The birds.

The elderly come down every morning with their songbirds. They walk down from their apartments somewhere around 6-7 am bearing huge cages meticulously woven from rattan; these hold as many as three of the little creatures within, chirping away. No mass-produced cold metal birdcages for these folks.

Being in that nebulous period where my coursework is done and I'm still seeking gainful employment, I've found time in the mornings to go down with a tin mug, buy a mugful of tea from the coffee shop, and then sit down on the benches by the playground to watch the old folks hang up their songbirds and sip at the stuff. No milk, no sugar.

It used to be the case, I hear, that there were whole parks around the country built for the sole purpose of songbird-keeping, with hundreds of metal poles for the elderly of the day to go about and hang their birdcages on, complete with pulleys so the birds could get some extra height. Of course, those parks are a thing of the past now - I have a few faint memories of seeing such parks when I was really young, but that's about it. Today, the old folks who still keep songbirds about my place have to use trees and stepladders for the same purpose.

I've tried talking to some of them, but while pleasant enough, they don't seem to be as gregarious or loquacious as my grandmother was. Offering to help carry their birdcages usually results in a gentle refusal, and so I've learned not to ask, but simply sit and watch. While interaction is little more than a nod and smile, and I could tell that my first few appearances did make the old folks uneasy, a couple weeks of being a semi-regular fixture has ameliorated that somewhat. It would be nice if they would talk to me, but talking to strangers, especially strange young men with wisps of a goatee, is probably right out in atomised Singapore.

And so it's just sitting down and listening to the songbirds. Birds are the one of the few things that are left uncorrupted in this world, I believe; it's a pity that Singapore is not exactly conducive to falconry, although it's practiced in Malaysia with the local birds of prey.

Ugh...

At times, I feel truly ashamed of my ethnicity:

Chinese Roadside Shitting, Baby Slaughtering, Spitting on the Floor Citizenism on Full Display.

Chinese Baby Rescued From Toilet Pipe (Photo):

Chinese Tourists Deface 3500 year old Egyptian Artifact:

Chinese wonder why their tourists behave so badly (Allow children to defecate on floor of airport, stealing, cutting in line, etc.)

Chinese Officials Cut out 8 month Baby from Mother and throw in Garbage:
 
Chinese Officials Arrest Parents for exceeding one child policy and place 13 month old on ground and run over repeatedly with truck:

2 Year old girl Chinese girl run over by car and 18 passers by ignore and fail to help her:

Chinese Van driver runs over toddler, realizes and runs over again to make sure child is dead ("Fine is Cheaper for killing child than medical costs to help"):

China building tallest building in the world, signifying the end of the boom there (Skyscraper index never lies):

Manboons are truly a global pestilence.

How are we screwed? Let me count the ways:

Thought I'd just make a nice little doom-and-gloom list, for posterity's sake.

All of the following are googlable and independently verifiable:

*Climate:
-It is the end of the Holocene, the unusually warm 10,000-year period in the global cycle of temperatures.
-Spring has been unusually late in coming. Record late snowfalls have been occurring in parts of the northern hemisphere.
-On the southern hemisphere, winter is unusually early in coming. New Zealand and Australia have already reported snow and hail.
-We may not be headed for just a Dalton Minimum, according to Tex Arcane, but a Grand Minima - in short, a major Ice Age. Think woolly mammoths.
-Competition for habitable and arable land is going to spike as the climate continues to cool.

*Famine:

-I've already covered this under this post, so you may wish to peruse it for the details. Suffice to say, it is not looking good.

*War and civil unrest:
-About one-third of US citizens believe that armed resistance will become necessary to protect freedoms in the next few years.
-46% of US citizens believe that the federal government is an active threat to their freedoms and liberties.
-I don't think I need to highlight the recent civil unrest in Sweden and the UK. Those are the current flashpoints; most of Northern Europe is under the same threat.
-Syria: the next assassination of Archduke Ferdinand?

*Environment:
-Most of China's cities, unlike the US, are competing for arable land. China does not produce enough food to feed its citizenry.
-China is literally being choked to death on pollution; expats toBeijing are being offered hazard pay; up to 90% of China's open bodies of water are too polluted to support life.
-Major aquifers and water sources, especially in the western US, are being rapidly drained into nonexistence.

*Pestilence:
-Dispensation of antibiotics like candies for any and all reasons has led to massive growth in drug-resistant pathogens, eg. TB.
-As an added corollary, thanks to the wonders of "free love", numerous STDs are becoming impervious to all drugs.
-Nothing may come of it, but it may be a good idea to keep an eye on the new viruses coming out of the Middle East.

*Economy:
-The US is in some deep shit, and rightly so.
-China is losing its only source of competitive advantage as average wages rise by double digits for the last three years running.
-China has been repeatedly proven to be "massaging" its economic data more than most countries do.
-Japan's Abenomics, especially when it comes to Japanese Government Bonds, looks set to enter a nice little spiral.
-As an added point to the above, the weakening of the yen may be the start of a bona fide currency war.
-Things are getting worse and worse in southern Europe; for example, Spain's youth unemployment is already as high as 60%.
-Indeed, the whole world looks fit to enter the shitter.
-Central banks around the world are buying gold like mad, as are private citizens.
-China is busy undermining the US dollar's status as world reserve currency, signing bilateral trade agreements at an increasing rate to bypass the US dollar. The same is going on with Russia and its trade partners.

*Demographics:
-Canadian research group Conference Board of Canada warns of economic crash due to population collapse in developed nations around the world.
-Thanks to the wonders of sex-selective abortion on demand, China's average male:female ratio is 1.2:1. This is made even worse in rural areas in which two children are allowed under strict conditions, making it 1.46:1 for the first child and 1.9:1 for the second. Attempts to export the surplus male population to west africa has not gone unnoticed by the natives there.
-India is not much better, with some states such as Punjab boasting 1.25:1 male:female ratios.
-The welfare states of the West which are essentially a ponzi scheme based off an ever-growing population will inevitably collapse. Social Security is already pretty much insolvent.
-Most of Northern and Western Europe are being flooded with immigrants from Africa. Islamisation is imminent. Say goodbye to your quaint "rights".

