Category: Uncategorized

It’s more convincing if you don’t lie

Some of Donald Trump’s critics don’t realize that being “a man of the people” is about supporting those people’s interests, not lying about your background and pretending to have worked your way up from the bottom:

Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens told CNNs’ Fareed Zakaria that Donald Trump’s campaign is “increasingly a vision of the privileges of a white ethnic bloc.” Stephens warned Trump has turned the Republican party into the “white party” and is doubtful the it can reclaim the principle of opportunity and the “right to rise” following a Trump loss.

“It’s basically increasingly a vision of the privileges of a white ethnic bloc who he is speaking to,” Stephens said of the Trump campaign. “If the Republican party essentially becomes the white party, it is going to be the death of it.”

Stephens fought back against the argument that anti-Trump Republicans are elitists living in a bubble.

Stephens said he wished he was born into a rich family entrenched in New York real estate and the privileges that comes along with that. Instead, he said, he “started at the bottom” and any achievements he has made were based on merit.

“This is the standard line of the Trump side of the party, that us who oppose him are just a bunch of elites who live in the Acela corridor in this bubble of unimaginable wealth,” Stephens said to his co-panelist, Trump surrogate Emily Miller. “I wish I had been born into an extremely wealthy New York real estate family and been given multimillion dollar loans to get my start in life. I started at the bottom like so many of us did and to the extent that I achieved anything I think it’s on merit.”

Stephens, however, was born in New York to a chemical company executive and attended boarding school at the Middlesex School in Massachusetts. He later attended the London School of Economics.

Stephens is not only lying about himself, he’s wrong. The only hope the Republicans have of survival is to become the white party, shut down immigration, and start deporting the post-1965 wavers. Due to the combination of demographics and white people opposed to white interests, it’s entirely possible that if Donald Trump does not win, no Republican will ever be president again.

Not all whites favor small government. But look around the world. White Americans are the only people who favor it. That means the Republican Party, with its current ideology, cannot possibly win in any polity that does not consist of predominantly white American voters. It would have to become party more akin to the British Tories or Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, or accept permanent opposition status.

Being a good cuckservative, Stephens probably favors the latter. What could be more satisfying than the certainty of knowing you can remain perfectly principled, secure in the assurance of your noble defeat.

CORRECTION: I stand corrected. Stephens (((Erlich))) is not a cuckservative, he’s just another media Jew who is opposed to a white Republican party because a white Republican party would reliably prioritize American interests over Jewish interests. As I’ve repeatedly predicted, ideology is dead. It’s all identity politics now.

On a tangential note, we’ll know America is no longer the premier global power when the Erlich-Stephens of the world start changing their names to Wang, Li, and Zhang.

The intellectually fearsome atheist

For some reason, Google occasionally emails me comments that people are making about Stefan Molyneux’s videos in which I’ve appeared. This one, by ismelljello, was particularly amusing.

Read the reviews of his book. It honestly compelled me to make a video series where i debunk his tired old arguments. If you’re going to peddle other peoples ideas, at least make sure they haven’t already been trounced.

He made a video series to debunk the tired old arguments of a book he hasn’t read. That’s… an interesting approach.

I have the distinct impression that he has absolutely no idea that The Irrational Atheist cannot possibly contain “tired old arguments” because they are new critiques of the arguments put forth by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michel Onfray, among others.

It should certainly be interesting to discover how he proves that religion causes war and is worse than child molestation.

This is the danger of intellectual posturing. Sooner or later, you’re going to strike a pose that will catch the attention of those who actually possess the information you’re pretending to have. Never pretend to know what you don’t.

When the Pope is not the Pope

What does that make him? Ann Barnhardt explains that, resignation or no resignation, Benedict XVI is still the Pope, not the Pope Emeritus, which makes the so-called Francis, what, exactly? I’m neither Roman Catholic nor an expert on Vatican law, but there is no question that Mr. Bergolio’s behavior has been worrisome, even to many Protestants and non-Christians:

Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger submitted an invalid resignation in February of ARSH 2013, predicated upon the error that the Papacy could be bifurcated or in any way shared or expanded.  The relevant Canon is Canon 188, which states very plainly and succinctly:

A resignation made out of grave fear that is inflicted unjustly or out of malice, substantial error, or simony is invalid by the law itself.

