Substack Notes - Vol. 11.1
The Turn of the Tide
Oct. 22nd - Nov. 14th
Is it possible? Do I detect rays of hope? Do I see the ideas I’ve been stating for years reflected in the larger body politic? I would caution everyone that power is power and the best way to ensure a competent government isn’t to dissemble for or excuse your favored clan or group (how’s that working out for the Democratic Party?) but to hold your leaders to account. Every new regime renews itself… or becomes an abusive parasite upon its people and is eventually thrown off. How auspicious to be here at the moment of renewal though! As always, thank so much for reading and liking and commenting.
I must become more selective and careful about the notes I choose to include here. My activity on this platform has grown apace. If you have any suggestions or any questions for me please reach out. I hope this compilation finds you very well.
Oct. 22, 2024
:The American corporate media… have bludgeoned the public with the false Russia collusion narrative, which has convinced millions of Democrat AWFL NPCs that Putin owns Trump. Meanwhile, the CCP has fully infiltrated the DNC. There are too many cases to list here, but the MSM always memory holes them to protect the narrative. The most prominent CCP spies are Senator Diane Feinstein’s driver for 20 years, Rep Eric Swalwell’s honeypot Fang Fang, and NY Gov Kathy Hochul’s Deputy Chief of Staff. Several covert CCP police stations were discovered in cities like NYC. As N.S. Lyons noted in “The China Convergence”, last year’s banger of the year, American elite behave quite like CCP princelings.
Loretta Lynch, who served as attorney general in the Obama administration, is working for a Chinese drone manufacturer. Lynch has also filed a lawsuit for DJI, a U.S.-designated Chinese military firm, against the Pentagon—arguing that DJI’s Chinese military designation is illegal. National Review reports that U.S. officials have “long warned” that the “drone manufacturer is tied to China’s defense-industrial complex” and that “the Chinese authorities have used DJI products in their mass surveillance of Uyghurs.” File Lynch’s latest gig under: things that should definitely be illegal if they’re not already illegal.
Bloomberg Philanthropies has dished out tens of millions of dollars in recent years to the Energy Foundation, a San Francisco–based entity with close ties to China’s government. The Climate Imperative Foundation, a separate group in San Francisco linked to China, received a $17.5 million infusion from Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2022 to “accelerate [the] transition to clean energy,” tax records show.
Well! Nothing sinister about that! I think we should generally pursue policies that our gravest enemies want for us… don’t you?
Oct. 23, 2024
:They say we’re living in a simulation, and recent events have convinced me that it must be a variation of Sid Meier’s Civilization. If we zoom in to the ground level and play it on pleb mode, an area like Springfield, Ohio, is a homeland: its buildings and landscapes reservoirs of cultural and ancestral memories stretching back centuries; its inhabitants the custodians and cultivators of that inheritance. But if we zoom out to the player view, these quaint notions disappear, and we see a grid map exposing Springfield as a generic hexagon in a vast imperial matrix. Toggle on the statistical overlay, and we see further that it’s a badly underperforming zone, dwindling in population, absorbing a bunch of imperial funds, and generating little in the way of money, production, culture, or political power for the Player. Meanwhile, only a few hexes away on the grid map, the collapsing city-state of Haiti pumps out surpluses of cheap labor just waiting for someone to claim them.
:
If the people who attend your college don’t read and the people who do read have to be anons on the internet, it says a lot about the culture you’ve created. You could have all the readers you seek, all the academic prowess you desire if you really wanted it.
You are fragile
Always trust your feelings
Us vs. Them
Oct. 27, 2024
:Men and women are diverging politically at an alarming rate, especially those under thirty. This bodes terribly for their future family formation prospects since almost no one dates across party lines anymore. Women have become among the most dogmatic about not considering men who don’t agree with every single thing they do, and I’m sorry, but that’s insane. Suppose women are unwilling to consider any man who isn’t as far to the left as they are; good luck finding a partner. Men with college degrees are increasinglyscarce, and women don’t date down. So the math of the situation comes out disfavoring women with college degrees.
Oct. 29, 2024
:Trump is taking counsel from truth-speaking patriots.
Among these is Bobby Kennedy, Jr, who was my preferred candidate for president. Kennedy left the race in August, and endorsed Trump. More important than that, Trump has embraced Kennedy, and we are told that Kennedy will be empowered in a Trump administration.
Kennedy sees the death grip that Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Ag have on the American people, and he has the capacity to address those problems. We have become a sick, out of shape, and confused people. We accept meds for every perceived ailment, including the ones caused by the last meds. The ingredients in the prepared foods on our grocery store shelves are a toxic brew—far more toxic than the products allowed on the shelves in other countries. Our food pyramid is inverted, and the recommendations coming out of nearly every agency tasked with watching out for our health are the inverse of what healthy people should do. Do not listen to the FDA, the USDA, or the CDC. Instead, eat animal proteins and fats, and produce that has been grown with as little chemical intervention as possible, savoring every single bit. And then do what is free and feels good. Go outside and face the sun. Walk. Form relationships. Touch people, and also grass and water and soil. Be barefoot under a night sky.
