Countenance Blog

Your Blogmeister’s Other German Desk

I have returned from Berlin. Which should now fill in the blanks for you that I left behind before the weekend, if you didn’t already figure it out.

No rest for me, packing for our vacation. Which will be relatively nearby, but also undisclosed until it’s over. And it also means hardly any social posting or blogging, unless something big happens.

But I wanted to take the opportunity to tie together a loose end and also make a prediction.

Patriot Front did a march in DC for the 250th.

Normiecons and lamercons doing their usual “zomg feds” thing.

Except they must have missed the last year and a half.

For one, the FBI is under new management. For two, the SPLC has been knocked flat on the mat. For three, USAID’s non-charitable spending has been eliminated.

Yet, Patriot Front continues.

What’s the conclusion, boys and girls?

They’re genuine. Even if their tactics are questionable.

Then again, I figured that out some time ago, because PF wasn’t moving in the ways that Feds/plants do. That, and their leader, Thomas Rousseau, is a frequent guest on sector outlets, including with Jared Taylor, from time to time.

Frojax was live and on site for the PF march.

Speaking of whom.

Frojax (brothers Forrest and Jackson) are a new creator duo that has really gotten a lot of traction in the American sector and really quickly.

Unfortunately, I don’t think they’re going to be able to make it that big, at least compared to other sector notables past and present.

That which makes them really presentable and of the sort that you would feel perfectly comfortable in taking home to meet the parents, the things which you would think would fuel their big future success and popularity and notoriety, are the very things which mean that they won’t.

They’re affable, approachable, patient at debating, linear, never get loud, never scream, never shout, and at least so far never say anything wild or off the wall or deliberately provocative.

Does that sound like someone in the sector that you’ve known or known of for several decades? Right. And now you know why I’m making the prediction that I just did.

You see, in our sector, at least until the social ecosystem changes, the only way to gain big notoriety is to be some mix-or-match of wild, bombastic, loud, rude, hysterical, conspiraTARDial, purity spiraling, gossip-mongering, internecine pie throwing, and most importantly, say and do provocative and stupid things, so that the mainstream media with its nutpicking penchant will pay you attention. Many bonus points if you can blame every hung toenail and misaligned throw rug on a certain tribe, at which point it will become unquestionable sector gospel.

To put it another way, sector assets get ignored, sector detriments get attention.

The Frojax brothers might get a little bit of mainstream media run initially, but once it’s figured out that they’re no ways useful to discredit the rest of the sector and the movement, they’ll never get called again. Just like the older individual I just riddled about, that being Jared Taylor. Frojax are just the new and young JT.

From where I sit, you don’t look a day over 200.

Not so coincidentally, the bicentennial of the passings of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, which I mentioned two years ago in the post about Jimmy Carter turning 100.

As for tomorrow, I’ll be spending it in a special but very appropriate place for a special get-together, one whose real estate just happens to be in this country, but whose mission is that of my own. That should be enough of a hint. “You’ll be spending America’s 250th birthday WHERE?” My much younger self would totally not believe it.

Philadelphia

You may be wondering if the American Declaration of Independence has ever been translated into German.

In fact, it was within a very few days of its completion and adoption translated and published, for the benefit of those in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who didn’t speak English well or at all.

An image of the original, and its easier to read text.

A declaration of independence in general, and the one that is about to turn 250 years old, in this country’s language, is called a Unabhängigkeitserklärung. Now, before you start pulling your hair out of your head and screaming about how Mark Twain was right, just calm down.

It’s as easy as this:

In the long word, you see “hang” (same meaning) and “klar” (“clear”). From there, you can figure out the rest.

Your Blogmeister’s Other German Desk

I realized something a few hours ago.

I’ve had my feet in this country for one reason or another (tourist, 2018 and then expat/employment, 2022 and 2026) for part or whole of the last three World Cups. In all three instances, Die Mannschaft (the name for the country’s national team), checked out early and with a decidedly less than stellar result. Not making it past the group stage in 18 and 22, and losing in the first game of the knockout stage yesterday on tiebreaking kicks, which was the first time DM ever lost in a WC game on tiebreaking kicks.

The last time there was a World Cup and my feet were not on this country’s soil? 2014. When they won it all, including the 7-1 rout of the host Brazil on their own soil in the semifinal.

Let’s just say I’m glad I’m not a public figure, that I’m not known. Because I seem to be such bad luck for DM that, if I was, they’d hunt me down and deport me right away. And it wouldn’t matter that I have a German wife and two German children (they’re also American nationals via their father). Because they’re just that intense about soccer around here.

And yes, today was probably the most dour day in this country since I’ve been in it, even more than four or eight years ago. Then again, with what happened later yesterday in Netherlands “versus” Morocco, (and I flashed on the heavy storms ahead when I saw that matchup was going to happen in the first round of the knockouts), you know, where the Moroccan team whose players live in The Netherlands beat the Dutch team full of Moroccan players who live in The Netherlands, and the victory riots that the Moroccans, both those with and without Dutch passports, went on today, I’m happy that this country hardly has any Paraguayans. Ironically, Paraguay has 60,000 Germans, it being a somewhat common destination for expats from here.

Yorba Linda, Calif.

Whaddaya know. More than thirty years after he left this world, Richard Nixon is having another comeback. We’ve got Nixon to kick around once again.