Last week, one of the most prestigious Vatican journalists, an Italian named Sandro Magister, published a piece called “A ‘Pontificate of Exception’. The Mystery of Pope Benedict Against the Antichrists who are undermining The Church.”  In this piece, the VERY influential and respected Magister quotes Italian Canon Lawyer Guido Ferro Canale at length, who honed-in on a very specific German term used by Pope Benedict’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Ganswein in late May: “Pontificate of Exception”, or “Ausnahmepontifikat”. Canale argues persuasively that Ratzinger may have thrown the Petrine Office into a suspended state of juridical emergency.

Magister also quotes Ganswein at length showing that Ratzinger STILL BELIEVES himself, and RESIGNED WITH THE INTENTION of continuing to BE THE POPE….

Jorge Bergoglio is NOT the pope. Joseph Ratzinger is the pope – Pope Benedict XVI.  “Pope Francis” is a fiction, and thus all of the scandal and damage that this wicked man Jorge Bergoglio is wreaking is, at its core, a function of the fact that we are calling him by a false name. We all know that it is a wicked lie to call Bruce Jenner “Caitlyn”, because to do so is to assent to a lie.  If we can all understand the gravity and scandal of a z-list celebrity and madman calling himself a woman, how much more grave is it to call a man who is NOT the Vicar of Christ, “the Pope?”

What it is high time people start discussing openly is the distinct possibility that Antipope Bergoglio is the False Prophet Forerunner of the Antichrist.  Students of End Times prophecy tell us that The Antichrist will neither be the pope (obviously), nor even APPEAR to be the pope.  BUT, the False Prophet Forerunner of the Antichrist could certainly APPEAR to be “a pope”.  And if one thinks about it, it makes perfect diabolical sense for the False Prophet Forerunner to be precisely that – an antipope.  He would wield the authority of Peter, auto-destruct the institutional Church, and even establish a false, apostate church, a “one world religion” with himself at its head, all in preparation for the coming of The Antichrist, who will be a secular leader that attempts to deify himself.  And if the False Prophet Forerunner were an antipope, the Holy Ghost would be “kept out of the way” with regards to the graces and protections of the Petrine Office.  This is why Bergoglio spews heresy on a near-daily basis.  It isn’t because The Holy Ghost is failing, or has forsaken the Petrine Office or the Church.  It is because Bergoglio is not the pope.  It really is that simple.

What I am now convinced Antipope Bergoglio is doing is attempting to draw “all peoples unto himself” and coalesce his power in preparation for the unveiling of a “one world religion” which will ultimately be the client of a “one world government”.  This has been the stated goal of Freemasonry for these last 300 years, manifested in the United Nations, the European Union, and the regime now occupying Washington D.C., and now we see the open and aggressive drive to dissolve all international borders, both conceptually and physically, with Antipope Bergoglio as its primary propagandist.  This has also been foretold in countless prophecies.

Now, having grown up in the shadow of various Christian eschatologists, I am extremely disinclined towards the paranoia of the Left Behind crowd, who see the Revelation of St. John playing out every time Russia sends a gymnastic squad to a competition, someone shoots someone else in the Middle East, or a Democrat is elected President. I have heard more candidates for “the Antichrist” than I can recall, from Jimmy Carter to an up-and-coming political player in Uzbekistan.

So, I don’t take this sort of Christian fretting about the End Times seriously at all. And yet, it’s impossible to deny that there is some seriously freaky stuff taking place behind closed doors in the Vatican at the same time the globalists are going off the deep end with their one-world policies.

All I can really say is that this is really not the world I envisioned when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed.

Was the US behind the recent coup attempt?

