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From the review in the Washington Post of right-of-center novelist Lionel Shriver’s new book Mania:
The story takes place from 2011 to 2027 in an alternative America where, for most of that time, something called the Mental Parity movement holds sway. In the novel, the so-called last acceptable bias — discrimination against those considered, um, not so smart — is being stamped out. Words such as “intelligent” and “sharp” are forbidden, thus making problematic the question of how to refer to books like “My Brilliant Friend” and everyday devices such as “smartphones.”
Shriver’s choice to set her novel in an alternative timeline recent past is an interesting one. Her The Mandibles was set in a somewhat vague future, where society is in decay but could not be said to be quite post-apocalyptic like Brave New World or 1984, a bit like Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange or Walker Percy’s 1971 novel Love in the Ruins, which is set in a 1983 that rather resembles America in the 2020s.
It sounds like a Nurture version of Mike Judge’s Nature documentary Idiocracy.
Yet, imagining a plausible future can be exhausting to anyone above a certain age, and even the present is a distraction. Are you sure you understand 2024? I’m not at all sure. Maybe you should skim Twitter some more to make sure you are up to date on 2024 trends?
So why not set your novel in an alternative timeline in a recent past that you remember well, such as Shriver’s choice of 2011 to 2017?
I could imagine writing an alternative timeline novel of the Great Awokening (except that writing fiction is really hard).
… “Don’t ask where anyone went to school. Don’t tell anyone where you went to school, even if you went to Yale — well, especially if you went to Yale! … Don’t ever mention, or fish for, IQ, obviously, but also SAT and ACT scores or grade point averages. You’re even meant to keep your trap shut about how well you did on newspaper quizzes on the major stories of the week. And forget asking or telling about a performance on Jeopardy!”
Uh-oh, reminiscing about my performance on Jeopardy! is about 5% of my material …
… in 2015, the Democratic Party seizes on Donald Trump as their “shoo-in” candidate for, among myriad other reasons, the fact that “he never reads.”
Okay, that’s funny.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
Isn’t “mental parity” now actually called “equity”?
We live in the most fascinating of times.
I had a rule about only actually buying books by white men these days. (Everything else gets bought secondhand.)
I will break it for Ms. Shriver.
I tried to post the following comment at the wp, only to learn that one must now buy a subscription, in order to do so.
Reviewer Maureen Corrigan is part of the world Shriver presumably mocks. Corrigan routinely speaks in leftwing euphemism, saying “reproductive rights,” instead of abortion, “transgender people,” instead of transvestites, and “undocumented immigrants,” instead of illegal aliens.
Oh, and I’m unfamiliar with any “adjunct professors,” even though I taught college as an adjunct lecturer for six years (the same job that the John Doe calling himself “Barack Obama” did).
Does the book include suggestions on how society should work to integrate a large group of people with average IQ around 80?
+++
What is a good neologism that means IQ which everyone knows means IQ and therefore should be verboten, yet is so catchy people use the term anyway?
+++
In 2024 the line between fiction and fact has been dissolved.
“Are you sure you understand 2024? I’m not at all sure.”
Same. I’m not at all certain whether I believe what the media tells me about the present: like with Covid or regarding events in Ukraine or Gaza or about the borders being “more secure than ever” or with Trump’s “insurrection” being “the worst thing since Pear Harbor” (It’s like when Adolf and the Knot-seas set the Reichstag on fire all over again!).
I’m reasonably certain that the government and media are making a sincere effort to tell me the truth even if what they say seems to contradict what my eyes tell me. In any event, I’m 100% certain that the media has told me the the entire candid truth about what happened in Central Europe between 1930 and 1945. I can be sure about that. They’re honest people those newspapermen and govmint folks.
If there’s one thing I can rely on it’s the totally unconflicted nature of the media owners to tell me the truth about events in (1) the Middle East today and (2) Central Europe in 1945. The ethnic mafia who’ve cartelized our media (and, in truth, the State Department, deep state and all of our higher educational institutions also) have absolutely zero conflicts of interests or reasons to lie about events in those times and places.
I also know that the biggest boogeymen in recent history have been Hamas, Hezbollah, Saddam, Assad, Iran, Gaddafi, the Inquisition, the KKK, white nationalists, Louis Farrakhan, whites supremacists, Mustache Man and Putin. Hence why Western countries, lead by the U.S. have made it their primary prerogative to eliminate all these bad guys. That these all happen to be the most hated and feared enemies of the people who own the media is, I’m sure, entirely coincidental with the fact that I, and everyone else in the West, has been conditioned to hate them in the same manner that Hasidic children on Purim hate-session Haman and then eating his ears. These entities aren’t just bad for the Jews but they’re bad for me too. They’re not just the Jews’ personal ethnic enemies they’re my enemies too. At least that’s what the television tells me and the television wouldn’t lie would it?
Now the media tells me that the greatest threat to the West is “Christian nationalism” and “white nationalist terrorists.” I believe that too. After all, would the media monopolists lie? No.
I and my countrymen have not in any way internalized or been conditioned into a false consciousness of hate for the Jews’ personal enemies by they media owners so as to be made into their useful idiot pawns against their personal ethnic enemies, have we? No siree. I’m a good Zogbot – erm I mean, I’m a good normie “patriot” prole and when the television tells me to hate someone I obey. They must be good reasons which have my interests at heart. I think I’m gonna volunteer for the army now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
Marx and Engels got a lot wrong, but they didn’t get everything wrong. Those who own the media, be they “capitalists” or Jews, can indeed employ it to condition the public into a false consciousness which is contrary to the public’s own interests.
Loved We Need To Talk About Kevin but the next novel, the Post Birthday World was awful. I hate it when an author disappoints like that.
PBW was a twin themed story, the lead character has an affair, she doesn’t have the affair, and two parallel stories evolved. So neither story is real, not even fictionally real so who cares what happens?
The trick with Kevin was a lot better and while I’m sure most of us could see the trick before we reached the end it was trumped with a bigger shock – she waits for the son she has forgiven.