*General state of humanity:
-People are getting stupider, lazier, more morally adrift and more ignorant, being content to be hooked up to the soma drip. Learned helplessness is ubiquitous across all modernised cultures.
-The rate of technological progress in most areas, save a few exceptions like computing and mathematics, is retarding at an accelerated pace. Where technological progress once meant going to the moon, today it's a bigger iGimmick screen.
-People are becoming increasingly atomised and the loss of tribe is keenly felt, even if not consciously.

All this is just off the top of my head; I'm sure I could pull out more if I wanted to. But nevertheless, it paints a grim picture of our future. While no one will be able to give you an accurate date or even timeframe, the end is inevitable.

Bunker down, everyone.

Singapore and the reaction.

I've heard it passed around some reactionary circles that Singapore is apparently some sort of reactionary paradise. It usually expresses itself as such:

Step 1: (varies)
Step 2: (varies)
Step 3: ?????
Step 4: Singapore.

I know most of these people are generally much smarter than I am, but to hold up Singapore as some sort of reactionary ideal is well, misinformed. Take it from me, I've lived here for more than two decades.

To recap, the following arms of neoreaction are summed up by Nick B. Steves in the following diagram (click to expand):

While techno-commercialists are depicted here as not concerning themselves with tribe, an alternative offered by some of them is that shared pursuit of economic growth constitutes tribe and identity, and Singapore is held up as some kind of ultimate proof of concept for that.

Which I would like to contend, having lived on the ground: a) does the pursuit of economic growth really promote tribe - is it the only reason Singapore's situation came about? b) if so, then is it sustainable?

Peering out of the box - 27/5/13.

Vox Popoli - Diversity in Sweden: Sixth Night

At this point, it should be obvious that my prediction of Anders Breivik being a harbinger of things to come was, at the very least, considerably less outlandish than many believed it to be at the time.  Nor are we seeing any sort of backlash in the form of more political support for the multicultural parties across Europe.
And if the police are stupid enough to play quisling and take the side of the immigrants, as they apparently are doing in Stockholm, then they'll have to go too.

Bloody Shovel - The Rightist Singularity.

As it turns out, the optimal engine for leftism is egalitarianism. The physical properties of DNA itself mean that individuals from the same species can never be equal, so egalitarianism is necessarily unattainable. But millions of years of hunting in small bands mean half of the human brain is optimized for envy and hating those who attempt to be better than you. Actually is even worse than that, envy is hard wired deep in the brain since we were monkeys.

Nick B. Steve - The Reactionary Consensus.

• Hierarchical social structures: Hierarchy is not only not bad, but natural and absolutely essential to the proper functioning of any social structure;
• Sex Realism: Sex differences are real, are ordained by nature or nature’s god or both, and we ignore them at our peril;
• Race Realism: Race and group differences are real, are ordained by nature or nature’s god or both, and we ignore them at our peril;
• Memetic Realism (“Deep Heritage”): Traditional folkways tend to be real, i.e., non-ideological, and naturally arising adaptations to social realities, which therefore represent pretty good (at least) local solutions to very (or intractably) complex problems;
• Economic Realism (later badly dubbed “Microeconomics” and we still await a name for the phenomenon): In any economy where an absolutely fixed supply of (properly divisible) money is deemed impossible or impractical, there is ipso facto a con game going where the issuance of money has itself become a political weapon;
• (Hyper)Federalism: Local optima rarely scale well; subsidiarity; the right of exit must be guaranteed;
• Social Justice: If social justice is anything at all, it is merely justice;
• Democracy: The best and brightest of any society were ordained by nature or nature’s god or both to lead. Expansion of the franchise beyond that natural aristocracy is tragicomically foolish;
• Politics: Defined as competition for parcels of power over unrelated others, usually as a means of redistributing wealth, politics is rightly minimized in any sane society.

Sultan Knish - The Warrior's Tale.

The tale has many variations. Sometimes there are many warriors, sometimes only a handful. They march into the village of the enemy in triumph, or they make a last stand on a rocky outcropping, spending the last of their heart's blood to buy time they will never know. There is the weak man who becomes strong, the strong man who becomes weak, the woman who mourns the man who will never return, and the man who goes off to battle with nothing to lose. These tales have been told countless times in the ages of men, and they will be told again for as long as men endure.

Cappy Cap - Strictly for da guys.

Greetings gentlemen. 
The ole Captain needs your help.
I need all the guys in the Cappysphere to send me what they would like to know in terms of personal financial and economics advice or wisdom.  This is going to lay the foundation for my next project and though I have a pretty good idea of the topics I'm going to cover, I want to make sure I leave no major or significant topic unaddressed.  Things like housing, budgeting, financial planning, etc, anything in the realm of personal finance that would be of interest, benefit or curiosity to you, please list them in the comment section below.

Thumotic - The specialisation of Reaction.

We need artists and speakers and marketers to brand and proselytize our cause. We need programmers and engineers to design our weapons. We need scribes, connectors, and social hubs to manage and catalog the Dark Enlightenment. We need specialized counter-Cathedral academics, journalists, and entertainers. We are building a complete replacement for the myriad of institutions which report to the Cathedral – The USG proper, her Anglosphere and EU satellites, the Universities, Colleges, Schools, Literati, Entertainment Industry, Churches, Foundations, and even temporary counters to Dalit street gangs. The Cathedral, interpreted broadly, employs tens of millions. A successful opposition will need manpower on a comparable scale.

Idiocracy is here.

I am inclined to believe it when it is claimed that people as recently as a hundred years ago were a whole SD smarter than the people of today. Consider this excerpt from the 1887 White House Cook Book, so kindly provided for by Mrs. TT:

"To Clean Brass-Ware, etc.:—Mix one ounce of oxalic acid, six ounces of rotten stone, all in powder, one ounce of sweet oil, and sufficient water to make a paste. Apply a small portion, and rub dry with a flannel or leather. The liquid dip most generally used consists of nitric and sulphuric acids; but this is more corrosive. 

Polish or Enamel for Shirt Bosoms is made by melting together one ounce of white wax, and two ounces of spermaceti; heat gently and turn into a very shallow pan; when cold cut or break in pieces. When making boiled starch the usual way, enough for a dozen bosoms, add to it a piece of the polish the size of a hazel nut. 