There are more and more rumors floating around that the US was responsible for the recent “Gulenist” coup attempt in Turkey:

The new evidence of the US participation in the coup attempt in Turkey emerged. Greek press published a photo made a day before the coup. It shows the US ambassador in Turkey John Basse together with the Turkish senior officer, who looks like one of the leaders of the coup Col. Ali Yazıcı (former military adviser to President Erdogan). They had  a private meeting in Cengelkoy café the day before the coup.

The image demonstrates the US involvement in the coup and its close ties with a part of Turkish army, before the upheaval. Recall, that physical elimination of Erdogan was one of the goals of the coup attempt.

The next move by the Turkish government will be to ask the expulsion of the American ambassador from the country which will cause further disruption to the US and trigger process of Turkey leaving the NATO.

We’ll see, but if the Turks do kick out the US ambassador, that will serve as virtual confirmation that the US was behind it. Let’s face it, there is no organization more likely to be behind a coup attempt than the US government, which has overthrown more than a few governments in the last two decades alone.

A game to remember

I mentioned previously that I was invited to play in a friendly with the first team for the club to which Ender is now on loan. There was just one little detail that escaped me: while the second team plays in the fifth league, the first team plays in the fourth league. Ruh-roh.

This makes a pretty big difference, you see, as promotion and relegation means that the higher up you go, the better and more athletic the players are. Our first team was third league last year, and despite having some really good players, ended up getting relegated, so the challenge suddenly looked considerably more difficult. Having played against our own first team, then with them, in two scrimmages last fall, I knew exactly how in over our heads we were likely to be in a fourth-league game. While I was a member of a fourth-league team that won promotion to the third league, then spent a year playing in the third league, that was 15 years ago.

Ender and I were both substitutes, of course, but he went in at wing with about 15 minutes left in the first half and the team down 2-1. For the first 5 minutes, he looked like a little kid in the scuola calcio who’d joined three years late and had never played in a real game before; he was so obviously bad that I thought the manager might take him out immediately. He was out of position, reactive, late to the ball, and on the rare occasions he did manage to get to it, he didn’t kick it to anyone, he just blindly kicked it forward.

But he wasn’t the worst player on the field, as that honor went to the goalie, the young man to whom Ender had lost the starting position for the club’s junior team two years ago. I noticed, while taking warm-up shots with the kid, that he actually appeared to have regressed, and once the game started my suspicions were confirmed. While the first goal might have been saved and the second one was a really nice shot about which nothing could have been done, the third goal, on a free kick, was totally inexcusable. It was a high bouncer, one that could have been easily saved by either stepping forward or stepping back, but the goalie froze, and the ball bounced over his head and into the goal untouched. 3-1, and right before halftime too.

Needless to say, the halftime talk was not even remotely complimentary. The second-team goalie was substituted in, and, I suspect, has since been promoted to first-team starter.

In the second half, Ender was able to adjust to the speed of the game and the aggression of the players, got some positional guidance from the assistance coach working the sideline, and his play significantly improved. First the striker scored to make it 3-2 with him effectively serving as a decoy distracting the goalie, then he had a phantom assist on a nice cross that would have leveled the game if the goal hadn’t been called off, rather questionably, for some innocuous shoving in the box. About ten minutes later, he got an assist that counted on a slick 15-meter through ball threaded precisely past three defenders to the striker, who promptly put the ball in the net. 3-3.

He came off not long after that, thoroughly exhausted, but he’d put in a solid 35 minutes and the team was quite happy with his performance. He got applause from the team when he came off the field, and one defender shouted, in heavily accented English, “I love dees Americain!” while thumping him on the back.  After the other team scored to make it 4-3, the coach put me in at striker for the last 15 minutes, and I would have had the equalizer in an empty net if the right wing had simply crossed the ball square to me, but instead he pulled it back to the midfielder arriving at the top of the box, who hit the crossbar. Sfortunato, ma c’e calcio cosi.