Shriver’s “The Mandibles” is a great novel and a core one, pretty much required reading, which put its finger on the central problem of the twenty-first century; just as Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” (also required reading) put its finger on the central problem of the twentieth century. By way of contrast, for example, Shriver’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a splendid tour de force, but it was/is not the societal novel everyone really NEEDED, and The Mandibles was.
Haven’t read Mania yet, I’m sure it’s well-executed, but somehow I doubt that lightning strikes twice. But here’s hopin’.
wait a minute, you are also a Jeopardy! alum? three episodes that aired in June Y2K. i embarrassingly booted final Jeopardy! on ep 3. so it goes.
She is not a classic leftist but she’s pushing back against those areas where the left has just gone too far. She still thinks highly of Obama and poorly of Trump. From the WaPo review:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/04/07/lionel-shriver-mania-novel-review/
Dystopian novels are a favorite literary subgenre, often involving a sudden catastrophic collapse. It is equally likely, though, that it might be like an L. Sprague de Camp novel I once read: Lest Darkness Fall.
This novel takes place in the late Roman empire. The author presents the decline of that empire as happening so slowly that those living through it are barely aware it is happening and therefore are not alarmed by it.
Someday in the future, people will look back at this era and may see there was a slow American decline. The proverbial frog just sat complacently in the pot while the heat was slowly turned up. Most people just continued to go about their daily lives, maybe occasionally griping that things were getting worse, but not actually doing anything about them until it was too late to do anything to reverse course.
Maybe Steve won’t mind if I write this here instead of where it’s less likely to get read, down at the bottom of the post on the contention in Amherst…
I do so because I’m tired of the presumptive brightest blog on the internet being completely ignorant in its commentary of the reality of demons and their leader Satan’s influence over human affairs.
If you people actually looked into the evidence of the Catholic Church from exorcists that demonic possession is absolutely real, you wouldn’t find them laughable those benighted DEI hires who blame the unmitigated evil of WWT on Satan.
THEN go see what Baphomet actually looks like and you will find yourself unsurprised by the agenda that such a creature would pursue if his human minions and useful idiots gave him spiritual reign over public education.
So please, you asinine atheists, you arrogant unbelievers, you monkey-brain materialists, lets do have it out over the evidence of preternatural agents acting on the physical world. Go ahead and see if you can deny in good conscience the voluminous testimony of the Catholic Church on the matter. I dare you.
Many people perceive this already. However, my bet is that the decline will play out like the bankruptcy per Hemingway.
Intelligence is so important but it doesn’t determine loyalty.
Klaus Fuchs, Morris Cohen, Ted Hall and the Rosenbergs were all pretty smart and they believed the most important thing they could do is give nuclear secrets to the USSR. Oppenheimer was pretty sympathetic to their cause (maybe more).
On the other hand, Edward Teller and John Von Neumann would’ve executed those traitors in a heartbeat.
All smart yet possessing radically different loyalties.
We all must break it for Ms. Shriver.
Random question:
Has anyone ever considered that the reason Leo Strauss NEVER WROTE ANYTHING ON ISRAEL was because THAT IS ALL HE EVER REALLY CARED ABOUT?
Explains where his disciples got the agenda. Explains why they’d be so devoted to a guy, a guy who would sacrifice his voice on the issue in that way for the cause.
Anyways, yeah I was just thinking how Paul Gottfried seemed kind of stumped by the guy in his book on him and it occurred to me…
We truly live in the most exciting of times.
I feel like The Mandibles is a good novel with a great political POV.
No, but there is a heroic minor character: a White immigrant woman from South Africa with Tourette’s whose name is Sadie Envoort.
Lionel Shriver hates Christians.
So no thanks
Lest Darkness Fall is about a time-travelling engineer rebuilding failed Rome with a bit of help from knowing history and technology. (“Hey, we should recruit this mistreated enemy general Belisarius!”) If memory serves, in the end he still doesn’t get any of the girls, which added a touch of realism. Pretty fun read, all in all.
Ek, these words, they make my head implode.
Sometimes ya just need a simple bit of fuzz guitar to clear your mind……
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
WB Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”
I have the answer!
It’s an airplane!
Randomly reading The Holy Bible (KJV) during the recent unrest in 2020 & came across Psalms 12:8 which struck me as prophetic for the time.
PS 12:8- The Wicked Walk On All Sides When The Vilest Of Men Are Exalted.
I think a “core” novel of this century (at least the aughts) was Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom”.
This is junk mail. Please stop posting endless updates on endless legal battles.
I thought Lionel was a male name? I hope it’s just the classic thing of women using male pseudonyms to be seen more seriously, and that she isn’t or becomes a transgender.
I don’t read contemporary fiction, I can’t even remember a single literary work written in the last, say, 20 years that I enjoyed, much less by female authors (*), so I don’t think I will try this. But it seems it could be at least interesting.
Interestingly, the surname “Shriver” means “writer”. Is she Jewish or partly Jewish?
(*) Ok, now I remembered that I read the “My Brilliant Friend” series and it wasn’t too bad, even if a bit uneven. Written by a woman, too. (I tried to read other books by Ferrante, but found them too much about “women’s stuff” which I don’t care much about.)
Nope. I read a number of Strauss’ books and some of his articles, and never saw any evidence that he cared about Israel.
Disciples? Devoted?
Why would anyone waste a book on someone who stumped him? I would never do that. Oh, but it was Paul Gottfried.
BTW, you might want to fix your caps key, or replace your keyboard. It’s sticking. It’s in very poor taste.
I use Twitter to get my news but it’s a really unsatisfying and demoralising experience. It feels like rummaging through a discount bin. I only do it because the respectable media lies so much. The respectable media is written by and for little Mr. and Ms. Satisfied:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolt_of_the_Masses
Hopefully Lionel Shriver’s Mania targets them above all.
Except, as Mark Twain, who wrote the story noted, there was no eclipse that year.
I, on the other had widely predicted to those of my ken that it would be a dark day when I got married.
I ensured the prophecy came true by getting married on Feb 26th 1998 on Antigua during a total eclipse.