An Erasive Fluid for the Removal of Spots on Furniture, and all kinds of fabrics, without injuring the color, is made of four ounces of aqua ammonia, one ounce of glycerine, one ounce of castile soap and [Pg 567]one of spirits of wine. Dissolve the soap in two quarts of soft water, add the other ingredients. Apply with a soft sponge and rub out. Very good for deaning silks."

Remember that this is what was expected of the average housewife back then: purchasing reagents from a chemist, mixing them up together and applying the result without hurting oneself - in essence, basic applied chemistry. Now let's see what we have today:

Close to half of Australian adults lack the basic reading, writing and maths skills needed for every day living such as interpreting instruction manuals or using the internet, a study has claimed.

Preliminary results from an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report released yesterday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that 44 per cent of adult Australians - or 7.3 million - achieved literacy results that were in the lowest two of five bands. About 8.9 million, or 55 per cent, were in the lowest two bands for numeracy.

The international assessment, held in 25 countries, also showed that 38 per cent of employed adults were in the lowest bands for literacy and 38 per cent for numeracy.

The test, which some completed using pen and paper and others did online, demanded solutions to real-life tasks such as getting information from a medicine label or navigating a website.

About 9000 Australians aged 15 to 74 took part in the sample testing. Australian Council for Educational Research senior fellow Dave Tout, a member of the group which designed the numeracy test, said the results were alarming.

 Stick a knife in it, we're done.

Two ant farms.

Recently over at Alpha Game, there's been a small tiff that Vox terms Nihilists versus Civilisationists. He notes the following:

"This is why the accusations of lotus-eating on the one hand and white-knighting on the other are both misplaced and ill-considered. Both nihilists and civilizationists are necessary to the process of first destroying, and then replacing, FI society. One need not agree with the other to respect and understand his - or her - role in the necessary, desirable, and, I would argue, inevitable, process."

If you'll excuse my humble opinion on the subject, this is practically the most sensible position to take. Unfortunately, both sides over at the comments have gone at each other anyway, leading to one poster noting that it was almost as if Vox had raised two colonies of ants and pitted them against each other for his amusement.

I think the problem with the civilisationists making their argument over there is that a) they assume we will continue our hedonistic ways after the fall of the Cathedral and b) we're doing nothing to improve ourselves in the meantime.

That's untrue. I'm a living example.

As above, so below (part 2).

In my last take on the subject, I pointed out how the anti-immigration sentiment in the western world is becoming increasingly mirrored here in South-East Asia, with much the same causes - loss of jobs to foreigners, loss of Singaporean identity, poor behaviour of immigrants and failure to assimilate and so forth.

Perhaps it is fitting that coinciding with the Woolwich incident and the riots in Sweden that something interesting has cropped up in the region:

Malay neo-Nazis.

No, really, I'm not joking.

"A couple of years ago, my friend moved out to Malaysia in search of a life where a winter wardrobe isn't a thing and you don't have to worry about stuff like moronic bro culture or seeing Kim K's face on television. What he found was a job as a bar manager in an establishment frequented by Malay punks covered in swastikas, wearing Combat 18 (a neo-Nazi terrorist organization) T-shirts and harping on about "Malay power." Turns out they're a group of far-right nationalists who want to rid Malaysia of any non-ethnic Malays and stop immigration into the country."

And maybe it's just me, but they seem to be holding a lot of the same concerns white nationalists, and to a lesser extent, local Singaporeans do hold:

"Malaysia is home to people from China, India, and foreign immigrants from Bangladesh, Africa, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Burma. The government can't control the entry of immigrants and we get so many of them. There are so many protests against the government about this issue, but they haven’t done anything tangible to improve the situation. Race has become a focus because of the inclusion of uncontrolled numbers of these people in our society.

Malay people have been affected in socio-economic terms. Ethnic Malays also fall prey to criminals who come from abroad and sell drugs and commit murder, rape, robbery, and so on."

Funny thing is, the Malaysian government had had a long history of discriminating for Malays instead of against them; my mother still remembers being told to "go back to China" as a village kid. Sure, there are a huge number of differences between what's going on in the West and what's going on right here, but it's nevertheless interesting to see that even with a government corruptly sympathetic to the Malays in Malaysia, they're still getting pissed off about immigration and want an ethnic homeland. They were already pissed off enough about letting in the Chinese and Indians half a century ago; this really doesn't come as a surprise to me considering it's further backed by sentiments sweeping the world.

Male disposability - a strength?

Male disposability, that big bugbear.

Ah, I still remember the old days when I was reading Angry Harry, of land whales squealing in excitement at the thought the Y chromosome might be decaying, "self-love" jokes when it was found it was capable of self-repair, and sullen silence when it was suggested its mutability may be responsible for much of human evolution.

Men are expendable. It's in our genes. Women are inherently valuable because they have wombs and thus are the reproductive bottleneck. You can spend forever trying to fight it, or you can accept the fact that men and women are not equal on any footing whatsoever and turn that to your advantage.

If it still can be, that is. Somehow, I doubt that.

The rise of indie gaming - a small exercise in skill and talent getting some light.

Some time back Dr. Faust did a small post on the second decline of the gaming industry. In a nutshell: mainstream games are getting worse these days because they're being rushed to meet schedules simply for the sake of staying afloat. Quality is being sacrificed for quantity, and people in suits are somehow forgetting that games are supposed to be fun.

This, of course, does not stop the average consumer from buying the next installment of the Call of Duty or EA sports or Assassin's Creed franchises. Which says as much about the average video game consumer as the companies which make said games.

I suppose this post will be somewhat disjointed and rambling, but it needs to be said anyway. Here's a game which took the spotlight some time ago: Dungeons of Dredmor. 

Does Dredmor have amazing graphics? Heck no, it uses indexed .pngs as sprites.

Does Dredmor have a compelling main gameplay plotline? No, it's essentially "bad guy in bottom of dungeon, kill him."

Does Dredmor have DRM? No, but strangely enough people want to give their money to the developers for their work anyway. Sometimes even if they aren't buying anything.

Such a fascinating concept, eh? If only people loved you so much they gave you money for nothing.

What Dredmor does right is that it's fun. It doesn't take itself seriously. It's accessible, without being dumbed down for the average two-bit drooling idiot that mainstream games are these days. The developers speak directly to the players instead of through "community managers" and "customer service representatives".

