James Altucher presents his 10-step technique for learning:
The fact of urban gentrification in Baltimore is that hipster homesteaders have moved into traditional working-class white enclaves:
These areas were sought by the first hipster pioneers to benefit from the protection of the tough whites in those areas who had held out against the black-on-white race purge that was the 70’s and 80’s in Baltimore. The end result is that the housing values go up so much that the working and poor whites must move out as they can’t pay the taxes.
Recently, beginning in the 2000s, Johns Hopkins University and Hospital have been buying up vast swaths of vacant property in East Baltimore [where Boomy the Nigerian cabby rescued the ‘blonde woman of the yuppies’] and along the Charles Village Corridor. This was in response to blacks preying on hospital and university staff. These large institutions are buying up the criminal seed beds which constitute perhaps a third of the black Baltimore economy [with welfare constituting roughly another third]. This has caused more damage to the drug gangs than any police action, and is covered in the final season of The Wire. Over the past two years a concerted effort to discourage white resettlement of Baltimore has been made by black criminal residents. However, the news spin and statistical manipulation engaged in by the leftist city government has successfully blinded the prospective home buyers of these facts until it is too late.
It is no accident that the prime targets of the mob attacks were the Shoppers supermarket [which was successfully defended thanks to the early warnings put out by black cashiers from the neighborhood], and the CVS drug store which the Mayor gave orders not to defend. Both of these locations were only established due to city government initiatives to bring businesses into the neighborhood.
Note that the most successful pockets of gentrification such as South Baltimore, Locust Point and Canton, fared better than the Hopkins controlled areas and the others, because they are neighborhoods with their backs against the water, and raiders have only one way out, with Locust Point, which terminates in Fort Mchenry National Park, being a virtual fortified position.
With the white trash priced out of the community, the protective basis for resettlement is now gone. Without nasty whites to fight the blacks at street level, and with the police now exposed as enfeebled, the hunt for Whitey is on in earnest. This is how I have lived my life, as a white hunted by blacks across an urban crimescape, what H.L Mencken famously called, “the ruins of a once great medieval city.”
Back in the 1920s, most American city-dwellers took public transportation to work every day, but then a company called National City Lines, which was controlled by GM, bought up all the streetcars — or so the conspiracy theory goes:
During the 1800s, animal-drawn streetcar lines were built in cities across the United States. Starting in the 1880s, they were replaced by electrified streetcars, which quickly became the dominant mode of transportation in many cities.
Running streetcars was a very profitable business. Cities expanded, and people who found themselves living too far from work to walk depended on them. (Some real-estate developers built nearby suburbs around streetcar lines.) Over time, the businessmen who ran the streetcars, called “traction magnates,” consolidated ownership of multiple lines, establishing powerful, oftentimes corrupt monopolies in many cities.
Eventually, many of them contracted with city governments for the explicit right to operate as a monopoly in that city. In exchange, they agreed to all sorts of conditions. “Eager to receive guarantees on their large up-front investments, streetcar operators agreed to contract provisions that held fares constant at five cents and mandated that rail line owners maintain the pavement around their tracks,” writes Stephen Smith at Market Urbanism.
The real problem was that once cars appeared on the road, they could drive on streetcar tracks — and the streetcars could no longer operate efficiently. “Once just 10 percent or so of people were driving, the tracks were so crowded that [the streetcars] weren’t making their schedules,” Norton says.
In some places, like Chicago, streetcars retained dedicated rights of way, and they survived. Pretty much anywhere else, they were doomed. “With 160,000 cars cramming onto Los Angeles streets in the 1920s, mass-transit riders complained of massive traffic jams and hourlong delays,” writes Cecilia Rasmussen at the Los Angeles Times.
What’s more, in many cities the streetcars’ contracts required them to keep the pavement on the roads surrounding the tracks in good shape. This meant that the companies were effectively subsidizing automobile travel even as it cannibalized their business.
And paying for this maintenance got more and more difficult for one key reason: many contracts had permanently locked companies into a 5-cent fare, which wasn’t indexed to inflation.
Basing quality-of-life estimates on average life expectancy at birth warps our view of pre-modern life:
For Neanderthals and other pre-modern humans life was short and brutal primarily because they had to kill animals with handheld weapons at close range. Neanderthals who survived into their thirties looked like they had been pulled out of a Humvee that was hit by an IED. One fellow was missing an eye, an arm, a thumb and a foot! These guys suffered from no known diseases. However, their main food [according to chemical analysis of their bones] was the auroch — basically a rodeo bull — which they had to kill be wrestling with it, stabbing it, and smashing it with rocks!
