Category: Uncategorized

Officially out

Yesterday, for the first time in 30 years, my fantasy football league drafted without me. They also drafted without the reigning league champion. 20 percent of the fantasy league left because we simply aren’t watching enough NFL football or paying enough attention to the rosters to be able to reasonably compete in the league anymore. Last year, I dropped my NFL GamePass subscription. This year, I don’t even know if I will watch a single game from start to finish because the politics have finally gotten too much for me to stand. And I am very, very far from alone in this regard.

The BLM cheerleaders in the sports media are talking bravely, as they usually do before the reports of declining ratings begin to appear. Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk in particular is trying to talk himself into the idea that the NFL and BLM can stand up to President Trump and the widespread disapproval on the part of white football fans.

The NFL can’t simply wander into this crowded minefield without a plan for handling the inevitable explosions. Frankly, the plan needs to be to fight back. Supporting the players means more than simply saying, “We support the players.” Supporting the players means standing up to anyone and everyone who will try to bully or attack them.

At a time when some owners are trying to thread the needle regarding support for player protests while also hoping that they choose to stand for the anthem, the more awkward needle to be threaded with a big, fat camel relates to the broader notion of having their players’ backs while simultaneously cramming money into the President’s front pockets. The latest Trump (son) tweet reconfirms that support for players and support for the President cannot be reconciled.

If the NFL once again stands silent in the fact of a torrent of tweets and other attacks, the disconnect will become even more glaring.

Of course, despite the posturing, Florio appears to have a pretty good idea that NFL Week One is going to be a catastrophe. He shut down his comments on that post after only six had been posted. The NBA’s TV ratings are currently down 40 percent from just two years ago, so it’s not at all impossible that the NFL will soon find itself on a similar downward trajectory. In Corporate Cancer I noted that 2/20 and 10/50 appear to be the year/percent ratio pattern once an organization becomes fully converged.

Now, I have no sympathies for, and nothing in common with, the clumsy gammas who hate all “sportsball” because it reminds them of their low social status. It’s not at all good that America’s sports have been stolen from the very nation that created them; this is a sign of cultural defeat. But submission to and acceptance of that defeat is even worse, which is why it will be encouraging to see more and more NFL fans refusing to accept the SJW-NFL wearing the skinsuit of the sport that it once was.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, I didn’t leave the NFL, the NFL left me.

UPDATE: It could be worse than anyone imagines, as this letter to Outkick indicates:

I’ve been part of a fantasy football league for the past 20 years with the same 9 guys. Fantasy Draft Day is the most fun day of the year – we all get together, away from the wives, drink, eat, and re-live the glory days. Needless to say, we’re all huge NFL fans. I recently sent an email, like I do each year, alerting the guys to the date and time of the upcoming fantasy draft. Much to my surprise, 7 of the guys are dropping out of the league and all of them cited the SAME reason – they’re tired of the NFL’s embrace of politics.

If you’re driving away 70 percent of your most hardcore fans, you’re in serious trouble. 

Put not your trust in men

 Jon Del Arroz contemplates the Culture War Grift

After you’ve been around the block awhile, you see posts of folk complaining about online movements which devolve into meaninglessness.

It’s pretty easy to spot the symptoms at this point to not involve yourself:

  1. Conservatives/Right Wingers are blacklisted/wronged/banned from some industry.
  2. The people react, supporting said right wingers.
  3. People want more — they want an alternative, they look for a leader.
  4. A few semi-celebrity grifters come in, act as leaders to either get themselves awards and/or money.
  5. The grifters bleat endlessly about how the art must be “apolitical”.
  6. The grifters fight the right wingers and wrestle control of the movement, often warning about “extremism on both sides”.
  7. The right wingers get ostracized/blacklisted, thus negating the purpose of the movement to beginwith.
  8. The grifters ride the movement until it dies.
I’m sure you can’t imagine whom he has in mind…. The key for any lasting organization or institution is to keep out the SJWs, which is something neither the grifters nor the wannabees will ever do. Sad Puppies and the Dragon Awards were doomed because they wanted to fix the enemy. The reason our projects continue moving forward – however irritatingly slowly they move – is because we refuse to embrace the apolitical or the irreligious.
Life is a fundamentally spiritual exercise. And those who are playing only for themselves, or worse, for the other side, cannot be allowed on the team.