But what have Dave and I always said about history? The past has zero control over how the future is going to view the past, given enough time. Maybe the most fabulously rich people in their times and lives can set up trust funds to hire whore-storians to construct PR cases and hagiographies about said individual. Eventually, that money dries up, gets burned through, is subdivided among generation after generation of heirs. Then even those people are left at the mercy of the whims of subsequent generations.

So now we arrive at “Nixonmaxxing” being the fourth and posthumous Nixon comeback, after the elder fopo statesmen years of the ’80s and early ’90s as his third, then the late ’60s as his second, and Checkers in ’53 as his first.

And it’s like what I just wrote above. Events and circumstances of more recent years are making people, especially relatively younger people, do the “if they lied about X, then what if they were lying about Y all along” thing, and then doing their own investigation.

I’ve said it myself, that if God gives me the deal of pick one limit one post-WWII President, one evening of conversation over beer, no doubt about it, for me it would be Richard Nixon.

Which is not the same thing as saying as he is my political favorite of the bunch. Obviously, of that universe, Trump is on top.

Nixon, OTOH, if you want the God’s honest truth, administratively locked in the Great Society. In no wise was he any kind of departure from the post-WWII consensus. I think he in fact proudly described himself as a globalist in his Congressional years. That he leveraged his popularity to stop Robert Taft in ’52, and was rewarded with being the running mate. A running mate to someone who was another pea in the same pod as Nixon himself, that being Dwight Eisenhower. Who himself must have given off bad energy and aura during his Presidency even if the media of the time tried to cover it up; My late mother’s two most common words to describe Ike were “bastard” and “sonofabitch.” The more time goes on, the more stupid that strapping up with China to spite the USSR looks, and I predict that this is a trend that will continue on the same trajectory in the near to mid term future. “We are all Keynesians now!” Watergate might have been way overblown, but what is undoubtedly true is that he was paranoid with and about power and a bully with it, generally speaking, especially after 1960 was stone cold stolen from him. (He deliberately avoided pressing the 1960 matter for the good of the country, magnanimity which his country did not repay twelve to fourteen years later, which is why I think Trump was totally right to contest 2020 in every legit way he could). That is why he did what he did with Watergate to begin with, because he was scared that it was all going to be taken away from him yet again. (In retrospect, why? A retarded monkey could have carried 49 states against McGovern in ’72). For another example, look at what he did vis-a-vis George Wallace with the backroom bullying, and, after the assassination attempt, having his FBI try to plant McGovern literature in Arthur Bremer’s hotel room (local cops already had the joint yellow taped off before they could). Ranted about blacks and Jews in private, but politically prostrated to both with his power and denied them almost nothing. He never had much in the way of coattails for his own political party.

But he was a hell of a conversationalist and had a really wide range. That one evening for me would be a lifelong memory and treasure.

What I’m saying is that just because they lied to you about X, doesn’t automatically mean anything either way either in the direction of the truth or lying about Y. Just keep a level head, and avoid the twin evils of pure faith and white pilling on one end and pure cynicism and black pilling on the other hand. Do your own thinking, but cut it down the middle. And remember that words and actions are on opposite sides of the world.

And, no. No Nixonmaxxing for me.

Washington, D.C.

Coddling Movie Substack:

The most popular streamers on the live streaming platforms Twitch and Kick—figures such as Adin Ross, IShowSpeed, Jynxzi, Kai Cenat, all of whom gross millions of views (and sometimes dollars) per month—center their content around gaming, gambling, cryptocurrency, and all sorts of “get rich quick” schemes that bypass traditional credential-based career routes. These are, for millions of young Americans, the most visible and compelling models of adult success available.

This helps explain the aspirations of American teenagers. According to a 2021 poll, American boys ages 13-17 now most commonly list YouTuber and professional gamer as two of the top jobs they “want to be when they grow up.” Where previous generations dreamed of being astronauts, today’s aspirational figures are different. The streamer in his gaming chair was a teenager not long ago. He is accessible, relatable, visibly wealthy, and he got there without a diploma.

The down side to that is that, like a lot of other pursuits, your odds of hitting it really big in streaming are somewhere between miniscule and infinitesimal. But it doesn’t mean that you won’t make any money if you never become Kai, Speed, Adin or Jynxzi. And that’s where the rub comes in. Think of some of the most famous words that Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote for Dionne Warwick: “L.A. is a great big freeway. Put a hundred down a buy a car. In a week maybe two they’ll make you a star. Weeks turn into years how quick they pass. And all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas.” However, today, all the big streamers that never were aren’t parking cars or pumping gas, metaphorically speaking, because they’re just small streamers. Hint: Search YouTube: “A day in the life of a small streamer.” There’s a reason why you get a wholehelluvalotta results; it’s because there are a wholehelluvalotta small streamers. The danger is that nobody will want to do the car parking and gas pumping work so to speak because being a small streamer winds up being good enough. That is, until the unsustainable economics of social media platforms, both video and otherwise, finally come home to roost.

See what I just did there? I found a through line between Dionne Warwick and Jynxzi, which is something only I can do, or would do.

Washington, D.C.; Paris

About that. I have a theory.

I don’t think that the anger that many black opinion makers and talking heads have about this particular controversy should be taken quite as face value.

Their level of white hot rage over the some lame brain goofy shit that most people would shrug off, makes me curious.