For a Neanderthal 35 years old was as old as it is for an NFL running back or a lightweight boxer. If one imagines a world where such athletes were executed at retirement, and that all men were such athletes, you get a good idea of the climate for thirty-something folks in the Old Stone Age.
Mature Stone Age hunting and gathering societies, which had not yet invented alcohol, and which did not live with disease bearing domesticate animals, and did not engage in repetitive chores that wear away their connective tissue, produced healthier warriors and women than more technologically advanced societies until the 20th Century. Although few men survived to old age due to constant small scale warfare, male leaders and women living into their 70s was common. As with other apex predators, like lions, most of a primitive’s day consisted of leisure activities.
Agriculture caused people to live in one place, which encouraged disease. With the addition of domestic animals living in close proximity, humanity acquired the measles, all the pox diseases, and venereal disease [don’t ask how]. The result was that few children lived to age five. This is reflected in the fact that many societies did not name children at birth, and that children were seen as a burden until they were able to engage in the horrid economy which the adults were shackled to.
An agrarian man typically worked from sunrise to sundown doing a small cluster of repetitive motions, resulting in a terribly worn body by about age 30. The woman had it no better, on her knees grinding grain all day long, and becoming arthritic before age 30.
This was a nasty way to live, so conquerors lived according to the more ancient primitive tradition. The apex of the population — the nobility and royalty, being the top 5% — continued to live as primitives, hunting and fighting and enjoying leisure time, and making all of those great scientific, literary, artistic, and military advances.
The common agrarian person was a machine, a brute who ate, worked, shat and died in misery, and was regarded as subhuman by his masters, who lived, essentially, as a primitive warrior class.
Note that the age of majority has always been based on man’s prime as an athlete or war fighter. Ancient Greek warrior-athletes, Roman soldiers and medieval knights were not considered fit for combat until age 21, and were regarded as pretty well shot by 40. This has not changed, with modern boxers and football players considered subpar until age 22 and over the hill by age 35. Likewise, various social rights, such as firearms licenses, drinking privileges, voting rights, and military service, have typically not been granted until the 18–22 year age range. It has also remained nigh unthinkable for a head of state to be younger than 35 years of age. This athletic life span corresponds with the hunting life span of the Neanderthal auroch hunter.
Jetman Yves Rossy and protege Vince Reffet fly around Dubai in a professionally produced video dubbed Young Feathers:
Violence is a huge topic, and I found that the kind of violence that I was really interested in was the duel, broadly understood. In my definition of the duel, we have everything from sports to a staring duel to a pissing contest to certain kinds of arguments, and so forth. So I stayed away from the more tactical, real-world, self-defense type of writing.
One of the reasons I think your article on the topic is so great is that I think every guy our age can relate to this. Men with families suddenly realize, “Holy shit. My dad doesn’t live with us anymore. If somebody comes through that door, it’s my job to deal with it.” So I absolutely have thought about that.
I live in a place — southwestern Pennsylvania, right on the border with West Virginia — where almost everyone owns a gun. And most working-class guys carry their guns everywhere.
So I’m living in the heart of gun culture, but I’m not a gun guy. I didn’t grow up with them; I was never a hunter; my dad was never a hunter. I’ve shot a handgun, and it really scared me. I also enjoyed it as I got more comfortable with it. And I do think about getting a gun. I’m not comfortable being at such a force disadvantage when everyone else is armed.
Right now, my self-defense, home-invasion plan is based on an ax handle that’s within easy reach in the kitchen, and I also have a hatchet in my bedroom. I chose the hatchet very carefully. In the sitcom, the dad always keeps a bat handy. But a bat is too long. You can’t swing it in a hallway, and it’s also not as terrifying as a hatchet.
[...]
A few times a year in my small town, one of these monkey dances goes off, and the guys are carrying guns, and they shoot each other. Or they shoot each other after a road-rage incident.
I think we have very similar attitudes toward guns and gun culture. I’m not an abolitionist, but I would like the laws to be stiffer. Now I can walk into a gun store in my town and buy military-grade weapons. You’d be shocked by the amount of firepower you can buy — .50 caliber sniper rifles and the same shotguns the Marines carry in Iraq or Afghanistan. It doesn’t matter whether I know how to use these things — I can just walk into a store and buy them.
And if I do get a handgun, I can take it to the sheriff’s department, and in about as much time as it would take me to order a value meal at Wendy’s, they will give me a concealed-carry license. There will be no screening at all to see whether I’m qualified to carry a gun in public — which I absolutely am not. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t gotten a gun in the first place: I don’t know how to use one.
