PS: 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑒𝑙𝑠𝑒 𝑠ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑎𝑡 𝑟𝑜𝑜𝑚 𝑡𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡.

Well. There are obvious exceptions like bread or peach cobbler or pumpkin pie. But you get the idea.

🙂 ☮️

PS: One more pro tip about those collards...

If you really want your collards to be the best tasting collards ever cook them the day before. Turn off the stove and leave them in the pot, on the stove (or where ever), overnight.

This is the only thing Mrs. Smith ever cooks this way. There is nothing else she ever leaves at room temperature overnight. Everything gets refrigerated as soon as it can go in the fridge.

But collards are the exception to the rule. Leave them overnight and bring them up to boil and let them simmer for ~15minutes or so.

Serve and enjoy! So delicious! 🙂 ☮️

PS: About those collards...

Ackshually... Step one is cleaning the collards really well to get the sand off of them. Sometimes they're not too bad, but sometimes they are quite sandy. Sandy = Gritty = Not good.

• Wash them very well to get the sand off.
• Parboil in unsalted water for ~15 minutes.
• Add new water and salt and bacon grease and onions.
• Couple heaping tablespoons of bacon grease. (Don't be bashful.)
• You can throw in a hambone if you like.

And, collards taste best after the first frost. Not sure how you would figure that out with store bought, but...

Anyway. I love me my collards! 🙂 ☮️

PS: 𝐶𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑠, 𝑖𝑠 𝑖𝑡? 𝑈𝑔ℎℎℎ, 𝐼 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦'𝑟𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑡ℎ𝑓𝑢𝑙, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 ... 𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑦.

You and I don't disagree about many things, Mr. Moderator, but I luv luv Love! me some collards. They are delicious.

But here's the trick. You have to parboil them first. And then pour off that water and start over. And you have to cook them with some bacon grease. Mrs. Smith also adds onions to the collards to make them even more delicious. Sometimes salt pork. Plenty of salt. (And sometimes a little sugar if needed.)

Truly though, bacon grease is the key.

I love me my collards. So delicious! 🙂 ☮️

PS: Collard greens, is it? Ughhh, I know they're healthful, but ... sorry. They serve a mean fried chicken in the club car, though.

Yes, it would be great to see this stuff come around the internet and back to us in some form. Maybe it'd be nice to pass some Tubwoman bills around. They should say "3/5" on the corners and "Legal for chicken tenders. For all major chains, public and private."

PS: Good morning, Mr. Moderator!

𝐼𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑒-39 of the 𝐻𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑡 𝑇𝑢𝑏𝑚𝑎𝑛 𝐸𝑛𝑗𝑜𝑦𝑠 𝐻𝑒𝑟 𝐿𝑢𝑛𝑐ℎ series...
https://i.ibb.co/b7Tm7XQ/image-39.png

I'm going to make it a hobby of sorts to graffiti the internet with stories about Harriet Tubman inventing the subway.

Happy Friday! 🙂 ☮️

PS:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/gaetz-withdraws-consideration-attorney-general

PS: Nah, it wiped it, Alarmist. It was the lack of a real email address, I suppose. I don't mind giving it to you, in fact, but it's a habit to use fake ones - on Mr. Hail's site, TUR, etc. Sorry about that. Reading the Taco Bell post now.

PS: Yes, I saw the news on ZeroHedge yesterday about Matt Gaetz. I'll write a quick update post on that. I intended to have more to say, but I ran across an article that said much of what I was going to.

Alarmist, I wrote a comment under you latest post on Dave Ramsey, but I can't be sure it took. I'll check on another device to see.

PS: I see you are spreading Mr. Smith's TubmanArt far and wide, Mr. Hail. It's be great if it became a running gag, and the Gov't dropped the whole thing out of embarrassment.

I like the clock one too. I remember the old days, 1845, '46, was it? It was a different time, you understand. The Underground Railroads ran on time. In fact, lots of people don't know this, but the touted on-time Italian train system under Mussolini was modeled after Tubman's UR. That was the only time the Italian trains ran on time. TBH, the much-touted Swiss system was not on time (but not too far off) when I rode the railroad there in the late '80s... 1980s, that is.

