are not.
5. Great and great-to-supreme are perhaps 5-15 other names- it depends on many variables.
6. I think that some great novels are good for screen adaptation, but most are not. If I would range supremes as 10, I’d give greats any number from 5 to 8. Even individual authors’ works seem to me hard to compare- I don’t see any continuity between Joyce’s “Portrait..” and “Ulysses”- unlike Dostoevsky’s early “The Double” and his latest work, “Karamazovs”.  
7. national cultures shape novel- German 20th C “novels” are basically philosophy in disguise, while Latino Boon in the 70s magical exoticism on steroids.

Contemporary fiction- and I mean the last 40-50 years- is far below the oldies. It’s not just the change in culture, influence of other media…. but also- novels are now frequently written by professors & other rather timid folk. Science now gives us more insight in human nature than fiction; also, there is a failure of nerve on the side of both authors and readers.

Who would have the guts to write a racialist novel, or something questioning the whole Western concept of human equality at all levels, or attack non-Christian religions, or female mystique and male romantic stupidity, or to extol European conquest & the superiority of the Western civilization ..or anything similar?

That whole thing with the S. African minister was great!

I think there are some problems in that thinking. The South Africa show was using videos from Congo. Similarly, the ABC news tattoo was photoshopped. I think it may be dangerous when his inner circle has no control on (or chooses to ignore) what sort of disinformation reaches him and he acts upon it. Especially so as he gets older and he may get befuddled with new technology like fakes media.

How Trump misrepresented images to support claims of “White genocide” in South Africa, including Congo video
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-white-genocide-south-africa-congo-video/

Experts cast doubt on Trump’s claim that Abrego Garcia’s finger tattoos prove MS-13 membership
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-claim-kilmar-abrego-garcias-finger-tattoos-ms-13/

That reminds me of a bit of medical “inside baseball” he once told me without realizing the political significance.

He said that people who apply and fail to get into medical school often get a Public Health degree instead, which they can generally do in one or two years and then try again for medical school with slightly better resumes and training. If they still fail, then they have the Public Health career to fall back on.

In other words, the Public Health field is largely composed of those not bright enough for medical school but who still crave the authority and respect of the medical profession.

In other other words, among all public officials who wield authority in the name of “expertise” and “science”, Public Health officials are among the least fit: mediocre intelligence × overreaching aspiration × thwarted self-image.

In other other other words, all Public Health officials should be presumptively ignored until proven competent.

Now when was it that we were suddenly subject to the mass authority of Public Health officials, and how did that work out … ?

Quora- a mixed bag- sometimes contains the right stuff. One guy- in my opinion, correctly-answered an old question “Who is greater, Joyce or Proust”

Determining whether James Joyce or Marcel Proust is “greater” depends largely on personal taste, literary preferences, and the criteria used for greatness. Here are some considerations for both authors:

James Joyce

Innovative Style: Joyce is known for his stream-of-consciousness technique, particularly in works like Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His narrative style and use of language were groundbreaking.
Cultural Impact: Ulysses is often hailed as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, influencing countless writers and shaping modernist literature.
Themes: Joyce explores themes of identity, sexuality, and the human experience in a deeply intricate way, often focusing on the everyday lives of ordinary people.

Marcel Proust

Narrative Depth: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past) is renowned for its profound exploration of memory, time, and consciousness. His lengthy, introspective prose delves deeply into the human psyche.
Philosophical Insights: Proust’s work often reflects on the nature of art, love, and the passage of time, offering rich philosophical insights that resonate with many readers.
Cultural Legacy: Proust’s influence on literature is significant, particularly in terms of how later writers approached narrative structure and character development.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the question of who is greater is subjective. Joyce may appeal more to those who appreciate innovative narrative techniques and modernist experimentation, while Proust might resonate more with readers interested in deep psychological and philosophical exploration. Both authors have left an indelible mark on literature and continue to be studied and admired for their unique contributions.

My addendum: both are 20th C authors. They don’t possess that archaic, mythic (or primitive) sense of self and cosmos that informs volcanic achievements of Aeschylus, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and parts of Melville that humans are theomorphic and that life is mystery beyond tragedy & comedy.

“I have real trouble telling the difference between incompetence and malice these days. Both are so widespread and the former is all too frequently used as an excuse for behavior due to the latter.”

The point you’re making here is plain-spoken, and has the virtue of being squarely and readily understood.