(With Montserrat blowing itself up in background for added color.)
Meanwhile in that leading dystopia, Scotland
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/we-cannot-cope-police-scotland-deluged-politicized-hate-crime-reports
She looks like a dude anyway, so not that much of a break.
It would be amusingly appropriate in a literary sense given his big argument was cryptic writing, but Israel advocacy was hardly verboten in that time period.
Always get right wing novelist Lionel Shriver confused with right wing sociologist Lionel Tiger.
She comes off as Scots Irish to me. Looks kind of like my mother. Evidently she’s from a Presbyterian family from the Carolinas so odds are that’s what she is.
Scots Irish in America absorbed a lot of Dutch and German Calvinists in the 18th and early 19th centuries (I’ve got some Dutch in the family tree). That’s likely where the surname comes from (like Teddy Roosevelt).
As will happen to any signifier of something detestable, “undocumented immigrant” has gone out of fashion. The preferred term is (for now) “migrant.”
Does anyone know a specific term for this sort of terminology creep? If having terms facilitates cognition, this process deserves one.
Not Jewish. Daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Besides, literacy has been fairly widespread among goyim too.
But, yeah, she’s on our payroll and we control all her thoughts.
Obama is certainly more articulate and well read than Trump. Obama “reads” as smart, Trump does not. Trump has a lot of native cunning. Shriver is pretty perceptive to see that Trump could have run for either party, he has no real ideology other than accumulating power. Most of these modern “conservative” ideologues are like that – Orban, Trump, Erdogan – they look for what is missing in the political marketplace that they can use to outflank the establishment and then vault themselves into power.
In most of the world, dominated as it is by liberal ideology, the core constituency not being served by the political marketplace tends to be rural, older and socially conservative. If you are a clever opportunist like Trump or Orban, you craft your message to get those people engaged and on your side. In Shriver’s alternate universe the GOP path wouldn’t make sense for Trump so naturally he takes over the Dems.
Why are Jews so paranoid? I was just asking. Lots of writers are Jews, you know? Even a few good ones.
(Although a small minority of the huge number of them promoted, since most are overvalued, including Philip Roth. Lots of publishers are Jewish too, so that’s explain it in part).
P.S. Do you know that even if being the “daughter of a Presbiteryan minister” she could be Jewish too, if the mother was ethnically Jewish, right? Jewish rules, I did not make them up.
It appears that the chap* who goes by the designation of Patrick lacks the necessary mental caliber to negotiate the barriers, hurdles, and challenges of the Anthropocene…
(*) Chap is no longer accepted by the permissible terms industry. Therefore consider the following acceptable terms:
“It appears that they/them who…”
Wikipedia:
“She voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In September 2022, Shriver released an open letter in which she endorsed Republican Ron DeSantis for the 2024 U.S. Presidential election. In the letter, she criticized both Biden and Donald Trump as poor leaders, and praised DeSantis for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, banning critical race theory in schools, opposing transgender women from competing in women’s sports, and passing the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act; while noting that she disagrees with him on abortion.”
So a stupid single issue voter.
In the context of college admissions, the euphemism I see is “academic preparedness”. It’s used in sentences like “It’s important that we accept the most academically prepared students due to our challenging first-year curriculum.”
Fine with me. I’m sick of beautiful losers limping up to explain why their principles prevent them from winning.
Well, we’ve got good historical experience of how to do just that and the ptb are working to bring it back, it’s called feudalism.
Kinda related:
Former Howard Stern “employee” (read: side piece) Elisa Jordan (real name Schwartz) assaults fellow youtube person on live stream.
The woman is clearly insane.
If Shriver actually wrote in the book that discrimination against low IQ was the “last acceptable bias,” she, herself, is a retard.
The last acceptable bias both then and now is against white people, even smart white people.
As to her politics, she appears to be an old-fashioned, Moynihan democrat, just like Steve. That hardly makes her right of center. She’s a liberal who understands that the rise of the weirdo wing of the Dems and, particularly, identity politics will bring down liberal Democracy, replaced by either left-wing tyranny or right-wing populism.
And she’s right. You can’t have a multi-racial country with Anglo-American values. Nature always wins.
Right, that’s what I was thinking, his contribution to the esoteric tradition was to write around the topic he cared about most. I remember one time Bill Kristol played the cryptic sage and advised the initiated not to tell others what they were reading. That was in a book review issue of the Weekly Standard. It seemed like a perfectly Straussian thing to say.
Comes back to the central question: Who are your people?
Ask that on this site, and you’ll get “Americans,” which, of course, is knowingly stupid. That’s become a club – and not a very exclusive one at that. At one time, American did (generally) represent a people, really a collection of peoples who shared enough to consider themselves a larger people like the Celts long ago. (Obviously, blacks were the old man out.)
I suppose what they’re really saying is that they are loyal to a set of ideas, the Enlightenment as described in the Constitution. Well, most of the Constitution, not the part of slavery and white men. But, ironically, to be loyal to Enlightenment ideals is to be loyal to whites and, in particular, the British and Anglo-American peoples.
After all, culture is downstream from biology, so to be loyal to a culture is to be loyal to a people. This belief that non-whites will adopt Anglo-American values from the 18th century is quite odd and is bound to fail.
That the high IQ readers of Steve can’t see that is interesting to say the least.
(Btw, I exclude the large Jewish contingent here. They are correctly loyal to their people and have shown that they will gladly dispose of any Enlightenment ideals when it helps their people. Jack D might be a lying jerk, but he is loyal to his people, and I respect him for that.)
Obama’s talents are theatrical, rather than intellectual. He has sufficient native intelligence to play the part of the smart black guy with an exotic background that is catnip to self-regarded elites who were waiting for this political messianic figure since a Communist killed Kennedy in 1963.
This thought crystalized for me after I heard Obama pronounce Pakistan as “Powk-ee-stahnn” on several occasions – he has the veneer of worldliness without ever having learned to speak a foreign language. The self-regarded elites hear him say “Powk-ee-stahnn” and get a warm feeling, and don’t ask too many questions.