…
The FDA was supposed to oversee the safety of our food and our drugs; instead, they are in bed with big pharma. The CDC was supposed to help us stay healthy and avoid disease; instead, they too are in bed with big pharma, and run by useful idiots. The NIH and NSF are supposed to be overseeing the funding of science; instead they, too, are in bed with big pharma (note a trend?), and also so bolloxed up that they don’t know science when it hits them in the head. They are funding politicized garbage which often doesn’t meet the basic expectations of science. Covid revealed the rot in medical and pharmaceutical research, but the rot is everywhere. Politically popular answers are generated by power brokers behind the scenes, and then research is funded and conducted to arrive at those answers. This “science” is conclusion driven, rather than hypothesis driven, and is therefore not science at all. Actual science that arrives at different answers—atmospheric Carbon is not the only thing responsible for our changing planet; puberty blockers are not safe for children—is disappeared.
Nov. 1, 2024
:Hollywood often portrays marriage as a trap. Stagnant and dull.
But when you look at the upper class in my beloved home state of California, they are far more likely than average to be married. For example, the marriage rate for college-educated parents in California is 20 percentage points higher than for non-college graduates.
Among the richest zip codes in Los Angeles, between 50 and 70 percent of households are married. Many of the people living in these areas are Hollywood executives and creative types working in show business.
In contrast, in the poorest areas, less than 15 percent of households are married.
Sixty-eight percent of Californians with a college degree say that it is personally important for them to have their own kids within marriage.
But eighty-five percent of Californians with a college degree say that family diversity, “where kids grow up in different kinds of families,” should be publicly celebrated.
My best friends in high school:
1 raised by his grandmother because his mom was an addict and his father was in prison
2 raised by single moms; one of whom had a new boyfriend living in their apartment every other month
1 raised by his dad who was married and divorced 5 times before we graduated high school
And me, raised in a variety of turbulent situations
According to my fellow Californians, the affluent ones, these different arrangements should be celebrated. The richest Californians say these environments should be praised for my friends and me. Meanwhile they privately make different choices about their own family arrangements.
Nov. 2, 2024
:The Greens are not a decaying corpse party like the SPD; instead, they represent the worldview of German elites. This is another way of saying that they are totally crazy. They hate nuclear power more than any other thing in existence, and as a close second they also hate carbon dioxide and those activities that emit carbon dioxide, such as industrial production and most economic activity. They are above all an urbanite party interested in performative self-abnegation, especially if mandating this abnegation also hurts their political enemies in the great unwashed middle of society.
Nov. 4, 2024
:The negative impact of policies rooted in the woke concept of “equity” is profound and not always immediately obvious. Consider the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act, signed into law by Governor Tim Walz, Vice President Harris’ running mate, in response to activists’ complaints about racial disparities in the child-welfare system. How is this statistically equal racial outcome achieved, you ask? By making it more challenging to remove black children from abusive and unsafe environments. Such actions have resulted in a rise in the proportion of black child maltreatment deaths. To echo the thoughts of Thomas Sowell, woke equity appears more focused on sounding good than on being effective.
Here’s the real problem, though: out of hundreds and hundreds of respondents, almost no one actually made an affirmative case for the Democrats and their agenda. The number of people who said some version of “I hear you, but I think Harris’s policy positions are more progressive than you think, here’s why” was in the single digits. The number of people who simply laid out the same litany of tired, rage-filled screeds that I’ve been hearing since 2000 was immense. Stop and think about that, for just a minute - what does it say that when challenged from the left, Democrats don’t bother to make the affirmative case for the Democratic party? It’s hard to think of a better symbol of the existential brokenness of the Democrats, of their status as an anti-party, than hundreds of angry Dems who are willing to say anything to get my vote for Kamala Harris… except why she’s actually the candidate who fits my values.
-Freddie DeBoer
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.
You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again.
-Freddie DeBoer
Nov. 6, 2024…
…from Reason.com
Harris' Career As Prosecutor Left Her Totally Unprepared for a Fair Fight…
Coercing defendants into plea deals is poor training for convincing people to vote for you
As San Francisco's district attorney, Harris used California's "three strikes" law to pile sentencing enhancements on defendants accused of nonviolent crimes. She fought to keep cases out of the city's drug court where defendants faced lighter sentencing and the potential for avoiding jail time.
Under Harris, San Francisco's D.A. office failed to notify defense lawyers of the misconduct of its drug lab technician. When she was attorney general, Harris' office defended dirty prosecutors who ran an unconstitutional jailhouse snitch program.