It’s because I don’t think their anger is really about whether Josh Hokit or anyone else actually believes that Michelle Obama is really a man. I happen to think that they know as well as anyone else that this “Michelle Obama is a man” yapping is just a dumbass fad that next to nobody who spouts it actually literally or seriously believes.

Why they’re really angry is the fact that anyone is even saying or thinking it to begin with, even if it’s out of a sense of jocularity or just to be glib or stupid.

And I think when you boil it all down, the root of it is blacks’ continued and subconscious anxiety and insecurity over their own lower sexual dimorphism compared to other groups. Meaning that black women are still insecure because they think that others believe that they look too much like black men. And if black women are angry about something, that instantly means that a high percentage of black men will have no choice but to be angry about it, considering blacks’ matriarchal nature.

Note: At the same time, crossing oceans and races, Emmanuel Macron’s wife is also constantly accused of being a man. I know that in that country on the other side of the Rhine from me, those accusations are mostly ignored, no crashing out. Part of it is to starve the silliness of oxygen, and another part of it is that as a generality (real) French women don’t suffer from this lack of dimorphism insecurity.

London

I think I’ve figured something else out that I sorta missed before.

Obviously, the sudden jihad from officialdom about social media is significantly political.

But there’s another reason.

Two Tier said in this proscription announcement against social media earlier today that he “wants to give children back their childhood.”

That phrasing rang bells in my head.

Remember, it is said of my sub-generation (“X-Ennials,” 1975-1980-ish birth years), that we had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood.

Now it’s becoming clear. A big part of the motivation for this is that Xennials, Gen X Classic, and Jones (i.e. latter half of the Boomers) are getting nostalgic about their own childhoods and are imposing that nostalgia on today’s younger people. It’s the “kids these days you kids will never know what it’s like to (blah blah).”

Washington, D.C,; Tehran

I think you can figure out the rest.

One thing that should be obvious thanks to these last three and a half months is that the “zion don” yappers in our sector are full of it. To wit, among many other examples:

Washington, D.C.

Trump’s 80th birthday, only two days after Elon Musk becomes the world’s first trillionaire.

Both names will resonate for centuries to come. Elon’s will resonate longer and more widespread because of the future ramifications of what he is doing today.

Yet and still:

What a time to be alive. “May you live in interesting times” need not always be a curse. Our grandchildren just may be jealous of us.

Which leads me to the NYT.

The pitfalls with this are being bipolar about it and think about it in either-or terms. Then again, I’m in a country full of people who have a reputation for either standing on the accelerator or standing on the brake. And I know I have that bad habit too, almost as if we’re loosely related. Moderation and cutting it down the middle are definitely acquired tastes for me.

This matter, likewise, needs moderate thinking. It’s not true that he’s just as spry and energetic as he was in his younger years, even ten years ago. It’s also not true that he’s right on the vestibule of being a human vegetable. The moderate way to think about this is that you can’t get around 80 years old, but he’s in high percentile shape for 80 years old and a man and someone doing about the most stressful public life-in-a-fishbowl job in existence.

Needless to say, “Trump 2028” was and is always nothing more than a merch hustle. Even if there was some sort of legal or constitutional pathway.

And I know I won’t even live to 80.

Washington, D.C.

Greg Johnson reviews Ibram X.’s new book.

Or what seems to be “his” new book.

Just going to cut and paste the comment I left there, here, with a few usage corrections.

*

Kendi (or whoever wrote this for him, and I’ll get to that) mentioned the Potsdam meeting in late November 2023.

In case you’re new here, that was just one of several stops for Martin Sellner on his book tour to advertise Regime Change von Rechts and to pre-advertise Remigration. I know, because I went to the one immediately before the stop in Potsdam, that being in Paderborn.

Soon after 2024 began, a left wing taxpayer funded outfit in this country called Correctiv concocted a story that made the Potsdam stop to be some sort of Wannsee 2.0. When all Martin did there was his usual spiel on that tour, including what I saw with my own eyes in Paderborn. (And he reenacted on his Rumble channel after the controversy broke). Eventually, the matter was taken to court, and Correctiv had to retract. Though quite a few people still want to believe Correctiv’s initial tall tale, or at least they want others to believe it, in the sense that the lie is already halfway around the world before the truth can get out of bed and put its boots on.

Somehow, someway, Kendi got wind of this and included this in this book.

Or did he?

That gets me to my second point.

I first heard of this book and its contents a few months ago. Right from the jump, I was suspicious about the whole thing. Why are we to believe that this midwitted skintellectual whose only real care before now was this that or the third gap between black people and everyone else in the United States, really cares about the nuances of Renaud Camus, the Le Pen family, (he seems to spend a whole lot of time on France, curiously), and of course, the Bad Mustache Man? What is any of this to him? What’s wrong with this picture? “One of these things is not like the other…”

My theory is that whoever wrote this for him was clever enough to write it in his goofy rambling disjointed hysterical “style,” so that his name as the authorship would not be questioned, but in reality wanted to write a book that really addressed the fears of upscale white liberals and organized activist Jewish interests, albeit one that has “Ibram X. Kendi” and his currently fashionable (among the American left) name listed as the official author.

Bern

The Switzerland ten million population cap vote is coming up on Sunday.

The slick and sly genius of the proposal is that, if it passes, (and it should), and hard caps the country’s population, it also means that annual immigration also will have hard limits, and will become a zero sum game. And that’s where the slick and sly comes in.