Tolkien hated the Devil Mouse

Considering the deep contempt in which both Tolkien and Lewis held Disney products even in the Golden Age of Disney, it should come as no surprise, then, that the Devil Mouse and its lesser kin so thoroughly hate them and everything in their Christian tradition right back:

Tolkien mostly hated Disney’s creations, and he made these feelings very clear. Snow White debuted only months after The Hobbit’s publication in 1937. As it happened, Tolkien went to see the film with literary friend and sometime rival C.S. Lewis. Neither liked it very much. In a 1939 letter, Lewis granted that “the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving.” But he also called Disney a “poor boob” and lamented “What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?”

Tolkien, notes Atlas Obscura, “found Snow White lovely, but otherwise wasn’t pleased with the dwarves. To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross oversimplification of a concept they held as precious”—the concept, that is, of fairy stories. Some might brush away their opinions as two Oxford dons gazing down their noses at American mass entertainment. As Tolkien scholar Trish Lambert puts it, “I think it grated on them that he [Disney] was commercializing something that they considered almost sacrosanct.”

“Indeed,” writes Steven D. Greydanus at the National Catholic Register, “it would be impossible to imagine” these two authors “being anything but appalled by Disney’s silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.” One might counter that Tolkien’s dwarves (as he insists on pluralizing the word), also have funny names (derived, however, from Old Norse) and also break into song. But he takes pains to separate his dwarves from the common run of children’s story dwarfs.

Tolkien would later express his reverence for fairy tales in a scholarly 1947 essay titled “On Fairy Stories,” in which he attempts to define the genre, parsing its differences from other types of marvelous fiction, and writing with awe, “the realm of fairy story is wide and deep and high.” These are stories to be taken seriously, not dumbed-down and infantilized as he believed they had been. “The association of children and fairy-stories,” he writes, “is an accident of our domestic history.”

olkien wrote The Hobbit for young people, but he did not write it as a “children’s book.” Nothing in the book panders, not the language, nor the complex characterization, nor the grown-up themes. Disney’s works, on the other hand, represented to Tolkien a cheapening of ancient cultural artifacts, and he seemed to think that Disney’s approach to films for children was especially condescending and cynical.

He described Disney’s work on the whole as “vulgar” and the man himself, in a 1964 letter, as “simply a cheat,” who is “hopelessly corrupted” by profit-seeking (though he admits he is “not innocent of the profit-motive” himself).

…I recognize his talent, but it has always seemed to me hopelessly corrupted. Though in most of the ‘pictures’ proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea…

This explication of Tolkien’s dislike for Disney goes beyond mere gossip to an important practical upshot: Tolkien would not allow any of his works to be given the Walt Disney treatment. While his publisher approached the studios about a Lord of the Rings adaptation (they were turned down at the time), most scholars think this happened without the author’s knowledge, which seems a safe assumption to say the least.

It’s fascinating to observe how the seeds of Disney’s evil blossoming into the Devil Mouse were always apparent to the sufficiently discerning artist. And while there is nothing wrong in seeking profit, which is often necessary if one is to produce anything of value, the problem, as Tolkien correctly noted, is permitting that goal to corrupt your artistic vision.

Or, as in Walt Disney’s case, to overwhelm it entirely.

The sun is setting

Sacrificial Lamb nobly attempts to explain to the Boomers why they are, and will probably remain, the most despised generation in recorded human history, before they pass from the stage:

You Boomers always had more wealth, more opportunity, and more political power than us younger generations……and your narcissistic stupidity caused you geezers to squander it all. If current trends continue on, then most of the people that will end up taking care of you Boomers in nursing homes will be low IQ, white-hating black Africans….here in a previously white nation. No joke. I know this because I have seen this multiple times, with my very own eyes. You Boomers wanted cheaper labor, and you got it.

We are all suffering from an endless parade of Boomer selfishness and Boomer mistakes.

Stop being defensive, and take a hard look in the mirror. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re going to have a full-blown civil war soon, and you Boomers need to acknowledge your role (wittingly or not) in creating this increasingly dystopian and Luciferian world that we live in today.

Oh, and people don’t bust you Boomers’ chops for being old. They bust your chops for being the most narcissistic, selfish, and delusional generation in modern history. People bust Boomer chops because you guys inherited a nation of laws, tradition, ethnic and racial cohesion, and prosperity….AND THEN JUST THREW IT AWAY, even when your adult generation still had demographics in your favor. You may have been (((manipulated))) into doing so, but that is not an acceptable excuse.

Can you now understand why some people might hold a slight grudge, or at least deliberately taunt you Boomers?

It’s time to take a hard look in the mirror, geezer…..because the sun is setting soon.