Gottschall clearly isn’t comfortable with — or particularly informed about — guns or gun laws. That makes this stand out even more:
My little brother is a federal law enforcement officer, and he’s also a firearms instructor. He came up recently to visit, and we went out to the range. Part of why I was attracted to the idea of owning a gun was self-defense, and part of it was that I’ve been fascinated by guns since I was a little kid, and I want to play with them. It seems like a lot of fun. And I had a great time. It was probably because I had such a skilled teacher. My brother really knows what he’s doing, and he knows how to make it safe. Shooting with him, and seeing his expertise, I had a tiny eureka moment. I suddenly realized that when it comes to the use of firearms, my brother is a badass martial artist. And I think that a lot of people who like training with guns are probably drawn to it not only for practical reasons, but also in that same restless quest for physical excellence that draws people to a martial arts dojo.
Yes, a lot of people who like training with guns are on the same restless quest for physical excellence that draws people to a martial arts dojo.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were two of Oxford’s Influential Inklings, but Lewis didn’t feel that he and Tolkien had influenced one another:
I don’t think Tolkien influenced me, and I am certain I didn’t influence him. That is, didn’t influence what he wrote. My continual encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him v. much to write at all with that gravity and at that length. In other words I acted as a midwife not as a father. The similarities between his work and mine are due, I think, (a) To nature — temperament. (b) To common sources. We are both soaked in Norse mythology, Geo. MacDonald’s fairy-tales, Homer, Beowulf, and medieval romance. Also, of course, we are both Christians (he, an R.C.).
Henry Dampier describes the wildly successful ethnic cleansing of New York City:
In NYC, America’s capitol of capitalism, the proportion of Whites was cut in half from 1950-2000, from 90% to about 45%. That’s about 7 million to around 3.5 million — a displacement of 3.5 million, which must include some fertility suppression as well.
[...]
Getting rid of 3.5 million Whites from one city in less than a century is an impressive feat, especially because it required no cattle cars or forced marches. How did they get it done, and with such clean hands, also?
Well, one easy way to do it is to teach in the schools that the ethnic group you want to get rid of is really evil and a source of all the bad things in history. Anyone who has been through the post-1960s education system knows that this is a major theme.
Another great thing to do is to encourage women in the ethnic group you want to get rid of to go in for long educations and strenuous careers, rather than having kids. If they have lots of kids, they’re harder to physically remove from the cities you want to get rid of them in.
[...]
All of this works great — in a short period of time, you can remove millions of people from the target ethnic group, forcing them to move to economically marginal areas, solidifying political control for your ethnic group and whatever coalition that you’ve brought along for the ride.
Finally, you want to soft-pedal the enforcement of criminal laws– especially symbolic, humiliating ones like rape — targeted against the population that you want to suppress or remove. Instead of executing criminals, you want to make a pretense of ‘rehabilitating’ them, providing them with long trials, generous probation periods, good-behavior releases, expensive prisons, and other forms of coddling based on relatively recent philosophical developments.
This makes it so that the ethnic group you want to get rid of knows that the police aren’t really on their sides, or are otherwise incapable of doing much. Meanwhile, you call any attempts at organizing defense by the group you want to displace either ‘terrorism’ or ‘organized crime.’
This policy is nothing more than a way of seizing territory and property from the people you want to get rid of. Using this policy, you can extract resources from healthy, successful people using coalitions of barbarians guided by glib sophists. It’s so effective that you can distribute the spoils from the millions of people you chase away to your cronies. Who said the era of rape & pillage was over? It’s just as effective as it ever was.
That’s democracy in the modern West. Conservative parties generally exist to prevent significant resistance to these campaigns from forming — by misdirecting attention to meaningless non-issues while people are prevented from living out good lives in the cities that their ancestors built in the wilderness.
It’s long been assumed that we’re stuck with this amount of risk, and that current levels of brain trauma are intrinsic to boxing and MMA. I don’t think that’s true at all. A huge percentage of this head trauma goes back to a single, simple mistake. In an effort to civilize combat sports, authorities mandated padded gloves and instantly made the sports far more savage. Granted, putting gloves on the hands seems like a nice thing to do. If you were being punched in the brain by a powerful man, wouldn’t you rather he strap a pillow around his fist? But the glove doesn’t do anything to diminish your brain damage. In fact, it magnifies it massively, because your opponent can then throw his hands around with wild abandon, punching from all angles — using the kinds of punches that you could never throw with bare fists without destroying your hands and crippling yourself in the course of a fight.