Let’s do the comparison to America and race. A benefit that is abstract is one that is almost always unlimited. In such a case, the advocates of that benefit have a direct incentive to create as many individual or group beneficiaries as possible. In order to create a large as possible political and electoral and lobbying force for that benefit to continue. Affirmative action is a prime example.

But when the benefit is fixed, it becomes a zero sum game. In such a case, the incentive is to limit the number of people and groups that can benefit, so that each slice of the fixed pie is worth having. With the abstract benefit of affirmative action, just because one new person or group becomes eligible for it doesn’t mean a previously eligible person or group suddenly does not. That’s not the case with a fixed benefit and zero sum game. Reparations for slavery is an example of the zero sum game — No matter how much money printer go brrr, there would have to be some practical real world upper limit or ceiling to the number of dollars that could be spent on reparations. And now you know why blacks in America started in on this tether and ADOS and FBA business in very recent years — It is PURELY because they got the sense that reparations are imminent (falsely so, IMHO), so it means that it was time to shame and throw post 1965 immigrant blacks out of “blackness” so that they can’t get reparations. They want the size of each individual reparations check to be as large as possible.

Applying this kind of thing to Switzerland.

If a hard 10m pop cap happens, then there will have to be fixed annual immigration limits. Then it means that immigration becomes a zero sum game. If it isn’t a zero sum game, then the various forces that want mass immigration for disparate reasons can easily team up with each other and cooperate and coordinate with each other, because they know the immigration flow is unlimited, and the incentive would be to create as many incentives to be pro-immigration and benefit from mass immigration so that it can create a big enough force to make sure the spigot stays open and unlimited.

However, if there are hard annual caps on the total number, then it turns immigration into a zero sum game. Meaning the disparate pro-immigration forces will start turning on each other and fighting each other for their slice of the fixed limited pie. Which for our cause, would be a good thing.

If America had a hard annual immigration cap, then the H-1B gluttons, the refugee racket, the diversity visa cultists, the “rotting in the fields” types, chain migration, and the “muh huddled masses” schmaltzers and the others would be in a constant state of war with each other, not ganging up with each other to keep the flow open and unlimited.

And this is why the establishment parties and forces in Switzerland are fighting like hell against this ballot proposal. Going so far, as you can see, to try and sell you on the ridiculous idea that Trump, Putin and Xi are secretly behind the measure to ruin Europe.

Heilbronn

Oh, Vince!

“ONLY FIVE”

The two knuckleheads and I were chatting about this that and the third, last night.

In response to the younger one, I said these exact words (in English, as I almost always speak to them in English):

“Your namesake would have put it a lot more cogently.”

Both he and his older by 19 minutes brother looked at me like I was strange.

The better half, who at that point must have walked in on the conversation, then shot me a different kind of stare.

The kind that says, “they’re only five years old.”

Okay, I’ll take the L. But if these two don’t truly grok the concept of cogency by the time they’re seven, then we’re gonna have big problems.

“Überzeugungskraft,” as it’s said here. Lit.: over + things + power.

Los Angeles

Looks like Spencer Pratt will finish in second place behind Karen Bass and thus make the runoff.

Repeating for those needing:

The important lesson of Spencer Pratt isn’t if he’ll ultimately win or not, and really not ultimately that he even made it this far. And yes, they could still wind up cheating him out of his rightful second place, but even that doesn’t matter. What matters is that he made himself far more of a force than he otherwise would have because of his effective selection of issues to place front and center, and his supporters’ AI video ads were also effective. It’s teaching everyone else how to do it, and a lot of those “everybody elses” live in more favorable political geography (and better election laws) with better chances of a more favorable binary outcome. To put it another way, that which turned Spencer Pratt from just one of many names on the ballot to a true contender in Los Angeles are things which turn narrow losers into narrow winners in, say, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Rhine-Westphalia.

As George Wallace said, the title of this post. To use the more current phrase, read the room.

Stirling, Scotland

Garrison, Ken.

I’ll just cut and past my own three social posts from yesterday.

*

A lot of people are interpreting his early retirement in a lot of predictable ways. MAGA, AIPAC, or what not. Those interpretations do have some validity.

But I think they’re missing a big one and a rather important one:

It’s indicative of the fall of right-libertarianism as a force that has the ability to wield significant political clout, and the fact that Trump and MAGA era populism and its ability to rack up big wins, including (at least) two Presidential elections, in contrast to right-libertarianism not being able to win that much even at its peak, is making people lose interest in it, even if most people who ever showed any adherence to it weren’t ever that serious about it and was only superficial, that they were just latching onto something out of frustration about other things but they weren’t about to get too serious about it because taking libertarianism too seriously would have hurt them. Not helping was/is right-libertarians’ ideological roadblocking to the White House on quite a few occasions.

Sticking to the state of Kentucky, this should serve as a wake up call to one Rand Paul. Provided he even wants a political career past 2028.

*

Addenda.

(1) There was inevitably going to be a clash between “principled” right-libertarians and Trump/MAGA/populism-ish. That much you could have seen coming even back in 2016.

(2) When they’re out to get you, the first thing you should do is not give them any weapons. Yes, AIPAC was probably out to get Massie. He might have been able to beat them back had he not have such a horrible immigration record in his later years in Congress.