And I don’t think it is the case that Trump “has no real ideology” as much as that Trump’s core beliefs crossed through both major political parties. He probably could have been a Democrat, but it would have had to have been twenty years ago.
Shrivers have been in Maryland and Pennsylvania since the 18th century. They began as Schreibers. Respellings of German names were common– all those American -baughs were -bachs. (No doubt the recording clerks were Scots-Irish.)
She’s very likely a distant cousin of Maria and her father Sargent. His parents were second cousins, both Shrivers.
Wikipedia says she was originally “Margaret” but changed her name because she was a “tomboy.”
Not Jewish. Her father was a Presbyterian minister.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Shriver
Citation please?
No argument here. What choo wanna argue about?
Obama pronounce Pakistan as “Powk-ee-stahnn”
Obama had many Pakistani roommates and friends when he was growing up. Naturally, he picked up the native pronunciation from them and not due to some affectation for political profit. How does it benefit him (politically) to pronounce a word differently from what most others in U.S. do?
In fact, I have observed many politicians switch to EYE-RACK and EYE-RAN for Iraq and Iran when they could have used the correct names for the countries (E-ROCK and E-RON) because they want to sound ordinary and familiar to most Americans.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/recalling-obamas-younger-days/
Your limericks suck, to your sorrow…
Chin up! There’s still hope for tomorrow.
Perhaps, by and by,
Generative AI
can help write them for you. Sayonara!
OT — Brown University study confirms neocon forever wars have cost us fourteen trillion dollars since IX/XI.
Here’s the thing. If Jews were merely greedy, and stole $14T, I would not only understand that, I wouldn’t be angry, I would admire the guy who put that together. This wasn’t theft. This is them putting the money in a pile and setting it on fire, plus decades of military waste directly creating national weakness, open borders, and normalized crime.
These are the geniuses who will tell Xi how things are to be. The ones who lost $14T, while losing every war they ever started.
This part doesn’t really capture what’s going on now. The people in power still care very, very much about “Yale”–elite credentials generally. And they are not about to stop talking about their superiority.
Steve’s quip gets at the issue.
Smarter, better educated, elite people have had plenty of attitudinal snark about stupid and uneducated people–and “the hicks from the sticks”–since the dawn of civilization … with varying levels of a sense of noblesse oblige.
What is different today is these very sharp negative attitudes of our elites toward ordinary Americans and their interests … coupled with absolute nonsense about intelligence (and other mental traits) with regard to race (minorities)–blacks especially, but foreigners, non-whites in general. It is a very specific, very incoherent ideology and attitude with a specific source.
The fact that credentialled morons enthusiastically prefer a smooth luftmensch over practical results is central to everything now happening.
This was not the Babylon Bee :
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/chicagos-lori-lightfoot-lands-400-hour-job-investigating-even-worse-mayor
Who is better qualified to rate the competition?
That’s an understatement. Her father was president of Union Theological Seminary, credited with “saving” it.
Sargent Shriver descended– through both parents– from an early Maryland politician born Johann Theobald Schreiber, who changed that to David Shriver. Among his eight children were Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and Rachel. Yes, Old Testament names were common at the time among Protestants– this Shriver was Reformed, i.e., Calvinist. But this is taking it a bit far. By 1900, Protestants were avoiding these same names.
Mostly agree. What might be a more accurate sentence is this: “What is different today is these very sharp negative attitudes of our white elites toward ordinary white Americans and their interests . . .”
Do Jewish elites have such a negative attitude toward less successful American Jews? Hispanic elite toward poor and working-class American Hispanics? Indian, Asian, black elites?
I don’t believe so. Sure, they may look down on them, but they still view them as part of their people and want to help and protect them. It seems only white elites truly despise their less successful cousins, along with believing nonsense about group genetics differences.
It’s only white elites who have fully abandoned their own poor and working-class cousins, refusing to even consider themselves as the same people.
Let’s avoid repeating all the obviously wrong stuff people write on the internet.
What makes a solar eclipse both very cool looking and rare is that the sun and moon both have about the same relative to the earth–half a degree. So the moon just barely covers the sun, but only in a very, very tiny spot at a given time. (Most people would live their whole lives and never ever see a full eclipse. Maybe they get a partial and might not even notice that.)
Columbus couldn’t have any knowledge of a coming solar eclipse in the Americas as he didn’t even know where he was (or how big the earth was).
If Columbus was leveraging any eclipse info, it would have had to have been a lunar eclipse. Since the earth is way, way bigger than the sun from the moon’s perspective, those are quite common. All you need is a full moon during the time–twice a year–when the moon’s orbital plane is lined up with the earth’s orbital plane and all three are in a line. And when you get a lunar eclipse the earth’s shadow is up there on the moon–usually going on for a hour or so–for everyone on earth’s “night side” to see–including the Indians.
Trump is notable not for a desire to “accumulate power”, but for a much lesser need to do so, compared to others in the pool. As in developing a vaccine but not mandating it. This, not fantasies of “the new Hitler”, is why he is popular.
He’s a twist on the old joke– when antifascism comes to America, it will be called fascism.
No Steve, it’s not funny. It’s not even remotely funny. It’s just stupid and condescending. But it’s the kind of dull thud attempt at humor that a typical Liberal midwit would find funny, because you know “Trump is such a dummy and I’m so much smarter ha ha ha.”
You have me worried lately Steve. Very worried.
Correction for my brain-quicker-than-fingers typing and poor editing:
both have about the same angular size relative to the earth.
Pretending to be Jews became less fun once the real ones showed up in large numbers.
I saw the total eclipse yesterday in a small town and was surprised during totality how small the disk of the sun was. The world looked like a late twilight and some stars came out. The ring of fire around the moon had some red spots which I assume were solar flares. You could look at totality without glasses but as soon as the moon moved off, the sun was back to being too bright to look at with the naked eye. Very cool.
Yeah, these idiots think New York publishing is controlled by Jews, like Hollywood & the MSM & the Biden administration.