And if a player doesn't like any aspect of the game, then they are free to mod it as they like with nothing more than notepad. Not to mention the modding community that's sprung up, of course.

Here's the head coder for the game, Nicholas Vining, speaking about how his team went about doing the writing for the game:

Because Gaslamp Games is small, they can do all this - and thanks to digital distribution, they can circumvent having to grovel at the feet of giant publishers and work on their own schedule.

Another well-known indie game developer is Edmund McMillen - his work is amazing, and yet often disturbing. Due to the content of his games, no mainstream publisher would dare to touch titles like Time Fcuk or The Binding of Isaac with a ten-foot pole (play them and you'll understand why), and his sheer genius would have gone unnoticed. Hell, if not for Newgrounds, where he got his start...

Derek Yu? Masterpieces like Aquaria and Spleunky.

Hour of gameplay per dollar spent on the game, indie games generally tend to yield far more than the 50-60 dollar nonsense on store shelves.

The gatekeepers of the old media, be it books, electronic media, music, video games - they are quickly falling apart thanks to the many-to-many model the internet has made possible. The future of media - and gaming in particular - seems to be indie, especially as game publishers become increasingly feminised and inefficient; a small start-up comprising of two pimply-faced nerds in their garages and bedrooms banging away at keyboards can reasonably compete with them, because first and foremost, games are supposed to be fun. Is there going to be a lot of crap? Sure, Sturgeon's Law applies in all fields; one look at the offerings on Steam Greenlight is going to prove that beyond all doubt.

But this is where they are allowed to ferment, to flourish, and the wheat separated from the chaff. The future, it would appear, is small-scale: while others are extrapolating this to the rest of humanity with predictions as to people moving away from cities and into villages, I'm going to stick with what's observably happening now in this regard.

I'm angry and hateful and I couldn't be happier about it.

"You're so angry."

This was professed to me by my sister over the phone after I'd stated a few tenets of the Reactionary position. As summed up by Aurini in Freedom and Authority:  

"While I'm not exactly in a hurry to go out and buy one of those things, I like that we have the freedom to buy a double-ended dildo, and think that we should have the freedom to buy one of those things. But strong authority in society is necessary to deal with the underclass, and quite really, it doesn't really affect me all that much if double-ended dildos get banned. The fact that so many drugs are illegal that shouldn't be illegal is an irritant to me. I'm not a slave to chemical desires...a reactionary society is going to require strong legislation and strong leaders, and every so often you're going to have a stupid law. But the smart people can avoid the stupid laws."

This was the line which provoked said response.

Are the words alone innately angry? I wouldn't say so. Did I say them angrily? Perhaps. But even if so, so what? "You're so angry" was as relevant to the current discussion at hand as "you're scaring me", and for the same reasons, too.

In any case, I chose that point to pass the phone to my mother and be done with the conversation.

Am I angry? Why yes, I am. Properly tapped, it's an incredible source of strength at times.

To never be angered is to never have conviction or passion, an existence of pleasant soma. Anything goes! Do what you will! To never hate, to never judge, the loins burning with love, the mind rationalising away endlessly, the heart missing, no chest, no ribs, no blood.

If you don't feel angry at anything, then you are not alive.

Which is why "I believe X is wrong, but won't speak out against it because I don't want to impose my morals upon others" is a pile of crap. Either you do believe X is wrong, in which case you are condoning evil by not speaking out against it, or you don't believe X is wrong, in which case you're a liar for claiming it is. Note I don't mention cowardice, because people do have to look out for number one, and most still do speak out where it is safe to do so.

And imposing morals on others by force? Well, isn't the only intolerable crime in the eyes of the PC brigade these days intolerance? In the end, the only thing that matters is whether said morals and mores are pleasing in the eyes of the Gods of the Copybook Headings, yes?

Anger is a perfectly valid response to injustice. Hatred is a perfectly good reaction to evil. Yet in the world of Agape before Logos, both have been criminalised, and the only hate allowed is that which is performed in the name of love. A people unable to be roused to rational anger is a people comprised of sheep and cattle, ready to be herded by fast food and cable television. Pliant. Controllable.

Little wonder why they're trying to stamp it out, trying to turn the very concepts into little more than expletives. They've succeeded quite well.

Peering out of the box - 20/5/13.

Cappy Cap - You're better off staying in your mother's basement and drinking than going to liberal arts college.

Sultan Knish - The end of competition.

The American Dream does not actually require a red, white and blue flag or a dream. What it requires is a willingness to accept messiness. 

Messiness is another word for chaos. And no one likes chaos. Chaos means that in the richest country in the world some people will be illiterate, others will be homeless and some will accidentally set themselves on fire because the fireworks don't come with enough safety warnings. 

Those aren't good things. They're not things that governments and the squeaky wheels who make governments what they are think should be tolerated. They're messy.

Stares at the World - The Right continues to be right.

So a request to all the mindless idiots who believe whatever they’re told, no matter how many times the story contradicts – kindly shut the fuck up, stop voting, and read some George Orwell.

Matt Forney - Diary of a manospambot.

My jaw damn near dropped. Omigod, a black woman who didn’t look or act like she walked out of a Tyler Perry movie? Omigod, an intact nuclear family in the year 2013? It was like seeing two unicorns rutting in a barn. My brains were blown out of my ears. I thought, “Man, I have GOT to share this with the guys on Roosh’s forum.”

Then I realized something: if they were an intact family, that means that the guy was married…

“CHUMP!” I stood up, pointing at the white guy. “BETA BETA BETA!”

The Economic Collapse - 10 charts that demonstrate the slow, agonizing death of the American worker.

Jim's Blog - Game, Dark Enlightenment, and Reaction.

If you believe that game works then:

1. You are darkly enlightened, since you believe at least one forbidden truth about human nature.
2. You  should logically conclude that women should never have been emancipated and never given the vote, thus logically, you should be reactionary.

DemCAD - The American culture of debt.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings in a nutshell.

Taken off an argument with a fellow on twitter, and consolidated after some simmering:

-Morals are absolute. Whether they come from God, if you're a theist, or from a more secular view, the Gods of the Copybook Headings (history and natural law), they underwrite basic human behaviours that need to be enforced by society at large in order for a civilisation to be functional and self-perpetuating.