So forgive me for making a few byzantine glosses on the side, in the spirit of philosophy…

— When comparing malice and incompetence, we should bear in mind that Malice is a form of moral incompetence. (Or rather, there are two types of malice: one is somehow not being able to tell what’s good and what’s evil, and the other is simply rejecting the Good, and subscribing to a moral framework which the rest of us would call evil: recall that one of the main rules of story-telling, is that the villain in his own mind believes he is the hero, and can’t understand why the heroes oppose him.)

— These days, malice is so firmly enthroned in all the avenues of American power, that it can afford to weaponize incompetence in furtherance of the goals of malice.

GLOUCESTER: But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want Love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
Why I, in this weak, piping time of peace,
HAVE NO DELIGHT TO PASS AWAY THE TIME!
Unless, to see my shadow in the sun,
And descant upon mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a Lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days…
I AM DETERMINED TO PROVE A VILLAIN,
And *hate* the idle pleasures of these days.

Richard III, I.i

“Joyce is known for his stream-of-consciousness technique”

I never liked that technique and therefore never liked writers who seemed to use it like Joyce, Woolf or Kerouac. What one likes in fiction is largely just a matter of personal taste. I think Raymond Chandler is a great writer but very few people would agree with that.

Remember when it was normal for the leader of South Africa to be a terrorist, but Saint Cyril was going to be something completely different?

Yeah, I saw her in Redondo Beach when she must have been in her ’80’s – a rock audience, but very appreciative of her effort. That TV show in the video used to be recorded live in beautiful downtown Compton, back when there were still White people there. The tall guy playing the double-neck Mosrite guitar is Joe Maphis, who was a go-to guitarist in Hollywood whenever they wanted a rural sound (the soundtrack to the move Thunder Road, for example, is largely Maphis improvising to the film being projected in the studio). The particular civilization captured in the video is deader than Atlantis.

I think I might have some photos somewhere- I’ll look later d.v. While not precisely the same thing, Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the USA honors their Revolutionary War dead on Memorial day.

https://www.shearithisrael.org/programs/holidays/memorial-day/

“I think Raymond Chandler is a great writer but very few people would agree with that.”

Oh I think Chandler is a fabulous writer and lots of people (esp other writers) would agree: “She had the sort of legs that would make a bishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window.”

The thing about Chandler is, a lot of people just don’t want to read a lot about crime and murder and detectives; James Ellroy is another terrific writer, I just don’t feel the need to care about his chosen subject matter. Courses for horses.

I think people make a mistake when they associate Joyce too closely with “stream-of-consciousness” as such. Like the other early Modernists, Joyce’s real beef was that he thought the old-fashioned, rational stepped-out form of prose-writing a la Dickens and George Eliot was missing out on vital dimensions of human experience, and not reporting reality accurately.

Joyce’s real “technique” in Ulysses is mainly in constructing a separate, independent formal strategy for each chapter which structurally reflects what the reality is: the most famous of these are the “musical” scene at the hotel, the goofy “newsroom” scene, the famously hilarious “Cyclops” in the bar, and the insane Walpurgisnacht “night-town” scene, which is the pivotal moment of the book. These chapters all read sort of like conceptual theater pieces, where there is a “conceit” which governs what is happening and how you view it. Stream of consciousness is just one of those conceits, and for my money the least interesting one.

Thanks. This is the most relevant quote I see.
https://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.FS_Q78_A4.html

Also.
https://ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/nature_grace.vii.ii.iii.html

I think “who is better?” conversations are fun for blog threads and bar-rooms, but they rarely have much impact.

Joyce is a denser and more difficult writer than Proust (who is more fluid and fluent), but I find him easier to read because he writes about stuff I know something about, whereas Proust who I’m sure is great, has always read to me like an alien from another solar system. I just can’t seem to get a grip on what he is talking about. No doubt that is my fault not his, but I’d rather read Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” if I’m going to read a giant foreign European epic; it’s a lot funnier.

People tend to forget, because of all the stylistic fireworks, that Ulysses is pretty much the first serious “anti-colonialist” novel. The sex and the dirty stuff gets in the way of the rather seriously disgruntled politics: it was published in 1922, while Michael Collins was still in the field, and only a few years after the Easter 1916 Dublin GPO massacre.