I didn’t have any trouble running with the younger guys, mostly because I was fresh and they’re not in full game shape yet, but I wasn’t in sync with them either and was ineffective for the most part. Our midfield lost its shape as they increasingly pushed forward for the equalizer, leading to an easy goal on the counterattack for the other team to close out the game, 5-3. After the game, I was one of those criticized for not leaving the ball to a teammate in front of me who’d called for it – I didn’t bother pointing out that I heard the guy and ignored him because there was a defender right on my back who would have had the ball if I’d let it go.

I was actually rather glad to hear the criticism, misplaced or not, because, as I later explained to Ender, no one ever yells at the old guy who is only being humored because he can’t play. We were both invited to come back and practice with the first team next week, but I shook the manager’s hand and politely declined. It was a lot of fun, and it was a game I won’t ever forget, but the veterans’ season starts soon, and apart from a possible friendly or two with the second team, I’ll do better to stick with the guys my own age. More, or as is almost entirely the case, less.

The White House on the Left

At this rate, if Hillary manages to beat Donald Trump, it appears the White House may look like a 1980s horror flick:

Call it conspiracy theory, coincidence or just bad luck, but any time someone is in a position to bring down Hillary Clinton they wind up dead. In fact, as we noted previously, there’s a long history of Clinton-related body counts, with scores of people dying under mysterious circumstances. While Vince Foster remains the most infamous, the body count is starting to build ominously this election cycle – from the mysterious “crushing his own throat” death of a UN official to the latest death of an attorney who served the DNC with a fraud suit.

As GatewayPundit’s Jim Hoft reports, on July 3, 2016, Shawn Lucas and filmmaker Ricardo Villaba served the DNC Services Corp. and Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz at DNC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., in the fraud class action suit against the Democrat Party on behalf of Bernie Sanders supporters (this was before Wikileaks released documents proving the DNC was working against the Sanders campaign during the 2016 primary).

Shawn Lucas was thrilled about serving the papers to the DNC before Independence Day… Shawn Lucas was found dead this week.

According to Zerohedge, that’s five mysterious deaths already. Since JUNE! I do think it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that a 27-year-old DNC staffer was in any position to bring down anyone, let alone Hillary Clinton. But still, WTF?

On the plus side, a Hillary presidency will create considerable interest in conspiracy theories. On the downside, the thought of Hillary with drones at her disposal is a sobering one.

Let them go their wicked ways

An eloquent reminder of why women should neither vote nor speak in church. Particularly self-declared “lifestyle theologians”.

Evangelicals are endorsing Trump by and large because he promises to return our nation to the “good old days.” Trump promises to bring back steel and coal, to return our country to an immigrant-free land, and, with gusto, he promises to make America the world super power it used to be. His campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has deeply resonated with leaders across the spectrum.

But our generation doesn’t quite know what that means. Don’t forget, we grew up during war times. On September 11th, 2001, I was in eighth grade. When the war in Iraq started, I was in high school. Graduation came and many of my high school friends enlisted. I can still remember my friend, Kyle, telling me he had enlisted and feeling this overwhelming sense that we were far too young for all of this. These are the days in which we have grown up. We haven’t known the days of peace and tranquility that older generations reminisce about and desire to return to. It’s not that we don’t think things should change, it’s just that we don’t know a different way.

But war was not the only thing the separated the “good old days” from today in many leaders’ minds. There were many “benefits” of that by-gone era for those supporting a traditionalist view. Women were in the home raising the children without complaint, the Christian feminist movement hadn’t yet touched the churches and immensely inconvenienced pastors who had not had to grapple with these issues in a long time, and the notion of being politically correct wasn’t as demanding on conference speakers, writers, and preachers as it is today. When some Evangelicals look back, they see more tranquil days simply because these things were absent. But when millennials look back, we see how far our society has come. Evangelicals have warned us against the allure of progressivism, but I’m here to say that we actually like the progress. We actually like that women are on their way to equal pay, we like that you can’t make a racist comment as a public figure and go unnoticed, and we like that there are more female theologians and teachers and professors than ever before in American history. So when you try to pull us back to the “good old days,” you’ll miss us.