PS: Good evening, Mr. Hail,

I present to you 𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑒-13 from the 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒 series...
https://i.ibb.co/DY6cg9z/image-13.png

Cheers! 🙂 ☮️

PS

-- Spotted on Substack --

Several entries of interest, recently found in the depths of the Substack blogging juggernaut:

https://alarmist.substack.com

https://alarmist.substack.com/p/madrid

https://alarmist.substack.com/p/james-earl-jones

https://alarmist.substack.com/p/who-won-last-nights-presidential

https://alarmist.substack.com/p/yo-quiero-taco-bell

__________

Life lessons:

- Hang around the right crowds, get James Earl Jones' voice on your answering machine;

- exported Americanization is a process that resembles a sci-fi cloud of a gaseous substance which, when it passes over a place it dumbs things down and makes them work less well.

- Not all "Hispanics" like tacos, or "Taco Bell."

Not sure how to turn any of these lessons into Adam Smith's Harriet-Tubman-style art, though.

PS

Matt Gaetz was railroaded!

Yes, we're looking at you, Harriet Tubman.

Why don't you invent your railroads and such under the ground of other countries, Mx. Tubman.

PS: Good afternoon, everyone!
(And good afternoon, Achmed!)

I just heard that Matt Gaetz has withdrawn himself from consideration for Attorney General.

https://apnews.com/article/gaetz-trump-fbi-justice-department-248b46ba0c882dd46d661568e8bd3bd7

----------

Harriet Tubman, Inventor of the Subway, making sure her underground railroad trains are running on time...

https://i.ibb.co/1sjK3YY/image-8.png

----------

American Heroine, Harriet Tubman, taking a quick (but much deserved) lunch break...

https://i.ibb.co/5jsjK1s/image-75.png

----------

Yeah, it's too bad that the people who design coins (at the mint? or the treasury?) don't have a sense of humor because I think Mr. Alarmist's 43.2 cent Tubman coin would be hilarious.

(Oh well...)

Happy Thursday! 🙂 ☮️

PS: I think Steve Sailer likes that you put in lots of time coming up with numbers to match your conjecture, Mr. Hail. I noted he "liked" your comments there on SteveSailer.net (of the ones I could read) more than in the past. It's good to get exposure. I imagine you will check your site stats and see if your links to your site on there help out.

As for that Plan B, I guess that is the Trump deal-making that you all were mentioning here. He's pushing for something that will probably be blocked somehow (total elimination of the FBI), maybe legally by Congress. However, that he may eviscerate the whole top end of it, or mix it all up, means people careers may suffer. They don't want any of that. Just leave Gaetz alone.

I saw on Instapundit a 30 second clip from "The View" where one of the ladies had to quit gossiping and doing the emotional womanalysis and make a statement to disavow any bogus charges against Gaetz. She had to get serious - must have been painful for her. (I imagine after that they got on with their inane BS - not agonna watch.)

PS: Re the David Brooks article. Due to what you've said and the opinion lodged in my mind, I may or may not get to it. However, an old guy - an old-timely left who I don't think gets the picture, but is a good guy (gets the race realism, at least) - brought up that very article when I talked to him at the coffee shop this very morning*. He brought up the out-of-touch Ivy-"educated" connected elites. I told him that Tucker Carlson brought up the difference between the American elites of yestercentury and those of today. I reviewed "Ship of Fools" - only 3 installments - one of them had the Dead song, I think - Tucker's a DeadHead too.

Along with that, I brought up the difference between the Globalist mindset of today's elites and the ability for these people to have very nice bug-out locations around the world - he mentioned a show about their properties in New Zealand vs. the more Nationalist, at least pro-Americans mindset of Rockefellers and the like.

He agree with me on the point about intelligence of people picked by Trump, for example, to lead important Feral Gov't departments.



* Yeah, I really want to write a blog post, and that would have been the time. I don't even know about tomorrow - busy!

PS: Ooops, not STILL rational, as .999 is not a rational number.

PS: Haha! That's hilarious, Adam. They should pitch the idea to the Franklin Mint, and see how they weigh in on the idea. I'm afraid it will go over like a Lead Panda, errr, balloon.

Or hell, let's leave that sordid past behind. I say let bygones be bygones and mint a FULL troy ounce Dred Scott coin. Fine print says ".666". Turn it upside down and you can fool some of the people pretty much all of the time. And, it's still better than 3/5ths, and it's still rational money, right? Rational, get it, math geeks?

PS

-- Plan B floated, amid Gaetz-gate derail-attempt --

Michael Waller, a pro-Trump national-security expert, says this on the Gaetz-gate confirmation-quagmire:

"If Senate Republicans don't confirm Matt Gaetz as attorney general & Kash Patel as FBI director, President Trump should sign an executive order to dissolve the FBI by rescinding the July 26, 1908 order that the FBI calls its founding document."

https://x.com/JMichaelWaller/status/1859063571172233272

It is a tweetified version of his recent article:

"Take apart the FBI piece by piece. Here’s how," by J. Michael Waller, November 15, 2024.

https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/author/imp_jmichael_waller/

Michael Waller's org is described by the noble editors of Wikipedia as: "a US far-right, anti-Muslim, Washington, D.C.–based think tank. ...The organization also operates a public counter-jihad campaign and the website counterjihad.com. ...In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labeled the CSP as a hate group."

PS

You raise a good point, Mr. Smith. Any note or coin with Ms. Tubman on it should be valued at 3/5 of its intended value and further discounted to 3/4 of that value to reflect the perceived wage-gap between men and women.

🕉

PS

Adam Smith's "Harriet Tubman invents an 'underground railroad'," 2024:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/time-for-pat-buchanan-to-get-the-presidential-medal-of-freedom/#comment-6868893

PS

CAPTION: "Harriet Tubman, the long-hailed American genius and top-three-rated all-time American hero, shows off the 'underground railroad she invented":

https://i.ibb.co/VTVCTV4/image-72.png

PS

Re: David Brooks

Having only read the introductory 10% or so an some excerpts of the rest when I wrote the above, and now having read much more of it thanks to Adam Smith (someone give this man a raise), I am less impressed with the David Brooks article.

To use a boxing analogy -- boxing being on many minds since Mike Tyson's return to lose a professional fight, at age 58, against some Youtube bozo -- David Brooks is "pulling his punches." He is giving pretty anodyne advice, too.

He ignores or dances past certain important truths and makes regular appeals to Wokeness-creeds, like where he laments that "affirmative action" being nominally illegal for public universities now leads to a tragic lowering of Black student percentages. Do people not see this as the same part of the Bad Elite problem? Does he think cramming in Blacks at 10x or more their natural rate makes the Bad Elite problem better, or worse? Does he care, really, about the ethnocultural core against which the Bad Elite are so resentful? He doesn't really mention Whites at all, except as vaguely Bad Guy-type characters from a pre-"meritocratic" age (which, throughout, he means before Jews became a huge component of the power-structure in the USA and signals that he means that, and even says so directly once early on).

At times, David Brooks does lead readers up to the precipice. Whether they are capable of seeing over the edge onto the vast plans and valleys below, that is up to them. But

PS

Sailer-Substack people voted two of my comments the "top two" at this recent thread, such as that they are visible to even a regular person who doesn't "click through to the comments":

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/why-do-dems-want-to-die-in-the-trans

________

The top one:

“One lesson I would be quick to draw from [the 2024 election]: Americans are not interested in seeing biological men punch women in the face at the Olympics… If that sounds like ‘Transphobia’ to you, you are the problem.” — Sam Harris

PS: Good evening, Messrs. Alarmist and Newman,

I think they should mint a Dred Scott coin that weighs three fifths of an ounce of .999 silver. Naturally, it should have a face value of sixty cents.

I think that would be fun. 🙂 ☮️

PS: "Just my two cents, which should have the head of George Washington rather than Abe Lincoln." Agreed about "honest" Abe. George is already on the quarter, which, if this helps, buys the same sized gum balls a penny would buy half a century ago. (Or REALLY close, but twice as hard on the teeth.)