My Irish grandfather was born in 1904, and so he grew up knowing people who still had living memories of the famine. And I got a whiff of his grudge-holding bitterness, which dissipated in my childhood into a kind of vaudeville joking about the evil Brits, by then it was a cartoon, and the little kids in my family now have no idea at all what any of this stuff signified. You kind of wish de turrrble slabery and the Holocaust would fade in time too, but I bet not, too much do$h at stake.

Anyway the point with Joyce is that there is a very serious and conflicted political undercurrent throughout, it is not all avant-garde fun and games: the book is not partisan or ideological or a screed, it is simply willing to admit that politics was there, rather thickly, and it flavored everything around it. One of Stephen’s big problems is that he wants to live the abstract life of the pure Artist, divorced from messy reality, but everywhere he looks there is still Politics: as he famously says:

— History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Experts cast doubt on Trump’s claim that Abrego Garcia’s finger tattoos prove MS-13 membership

Experts, eh?

IDK if this is urban legend, but supposedly online dating sites have a curiously large number of men who list their heights as six feet even, and a curiously low number who say they’re 5’10” or 5’11”.

For similar reasons the sites have a curiously high number of 29-year-old women.

(I was hoping to sucker in Generic American, I gotta admit. I think he might see it coming.)

I wasn’t paying attention… but if I understand correctly, you’ve been changing the image but keeping the same address, hosted by yourself. Very clever! Interesting way to edit a ‘comment’ way past the edit window. 🙂

The PSA test, and other prostate test types, yield so many false positives that one is almost inclined to ignore them. Also, ahem, if you had sex recently before your PSA test, you will get a higher, false positive result. I had that happen, and I laugh. In addition to all of this, there is the ubiquitous tendency now for medical professionals like urologists to schedule you for additional work that gets charged to your insurance. Cha-ching $$$

Avoid it if you can. When you get to this stage of life, you will have some issues with pissing eventually, because your prostate gland will get bigger. (You can still fuck, though!)

Don’t let them fuck with your prostate unless it is really obvious that there is cancer. In most cases there is not, but if you are lucky to live long enough, there is a good chance that then, then, it will happen. God didn’t design your piss/cum valve to work forever. At least it lasts longer than any car you’ve ever owned.

Here is one from Philadelphia

What?? Why would a stadium full of black people in the Congo be yelling “Kill the Boer!” I’d seen that video well before Trump showed it to that minister from S. Africa. On a larger time scale, the farm murders have been going on for decades. I wrote an 8 part series about the situation in S. Africa based on a long article by a long-term SA (I think English ancestry, not Boer) ex-pat to Michigan I read.

The place has been going to hell gradually, but it’s turned to suddenly. When the blacks are stealing the railroad rails for scrap and people can’t commute anymore … Though 8% of the population then (at the writing of this article a couple of years back) were White, there was a quota of only 2% Whites admitted to medical schools. That ain’t good for anybody.

About the only mistake I know of that Trump made is saying that the 1000’s of crosses by the road in that video were graves of White people. They were markers – I imagine the graves are elsewhere.

Trump might miss a few details, but he knows very well what’s going on there, and he’s the first American high official since the start of black-run SA to call out what’s been going on. Putting in the guy’s face like that during a meeting was very welcomed by me – it should be by White people everywhere.

Do me a solid and put an Agree up there.

Same for me, a five foot six musician friend who could charm the birds from the trees.

But I think online dating has made life much harder for males under six foot

Average male height in America is 5’9. Women might be punching in “6ft or taller” with no sense of average. Most just want someone taller than them.

Dating White women probably sucks if you are 5’6. Foreign women are probably the way to go in your case.

But if it makes you feel better my friend is 6’1 and has had poor luck with the apps. I’m convinced they are garbage. He has the height and charm but still doesn’t get many dates. Sounds like a hundred men all messaging the same 5 women. I told him he is better off talking to women in public but he doesn’t have the guts to do it. He feels like he is being rude if it isn’t a sanctioned social group. His naivety cracks me up. It’s unreal to me that he still retains the “let’s not anger women” attitude. Western conditioning is unreal.

There is no doubt lot of nasty things are happening in South Africa. But some of the pictures and videos he showed to the S.A. president were from Congo as Reuters reporter who took the photo/video said. The crosses were also misrepresented as you mention. I don’t think the factual errors are a big deal in this instance. But there is a danger that he may be fed ‘convenient facts’ by the court jesters for their personal agendas. What if some scoundrels show some horrible ‘photos’ or’ videos’ and provoke him into military action? There is very little filtration in the administration and Trump is getting old.