Generation X doesn’t hate its grandparents or its kids. The Zoomers don’t hate their Gen-X parents. But both generations, as well as the Millennials, despise Boomers. Indeed, the small minority of Boomers capable of both a) generational self-reflection and b) self-identification rather than generational identification despise their fellow Boomers too. 

There is a reason that “Boomer” is now used unironically as an insult by the two youngest generations, and that reason is that being a Boomer is observably synonymous with narcissism, selfishness, short time preferences, indifference to one’s posterity, technological and temporal cluelessness, lack of gratitude, and generational identification.

If you’re a Boomer, instead of asking yourself if this is true of you, try asking yourself if it is true of your acquaintances of an age with you. Do they sacrifice for their children and grandchildren or do they live in nicer homes than their kids do on the other side of the country? Are they leaving bigger and better legacies for their descendants than their ancestors left for them or do they brag about spending their children’s inheritances? What sort of world are they leaving behind them? Will the Earth be a better place for them having been here or not?

The sun is setting, Boomer. Isn’t it time you stop lying to yourself about how your generation changed the world and face up to the material consequences of your generation’s actions? Wouldn’t it be better to spend your final chapter doing whatever you can to rectify the damage that has been done over the course of your lifetime?

The serpent lurks

The conservative establishment’s favorite lunatic drug addict is at it again and now he’s explaining the existence of evil:

Why the Serpent Lurks Eternally in the Garden

The following is from a draft of 

Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

The presence of the serpent in the garden also signifies something even deeper: the impossibility of the order suitable for human beings existing without some admixture of chaos. There is simply no way, even for God himself, to wall off some isolated portion of the greater surrounding reality and make everything permanently predictable and safe within it. Some of the reality that has been so carefully excluded will always sneak back in. A snake will therefore inevitably appear, no matter what care is taken. Even the most assiduous of modern parents will not be able to protect their children from internet porn, drugs, or alcohol, even if they lock them in the basement (in which case they only end up exposing them to the snakes they harbor within themselves). We might have learned such things by watching the great, degenerate totalitarian utopias of the 20th century. Leaders and citizens alike attempted, with ever-increasing desperation, to force everything that existed into a defined, comprehensible and too-perfect order. That merely ensured that chaos burst forth without reserve into their souls, and then into their societies.   

You see, you have to give into the chaos if you want not-too-perfect order. That’s why smoking meth is the best way to avoid becoming a drug addict. No one has thought this thought before while not-smoking not-meth.

Take your pills!

This really isn’t that hard

Not that the usual morons will pay any heed to this, but simply because it will permit me to tell them in the future that I already pointed this out, I would like everyone to please note that all comments are moderated here. This is necessary because there are literally hundreds of spam comments that spammers attempt to post here every day due to the 100k daily pageview traffic. If moderation was not in effect, the comments would be entirely unreadable.

THIS MEANS THAT IF YOUR COMMENT DOES NOT APPEAR RIGHT AWAY, DO NOT TRY TO POST IT A SECOND TIME. THIS MEANS YOU, YOU MORON. 

UPDATE: ALSO AND ESPECIALLY YOU, BOOMER.

Literally nothing that anyone has to say is so urgent that it necessitates a second, or third, or even fourth attempt to post it. If you’re worried that your Very Important Comment may have been lost, then for the love of all that is Good, Beautiful, and True, accept with equanimity that possibility as The Decretive Will of God, An Act of Nature, An Unfortunate Accident, or even The Insidious Work of the Father of Lies, whatever may happen to best suit your particular philosophical perspective. FFS, this isn’t a difficult concept!

Let me repeat for those of you who are too stupid to grasp the readily apparent: DO NOT TRY TO COMMENT A SECOND TIME WHEN YOUR INITIAL COMMENT DOES NOT IMMEDIATELY APPEAR.

Furthermore, please note that adding an “OT” to your off-topic comment does not make it acceptable. It is still off-topic. If you feel the need to share your Very Important Opinion or some Very Important News, then feel free to do so on your own site. Do not do it here. All that adding “OT” to your off-topic comment accomplishes is to make it clear that you know you’re a jackass and you’re going to try to hijack the mic even though you know you’re not supposed to. Furthermore, if your Very Important Breaking News is a link to Drudge, Twitter, Instapundit, or the AP News Wire, then there is absolutely no need to “alert” anyone to anything. 

This may come as shocking news to the solipsistic, but everyone else reads those sites too.

UPDATE: If you’re a Boomer who doesn’t understand why everyone Gen X and younger can’t stand you and your g-g-generation, allow me to point out that one of the regular Boomers here has ALREADY tried to post the same comment on this post TWICE, presumably because he didn’t see the first one appear immediately. The Day of the Pillow cannot arrive soon enough.