Who should be on the fiver then?

PS: I didn't know I was in agreement with this David Brooks on anything, so that's interesting. I'd thought of him as a NeoCon, one who's, as you wrote, been mentioned by iSteve on occasion. He does like to read that Atlantic. I don't have the Constitution for things like that. Thanks for the David Brooks article link, Adam.

Big Mike there looks like, if (s)he doesn't eat her broccoli, surely eats a lot of spinach.

As for the images of Tubwoman, they bring up old song lyrics - Steve Goodman, as sung most famously by Arlo Guthrie:

"The conductor sings her song again,
the passengers may please refrain.
This train got the disappearing enslaved man blues..."

I read Mr. Smith's comment and the replies. That puts together some race realism together with (old timey) Adam Smith money realism.

PS

I tell ya, folks ... Tubman was a runaway/gotaway slave. The brother who should be on the FRNs is Dred Scott, who ran away but was returned by judgement of the Supreme Court, which shows the true rottenness of the system to our black folk.

Just my two cents, which should have the head of George Washington rather than Abe Lincoln.

🕉

PS: Good afternoon, Mr. Hail!

https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-tries-explain-baffled-william-shatner-why-harris-lost-election

Maher tried to explain that Harris "was not a great candidate".
"Let's be honest," he said. But Shatner defended Kamala.

"Why isn't she a great candidate? She combined several trends of thought here. 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤!, a woman," he offered.

"𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤? Because of the one drop rule and the absent 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤! father?" Maher should have replied.
(Because that would have been pretty funny.)(To me anyway...)

-------------
Hey googoo, when did Harriet Tubman invent the subway?
https://i.ibb.co/b5rpWwc/AI-Overview-Tubman.jpg

So, I started writing a comment to you yesterday evening. I was going to thank you for the heads up on the interest that Tubman comment drew (even Mr. Ganderson chimed in!), but after reading Bugg's comment I went on a little tangent of sorts. I started tinkering with the AI art bot with prompts like "Heroic Black Woman Harriet Tubman First Subway Train Operator in America" and other such silliness...

https://i.ibb.co/GJfXpbg/image-4.png
https://i.ibb.co/yqMD6B0/image-8.png
https://i.ibb.co/kQ89k3y/image-24.png
https://i.ibb.co/WPjK30M/image-63.png
https://i.ibb.co/Dk2G43k/image-66.png

But I noticed she wasn't smiling in any of the "photos". So I changed up the prompts to things like "Heroic Black Woman Aunt Jemima First Subway Train Operator in America"...

https://i.ibb.co/VqR6zhB/image-1.png
https://i.ibb.co/x7J9sKR/image-28.png
https://i.ibb.co/5LF2Z2x/image-52.png
https://i.ibb.co/3719Dhv/image-70.png
https://i.ibb.co/VTVCTV4/image-72.png

And about 200 images later I kinda forgot about finishing that comment I started. So, thanks for letting me know I had some replies. (When I had last checked there were no replies yet.)

-------------
"How The Ivy League Broke America," by David Brooks
https://archive.ph/lHCIQ

I haven't read it yet, but it looks interesting. I'll have to check it out later though, as I'm headed to work.

But real quick... About this meritocracy business... I agree with Achmed. I would rather have honest people in positions of "authority" than high IQ criminals and scumbags. Unfortunately, it seems that only the worst sort of people are the kind of people who would "work" for ＜s＞"government"＜/s＞ The Great Satan. And as long as they're going to be evil, I prefer they be stupid.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/

(But anyway...)
https://i.ibb.co/ZHpsr3G/Big-Mike.png

I hope you guys have a great evening! 🙂 ☮️

PS

-- David Brooks attacks meritocracy --

RE: IQ scores and ability to lead government departments (or the like)

The journalist David Brooks has a long (ca. 10,000-word) essay published this week in The Atlantic, "How the Ivy League Broke America." He makes the same basic argument you're making, namely, how bad an idea it was to create a giant social machine to funnel people into supposedly meritocratic institutions filtered heavily by IQ and nothing else. He says this system removed certain social moorings and created a bad elite. The USA began this process in the second quarter of the 20th century and completed it full in the third quarter of the 20th century. Or so he says.

(The entire bad-old-world-needing-reform story he pitches is basically filtered threw his Jewish lens--as if before Jews were allowed to "take over" the Ivy League universities, the graduates were idiots and losers who only got in for having family-trees with Mayflower members, or something. It's a bit of an artificial or 'contrived' story, but he uses it for his rhetorical purposes. His purpose is to analyze the past number of decades and the system we now have; his thesis is we have a bad elite and it's specifically because of the Ivy League and the high-IQ sorting directive.

David Brooks says that the "bad elite" problem has been evident for decades, despite the success of elite institutions filtering and scooping up high-IQ people. The IQ-centric (or test-taking centric?) meritocracy model, he says, was and is flawed. (He only briefly mentions what I consider an elephant in the room in the discussion.)

We're talking about it now that a Fascist political candidate has won two presidential elections (okay, David Brooks didn't use the word "fascist," I just like inserting it because of how absurd it is, humor value). But the thing is bigger than a few bad apples -- a Hillary here, a Kamala there -- as it is actually an entire system, and has operated full-on more than well over fifty years. Several generations of elites are products of it; none remember anymore the days of another model of the elite.

David Brooks himself is now an older man and he remembers, barely, in his younger years, seeing blue-collar newsmen of a type now completely extinct. Everyone in any kind of high-level journalism is now elite-educated and so on. There are none of the old-stock, blue-collar beat reporters left. And in fact he has a study showing over 50% of the top journalists and top newspaper have degrees from the top-2% or so of universities. Is it a good thing that "the media" is now staffed by people like this?

David Brooks is, I think, a long-running favorite of Steve Sailer's. Brooks is a center-right Jewish journalist and commentator, who often says certain good things. He stays within the "cordon sanitaire" of the directives of Wokeness ideology. But, still, poking the Wokeness-behemoth at certain of its pressure points in the bloated carcass the monster-like entity lumbers along with, crushing good White citizens beneath it daily. He is just provocative enough that The Atlantic would invite him to publish a long essay attacking the left-wing Woke-Elite, of which The Atlantic itself has been emblematic for many years (certainly all of this century so far).

If Adam Smith is seeing this, the article is titled:

"How The Ivy League Broke America," by David Brooks, The Atlantic, Dec. 2024 issue (published online, Nov. 14, 2024).

PS: I think there was a mistake made with the Captain Kirk quote. The date of the INTERVIEW's release was 2 days ago. The actual date of the interview must have been in 1955 when Kirk, Scotty, and some other Bill Mahar were beamed down to Earth for a few days to take care of some business. That sounds a lot more, errr, logical.

PS: Thanks for the short history of Joe Scarborough, Mr. Hail. What about the wife? I know nothing of these people and don't even care to look them up.

"Scarborough now looks frightened, and has said he fears that Trump's administration will seek arrest warrants and prosecution "against "Americans who speak up at School Board meetings or protest election fraud" and Trump and VDare, which he stresses is un-American and wrong, and is against "the best interests of the United States."

FIFY,J, and thanks for your statement. Very true. Do you see how these people lie?!

I used the term retribution. I could expand it to retributive justice. That's a term the ctrl-left uses (or is "redistributive justice"?) when they want more of your stuff. However, any prosecution of people like Garland and Mayorkas is REQUIRED by the US Constitution. Treason is bad, mmmmkaaay?

PS: About the rest of that same comment. Yes, that's a very important point that lots of things that we Americans have in the past taken for granted (water in our fishbowl) are not things that can happen in other cultures, even the supposedly best of them. I'll include Japan and Korea there too. Even though we've probably all seen those returning-of-dropped-wallets videos, there is no millennium-long history, from the English (very hard to believe this in 2024!) of respect for rule-of-law, the rejection of absolute power, etc.

Perhaps our Founding Fathers were a one-time singularity event in the history and future of the world.

You need reasonably competent people in the bureaucracy, but, more importantly, you need honest, moral people that will do their jobs without corruption. Even the best of Dept. Heads cannot straighten out an organization full of this stuff, without being a Duerte himself. He can fire them all, not by firing squad, but if the population consists of generally not people of integrity, you never get very far for long.

Anyway, I just wrote things you've already said.

Sorry for the long delay. I've been really busy for a couple of days.

PS: Hello, Mr. Hail:

Lissa
Nov 15
Liked by Steve Sailer
They’re MAGA loyalists. Not much experience, around 120-130 IQ. Was hoping for something different but I guess this is where we’re at.

If RFK jr. takes away my biannual Flaming Hot Cheeto binge I will storm the capitol.

That's a Steve Sailer thing too, IMO, thinking that smarts are everything. Sure, no 90IQ "slightly slow" guy would be likely to be able to run one of the Departments in the direction Trump (and WE) want. Even he could, with the right capable underlings, could do what we need though. Of all the people proposed none of them is a Senator Fetterman (before he got better) or a Hank Johnson. (In fact, speaking of the latter, are any of them at all non-White? GASP! I think the ctrl-left has gotten so perturbed by the possibility of a return to the rule-of-law, they have forgotten to play the race card - it's in there somewhere.)

What matters foremost is that these cabinet heads and "czars" (Mr. Homan of the BP), "special advisors" (Steven Miller) have integrity. I believe that is the case with those 2 examples, BTW, in this MOST IMPORTANT area of all.

IQ 110, IQ 145, whatever! We can't have people who will cave, whether it's their own weak mindsets, being bribed, being blackmailed, etc. The way Trump 45 worked, if one did, there'd be a year-long tweet battle before he was finally fired, with more precious time wasted and damage done.

It's not just Lissa there who I have a disagreement with on this. I think quite a few of the commenters there, smart people themselves, think high intelligence is the most important quality. That's wrong. I believe it's the ones that get really into the IQ test scores stuff that think this way. (That's nothing against the articles and discussion about test scores and AA, now Wokeness - just boring after a while to me.)

BTW, I pasted in Lissa's whole comment because I liked that cheetoes joke. It reminds me of the meme with RFK Jr. holding a Big Mac, or whatever it was, at the table with Vickram, Trump, and Musk(?). Some guy wrote - I paraphrase - "Making the gang initiate take his own drugs to make sure he's not a Fed."

Hahaaa. If RFK, Jr. stays in his own lane, that is, keeping off the Climate Calamity™ crap, he'll be a very welcome change for this country. Trump, in a very encouraging (because it was not more BS'ing and entertainment talk) moment in the Rogan interview, said that he was concerned that this guy stick to the one area. (Can't remember the exact wording.)

PS

-- Shatner puzzled at The Kackler's defeat --

"I don't know why the Democrats lost. I don’t understand... Prices have come down, the economy is good. I don't know why they voted against her, against the party." — William Shatner, speaking in interview with Bill Maher, released Nov. 17, 2024.

PS

-- Scarborough's supplication at Mar-a-Lago --

Two of MSNBC's leading anti-Trump vendetta-pursuers, Joe Scarborough and "Mika" Brzezinski (co-hosts turned husband-and-wife), it has been reported, paid a long, private visit to Mar-a-Lago on the weekend.

They revealed this meeting, their first face-to-face meeting with the USA's first orange-haired president in "seven years." They report that he was in good spirits and was chatty and optimistic.

Joe Scarborough and Mika came out, at the lead of their influential morning MSNBC show, in an unusually serious, somber tone. They revealed their secret, private visit. And they spoke, entirely on a prearranged script, certain things about the visit. They say that they appealed, begged, to Trump to refrain from any political prosecutions in 2025. Political prosecutions, they told Trump in their private meeting, are un-American and "don't work."

Joe Scarborough (b.1963) has been an MSNBC host since 2007. He was elected to Congress as a Republican in 1994, 1996, 1998, and 2000. His district, interestingly enough, was Florida-1. A number of election cycles pass under the bridge and, in 2016, in comes a young man named Matt Gaetz to win the same seat (reelected, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024; resigned shortly after winning 2024 reelection). Scarborough hates Gaetz and it may be 'personal' because Gaetz being his successor in the same district.

