Eggs are fantastic for a diet.
If you don't like the taste, just add cocoa, flour, sugar, butter, baking powder and cook at 180-degrees for 30 minutes.
*.*
William Shatner has discontinued his line of women's lingerie.
Apparently, Shatner Panties wasn't the best choice for a name.
*.*
The controller, working a busy pattern, told the 727 on downwind to make a three-sixty (do a complete circle, usually to provide spacing between aircraft).
The pilot of the 727 complained, "Do you know it costs us two thousand dollars to make a three-sixty in this airplane?
Without missing a beat the controller replied, "Roger, give me four thousand dollars worth!"
*.*
What do you get when you cross the Atlantic Ocean with the Titanic?
Halfway.
*.*
You know that you're a really boring person when someone steals your identity and then tries to give it back.
Quote of the Times;
“A conspiracy of Democrats, Fake News, FBI, and the CIA recently framed an American President for Russian collusion. That much we know for sure. But our election systems that can’t be fully audited are fair and accurate according to the same people. So stop your worrying.” - Scott Adams
Link of the Times;
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/12/01/monty-python-is-the-nostradamus-of-our-ridiculous-times-n1537965
Issue of the Times;
Whose Land Did Native Americans Steal Before Europeans Stole It From Them? by Rick Moran
We all know that history is not the left’s favorite subject. Many times, it’s just too inconvenient for their political narratives. Often, history has to be erased or submerged in order to achieve the “greater good” of creating a just and moral society.
In truth, it’s not much better on the right, although generally, the conservative take on American history is more nuanced. Christopher Columbus was an ass — a greedy, cruel, ambitious man who didn’t let anyone stand in his way to achieving riches and power, especially native people. But he was courageous enough to cross an unknown ocean in a rickety ship and with a mutinous crew.
Do his sins outweigh the good he’s done? Not our call. And certainly not the call of biased, cretinous leftists who don’t want to understand Columbus and only use his sins as illustrations in their little morality plays to condemn the entire “Age of Exploration.”
American history did not begin in 1492. There have been human beings residing in North America for at least 20,000 years and probably longer. But the people who crossed the Bering Sea land bridge from Asia to North America during the last Ice Age may not have been the first humans to arrive here. Recent DNA evidence shows that there have been several different migrations to North America with Native American tribes only being the most recent.
And that leads to the inescapable conclusion: the Native Americans who were present on the North American continent when Europeans arrived were not the same Native Americans who arrived 20,000 years ago. DNA evidence tracks the migration of one early American civilization — the Clovis people, so-called because the first tools and weapons were found in Clovis, New Mexico — and reveals that they thrived in both North and South America until about 8500 years ago.
National Geographic:
This has been a big debate for some time, that people some 13,500 years ago were making distinct tools that you can find all over the Americas, so-called Clovis Weapons. This is a new style of weaponry: finely crafted, relatively flat spear points no thicker than an envelope, which required unique skills, and therefore stand out in the record.
Something happened, a cultural change or an arrival. For a long time they were seen as the first people. Now, we’re seeing it more as the middle-age arrival in the Ice Age. Where these weapons came from has also been a huge question for archaeologists. Many have been trying to trace them back to the Bering Land Bridge, but the evidence just doesn’t stack up. Others have tried to trace them to an Atlantic arrival by Palaeolithic Europeans around 20,000 years ago.
Any hint that ancient Europeans settled in North America at about the same time as modern Native Americans cannot be countenanced either by Native American tribes or white liberals. For Native Americans, it is a deep insult to their culture to claim that their origins were anywhere else but North America. They reject any migration theories for religious reasons.
The controversy over Kennewick Man shows the lengths that some Native Americans will go to “protect” their culture. A skeleton found in Washington bore some markers of being Caucasian. A huge controversy erupted as some Native Americans fought to keep science from unlocking the secrets of the skeleton. After more than a decade of legal wrangling, scientists were allowed to examine the priceless find and the skeleton gave up its secrets. The remains are more closely related to modern Native Americans than to any other living population.
There is also a modern-day political reason for rejecting any hint that Native Americans came from somewhere else.
The idea of coming from somewhere else might threaten the notion that they have primacy on the lands. But, they obviously do because they are coming from these much older stories than anybody else. I look at these stories of arrival and think, “Yeah, they come out of the ground because that is how deep their history goes.” It’s a non-scientific view of the world, but it gives us a window into what it means to be in a place for that long.
So what happened to these older, primitive societies — the Clovis people and others who were clearly present in North and Central America before modern Native Americans? They no doubt had what they considered “their land” to hunt and forage. Who stole it from them and wiped them out?
It’s not a simple question because there are so many holes in our knowledge of early North Americans. There may have been tribal conflicts, and there may have been tribal marriages. The DNA record is silent about land claims, but is that really the point?
What happened to Native Americans when European settlers arrived was as tragic as what happened to the Celtic people when the Slavs and Huns invaded Celtic lands just 800 years before the arrival in North America of Columbus. If anything, the Huns were even more brutal than Europeans were to Native North and South Americans. They also massacred entire villages. They also brought disease and pestilence.
To try and single out what happened to Native Americans as somehow uniquely brutal or unusually evil is ludicrous on its face. It doesn’t make what happened to Native Americans morally right to point out that the entire history of human civilization is replete with examples of deadly contact between civilizations. But it explains it in a way that needs to be understood by everyone — right, left, white, and Native American.
In fact, these conflicts have been part of the march of human progress for tens of thousands of years. Native Americans may mourn their lost lands and be enraged by the killing of so many of their people, but for them to ignore the benefits of contact with Europeans is to ignore reality. There has never been an equal two-way exchange when civilizations clash. White Europeans won out because, as author Jared Diamond points out, they had the “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and Native peoples did not. This didn’t make white society better — only stronger.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century philosopher, saw Native Americans as “Noble Savages” — uncorrupted by anything considered “modern. It’s a racist view of Native Americans but it’s still quite popular among many on the left.
“He believed the original ‘man’ was free from sin, appetite, or the concept of right and wrong, and that those deemed ‘savages’ were not brutal but noble,” explains the website The Conversation. In fact, Native Americans before Columbus lived short, brutal lives — just like white people in Europe did. They could be just as devious as any white Europeans. They could lie like white Europeans. They could kill just like white Europeans. Native Americans didn’t need white Europeans to teach them these things.
In American politics today, we don’t do nuance. If the argument can’t be reduced to 140 characters, it’s not made. But as a society, we don’t dwell on the past very much — a failing and a huge advantage given the Jekyll and Hyde nature of our history. “Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negro slaves?” asked British writer Samuel Johnson. It’s a duality that continues to bedevil us as we move further along into the 21st century.
News of the Times;
https://neonnettle.com/news/12201-msnbc-producer-quits-calls-network-cancer-that-s-dividing-americans
https://www.bitchute.com/video/TdhrDaGFvshw/
https://www.lifenews.com/2021/11/20/doctor-exposes-how-some-covid-patients-were-euthanized-instead-of-treated/
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/11/24/what-elephant-the-media-again-buries-a-hunter-biden-scandal-on-foreign-deals-during-the-biden-vice-presidency/
https://thestarnewsnetwork.com/2021/12/01/nonprofit-further-exposes-salvation-armys-wokeness-in-press-conference/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/says-cant-overturn-fraudulent-elections-results-local-2020-election-florida-just-overturned-decertified/
https://www.redvoicemedia.com/2021/11/l-a-firefighter-allegedly-does-what-most-want-to-do-wipes-butt-with-bidens-jab-mandate/
https://summit.news/2021/11/26/new-york-er-closes-as-employees-refuse-to-comply-with-vaccine-mandate/
https://spectator.org/poland-belarus-putin/
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/when_everyones_a_white_supremacist_no_one_is.html
https://www.foxnews.com/us/ryan-rogers-murder-florida-suspect
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/11/29/watch-detroit-school-superintendent-our-curriculum-is-deeply-using-critical-race-theory/
https://www.illegalaliencrimereport.com/post/illegal-alien-charged-with-raping-killing-14-year-old-girl-in-nc
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10271767/Columbia-University-engineering-graduate-student-30-stabbed-death.html
https://www.lawofficer.com/las-vegas-woman-jailed-after-allegedly-threatening-to-shoot-some-white-people-with-rifle/
Before?
Tracking?
I missed that partial lunar eclipse last Friday morning, which was said to be the longest partial eclipse in almost 700 years.
To be completely honest, I'm only partially disappointed.
*.*
A young miss was pacing through her living room waiting for her new beau to arrive. Just then a young man driving a brand new red Corvette was parking in front of the house.
The girl's father glanced out the window at the same time. His chin dropped two feet and his pupils doubled in size. He turned to his daughter and asked, "What does your boyfriend do?"
She replied, "He inherits."
*.*
German Health Minister Jens Spahn has announced his aggressive plan to fight Covid, which will include gathering all the unvaccinated people and putting them in special secured areas where they won't bother anyone.
"Ze key to fighting ze Covid ist very simple," said Spahn. "Ve must concentrate all ze filthy inferior people into special camps with very tall barbed-wire fences all around, where they will not infect us with their filthy anti-vaxx influence anymore."
Unvaccinated Germans will also be required to wear highly-visible markings on their clothing, so everyone will know to stay away from them, or turn them in if they attempt to buy food in a public market.
"Zis ist for ze good of ze German volk," continued Spahn. "Ve vill not tolerate zese disgusting unvaccinated in our presence anymore. Heil Science!"
Australia praised the move by the German Health Minister, saying it worked great for their Aboriginal subhumans.
*.*
A second cast member of "General Hospital" has been fired because they refused to get the COVID vaccine.
Boy, this is turning into a real soap opera.
*.*
According to my chocolate Advent calendar, there are only 3 days left until Christmas.
Quote of the Times;
“I’m not gonna read it at all. I’ll just sign it.” – Joe Biden signing Veterans’ Bills
Link of the Times;
https://newsrescue.com/the-undeniable-ivermectin-miracle-indias-240m-populated-largest-state-uttar-pradesh-horowitz/
Issue of the Times;
How to Evade Trackers and Tracking Dogs by Kit Arthur
Through years of working with other military professional recon soldiers, special forces, police, and counter-drug agents, I’ve found that every single one of them has the same concern no matter their skill level or area of expertise. And that concern is SERE (Survive. Escape. Resist. Evade.) As a result, I wanted to share with you a few tips on evasion and how to avoid enemy capture when you are being searched for by canines and professional trackers.
As a kid, I used to track deer through the swamp. Little did I know that what I was doing was preparing myself to be a human tracker as an adult. It wasn’t until I found myself being trained by the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) that I understood my full potential resulting from my years of practice tracking deer as a child. This led me to realize that if I could track a human… I could evade one too.
What I’m about to share with you are solid, no kidding, real tactics to evade dogs and human trackers. Almost all of these, I have used in real life. Being able to evade capture has saved my butt a few times now, but evading detection has enabled me to have a successful 13-year career as a Recon soldier.
How to Evade a Tracking Dog
Imagine that a dog sees the scent like a red fog that hovers over the ground where you just traveled. This will assist you in understanding how to evade one.
If the wind moves at 3-5 MPH (a gentle breeze) the scent will travel with the wind about 5-15 yards. A stiff wind at 20-30 MPH the scent will travel 100-200 yards off the route traveled. Anything above 30 MPH, the handler ain’t even going to try because your scent has been totally dispersed everywhere and is just plain gone.
#1 Scent Massing
Yes, you read that right. Run hard to open the gap between your pursuer and yourself. Then stop and start running in a circle. Slowly run in a spiral until the circle is approximately 50 yards in diameter. This is called scent massing. What you just did placed your scent everywhere. As the dog approaches, they just smell you in every direction. With no clear trail, the dog will simply give up. I actually did this during a training mission with a local sheriff’s department.
Thirty minutes prior to the track, the handler had been bragging about how he and his bloodhound had just completed a week-old 26-mile track. (That’s NC state requirement to be certified as a bloodhound tracking handler/dog). Not even 15 mins into the track they hit my scent mass and both just gave up. They had no clue what to do or what had happened. Needless to say, the handler was super pissed at me.
Side Note: Your scent flows off of you the hotter your body gets. That means that your head, sweat, clothing, detergent, etc. are all the scents that make up you as the target. So as soon as you can slow down, do it. Try not to sweat any more than you have to.
#2 Scent Masking
I was running rabbit – in this case, I was giving the dog and his handler something to chase/track for training purposes – for a buddy of mine who was a bloodhound handler for a neighboring county sheriff’s department (it was a different agency from the last one.) I had just finished running about a mile when it started to rain. Not thinking anything of it, I threw on my poncho, walked 25 yards in the woods, and sat down.
I watched for a hot minute while my friend and his dog walked by me about 3 or 4 times. Finally, he called me on the phone and asked where I was. I stood up and scared the crap out of him. When I told him what I had done, he explained to me that I had just taken my scent and put it into a ziplock bag. I totally just scent-masked myself.
Side note: If you can smell someone without the aid of a dog, then you’re within 25 yards of them. (I figured this out also while stalking deer in the swamps of NC.)
Whenever you find yourself evading a dog, be sure to use 2 or more tactics to throw the dog off your trail. Unfortunately, what works for a dog, will not work for a human tracker.
How to Evade a Human Tracker
#1 Sweeping Dirt
We were on the run. My less experienced team member had gotten too close to the target that we were tasked with observing. Their boxer indicated on us – he noticed something or someone (us) was in the bushes and alerted his owner that something was up. Now they were in pursuit. They had deployed about 10 guys on four-wheelers and dirt bikes (I don’t know the actual number – I’m guessing based on the sounds that I heard.) Either way, men armed with AK-47s and God knows what else were looking for us.
We had to cross a path to get to the woods which was our only way out. The problem was that the path was all sand. Which made it perfect for leaving “sign” (sign is anything that proves a human was there. This could be anything from a thread of clothing, a broken branch at shoulder height, a boot print in the dirt, etc.)
Just as the last of the ATVs passed us, we sprinted across the path. I turned and looked back and realized that one of us left a beautiful boot print right on the path! I quickly grabbed a small branch that had fallen off of a pine tree. It still had some of the needles attached. I swept it back and forth on the ground until you couldn’t see the print any longer. Turning, I ran into the woods just before another ATV crept past us. The driver was intently looking at the path for sign, but was moving too fast and drove right over where I had just swept the dirt. As a result, he covered the mark up nicely with a tire track.
You can do this with any stick but one that has its leaves on it still will work even better. Just don’t break it off a tree (this will leave sign. Pick a stick from off the ground! – Also be sure to put it back right where you found it.)
You can also do this with your hands or a shirt if you need to. Unfortunately, it will not work on a trained human tracker. A professional and experienced human tracker is trained to pick up on tricks like that and will recognize that tactic. In my SERE course, I teach individuals counter-tracking tactics that you can use against a professional. However, it is very rare to have a human tracker and a trained track dog at the same time. There are only a select few in the world who are both a canine handler and a tracker. However, I will tell you that it has worked so many times for me that I literally cannot remember them all.
