I really wanted to read an in-depth investigative report on the Wa drug cartel. I opened Patrick Winn’s Narcotopia, hoping to find information and insight. Instead, from the first pages, I discovered that the Wa druglords are good because they are indigenous to the area where they live. I’m not remotely indigenous to the area where I live but I don’t believe that either situation is inherently morally charged. What is inherently morally charged is whether you sell drugs. I don’t, and I tend to take that as far more important to my character as to whether I’m “indigenous.”

It gets worse. Winn insists that the US is guilty of Wa’s drug trafficking. Why? Well, because the US is guilty of everything. A bear farts in Magadan, and it’s America’s fault. According to Winn, if Americans would have only given Wa “a little bit of food”, they wouldn’t have cooked and sold meth in the first place. It’s apparently America’s duty to prevent people from becoming drug overlords by feeding them. Of course, the idea that anybody would give up the immense fortunes and power brought in by running a cartel in exchange for a bowl of rice is extremely strange but we’ve heard this reasoning before. Whenever there’s a riot here in the US, we are told that the rioters are looting Louis Vuitton stores because they are perishing of hunger.

It gets better. Winn accuses the CIA of attempting to conduct “regime change” in the territories controlled by the cartel. I keep wondering how do people not get bored of this tired old narrative about CIA regime changes? There’s never any proof but that’s not even the point. We are supposed to accept that “regime change” is a bad thing. But why? Nobody ever explains. Regime change = bad, America = bad, indigenous = good.

People, do help. I saw a car in town today, and it was so unusual. It looked like a futuristic tank. Very geometric, steel-grey. I thought we were being invaded by space aliens.

And now I can’t find it on Google because my descriptions don’t lead to anything like that vehicle.

Does anybody know what I’m talking about and can drop an image? Or a name? This is driving me nuts.

Our particularly gifted friend is at it again:

With students who are resistant to letting knowledge seep in, it sometimes helps to ask a question.

Do the Jewish victims of the genocidal  Palestinian attack on 10/7 have the right to defend themselves from the Jew-hating, murderous, raping, baby-slaughtering savages who committed these atrocities?

No further “rights” questions will be accepted until you formulate a clear answer to mine.

Also, it’s impossible to follow links from an image.

What? Without the bill he seemed to need so desperately to do the same at 5,000 crossings a day? Turns out he’s been able to do it this whole time?

The question of why it’s necessary to wait for 4,000 crossings and not just do it already remains.

So does the question why people who took the narrative that “Republicans in Congress torpedoed the immigration reform bill” seriously are not upset with being lied to.

That’s good news. N said that if there are no debates, he’s not voting at all, and I agree. If the candidates don’t respect us enough to debate, it’s not a real election.

People keep advancing ideas on why it went down so precipitously but that’s the wrong question to answer. It looks like the numbers went back to the norm. The interesting question is why it rose so dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s?

In my part of the world, the most notorious serial killers are from that era, too, so it’s not culture-specific.

“I’m putting money into a college fund for when you go to Yale,” I explain to Klara.

“I’m not going to Yale,” she says coolly.

“Where then? Harvard?” I quip.

“I’m going to the University of”Wherever-My-BFF-Goes”,” she responds.

What goes unsaid tends to become unthought, and eventually unthinkable.

Steve Sailer, Noticing (2024)

Wow, folks, I have truly arrived. I found a dude in Ukraine who plagiarized me. He Google-translated a passage into English and pasted it into his article. That’s so cute. I’m not even upset because it’s really too cute.

The way I found the plagiarist is funny, too. I’m reading his piece and thinking, “OK, sleeplessness is really getting to me. This paragraph sounds exactly like something I would say. I think I’m losing my mind.” Then finally I realize that it doesn’t sound like my paragraph. It is my paragraph. And my linguistic idiosyncrasies were actually preserved quite well in the English translation. 

Yes, actions have consequences. The collapse of the Western presence in Niger is a very big deal and will have profoundly negative consequences. The US is being perceived as traversing its weakest moment right now. We can repeat ad nauseam how successful our withdrawal from Afghanistan and the rest of our foreign policy is but these fairy tales aren’t persuading anybody else.