In 2007, when Scarborough was hired by MSNBC, the network not yet Hard-Left. He was hired , and celebrated for years, for being supposedly a centrist or moderate Republican and relatively young (44 in 2007; replacing Don Imus who was life-banned from television for using the phrase "nappy-headed hoes" about some Black women). Starting in mid-2015, Scarborough became an angry anti-Trump hardliner, and left the Republican Party in anti-Trump rage, around 2017.

Scarborough now looks frightened, and has said he fears that Trump's administration will seek arrest warrants and prosecution "against "members of the media" and other anti-Trump hardliners, which he stresses is un-American and wrong, and is against "the best interests of the United States." He says he has a range of advice on how Trump can avoid un-American activities and hopes to persuade him through fair coverage over Trump Term Two.

PS

Adam Smith's recent post about Harriet Tubman has drawn much interest:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/time-for-pat-buchanan-to-get-the-presidential-medal-of-freedom/#comment-6863953

PS

"some woman on there commenting that 120-130 IQ or whatever is not good enough, and we need the really smart people. That is so wrong. There are very bright people that are evil. ... So long as the official is not on the level of Kameltoe Harris, meaning, if we're talking IQ, 110 or higher, with good intentions, a hard worker, and someone who doesn't mind being called names by the Lying Press, that's a good hire."

Which comment-thread are you referring to?

I think this kind of discussion can bog down, to an extent, by a poor application of Great Man theory where it might not belong.

I think I agree more than I disagree with the Great Man theory of history. But if you're talking about Secretary of the Interior, or something, an effective organization could have a well-meaning but mediocre bumbler at the top and still be very effective.

What matters for organizations seems more to be social norms, and the competence and effectiveness of several dozen to hundred to thousand people all across the organization's mid-to-upper ranks. (Depending on size of the organization.) These people, we will never know their names (realistically), so we kind of project all of them in aggregate onto the figurehead of the top man or woman of the government department (or other organization). Traditionally, in the West, we just assume goodwill and competence across these ranks, and cases of overt corruption or incompetence are intolerable to us.

One thing one learns in interacting with virtually non-European peoples (and even some on the periphery of Europe), is this assumption of wide-and-deep competence-and-goodwill is not only absent, it's also not even seen as necessary. There is a lot of magical thinking including based around various "tough guy" mental models (such as Duterte of the Philippines, recently; and possibly even the much-praised President of El Salvador who has suspended all constitutional rights, and bragged of reductions in crime as he oversees a system in which 10% of adult-males are sitting today in prison). Resentments might occur if a different faction is seen to be in control than your own, but you know your own side would do the same thing.

The beauty and glory of the West, is something most of us don't even notice because of the fish-in-water perception-problem: Competence and public-spirited goodwill are the norm and are everywhere. (In my study of the history of the socialist movements between their (pre-Marx) emergence in the 1820s and the 1910s (when the Bolshevik Revolution) happens and bad results follow, I've come to believe our good institutions and goodwill allowed for socialist movements to seem realistic. There was a lot of misunderstanding that this model could work in non-Western societies or, God forbid, in a mass-democracy multiracial environment.)

The point is, the senior leaders don't need to be the very best. The people running the gears of the bureaucratic machine, they do need to be competent and morally serious. This is getting less true than it's ever been. The D-team's Wokeness model definitely does not solve that problem and, obviously, makes it worse.

PS

To my surprise, Steve Sailer "liked" my "Remember the Arizona (Audit)!" comment.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/democrat-politicians-assume-democrat/comment/77563936

PS: Yes, I just read Steve's latest one, the one you linked to here. I haven't read the comments yet, Mr. Hail. Thank you for the multiple PS links in various places.

Steve Sailer is a good writer, so I can't help reading the posts I'm allowed to read. Believe me, it's not the $100/yr, but I didn't join because I'd want to comment in all the time, as I'd done on TUR, and I'm trying to stick to my goal to spend my time in other ways.