In all but 2 cases I used this very tactic to avoid detection. My targets never even knew I had ever been there. In the story above, covering our sign saved mine and two other guys’ lives.
#2 Crossing Water
If you come across moving water (think a creek or a small river) you can use this to throw off your tracker. It will not work for a tracking dog, but as you will see, I have a trick for that too. Remember that your footprint will leave a nice sign for a tracker to follow. Furthermore, it tells a dog handler that they are on the right track. You can use that to your advantage by leaving them one or two.
Don’t make it too obvious. Also if you’re able to make it to the far side of the waterway then that will work even better at convincing them that you did in fact cross.
Caution: don’t walk backwards in your own tracks! A tracker will see right through that and realize what you did. Instead, just cross the waterway. Run about 500 yards then scent mass the area. You want to be far enough to convince those tracking you that you’re not going to use the waterway. After scent massing the area, scent-mask your body with a poncho. Then walk at an angle back to the waterway. Be careful not to leave any sign!
When you reach the water, you want to be about 100 yards or more downstream from where you first crossed. Slowly take your time until you can find a spot to get into the water without leaving sign and walk downstream for about 1,000 yards. When you get out of the water, be sure to leave no sign and also conduct another scent massing. Then do a scent change. By changing scent you’ll have to roll in something else that smells different. Fecal matter is ideal but dirt will work if you’ve got nothing more pungent to work with. Or if happen to run across an extra set of clothing that doesn’t smell like you, but that is unlikely. (Be careful not to leave sign…Don’t disturb the nearby leaves or trees) and be on your way.
Side Note: When you’re walking in the water (again think of a creek), you’re disturbing the water bed. This causes debris to float in the water. Thus if you travel upstream, you’re sending debris downstream towards the people tracking you. But, by traveling downstream the water will carry the debris with you as you walk.
The moving water will quickly cover up your footprint and thus leave no sign for the tracker to follow. Basically, you just disappeared, and by the time the tracker figures it out…it’s too late. The scent massing and masking are just in case they are working with a tracking dog too. A real tracking team will do that, but it is very rare.
Side Note: If you do leave a track on the creek bed, just use the sweeping dirt method and then splash some water over it. That should dissolve the track efficiently enough.
In conclusion, I want to teach you two other things.
Number 1: When evading be sure to use as many of these tactics as you can.
If you want to head north to your extraction point, then run south. Use whatever applicable tactic you can and then run east for 200-300 yards and deploy a different tactic. Then go south again for another 100-200 yards and deploy another. Head east again and deploy yet another anti-tracking tactic.
Only after you’re sure that you have thrown them off your trail can you start heading north to your extraction point. While the distances are really up to you, the idea is to take them in the opposite direction of where you’re really trying to go.
This leads me to point number 2: Have a plan for extraction! No matter whether you’re on a mission or just trying to live through SHFT in your own home, have a plan to get out fast. As we use to say in Recon, (Have one foot out the door and another on a banana peel).
When you get to your extraction point have a vehicle waiting for you. It doesn’t matter if you stage one prior or if you call in a buddy via radio to come and get you. You need a way to get out of the area fast. This totally removes you and any traceable sign out of the hands of the people tracking you.
I have personally seen a simple car pickup help the runner, both in cases where I was tracking a guy and where I was being tracked. In every one of these cases, the runner got away.
News of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/desantis-blasts-media-waukesha-attack-suspect-anti-white-animus-intentional-act-video/
https://nypost.com/2021/12/01/george-soros-has-blood-on-his-hands-for-the-rise-in-killings-nationwide/
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/sheriff-announces-criminal-charges-against-election-commission/
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/11/29/the-biden-grift-influence-machine-is-even-worse-than-you-thought-n1537250
https://anti-empire.com/australia-loads-up-aborigines-on-army-trucks-dumps-them-in-isolation-camps/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/covid-19-vaccines-not-prevent-transmission-disease-judge-doughtys-ruling-destroys-bidens-vax-mandates/
https://nationalvanguard.org/2017/12/the-jewish-family-behind-the-opioid-addiction-crisis-in-north-america/
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/george-floyds-nephew-arrested-for-intimidation-of-kyle-rittenhouse-jurors/
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/11/what-chinese-colonialism-looks-europe-daniel-greenfield/
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/uganda-international-airport-china-default-debt-repayment-1881674-2021-11-28
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/common-core-fail-new-national-analysis-finds-massive-drop-in-reading-and-math-scores-of-teenagers/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/11/24/big-three-u-s-automakers-agree-to-not-mandate-vaccines-for-uaw-union-members/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democrats-blocking-senate-bill-bans-imports-made-uyghur-slave-labor
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-11-23-flight-attendants-bad-reactions-to-covid19-vaccine.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/former-pro-calls-investigation-after-another-soccer-player-suddenly-collapses
To be completely honest, I'm only partially disappointed.
*.*
A young miss was pacing through her living room waiting for her new beau to arrive. Just then a young man driving a brand new red Corvette was parking in front of the house.
The girl's father glanced out the window at the same time. His chin dropped two feet and his pupils doubled in size. He turned to his daughter and asked, "What does your boyfriend do?"
She replied, "He inherits."
*.*
German Health Minister Jens Spahn has announced his aggressive plan to fight Covid, which will include gathering all the unvaccinated people and putting them in special secured areas where they won't bother anyone.
"Ze key to fighting ze Covid ist very simple," said Spahn. "Ve must concentrate all ze filthy inferior people into special camps with very tall barbed-wire fences all around, where they will not infect us with their filthy anti-vaxx influence anymore."
Unvaccinated Germans will also be required to wear highly-visible markings on their clothing, so everyone will know to stay away from them, or turn them in if they attempt to buy food in a public market.
"Zis ist for ze good of ze German volk," continued Spahn. "Ve vill not tolerate zese disgusting unvaccinated in our presence anymore. Heil Science!"
Australia praised the move by the German Health Minister, saying it worked great for their Aboriginal subhumans.
*.*
A second cast member of "General Hospital" has been fired because they refused to get the COVID vaccine.
Boy, this is turning into a real soap opera.
*.*
According to my chocolate Advent calendar, there are only 3 days left until Christmas.
Quote of the Times;
“I’m not gonna read it at all. I’ll just sign it.” – Joe Biden signing Veterans’ Bills
Link of the Times;
https://newsrescue.com/the-undeniable-ivermectin-miracle-indias-240m-populated-largest-state-uttar-pradesh-horowitz/
Issue of the Times;
How to Evade Trackers and Tracking Dogs by Kit Arthur
Through years of working with other military professional recon soldiers, special forces, police, and counter-drug agents, I’ve found that every single one of them has the same concern no matter their skill level or area of expertise. And that concern is SERE (Survive. Escape. Resist. Evade.) As a result, I wanted to share with you a few tips on evasion and how to avoid enemy capture when you are being searched for by canines and professional trackers.
As a kid, I used to track deer through the swamp. Little did I know that what I was doing was preparing myself to be a human tracker as an adult. It wasn’t until I found myself being trained by the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) that I understood my full potential resulting from my years of practice tracking deer as a child. This led me to realize that if I could track a human… I could evade one too.
What I’m about to share with you are solid, no kidding, real tactics to evade dogs and human trackers. Almost all of these, I have used in real life. Being able to evade capture has saved my butt a few times now, but evading detection has enabled me to have a successful 13-year career as a Recon soldier.
How to Evade a Tracking Dog
Imagine that a dog sees the scent like a red fog that hovers over the ground where you just traveled. This will assist you in understanding how to evade one.
If the wind moves at 3-5 MPH (a gentle breeze) the scent will travel with the wind about 5-15 yards. A stiff wind at 20-30 MPH the scent will travel 100-200 yards off the route traveled. Anything above 30 MPH, the handler ain’t even going to try because your scent has been totally dispersed everywhere and is just plain gone.
#1 Scent Massing
Yes, you read that right. Run hard to open the gap between your pursuer and yourself. Then stop and start running in a circle. Slowly run in a spiral until the circle is approximately 50 yards in diameter. This is called scent massing. What you just did placed your scent everywhere. As the dog approaches, they just smell you in every direction. With no clear trail, the dog will simply give up. I actually did this during a training mission with a local sheriff’s department.
Thirty minutes prior to the track, the handler had been bragging about how he and his bloodhound had just completed a week-old 26-mile track. (That’s NC state requirement to be certified as a bloodhound tracking handler/dog). Not even 15 mins into the track they hit my scent mass and both just gave up. They had no clue what to do or what had happened. Needless to say, the handler was super pissed at me.
Side Note: Your scent flows off of you the hotter your body gets. That means that your head, sweat, clothing, detergent, etc. are all the scents that make up you as the target. So as soon as you can slow down, do it. Try not to sweat any more than you have to.
#2 Scent Masking
I was running rabbit – in this case, I was giving the dog and his handler something to chase/track for training purposes – for a buddy of mine who was a bloodhound handler for a neighboring county sheriff’s department (it was a different agency from the last one.) I had just finished running about a mile when it started to rain. Not thinking anything of it, I threw on my poncho, walked 25 yards in the woods, and sat down.
I watched for a hot minute while my friend and his dog walked by me about 3 or 4 times. Finally, he called me on the phone and asked where I was. I stood up and scared the crap out of him. When I told him what I had done, he explained to me that I had just taken my scent and put it into a ziplock bag. I totally just scent-masked myself.
Side note: If you can smell someone without the aid of a dog, then you’re within 25 yards of them. (I figured this out also while stalking deer in the swamps of NC.)
Whenever you find yourself evading a dog, be sure to use 2 or more tactics to throw the dog off your trail. Unfortunately, what works for a dog, will not work for a human tracker.
How to Evade a Human Tracker
#1 Sweeping Dirt
We were on the run. My less experienced team member had gotten too close to the target that we were tasked with observing. Their boxer indicated on us – he noticed something or someone (us) was in the bushes and alerted his owner that something was up. Now they were in pursuit. They had deployed about 10 guys on four-wheelers and dirt bikes (I don’t know the actual number – I’m guessing based on the sounds that I heard.) Either way, men armed with AK-47s and God knows what else were looking for us.
We had to cross a path to get to the woods which was our only way out. The problem was that the path was all sand. Which made it perfect for leaving “sign” (sign is anything that proves a human was there. This could be anything from a thread of clothing, a broken branch at shoulder height, a boot print in the dirt, etc.)
Just as the last of the ATVs passed us, we sprinted across the path. I turned and looked back and realized that one of us left a beautiful boot print right on the path! I quickly grabbed a small branch that had fallen off of a pine tree. It still had some of the needles attached. I swept it back and forth on the ground until you couldn’t see the print any longer. Turning, I ran into the woods just before another ATV crept past us. The driver was intently looking at the path for sign, but was moving too fast and drove right over where I had just swept the dirt. As a result, he covered the mark up nicely with a tire track.
You can do this with any stick but one that has its leaves on it still will work even better. Just don’t break it off a tree (this will leave sign. Pick a stick from off the ground! – Also be sure to put it back right where you found it.)
You can also do this with your hands or a shirt if you need to. Unfortunately, it will not work on a trained human tracker. A professional and experienced human tracker is trained to pick up on tricks like that and will recognize that tactic. In my SERE course, I teach individuals counter-tracking tactics that you can use against a professional. However, it is very rare to have a human tracker and a trained track dog at the same time. There are only a select few in the world who are both a canine handler and a tracker. However, I will tell you that it has worked so many times for me that I literally cannot remember them all.
In all but 2 cases I used this very tactic to avoid detection. My targets never even knew I had ever been there. In the story above, covering our sign saved mine and two other guys’ lives.
#2 Crossing Water
If you come across moving water (think a creek or a small river) you can use this to throw off your tracker. It will not work for a tracking dog, but as you will see, I have a trick for that too. Remember that your footprint will leave a nice sign for a tracker to follow. Furthermore, it tells a dog handler that they are on the right track. You can use that to your advantage by leaving them one or two.
Don’t make it too obvious. Also if you’re able to make it to the far side of the waterway then that will work even better at convincing them that you did in fact cross.
Caution: don’t walk backwards in your own tracks! A tracker will see right through that and realize what you did. Instead, just cross the waterway. Run about 500 yards then scent mass the area. You want to be far enough to convince those tracking you that you’re not going to use the waterway. After scent massing the area, scent-mask your body with a poncho. Then walk at an angle back to the waterway. Be careful not to leave any sign!
When you reach the water, you want to be about 100 yards or more downstream from where you first crossed. Slowly take your time until you can find a spot to get into the water without leaving sign and walk downstream for about 1,000 yards. When you get out of the water, be sure to leave no sign and also conduct another scent massing. Then do a scent change. By changing scent you’ll have to roll in something else that smells different. Fecal matter is ideal but dirt will work if you’ve got nothing more pungent to work with. Or if happen to run across an extra set of clothing that doesn’t smell like you, but that is unlikely. (Be careful not to leave sign…Don’t disturb the nearby leaves or trees) and be on your way.
Side Note: When you’re walking in the water (again think of a creek), you’re disturbing the water bed. This causes debris to float in the water. Thus if you travel upstream, you’re sending debris downstream towards the people tracking you. But, by traveling downstream the water will carry the debris with you as you walk.
The moving water will quickly cover up your footprint and thus leave no sign for the tracker to follow. Basically, you just disappeared, and by the time the tracker figures it out…it’s too late. The scent massing and masking are just in case they are working with a tracking dog too. A real tracking team will do that, but it is very rare.
Side Note: If you do leave a track on the creek bed, just use the sweeping dirt method and then splash some water over it. That should dissolve the track efficiently enough.
In conclusion, I want to teach you two other things.
Number 1: When evading be sure to use as many of these tactics as you can.
If you want to head north to your extraction point, then run south. Use whatever applicable tactic you can and then run east for 200-300 yards and deploy a different tactic. Then go south again for another 100-200 yards and deploy another. Head east again and deploy yet another anti-tracking tactic.
Only after you’re sure that you have thrown them off your trail can you start heading north to your extraction point. While the distances are really up to you, the idea is to take them in the opposite direction of where you’re really trying to go.
This leads me to point number 2: Have a plan for extraction! No matter whether you’re on a mission or just trying to live through SHFT in your own home, have a plan to get out fast. As we use to say in Recon, (Have one foot out the door and another on a banana peel).
When you get to your extraction point have a vehicle waiting for you. It doesn’t matter if you stage one prior or if you call in a buddy via radio to come and get you. You need a way to get out of the area fast. This totally removes you and any traceable sign out of the hands of the people tracking you.
I have personally seen a simple car pickup help the runner, both in cases where I was tracking a guy and where I was being tracked. In every one of these cases, the runner got away.