Thanks.

My recollection of the passage is somewhat different, but maybe that’s a matter of different translations.

Anyway, the second cite is similar to what I remember. It says, that due to “the sin of our first parent” (aka original sin, aka imperfection of man, presumably), reason tends to fail, which we call “ignorance”, and will[power] tends to fail, which we call “malice”.

So per Aquinas Article 3, page 130, ignorance and malice have the same ‘root cause’ though they afflict us differently, which I don’t disagree with, but it’s still not quite what I remember from before, which was that they spawn from each other, rather than that they are both spawned from something else.

That Quora thing reads suspiciously like AI essay slop.

Do me a solid and put an Agree up there.

Done!

https://www.unz.com/isteve/isteve-open-thread-6/#comment-7139205

As our wise elders said: Those who can, do; those who can’t do, teach; those who can’t teach, administrate.

Congratulations George Floyd! Five years drug-free! Five years without a felony!

It was written, I think, 6 years ago.

Joyce’s simultaneous repudiation & fixation on his country seems to me emotionally and morally immature. He dismissed learning Irish; he mythologized Parnell, but that’s more or less everything about Irish identity; his “epiphanies” are actually rather weak. The entire work is a huge construction based on medieval hermetic correspondences he found in Aquinas & a parody of “Odyssey”. I don’t see any purpose in that.

He is a mega-Flaubert, and all the talk about mythology in his work is empty- he writes about mythological themes (better, uses them in his construction), but doesn’t possess the mythic power of spiritual/religious mind.

I think Joyce’s achievement is mostly technical, while he is at his best a comical writer, exposing the imbecility of everyday futile & meaningless lives.

Proust, on the other hand, is a wisdom writer, an heir to Montaigne & a deep knower of human nature. His greatest strength is the expansion of the reader’s mind who is transformed after reading him (one somehow gets a broader consciousness of everything); his weakness is pessimism that informs even the best comic scenes and too strongly colors his masterwork. It’s like reading a modern Buddha: Everything is painful, everything is transient. A healthy mind would say- no, some things are painful, some are joyful & most are indifferent in our field of perception. And transience is a potential for a fulfilling change. A work of a man who was ill all his life.

So what? Nietzsche was also biological dead end, plus a mega-nihilist.

Thanks for your replies. Your recent comments got me to thinking about a depressing topic–what happens when the Black! tidal wave engulfs a city, and houses of worship close/are repurposed.

I am thinking specifically about Baltimore, where I was born and grew up. I remember 30 or 40 years ago driving through a section of northwest Baltimore, which had been predominantly Jewish (probably in the time from 1900 to 1970) and noticed several buildings that obviously had been synagogues but now (I’m talking late 1980s or 1990s) were Black! churches. (The 1980s and 1990s were after the wave of destruction caused by the 1968 riots, but before the final collapse that has occurred over the last 20 years or so.)

More recently, in the northeast part of town, which had been predominantly Catholic, the congregations got old and died, and their kids either left the Church or moved to distant suburbs (e.g. Harford County, 30 miles to the northeast). The Archdiocese last year decided to close the majority of parishes in Baltimore City because it had become too expensive to maintain them, and they now had so few congregants. Some of those churches were beautiful, old buildings, that I cannot see being repurposed very easily or economically, but I don’t claim expertise.

This is one of the former parishes, images are in the linked search result:

Shrine of the Little Flower Baltimore

Those assertions sound so plausible, given human nature, that I am inclined to believe them.

Thanks for your well-reasoned reply. I was probably too quick to jump reflexively to assuming malice as the likely reason, but I can’t help it. After all, these are the heirs to those who published Walter Duranty and never renounced his false reporting. And their lies probably go back before then.

But you raise a deep point about incompetence in major public institutions. Whether that seeming tidal wave of incompetence is a corollary of enforced DEI or is the just the consequence of an empire in terminal decline, I am not sure. But certainly there are examples of in-your-face incompetence everywhere you look nowadays. (And BTW, on another plane, probably another reason we see it is because of the private equity ethos that has engulfed the country in the past 30 or 40 years. The constant focus on providing the bare minimum of customer service because it is cheaper that way (and so the inside investors can squeeze out more $$) no doubt leads to incompetence being institutionalized in every day life.)