Don’t tell anyone where you went to school, even if you went to Yale — well, especially if you went to Yale!
The correct form is to drop in a “when I was at New Haven.”
Cormac McCarthy did some good work and Houellebecq wrote things that were interesting.
That he doesn’t read is not a comment by his detractors. It is an observation by his loyal officials who head the government agencies.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-does-not-read-white-house-top-secret-intelligence-briefings-big-617515
Yes, only a midwit would think Trump isn’t that smart or principled. To us geniuses, his breadth/depth of knowledge, consistency, selflessness, and long record of accurate predictions are obvious.
Us geniuses also understand that the quoted excerpt is not, in fact, primarily a dig at (an alternate version of) the Democrats but a heresy against our savior Trump. So, laughing is a sin. I’ll be praying for Steve.
It is a very safe bet that Trump has never read a novel or a full non-fiction book in his life. Trump was notorious in the White House about not reviewing his briefing books and being unbrief-able by professional staff. Another joke is that one does not have an hour long meeting with Trump but one has 60 one minute meetings since Trump cannot focus for more than a minute.
Yep, the solar flares/prominences were impressive. We’d gone down to Baker City Oregon for the 2017 eclipse–rented a guy’s house for a couple nights. Excellent viewing, very clear, stunningly beautiful but near a solar low and didn’t see all that much surface activity.
We came here to Dallas for this one–staying with some extended in-law family. We got very lucky with the clouds and saw all but the last 30s or so of totality and still saw the diamond ring pop out. But yeah this one the sun is near its solar maximum and the surface was busy. The bright red solar prominence–on the bottom from our Texas angle–was striking.
$14 Trillion, Steve. Let it through. Simplicius has:
Is it really Steve? Was there a large unusual pod growing in his greenhouse lately?
I think you’re using “opportunist” here to simply mean someone with some ambition.
Agree with Reg, this is not quite right.
Trump has a big ego and he is not particularly ideologically “conservative” in some sort of traditional 1980s era American political spectrum. But that doesn’t mean he does not have an ideology.
You could fairly say Trump’s ideology is
1) Donald J. Trump is great!
2) America is great! And American elites have been doing a really crappy job, selling out America and Americans.
I’m not enamored by #1. But Trump is dead on right with #2. (And while some people turn up their noses at #1, #2 is why the elites hate him.)
I don’t claim to know much about Orban, but I suspect the situation is similar. Orban is no doubt highly ambitious, but I’d bet he also sincerely believes that Hungarians have a right to their nation and that Hungary should not be globohominized and immivaded as the EU dictates.
There is a consensus among Rabbis that the total solar eclipse was a bad sign, but hey it seems we got a truce in Gaza.
“I went walking in the wasted city
Started thinking about entropy
Smelled the wind from the ruined river
Went home to watch TV
And it’s worse when I try to remember
When I think about then and now
I’d rather see it on the news at eleven
Sit back, and watch it run straight down
…
We’ve been living in the shadows all our lives
Where it’s stand in line and don’t look back and don’t look left and don’t look right
So we hide our eyes and wonder who’ll survive
Waiting for the night …”
You don’t need the devil to explain this disaster.
Plain old human behavior–ethnic animus, will to power, greed, status seeking, virtue signaling, intellectual arrogance, stupidity, conformity … –is sufficient.
For all I know, the devil has been on vacation down on the beach at Cancun, doing shooters and raping drunk college girls … no need to do any heavy lifting as humans are destroying the West all by themselves.
Remember when they wanted to use the 25th on Trump but when tested he turned out to be a very stable genius? Biden recently skipped that test, lol. I’m sure there are complex excuses available on demand.
Shriver brings up Owings and both of them are better than those Kennedy people.
Screw those Kennedy Leprechauns.
Bridges, ski slopes, airplanes, fireworks, drugs, alcohol…these Kennedy Leprechauns are a threat and a menace.
The Owings exist, and they’re Welsh, and they’re better than any Leprechaun Kennedy crash artists.
Maria OWINGS Shriver has some Welsh ancestry. She also has German ancestry from the Schreiber blood that became the Shriver name.
I presume that Maria Shriver got her middle name from her ancestor Mary Margaret Josephine Owings.
I have a Margret Elizabeth Owings in my ancestry. Her parents were Nathaniel Owings and Phebe Larue. She was born in Illinois, married William Hartwell Pewitt, had 7 children, and died in Tennessee.
This looks interesting, a work of fiction set in a dystopian near future that incorporates technologies and trends from our current world:
The Final Countdown, by Aaron Day
Crypto, Gold, Silver, and the People’s Last Stand Against Tyranny by Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBCDs)
Reading selection from first chapter, courtesy of Zero Hedge:
Thanks, but I had looked at Wikipedia before — I just don’t trust it.
Unfortunately, many times that is all we have.
I miss the old Encyclopedia Britannica…
This has been going on a very long time. One of the unsung heroes of American journalism is John Mein. In 1769, in his Boston Chronicle newspaper, he published a series of exposés documenting that the leading “revolutionaries” were secretly keeping their lucrative trade with English merchants, despite very publicly supporting the Non Importation anti-tax protest. The result was that John Hancock (the richest man in Boston, incidentally) sent a mob of “Sons of Liberty” to the newspaper office, where they burned Mein in effigy. He got the message and soon after, he fled the colony.
The supposed apostle of the free press, Thomas Jefferson himself, in an 1807 letter to John Norvell lamented, “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.”
Having anything to do with Howard Stern could make a person crazy or maybe that job simply requires a crazy person. She is probably on psych meds and street drugs.
Try this one:
“We don’t need a Bush Presidential Library for #43 because W can’t read.”
Lionel Shriver on Mass Immigration — June 21, 2006 — The Guardian:
I’ve been obsessed with immigration for decades. Why? Because the whole world thinks it has a right to live in the US
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/22/immigration.comment
Lionel Shriver on Baby Boomers — September 16, 2005 — The Guardian:
No kids please, we’re selfish
Lionel Shriver says:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/17/society
I say:
I have been saying that a good short–sharp–shock financial implosion would snap the European Christians out of their greed and demographic displacement. This is why I want the Federal Reserve Bank to raise the federal funds rate to 20 percent. That would pop all the asset bubbles and financially wipe the Baby Boomers out.