News of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/desantis-blasts-media-waukesha-attack-suspect-anti-white-animus-intentional-act-video/
https://nypost.com/2021/12/01/george-soros-has-blood-on-his-hands-for-the-rise-in-killings-nationwide/
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/sheriff-announces-criminal-charges-against-election-commission/
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/11/29/the-biden-grift-influence-machine-is-even-worse-than-you-thought-n1537250
https://anti-empire.com/australia-loads-up-aborigines-on-army-trucks-dumps-them-in-isolation-camps/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/covid-19-vaccines-not-prevent-transmission-disease-judge-doughtys-ruling-destroys-bidens-vax-mandates/
https://nationalvanguard.org/2017/12/the-jewish-family-behind-the-opioid-addiction-crisis-in-north-america/
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/george-floyds-nephew-arrested-for-intimidation-of-kyle-rittenhouse-jurors/
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/11/what-chinese-colonialism-looks-europe-daniel-greenfield/
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/uganda-international-airport-china-default-debt-repayment-1881674-2021-11-28
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/common-core-fail-new-national-analysis-finds-massive-drop-in-reading-and-math-scores-of-teenagers/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/11/24/big-three-u-s-automakers-agree-to-not-mandate-vaccines-for-uaw-union-members/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democrats-blocking-senate-bill-bans-imports-made-uyghur-slave-labor
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-11-23-flight-attendants-bad-reactions-to-covid19-vaccine.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/former-pro-calls-investigation-after-another-soccer-player-suddenly-collapses
Argue?
I wanted to marry an English teacher when she got out of jail.
But you just can't end a sentence with a proposition.
*.*
When a group of tourists visited a crocodile farm, the owner of the place launched a daring proposal;
"Whoever dares to jump, swim to shore and survive, I will give 1 million dollars."
Nobody dared to move, suddenly a man jumped into the water and desperately swam towards the shore while he was chased by all the crocodiles.
With great luck he arrived, taking the admiration of everyone in the place, then the owner announced; "We have a brave winner."
After collecting their reward, the couple returned to the hotel, upon arrival, the manager told him; he was very brave to jump, then the man said; "I didn't jump, someone pushed me!"
The wife smiled.
*.*
Thousands gathered outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology with faces of anxious anticipation over the weekend, as rumors had been circulating that a new COVID-19 variant would soon be named. The hopeful pilgrims' hours of waiting were not in vain. Cheers erupted as white smoke began pouring out of the chimney early Sunday morning, signaling the creation and naming of a new COVID-19 variant.
"It was a lively debate," said one source from inside the Wuhan lab. "Yuhang suggested we just keep following the Greek alphabet and name it Xi. We haven't heard from him in a few days, come to think of it."
"Nu" was also floated as a possibility, but scientists wanted to avoid the stigma of being associated with nu-metal, generally acknowledged as the worst musical genre on the planet. One guy kept wanting to call it "The One-Der Variant" but this was confusing as everyone kept pronouncing it as Oh-NEE-der instead of Wonder. Finally, there was a last-ditch effort to name it the Trump variant, but this was finally defeated in favor of the safer "Omicron variant" according to sources within the lab.
After the celebration died down, the pilgrims shuffled away, their faces full of cheer. But they'll be back in a few weeks for the next one.
*.*
A visitor to a certain college paused to admire the new Hemingway Hall that had been built on campus.
"It's a pleasure to see a building named for Ernest Hemingway," he said.
"Actually," said his guide, "it's named for Joshua Hemingway. No relation."
The visitor was astonished. "Was Joshua Hemingway a writer, also?"
"Yes, indeed," said his guide. "He wrote a massive check."
*.*
Top 5 Reasons that TSA Agent Creeps You Out:
Well, there's that "I Love Cavity Searches" t-shirt he's wearing.
Actual name on his name tag: Grabby Cop-A-Feel.
Greets you with, "OK, next victim."
He just offered to carry you through the metal detector.
Just smelled the shoes you took off.
Quote of the Times;
“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear.” – Reagan
Link of the Times;
https://chinanever.com/
Issue of the Times;
How to Argue and How This Ends by Eugyppius
You cannot discuss heavily propagandized matters, such as Corona, in the same way you discuss other, more ordinary things. Months and months of pervasive media messaging have polluted everybody’s thoughts and opinions. If you eavesdrop on ordinary people discussing propaganda topics like Corona, you’ll realize that their conversations involve little more than the exchange of pre-digested axioms they have absorbed from the press mythology. They do not have thoughts or ideas so much as a bland and vacuous collection of talking points, which work primarily at the level of emotion. Right now, these talking points go something like this: Corona is extremely dangerous and if you contract it you will likely die; vaccines are absurdly safe and they are the only thing that can save you.
When dealing with adherents of this propaganda, it is generally a mistake to make forthright arguments, with clear theses and thorough citations. Perhaps if you’re speaking to someone who trusts you and your judgement absolutely, this can work, but otherwise it is precisely the wrong thing to do. This is not because your views are not right or can’t be defended. Rather, it’s because the press has not only fed people their fill of lies and omissions and sophistries; it has also told them many stories about the sad, ignorant, dangerous thought criminals and dissidents lurking around every corner. These villainous Corona-deniers are almost as dangerous as the virus itself. Indeed, through their ignorance, they facilitate its spread. Any time credulous people sense they are speaking to one of these types, an iron gate will fall in their minds and they will discount everything you say, however well-reasoned, as the ravings of a dangerous virus criminal. They will think: This is one of those horrible anti-vaxxing Covid-denying conspiracy lunatics I’ve heard about. Whatever he says is a lie, and it is scary how convincing he sounds. What a horrible person.
These mental defenses are formidable, and they make most reasonable discussion impossible. There are, however, various strategies you can deploy against them.
You can try to circumvent this security system and slip in moments of skepticism or incredulity that will cause your interlocutors to think twice about some of the ridiculous things they believe. Call this Sowing Doubt. The other strategy, when you are speaking before an audience and the person you’re addressing enjoys some status or is overconfident, is to mock their stupid beliefs and hold them forth as an object of pitiable ignorance. This won’t convince them, but if you do it with the right mix of humor and aggression, it will amuse others and show them how absurd many orthodox positions are. It will also cause any other true believers in the audience to think twice before airing their views in similar society. Call this Ridicule. If reasoned argument is the middle path, Sowing Doubt is a lighter touch, while Ridicule is a much heavier one. Both have their place.
Sowing Doubt is for private settings, with people who don’t really know the full extent of your views on Corona, or vaccines, or anything else. In the best case, they’ll think you’re an ordinary consumer of press talking points like them. You don’t want to trip any Narrative Security System alarms, so you should avoid advancing any positive theses or definite arguments. Instead, you get them to talk. When they begin to rehearse their cavalcade of orthodoxies, complete with emotional affirmation, you express a sharp, slightly bemused skepticism. Your basic line should be: “Wow. You really believe that?” A common thing, is that they’ll respond with something like: “Well yes, what do you think?” Here it is essential to keep everything in negative, incredulous territory. Avoid positive statements of your own beliefs. I have found that it is especially powerful to cast doubt on the efficacy of policy interventions, because many true believers think their governments aren’t doing enough anyway and are personally bewildered at the persistence of the virus. When they start talking about the need to vaccinate children, your response should be: “I mean, you really think that will stop the pandemic? All the deer have it.” When they start talking about how much they want to get quadruple boostered, you say: “But I mean, it didn’t work the first two times, right?”
It is harder to provide straightforward advice about Ridicule. This should only be your approach when there is a sympathetic audience, and if the target is equal or higher to you in social position. It is also useful on social media, where many of my friends have turned it into an art form, particularly against journalists and pundits. There are ways to proceed more gently, and ways to be overtly cruel. Given that many of the policies we oppose are destructive and will literally kill people, you should not avoid harshness and mockery if the circumstances call for it. The best opening, is if you can catch your adversary in some obviously identifiable error or untruth. This is not very hard, as the official narrative is peppered with arrant nonsense that overconfident people just blindly repeat all the time. As with Sowing Doubt, the most effective approach will be skepticism and negativity. Save reasonable discussion for reasonable people.
While it’s a mistake to advance any kind of clearly stated thesis, you should have a loose model of what you want to work towards in the back of your head. I suggest something like this: Lockdowns, mass testing, and all the rest of mass containment—even if you believe they work—buy time only. We were buying time because it was believed the vaccines would provide effective and long-lasting immunity. The theory was that delaying cases would prevent infections. That theory is now obviously wrong. The vaccines slowed the virus down at the beginning, and that’s over now. Vaccination won’t eradicate Corona. Closures won’t either. It is time for governments to develop a long-term strategy for dealing with this virus, and that strategy has to be the same as our strategy for influenza. That strategy is nothing.
I have formulated this thesis to sidestep all the arguments about how dangerous the vaccines might be, and about how dangerous or not Corona might be, and how destructive or not lockdowns might be. Media messaging has been heaviest of all on the matter of risk, and for most people, the massive risk of Corona and the boundless safety of the vaccines are religious doctrines. These are very hard battles to fight.
The goal of these polemical approaches cannot be to win anyone over, exactly. Rather, we want to increase the intellectual resistance that the central tenets of Corona propaganda face in everyday society. There aren’t yet that many of us, but the media line is laughable and extremely easy to falsify. Lockdowns and extended social isolation are one of the reasons it has been able to succeed as long as it has.
I concluded Stupid and Evil in Equal Measure by writing that nobody knows how to stop the iterative bureaucratic processes driving Corona hysteria and mass vaccination. Some of you nevertheless asked how it might stop, and I have spent the past few days thinking about that.
To begin with, I think no small part of the over-reaction to Corona was driven by personal fear, both among our elite and within our bureaucracies. This fear arises, in part, from an informal knowledge among key actors that SARS-2 was the product of virological tinkering in a Wuhan laboratory. There are two processes, which are at every moment working to change this basic dynamic by either dampening or redirecting the fears of the bureaucrats.
The first of these, is the simple fact that more and more of them will be infected in the coming months. After this winter, it is probable that a majority of them will have had it. Because the risk of Corona is generally overstated, these direct experiences will falsify prevailing narratives in their own minds. The way the disease is portrayed in the press and in statements by politicians will gradually be brought back to earth, to reflect the lived experiences of the people responsible for this messaging. In all of our countries, this process is already underway. In the United Kingdom, officials are contemplating a complete rollback of Corona containment. In Germany, skyrocketing case numbers can only intermittently seize headlines anymore. Here it also helps that respiratory viruses are highly seasonal and therefore repetitive. This makes saturation news coverage, extending across more than one or two virus seasons, increasingly tedious. It is why, for example, the press hardly ever bothered about seasonal influenza outbreaks.
The other process is much less hopeful, but probably more potent. It is the sword of vaccine injuries. Many innocent, ordinary people will fall victim to these, but so will the bureaucrats and politicians. I do not know how many cases like Gavin Newsom it will take for this to matter, but the limit is out there somewhere. Remember that the leading vaccinators in government and the press are all true believers. They will be the first to triple vaccinate themselves and double vaccinate their children, and very soon a nontrivial portion of them will develop very personal reasons to doubt the prudence of the policies they advocate.
A final point, is that mass vaccination, like mass containment, is a losing policy for elected officials. They can win the fanatics over to their side for a time, by adopting harsh, eradicationist measures. They cannot, however, actually deliver on eradicating SARS-2, because eradication is impossible. The result is that before long they lose their hardline supporters, who blame them for the persistence of the virus, all while their destructive extremist policies alienate more reasonable people as well. At the height of the lockdown last winter, it was amusing to read Twitter replies to the profoundly stupid yet opportunistic Bavarian governor, Markus Söder, who from the beginning positioned himself as Angela Merkel’s ally in locking down harder and longer than anybody else. There were people like me yelling at him, and then legions of Corona enthusiasts yelling at him, and for months nobody approved of anything he did. This is the logic of containment, and it is all the time driving a wedge between the political and the bureaucratic sides of government.
I think, in the end, these natural processes will destroy mass containment and mass vaccination as serious avenues for policy, and the bureaucracy will disengage. Our countries are no longer nearly as coordinated as they were last year. The vaccines were supposed to end this, and the result is that there is no longer a single script guiding policy everywhere. As some countries start to break ranks, they will take others with them, until this is mostly forgotten.
News of the Times;
https://rescue.substack.com/p/a-judge-stands-up-to-a-hospital-step
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/11/the-us-navy-is-rusting-away/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/montana-governor-signs-law-prohibiting-enforcement-federal-gun-bans-protect-constituents-bidens-attack-second-amendment/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/survey-34-of-white-college-applicants-lied-about-their-race-to-improve-chances-of-getting-accepted/
https://resistthemainstream.org/17-year-old-girl-dies-of-cardiac-arrest-weeks-after-receiving-pfizer-covid-vaccine/
https://www.independentsentinel.com/breaking-judge-ends-masks-other-mandates-in-mo-for-good/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/11/23/report-nancy-pelosi-joining-the-pro-desantis-migration-and-purchasing-a-home-in-the-free-state-of-florida/
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/three-foreign-billionaires-finance-dem-dark-money-daniel-greenfield/
https://nypost.com/2021/11/28/chinese-titan-lavished-hunter-biden-with-3-carat-gem-offer-of-30-million/
https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/11/28/just-the-worst-people-n2599726
https://www.dailywire.com/news/126-ex-generals-admirals-warn-about-biden-u-s-in-deep-peril-health-a-concern-7-red-flags-emerging
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/global_warming_scaremongers_refuted_as_arctic_ice_growing_on_track_to_be_the_most_ice_in_2_decades.html
https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/american-heart-association-journal-publishes-data-that-uk-medical-doctor-claims-are-proof-that-covid-19-vaccines-are-murder/
https://resistthemainstream.org/florida-reports-lowest-daily-covid-19-cases-per-capita-in-us/
https://thegoldwater.com/news/38882-Georgetown-Professor-s-Loxism-Says-White-Men-Should-Be-Fed-To-Swine-Castrated
But you just can't end a sentence with a proposition.
*.*
When a group of tourists visited a crocodile farm, the owner of the place launched a daring proposal;
"Whoever dares to jump, swim to shore and survive, I will give 1 million dollars."
Nobody dared to move, suddenly a man jumped into the water and desperately swam towards the shore while he was chased by all the crocodiles.
With great luck he arrived, taking the admiration of everyone in the place, then the owner announced; "We have a brave winner."
After collecting their reward, the couple returned to the hotel, upon arrival, the manager told him; he was very brave to jump, then the man said; "I didn't jump, someone pushed me!"
The wife smiled.
*.*
Thousands gathered outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology with faces of anxious anticipation over the weekend, as rumors had been circulating that a new COVID-19 variant would soon be named. The hopeful pilgrims' hours of waiting were not in vain. Cheers erupted as white smoke began pouring out of the chimney early Sunday morning, signaling the creation and naming of a new COVID-19 variant.
"It was a lively debate," said one source from inside the Wuhan lab. "Yuhang suggested we just keep following the Greek alphabet and name it Xi. We haven't heard from him in a few days, come to think of it."
"Nu" was also floated as a possibility, but scientists wanted to avoid the stigma of being associated with nu-metal, generally acknowledged as the worst musical genre on the planet. One guy kept wanting to call it "The One-Der Variant" but this was confusing as everyone kept pronouncing it as Oh-NEE-der instead of Wonder. Finally, there was a last-ditch effort to name it the Trump variant, but this was finally defeated in favor of the safer "Omicron variant" according to sources within the lab.