There is no universal recipe for a man, especially in the modern world. People differ in their emotional profile, moral sense, urges,…

I would say that most normal men want family, their woman for sex and intimacy and friendship, as well as children. They then feel their life is fulfilled, if it works.

On the other hand, high statistics of divorce & too many bitter examples of men who had been dumped after 10-30 years of marriage and now feel their lives are destroyed (not just financially, but that they’ve been living a lie for, say, 20 years).

My observation- I could be wrong- that in the Western world, and especially in America, way too many men have remained vulnerable romantics who idealize women, while too many women are brainwashed by contemporary decadent culture, behaving improperly like spoiled children. Plus, they’re cunning when it comes to material things.

So, it is a lottery.

Yes, I know the song. Our elementary school music teacher even had us sing it circa 1970. I was too innocent then to realize how insulting and subversive it is.

“Avoid it if you can. When you get to this stage of life, you will have some issues with pissing eventually, because your prostate gland will get bigger. (You can still fuck, though!) ”

I’ve spoken about this before. One way to avoid an enlarged prostate and the subsequent higher risk of prostate cancer is is to keep your T and E levels what they were when you were a 20 something year old.

Estrogen is the cancer hormone. It drives breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men, because E levels increase in men as they age.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3134227/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1477605/

He’s probably better looking now as well.

Before:

After:

I don’t find that strange. We haven’t been able to find my Scots-Irish “L”s before the 1790 census.

Steve frequently points out that Harvard likes to admit a few military members every year–after their service. Fig leaf?

Well I think that one of the more refined pleasures in life is agreeing to disagree with a worthy, civilized opposite. Spirited literary conversation is just fun in a way that I suppose boxing fans think that boxing is fun. When I look at boxing, all my untrained eye sees is Rock-‘Em-Sock-‘Em Robots; but people who truly understand the sport assure me that it is actually really sophisticated, if you know what to look for. So my quibbles and disagreements with you are merely in the spirit of conversation, not oppositional snark.

You clearly have an advanced understanding of Proust in a way that I will never have, because I don’t have the patience. Proust is one of those writers like Trollope and George Eliot who I have simply given up on trying to read, because something in my head can’t process it and I figure life is too short, let’s move on to the stuff I can actually enjoy. Like George Herriman and Ernie Bushmiller.

I would say that at bottom, Joyce is sort of a Cubist. If you are willing to be charitable to the aims of Cubism, which was an attempt to see an object or a scene from multiple angles simultaneously, not just one. Joyce to my mind never actually “says” anything on his own, he doesn’t seem to have an opinion about what he is writing about, he just shoots it from multiple angles. His great strength is as a master of juxtaposition and eccentric strategies of “framing”; his personal opinions about Ireland are of no real consequence, nobody ever founded a Joycean political party with actual goals. Which is a way of saying that I think a lot of your claims are merely based on a misreading or misunderstanding of what he was trying to do. I think his ambivalent attitude towards his troubled homeland was, not exactly courageous, but nevertheless somehow necessary, amongst other equally necessary views.

He is, to my mind, an artist like Jackson Pollock, in the sense that you have to go and do a bit of homework first, in advance, in order to understand what is really going on. (Many people just prefer an artist like Dickens or Manet, where you can get just get it the first time around without sweating for it.) People who are unsympathetic look at a Pollock and they are only willing to see squiggles; but if they did a bit of work, they would come to understand WHY the squiggles are there, what is hidden underneath them, what the history and influences of the drip technique actually are, and they would start to see these paintings as a sort of spiritual autobiography, not just random claptrap. The drip is simply a means to an end. He called his paintings “energy made visible”. I tend to think of them as enormous infinitely complex Chinese characters, each expressing an elaborate personal idea for which there is only one word, with infinity brush-strokes needed to spell it.

In the same way, I think you misapprehend what Joyce was doing when it came to what you call “mythology”. He wasn’t really interested in Mythology at all, and Ulysses is not a parody of Homer… he just needed some scaffolding in order to get up to the Sistine ceiling. It is all structure and juxtaposition, a game of billiards in a way.

Anyway I appreciate your views, and though I am sure Proust is splendid, I don’t think it’s in the cards for me.

I was going to •LOL that, but then I realized his corpse was probably given the Lenin treatment.

They put FDR on the WW2 list.
Kermit Roosevelt is on it too. He committed suicide while posted in Alaska, so not just KIA.