-Numerous civilisations throughout history have all, despite a wide variety of environments, curiously converged upon similar basic tenets - for example, laws against murder, some form of property rights, the definition of marriage as monogamous and hetrosexual, the curtailing of women's dysgenic mating choices, so on and so forth. Even Ancient Greece, which had widespread pederasty, nevertheless defined marriage in such terms. Where exceptions may be made for the elites such as a sultan and his four wives, they nevertheless are the rules for the masses.

-Sufficient deviancy from these tenets will cause either civilisational collapse or it being subsumed by a stronger civilisation without fail. The can may be kicked down the road a little with distorting effects by factors such as technology, but eventually modern civilisation is slated for either implosion (as in the East) or being devoured by the Mexican and Muslim hordes (in the West). Rome and Sparta fell under their own weight and hubris, and so will we.

-If moral standards required for successful civilisation are determined by negotiation within society, then anything can be made moral so long as a majority of people agree on it - or in our modern case, it is dictated from up on high by the elites. Yet the fellow who was arguing for "evolving morals" was unable to give an answer as to why rape and slavery should not be considered moral if society decided morality should evolve that way. Of course, human genetics and behaviour has a plausible explanation of why the rape of women is not just immoral, but given greater weightage than a man being raped - that a genetic interloper in a tribe would be divisive, at the very least.

-In order for "evolving morality" to have even the remotest chance of success, then core human behaviour must change - implying that core human behaviour is changeable in the first place. Oh, morals are free to "evolve" as they like, or as the elites demand, but these "evolving morals" will not exist very long as the civilisation which holds them vanishes.

-In order to take core human behaviour as changeable, one must assume tabula rasa. Yet tabula rasa is easily disproven with two very simple examples: the intelligence of Jews and lower-class whites. The former has faced persecution for much of history and yet still are more intelligent than the average person, and the latter consistently perform better academically than the children of, say, upper-class blacks. Nurture has to work within the limits set by nature. It is easy to admit that a bulldog is inclined to be violent, a collie to herd, and a doberman to guard, but horribly taboo to think human behaviour can be genetically determined thanks to the PC brigade.

-If tabula rasa is the greatest myth of our time, then human behaviour, and thus morality, can only "evolve" along with human genetics. Yet substantial evolution is supposed to take millenia, if not millions of years.

-Since for our intents and purposes, human genetics is immutable, human behaviour is equally not changeable and hence an objective standard of morality required for the formation and sustaining of a functional civilisation exists. The social engineers can twist and deform all they want, but blood will out in the end.

These are the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Civilisations ignore them at their own peril. The problems with modern civilisation have been seen before, and knowing manboons, will be seen again. We have only put it off for this long for two reasons: 1) the massive distortion caused by technological surplus and 2) we have been cannibalising the corpse of the West, but the bones have been picked almost clean now.

Yet the progressive's religion is progress: they think of history in a straight line instead of a cycle, and the past is to be shunned and avoided instead of being thought of as a lesson to be learned from. In their eyes, a solution that was used historically is unacceptable irregardless of its effectiveness - hence their disdain for "Iron Age fairy tales".

Don't like the grassroots response to immigration? Attempt to eat it out from within.

Well, this was surprising...well, not really.

SINGAPORE: Expect to see more new immigrants to Singapore as community leaders in the future -- the People's Association is planning to induct more of them into the ranks of grassroots leadership.

Currently, some 3,000 new immigrants are grassroots leaders.

They make up nine per cent of Singapore's 33,000-member strong grassroots leadership.

Hah. I thought the whole idea of grassroots organisations was to provide some idea of what people on the ground feel...so if you don't like it, change their makeup so it complies with your revolutionary vision of the future.

Ms Fu said through interaction with others, grassroots leaders can facilitate common understanding, even if it involves the work of dispute resolution.

She said: "We hope to get more people to step forward and represent views of diverse groups so that the government can actually have a more diverse representation, and understand the needs of each community stakeholder better.

"So whether you're a new citizen, old citizen, we'd like you to step forward, do something for the society, and that's how we can get engagement from our citizens."

Of course, firstly, the unquestioned assumption that diversity is automatically Good(TM)m so ingrained in all of us as the modern religion. A culture for everyone, unfortunately, is necessarily a dumbed-down, unremarkable culture, having everything, meaning nothing. It has to appeal to everyone, after all, the underman included, and in doing so loses the point of a culture.

Me? I'm finding all of this quite hilarious. The current culture of Singapore is at best three or four decades old - whatever that was here before the '70s was systematically dismantled and destroyed. The Singapore of today has absolutely no cultural roots in the Singapore of 1812 where Stamford Raffles set foot on this island and instead is stitched and glued together from government policy, social engineering and a subservient populace. When I hear locals complain about Singaporean culture being destroyed and locals being displaced, I have to suppress the urge that we were more than willing to do it to ourselves, after all.

Well, at most we've only lost a couple centuries' worth of history, as opposed to a couple millenniums' worth in the case of Europe. No big loss when you put it into perspective, right?  

Some people need civilisation beaten into them.

It's hard not to come to this conclusion nowadays.

When I was eight or thereabouts,  rattan canes were commonplace throughout Singapore. Every mom-and-pop grocery store within the void decks of apartment buildings would have a bin of the things - dried and toughened strips of the woody liana, each about as thick as my pinky finger is now and adorned with a bright plastic handle.

Rattan is a wonderful material, light, flexible and strong, but somehow even as a kid I didn't get the impression that the strips of cane in the bins were there because people wanted to do some furniture weaving on their own time. It's also the same material used in those scarring caning sessions Singapore and Malaysia are so famous for, only the prison service uses canes about one-and-a-half times as thick as one's thumb to do the caning.

Singaporean Kindness Mascot gives up on "angry and disagreeable" Singaporeans, quits.

A little something something from this part of the world to build on my previous thoughts on the subject. It's always nice to be vindicated.

Seems like this fellow has got the idea. Well, at least some, if not all of it.

SINGAPORE: The Singapore Kindness Movement’s mascot, Singa the lion, has resigned.

In open letter, the lion mascot that was previously the Courtesy Lion, said it was "just too tired to continue facing an increasingly angry and disagreeable society.”