In 2008, the decision was made to save the Baby Boomers, the globalized plutocrats, transnational corporations and the government workers by Zero Interest Rate Policy, asset purchases, dollar swaps, trillion dollar bailouts, ballooning the balance sheet of the Fed with toxic mortgage backed securities and more monetary policy extremism.
Politics now boils down to this:
Debt and Demography
or, in other words:
Monetary Policy Extremism and Mass Immigration
Tweet from 2018:
I think Trump thinks dynastically and wants to leave power to his kids. This power can be mostly behind the scenes.
Yes, but- whatever I think of Orban & his supporters- their world view is not different from other ex-communist countries’ leaders: this is our country & other races and cultures need not apply.
Orban is just a loudmouth & frequently at odds with other countries because of his open confrontation with affluent EU elites about some controversies like migration & gay/trans issues. Just, his support for Putin’s invasion made him detestable in the eyes of most ex-communist nationalist leaders.
As I wrote some time ago:
Orban is a delusional corrupt garbage.Orban, whatever he is or is not, is not illiberal (never mind what he says). He has two weaknesses: overblown & completely self-defeating Hungarian nationalism (see Trianon tragedy and other Hungarian myths) & his policy of corruption.
How corrupt is Orban? I would say as much as any other politician. Not something special.
How heroic is he in defending his own country?I would say it is all overblown. He talks, talks and people agree. I agree, too. But other countries like Slovenia, Czechia, Slovakia, most of the Baltic states- have achieved even more with regard to prosperity; they didn’t let anyone Muslim or colored in, without inflammatory rhetoric; they have high enough level of national identity & self-consciousness, without too much blather; they are stable & Soros & comp. don’t matter.
My neighbors Slovenes are a good example. They’re solid; they won’t let anyone colored in; and they’re mostly silent. They have gay marriage- but without the right to adopt.Did the heavens fall?
If yes, I haven’t noticed yet.
Hungary’s policy is w-r-o-n-g, read my lips. They should have, as we have done & Slovenes, too, simply transport all those Muslims & Africans to Germany & Italy & France & Belgium etc.
If you want them, you can have them. We don’t want them, so we’ll just unload them to you, you idiots. We are not defenders of the West because the West, as it is now- sucks.
And here is where Orban, along most of his worshippers, is wrong. A reasonable country can preserve their way of life without importing aliens or paying too much attention to faggotry.
Orban’s (and Hungary’s) trajectory shows that a strongly ideological & polarizing policy is doomed. Better keep lines blurred & have your own way through compromise & deception.
OT but very iSteve material. It features a Jewish hero, expressing his chagrin at NPR taking too far a turn toward the Woke left. It appears that the back breaker for him was that NPR has too much sympathy for the Palestinians. Tsk, tsk.
“An Open-Minded Spirit No Longer Exists Within NPR” – NPR Veteran Excoriates Outlet Over Hunter, Russiagate Activism
Reality has beaten the Bee. There’s nothing they could write that isn’t believable.
From the Twitter thread:
Yet Musk has perma-banned David Cole for his holocaust research.
Here’s an interview with Cole by Fróði Midjord in which he discusses pretty much everything about his involvement with the issue and how his views have evolved as he has learned more since he was 21 years old.
I’m not Jewish and really don’t care one way or the other about this issue; it’s just another part of the horror show that is history, but I found the interview fascinating, and don’t understand why Cole has had his life ruined over simply being someone who wanted to find out what really happened, and if the accepted version of the past was found in error, to correct it. That’s done all the time about every subject under the sun.
Maybe I’m missing something.
The link has both video and audio-only links.
https://gtkradio.com/davidcole-interview
For all you young lurkers out there who are dissatisfied with everything, and are quite sure you’re being short-changed in terms of a decent education, here is a bit of a cheat-sheet on the sly……
1. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ARGUING WITH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
— George Bernard Shaw, “Arms and the Man,” “Saint Joan,” “Major Barbara,” “How He Lied to Her Husband”.
— Bert Brecht, Collected Poems, plus Five Early Plays: “Baal,” “Mann Ist Mann (trans. A Man is a Man is a Man)” “Jungle of Cities,” “The Three-penny Opera,” “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”
— DH Lawrence, Collected Poems (skip the novels, read the poems)
— Robert Musil, “The Man Without Qualities”
— Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain”
2. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ARGUING WITH ITSELF
— James Joyce, “Ulysses” (you should read it not as a Modernist text, but as the earliest and most complete statement of anti-colonial consciousness and its contradictions)
— Eugene Ionesco, “Rhinoceros”, “The Chairs,” “The Lesson”
— Samuel Beckett, “Molloy/Malone Dies”, “Endgame,” “Waiting for Godot”
— Thomas Pynchon, “Gravity’s Rainbow”
— Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems
— John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
— Don DeLillo, “White Noise”
3. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ARGUING WITH THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
— Kathy Acker, “Great Expectations”
— Sonic Youth, “Sister,” “Daydream Nation,” “Dirty”
— Los Bros Hernandez, “Love and Rockets” (esp. Xaime’s “Locas”
— Paul Pope, “THB”
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ARGUING WITH ITSELF:
— Lionel Shriver, “The Mandibles”
— Showtime, “Let the Right One In”
— Showtime, “Yellowjackets”
— Jennifer Lawrence et al, “The Hunger Games”
That oughta keep youse busy. Call me when you’re grownups.
Signed,
Uncle Germ
Greg Cochran, in a recent conversation with the Future Strategist, made a remarkable observation about the long-forgotten proposal to harden nuclear missiles against a first strike by configuring them in a “dense pack”. Donald Trump, he claimed, had very strong opinions about dense pack.
For that matter, Trump genuinely wanted to know about potential treatments for Covid, and his supposed endorsement of bleach as a medication was actually a rambling, sloppy description of a promising new medical technology. His mind, when he can be bothered to use it well, has hidden depths.