After the celebration died down, the pilgrims shuffled away, their faces full of cheer. But they'll be back in a few weeks for the next one.
*.*
A visitor to a certain college paused to admire the new Hemingway Hall that had been built on campus.
"It's a pleasure to see a building named for Ernest Hemingway," he said.
"Actually," said his guide, "it's named for Joshua Hemingway. No relation."
The visitor was astonished. "Was Joshua Hemingway a writer, also?"
"Yes, indeed," said his guide. "He wrote a massive check."
*.*
Top 5 Reasons that TSA Agent Creeps You Out:
Well, there's that "I Love Cavity Searches" t-shirt he's wearing.
Actual name on his name tag: Grabby Cop-A-Feel.
Greets you with, "OK, next victim."
He just offered to carry you through the metal detector.
Just smelled the shoes you took off.
Quote of the Times;
“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear.” – Reagan
Link of the Times;
https://chinanever.com/
Issue of the Times;
How to Argue and How This Ends by Eugyppius
You cannot discuss heavily propagandized matters, such as Corona, in the same way you discuss other, more ordinary things. Months and months of pervasive media messaging have polluted everybody’s thoughts and opinions. If you eavesdrop on ordinary people discussing propaganda topics like Corona, you’ll realize that their conversations involve little more than the exchange of pre-digested axioms they have absorbed from the press mythology. They do not have thoughts or ideas so much as a bland and vacuous collection of talking points, which work primarily at the level of emotion. Right now, these talking points go something like this: Corona is extremely dangerous and if you contract it you will likely die; vaccines are absurdly safe and they are the only thing that can save you.
When dealing with adherents of this propaganda, it is generally a mistake to make forthright arguments, with clear theses and thorough citations. Perhaps if you’re speaking to someone who trusts you and your judgement absolutely, this can work, but otherwise it is precisely the wrong thing to do. This is not because your views are not right or can’t be defended. Rather, it’s because the press has not only fed people their fill of lies and omissions and sophistries; it has also told them many stories about the sad, ignorant, dangerous thought criminals and dissidents lurking around every corner. These villainous Corona-deniers are almost as dangerous as the virus itself. Indeed, through their ignorance, they facilitate its spread. Any time credulous people sense they are speaking to one of these types, an iron gate will fall in their minds and they will discount everything you say, however well-reasoned, as the ravings of a dangerous virus criminal. They will think: This is one of those horrible anti-vaxxing Covid-denying conspiracy lunatics I’ve heard about. Whatever he says is a lie, and it is scary how convincing he sounds. What a horrible person.
These mental defenses are formidable, and they make most reasonable discussion impossible. There are, however, various strategies you can deploy against them.
You can try to circumvent this security system and slip in moments of skepticism or incredulity that will cause your interlocutors to think twice about some of the ridiculous things they believe. Call this Sowing Doubt. The other strategy, when you are speaking before an audience and the person you’re addressing enjoys some status or is overconfident, is to mock their stupid beliefs and hold them forth as an object of pitiable ignorance. This won’t convince them, but if you do it with the right mix of humor and aggression, it will amuse others and show them how absurd many orthodox positions are. It will also cause any other true believers in the audience to think twice before airing their views in similar society. Call this Ridicule. If reasoned argument is the middle path, Sowing Doubt is a lighter touch, while Ridicule is a much heavier one. Both have their place.
Sowing Doubt is for private settings, with people who don’t really know the full extent of your views on Corona, or vaccines, or anything else. In the best case, they’ll think you’re an ordinary consumer of press talking points like them. You don’t want to trip any Narrative Security System alarms, so you should avoid advancing any positive theses or definite arguments. Instead, you get them to talk. When they begin to rehearse their cavalcade of orthodoxies, complete with emotional affirmation, you express a sharp, slightly bemused skepticism. Your basic line should be: “Wow. You really believe that?” A common thing, is that they’ll respond with something like: “Well yes, what do you think?” Here it is essential to keep everything in negative, incredulous territory. Avoid positive statements of your own beliefs. I have found that it is especially powerful to cast doubt on the efficacy of policy interventions, because many true believers think their governments aren’t doing enough anyway and are personally bewildered at the persistence of the virus. When they start talking about the need to vaccinate children, your response should be: “I mean, you really think that will stop the pandemic? All the deer have it.” When they start talking about how much they want to get quadruple boostered, you say: “But I mean, it didn’t work the first two times, right?”
It is harder to provide straightforward advice about Ridicule. This should only be your approach when there is a sympathetic audience, and if the target is equal or higher to you in social position. It is also useful on social media, where many of my friends have turned it into an art form, particularly against journalists and pundits. There are ways to proceed more gently, and ways to be overtly cruel. Given that many of the policies we oppose are destructive and will literally kill people, you should not avoid harshness and mockery if the circumstances call for it. The best opening, is if you can catch your adversary in some obviously identifiable error or untruth. This is not very hard, as the official narrative is peppered with arrant nonsense that overconfident people just blindly repeat all the time. As with Sowing Doubt, the most effective approach will be skepticism and negativity. Save reasonable discussion for reasonable people.
While it’s a mistake to advance any kind of clearly stated thesis, you should have a loose model of what you want to work towards in the back of your head. I suggest something like this: Lockdowns, mass testing, and all the rest of mass containment—even if you believe they work—buy time only. We were buying time because it was believed the vaccines would provide effective and long-lasting immunity. The theory was that delaying cases would prevent infections. That theory is now obviously wrong. The vaccines slowed the virus down at the beginning, and that’s over now. Vaccination won’t eradicate Corona. Closures won’t either. It is time for governments to develop a long-term strategy for dealing with this virus, and that strategy has to be the same as our strategy for influenza. That strategy is nothing.
I have formulated this thesis to sidestep all the arguments about how dangerous the vaccines might be, and about how dangerous or not Corona might be, and how destructive or not lockdowns might be. Media messaging has been heaviest of all on the matter of risk, and for most people, the massive risk of Corona and the boundless safety of the vaccines are religious doctrines. These are very hard battles to fight.
The goal of these polemical approaches cannot be to win anyone over, exactly. Rather, we want to increase the intellectual resistance that the central tenets of Corona propaganda face in everyday society. There aren’t yet that many of us, but the media line is laughable and extremely easy to falsify. Lockdowns and extended social isolation are one of the reasons it has been able to succeed as long as it has.
I concluded Stupid and Evil in Equal Measure by writing that nobody knows how to stop the iterative bureaucratic processes driving Corona hysteria and mass vaccination. Some of you nevertheless asked how it might stop, and I have spent the past few days thinking about that.
To begin with, I think no small part of the over-reaction to Corona was driven by personal fear, both among our elite and within our bureaucracies. This fear arises, in part, from an informal knowledge among key actors that SARS-2 was the product of virological tinkering in a Wuhan laboratory. There are two processes, which are at every moment working to change this basic dynamic by either dampening or redirecting the fears of the bureaucrats.
The first of these, is the simple fact that more and more of them will be infected in the coming months. After this winter, it is probable that a majority of them will have had it. Because the risk of Corona is generally overstated, these direct experiences will falsify prevailing narratives in their own minds. The way the disease is portrayed in the press and in statements by politicians will gradually be brought back to earth, to reflect the lived experiences of the people responsible for this messaging. In all of our countries, this process is already underway. In the United Kingdom, officials are contemplating a complete rollback of Corona containment. In Germany, skyrocketing case numbers can only intermittently seize headlines anymore. Here it also helps that respiratory viruses are highly seasonal and therefore repetitive. This makes saturation news coverage, extending across more than one or two virus seasons, increasingly tedious. It is why, for example, the press hardly ever bothered about seasonal influenza outbreaks.
The other process is much less hopeful, but probably more potent. It is the sword of vaccine injuries. Many innocent, ordinary people will fall victim to these, but so will the bureaucrats and politicians. I do not know how many cases like Gavin Newsom it will take for this to matter, but the limit is out there somewhere. Remember that the leading vaccinators in government and the press are all true believers. They will be the first to triple vaccinate themselves and double vaccinate their children, and very soon a nontrivial portion of them will develop very personal reasons to doubt the prudence of the policies they advocate.
A final point, is that mass vaccination, like mass containment, is a losing policy for elected officials. They can win the fanatics over to their side for a time, by adopting harsh, eradicationist measures. They cannot, however, actually deliver on eradicating SARS-2, because eradication is impossible. The result is that before long they lose their hardline supporters, who blame them for the persistence of the virus, all while their destructive extremist policies alienate more reasonable people as well. At the height of the lockdown last winter, it was amusing to read Twitter replies to the profoundly stupid yet opportunistic Bavarian governor, Markus Söder, who from the beginning positioned himself as Angela Merkel’s ally in locking down harder and longer than anybody else. There were people like me yelling at him, and then legions of Corona enthusiasts yelling at him, and for months nobody approved of anything he did. This is the logic of containment, and it is all the time driving a wedge between the political and the bureaucratic sides of government.
I think, in the end, these natural processes will destroy mass containment and mass vaccination as serious avenues for policy, and the bureaucracy will disengage. Our countries are no longer nearly as coordinated as they were last year. The vaccines were supposed to end this, and the result is that there is no longer a single script guiding policy everywhere. As some countries start to break ranks, they will take others with them, until this is mostly forgotten.
News of the Times;
https://rescue.substack.com/p/a-judge-stands-up-to-a-hospital-step
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/11/the-us-navy-is-rusting-away/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/montana-governor-signs-law-prohibiting-enforcement-federal-gun-bans-protect-constituents-bidens-attack-second-amendment/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/survey-34-of-white-college-applicants-lied-about-their-race-to-improve-chances-of-getting-accepted/
https://resistthemainstream.org/17-year-old-girl-dies-of-cardiac-arrest-weeks-after-receiving-pfizer-covid-vaccine/
https://www.independentsentinel.com/breaking-judge-ends-masks-other-mandates-in-mo-for-good/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/11/23/report-nancy-pelosi-joining-the-pro-desantis-migration-and-purchasing-a-home-in-the-free-state-of-florida/
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/three-foreign-billionaires-finance-dem-dark-money-daniel-greenfield/
https://nypost.com/2021/11/28/chinese-titan-lavished-hunter-biden-with-3-carat-gem-offer-of-30-million/
https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/11/28/just-the-worst-people-n2599726
https://www.dailywire.com/news/126-ex-generals-admirals-warn-about-biden-u-s-in-deep-peril-health-a-concern-7-red-flags-emerging
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/global_warming_scaremongers_refuted_as_arctic_ice_growing_on_track_to_be_the_most_ice_in_2_decades.html
https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/american-heart-association-journal-publishes-data-that-uk-medical-doctor-claims-are-proof-that-covid-19-vaccines-are-murder/
https://resistthemainstream.org/florida-reports-lowest-daily-covid-19-cases-per-capita-in-us/
https://thegoldwater.com/news/38882-Georgetown-Professor-s-Loxism-Says-White-Men-Should-Be-Fed-To-Swine-Castrated
Drastically?
I just realized Titanic and the Sixth Sense are basically the same movie.
Icy dead People!
*.*
What nationality were Adam and Eve?
Soviet, of course.
Who else would walk around barefoot and naked, have one apple to share between them, and think they were in Paradise?
*.*
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.
When an eel bites your thigh and you bleed out and die, that’s a moray.
When you’re smashed with a jug in a South Auckland pub, that’s a Māori.
When you see a big boat tied up with a rope, that’s a mooring.
When you wake up and it’s bright because it’s no longer night, that’s the morning.
*.*
Local commuter Brandon Bongofritz was pulled over by Chicago city police this morning after being caught using the carpool lane even though he was alone in the car.
"Officer, there must be some kind of misunderstanding," said Bongofritz confidently. "My pronouns are they/them. I'm a two-spirit genderqueer couple trapped in a single body so there are actually two individuals in the car right now. I'll let you off for not understanding this once."
The officer then pulled him out of the car to see if the motorist had been drinking. "Son, I'm not sure what you're talking about, but there is definitely only one person in this automobile right now. I'm gonna have to write you a ticket."
The officer has been put on leave for re-education.
Chicago city council is now considering new carpool rules that will allow commuters with they/them pronouns to use the carpool lane.
*.*
Two friends are talking over lunch in an outdoor patio.
"So what are you doing for summer vacation?" one asks.
The other one replies, " I want to go to Italy again, like last year."
The first asks, "Wow! You went to Italy last year?"
The other answers, "No, but I wanted to."
Quote of the Times;
When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization. – Daniel Webster
Link of the Times;
https://fullmeasure.news/news/shows/amish-covid
Issue of the Times;
Italian Institute of Health Drastically Reduces Its Official COVID Death Toll Number by Paul Joseph Watson
Changes definition of COVID death from “with COVID” to “by COVID”
The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically reduced the country’s official COVID death toll number by over 97 per cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died from COVID rather than with COVID.
Italian newspaper Il Tempo reports that the Institute has revised downward the number of people who have died from COVID rather than with COVID from 130,000 to under 4,000.
“Yes, you read that right. Turns out 97.1% of deaths hitherto attributed to Covid were not due directly to Covid,” writes Toby Young.
Of the of the 130,468 deaths registered as official COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic, only 3,783 are directly attributable to the virus alone.
“All the other Italians who lost their lives had from between one and five pre-existing diseases. Of those aged over 67 who died, 7% had more than three co-morbidities, and 18% at least two,” writes Young.
“According to the Institute, 65.8% of Italians who died after being infected with Covid were ill with arterial hypertension (high blood pressure), 23.5% had dementia, 29.3% had diabetes, and 24.8% atrial fibrillation. Add to that, 17.4% had lung problems, 16.3% had had cancer in the last five years and 15.7% suffered from previous heart failures.”
The Institute’s new definition of a COVID death means that COVID has killed fewer people in Italy than (whisper it) the average bout of seasonal flu.
If a similar change were made by other national governments, the official COVID death toll would be cut by a margin of greater than 90 per cent.
Don’t expect many others to follow suit though, given that governments have invested so much of their authority in hyping the threat posed by the virus.
For example, behavioral psychologists in the UK worked with the state to deliberately “exaggerate” the threat of COVID via “unethical” and “totalitarian” methods of propaganda in order to terrify the public into mass compliance.
And it worked.
A survey conducted after the first lockdown found that the average Brit thought 100 times more people had died from COVID than the official death toll.
Now we come to understand that the official killed ‘by COVID’ and not ‘with COVID’ figure is less than one tenth what is officially reported as the total COVID death toll.
Despite the change, Italy may yet take the decision to make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory, although how such a scheme would be imposed remains unspecified.