Having done the job for over 30 years, Singa noted that kindness should not be a campaign, but a part of values education, adding that “people in authority - at work, in school, at home and in government - should lead by example”.

"I suppose it's time for real people to step up, and for the mascot to step aside."

You can read the full letter off the linked article. I'll admit it actually manages to convey the weary tone of the mascot as if he'd been a real person, whether intentional or not, and the confusion as to why his long labours are fruitless in the end.

I sort of pity him, really.

Aurini - defining misogyny.

And another great video from Aurini. Watch it all.

Which gets me thinking.

I went to Norway couple of years ago visiting friends, and passed through Oslo and Drammen. The latter wasn't as bad as the former, but in Oslo? Whole neighbourhoods that were clearly marked out as Muslim; I saw them on the train out. Plenty of them around, too.

Not that the native young men were much better; bunches of hooligans on the trains and loitering about the town hall of the small village where I was staying.

My friend and guide, she mentioned how terrified she was of being raped and wanted to keep a pocketknife on her at all times for self-defense. If Norwegian law didn't disallow it, she'd have gotten a switchblade.

Of course, neither of us could say it, but the massive surge in rapes in the Nordic countries was purely due to equally massive Muslim immigration from the third world.

She at least had something of a head on her shoulders. Can't say that for so many other women:

Knowing what I know now, I'd have told her to drop the switchblade and get a gun if she actually wanted to be effective instead of carrying the illusion of effectiveness, but that's all in the past now.

Things are getting bad. Things will get worse. And they won't get better until everything has been corrupted.

Peering out of the box - 13/5/13.

Sultan Knish - With blood on their hands.

Real life villains are closer to Richard III than Lady Macbeth, offering to trade their stolen kingdom for a horse to the very end, rather than seeking some intangible repentance in a fit of remorse. They are more likely to ask what difference it makes; the solipsistic query of the sociopath to whom the feelings of others are abstract things.

Benghazi simply proves that the US government is corrupt. All of it. Naturally, people will not know, or if they do know, care, because the televitz is on.

I fully expect a false flag soon to cover up Benghazi and the IRS scandal.

Stares at the World - Your democracy is an illusion.

The Economic Collapse - The price of copper and 11 other recession indicators that are flashing red.

Vox Popoli - Health Evaders and the B Ark.

Honestly, I don't see how this whole creaky system is going to survive much longer.  History shows that there is a lot of ruin in a nation, but at this rate, the entire business activity of the USA is soon going to be computers trading stocks with other computers and people filling out forms for the IRS and other government agencies.
Welcome to the B Ark economy.

The Real Singapore - I brought my girlfriend to Mustafa Centre to convince her not to have an expensive wedding.

"My girlfriend wants the same lavish wedding as it's a 'once in a lifetime', 5 star hotel blah blah blah.

"So one day, I happened to be at Mustafa Centre.

"I brought her to the electronics department and started showing her the prices of basic necessities like the washing machine, refrigerator, television and vacuum cleaner.

"I told her: Look, all these cost close to $1k each. Why waste money on a stupid wedding, only to please other people? Got flat already but no basic necessities how? Wash clothes by hand? (she cringed when she heard this)

"Immediately her perspective changed."

My money is on her dumping this fellow and moving onto a richer guy that she "deserves". And to be frank, it would be better for this guy if she did just that.

Ice Age Now - The new mini ice age is upon us.

Piers Corbyn agrees: the mini ice age has started.
In 2000, they warned us about runaway global warming.
They told us that 2010 would be the end of snow in the U.K.
Instead, the world got colder
So now they say warm is cold.

 I'm more with Tex Arcane when he says that we're not just headed for a Maunder Minimum, but a Grand Minima. Time will tell.

Wrap up well, folks.

Alternative Right - The IQ of revolutions.

Considering the seriousness of the existential threat, White America should be rising up in revolution, yet it isn’t. This proves that the 100 point mark on the IQ continuum, which we can call semi-intelligence, is something of a passivity 'sweet spot.' There are two elements to this:

1. A semi-intelligent population is rather adept at deceiving itself. It has enough smarts to construct elaborate and plausible explanations that miss the point and prognostications that defer the moment of truth. It melds enough inventiveness and gullibility together to make continuous denial relatively easy.
2. A semi-intelligent population is also smart enough to work around and ameliorate the negative effects of serious flaws in the socio-political fabric. This is what is happening in America, as the intelligent, frugal, and hard-working portion of the population take up the load of the increasingly large and dysfunctional underclass. In a lower IQ society, this balancing act would already be breaking down.

Revolutions have many factors, but a lot of these other factors are in fact tied to IQ. IQ is therefore one of the most important factors leading to revolution. The question then arises of where is the optimum revolutionary IQ level at which a flawed state can be expected to undergo a much needed revolution.

This is when I knew I would NOT enjoy the novel:

"I'm a writer."

"What sort of books?"

"Children's books. What were once called fantasies, but are now categorised as urban fantasies. No vampires, though," she added with a quick grin. "I don't do vampires."

This is when I take a deep breath, close the book and force myself to put it down calmly. Not that it was already stellar before, but this was the breaking point.

How utterly oblivious must you be to a) use your characters as mouthpieces and stand-ins for you and b) be so utterly wrong about the nature of the genre, its history, and what it stands for?

As an aside, I'm sure children will be more than enthused to read My necro-bestial-fae-magic Hot Boyfriend #9958403323476.

The degeneration of the genre has not gone unnoticed. It's sad.

"But that is neither fantasy nor science fiction.  What we are witnessing is the lingering death of two literary genres. What we are seeing is the subsumption of fantasy and science fiction by romance and horror."- Vox Day.

As above, so below.

One of the points of constant interest for me, especially with the latest May Day rally against it, is the way a lot of the anti-immigration sentiment is reflecting that of western nations, with a few tweaks to give the whole thing a local flavour.

So what if the immigrants are of the same racial/genetic/ethnic stock as your locals? All the usual tools need are a little tweak - once it used to be "witch", then it got turned into "racist", and now it's "xenophobic".

It works just as well, aye? Doesn't matter if you're already multicultural, doesn't matter if you're already diverse. You just gotta shake up the slogans a bit!

"Singapore for Singaporeans?" That is very racis - I mean, xenophobic!

Our own ministers blare out the need for diversit - oh, I mean, integration.