She’s right. National greatness doesn’t appeal to these millennials because they have no idea what it is. They love their degradation and their evil. They crawl like animals and believe themselves superior to those who came before them and walked upright. They genuinely believe that a descent into a crime-ridden third-world hellhole that can’t even teach children how to read, let alone put a man on the Moon, is “how far our society has come”.

Let them go. They worship feminism, globalism, and progressivism, not Jesus Christ. Follow the Divine example and abandon them to the Hell of their own choosing. We don’t need them. We don’t need numbers. All we need is 12 God-fearing men.

You will be hard pressed to find a millennial nationalist outside of the Republican intern pool. Perhaps it is that international travel is more available to our generation, or that we are living in more diverse communities that celebrate that diversity, but we don’t think America is the only great country, and we certainly don’t think that America is a Christian country.

Evangelical leaders are not just supporting nationalism, but are elevating nationalism to a Christian virtue. Many point back to the founding fathers as Christian leaders in our nation and impress upon us that we must support the constitution and protect our country because it is a Christian thing to do. We have deeply muddied the language between serving our God and serving our country. Forget the martyrs of the faith around the world, posters show us that soldiers make the “ultimate sacrifice.” As Christian millennials, we just can’t buy this. We look over our shoulders at our nation’s history and wince a little. We don’t have a lot of national pride because we are waking up to the immense on-going racism that exists in our nation’s systems, the horrors of early American history, and the tragedies around the world that happen because every country has nationalists. So when you equate nationalism with Christian virtue, we’re out.

Then you’re out and good riddance too. It’s not so much that nationalism is a Christian virtue as anti-nationalism being a Satanic one; globalism is overtly anti-Christian Neo-Babelism. Foolish millennials like these belong to neither the nation nor the church and should be kicked out of both without hesitation or regret. Evangelicals aren’t losing a generation, rather, Satan is running out of Baby Boomers and is in the process of reloading.

Although it may be tempting, there is no need to tell stupid young women like this to go to Hell. They are already well on their way.

Rod Walker, Castalia author

I have been inexcusably remiss in failing to put Rod Walker’s site on the list of Castalia Author’s on the right sidebar. He not only has a blog, but it’s an interesting one, complete with links to reviews of his first book with Castalia as well as his reviews of other books, such as Peter Grant’s Western, Brings the Lightning.

Rod Walker says he enjoyed working with Castalia House to bring out MUTINY IN SPACE, and found it an excellent experience in all respects. In previous careers, RW dealt with several traditional publishers and a few small presses, and never found it an enjoyable experience, a marked contrast to his adventure with Castalia House. For all his low opinion of traditional publishers, RW thinks it is better to classify Castalia House as a “nontraditional” publisher. The Internet has made traditional publishing obsolete as a mode of organization, just as the rise of mass industry made the craft guild system obsolete as a method of economic production….

So the way forward for publishers, in RW’s opinion, is to abandon the gatekeeper function and instead become “nontraditional” publishers – that is, curators who seek out specific kinds of excellence. RW thinks that John C. Wright’s books SOMEWHITHER and IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY are superb fantasy novels, and in all probability these books would never have been published without Castalia, just as Jerry Pournelle’s THERE WILL BE WAR series would never have been revived.

I’m delighted to hear that Rod enjoyed working with us, as we’re very pleased to be working with him. He is one of the most professional authors in the industry, delivering what must be some of the cleanest manuscripts delivered anywhere. He’s not only professional, he’s prolific, as we’ll be publishing two more of his novels before the end of the year, Alien Game, which is a second Heinlein-style SF juvenile, and an as-yet-untitled fantasy novel set in Minaria, the world of Divine Right.

If you haven’t read his first SF juvenile, Mutiny in Space, you really should do so, as it is a fast-paced, old-school, true-Blue SF novel.