Source: https://www.iltempo.it/attualita/2021/10/21/news/rapporto-iss-morti-covid-malattie-patologie-come-influenza-pandemia-disastro-mortalita-bechis-29134543/
News of the Times;
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10234599/Woke-Waukesha-DA-admitted-bail-reform-GUARANTEED-innocent-people-killed.html
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/11/college-democrats-of-america-imploding-as-they-embrace-cancel-culture-and-accuse-each-other-of-racism/
https://www.newsweek.com/salvation-armys-donors-withdraw-support-response-racial-wokeness-initiative-1645658
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/they-laughed-parents-leaked-audio-reveals-how-california-teachers-recruit-kids-lgbtq-clubs
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-11-10-pfizer-heart-attack-drug-children-covid-vaccines.html
https://dailytelegraph.co.nz/covid-19/crisis-in-slovenia-whistleblower-nurse-says-politicians-receive-saline-instead-of-mrna-jab/
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/8026264/scotland-newborn-deaths-probe/
https://www.wnd.com/2020/07/feds-stay-secretive-took-24-years-arrest-ghislaine-maxwell/
https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/in-wake-of-central-park-rape-politicians-are-underestimating-how-scared-women-are-in-nyc-today/
https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/fda-asks-federal-judge-to-grant-it
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/21/the-new-blue-confederacy/
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-medias-verdict-on-kyle-rittenhouse
https://thepalmierireport.com/revealed-documents-show-bill-gates-has-given-319-million-to-media-outlets/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/best-buy-crashes-margins-slide-due-organized-retail-theft
https://www.wnd.com/2021/11/america-last-biden-selling-1-3-oil-reserves-releasing-china-india/
Icy dead People!
*.*
What nationality were Adam and Eve?
Soviet, of course.
Who else would walk around barefoot and naked, have one apple to share between them, and think they were in Paradise?
*.*
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.
When an eel bites your thigh and you bleed out and die, that’s a moray.
When you’re smashed with a jug in a South Auckland pub, that’s a Māori.
When you see a big boat tied up with a rope, that’s a mooring.
When you wake up and it’s bright because it’s no longer night, that’s the morning.
*.*
Local commuter Brandon Bongofritz was pulled over by Chicago city police this morning after being caught using the carpool lane even though he was alone in the car.
"Officer, there must be some kind of misunderstanding," said Bongofritz confidently. "My pronouns are they/them. I'm a two-spirit genderqueer couple trapped in a single body so there are actually two individuals in the car right now. I'll let you off for not understanding this once."
The officer then pulled him out of the car to see if the motorist had been drinking. "Son, I'm not sure what you're talking about, but there is definitely only one person in this automobile right now. I'm gonna have to write you a ticket."
The officer has been put on leave for re-education.
Chicago city council is now considering new carpool rules that will allow commuters with they/them pronouns to use the carpool lane.
*.*
Two friends are talking over lunch in an outdoor patio.
"So what are you doing for summer vacation?" one asks.
The other one replies, " I want to go to Italy again, like last year."
The first asks, "Wow! You went to Italy last year?"
The other answers, "No, but I wanted to."
Quote of the Times;
When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization. – Daniel Webster
Link of the Times;
https://fullmeasure.news/news/shows/amish-covid
Issue of the Times;
Italian Institute of Health Drastically Reduces Its Official COVID Death Toll Number by Paul Joseph Watson
Changes definition of COVID death from “with COVID” to “by COVID”
The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically reduced the country’s official COVID death toll number by over 97 per cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died from COVID rather than with COVID.
Italian newspaper Il Tempo reports that the Institute has revised downward the number of people who have died from COVID rather than with COVID from 130,000 to under 4,000.
“Yes, you read that right. Turns out 97.1% of deaths hitherto attributed to Covid were not due directly to Covid,” writes Toby Young.
Of the of the 130,468 deaths registered as official COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic, only 3,783 are directly attributable to the virus alone.
“All the other Italians who lost their lives had from between one and five pre-existing diseases. Of those aged over 67 who died, 7% had more than three co-morbidities, and 18% at least two,” writes Young.
“According to the Institute, 65.8% of Italians who died after being infected with Covid were ill with arterial hypertension (high blood pressure), 23.5% had dementia, 29.3% had diabetes, and 24.8% atrial fibrillation. Add to that, 17.4% had lung problems, 16.3% had had cancer in the last five years and 15.7% suffered from previous heart failures.”
The Institute’s new definition of a COVID death means that COVID has killed fewer people in Italy than (whisper it) the average bout of seasonal flu.
If a similar change were made by other national governments, the official COVID death toll would be cut by a margin of greater than 90 per cent.
Don’t expect many others to follow suit though, given that governments have invested so much of their authority in hyping the threat posed by the virus.
For example, behavioral psychologists in the UK worked with the state to deliberately “exaggerate” the threat of COVID via “unethical” and “totalitarian” methods of propaganda in order to terrify the public into mass compliance.
And it worked.
A survey conducted after the first lockdown found that the average Brit thought 100 times more people had died from COVID than the official death toll.
Now we come to understand that the official killed ‘by COVID’ and not ‘with COVID’ figure is less than one tenth what is officially reported as the total COVID death toll.
Despite the change, Italy may yet take the decision to make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory, although how such a scheme would be imposed remains unspecified.
Source: https://www.iltempo.it/attualita/2021/10/21/news/rapporto-iss-morti-covid-malattie-patologie-come-influenza-pandemia-disastro-mortalita-bechis-29134543/
News of the Times;
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10234599/Woke-Waukesha-DA-admitted-bail-reform-GUARANTEED-innocent-people-killed.html
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/11/college-democrats-of-america-imploding-as-they-embrace-cancel-culture-and-accuse-each-other-of-racism/
https://www.newsweek.com/salvation-armys-donors-withdraw-support-response-racial-wokeness-initiative-1645658
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/they-laughed-parents-leaked-audio-reveals-how-california-teachers-recruit-kids-lgbtq-clubs
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-11-10-pfizer-heart-attack-drug-children-covid-vaccines.html
https://dailytelegraph.co.nz/covid-19/crisis-in-slovenia-whistleblower-nurse-says-politicians-receive-saline-instead-of-mrna-jab/
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/8026264/scotland-newborn-deaths-probe/
https://www.wnd.com/2020/07/feds-stay-secretive-took-24-years-arrest-ghislaine-maxwell/
https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/in-wake-of-central-park-rape-politicians-are-underestimating-how-scared-women-are-in-nyc-today/
https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/fda-asks-federal-judge-to-grant-it
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/21/the-new-blue-confederacy/
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-medias-verdict-on-kyle-rittenhouse
https://thepalmierireport.com/revealed-documents-show-bill-gates-has-given-319-million-to-media-outlets/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/best-buy-crashes-margins-slide-due-organized-retail-theft
https://www.wnd.com/2021/11/america-last-biden-selling-1-3-oil-reserves-releasing-china-india/
Envy?
Every morning, I have just two objectives:
Drink lots of coffee and not have more than two objectives.
*.*
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott has banned all vaccination mandates in his state and says that Biden Administration has been bullying states.
In response, President Biden has asked the Justice Department to stuff the governor into a school locker.
*.*
A local mom was seen screaming her regrets and frustrations into a decorative throw pillow that read, “Family is Forever,” reported a neighbor who witnessed the incident from her window.
“My first reaction was to go over and see where she got that gorgeous linen throw pillow from,” said neighbor Danielle Orlowski. “I’ve been looking for a new pillow to scream my primal fears and guttural sorrows into ever since I found out my husband was sleeping with someone from his gym, but everything has beads or sequins stitched onto it, which makes it hard to get a good scream in. Plus, I don’t think they’re machine washable.”
Home furnishing stores market throw pillows as decorative accessories used to tie in color accents, but sales associates insist there is no wrong way to use a pillow.
“We want the pillows to be fashionable enough to make a modest statement about your social standing but functional enough to scream your resentments into before your kids come home from school,” said Marshalls’ merchandising supervisor Patrick Evans. “Once upon a time, women were forced to scream into cheap polyester pillows from Sears, but Marshalls is committed to transforming the way people scream into pillows by offering a wider range of colors and fabrics to choose from, in both seasonal themes and classic designs.”
Alice Sawyer, seen screaming into her pillow earlier, uses Marshalls as her go-to for ceramic pumpkins, framed stock photos of the Eiffel tower, or just a place to browse while she wonders what could have been.
“I’m a little embarrassed she saw me screaming into that pillow and not one of my better ones,” said Sawyer, fluffing a European pillow sham. “My husband keeps telling me to stop wasting his hard-earned money on ‘useless crap,’ but I’d rather pay $9.99 to scream into a chenille throw pillow than spend thousands on a divorce lawyer. Why does he care about how many throw pillows are on the bed? We’ve been sleeping in separate rooms for years.”
At press time, Sawyer was seen stabbing a pillow that read “Too Blessed to be Stressed” with her new Cuisinart paring knife.
*.*
One day a man went to an auction. While there, he bid on a parrot. He really wanted this bird, so he got caught up in the bidding. He kept on bidding but kept getting outbid, so he bid higher and higher and higher.
Finally, after he bid way more than he intended, he won the bid - the parrot was his at last!
As he was paying for the parrot, he said to the auctioneer, "I sure hope this parrot can talk. I would hate to have paid this much for it, only to find out that he can't talk!"
"Don't worry," said the auctioneer. "He can talk. Who do you think kept bidding against you?
*,*
If I get a job at a railroad...
Will they train me?
Quote of the Times;
Dr. Fauci's suppression of early treatments will go down in history as having caused the death of a half a million Americans in the ICU. - Dr. Pierre Kory
Link of the Times;
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/18/terror-in-the-capitol-tunnel/
Issue of the Times;
How Envy Causes Racial Conflict by Roger Devlin
Even before I begin, I imagine most of you have probably sensed at one time or another that envy does play such a role in race relations. Many writers have alluded to it in passing, but I have never come across a thematic discussion. There is a tendency among our people to underestimate the importance of envy because Western civilization has been unusually successful in overcoming its effects, for reasons I will go into later. Today we are witnessing the collapse of this earlier resistance.
Envy is a negative feeling aroused by noticing an advantage enjoyed by someone else. Sometimes unfavorable comparisons of this kind motivate people to try to get a similar advantage for themselves. In that case, the result is emulation, not envy. The envious man dwells on his perceived inferiority, which humiliates him and often arouses a sense of impotence or self-pity. The differences in status that provoke such feelings need not be great. In fact, truly enormous differences such as between a peasant and a king tend not to arouse envy, because the peasant has a hard time even imagining himself in the king’s place. Invidious comparisons arise most easily among relative peers.
Envy is also distinct from any desire to possess the advantage in question. Very often, it is aroused by advantages which by their very nature cannot be transferred from one person to another, or by things that would be of no benefit to the envious man if he did come into their possession. So, it is not a form of covetousness. An envious man with a broken leg does not so much want to be whole again as to see everyone else break their legs. His concern is not primarily with his leg per se, but with a sense of inferiority in comparison with others, which he would like to avenge upon others. This is one reason schemes for redistributing wealth do not solve the problem of envy. A person with an envious disposition tends to see whatever confirms his envy, and he can always find new inequalities to focus on once one has been removed.
This essentially futile character of envy, its lack of constructive purpose, has traditionally caused it to be considered an especially shameful fault. Few people are prepared to admit to serious feelings of envy. Occasionally one may hear people say “I envy you” in relation to some small advantage, but the speaker does not mean he would rather see his friend lose the advantage or come to grief. Real envy is a serious matter. Crimes, including murder, have been motivated by it. People are therefore reluctant to admit, even to themselves, that they are envious. The fault often is disguised, for example, as righteous indignation or a zeal for justice.
To study envy and its effects, we would naturally want to look at some especially envy-ridden societies. Many of these turn out, not coincidentally, to be among the most primitive known to anthropology. In his book Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, the German scholar Helmut Schoeck has studied the ethnographic literature. A study of the Jivaro Indians of the western Amazon, for example, describes a difficult boat trip up a flooded river amid rains that had gone on for weeks. When the crew finally reaches its destination, one man says he will perform the magical rites necessary to make the rains continue “so that other travelers would have the same difficulties as we had.”
The ethnographer who reported this says that it is no isolated case: “When the Indians try to produce rain by magical means they nearly always do so merely out of wickedness, that is, to cause their fellow tribesmen harm or annoyance,” rather than to make crops grow, for instance. In the story cited, the object of envy was not even any definite person, but a hypothetical class of possible future travelers. This is an unusually clear example of envious behavior since the man could not benefit in any way from the difficulties he proposed to create for others. His own hardship was in the past. But the memory of it caused him to begrudge others an easier time of it.
My favorite ethnographic account, however, is of the Siriono Indians of Eastern Bolivia. When a Siriono hunter manages to kill an animal, he dare not be seen bringing it back the village. He finds a hiding place for it and returns to the group feigning dejection over his supposedly unsuccessful hunt. Only after dark does he return to retrieve and eat the meat. This is because any Siriono bold enough to eat in broad daylight usually finds himself surrounded by a small crowd of hungry fellow-villagers staring enviously at him. Most Siriono in such a situation do not share their food, and the staring bothers them. Siriono are constantly accusing one another of stealing food, which is another reason to keep anything edible hidden. This in turn leads to accusations of hoarding, and the tribe has found no way out of these sentiments.
As we see from this example, envy is harmful not only (or even mainly) to the envious man himself, but also to its object, the successful man, even where “success” means only having gotten food. Life in envy-ridden societies is haunted by a fear of arousing envy in others. The Siriono practice of hiding food is a form of envy-avoidance, and it is costly. The tribe is unlikely ever to become prosperous, for no one has discovered how to raise prosperity simultaneously for everyone. Someone always has to prosper first, and this leads to envy.
Schoeck even found examples of tribes without any concept of personal success or achievement at all. Anyone who prospers is thought to have done so at the expense of someone else. In order to justify this view, goods of which the supply is not limited are treated as if they were scarce. Among the Dobu Islanders of Melanesia, any man who farms more yams than his neighbors is accused of having stolen them, usually through black magic. People will not admit the possibility that a man might be eating better than his neighbor because he has put in more honest work tilling his yam field. All prosperity is caused by the deprivation of others. The result, of course, is a general fear of good crops, and an entire society is kept at the level of bare subsistence.
In the West, a man lacking an advantage he finds in his neighbor may console himself with the thought that the unequal distribution is the effect of mere luck, an impersonal force for which no one is responsible. But we find that envy-ridden primitive tribes sometimes lack any concept of luck. In such a society, anyone who suffers a misfortune automatically attributes it to black magic on the part of someone who envies him. There even exist peoples with no concept of natural death. All deaths, however elderly the person, are ascribed to malicious magic. If an outbreak of some disease kills certain tribesmen and not others, the explanation is that the survivors practiced witchcraft. At the root of all such beliefs is the incorrect assumption that one man’s gain must mean some other man’s loss, as if there were a fixed amount of success or prosperity in the world, which can only be distributed in varying amounts.
People in these simple societies think it is somehow normal for everyone’s situation to be identical, even though reality never matches this expectation. Since they do not understand the real causes of inequalities, they explain all deviations from it by assuming the use of magic. The man with less is thought to practice magic out of envy, but the man with more is assumed to have gotten it through magic of his own.
Envy avoidance takes many forms, sometimes including concealment not only of prosperity but even of any striving for it, through work, for example. Schoeck cites the Lovedu of Southern Africa. If one passes a field where Lovedu are working and calls out “working hard, eh?” they respond: “We’re hardly working!” Conspicuous hard work might provoke envy of the wealth others suspect might result. The Lovedu avoid all competition. In their language, the word for good or virtuous is supposedly identical to the word for slow. When the Lovedu pray to their ancestors for help or favor, they add the qualifier: “but only in the same measure as others.”
Among some primitive peoples, the successful man averts envy by apparent generosity. Some Polynesian fishermen prefer to give away the only fish they have caught all day rather than run the risk that a man who failed to catch any fish will go about saying: “That fish he caught, he did not give it to me but kept it for himself.” This preemptive generosity is called “the blocking of envy.” Unfortunately, such appeasement does not always work. An envious man may view his benefactor as an enemy.
Perhaps some of you have run into people incapable of accepting even small favors. They resent the idea of being under an obligation. This is because the ability to bestow a benefit is a kind of superiority, and can arouse feelings of humiliation in the beneficiary. The more sincere the generosity, the clearer the benefactor’s superiority. For this reason, it has often been observed that the better an envious man is treated, the worse he gets. Even raising him to one’s own level may not solve the problem, for any equality so established is artificial and the beneficiary can never rid himself of the memory that it resulted from charity.
Sometimes resentment and suspicion of benefactors can be found on a mass scale. Following the Second World War, the Marshall Plan was viewed with extreme skepticism in parts of Europe. If Americans were helping rebuild their ruined countries, people reasoned, it could only be part of a cunning plot to distract public attention from another and larger flow of wealth out of Europe and towards America itself. Such people often admitted that they had not yet been able to uncover the precise workings of the swindle, but a swindle there had to be. No one could possibly be trying to benefit them merely for the sake of benefitting them.
According to Schoeck, such attitudes are common in Latin America. One study of lower-class village life in Mexico found that “doing favors is rare and creates suspicion.” When children impulsively show kindness to outsiders, their parents “correct” this misbehavior. Doing favors is associated with more educated people who, it is assumed, do them in order to get favors in return.
During the 1960s and 70s, Latin Americans developed an influential body of economic thought called “dependency theory.” It is out of fashion now for good reason: Predictions based upon it have been falsified, and there is too much it cannot explain. But it is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking Schoeck found among primitive tribes translated into more sophisticated language. According to dependency theory, Western prosperity causes poverty in the rest of the world. The West controls the terms of international trade, locking up the market for technology and sophisticated manufactured goods while forcing everyone else to supply them with raw materials, thus condemning them to perpetual backwardness.
There was an obvious racial aspect to dependency theory, or at least to its popularity in the third world, with the white man like the well-fed Dobu islander who must have spirited his extra yams out of other men’s gardens. Whether Melanesian headhunter or third world economist, the constant claim of the envious man is that the advantages enjoyed by others were got unfairly and at their expense.
The downfall of dependency theory among serious economists, by the way, was its inability to explain the rise of East Asian countries, most of which started out with fewer natural resources than Latin America. The case is exactly analogous to the inability of our opponents to explain why the “white supremacists” who supposedly designed IQ tests should have done so in a way that lets Asians outscore whites.
Envy has long blinded men to the real causes of economic prosperity, which include intelligence, hard work, a future orientation, and an ability to calculate risk and defer gratification. To these, Helmut Schoeck’s review of the literature allows us to add another: the possibility of disregarding envy, whether because it is not prevalent in one’s society or because one is bold enough to defy it.
Schoeck mentions an awareness of this among the Tiv people of northern Nigeria. Most better-off Tiv disperse their wealth among their dependents and kinsmen, or by paying for elaborate religious sacrifices. But a few men capitalize on their wealth to get even more. They are not intimidated by the possible envy of others. Such men are said to have “strong hearts,” and are both respected and feared.
The Tiv believe envy can be defied only by those with a magical essence called tsav. Anyone who presumes to excel at anything, even dancing or singing, is thought to need at least some tsav. But the preeminent example of a “man of tsav” among them is the rich, healthy man with a large family and extensive, productive farmlands. Without loads of tsav, he could never ward off the envy-inspired black magic of others.
As I said, European civilization has historically been successful — perhaps uniquely successful — in overcoming the debilitating effects of envy, even to the extent that we tend to forget its dangers and badly underestimate its influence on others. Post-World War II development theorists generally assumed that teaching a few technical or agricultural skills to a few third-world peasants would be enough for them to spread quickly from village to village, rapidly increasing the wealth of entire societies. But people act to maximize prosperity only when they are not afraid they will provoke envy. In such a society, peasants might not practice new skills at all or do so secretly.
How did the West tame envy? Is there a racial factor involved? Unfortunately, I am not aware of any research on this. Schoeck emphasizes the influence of Christianity. The pre-Christian Greeks were keenly aware of the problem of envy, and believed that excessive human prosperity might even arouse envy in the gods, who could then bring overly successful men to grief. In contrast, the transcendent God of Christianity is so far above the human level that any thought of his envying his own creatures is absurd. There are a number of passages in the Gospels against envy, the clearest probably being the parable of the workers in the vineyard who are paid the same amount whether they labored all day or only began an hour before sunset. Christianity teaches that the advantages that commonly provoke envy are of no consequence in man’s relation to God, in which the king enjoys no advantage over the pauper.
But an awareness of the harmful effects of envy is not unique to Christianity, and other religious traditions have developed ways of combatting them. The essential point is that the envious man must somehow have his attention drawn away from the advantages enjoyed by others and toward realistic goals within his own power. This is the only way he can begin to act constructively to improve his own situation. Historically, various religious conceptions have refocused men’s attention this way.
The most cursory look at the sort of thinking now dominant in the West shows that it is doing the reverse. Anti-racism never concerns itself with the spiritual self-improvement of its beneficiaries. It is concerned with worldly goods, but does nothing to help people improve their lot through effective means such as learning skills or deferring gratification and planning for the future. Its constant message is: You have less because the white man has more, and he has more because he has rigged the game in his favor.
“Critical race theory” is a pretentious name for what is in fact a reemergence of the most primitive, envy-driven form of reasoning. Emotionally, its appeal is identical to that of the Dobu Islander’s belief that his neighbor is eating better only by spiriting yams out of other people’s gardens. And it is not merely a rationalization of and justification for envy but, insofar as it is successfully propagated, it’s a means of creating envy where none previously existed. Critical race theory inculcates resentment among children to whom it might otherwise not have occurred to compare themselves invidiously with their white neighbors, and directs their attention away from practical ways to improve their own lives. As we have seen, many societies have been dominated by envy, but I cannot think of another case of a regime systematically trying to maximize envy in the rising generation. It is genuinely cruel to the non-white children who are supposedly its intended beneficiaries, but as we would expect from envy-inspired behavior, the aim appears to be to harm us rather than to help them.
The harm involves first of all the inculcation of guilt, which is the modern counterpart of the primitive’s fear of envious black magic. Nonracial precedents for such guilt are easy to find. You have probably seen, perhaps on some liberal neighbor’s bumper-sticker, the injunction “Live simply, so that others may simply live.” At bottom, this is the same Dobu-Islander fallacy of assuming there must be a fixed number of yams, so that if you take more than your share, others must go hungry.
Socialist intellectuals of the last century poisoned their lives with this sort of guilt, imagining that any enjoyment they permitted themselves amounted to robbing the toiling masses. Today, progressive academics with no understanding of how wealth is created advocate massive capital transfers to the third world in order to assuage their guilt over living in a prosperous society. It cannot be overemphasized that this is a fallacy, that the world’s good things do not exist in any fixed quantity and, therefore, enjoying a few of them does not deprive anyone else.
Today, young whites are being targeted for prosperity-guilt. Many, of course, are not even prosperous, living in communities ravaged by opioids and long-term unemployment. Yet these children are now being taught that they are responsible for the problems of the ghetto. Since this cannot directly benefit anyone in the ghetto, we are forced to ask ourselves what is really going on. Don’t let yourself be put off by any talk about the need to “foster difficult conversations about race.” The inculcation of guilt and resentment is not a conversation, and the children involved are too young to talk meaningfully about race anyway.
The most important historical precedent for critical race theory’s deliberate cultivation of racial guilt and resentment, I believe, is communism, which harnessed class-envy not to improve the lives of the working class, but to subvert society and let a tiny, ideologically-defined elite rule over the ruins, unconstrained by law or custom. In the same way, the only beneficiaries of critical racial theory are likely to be those who are already powerful.
But critical race theory is simply the most recent in a series of bad policies due in part to a failure to understand the social effects of envy. Racial integration already followed the same pattern more than half a century ago. Envy is a phenomenon of proximity; distance, both social and physical, tends to diminish it by making comparison harder. At one time, segregation served this important social function. Whether averting envy was among the purposes of those who started it in the late 19th century I do not know, but it was certainly an effect of their actions.
In his book Race and Education, the late Raymond Wolters offers many examples of black racial resentment enflamed by integration. Whites’ participation in class discussions, for example, appeared to some blacks “as an arrogant display, a deliberate flaunting of knowledge that downgrades other class members.” Some suspected the only reason white children even bothered working for good grades was to look better than blacks. One black girl, asked why she picked on a smaller white girl, said she was annoyed by the girl’s “attitude in class. She knows all the answers. She gets them right all the time.” It may have been wiser to segregate the races and let people suspect black children were less smart than to integrate them and remove all doubt.
One of the commonest effects of school integration was a rise in vandalism. Wolters notes a dramatic instance that occurred in Topeka, Kansas, the school system directly at issue in the Brown decision. In 1970, a principal refused to authorize an assembly on the Thursday of his school’s official “Black Culture Week” celebration. There had already been assemblies and presentations that week, and by Thursday this principal thought that enough instruction time had been lost. In response to his refusal, a group of black students set fire to the school auditorium, doing over $27,000 worth of damage.
Vandalism is destruction without any corresponding gain to the vandal, and sometimes even involves effort or risk. Such acts are commonly described as senseless, but we can often begin to make sense of them once we understand envy. Schoeck discusses a case in which someone painstakingly slashed the tires of 20 cars in a single night. Detectives could not discover any motive. But Schoeck asks whether it is really so hard to put oneself in the position of a young lout who has failed his driver’s test and is driven into a rage by the sight of a row of shiny new cars waiting for their lucky owners. He quotes a similar case in which a man arrested for setting fire to eight cars told the police: “I couldn’t afford to own an automobile . . . and I didn’t want anyone else to have one.” Vandalism was better than stealing a car.
In the 1950s, at the same time as school desegregation, many white liberals began to worry that schools in white neighborhoods were getting more funding than those in black neighborhoods. A campaign to build new, state-of-the-art schools for the underprivileged was launched. The immediate result was widespread vandalism. In 1958, the New York Department of Education was forced to replace 160,000 windows and make good the damage done by 75 cases of arson. Schoeck notes that envy was probably the motive:
To the slum child, the daily contrast between his “home” and the school’s air-conditioned chrome-and-glass luxury is an irritant. If he is burdened with learning difficulties, he sees school as a world to which he will never belong. He knows that when his schooldays are over there will be no comparable place of work waiting for him. What, then, is more probable than that he should give free rein in vandalism to his rage and resentment? The culprits may be turning against too perfect an environment which they themselves did not help create.
Within a few years, schools were being built with fewer windows, and they had iron bars. Many noted the resemblance to prisons.
Eventually the envy directed against successful white students and shiny new buildings began to include high-achieving blacks. They found themselves accused of being sellouts and “acting white.” Roland Fryer of Harvard devised a quantitative study of this “acting white” effect. He discovered that in integrated classrooms, as the grade-point averages of black students increases beyond the level of a B+, they tend to have fewer friends. In schools that were almost all black, he found “no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students’ popularity.” A president of Atlanta’s Spelman College also noted that “an oppositional identity that disdains academic achievement has not always been characteristic of black adolescent peer groups. It seems to be a post-desegregation phenomenon.” The reason should be obvious: invidious comparisons depend upon proximity. School integration is a classic example of the harm that can be done by failing to understand the importance of envy in human relations.
Most of Schoeck’s examples of envy are of people in more or less homogeneous societies, but he does cite one example of its influence on group dynamics that is based on a study of a small Colorado town around 1950. The town consisted of two well-defined groups, a white, English-speaking upper stratum and a slightly larger Spanish-speaking population with lower occupations. The dominant, English-speaking group, though having a certain caste spirit, was open enough to absorb the most capable members of the Spanish-speaking group. Other Spanish-speakers saw them as traitors who had sold out to the Anglos, practicing subservience to them while climbing over the backs of their own people. Even Spanish-speakers who had attained an only slightly better-than-average economic position were accused of arrogance and viewing other members of their own group with contempt.
Obviously, this behavior of Spanish-speakers in Colorado in 1950 perfectly parallels the more recent controversy over successful black students accused of “acting white.” Then as now, an envious group may be driven to embrace even failure itself as a badge of identity and claim to moral superiority. There is nothing new under the sun.
I’d like to focus now on the charge of arrogance that appears in both the school integration anecdotes and Schoeck’s Colorado study. It is classic envy to accuse others of “thinking they are better.” Most often, this is psychological projection: It is not the envied man who thinks he is better, but the envier who perceives himself as inferior. How likely do you think it is that even a single white child in America works for good grades specifically to humiliate black classmates? And yet black children are perfectly capable of imagining this. Whites do not compare themselves to blacks; they are far more likely to compare themselves to other whites.
To state the obvious, our purpose in discussing IQ, for example, is not to pat ourselves on the back, but to refute the notion that we are conspiring to keep other people down. Equality of natural endowments is not something in our power, or anyone’s power, to grant. Natural selection is an impersonal process that from the human point of view scarcely differs from chance. But, as I noted earlier, there are primitive societies that altogether lack any concept of chance or luck. They think all differences between men are the result of intentional action, usually magical. Some similar superstition probably underlies the thinking of our enemies.
Occasionally we discuss the high proportion of human achievement originating in Europe and its people. Until fairly recently, this historical fact was considered so obvious that it was not worth talking about. And this does not mean, by the way, that Western man ever sought to deny the genuine achievements of others; a self-confident people feels no need to begrudge due recognition to others. Today, the basic facts of Western accomplishment are under attack, and a response has become necessary. Many of you will be familiar with the important work done by Prof. Ricardo Duchesne in this area. Once again, self-congratulation is not the point. Speaking personally, contemplation of the vastness of Western achievement is more likely to inspire me with a feeling of humility than one of pride or arrogance. Measured against what our ancestors wrought, our personal achievements are laughably modest.
What can be done to combat racial envy? This is not an easy question. If we look to our own tradition of ethical thought developed over many centuries within Christendom, we find envy characterized as a sin. It is one of the seven cardinal sins upon which most more specific sins hinge. Sin is an essentially spiritual phenomenon which means, among other things, that it must be combatted at the level of the individual soul. There is no possible political or legislative program to eliminate envy any more than pride or wrath. These are timeless temptations intrinsic to the human condition.