And interestingly, the exact same canards are coming out of the woodwork - we are a "nation of immigrants", you see, and we simply need all these immigrants for economic reasons despite a jobs crunch here and the fact that real wages haven't risen for decades, and the old cry of "raciss-" oh, wait, "xenophobiss!"

Oh, sure, we still keep our borders - I would know, from my navy days - but some people are voicing concern that our immigration policies are just a wee bit too relaxed when people with criminal records can slip past Immigration and get permanent residency, if not outright citizenship here.

Currently, Singapore's population is comprised of 40% foreigners at 5.31 million. I've done some quick calculations - assuming that the native population doesn't shrink (unlikely) and the government does achieve its 2030 target of 6.9 million people, that means that less than half of Singapore's population will be native.

If any other non-nation state country was 40% non-native, you'd get quite a shock from, say, the white nationalists.

As I mentioned, not everything is the same. Just as we didn't quite rely on feminism to break apart the family and abused the east asian achievement drive for that instead, so the people arguing against immigrations here are quite on the left on other issues, as opposed to the more right-wing or reactionary nationalists we find here in the Anglosphere. That's why we get idiots showing up at anti-immigration rallies who believe that V for Vendetta is cool and edgy.

And naturally, we're so inherently subservient and have been conditioned that way for decades, that all Singaporeans can manage are a couple rallies and slogans sprayed on walls in the middle of the night.

Me? I have no skin in the game, really. Remember, I'm not looking to save this society, but to give it a nudge every now and then to send it over the cliff all that quicker. But I do find it a constant source of amusement and an interesting data point to study compared to various European countries or the US of A.

Because - and I'm being quite serious here - if you westerners can't manage it, I don't think anyone else can.

Singaporean government asks national servicemen to provide feedback on conscription.

What it says on the tin.

Over the next six months, Singaporeans will be asked for feedback on how to better recognise and motivate national servicemen.

The Committee to Strengthen National Service, announced in March, will lead focus group discussions and town hall sessions while also conducting online consultation sessions via a new website, www.strengthenNS.sg 

The Committee, which met for the first time on Wednesday, expects its work to be done within a year.

Made up of 20 members, including Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen, Members of Parliament, military top brass and private sector employers, the committee will use the feedback gathered to recommend measures to enhance National Service as a critical institution for Singapore's continued survival and success.

Like asking women how to go about dating other women, I have some reservations of the efficacy of this proposed course of action: most NSmen won't have the foggiest idea how to make themselves more motivated, those who do have the correct ideas won't be able to articulate said ideas properly so the government understands, and those who have an idea and can articulate themselves generally have no incentive to tell the government the truth. Given the chance, the average NSman is going to try and sway for as little interruption to his daily life as possible, which in all probability is going to run counter to the government's interests.

But me? What does poor old me think will encourage Singaporean men to be more motivated towards conscription? The natural cynic in me will, of course, say: "nothing". Conscription suffers from the same problem as all forms of coerced labour, that individuals will tend to do the minimum required to get by without serious punishment and will take every opportunity to underperform, which is why you see such a difference between regulars and conscripts.

To be honest, my suggestion would be to observe what NSmen do when, say, they're called up for in-camp training or even and take (and often fail) their physical fitness tests. What they say in the coffeeshops, when they think no one's watching, how they react when receiving notification of in-camp training, how their employers, co-workers, and families deal with it. All right, so you don't want to get too intrusive, you take a look at how young men behave when they report to CMPB for their medical exam, you study trends of IPPT defaulters -

But you see, that would take some planning and effort, and require a higher caliber of "civil servant" than of the sort who is paid to sift through mounds upon mounds of inane comments left on a website.

So long as people are aware their labour is being forced out of them, they are going to resist it and no amount of badgering is going to make them accept it wholeheartedly, only make them less grumpy about the whole thing. That's why it's essential to maintain the illusion of freedom for today's modern slave classes and have them put on their own chains.

Edit: Aurini's comment reminds me of a photo that went viral locally of a couple of local girls snerking (for lack of a better word) at full-time NSmen out on route march:

Not an encouraging sign, really.

Getting back into the groove.

Ah, that nebulous period of time in between me finishing my final exams and getting my reports back from the university's career center as to prospective job offers. I'd rather not go for my commencement - it really is just one big waste of time, to be honest - but since my folks want me to go, I'll oblige them, I suppose.

Nevertheless, with a bit of idle time on my hands, I've been doing a little XML coding for various game mods. The most productive use of my time? Perhaps not, but it's definitely getting myself back in the creative and problem-solving groove that I've missed being in for a while now. And more importantly, it's a problem I can solve, as opposed to the various pieces of news that filter down into this box from the outside world.

The great soma.

Hush, everyone's sleeping.

Glued to Facebook, the televitz and smartphones.

Taking Ritalin, Prozac and SSRIs to get through the day.

Shovelling GMO grains, refined sugar and hydrogenated vegetable oils down their gullets in the form of approved feed instead of actual food.

Trapped in the box, yet unwilling to end it all so they can leave.

They don't want to be wakened, but every now and then one of them will stir of their own accord. Some fall back into their slumber; we take the others to the fireside where they keep watch with us.

Don't wake the sleepers. Hopped up on drugs prescribed to them or produced by their own brains thanks to a never-ending stream of sex and debt, they turn violent when provoked. Tiptoe around them when you have to pass near, and build your walls high while waiting for the ice to come.

They'll have to wake up soon enough, and you don't want the grasshoppers storming your anthill.

Singapore reportedly best place in the region to be a mother, local women whine.

So recently, our local media ran a small piece on how Singapore was ranked as the best place to be a mother in Asia. This, in turn, provoked all sorts of angry protests from bitches:

Let's examine this one in detail, shall we?

A nation of me-toos.

Vox has just made a post about how entrepreneurs are vanishing in the western world, and I'm not surprised. With so many regulations and taxes choking small and medium enterprises, it's only natural that things end this way, with obvious repercussions for the economy.

Oddly enough, we appear to have similar problems, despite the Singaporean government being more friendly to startups than most. After all, if I had a great idea as a student and was willing to draft up a business plan for it, I could have conceivably have went and applied for a government grant of about ten thousand dollars to help me get started. Not that much, admittedly, but when you're a small startup every dollar is going to count. We don't have that many regulations choking us (yet), and the environment is still quite pro-business.