Mostly agree, but what about Trump and his ideology make people like Steve and Charles Murray hate (or, at the very least, strongly dislike) Trump?
Ideologically, Trump is pretty close to those guys. He wants America to culturally go back to 1985. What about that so upsets Sailer and Murray types.
Sure, there’s Trump’s personality, which, I’m sure, grates Sailer and Murray to no end, but I can’t imagine that they’re big fans of Schumer or AOC’s personalities either but they don’t seem to viscerally hate them.
No, there’s something more. I have my suspicions, but I’d be interested to here others’ thoughts.
How about this from a current Axios article:
“Here’s a wild thought experiment: What if we’ve been deceived into thinking we’re more divided, more dysfunctional and more defeated than we actually are?”
“No, most college professors aren’t trying to silence conservatives or turn kids into liberal activists. Most are teaching math, or physics, or biology.”
The Bee turned out to be just another gatekeeper outfit that accepts the elites morality.
Trump bad.
Whites thinking of themselves as a group bad.
Israel good.
So tiresome.
This was the last North American total eclipse until 2044 so I am glad I went.
Here is a view from a Starlink satellite. Who knew they had cameras?
but B.O. also pronounced the word corpsman as “corpseman”!!! Not as smart as he thinks he is
But does it have electrolytes?
This just in from Frito Pendajo who graduated from Costco law school magna cum laude:
Go away batin’ to Sweet Bang Tube.
Naomi Wolf (former advisor to Al Gore and assistant to Hillary Clinton) has take a sharp turn in the past four years. The abuses of power and lies associated with COVID have opened her eyes. She agrees with you to a surprising degree:
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/have-the-ancient-gods-returned
Remember how Obama called ISIS “Daesh”? No one else ever called it that and he clearly thought it made him smarter and the media kept swooning
I agree. Trump may be very malleable on some things (like culture war) but if you watch clips of Trump interviews going back to the ‘80s or ‘90s he’s been quite consistent on one thing:
Free trade has not been an unalloyed good for the United States. Those who would rule us despise him for that alone.
@Steve Sailer:
“Post of right-of-center novelist Lionel Shriver’s new book Mania:”
What makes you say that he is Right-of-Center, and why is this relevant? Are you mentioning this because there are so few novelists that are Right-wing politically?
Regardless, there is too much hysteria on the conservative Right regarding “Wokeness”. For instance, Fox News has made a hige deal of “Tranny Hour” in schools, where Transgendered teachers “indoctrinate” children.
But when you look at the figures, there are only a handful of schools in the country that adopted “Drag Queen Hour” mostly posh schools in the Bluest school districts of Blue cities like Portland and NYC.
Remember that the upper middle-classes and upper classes are heavily, heavily liberal across the country, but even more so in the big cities of Blue states, and white Libs are terrified of coming across as insentitive and intolerant towards people with alternative lifestyles.
They do want to protect their children, but they are conflicted over coming across as hateful bigots. But this apply only to a few school districts in the big cities of Blue states. Even in Blue States, white Lib parents in smaller towns almost instantly veto this kind of thing. But rhe white Lib parents in big cities like Seattle, Portland and Manhattan have way too many people watching them.
I read The Mandibles when it came out and it was hugely distressing to read about a bankrupt and inflation-wracked America, although at the time I thought it was more of a mental exercise in writing…whereas now it’s somewhat prophetic.
So it’s hugely concerning to see she has written another book that touches on a very real issue in modern America that a sane country would never have allowed to be taken seriously.
Although there is a lot of ruin in a nation, currently my feeling is too many powerful/influential people are willfully obtuse to a degree too dangerous to avoid some really awful decades ahead.
You had better end your crazy policy of mass immigration (illegal and legal) or there are going some very serious problems down the road.
https://www.space.com/27412-christopher-columbus-lunar-eclipse.html
Thanks.
Wasn’t Al Gore the main Senate proponent of “dense pack” nuclear missile siting in the 1980s?
Wikipedia says Gore was pushing (totally impractical) single-warhead missiles with mobile launchers in the early 80s, so he was probably against it (and the MX) then but wanted to appear pro-defense. It says Dense Pack was a rejected early Reagan administration idea that was revived and rejected again later in the 80s.
I was helping produce modeled fallout maps (using a 300 baud link to a Cray in Los Alamos) in ’84-5 and remember discussion of missile fratricide then as part of SDI, the next big thing that my boss was jumping on. Northern Maine was your
bestonly bet in the lower 48 if the balloon had gone up (without Canadian targets).Sarcasm rarely works in writing. Sarcasm requires performance to make it work.
Yeah, but Don, Eric, Ivanka, and especially Tiffany are not out to remake the world. Better them than the Soros boys.
I wonder if Columbus’ ruse was borrowed by Rider Haggard for King Solomon’s Mines, in which the heroes use their knowledge of an eclipse:
“Illegal aliens and Border Patrol agents enjoying the solar eclipse together”
And when the sun goes out and they’re staring at the spectacle, the agents wrist-tie them, then wrestle them to the ground, tie their feet and bundle them into the boot of a car. Five hours later, they are untied and released, along with a hundred others, at a remote airfield on the Venezuela/Guyana border. Say Tumenero.
Rinse and repeat. The message would get through in no time.
I know people who knew Obama, and lemme tell you, nobody backstage was impressed. He was a salesman for the junta, just like Biden. What else do you want to know?
Yes, I don’t think it is a bad thing (except for The Jared). Having a theory of what makes Trump tick gives me comfort.
Schumer and AOC aren’t running for president. Big difference.
Being the point man for the Jewish lobby, Schumer is at least as powerful as the president and has been around for decades. So, no, there’s no difference.
But, yes, AOC is a clown, so her personality doesn’t count.
Thanks. Link to the full paper here.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2021/ProfitsOfWar
Interesting assertion. I find the first part more believable than the second. The activist types ARE probably less than half (significantly IMO). The problem is I do think most college professors go along with them.