(3) I said it myself that in spite of what seems to be a lot of official Republican unity behind Trump, there has all along been an undercurrent of hard feelings, jealousy and figurative Brutus style cloaking daggers behind their backs. It’s because Trump showed up an entire system that they themselves dedicated their careers to as a plastic banana. With right-libertarians in particular, Ron Paul only ever won in a Congressional district (and had to sweep some of his libertarianism under the rug to do that), and when he tried running for President, never won even one real Republican primary or caucus. Rand Paul did wind up winning actual statewide elections, but mainly because he edged away from his father’s ideological hard line and tried to split the difference between that and what was at the time official Republican Party party lines, and later on also Trump/MAGA/populism-ish. Yet and still, Trump being that bull in a china shop in 2016 resulted in hard feelings that are still open wounds, Thomas Massie to wit.

*

About this AIPAC business.

For a long time, I have gone the opposite way compared to most of my sector about AIPAC. Most of the sector believes it to be this big invincible ultra-powerful juggernaut. I think AIPAC is just a really big plastic banana with a lot of hot air inside. AIPAC loves to ride behind more powerful lobbying groups and more fundamental political occurrences, then post hoc try to take the credit for the results. And of course fundraise off it and fluff itself up.

Predictably, AIPAC is spiking the football on the fall of Massie. When Massie lost for the reasons I already stated earlier today, just scroll down a bit in my timeline. Because right-libertarianism is a dying force, and Massie screwed his own pooch with his immigration treachery. From what I can discern, Israel wasn’t even an issue either way in his district and in the campaign between himself and the challenger that won.

To summarize: Don’t fear AIPAC.

Hamburg; Miami

ZOMG LOOKSMAXXING IS NAZI LOL~!!!!111!1 (mit dem Tagesschau, followed by their long time instrumental jingle which sounds like it’s composed in a minor key)

Really, it’s none of that.

When I think of the concept, and its most notable advocate and adherent, one Mr. Eric Braden Peters, better known by his social media handle Clavicular, I think of another N word:

Narcissus.

A couple of months ago, I came up with the bon mot that what Ovid wrote on the legend of Narcissus can be viewed as an advance obituary for Clavicular.

A lot of people don’t grok the real lesson in the Narcissus legend. It’s that Narc hurt himself out of grief because he figured out he would never be able to be with the only person he truly loved, because that person was just his own reflection in the water. Likewise, Clavicular has admitted that some of the things that help him with his “looksmaxxing” are making him sterile. Which would seem to defeat the purpose, unless you grok the moral of Narcissus. Checking yourself out of the gene pool in pursuit of the most perfect looking version of yourself possible is something that not even Ovid could have dreamed up.

Note: Even if Clavicular does make it to my age, some of the things he’s doing in the pursuit of looksmaxxing are going to leave him so full of early age arthritis and pain that he’s going to want to do the actual Narcissus final thing.

Hamburg; New Orleans; Washington, D.C.

I had two articles in my hopper right today that I was intending for use as social media posts. Instead, they have a through line and relevance to a post here a few years ago. So let’s go.

One of them, German, from AnonymousNews, is about two left of center newspapers compiling and making public a registry of members of the NSDAP (the actual Nazi Party). The other, from Counter Currents, is a review of a book by a left of center author about what he was able to discover about one of his great-great-grandfathers who was pretty big in the Klan. In it, the author admits that some 137 million Americans today are the direct descendants of actual Klan members first or second wave. Likewise with the Nazi thing, nearly all Germans have a direct ancestor who was a party member.

In a similar spirit, several years ago, we got “research” from Reuters that shows that so many of the current American political ruling class are the direct descendants of slave owners. Likewise, a high percentage of people who voted for the elected officials in that class are also direct descendants of slave owners.

So why the big whoop?

Because the left wants to keep on doing their antiquarian sperging out and crashing out about Nazis, the Klan and slavery. Etc, usw. As a side benefit, they’ll have it as a weapon which they can selectively wield if they want to get you somehow. Let me spell that out for you: AfD getting close to winning an election? Their top of the list candidate is a descendant of a Nazi. (So are the top of the list candidates for the CDU, SPD, Greens, Die Linke and FDP, but shhhh.) This Supreme Court justice finds that race man short bus gerrymandered Congressional districts are unconstitutional? His great-great-great-grandfather owned slaves. (Justices who made the opposite decision on the matter are also great-great-great-grandchildren of slaveowners, but shhhh.). Suburban housewife gets together an effort to stop the building of an apartment complex round the way? Her great-great-grandpa was a Kluxer. (The complex’s developer also had a great-great-grandpa in the Klan, but shhhh.) Hell, they can’t let go of the fact that Fred Trump, Sr. was arrested in the proximity of a Klan event in 1927.

Get the picture?

Atlanta

RIP Ted Fonda.

He pretty much single handedly dragged American television out of the few number of over the air stations three major networks era.

And, make all the jokes you want about his politics, and I just did one. Give him this much: He helped fund and had a cameo role in the movie whose poster you see above.

Montgomery, Ala.

There’s a developing trope out there, and in fact, I can see that is already infecting our own sector, that needs to be refuted.

I’m going to set it up with a joke I heard a long time ago:

You know your kid is destined to be a Federal prosecutor if his or her first word is either conspiracy, attempted or furtherance.

The trope is that this indictment of the SPLC is underwhelming and therefore destined to fail.

The trope and those who are pushing it misunderstands the nature of the American Federal criminal prosecution.

The Feds heavily rely on process and inchoate offenses. For one, to make sure that the prosecution attempt doesn’t get knocked down for federalism slash tenth amendment, and for two, to make sure something sticks.

As an example, when the Feds indict a dope dealer, it’s not on the actual dope dealing. It will be “conspiracy to launder money via interstate commercial networks in the furtherance of the trade or transport of Federally scheduled substances,” or some such.

The reason the SPLC indictment seems underwhelming is the reason why most Federal indictments seem that way, because they don’t involve the big boom sexy legal matters. A lot of people are reading a lot of banal process and inchoate blah blah and mistaking it as a weak sauce case. When in reality, it’s a typical Federal case.

However, at least if you want to go by my decidedly non-qualified opinion, after reading the SPLC indictment, assuming the facts are all there, and there is no jury funny business, the DOJ has the SPLC dead to rights.

Washington, D.C.; London

“Nice” is all there is to this. It’s just “nice” to know, but apropos of nothing. Nice, but not special, and not profound.

In reality, nearly every living human being is the direct descendant of some hereditary monarch of the past, which means we wuz all kangz and queanz. Furthermore, 15th cousin is consanguinitely speaking basically nothing. In fact, if someone did some research, I bet they would find another path to a Trump-Charles relationship that is much closer than 15th cousins.

Someone back in 2016 did some digging and found that both Trump and Hillary Clinton are direct descendants of Edward III (1327-1377 reign) and the two of them were 16th cousins. It is estimated that 80% of current Britons are direct descendants of E-3. Which means that a majority of people that voted for either Trump or Hillary in 2016 are likewise.

Remember when it comes to things like this: The idea of who your relatives are is a relative concept, not an absolute concept. That’s why they’re called “relatives.” So the proper question is not if you and a given person are related or not, it’s how closely you’re related on the horizontal and/or vertical axes, and if whatever that result winds up being is close enough to matter to the given subject matter.

Washington, D.C.

My theory about last night is that nutbar made a bet that the security at any given White House Correspondents Dinner would be relatively lax, because who would ever think that anyone who would attend it would want to do a mass shooting or an assassination? Which means nutbar thought he could do a Usain Bolt past the relatively relaxed security and get into the ballroom and assassinate Trump or whoever.

Montgomery, Ala.; Washington, D.C.

Tell me I’m dreaming.

I knew the SPLC and the FBI were for a long time coordinating. That the FBI was using the SPLC for intel gathered in ways the FBI was not allowed, in exchange for the FBI having its informants engage in funny ways that would create fodder for the SPLC. That much came from actual academic work.

But I would have never thought that the SPLC would be or have ever been so stupid as to take Fed chances by actually directly funding the funny business crowd directly. Maybe partially during Trump 1.0 and fully during Trump 2.0, the SPLC didn’t have the FBI at its disposal. But that wasn’t a problem any other time. Of course that answers my own question – What did the SPLC ever have to or believe it had to fear? You get away with things for so long that you get to the point where you think you will forever. FAFO.

What is also confounding is that why the SPLC really needed to do these particular things, in terms of directly astroturfing the race-minded right, when in recent years, they’ve largely shifted their attention to World Wars G and T, largely to get gay men to open their purses. The fall of Madoff hurting the net worths of the kind of elderly Jewish women paranoid about the latter day fans of the starving Austrian artist is why the SPLC started taking up this gay business, to hunt for new donors. In the most recent years, likely in a play for Arabian oil money, they added zomg Islamophobia to the program.

Now our sector is going to have to sit back and wait on pins and needles to find out who on our side was SPLC funded. This will be a falling tide that exposes the skinny dippers. Though I think it’s obvious that they will be the groups and individuals who did the most optically outlandish things. One might also want to add the ones who were most provocative of violence, but those people and groups would be way more of interest to the FBI than the SPLC. The SPLC was all about the juicy photography. OTOH, I fear that this is going to start a doom loop within the sector where everyone is going to be accusing everyone else of being on the SPLC take, and that normiecons are going to start thinking that the whole entire alt or dissident right is nothing more than an SPLC astroturfed construct. That would be nowhere near the truth. The Fed indictment is not alleging that.

Livermore, Calif.; Sacramento; Washington, D.C.

Eric Swalwell. Really haven’t been interested in that hot mess.

But there is one angle that really does jump out at me. It leads me into a football spiking toldyaso about these structural games that political parties like to play because they think they’re locking in monopoly power, when they only wind up being too clever by half.

A likely true theory to “why now” on Swalwell is to clear out Democrats running for California governor this year. Because California has a jungle primary, top two finishers regardless of party advance, and because a lot of credible Democrats are running, the way the polling there is going now, two Republicans are currently in the top two, albeit with low percentages. The anxiety among California Democrats is to start bouncing people out of the club.

Remember, not that long ago, California Dems just had to implement this jungle primary. Their supposed official reason was to enforce moderation and discipline, and discourage fringe extremist candidates on both sides. The real reason, so they believed, was that they assumed that in all cases, with California the way it is, the top two finishers would always be Democrats, thereby ensuring some Democrat wins the whole thing.

Well, at least right now, it’s not working out that way, is it?

So much of a clusterfuck (for them) this is that they’re essentially reinstituting a party boss partisan primary, the smoke filled rooms from the bad ole days, by any other means, and in a roundabout way.

More and more of that backfiring will happen.

Now that you realize that, let me drop the other shoe:

All this mid decade legislative gerrymandering that is so fashionable among both Republicans and Democrats in America right now, is more likely to backfire (for both sides) than yield the desired result. More likely is that it will have almost zero or actually zero real holistic meaningful effect.

Budapest

This was a devastating loss.

There is no massaging this, no nuancing this, no qualifying this, no spinning this, no sugarcoating this, no butackshuwalying this.

I just got home, having been in Budapest for the weekend and for what I was hoping to be a better outcome, and I’m too tired to do much expounding.

I will say this, here and now.

First off, in a perverse way, I’m glad that it was a landslide and not close. Because a close vote would have opened the stolen election wound which would have never truly healed. At least with a landslide, it instantly settles the legitimacy and credibility question. If they’re gonna kill you, just hope they get it done right quick instead of torturously dragging it out.

Now as for the greater point. Resist the temptation to dwell on complicated reasons or politically goosed reasons. This happens with a lot of elections. After it happens, a bevy of interest groups and ideologically charged people and groups ride in to claim that whatever they’re concerned about made the whole entire difference (the obvious follow up implication is that they should get more money, publicity, power and public rectitude). Also resist the temptation to dwell on Viktor Orban’s “mistakes.” He, being human, has made mistakes and will continue to do so. It’s just that whatever mistakes he made weren’t relevant to how things went yesterday.

There is only one real meaningful reason why yesterday turned out the way it did:

It’s because the Hungarian people were for months and years bullied and blackmailed in a pincher movement with Brussels at one end and Kiev at the other. No matter how strong willed you are, if you’re pinched too tightly, you’ll eventually pop. Yesterday was the popping.

That’s the conclusion; Later this week, likely as a comment on this post, I’ll fill in everything that comes before, and also add my predictions about the incoming government.

Note – Magyar’s election night gathering which turned out to be a victory rally last night had a lot of tiki torches. ISYN.

UPDATE 4/16

I’ll pay that off now before I forget about it and be as succinct as I can.

The pressure from Brussels is that the EU had funding cutting measures it was able to do, and in fact did, for a long time. Unfortunately, Orban himself made a blunder during the Covid era when he signed on to a deal where EU countries taking EU Covid relief funding had to abide by “rule of law” (selectively enforced) provisions. That was Orban handing Brussels a whole warehouse full of grenades. And you know they used them.

The pressure from Kiev was mostly that some sort of Ukrainian assents blew up oil and natural gas pipelines that ran through Ukraine and transported Russian oil and gas to Hungary and the rest of Europe. Of course, they denied doing it, (“it was just an accident”), and, “strangely,” they dragged their heels on repairing the thing, giving estimates on when the repairs could have been done not until (“coincidentally”) after Hungary’s election day. Secondarily, the pressure from Kiev involved the impressment of ethnic Hungarians who live in the current boundaries of the Ukrainian state (the Tragedy of Triannon), that impressment leading to the deaths of several middle aged Hungarians. Not to mention generic abuses against Hungarian-Ukrainians from Kiev. The irony in that is that Orban was nothing but fully accepting to and accommodating of Ukrainian refugees who fled to Hungary. And the reason why he had to nuance the Russia question ever since 2/24/22 was that the post-Soviet Ukrainian government, no mater who has been in charge, has tended to give ethnic Hungarians the short end of the stick, if not worse.

As for my prediction for the Magyar government. He will substantively do what Brussels wants for the most part. To the small extent he doesn’t, he (with the understanding of Brussels) will tout his “resistance” to the high heavens to try to bamboozle enough of the Hungarian electorate.

Stockholm

It’s short, so read the whole thing. GT only makes a few missteps, none materially important.

This leads me to a prediction.

Just as the term “work-life balance” has been a thing for awhile, I predict we will soon start seeing and hearing the term “analog-digital balance” used as both an imperative and a virtue.

It’s a go.

Launches about half past midnight my time, so I’ll most likely be well off into log sawing land.

It’s not that what Artemis II is going to do hasn’t been done before. It’s that it’s emblematic of the ability to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. I can relate.

And yes, being as 2026 is way different from 1968 from a media and technology perspective, NASA will stream everything, except for the 45 or so minutes blackout once they’re behind the Moon on the far side. It may be the biggest internet stream in history so far.

All four of the Artemis II crew were born in the second half of the 1970s. Like a certain someone I know.

4/4

Click to enlarge. This is a screenshot from earlier today, inside the capsule, as it was around 60% of the way to the Moon.

This is a surreal image.

First off, about “that.” I’ve been too happy about the fact that this mission is even happening and so far has been successful to let myself get my usual disgruntled about the affirmative action of it all. I’ll sperg out maybe sometime later.

But that’s not what jumps out at me.

The last time any human beings were this far away from Earth was of course the final Apollo mission, 17, in December 1972.

One is wearing an Apple Watch and doodling around on a tablet. The other is wearing an Under Armour shirt and is wearing some sort of FitBit on his wrist.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Under Armour. All companies that did not exist the last time humans were that far from Earth.

Apple’s 50th anniversary of founding was in fact on A-II’s launch day this past Wednesday. Microsoft, founded about a year before. Google and UA, 1996.

That’s not including the fact that there’s no way that silicon development and other technological necessities were that far along in 1972 for smart watches and tablet sized true Turing devices to exist at that time. The tablet by itself probably has more raw computing power than the entire set of computers used to power the whole Apollo program.