Maybe I should have phrased myself better: our problem isn't so much that there aren't so many start-ups. It's that almost all of them fizzle into nothingness. Singapore has only one truly big name to its fame: Creative. Oh, and that star has long since- well, it hasn't merely set, more like faded into obscurity with a whimper. Just compare the sale of iPods verses Zens, and that should speak for itself.

Fuck this shit.

See, it's not idolatry. They were worshipping Baal-Molech "ironically".

Fucking Occupy. Well, at least the left has come out and admitted it.

In other news, Japan seems about set to return to authoritarianism:

Reuters reports:  The draft [of the revised Constitution] deletes a guarantee of basic human rights and prescribes duties, such as submission to an undefined “public interest and public order.” The military would be empowered to maintain that “public order.”

Stick a knife in it, this world is done.

The recent Malaysian elections.

Recently, Malaysia has gone ahead and held their federal elections. Since half of my extended family is in that merry country just north of the Causeway, things do filter down to me through the grapevine, and it's really both a mixture of hilarious and sad, the kind of mixture that makes you want to shut yourself in a padded cell until it's safe to come out.

This, folks, is what "democracy" looks like. In retrospect, it could be argued that Malaysia was better governed under either the British Colonial government or when the thirteen sultans of the states held absolute power.

"But everyone knows monarchs are evvvil!"

Well, friend, let's have a look at these democratically elected leaders in action:

Another music post.

Sorry, folks. Nothing to report today, and I get the feeling that if I waxed philosophical I'd take a sharp turn into negative territory, and we've had enough of that yesterday.

In lieu of my exams, why don't you folks have some music?

 

 

Future uncertainty.

When people are uncertain, in general they become more hesitant to act. This effect is tempered by how risk-averse people in a culture are, as well as any inherent predispositions people may have, but it's still true enough to hold as a general rule.

Tighten your belt. Don't risk what you can't afford to lose. Keep your eyes open for opportunities weighted in your favour, no matter how small.

Cappy Cap recently wrote about how he used to feel safe as a kid in the 80's:

"I am not joking when I say this, but when Ronald Reagan was in charge I felt very safe and never worried about the country.  Of course I was only a child at the time and there really wasn't anything I could do about it, but I intuitively KNEW the government or "what adults were in charge of" was something I didn't have to concern my mind with."

It should be no surprise that people are getting antsy these days. We've all been on the slope of the coaster for a while, being wheeled up the hump, and now is the time when the track starts to even out before the plunge, the sense of trepidation before the storm.

Peering out of the box - 3/5/13.

Sultan Knish - "The Golden Apple", a socialist fairy tale.

"Fortunately this is only a fairy tale that could never ever happen in real life. Still it might be worth remembering that when you kill the golden apple of the free market, all that's left are moldy pears. And that "Fruit for Everyone" usually means "Fruit for No One"."

Vox Day - Speaking out vs. shooting.

"There will be war, whether anyone truly desires it or not. There has always been war and there always will be war, the arrogant pretenses of the totalitarians and their self-serving promises of peace on Earth notwithstanding. As Vegetius wrote: Si vis pacem, para bellum.  The Union cannot be saved because it no longer exists in the hearts of men."

Free Northerner - Men need responsibility and reward.

"Demanding they man up is pointless. Demanding they feed themselves into the grinder is both sadistic and pointless. Making them accountable without giving them power is cruel and pointless, as is punishing failure, but not rewarding success.

Give men responsibility, then demand they be responsible, and let them know they will receive the natural rewards and/or penalties for their care of their area of responsibility, and you will get the men you want."

Hawaiian Libertarian - The F YOU fund.

"Boiled down to it's essence, the F YOU fund is nothing more than realizing that you need to order your life so that you are not in a position to be forced to do something....or do anything you don't want to out of a position of fear."

Economic Collapse Blog - 22 facts that prove the bottom 90% of Americans are getting poorer.

The mainstream media is not telling you this, but the truth is that most Americans are steadily getting poorer.  The middle class is being absolutely eviscerated, and poverty is soaring to unprecedented heights.

Zero Hedge - Middle-aged suicide rates soar.

During the 11-year period studied, suicide went from the eighth leading cause of death among middle-aged Americans to the fourth, behind cancer, heart disease and accidents. Today's payrolls data will do little to lift the spirits of the middle-aged worker; we live in cruel and unusual times.

DEMCAD - Things to consider for your urban bug-out bag.

Apocalypse Cometh - It should never have gotten to this point.

"It should have never have gotten to this point. I sit in my farmhouse loading ten thirty round magazines for an AR15 hoping that I’ll never have to use it but knowing that in the near future that I will regardless of my choice. I’m loading 16 round S&W pistol mags knowing that in the very near future that what I do today is going to save my life tomorrow. Burying seeds in mylar bags and pvc pipe knowing that I’ll eventually have to grow my own food. Buying every round of ammunition even if I don’t have a gun to shoot it because I know people that have guns that shoot them and they will trade gas, food or guns for things they can’t get. It’s gotten to this point and if you don’t know it, I feel sorry for you."

 

My bets on the next shortage:

As things continue to unravel globally, I'm fully expecting more and more shortages. Of course, there's no one reason for any shortage - for example, the ammo shortage in the US is taken to be both from panic buying on the part of private citizens and government orders. But so far, we've had gun, ammo and precious metals shortages, what's next?

May Day rally against immigration in Singapore.

Well. Today we just had another anti-immigration protest as a follow-up to the one in February. Organiser's estimate of the turnout is 5-6 thousand people by the end of the protest.

I've already mentioned how I feel about the whole immigration issue before in my interview with Aurini, but I'll repeat it here for posterity's sake: Singaporeans have got the cart before the horse. So immigration is a problem, what do they do? Ask the government to fix the problem they created in the first place.

Not that they're taking the initiative to fix the problem themselves by reproducing, but to be fair it really isn't safe to do that just yet with the world circling the drain. I mean, even I'm putting off taking the first step until I can get a measure of how bad the excrement on the rotary ventilation device really is going to be. Add to that the fact that executive privilege will always trump democratic voting and nothing will change, really.

Anyways, a few photos garnered from the internets reporting of the event and a little commentary for fun: