Famous last words:
“I don’t want to be known as a war president,” LBJ, Summer 1965.
Whoops.
A few short years later:
“That bitch of a war destroyed my Great Society – the woman I really love,” LBJ, late in his term.
Now that’s just sad.
Monthly Archives: May 2014
LBJ on the War
Filed under Democrats, Politics, US Politics, Vietnam War, War
Chimps Are Evil and Stupid, and So Are Men
Chimps are flat out nasty, ugly beasts with little to redeem them. They are also pretty shortsighted and often downright stupid. It is downright frightening that these are our closest relatives in the animal world. What does that say about us!?
Chimpanzees are nastier than many people like to think. They kill monkeys and are pretty unpleasant to each other, too. Their sex lives would shock Queen Victoria, and their ethical universe, if they have such a thing, is much darker than our own. They live in groups, but the groups break and reform as their members quarrel. Terror makes their world go round. If two chimps need to pull a rope to get a tray of food, they will, but only if they are out of reach of one another. Otherwise, the dominant animal attacks its subordinate and neither of them gets anything. Anger and greed destroy the hope of reward.
And we humans are barely better, to each other or to our nearest mammalian relatives:
As men and women filled the world they killed off many of their kin. The Neanderthals were the first to go. Human habits have not changed since then. Now just a few remnants of our once extensive clan linger on. In a century or so we will be the only large primate (and almost the only large mammal) found outside farms or zoos. Almost all the apes will be extinct in the wild, some before they have been properly studied by science, and much of our biological heritage will be lost forever.
We are also foolish, great at destroying our patrimony but not so skilled at creating it where we need it most (after we ruined it):
Man has flayed his native planet for ten thousand years. Soil is hard to make but easy to destroy. A modern plough turns over hundreds of tons a day, far beyond the capacity of the most vigorous invertebrate. It digs down no more than a couple of feet, making a solid and impermeable layer at the depth of the blades. When heavy tractors roll across the surface their wheels compact loose earth into something like concrete, in which nothing will grow. Continued ploughing also breaks up the topmost layer and allows vast quantities to wash away. The farmers’ raw material is on the move, from hill to plain, from plain to river, and from land to sea.
The evidence is everywhere. My parents’ house overlooked the Dee Estuary (the Welsh rather than Scottish version). What was, a few centuries ago, a broad waterway has become a green field with a ditch in it, and the local council is much exercised about the rising sand that blows onto its roads. The reason lies in the fertile fields of Cheshire and North Wales. They have been ploughed again and again, and their goodness has disappeared downstream.
That’s just dumb. There’s got to be a better way to grow stuff.
All passages from The Darwin Archipelago by Steve Jones (2011).
Filed under Agricutlure, Animals, Anthropology, Apes, Cultural, Mammals, Wild
Alexander of Macedon
Ah yes, Alexander the Great. Perhaps the greatest military strategist that even lived, no?
But what did he want? What were his goals? William Woodthorpe Thorn, the great classicist, birthed the Napoleonic notion that Alexander was after nothing more than “the Brotherhood of Man” or uniter of nations. This view was later popularized by Mary Renault in a series of popular novels.
I disagree.
Alexander wanted merely the same thing that all other conquerors (and all colonists for that matter) want:
- Land
- Money
In other words, the booty.
Let’s not romanticize these militarists too much.
Filed under Ancient Greece, Antiquity, Colonialism, History, Literature, Political Science
Who Authored William Shakespeare’s Works?
Yes, there was a man named William Shakespeare who lived around that time. However, he was merely a petty bureaucrat who quit his job after he made a pile of money so he could retire early. He was also a very bad person. He was mean and ugly. In the midst of a horrible famine, he hoarded food for himself and his family. He sued friends when they owed him mere pocket change. He left his family little in his will, and most shockingly, the will contains no mention of plays or any other writings by him or anyone else. His death went utterly unnoticed by society, which would seem to make little sense.
It is for reasons such as these and for no others than the question, “Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays” is so endlessly debated.
Although the question has been tossed about for years and there are many contenders, scholars have not yet decided, who, if anyone other than Shakespeare, wrote his plays. Sir Francis Bacon is one of the most frequently tossed about names, but on style alone he needs to be thrown out. The other top contender died in 1604 in the middle of Shakespeare’s career, which makes no sense and would require a redating of many of the most famous plays.
Filed under Literature
RIP Black Rhinoceros
At some point in the next five or ten years, all sub-species of black rhinos will go extinct in the wild. He writes at one point that in order for Namibia’s black rhinos to survive, it isn’t necessary for local tribesmen to like the animals – it’s only necessary that they not hate them. But as long as there exists a black market in Africa, those tribesmen need only hate their own poverty (or feel a touch of a human emotion called greed) to keep going out into the scrubland and shooting rhinos.
The more the Namibian government clamps down on poaching, the more money the black market will offer for every dead animal. This would be bad enough if there were ten thousand black rhinos in the world, but there are very likely fewer than a thousand. There’s no way the animals can win.
Conservatives like this? They think this is ok, all right, no big deal, not a problem?
I don’t get it. But I will say, “Screw conservatives,” just for that one crap view right there.
On another note, primitive people of any type, African Blacks in particular, simply cannot be relied upon to preserve any wild animal of any type. To preserve wildlife goes against the human tendency to solipsism and short-term profit at the expense, and I think in the modern era, it requires a relatively high IQ. The Black African IQ, at 67 or 75 or whatever it is, is simply too low to preserve any wild animal. “What’s in it for me?” They will ask. “Nothing,” will be the answer.
Don’t give me the poverty argument. Georgia and Moldova are just as poor and they are not exterminating any animals on their land, though they could easily do so, particularly with the hated wolves.
The Blacks were never able to complete their goal of exterminating everything wild in Africa but the cockroaches and flies not because they were nice people but because they had primitive weapons. When modern weapons showed up, the Blacks were all colonized, and the Europeans, believe it or not, kept the Blacks from exterminating all the animals, and even made parks to protect the creatures.
With decolonization in the mid-1960’s, the Africans quickly went about exterminating all non-human non-domesticated animals. After all, now they not only had guns, but they even had automatic weapons. Giving a 67 IQ human an AK-47 can never be a good idea. At the same time, they also went about exterminating a lot of their fellow humans. The extermination of wildlife was so extreme (painfully recorded in the great Italian film Africa Addio) that the Europeans, who had just been tossed out, were quickly called back in by some decent-minded Africans to serve as quasi-colonists to protect the animals from the Africans and the Africans from themselves.
European paternalism is the only reason that there are large numbers of wild animals left on the continent. I am still convinced that Africans are in need of some paternalism.
Filed under Africa, Animals, Blacks, Endangered Species, Environmentalism, Europeans, Intelligence, Mammals, Namibia, Psychology, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Southwest Africa, Wild
Confidence Is Real or It’s Nothing
Well, yeah, I do have an Alpha/Sigma side to my personality. When I am in it, I am basically a self-impressed, vain, egotistical, conceited douchebag who thinks he is God’s gift to women and who walks around like he is the King of the World. I can turn that on or off at will. One thing I noticed though is that there are times when it is hard to go into that personality due to low self-esteem, a lot of lousy, failure-type things happening in my life or this or that bummers. Sometimes I cannot go into that personality, but I try anyway, and it feels like I am faking it and it’s all a big lie. That definitely does NOT work somehow, and somehow amazingly people pick up on the fact that it’s all fake.
If you are going to try to go into a personality like that, the only thing that works is that you need to believe it 100%. It may be a big lie, but you have to believe in that lie completely. Fake confidence, fake self-esteem, etc. simply does not work. If it’s not real, then hang it up. People can tell.
There are all these PUA sites telling all these guys how to act like Alpha males. Well, fine and dandy, but a lot of these probably just do not have that personality structure available to them. Sadly this sort of behavior is generally derived from experience, especially experiences in adolescence and early adulthood. In other words, a lot of Alphas/Sigmas, etc. simply had a lot of really great and successful experiences with females during these formative years. If a man does not have these successful experiences at this stage in life, I am a bit worried that he might never be able to access a personality structure like that. In particular, guys who had a lot of humiliating and degrading failures with the opposite sex seem to be damaged by these experiences far into adulthood.
These guys are not “Naturals” are going to try on the Alpha thing, and they will come across as “Synthetic” Alphas at best. It’s not going to work. Every guy cannot become an Alpha Male. It’s like having a footrace with 100 guys and saying that they are all going to finish in the Top 15%.
Filed under Gender Studies, Man World, Psychology, Romantic Relationships
Epitaph for Elliot Rodger
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition…Man is…a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself, he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.”
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
Great words from possibly Mexico’s greatest poet.
Filed under Literature, Philosophy
Top Ten: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
World’s 10 most interesting cities where it safest for a woman to travel alone – Guess what? They are all White cities, except one that is mostly Asian with a White minority.
10 worst cities to visit in the US – Guess what? They are all non-White (generally Black) cities.
Filed under Blacks, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Sane Pro-Woman, Sociology, Travel, Urban Decay, Urban Studies, USA, Whites
Once Upon a Time in Moronica
Moronica (Southern Division) continues to live up to its name.
All we need is Sergio Leone, De Niro, and a guy with a camera and the scene is complete.
Alpha Unit
Robert A. Lindsay