So it leads to the black pill in all this: Why did it take us so frickin long just to do this again with all the technological wind in our sails?

4/5

OTOH, with Microsoft..

Someone snarked that it’s the first ever software support ticket from space.

Your Blogmeister’s Other German Desk

Otherwise not an important number, even if it is a perfect square.

But we all know which one is the next exit. It’s a biggie.

Really, I was caterwauling like a bitch in the year up to my 40th birthday.

Then it came. And afterward, I wondered why I was even crying so much.

Then a few months later, and all that has transpired since then.

I don’t fear the reaper anymore. And I’m in no way apprehensive at all about 50 over the horizon.

Mainly because all that happened in my forties has really gotten my mind straightened up and my priorities right.

These days, I care more about December 22 and May 2 as birthdays rather than my own.

Speaking of May 2, once she passes this one, guess what her own next one is going to be.

Oh yeah, I’m grabbing the popcorn. Your turn.

Washington, D.C.

I have tended to be somewhat but not completely dismissive of complaints about Donald Trump’s ego. “Not completely,” because there is a cause for concern. I’ll get to that.

Generally, the reason why I blow off screeching about “zomg Trump’s ego lol” is because just about every politician has a big ego. To wit, and someone who will be used as a compare-and-contrast foil in the rest of this post: Barack Obama, pronouns I/me.

“But something about Trump’s ego just feels different, hits different.”

Remember I said a few moments ago the words “not completely?” Here’s where I pay that off. In doing so, you’ll realize why I get paid the big bucks.

Those who think that Trump’s ego is different enough from the egoes of most politicians such that it’s at some level a cause for concern can never state how or why. They can’t get it off the tips of their tongues.

I’m going to get it off the tips of their tongues.

In doing so, I’m going to use Obama (I/me) as a metaphor for most typical high level politicians, even though he’s far from the only one. It’s just that he was President right before Trump, so he’s fresh enough in enough peoples’ minds for this conversation to be enlightening.

Here’s the difference.

Obama’s ego is a political ego. Which is to say, it’s the ego of someone who rose to the highest singular level of American politics and matriculating the standard way, even if Obama (I/me) himself speedran through the process.

Trump’s ego is a general purpose ego, grafted onto someone who is at the highest singular level of American politics. IOW, it’s a generic ego of someone doing a highly political job.

One side, political ego. Other side, generic ego.

There is a difference. Now here’s where I earn my salt (mine).

A political ego might be an ego. But it’s the type where those who have it and do political jobs will not let it either do or not do that which they would otherwise not do or do, respectively.

Let me detangle that rhetoric.

A normal politician with a political ego won’t let his ego make him change course if there are more important political considerations in the way.

For instance, Barack Obama (I/me) surely had and has an ego. But it was and is a political ego. Which meant that there was no way anyone was ever going to be able to ego massage Obama (I/me) out of doing ObamaCare, or reversing course on gay marriage (starting when he decided to quit lying about it), or the myriad of other things we associate with his administrations. Obama wanted to do ObamaCare because of the long time desire of Democrats to have universal health care or anything that would pass for it, and he wanted to do gay marriage because his gay donors wanted it. Those were political concerns that were always going to override Obama’s egotistical sense of himself.

Trump, OTOH, is a different story. He has very few core principles, he’s really transactional and hardly ideological (which has both upsides and downsides), and then there his lifelong bad habit of agreeing with the last person he talks to (“Please don’t let him strike up a conversation about this business deal with the elevator boy.”) This is why Project 2025 had to exist. The kook left thinks that P25 was about the agenda, the manifesto. In reality, P25’s policy proposals were just a situational hobcobble of junk that was lying around in think tank drawers for years, just something they had to throw together to give it some spit shine and polish, and not really the critical matter. P25 was always about personnel. The antenna is more important than the radio, the transmission is more important than the engine. P25 was about antennas and transmissions. (“Personnel is policy” – Reagan). To make sure that the last person that Trump talks to is someone who is already down with the zeitgeist. And because the first term had some not so good personnel choices which sorta mucked up the policy. The reason why P25 as personnel and not agenda couldn’t be openly admitted throughout 2024 is because Biden was still President, Garland still USAG, and admitting that would have been admitting to coordinating with a partisan political campaign, which C3s and C4s are legally not allowed to do. Now, Trump is President and Bondi is USAG, so there’s no legal fear of admitting it now.

Combine that with his generic non-political ego.

What it means is that everyone constantly has to be on pins and needles, because there is next to nothing in terms of agenda that Trump won’t sacrifice, even his keynote issues, because someone is buttering him up.

Furthermore, his ego can and has affected his plenary decision making ability.

Which leads me to Iran.

A few weeks ago, I explained why I think Trump pulled the trigger with the toys that make the noise.

Now I think that is a function, and in fact, perhaps a down side, of someone with a generic ego and not a political ego doing a political job.

If Trump had a political ego, sure, he would have still been nursing nearly a half century of boomer butthurt over Iran hostage. However, a political ego would mean that he would think about all the other factors, the asterisks, the whatabouts, the yeahbuts, the water under the bridge, the whatifs, the whatnext, before settling on yes or no, and meaning that no would have been more likely to be the final choice. Generic ego gives the asterisks much less consideration, so it’s full ego-driven revenge ahead.

The bill is in the mail. I bill hourly.