PS: I didn't feel like looking up the story at the time, but thanks for that reminder of what happened, Alarmist. I remember watching video clips of her when she mentioned the deal with Big Mike. I don't know. Perhaps it's still Big Michelle, but someone with great power was a bit pissed off at the insults.

"Punochet and helicopters" Oh, I thought you were talking about bands that ought to be in the R&R Hall of Fame. Thanks for the correction.

"Karma is a bitch" Kamala is a bitch. FIFY. Yes, we need an editor here - that's 2 of them you made. ;-}

PS: I read Mr. Sailer's post and the whole comment thread (as of yesterday sometime), Mr. Hail. I agree with the guy who noted that you had been a very thorough investigator. I'd call it great detective work. The commenters there ought to be paying you $200 a day, plus expenses. (What expenses - a replacement keyboard and a new set of pajamas? ;-} )

Anyway, it's so surprising to me that Mr. Sailer has had dinner with Matt Gaetz, IF that's who it is. As I've written multiple times, Mr. Sailer doesn't seem to like these kinds of firebrand hard-care anti-UniParty people* like Gaetz and MTG. OTOH, he didn't say he liked him, but he gets along well with his (Sailer's) mellow personality.

Yeah, Almost Missouri is a smart and a good guy, and I've agreed with him on probably 99.9% of his. posts on TUR.

Well, I can't write there, but since I did read, and I mentioned "smart" and "good", I will say what I think about some woman on there commenting that 120-130 IQ or whatever is not good enough, and we need the really smart people. That is so wrong. There are very bright people that are evil. In general - and I will write lots more on this - Trump has picked people who are ready to do their jobs. Majorkas might have an IQ of 140 (I really doubt it, though), but that wouldn't matter. He'd be that much better at thinking of methods to culturally destroy this country. Screw the super high IQ thing - doesn't matter.

So long as the official is not on the level of Kameltoe Harris, meaning, if we're talking IQ, 110 or higher, with good intentions, a hard worker, and someone who doesn't mind being called names by the Lying Press, that's a good hire.


* Well, Pat Buchanan has always been anti-UniParty, and Steve thinks the world of him, rightly, as per not only his politics but as a very decent person per that Tucker interview. (I watched the whole thing.)

PS

Pinochet.

PS

Not long after making her jokes about Big Mike, Joan Rivers stopped breathing on the operating table during minor throat surgery, was resuscitated an hour later and put into a medically induced coma, and died a few days later. Coïncidence ?

We need people who embody the spirit and principles of Conan the Barbarian and Lavretiy Beria. I’m thinking Punochet and helicopters.

Karma is a b***h. ☯️

🕉

PS

-- "Remember the Arizona (Audit)!" --

Does anyone except me remember the "Arizona Audit" of 2021?

With Steve Sailer now signaling he believes in the possibility that D-teamers can and do commit election fraud in some situations (see his latest Substack-blog entry), I brought up that forgotten little incident:

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/democrat-politicians-assume-democrat/comment/77563936

(featuring a link to Peak Stupidity entry-2054.)

PS

Am hearing that CNN is pressing hard against Gaetz, their main broadcasts dominated by whatever Gaetz-Gates they can cook up or furrow down to find and bring to light.

CNN has interviewed several Republican House members and gotten them to disparage Gaetz on camera.

PS

Steve Sailer tells an anecdote from a dinner he had with Matt Gaetz and two other people in California, around late 2019 or very-early 2020:

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/what-do-you-think-of-trumps-picks

Sailer released this anecdote without naming Gaetz but giving important clues. Almost Missouri and I solved the puzzle: There are 3 to 5 candidates on technical grounds. Two of the three main ones were eliminated, leaving Gaetz as the "last man standing." It cannot be absolutely certain, but the odds are very strong, based on available evidence, that it was Gaetz at that mystery Sailer Dinner.

Any lingering doubt that it was Gaetz seems to be removed by some of Sailer's tweets in which he names Gaetz with language similar to that Substack-blog entry but without the exact anecdote. Sailer left plenty of bread-crumbs on this.