Regarding the latter part, it’s hard to be sure given the lack of granularity in the data and the large proportion of “all other fields,” but two of those majors are relatively small (math and physics). Biology is larger if you include “health sciences,” but my guess is that probably includes more biology-adjacent (e.g. medical administration) than biology professors. Seems unlikely to be true to me.
https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/number-faculty-members-humanities-and-other-fields#31692
Here is the Axios article.
https://www.axios.com/2024/04/09/america-politics-divided-polarization-data
“Does anyone know a specific term for this sort of terminology creep?”
Can’t think of one at the moment, though for now at least “hypocrisy” works for me (La Rochefoucauld’s pithy definition thereof remains spot-on).
If the goal is to be funny, sure. But it works just fine to ridicule annoying people.
Interesting, thanks.
BTW the actually Jewish family name associated with the writing profession is not Shreiber but Soffer/Sofer/Sopher/Soifer/Sofaer (etc).
You fail to recognize Imperator Barron I
Thanks.
Steven Pinker has written of “the euphemism treadmill.” That’s the best I’ve been able to come up with so far.
https://thisistrue.com/the_euphemism_treadmill/
“He wants America to culturally go back to 1985.”
Right, so he can continue the grift. Trump is bad. Why can’t you admit it? He’s been a scofflaw since the 1970s. Why do you champion him?
“Ideologically, Trump is”
About what he can get for himself. Remember, everything is transactional for him. But truth be told, he hates you unless you do things for him that strikes his massive ego.
Again, why do you put him on a pedestal?
“Ask that on this site, and you’ll get “Americans,” which, of course, is knowingly stupid.”
But that is our people. Millions of whites feel that way. They have chosen their group to align to, which includes jon whites. That’s our club. Especially among Gen Z.
“At one time, American did (generally) represent a people”
Which has changed time and time again. For our posterity.
“But, ironically, to be loyal to Enlightenment ideals is to be loyal to whites and, in particular, the British and Anglo-American peoples.”
This is incredibly short sighted on your part. Because using your metric, Eastern and Southern Europeans have been and willl continue to be incapable of fully understanding and applying those ideals. Paper Americans, right?
“This belief that non-whites will adopt Anglo-American values from the 18th century is quite odd and is bound to fail.”
You mean values from English, French, Dutch, and German philosophers that all people are capable of they so want to or choose to apply to their lives.
“That the high IQ readers of Steve can’t see that is interesting to say the least.”
What we can see is that you truly are outside of the norm.
Well, what struck me about the assertion was the totally idiocy of it. I don’t think the right-wing narrative is that math and engineering professors are cornering their students and violently cramming BLM propaganda down their throats. It’s the humanities/lib ed profs they are talking about, and they are dead right. If you’re saying that only about half of all professors are totally unhinged DEI lunatics, my response is that in the humanities/lib ed ranks the overwhelming majority are deranged progressive cultists–most of the ones who “go along with it” become what they imitate.
“At one time, American did (generally) represent a people”
— Which has changed time and time again. For our posterity.
If I weren’t so utterly bored by your abject stupidity, I might find something as vacuous as this shite sort of clinically fascinating, in a perverse way, by the sheer unstoppable retarded-ness of it: if I could be bothered to get up off my barstool and act as a clinician, as it were.
But I’m not, so I don’t, so I’ll just stick with: you’re one of the most operatically stupid people I’ve ever come across — and I hang out in dive bars with drunks, so that is reeeeally saying something.
LOL.
Thank you for confirming your historical illiteracy. Made my week.
the Democratic Party seizes on Donald Trump as their “shoo-in” candidate for, among myriad other reasons, the fact that “he never reads.”
Is there evidence that Trump never reads? I assume he reads newspapers, mostly. One of his friends who knew him socially in the 1990s said he always kept a stack of news and business magazines by his favorite chair.
I asked a high school classmate who is now one of the top lawyers in New York–you would recognize his name– what books he’d read lately. He laughed and said, “I haven’t read a book in 20 years.” People like him and Trump just read what’s relevant to their profession or business.
Does anyone imagine Biden reads? I picture him watching reruns of “Matlock” and “Barnaby Jones.” He could watch the same episodes over and over as he would never recall whodunit.
I recall George W. Bush leaving a bookstore conspicuously carrying Camus’ The Stranger. Well, it’s an easy read, anyway. People who worked with him described W as a voracious reader; hard to picture, somehow.
I am certainly projecting my own preferences, but I don’t see how most people who are curious about the world & have some spare time would spend their time reading imaginative literature past their 30s-40s.
If you take stories, novels, plays worth reading, you are dealing with the 19th & perhaps the 1st half of the 20th C. And that’s it.
The 19th C masterpieces told you something about human life, society, manners, world-view, ideas, various cultures … that were not present in contemporary psychology, sociology, philosophy, history. But after the development of some of those disciplines in the 20th C & later, most of the fiction became superfluous.
For instance, an ambitious novel like Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” can’t tell you about the phenomenon of Nazism as much as serious works on history, biography, philosophy, sociology, economy, psychology,…
As far as entertainment value goes- I don’t see that Updike’s novels on the US middle class are much entertaining. Nor revealing.
Ambitious novels simply don’t reveal anything significant, unlike their 19th C predecessors.
And they are not enjoyable in a “wider world”. Educated civilized world still enjoys, to some degree, great achievements of French and Russian 19th C fiction. Not so with any contemporary fiction, including American.
What can Franzen or Shriver offer to most Europeans (and probably a big chunk of educated white Americans)? What kind of “revelation”? Fun?
Not much, I’d say.
I remember back in the Gee Dub days one liberal journalist (forget who) begrudgingly conceded that W had “deep, if often un-nourished” intellect.
At first quick glance I thought the guy was Stern show former intern High Pitch Mike.
When Lebron James finishes a book, he sends it to Biden.
Does he send the crayons too?
This was decades ago but my most liberal teacher was in history. I only had one hard science teacher who was liberal.
True, I think. But it might be they have a very narrow world view.