As already stated, the best way to overcome envy is to have goals of one’s own. Once a man begins to concentrate on achieving something through his own efforts, invidious comparisons with others begin to seem like distractions. He loses interest in them. But this shift in focus is not the kind of thing one man can achieve on behalf of another, still less that one social or racial group can confer upon another. It is a spiritual challenge for each individual. The best we can probably do is to remove direct incitements to envy such as critical race theory. Also, as previously noted, distance can diminish the effects of envy, but under a regime of forced and micro-managed association, this is impossible to achieve.
Another lesson is that we should not take too literally the accusations about slavery and colonialism constantly cast in our teeth. No one would care about the sins of our great-grandfathers, real or imagined, if we were not more successful than certain other races today. It is observed superiority that inspires resentment, not the wrongs of past centuries, which are at most post facto ways of rationalizing resentment.
But perhaps the most important lesson for us to learn is the futility of appeasement. As Helmut Schoeck observes, people who find themselves the targets of envy have difficulty responding rationally. In particular, they are prone to imagine envy arises as a direct consequence of their being better off and will, therefore, necessarily wane if even unrealistic demands are pandered to. As noted, envious people often get worse, the better they are treated. The more generous we are in benefitting the envious, the more clearly we demonstrate (in their eyes) our own superiority. The best we can probably do is to insist upon two truths: 1) that any advantages we may enjoy are not the cause of others being deprived of them, and 2) that the future of other racial groups is in their own hands, not ours.
News of the Times;
https://deadspin.com/the-nfl-s-domestic-violence-program-appears-to-be-going-1848083886
https://thepostmillennial.com/los-angeles-police-tells-residents-to-cooperate-and-comply-with-robbers-as-street-robberies-increase
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hunter-bidens-private-equity-firm-facilitated-38-billion-chinese-purchase-american-owned
https://neonnettle.com/news/17440-biden-admin-resettling-4-000-afghans-across-46-u-s-states-every-week
https://www.propublica.org/article/st-jude-hoards-billions-while-many-of-its-families-drain-their-savings
https://fee.org/articles/a-75-year-old-warning-about-those-who-say-listen-to-the-science/
https://teamtuckercarlson.com/news/experts-befuddled-by-mysterious-fact-that-africa-is-less-than-6-vaccinated-but-has-avoided-covid-disaster-unlike-europe-and-the-us/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/dont-unless-ready-suffer-die-california-man-died-covid-19-vaccine-described-horrific-pain-suffering-writing-passing-away/
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adults-under-60
https://humansarefree.com/2021/11/bill-gates-gave-319-million-to-msm.html
https://www.kcra.com/article/ex-college-professor-charged-with-setting-california-fires/38295240
https://www.fox6now.com/news/waukesha-christmas-parade-car-drove-through-barricade-mayor-says
https://nationalfile.com/uk-muslim-liverpool-bombing-suspect-had-asylum-status-rejected-but-was-never-deported/
https://www.redpapernews.com/president-biden-just-lost-a-major-court-battle-judge-hands-joe-a-nationwide-injunction-on-joes-no-drilling-order/
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2021/11/19/fauci-caught-maskless-at-dc-book-party-in-violation-of-local-mandate-n2599399
Drink lots of coffee and not have more than two objectives.
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Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott has banned all vaccination mandates in his state and says that Biden Administration has been bullying states.
In response, President Biden has asked the Justice Department to stuff the governor into a school locker.
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A local mom was seen screaming her regrets and frustrations into a decorative throw pillow that read, “Family is Forever,” reported a neighbor who witnessed the incident from her window.
“My first reaction was to go over and see where she got that gorgeous linen throw pillow from,” said neighbor Danielle Orlowski. “I’ve been looking for a new pillow to scream my primal fears and guttural sorrows into ever since I found out my husband was sleeping with someone from his gym, but everything has beads or sequins stitched onto it, which makes it hard to get a good scream in. Plus, I don’t think they’re machine washable.”
Home furnishing stores market throw pillows as decorative accessories used to tie in color accents, but sales associates insist there is no wrong way to use a pillow.
“We want the pillows to be fashionable enough to make a modest statement about your social standing but functional enough to scream your resentments into before your kids come home from school,” said Marshalls’ merchandising supervisor Patrick Evans. “Once upon a time, women were forced to scream into cheap polyester pillows from Sears, but Marshalls is committed to transforming the way people scream into pillows by offering a wider range of colors and fabrics to choose from, in both seasonal themes and classic designs.”
Alice Sawyer, seen screaming into her pillow earlier, uses Marshalls as her go-to for ceramic pumpkins, framed stock photos of the Eiffel tower, or just a place to browse while she wonders what could have been.
“I’m a little embarrassed she saw me screaming into that pillow and not one of my better ones,” said Sawyer, fluffing a European pillow sham. “My husband keeps telling me to stop wasting his hard-earned money on ‘useless crap,’ but I’d rather pay $9.99 to scream into a chenille throw pillow than spend thousands on a divorce lawyer. Why does he care about how many throw pillows are on the bed? We’ve been sleeping in separate rooms for years.”
At press time, Sawyer was seen stabbing a pillow that read “Too Blessed to be Stressed” with her new Cuisinart paring knife.
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One day a man went to an auction. While there, he bid on a parrot. He really wanted this bird, so he got caught up in the bidding. He kept on bidding but kept getting outbid, so he bid higher and higher and higher.
Finally, after he bid way more than he intended, he won the bid - the parrot was his at last!
As he was paying for the parrot, he said to the auctioneer, "I sure hope this parrot can talk. I would hate to have paid this much for it, only to find out that he can't talk!"
"Don't worry," said the auctioneer. "He can talk. Who do you think kept bidding against you?
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If I get a job at a railroad...
Will they train me?
Quote of the Times;
Dr. Fauci's suppression of early treatments will go down in history as having caused the death of a half a million Americans in the ICU. - Dr. Pierre Kory
Link of the Times;
https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/18/terror-in-the-capitol-tunnel/
Issue of the Times;
How Envy Causes Racial Conflict by Roger Devlin
Even before I begin, I imagine most of you have probably sensed at one time or another that envy does play such a role in race relations. Many writers have alluded to it in passing, but I have never come across a thematic discussion. There is a tendency among our people to underestimate the importance of envy because Western civilization has been unusually successful in overcoming its effects, for reasons I will go into later. Today we are witnessing the collapse of this earlier resistance.
Envy is a negative feeling aroused by noticing an advantage enjoyed by someone else. Sometimes unfavorable comparisons of this kind motivate people to try to get a similar advantage for themselves. In that case, the result is emulation, not envy. The envious man dwells on his perceived inferiority, which humiliates him and often arouses a sense of impotence or self-pity. The differences in status that provoke such feelings need not be great. In fact, truly enormous differences such as between a peasant and a king tend not to arouse envy, because the peasant has a hard time even imagining himself in the king’s place. Invidious comparisons arise most easily among relative peers.
Envy is also distinct from any desire to possess the advantage in question. Very often, it is aroused by advantages which by their very nature cannot be transferred from one person to another, or by things that would be of no benefit to the envious man if he did come into their possession. So, it is not a form of covetousness. An envious man with a broken leg does not so much want to be whole again as to see everyone else break their legs. His concern is not primarily with his leg per se, but with a sense of inferiority in comparison with others, which he would like to avenge upon others. This is one reason schemes for redistributing wealth do not solve the problem of envy. A person with an envious disposition tends to see whatever confirms his envy, and he can always find new inequalities to focus on once one has been removed.
This essentially futile character of envy, its lack of constructive purpose, has traditionally caused it to be considered an especially shameful fault. Few people are prepared to admit to serious feelings of envy. Occasionally one may hear people say “I envy you” in relation to some small advantage, but the speaker does not mean he would rather see his friend lose the advantage or come to grief. Real envy is a serious matter. Crimes, including murder, have been motivated by it. People are therefore reluctant to admit, even to themselves, that they are envious. The fault often is disguised, for example, as righteous indignation or a zeal for justice.
To study envy and its effects, we would naturally want to look at some especially envy-ridden societies. Many of these turn out, not coincidentally, to be among the most primitive known to anthropology. In his book Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, the German scholar Helmut Schoeck has studied the ethnographic literature. A study of the Jivaro Indians of the western Amazon, for example, describes a difficult boat trip up a flooded river amid rains that had gone on for weeks. When the crew finally reaches its destination, one man says he will perform the magical rites necessary to make the rains continue “so that other travelers would have the same difficulties as we had.”
The ethnographer who reported this says that it is no isolated case: “When the Indians try to produce rain by magical means they nearly always do so merely out of wickedness, that is, to cause their fellow tribesmen harm or annoyance,” rather than to make crops grow, for instance. In the story cited, the object of envy was not even any definite person, but a hypothetical class of possible future travelers. This is an unusually clear example of envious behavior since the man could not benefit in any way from the difficulties he proposed to create for others. His own hardship was in the past. But the memory of it caused him to begrudge others an easier time of it.
My favorite ethnographic account, however, is of the Siriono Indians of Eastern Bolivia. When a Siriono hunter manages to kill an animal, he dare not be seen bringing it back the village. He finds a hiding place for it and returns to the group feigning dejection over his supposedly unsuccessful hunt. Only after dark does he return to retrieve and eat the meat. This is because any Siriono bold enough to eat in broad daylight usually finds himself surrounded by a small crowd of hungry fellow-villagers staring enviously at him. Most Siriono in such a situation do not share their food, and the staring bothers them. Siriono are constantly accusing one another of stealing food, which is another reason to keep anything edible hidden. This in turn leads to accusations of hoarding, and the tribe has found no way out of these sentiments.
As we see from this example, envy is harmful not only (or even mainly) to the envious man himself, but also to its object, the successful man, even where “success” means only having gotten food. Life in envy-ridden societies is haunted by a fear of arousing envy in others. The Siriono practice of hiding food is a form of envy-avoidance, and it is costly. The tribe is unlikely ever to become prosperous, for no one has discovered how to raise prosperity simultaneously for everyone. Someone always has to prosper first, and this leads to envy.
Schoeck even found examples of tribes without any concept of personal success or achievement at all. Anyone who prospers is thought to have done so at the expense of someone else. In order to justify this view, goods of which the supply is not limited are treated as if they were scarce. Among the Dobu Islanders of Melanesia, any man who farms more yams than his neighbors is accused of having stolen them, usually through black magic. People will not admit the possibility that a man might be eating better than his neighbor because he has put in more honest work tilling his yam field. All prosperity is caused by the deprivation of others. The result, of course, is a general fear of good crops, and an entire society is kept at the level of bare subsistence.
In the West, a man lacking an advantage he finds in his neighbor may console himself with the thought that the unequal distribution is the effect of mere luck, an impersonal force for which no one is responsible. But we find that envy-ridden primitive tribes sometimes lack any concept of luck. In such a society, anyone who suffers a misfortune automatically attributes it to black magic on the part of someone who envies him. There even exist peoples with no concept of natural death. All deaths, however elderly the person, are ascribed to malicious magic. If an outbreak of some disease kills certain tribesmen and not others, the explanation is that the survivors practiced witchcraft. At the root of all such beliefs is the incorrect assumption that one man’s gain must mean some other man’s loss, as if there were a fixed amount of success or prosperity in the world, which can only be distributed in varying amounts.
People in these simple societies think it is somehow normal for everyone’s situation to be identical, even though reality never matches this expectation. Since they do not understand the real causes of inequalities, they explain all deviations from it by assuming the use of magic. The man with less is thought to practice magic out of envy, but the man with more is assumed to have gotten it through magic of his own.
Envy avoidance takes many forms, sometimes including concealment not only of prosperity but even of any striving for it, through work, for example. Schoeck cites the Lovedu of Southern Africa. If one passes a field where Lovedu are working and calls out “working hard, eh?” they respond: “We’re hardly working!” Conspicuous hard work might provoke envy of the wealth others suspect might result. The Lovedu avoid all competition. In their language, the word for good or virtuous is supposedly identical to the word for slow. When the Lovedu pray to their ancestors for help or favor, they add the qualifier: “but only in the same measure as others.”
Among some primitive peoples, the successful man averts envy by apparent generosity. Some Polynesian fishermen prefer to give away the only fish they have caught all day rather than run the risk that a man who failed to catch any fish will go about saying: “That fish he caught, he did not give it to me but kept it for himself.” This preemptive generosity is called “the blocking of envy.” Unfortunately, such appeasement does not always work. An envious man may view his benefactor as an enemy.
Perhaps some of you have run into people incapable of accepting even small favors. They resent the idea of being under an obligation. This is because the ability to bestow a benefit is a kind of superiority, and can arouse feelings of humiliation in the beneficiary. The more sincere the generosity, the clearer the benefactor’s superiority. For this reason, it has often been observed that the better an envious man is treated, the worse he gets. Even raising him to one’s own level may not solve the problem, for any equality so established is artificial and the beneficiary can never rid himself of the memory that it resulted from charity.
Sometimes resentment and suspicion of benefactors can be found on a mass scale. Following the Second World War, the Marshall Plan was viewed with extreme skepticism in parts of Europe. If Americans were helping rebuild their ruined countries, people reasoned, it could only be part of a cunning plot to distract public attention from another and larger flow of wealth out of Europe and towards America itself. Such people often admitted that they had not yet been able to uncover the precise workings of the swindle, but a swindle there had to be. No one could possibly be trying to benefit them merely for the sake of benefitting them.
According to Schoeck, such attitudes are common in Latin America. One study of lower-class village life in Mexico found that “doing favors is rare and creates suspicion.” When children impulsively show kindness to outsiders, their parents “correct” this misbehavior. Doing favors is associated with more educated people who, it is assumed, do them in order to get favors in return.
During the 1960s and 70s, Latin Americans developed an influential body of economic thought called “dependency theory.” It is out of fashion now for good reason: Predictions based upon it have been falsified, and there is too much it cannot explain. But it is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking Schoeck found among primitive tribes translated into more sophisticated language. According to dependency theory, Western prosperity causes poverty in the rest of the world. The West controls the terms of international trade, locking up the market for technology and sophisticated manufactured goods while forcing everyone else to supply them with raw materials, thus condemning them to perpetual backwardness.
There was an obvious racial aspect to dependency theory, or at least to its popularity in the third world, with the white man like the well-fed Dobu islander who must have spirited his extra yams out of other men’s gardens. Whether Melanesian headhunter or third world economist, the constant claim of the envious man is that the advantages enjoyed by others were got unfairly and at their expense.
The downfall of dependency theory among serious economists, by the way, was its inability to explain the rise of East Asian countries, most of which started out with fewer natural resources than Latin America. The case is exactly analogous to the inability of our opponents to explain why the “white supremacists” who supposedly designed IQ tests should have done so in a way that lets Asians outscore whites.