One of the things Castalia is building is a community of readers and writers, just as DevGame is the foundation for a community of gamers and game developers. As both the first DevGame game, Elveteka, and Rod’s third book with us shows, there is room for a considerable amount of overlap and cross-pollination; a DevGame team is already actively developing the computer wargame version of Divine Right and Castalia will be publishing the print edition of a Divine Right RPG book that is in the very early stages of development. This community-building is important, for as Dave Freer notes at the Mad Genius Club, the publishing world is rapidly changing.

The problem is our whole genre, all of publishing (both indy and traditional) and the business of writing are moving targets. Even the audience is moving and changing. And they’re not moving predictably, but like a cheetah full of amphetamine, LSD and blindfolded too.

Which is all rough on the painstaking ‘stalker’ – the author trying to set themselves up for the ‘kill’. It’s certainly resulted in some very wild shooting – some innocent bystanders hit, lots of prey (AKA sales) disappeared into the scrub never to be seen again. I mean, once upon a time you simply had to kiss up to the right editors, loudly espouse the correct SJW cause de jour and you were in every B&N from here to Timbuktu, and on NYT bestseller list… and life was sweet. Now you can do all that, impeccably, win a Nebula and a Hugo, and be in the surviving book-stores… and still be a sales failure. Readers are being considerably more difficult and relying on Amazon, are more price aware, and more inclined to sample on KU…. I think looking toward writer’s co-ops would be smart.

KU is the real game-changer now, because the traditional publishers can’t play there. But we can, and last month, one of our better-selling books sold more via KU than through all the other means and editions combined. It doesn’t make sense for us to sell all our books that way, as we’ve experimented and some books do great while others don’t, but KU editions are now every bit as important in their own right as paperback, hardcover, or audiobook editions.

As for coops and communities, we’re not the only ones who have noticed that building communities is vital for authors these days:

Most books today are selling only to the authors’ and publishers’ communities. Everyone in the potential audiences for a book already knows of hundreds of interesting and useful books to read but has little time to read any. Therefore people are reading only books that their communities make important or even mandatory to read. There is no general audience for most nonfiction books, and chasing after such a mirage is usually far less effective than connecting with one’s communities.

This is why it is important for VP and Castalia to continue to grow – blog traffic looks likely to pass 2.6 million this month – and why it is equally important that Castalia does not grow at the price of sacrificing its level of quality. We only got one book out last month, but this month we expect to publish books by THREE new members of our writer’s community – Fenris Wulf, Ivan Throne, and Nick Cole – in addition to a first novel in a new series by one of our leading members, which is to say Mr. John C. Wright. Not all of these books will be for everyone, but all of them will be recognizably Castalia House books in their own way. We’ve also signed three new authors about whom we are very excited, but who shall remain anonymous for the present.

It is because this community is growing that it is increasingly under assault from trolls, self-seekers, and ideological missionaries. And it is because this community is important, and because you, the reader, are important, that the moderators and I are so ruthless in purging those who are attempting to disrupt and destroy it.

How important is it? We can quantify that. On an annual basis, the average Castalia book sells more than 10 times the number of copies of the average book. I expect that within five years, that ratio will be 100 to 1.

UPDATE: I didn’t look at the comments the first time around. Dave also had some nice things to say about Castalia there.

I seriously believe Castalia is merely one of the first of the new generation publishers. Say what you like about Vox Day – he pays 50%, does the legwork AND does the marketing. And he really does market. 50% of $20K (and no hassles and costs) is worth a lot more than 70% of $3K and hassles, costs. But at 17.5% of most of the Trad houses (apples to apples comparison) where they do the legwork, but scanty marketing but bump the price right up (so you might get $5K sales) well – it’s a no-brainer, really. Which is why I worry so much that so many people still choose that option.

We admittedly could do a lot better on the marketing. (And yes, marketing volunteers, I’m going to try to contact you this weekend. I’ve genuinely been so busy that I haven’t had time to even respond to the volunteers who are actively trying to help out.) But the quadpartite community of VP, AG, DG, and CH, in combination with our author’s networks, does have a marketing multiplier effect. And once a few of the bigger names start working with us – and they will – that’s when things are going to seriously take off.

UPDATE: One more note for established writers at other publishers who might be interested in talking to us about working together in the future. We not only pay much higher royalties much earlier than the traditional publishers do, this year, we are already paying all of our authors out for Q1 and Q2 2016, even though we haven’t been paid for June yet. I’m finishing the various reports this weekend. When we say our authors come first, we really mean it.

Why no one watches the Olympics anymore

Reason covers the many reasons, most of which are nonsense:

  1. The end of the mostly-fake-but-still-compelling fiction that participants were “amateurs” who competed out of mere love of the game.
  2. A fuller understanding of just how much cheating went on among the athletes. First, it was the massive revelations about juicing by Iron Curtain teams but post-Cold War, it became clear that many Western athletes (Ben Johnson! FloJo! Marion Jones!) who won our hearts were faking it too (except for Carl Lewis, the greatest track and field Olympian yet one who was never fully embraced by the crowds, either).
  3. The mainstreaming of sports TV and the ability of less-popular sports to gain an audience independent of the Olympics.
  4. The disturbing spectacle of the Games being hosted by tyrannical and/or bankrupt countries and cities that wasted huge amounts of money on conspicuous consumption (Beijing, Moscow and Sochi, and Athens obviously, but let’s never forget Montreal too!).
  5. An endless stream of scandals implicating national-level Olympic Committees but also the IOC itself in just terrible, terrible behavior.
  6. The growth in cosmopolitanism around the globe, meaning that we are no longer as mesmerized by “exotic” athletes from foreign countries.
  7. Oscar Pistorius.
  8. Bob Costas.
  9. Rick Wakeman’s 1976 soundtrack to the Innsbruck Winter Games, White Rock.
  10. Brazil’s political instability, Zika problems, and inability to control sewage.
  11. The long, acrid hangover from the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, during which the Palestinian terrorist group Black September killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. In the wake of the murders, the head of the IOC, American Avery Brundage, famously declared that “the Games must go on,” despite “two savage attacks.” For Brundage, a lifelong racist and personal friend of Adolf Hitler (as head of the USOC during the ’36 Games in Berlin, Brundage watch track and field competitions from der Fuhrer’s box and pressured the American track coach to sideline Jewish runners), the second “attack” during the ’72 Games was a threatened boycott of the Olympics by African nations if apartheid Rhodesia was allowed to compete. Beyond all that, endless boycotts for this or that reason, usually tied to politics, not athletics.
  12. The Olympics, designed as a means by which France might avenge its loss in the Franco-Prussian War, is explicitly nationalistic in a world that is moving toward greater individualism.
  13. “The Olympics matter less because we live in a better world, one filled with innumerable options for leisure and one mostly—though by no means completely—free from the most onerous aspects of geopolitical strife. We live in a world where nations matter less than individuals, a reality that is mirrored by the increasing number of ‘nation-hopping’ Olympians.” And the rise of an actual “refugee team.”
  14. The IOC’s insane attempt to control and regiment all aspects of the Games on the Internet, including a prohibition on GIFS, Vines, and other home-brewed content. Apart from all the scandals, the IOC is the athletic equivalent of Metallica, busting the balls of its most-fervent fans in the hope of squeezing a few more nickels out of a dying franchise.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t watch it for one simple reason. It’s no longer the Olympics of “a miracle on ice”, it is a politically correct SJW fest with coverage that devotes more time to sob stories than it does to sports. I mostly thought it was funny to see that Reason is still stuck on the outdated idea that the world is “moving toward greater invididualism” and away from nationalism.

On the plus side, the Olympic torch carrier sprinting to get away from gunshots in a nearby favela has already provided more entertainment than any three recent Olympics.