Even when it’s not black infiltration into a neighborhood, the much lower church attendance has some churches nearby selling off buildings (though a church with the same name is elsewhere but way smaller). In this case, a bunch of money was spent to convert the property, including the sanctuary itself, into a bunch of apartments.

One of the Catholic Churches is downtown. I don’t know how that’s working out now – I doubt well. It’s still standing, anyway.

Kinda’ like The Monkees Pleasant Valley Sunday, Buzz.

We also had lefty elementary school teachers in one place we lived when I was young. I can remember the 5th grade teacher – not any particular thing he said, but that he was a typical lefty trying to instill those values. Fortunately, my Conservative Dad being who he was, it didn’t take.

I do remember the Social Studies, with a big weeks-long study on those who we could still call Eskimos then. We played games about accumulating seal blubber (no fat kids were harmed), and then we built igloos by gluing together sugar cubes. Mine was about half torn down by the end of the week. Mmmmm, sugar cubes….!

No, I mean on the billboard post up top.

Here is a basic way of “reading” what is going on in Ulysses:

— Stephen Dedalus is a bitter, broke would-be intellectual and artist. He is kind of an unbearable smartypants, but you feel for him anyway: his father is a ridiculous drunk blowhard and his saintly mother died horribly of cancer. He is sharing a squat with a blustery medical student and an annoyingly smug rich Englishman. He finds his whole situation just too silly for words, like many an over-educated ambitious young man who can’t find the right key to turn in the lock.

— Leopold Bloom is a mild-mannered, well-meaning, sort of sexless middle-aged Jewish man whose only son died tragically young; his sexpot wife has grown tired of him and holds him in contempt, and cheats on him constantly which he sort of puts up with because he is so dickless.

In the course of the book, Stephen walks around town getting increasingly exasperated by both all the nagging art ideas in his head, and also what he sees as an intractable political situation, which makes him angrier and angrier because he feels that Mother Ireland is calling on him to die for the Cause, but he doesn’t really feel like doing that. He is in a way sort of like Hamlet, who feels he is obliged to avenge his father’s death by killing the king which would probably mean death for him too, and he doesn’t really feel like being the star of a show called The *Tragedy* of Hamlet.

Bloom walks around encountering various Irish blowhards, and trying to talk sense to them in his mild-mannered but ineffectual and unconvincing way. He is sort of a softie, but he can’t help it even though he sort of knows it.

— For some strange reason, the two of them meet up by accident in a whorehouse in the red-light district. Stephen is drunk out of his mind, babbling incoherently, and picks a fight with two British soldiers. Bloom finally mans up and steps in to save the drunk college kid from getting his arse kicked, somehow summoning up some native patriarchal cojones in the process.

He takes Stephen away to get some coffee and sober him up, and discovers that the kid is really quite bright, and instigates all sorts of thoughts in Bloom’s head that he didn’t know he had.

Bloom goes home with a kind of new-found manliness, goes to sleep and orders his wife to serve him breakfast in bed in the morning. His wife is impressed by his little manly transformation, and falls asleep in a reverie of their courtship, dreamily remembering what she used to like about him. There might be some hope for these two after all. The End.

In the meantime there is a blistering kaleidoscopic portrait of practically everyone who lived in Dublin at the time, many or most of the portraits drawn from real life.

What you choose to make of all this is anyone’s guess.

A Marijuana leaf, a Smiley Face, followed by the numbers 1 and 3. Probably a coincidence that it symbolizes MS13 on his fingers.

You provide inconvenient facts about Trump’s inner circle and their knack for spreading disinformation, but unfortunately it’s not going to penetrate the confirmation bias addled mind of Achmed and company.

Fig leaf?

Yes.

A recent instance:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/05/after-flying-apaches-she-needed-a-new-challenge/

(At first glance I thought she might have been the Potomac crash girl—apparently there’s a factory in the Alleghenies cranking these ladies out—but no, Mrs. Chrismon seems to be a better person and better pilot than Ms. Lobach was.)

It is the Business School, but it’s still Harvard.

Nathaniel Fick, a Marine Corps Lieutenant with actual combat experience, who was portrayed in Evan Wright’s Generation Kill and the subsequent television miniseries, reported in his autobiography that an admissions officerette from the unnamed graduate school he applied to [almost certainly Harvard] phoned him up to get him to “disavow” something Wright quoted him saying before they would admit him.