Cancelling Darwin

It doesn’t matter how well you’ve served the Black Rider. Sooner or later, you will be cast from his high horse, even if you are a secular saint as revered as Charles Darwin has been:

The UK’s Natural History Museum is reviewing options for its Charles Darwin exhibits, including possible removal, after an internal review ordered amid Black Lives Matter protests found that they could be deemed “offensive.”

The museum’s directors are scrutinizing collections that may be considered “problematic,” which could lead to removal or lesser remedies, such as renaming, The Telegraph reported, citing internal documents. Artifacts from the father of evolutionary theory are among the suspects because Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos Islands on HMS ‘Beagle’ was one of the UK’s “colonialist scientific expeditions.”

“In light of Black Lives Matter and the recent anti-racist demonstrations around the world,” the museum is re-evaluating room names, collections and statues to root out any that “could potentially cause offense.” A large wing of the museum is named after Darwin, and a statue of the naturalist stands in the museum’s main hall.

As a Christian who has seen the way Darwin’s work has been used and abused to attack the Faith, I won’t mourn the man’s academic defenestration. As a philosopher who has logically and mathematically destroyed even the most remote possibility of his primary hypothesis, I’m not bothered by his scientific diminishment.

But as a student of history, I am deeply concerned about his historical erasure by the Year Zero barbarians. 

Fake reviews infesting Amazon

I warned about this more than a few years ago. But Amazon didn’t care when it was just SJWs weaponizing their fake reviews against right-wing authors, and apparently they were unaware of Broken Window policing theory and the inevitable consequences of failing to deal with problems when they are small:

Since Amazon’s early days, reviews are the one big metric customers have relied on to determine the quality and authenticity of a product. Amazon’s listings often have hundreds or thousands of reviews, instead of the handful found on competing marketplaces. But many of those reviews can’t be trusted. Thousands of fake reviews have flooded Amazon, Walmart, eBay and others, as sales have skyrocketed.

From Facebook groups where bad actors solicit paid positive reviews to bots and click farms that upvote negative reviews to take out the competition, fake reviews are getting harder to spot. In July, UCLA and USC released a study that found more than 20 fake review related Facebook groups with an average of 16,000 members. In more than 560 postings each day, sellers offered a refund or payment for a positive review, usually around $6.

The repercussions are getting more serious, too, as shoppers stay home and increasingly turn online for things they’d normally want to shop for in person. In recent months, fake reviews have boosted sales of unsafe products and hurt business for legitimate sellers, causing huge brands to sever ties with Amazon.

Amazon told CNBC it uses “powerful machine learning tools and skilled investigators to analyze over 10 million review submissions weekly, aiming to stop abusive reviews before they are ever published.” Still, the company recently removed 20,000 reviews after an investigation found that the top Amazon reviewers in the UK were engaging in fraud.

Simply requiring a confirmed purchase of the product at least two weeks prior to posting a review would eliminate the majority of fake reviews. As would simply responding to the sellers when obviously fake reviews are reported.

Analysis of an Assassination

Thomas Wiktor summarizes his detailed analysis of the murder of Trump supporter Jay Danielson:

Let’s consolidate the FACTS in the murder of Aaron “Jay” Danielson.

These are only the things I know for sure.

No theorizing.

It was a planned, premeditated sectarian assassination carried out by a death squad of six active participants.

It’s not possible to know if there were more people in addition to the four males and two females.

Read the whole thing. And realize this is why it is very important to keep out of the cities, especially Democrat-controlled cities, and stay away from Antifa. They are being actively protected by sympathetic state and local authorities and their actions have been sanctioned; there is no point in mass public demonstrations and even passing confrontations could put you at risk of a similar operation.

You do not know your enemy, so don’t fail Sun Tzu 101 by putting yourself in a situation where you are as likely to lose as to win.

Antifa is playing for keeps. You are not. So don’t engage.

Busting the Boogaloos

It’s really rather remarkable that Team Soros and the media have actually managed to concoct a narrative that is less convincing than an oft-seen meme. After all, everyone even remotely familiar with the Alt-Right Revolutionary Movement knows that Sammy Hide is the real leader of the Boogaloo Bois.

The Boogaloo movement is a loosely organized network of anti-government extremists who advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and predict and hope for an impending civil war, which they refer to as ‘Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo,’ a reference to the title of the 1984 sequel to the film Breakin’.

Heinlein didn’t foresee the half of it when he wrote about the Crazy Years.