As attorney general, she was happy to tilt the scales of democracy in her favor as well.
In California, the attorney general is responsible for writing the titles and short summary language for ballot initiatives. Harris used this narrative-setting power to write biased language on a pension reform initiative she and her union allies opposed.
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Nov. 7, 2024
:Normal human romance was sexism. Normal human humor was racism. Wokeness was almost the polar opposite of charisma. To be charismatic, you have to tell stories and jokes that push the boundary. And the more uncomfortable the joke, the more a joke hits deep enough to make people, especially men, go “he really got me there,” the more it was demonized.
The worst sin of all was noticing. It was noticing natural differences. Accepting them. Even taking joy in them and using them to bring people together, as many comedians do, could get you exiled.
Wokeness festered to a nearly unimaginable degree. It took over universities, the entire Democratic political machine, and most of corporate America. And it was unabashedly associated with the Democratic Party. It promoted the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party promoted it.
…the Democratic Party is running out of Joe Bidens. He’s just getting too old. And many of the Democratic politicians who have that authenticity are no different, from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin. This charm goes beyond ideology, at least economic or legal ideology. After all, what do Joe Manchin and Bernie Sanders even agree on? Here’s your answer: They’re comfortable with the basic reality that men will be men and women will be women.
At the same time, this attitude is a real philosophical principle. It warps the persona, behavior, and strategy of world-class politicians.
1. Those that don’t get angry.
2. Those that get angry at their enemies.
3. Those that even get angry at their friends.
The document also required all students to address one another “by a name and the pronouns consistent with the student’s gender identity,” and contained a “right to privacy” that requires a student’s written consent before their “transgender or gender-nonconforming status” is disclosed to anyone, including their parents.
California now has one of the highest rates of trans identifying youth in the US, with 1.93 percent of those between ages 13 and 17 identifying as transgender—almost 38 percent higher than the national average.
One mother in Davis, California became concerned about these rising numbers when she began hearing about “clusters” of trans-identified students within the school district: five students in one 6th-grade elementary classroom, a third of kids in one music program, and multiple young teens in friend groups suddenly identifying as non-binary or trans. Her concern grew when she herself was given a “YouthTruth Family Survey” in October of 2022 asking if she identified as “transgender.” This led her to submit a public record request to the Davis Joint Unified School District (DJUSD) about the survey instrument and results.
What she received was shocking.
The YouthTruth survey that was administered to all DJUSD 5th, 7th, 9th, and 11th grade students from 2016 to 2021, at a cost of $53,750 just for last year’s survey to some 8,500 students, showed that rates of trans identification in Davis schools soared far above the national average.
Nov. 11, 22024
For years now, California has symbolized Democratic misgovernment. Over the past few years, the state has been a labratory for progressive policies on drugs, homelessness, and crime. And the results have been disastrous. The number of homeless people in the state has risen by 50 percent over the last ten years. In the Bay Area, businesses have closed on the grounds of public safety, and a quarter of a million people fled the region between 2020 and 2022. Last week, Californians finally sent a message: enough.
Seventy percent of voters in the state—and every single county—backed Proposition 36, a measure undoing soft-on-crime measures brought in under 2014’s Prop 47. Among its changes: If you are caught stealing items worth under $950 three times, you will be charged with a felony, rather than a misdemeanor.
In Los Angeles, voters elected a Republican district attorney.
In Oakland, voters recalled their DA and mayor.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed lost her reelection bid to moderate Dan Lurie.
-Michael Shellenberger
Nov. 12, 2024
:Meanwhile some hack, anti-establishment, pro-BLM leftist independent journalist tried to argue with me that she was only voting for Biden in 2020 because of his groundbreaking climate change policies.
I told her to share resources that would convince me and it only took a day’s reading to completely debunk her weak arguments for supporting Biden’s policies. When I offered feedback and she seemed to realize she had just made an argument to vote for Biden based on emotion, she did what every leftist in this position does: move the goalpost, then abandon the conversation entirely.
To think I almost made myself feel small during the initial exchange because I’d read some of her work and she sounded smart, studied journalism, and here I was, some aspiring photojournalist who knew nothing about nothing.
My point: don’t take any of these people’s titles seriously. Don’t take their word salads seriously. Challenge every single one of their arguments. Call them and their ideas out, assertively but in a civil manner, to their face. Ask the simplest questions possible. Have them send you resources that would instantly convince you to take their side.
You may not be as decorated as those who went to the fancy schools and got the fancy degrees, but the one thing you do have is the ability to think critically and freely, without ideological constraints. That puts you on a tier that such “journalists” could never reach in their entire career, even as they get their works readily featured inside of legacy media.
It’s the journalistic work that counts. Not the publication it’s placed in.
(Photo: quo vadis = “who watches” …the watchmen?)