Fick refused. Apparently Harvard backed down and let him in anyway.

Joyce vs Proust hmm can’t seem to find either in my comic book collection

“On a larger time scale, the farm murders have been going on for decades. I wrote an 8 part series about the situation in S. Africa based on a long article by a long-term SA (I think English ancestry, not Boer) ex-pat to Michigan I read.”

JFC, you’re straight up gaslighting.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyj1198wy3o

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-trumps-claims-of-white-farmer-genocide-in-south-africa

Even Mr. Sailer knows better given the available statistics. He would undoubtedly have posted repeatedly about such a phenomenon.

Theodore Roosevelt III (President’s son) too. Died of a heart attack in his sleep.

Obviously, you didn’t have to get actually shot/blown up/incinerated to get on the Wall.

To be fair, these guys (except maybe FDR) would be considered War Dead under the modern standard too.

I haven’t read Joyce or Proust. But Flaubert is great. Why doesn’t he get more respect?

My observation- I could be wrong- that in the Western world, and especially in America, way too many men have remained vulnerable romantics who idealize women, while too many women are brainwashed by contemporary decadent culture, behaving improperly like spoiled children. Plus, they’re cunning when it comes to material things.

A pretty good insight but there is another factor that disrupts natural male/female relationships which is liberalism. It goes beyond materialism and a culture of hedonism.

The colleges encourage a level of resentment against White men. The women are taught an underlying belief that everything would be better if not for scheming White men. It adds this layer of resentment to an already unhealthy culture.

There isn’t a basic accounting of certain politically incorrect realities which leaves people confused. White women end up with contradictory feelings of both resentment and attraction to their own kind. It is a common belief among liberal White women that White men ruined the world. But they also have natural attraction to these Wakanda destroyers. Women already deal with a lot of contradiction and modern society further conflicts them.

Conservatives have let liberals take the narrative on race and gender. It’s directly related to men and women having a harder time dating.

Here is the quote from his book.

After channeling all my energy into applying to graduate school, I got a phone call from an admissions officer: “Mr. Fick, we read your application and liked it very much. But a member of our committee read Evan Wright’s story about your platoon in Rolling Stone. You’re quoted as saying, ‘The bad news is, we won’t get much sleep tonight; the good news is, we get to kill people.’” She paused, as if waiting for me to disavow the quote. I was silent, and she went on. “We have a retired Army officer on our staff, and he warned me that there are people who enjoy killing, and they aren’t nice to be around. Could you please explain your quote for me?”

“No, I cannot.”

“Well, do you really feel that way?” Her tone was earnest, almost pleading.

“You mean, will I climb your clock tower and pick people off with a hunting rifle?”

It was her turn to be silent.

“No, I will not. Do I feel compelled to explain myself to you? I don’t.”

Fick’s graduate school bio is all Harvard.
https://www.rsaconference.com/experts/he-nathaniel-fick

The book was published September 7, 2006. Fick’s bio says he was at HBS from 2006-2008, but this article seems to indicate he was at Harvard in 2005.
https://www.matthewpower.net/articles/2005/9/1/qa-with-nathaniel-fick-author-of-one-bullet-away

In that he comments on a point made in the Harvard war memorials discussion above.

It’s about changing the perception. Why do people snicker. It’s perfectly acceptable to come out of Dartmouth or Harvard and go to Goldman Sachs. It’s perfectly acceptable to come out and join McKinsey. It’s a little less, but still acceptable, to go to the Peace Corps or go to Teach for America. But it’s not okay to join the military. There’s been a cultural shift, because 300 members of Yale’s class of 1946 went straight into the military.

His LinkedIn has him at the Kennedy School from 2004-2008.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/natefick/details/education/

Why are you confident the quote referred to Harvard? It seems odd that he would bite the hand that is feeding him like that.

Even when it’s not black infiltration into a neighborhood, the much lower church attendance has some churches nearby selling off buildings (though a church with the same name is elsewhere but way smaller). In this case, a bunch of money was spent to convert the property, including the sanctuary itself, into a bunch of apartments.

I’ve seen two churches converted into restaurants. Kind of weird.

One of the Catholic Churches is downtown. I don’t know how that’s working out now – I doubt well. It’s still standing, anyway.

Well those can be subsidized.

It seems the Catholic church will keep open churches in run down areas.

Those itty-bitty little boxes made of ticky-tacky (inspiration for that song) are a million and half properties now!

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2424-Vicente-St-San-Francisco-CA-94116/15123918_zpid/

noticed several buildings that obviously had been synagogues but now (I’m talking late 1980s or 1990s) were Black! churches. (The 1980s and 1990s were after the wave of destruction caused by the 1968 riots, but before the final collapse that has occurred over the last 20 years or so.)

I vividly remember being in Richmond, VA on a sabbath around 30 years ago and deciding I would walk to the Orthodox synagogue my guidebook assured me was on the other side of town. I remember the sinking feeling as I penetrated deeper into the neighborhood it was in. I arrived only to discover it was now a Pentecostal church.

It would be odd if he went to Harvard as a backup after not getting into his *real* choice.

This can go on for weeks later…

Years, actually. (I tried it.)

☮️

“It seems the Catholic church will keep open churches in run down areas.”

That is definitely no longer the case in Baltimore. I am not expert on their finances, it may be that the huge, open-ended liability for harboring sex offenders many decades ago, which in the past few years here (Maryland) was made no longer subject to the statute of limitations, also played a role.

A Marijuana leaf, a Smiley Face, followed by the numbers 1 and 3. Probably a coincidence that it symbolizes MS13 on his fingers.

See, that there snark is why you’re not an “Expert®”.

Glad you got out in one piece. Reminds me of when I went to college as a commuter and one of my tasks was to guide out-of-town students away from the most dangerous neighborhoods within walking distance of campus. When you visit someplace else, you sense the dangerous areas, but there is no substitute for local knowledge.

It wasn’t that, it was the collapse in attendance.

There was recently an enthusiastic and peopled Flaubert thread on 4chan’s /lit/ board and it drove me to pick up two different translations of Salammbo.

The Austin tower shooting, that one especially because it was demonstrated (and actually noted by the shooter) to be an experiment, but also all “random” mass shootings have successfully been passed through a certain threshold in the popular conciousness. Even stupid NPCs in the past understood that this was a meteor-landing-in-your-lap one-off craziness. After the Year of Heavily Celebrated and Weekly Mass Shootings (’12-’13), now NPCs seem to be under the impression that this is a thing that happens, and furthermore, it always was. I don’t watch television of The Current Year but there are services like Red Ice that compile montages I take the be representative. SoyTV has plenty of mass shootings to reinforce the idea that this is normal. Because they insist on juggling multiple propaganda priorities (stretchy claims) at once, the credulity of the innocent may be protected by one faith article crashing into another: one mass shooting scene precedes the big event by focusing on happy and monogamous homosexuals strolling together. The most hilarious one is the one where the shooting is precluded by interpretive dance.

Mrs Chisom is more elite than me. Has she flown her gunship over any Muslim wedding parties? We want the whole story not just the high points. Has she whacked any negroes defending our freedom?

All true, but- why are they susceptible to idiotic historical cartoons? Why don’t they have a natural revulsion to Wakanda inhabitants, who are something like humanoids?

Add the phenomenon of “sugaring” (which is, judging from investigations, a way of life of maybe 10% female college students)- you have a clinical picture of a civilizational decline. Sugar babies should look good & behave well, and are essentially elite prostitutes or courtesans. Stats are even worse in the UK than in the US, and the UK has a better, much cheaper higher education system.

A future marriage material?

I think- not.

That is 4 bedroom/2 bath/1,750 sqft.

The Levittown houses were 2BR/1 bath/about 750 sqft.
https://kerimurrayarchitecture.com/levittown-ny/

It is amazing how much the US norm for house sizes has changed since the 1950s. Especially when compared to average family sizes.

Average house size by decade.
https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes-decade-by-decade.html

Average household size since 1960.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-households-in-the-us/

That said I would not be shocked to see a $1.5M 750 sqft house in some areas. The shocking part would be that it had not been knocked down to build something bigger.

Now let’s do Elmer Kelton vs Cormac McCarthy

It seems the Catholic church will keep open churches in run down areas.

That is definitely no longer the case in Baltimore. I am not expert on their finances, it may be that the huge, open-ended liability for harboring sex offenders many decades ago, which in the past few years here (Maryland) was made no longer subject to the statute of limitations, also played a role.

That is probably more a case of consolidation. In the larger cities they have been closing the smaller churches.

But they definitely subsidize some of them. It isn’t like a corporate chain where each branch has to turn a profit.