Envy has long blinded men to the real causes of economic prosperity, which include intelligence, hard work, a future orientation, and an ability to calculate risk and defer gratification. To these, Helmut Schoeck’s review of the literature allows us to add another: the possibility of disregarding envy, whether because it is not prevalent in one’s society or because one is bold enough to defy it.
Schoeck mentions an awareness of this among the Tiv people of northern Nigeria. Most better-off Tiv disperse their wealth among their dependents and kinsmen, or by paying for elaborate religious sacrifices. But a few men capitalize on their wealth to get even more. They are not intimidated by the possible envy of others. Such men are said to have “strong hearts,” and are both respected and feared.
The Tiv believe envy can be defied only by those with a magical essence called tsav. Anyone who presumes to excel at anything, even dancing or singing, is thought to need at least some tsav. But the preeminent example of a “man of tsav” among them is the rich, healthy man with a large family and extensive, productive farmlands. Without loads of tsav, he could never ward off the envy-inspired black magic of others.
As I said, European civilization has historically been successful — perhaps uniquely successful — in overcoming the debilitating effects of envy, even to the extent that we tend to forget its dangers and badly underestimate its influence on others. Post-World War II development theorists generally assumed that teaching a few technical or agricultural skills to a few third-world peasants would be enough for them to spread quickly from village to village, rapidly increasing the wealth of entire societies. But people act to maximize prosperity only when they are not afraid they will provoke envy. In such a society, peasants might not practice new skills at all or do so secretly.
How did the West tame envy? Is there a racial factor involved? Unfortunately, I am not aware of any research on this. Schoeck emphasizes the influence of Christianity. The pre-Christian Greeks were keenly aware of the problem of envy, and believed that excessive human prosperity might even arouse envy in the gods, who could then bring overly successful men to grief. In contrast, the transcendent God of Christianity is so far above the human level that any thought of his envying his own creatures is absurd. There are a number of passages in the Gospels against envy, the clearest probably being the parable of the workers in the vineyard who are paid the same amount whether they labored all day or only began an hour before sunset. Christianity teaches that the advantages that commonly provoke envy are of no consequence in man’s relation to God, in which the king enjoys no advantage over the pauper.
But an awareness of the harmful effects of envy is not unique to Christianity, and other religious traditions have developed ways of combatting them. The essential point is that the envious man must somehow have his attention drawn away from the advantages enjoyed by others and toward realistic goals within his own power. This is the only way he can begin to act constructively to improve his own situation. Historically, various religious conceptions have refocused men’s attention this way.
The most cursory look at the sort of thinking now dominant in the West shows that it is doing the reverse. Anti-racism never concerns itself with the spiritual self-improvement of its beneficiaries. It is concerned with worldly goods, but does nothing to help people improve their lot through effective means such as learning skills or deferring gratification and planning for the future. Its constant message is: You have less because the white man has more, and he has more because he has rigged the game in his favor.
“Critical race theory” is a pretentious name for what is in fact a reemergence of the most primitive, envy-driven form of reasoning. Emotionally, its appeal is identical to that of the Dobu Islander’s belief that his neighbor is eating better only by spiriting yams out of other people’s gardens. And it is not merely a rationalization of and justification for envy but, insofar as it is successfully propagated, it’s a means of creating envy where none previously existed. Critical race theory inculcates resentment among children to whom it might otherwise not have occurred to compare themselves invidiously with their white neighbors, and directs their attention away from practical ways to improve their own lives. As we have seen, many societies have been dominated by envy, but I cannot think of another case of a regime systematically trying to maximize envy in the rising generation. It is genuinely cruel to the non-white children who are supposedly its intended beneficiaries, but as we would expect from envy-inspired behavior, the aim appears to be to harm us rather than to help them.
The harm involves first of all the inculcation of guilt, which is the modern counterpart of the primitive’s fear of envious black magic. Nonracial precedents for such guilt are easy to find. You have probably seen, perhaps on some liberal neighbor’s bumper-sticker, the injunction “Live simply, so that others may simply live.” At bottom, this is the same Dobu-Islander fallacy of assuming there must be a fixed number of yams, so that if you take more than your share, others must go hungry.
Socialist intellectuals of the last century poisoned their lives with this sort of guilt, imagining that any enjoyment they permitted themselves amounted to robbing the toiling masses. Today, progressive academics with no understanding of how wealth is created advocate massive capital transfers to the third world in order to assuage their guilt over living in a prosperous society. It cannot be overemphasized that this is a fallacy, that the world’s good things do not exist in any fixed quantity and, therefore, enjoying a few of them does not deprive anyone else.
Today, young whites are being targeted for prosperity-guilt. Many, of course, are not even prosperous, living in communities ravaged by opioids and long-term unemployment. Yet these children are now being taught that they are responsible for the problems of the ghetto. Since this cannot directly benefit anyone in the ghetto, we are forced to ask ourselves what is really going on. Don’t let yourself be put off by any talk about the need to “foster difficult conversations about race.” The inculcation of guilt and resentment is not a conversation, and the children involved are too young to talk meaningfully about race anyway.
The most important historical precedent for critical race theory’s deliberate cultivation of racial guilt and resentment, I believe, is communism, which harnessed class-envy not to improve the lives of the working class, but to subvert society and let a tiny, ideologically-defined elite rule over the ruins, unconstrained by law or custom. In the same way, the only beneficiaries of critical racial theory are likely to be those who are already powerful.
But critical race theory is simply the most recent in a series of bad policies due in part to a failure to understand the social effects of envy. Racial integration already followed the same pattern more than half a century ago. Envy is a phenomenon of proximity; distance, both social and physical, tends to diminish it by making comparison harder. At one time, segregation served this important social function. Whether averting envy was among the purposes of those who started it in the late 19th century I do not know, but it was certainly an effect of their actions.
In his book Race and Education, the late Raymond Wolters offers many examples of black racial resentment enflamed by integration. Whites’ participation in class discussions, for example, appeared to some blacks “as an arrogant display, a deliberate flaunting of knowledge that downgrades other class members.” Some suspected the only reason white children even bothered working for good grades was to look better than blacks. One black girl, asked why she picked on a smaller white girl, said she was annoyed by the girl’s “attitude in class. She knows all the answers. She gets them right all the time.” It may have been wiser to segregate the races and let people suspect black children were less smart than to integrate them and remove all doubt.
One of the commonest effects of school integration was a rise in vandalism. Wolters notes a dramatic instance that occurred in Topeka, Kansas, the school system directly at issue in the Brown decision. In 1970, a principal refused to authorize an assembly on the Thursday of his school’s official “Black Culture Week” celebration. There had already been assemblies and presentations that week, and by Thursday this principal thought that enough instruction time had been lost. In response to his refusal, a group of black students set fire to the school auditorium, doing over $27,000 worth of damage.
Vandalism is destruction without any corresponding gain to the vandal, and sometimes even involves effort or risk. Such acts are commonly described as senseless, but we can often begin to make sense of them once we understand envy. Schoeck discusses a case in which someone painstakingly slashed the tires of 20 cars in a single night. Detectives could not discover any motive. But Schoeck asks whether it is really so hard to put oneself in the position of a young lout who has failed his driver’s test and is driven into a rage by the sight of a row of shiny new cars waiting for their lucky owners. He quotes a similar case in which a man arrested for setting fire to eight cars told the police: “I couldn’t afford to own an automobile . . . and I didn’t want anyone else to have one.” Vandalism was better than stealing a car.
In the 1950s, at the same time as school desegregation, many white liberals began to worry that schools in white neighborhoods were getting more funding than those in black neighborhoods. A campaign to build new, state-of-the-art schools for the underprivileged was launched. The immediate result was widespread vandalism. In 1958, the New York Department of Education was forced to replace 160,000 windows and make good the damage done by 75 cases of arson. Schoeck notes that envy was probably the motive:
To the slum child, the daily contrast between his “home” and the school’s air-conditioned chrome-and-glass luxury is an irritant. If he is burdened with learning difficulties, he sees school as a world to which he will never belong. He knows that when his schooldays are over there will be no comparable place of work waiting for him. What, then, is more probable than that he should give free rein in vandalism to his rage and resentment? The culprits may be turning against too perfect an environment which they themselves did not help create.
Within a few years, schools were being built with fewer windows, and they had iron bars. Many noted the resemblance to prisons.
Eventually the envy directed against successful white students and shiny new buildings began to include high-achieving blacks. They found themselves accused of being sellouts and “acting white.” Roland Fryer of Harvard devised a quantitative study of this “acting white” effect. He discovered that in integrated classrooms, as the grade-point averages of black students increases beyond the level of a B+, they tend to have fewer friends. In schools that were almost all black, he found “no evidence at all that getting good grades adversely affects students’ popularity.” A president of Atlanta’s Spelman College also noted that “an oppositional identity that disdains academic achievement has not always been characteristic of black adolescent peer groups. It seems to be a post-desegregation phenomenon.” The reason should be obvious: invidious comparisons depend upon proximity. School integration is a classic example of the harm that can be done by failing to understand the importance of envy in human relations.
Most of Schoeck’s examples of envy are of people in more or less homogeneous societies, but he does cite one example of its influence on group dynamics that is based on a study of a small Colorado town around 1950. The town consisted of two well-defined groups, a white, English-speaking upper stratum and a slightly larger Spanish-speaking population with lower occupations. The dominant, English-speaking group, though having a certain caste spirit, was open enough to absorb the most capable members of the Spanish-speaking group. Other Spanish-speakers saw them as traitors who had sold out to the Anglos, practicing subservience to them while climbing over the backs of their own people. Even Spanish-speakers who had attained an only slightly better-than-average economic position were accused of arrogance and viewing other members of their own group with contempt.
Obviously, this behavior of Spanish-speakers in Colorado in 1950 perfectly parallels the more recent controversy over successful black students accused of “acting white.” Then as now, an envious group may be driven to embrace even failure itself as a badge of identity and claim to moral superiority. There is nothing new under the sun.
I’d like to focus now on the charge of arrogance that appears in both the school integration anecdotes and Schoeck’s Colorado study. It is classic envy to accuse others of “thinking they are better.” Most often, this is psychological projection: It is not the envied man who thinks he is better, but the envier who perceives himself as inferior. How likely do you think it is that even a single white child in America works for good grades specifically to humiliate black classmates? And yet black children are perfectly capable of imagining this. Whites do not compare themselves to blacks; they are far more likely to compare themselves to other whites.
To state the obvious, our purpose in discussing IQ, for example, is not to pat ourselves on the back, but to refute the notion that we are conspiring to keep other people down. Equality of natural endowments is not something in our power, or anyone’s power, to grant. Natural selection is an impersonal process that from the human point of view scarcely differs from chance. But, as I noted earlier, there are primitive societies that altogether lack any concept of chance or luck. They think all differences between men are the result of intentional action, usually magical. Some similar superstition probably underlies the thinking of our enemies.
Occasionally we discuss the high proportion of human achievement originating in Europe and its people. Until fairly recently, this historical fact was considered so obvious that it was not worth talking about. And this does not mean, by the way, that Western man ever sought to deny the genuine achievements of others; a self-confident people feels no need to begrudge due recognition to others. Today, the basic facts of Western accomplishment are under attack, and a response has become necessary. Many of you will be familiar with the important work done by Prof. Ricardo Duchesne in this area. Once again, self-congratulation is not the point. Speaking personally, contemplation of the vastness of Western achievement is more likely to inspire me with a feeling of humility than one of pride or arrogance. Measured against what our ancestors wrought, our personal achievements are laughably modest.
What can be done to combat racial envy? This is not an easy question. If we look to our own tradition of ethical thought developed over many centuries within Christendom, we find envy characterized as a sin. It is one of the seven cardinal sins upon which most more specific sins hinge. Sin is an essentially spiritual phenomenon which means, among other things, that it must be combatted at the level of the individual soul. There is no possible political or legislative program to eliminate envy any more than pride or wrath. These are timeless temptations intrinsic to the human condition.
As already stated, the best way to overcome envy is to have goals of one’s own. Once a man begins to concentrate on achieving something through his own efforts, invidious comparisons with others begin to seem like distractions. He loses interest in them. But this shift in focus is not the kind of thing one man can achieve on behalf of another, still less that one social or racial group can confer upon another. It is a spiritual challenge for each individual. The best we can probably do is to remove direct incitements to envy such as critical race theory. Also, as previously noted, distance can diminish the effects of envy, but under a regime of forced and micro-managed association, this is impossible to achieve.
Another lesson is that we should not take too literally the accusations about slavery and colonialism constantly cast in our teeth. No one would care about the sins of our great-grandfathers, real or imagined, if we were not more successful than certain other races today. It is observed superiority that inspires resentment, not the wrongs of past centuries, which are at most post facto ways of rationalizing resentment.
But perhaps the most important lesson for us to learn is the futility of appeasement. As Helmut Schoeck observes, people who find themselves the targets of envy have difficulty responding rationally. In particular, they are prone to imagine envy arises as a direct consequence of their being better off and will, therefore, necessarily wane if even unrealistic demands are pandered to. As noted, envious people often get worse, the better they are treated. The more generous we are in benefitting the envious, the more clearly we demonstrate (in their eyes) our own superiority. The best we can probably do is to insist upon two truths: 1) that any advantages we may enjoy are not the cause of others being deprived of them, and 2) that the future of other racial groups is in their own hands, not ours.
News of the Times;
https://deadspin.com/the-nfl-s-domestic-violence-program-appears-to-be-going-1848083886
https://thepostmillennial.com/los-angeles-police-tells-residents-to-cooperate-and-comply-with-robbers-as-street-robberies-increase
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hunter-bidens-private-equity-firm-facilitated-38-billion-chinese-purchase-american-owned
https://neonnettle.com/news/17440-biden-admin-resettling-4-000-afghans-across-46-u-s-states-every-week
https://www.propublica.org/article/st-jude-hoards-billions-while-many-of-its-families-drain-their-savings
https://fee.org/articles/a-75-year-old-warning-about-those-who-say-listen-to-the-science/
https://teamtuckercarlson.com/news/experts-befuddled-by-mysterious-fact-that-africa-is-less-than-6-vaccinated-but-has-avoided-covid-disaster-unlike-europe-and-the-us/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/dont-unless-ready-suffer-die-california-man-died-covid-19-vaccine-described-horrific-pain-suffering-writing-passing-away/
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/vaccinated-english-adults-under-60
https://humansarefree.com/2021/11/bill-gates-gave-319-million-to-msm.html
https://www.kcra.com/article/ex-college-professor-charged-with-setting-california-fires/38295240
https://www.fox6now.com/news/waukesha-christmas-parade-car-drove-through-barricade-mayor-says
https://nationalfile.com/uk-muslim-liverpool-bombing-suspect-had-asylum-status-rejected-but-was-never-deported/
https://www.redpapernews.com/president-biden-just-lost-a-major-court-battle-judge-hands-joe-a-nationwide-injunction-on-joes-no-drilling-order/
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2021/11/19/fauci-caught-maskless-at-dc-book-party-in-violation-of-local-mandate-n2599399
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.