If you took the gloves off, you’d change the sport. You’d no longer see windmilling, Roy Nelson-style overhand rights being thrown. You’d see far fewer hook punches thrown. It would revert to a much simpler bag of techniques that was closer to the repertoire of old-fashioned bare-knuckle, and you would see a lot more grappling.
So BJJ guys, for instance, would be much more competitive, because you couldn’t just beat them to death from the top position. And BJJ guys could also attack more effectively, because bulky gloves make for clumsy grappling and give the opponent a good handle to grab onto. (Just to give one example, the rear naked choke has become harder and harder to finish in MMA because defenders just grab onto one of the attacker’s hands with both of theirs and hold on for dear life. The glove provides the grip that makes this defense possible.)
Fighting bare-handed would also move the UFC back to what it originally was — a pretty good simulation of an actual fight. Putting on gloves is completely artificial. You are basically giving the fighters weapons that allow them to do more damage, and this completely changes the character of a human fistfight.
[...]
It was a great PR move, sort of like the football helmet. The football helmet was a way of making kids safer, or so they thought. It was a well-intended humanitarian gesture, but it was a horrible mistake. It made football more dangerous.
You would diminish the risk in MMA to an acceptable level if you just took off the gloves. This would reduce the violence from an insane, NFL level to a rugby level. You would still have a rough, tough, bloody sport that really tests its fighters, but you wouldn’t introduce silly risks that don’t need to be there.
America is not reverting to earlier racist patterns, Orlando Patterson writes — in the New York Times:
[C]alling for a national conversation on race is a cliché that evades the real problem we now face: on one hand, a vicious tangle of concentrated poverty, disconnected youth and a culture of violence among a small but destructive minority in the inner cities; and, on the other hand, of out-of-control law-enforcement practices abetted by a police culture that prioritizes racial profiling and violent constraint.
First, we need a more realistic understanding of America’s inner cities. They are socially and culturally heterogeneous, and a great majority of residents are law-abiding, God-fearing and often socially conservative.
According to recent surveys, between 20 and 25 percent of their permanent residents are middle class; roughly 60 percent are solidly working class or working poor who labor incredibly hard, advocate fundamental American values and aspire to the American dream for their children. Their youth share their parents’ values, expend considerable social energy avoiding the violence around them and consume far fewer drugs than their white working- and middle-class counterparts, despite their disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates.
In all inner-city neighborhoods, however, there is a problem minority that varies between about 12.1 percent (in San Diego, for example) and 28 percent (in Phoenix) that comes largely from the disconnected youth between ages 16 and 24. Most are not in school and are chronically out of work, though their numbers are supplemented by working- and middle-class dropouts. With few skills and a contempt for low-wage jobs, they subsist through the underground economy of illicit trading and crime. Many belong to gangs.
Their street or thug culture is real, with a configuration of norms, values and habits that are, disturbingly, rooted in a ghetto brand of core American mainstream values: hypermasculinity, the aggressive assertion and defense of respect, extreme individualism, materialism and a reverence for the gun, all inflected with a threatening vision of blackness openly embraced as the thug life.
Such street culture is simply the black urban version of one of America’s most iconic traditions: the Wild West.
The hipsters at Boing Boing ironically share this shooting gallery plan as a low moment in how-to history, because shooting BBs at rabbit and squirrel silhouettes is obviously wrong:
You see these titanic egos clash, and only one survives. Many of these guys are the best fighters they’ve ever met and appear to think they’re invincible. This was especially true in the early days, when every discipline was isolated from every other, and people were just ignorant about what they were going to confront in the cage.
So you have the spectacle of two guys who can’t imagine losing thrown together, and one of them triumphs. Then you wait a few months, and this still-invincible fighter gets destroyed by the next guy. It’s a cascade of ego destruction that from a psychological point of view is pretty mesmerizing to watch.
Gottschall adds his own thoughts:
I think a lot of people assume that a fight fan is just a troglodyte who’s sitting in the stands grunting and wanting to see blood. I don’t think that’s the main allure of it. The main allure, from the fan’s point of view, is closer to what you’re saying: A really intense human drama is taking place in front of you.
There’s a whole lineage of great writers who have been fascinated by boxing especially (this was pre-MMA). They were drawn in not only by the spectacle of the fight, but by their own reaction to it.
They were thinking, “I’m Ernest Hemingway, or I’m Joyce Carol Oates, or I’m Norman Mailer. I’m one of the greatest artists in the world. I have all this empathy inside me. I have to have empathy to do my work, and yet here I am, watching two men destroy themselves for my pleasure. What’s going on here? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with all of us for wanting to watch this stuff?”
I think part of it is, just as you said, the appeal of tragic storytelling. So the promoters introduce you to the characters, and they usually try to build up a story of conflict between the two fighters. And then, as in almost all stories, you have a contest between the protagonist and the antagonist, depending on whom you happen to be rooting for. If your guy loses, it’s a tragedy. Even if your guy wins, it’s still a tragedy, because as you said, an ego has been more or less destroyed in the cage.
Of course, the fact that we see it that way, as a tragic brand of storytelling that produces lofty emotions in us, doesn’t necessarily justify it.
I watch fights and I often feel morally compromised by it. I feel like I’m morally culpable for what’s occurring because I’m the spectator and ultimately footing the bill for the spectacle.
But I don’t think people are reacting primarily to the danger of the sport. There are many other activities that are truly dangerous that we have no inclination to ban. Motocross is incredibly dangerous. It’s really bad for your brain—some of these guys have had dozens of concussions. Bull riding is probably the most dangerous sport in the world in terms of head injuries (this New Yorker article on the subject is a fascinating read). Cheerleading is also very, very dangerous. You take a little girl and launch her into the air—sometimes she comes down hard. Cheerleaders can get catastrophic spinal injuries.
I think what bothers us about fighting sports isn’t the damage to the athlete but the fact that you win by doing more harm to your opponent than he does to you. It just seems ugly.
A boxing contest is a brain-damage contest, he notes.
We tend to associate traditional Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) with traditional Japanese subject matter — namely Hokusai’s Great Wave — but the popular art style found itself applied to modern military subjects, too:
This should not be too much of a surprise, however: the most famous of the great Japanese woodblock artists died only a few decades before Commodore Perry brought his black boats to Edo bay. Much of their era would disappear in the miraculous changes of the Meiji revolution, but as the prints included here show quite clearly, much of the old order lived on into the 20th century.
These prints all depict episodes from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 or the Russo-Japanese War that was waged a decade later. Remarkably, none of these prints were designed to be great works of art; the great majority were carved and colored to accompany news reports from the front-lines, printed in newspapers or periodicals circulating in Japan on short notice. The artists never saw the battlefields they depicted, relying instead on common visual tropes, reporter’s accounts (you can see a gaggle of such reporters in the bottom right corner of the print placed directly below), and their own imaginations to create these images. The prints are therefore less useful for understanding the tactics or battlefield conditions of these wars than they are for understanding the attitude of a Japanese public mobilized for external conquest for the first time in centuries.
As historical sources the prints are revealing. A comparison of the physical features of the Japanese and Chinese soldiers depicted testifies to how thoroughly the Japanese people had adopted the racialist ideology common in European circles at the time. The prints, like the wars themselves, also betray how eager the Japanese were to prove that they were the equals of the Western powers. Perhaps most interesting, however, is how exultantly they depict the wars of their day. Tactically, the Russo-Japanese War was not far removed from the Great War that soon followed it, but the way the Japanese portrayed their experience with industrial warfare could not be further removed from the collective horror Europeans felt when they fought in the trenches. These woodblock prints were some of the first artistic renderings of industrial age warfare; never again would a people forced to wage such a war render it so beautifully.
“We’re all hanging out in this cabana at the Hard Rock Cafe, and Elon is there reading some obscure Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy and looked like it had been bought on eBay.” — Kevin Hartz, an early PayPal investor, describing an outing in Las Vegas that was intended as a time to celebrate the company’s success.
“That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.” — an anonymous Tesla employee recalling an e-mail from Musk after missing an event to witness the birth of his child.
“They got my best [expletive] friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that [expletive] hurt.” — Elon Musk, who said he was hospitalized after one beating and couldn’t return to school for a week. He was living with his father, who was said to delight in being hard on his sons.
“He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world. He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.” — Elon Musk’s mother describing how as a child Elon sometimes seemed to drift off into trances. He wouldn’t respond when spoken to and would have a distant look in his eyes. Musk’s parents and physicians thought maybe he was deaf and removed his adenoid glands thinking that would improve his hearing. It made no difference.
“I wanted him to meet me behind security so he couldn’t pack a gun.” — Jim Cantrell, describing his first meeting with Elon Musk. Cantrell was once accused of espionage by Russians, so he was fearful when he received a call from a stranger with an accent asking to help him with a space program. They met in an airport, hit it off, and would later travel to Russia hoping to buy rockets.
If that “no excuse” note seems over the top, that may be because it never happened. Elon Musk replied:
I have never written or said this. Ashlee’s book was not independently fact-checked. Should be taken w a grain of salt.