My friend from college texted me: “I’m okay — deep diving into this weird fear/belief that I can’t provide for myself. That I somehow lost the capacity the second I started being more authentic and prioritizing my inner peace.”

B.S., I thought.

The friend in question used to be one of the most capable human beings I knew, but when Covid hit, she took a “sabbatical” because she was working too much and would “lose herself.”

She moved to a Western-town-Disneyland built for rich Californians, “to be closer to nature.” In the past six years, she hasn’t worked, and she never started any of the six business ideas she used to tell me about. She “wasn’t sure they were really in tune” with her spirit.

This friend of mine left a bad marriage and never remarried. Never had children, because she “was very independent and valued her self-reliance.” I suspect she didn’t allow herself to meet a serious and capable man, because what if he turned out to be a Republican? Instead, her relationship with a younger (suitably liberal) Californian masseur ended this year when he left her for a younger woman. Now, her landlady wants to sell the house my friend lives in. Her savings will run out in six months.

My Own Worst Enemy

We make sure to visit the US every summer so our daughters can keep up their English, see their grandparents, and experience their father’s homeland. We visited my friend during our last summer trip, and since then, she’s been texting me poetry, pictures of the moon, and Instagram half-rants by self-righteous middle-aged ladies aggressively self-affirming at the camera.

This text about deep-diving into inner peace interrupted me in the middle of work. I had forensic accountants chasing me about one of my businesses, and I’d just been forced to let three people go from the other one. One of these is a woman of exactly my friend’s age and professional profile, except she has two kids and has not wasted her late thirties finding herself. She and the other employees I’d had to lay off all found new positions quickly, but for my friend, the job search is much harder.

I responded as gently as I could:

ME: With love, you can provide for yourself. You’ve just been outside of the job market for a long time. Employers find this weird, so it puts you at a disadvantage. All you need to do is apply more and wider to overcome that disadvantage. You’ve overcome worse disadvantages before. You are good at this. Just don’t give up.

HER: I don’t want to be an employee. And I haven’t determined a strong enough product/service to offer in place of working as an employee. I have so many skills and no clear path to apply them. Acknowledging that I am my own worst enemy is hard, day after day.

I told her she was overthinking this, and she started sending me panicked messages about how she just wanted to provide the best possible life for her dog.

We’d been friends since we were twenty. I’d been so proud this tall, scary-funny, sassy, intelligent girl wanted to hang out with me in college. Now she seemed to have become so weak. I knew she wasn’t talking to her parents, and she’d just been through this bad breakup. Here we go again, I thought, and pressed the call button.

She burst into tears at the sound of my voice, which didn’t surprise me.

Millennial Women’s Envy

I have this strange effect on American Millennial women: they cry at me. She’ll be telling me how miserable her life is, I’ll point out that problems have solutions and she can surely find them. At that, invariably, tears and accusations. I’m making her feel “not seen” because of my privilege.

What privilege, I used to wonder? My life’s trajectory after college shouldn’t shock anyone: marriage to my college boyfriend, two daughters two and a half years apart, a couple of failed business ventures and two successful ones. A lot of that I did with the help and guidance of more experienced and successful people, people who I didn’t cry at.

But now, in my forties, I have come to understand the envy of the Millennial Aunt. A quarter of them have never been married,1 and almost none have children; the exceptions are almost all international students. Most of the American women my age who I know are on some kind of long-term psychoactive medication (compared to only 25% of women in the country as a whole, but remember I made my American friends in college).2 None of them have started a business (baking cookies or giving your friends advice on how to be less anxious is not a business) or taken care of an ailing grandparent.

Why is that? The answer can’t only be “standard of living.” The US is far wealthier than Bulgaria.3 It can’t be something globally wrong with my generation either; plenty of women my age in Bulgaria have children about the age of my daughters and a stable career or a business of their own. Many are getting ready to take care of their aging parents.

So What Went Wrong?

My fellow Tortugans ask this question every day on our private Telegram, with brave-looking emojis that conceal real, uncomprehending horror.

To an outsider who shared these women’s formative years in college and then kept in touch through their lives’ milestones, the answer is obvious. Although nobody - least of all their parents - would admit it, Millennial women in the US were sold a bill of goods:

1. College is for experimentation and finding yourself.

2. Pretty girls are dumb. No one will take you seriously if you’re pretty.

3. Go to grad school. You have time.

4. You must choose a profession that reflects who you really are.

5. You have to play the field before you commit to a man.

6. Don’t move to be with him.

7. Getting married early is low class. Having kids in your twenties is shameful.

8. Above all, you must be comfortable. Stress and hardship will scar you forever, so avoid emotional trauma at all costs.

I’m going to say this is bad advice.

My husband and I didn’t invent our lifestyle. We learned it in college and later as young professionals in Boston from older friends and respected professors. Many of my friends, though, absorbed snake oil. Ask my friend today and, yes, she will tell you all about playing the field, while depressed and alone.

What do you say to that? If I tried to rescue her, she’d fight me all the way and blame me for the trauma afterward. The usual advice is to “support them and tell them we’re here for them,” which sounds like it came from that girl with the nail in her head.

Education Is an Investment

Everyone thought I was unimaginative for spending my expensive American education on technical classes. No, I did not take Perversion in Victorian Poetry - Bulgarians do not need these classes - but the bigger difference between me and my peers was who was paying for our education.

My college’s financial aid strategy came from an era when young American men needed capable and exotic imported brides, so it agreed to foot most of my (enormous) tuition bill. Four-hundred-year-old institutions of higher learning had found an intelligent and socially acceptable way to ensure that the sons of their traditional donor families would find suitable female companionship to either continue the bloodline or at least have an emotionally enriching experience along the way.

Of course I knew that. My calculus study group partner, who tried to explain to me what the phrasal verb “to make out” means, knew it too. The American girl in my political economy class, who accused me of dressing up too much for class, knew it. So did the upperclassman who tried to pick me up by explaining that my country had eleven time zones (he thought I was Russian). I also knew I would leave college with a student loan to pay off.

My dad told me to study economics, because Americans knew about money, but my American girlfriends thought materialistic thinking was crass. Their parents paid their bills and told them to have new experiences and find themselves, so they studied anthropology, sociology, or government with lots of performance art classes (except the poor fools who went into the sciences and consigned themselves to a decade of credential-seeking serfdom pumping out papers on climate change). Few ever exceeded their intellectual achievements in college. By age thirty-five, they all needed therapy.

Now, okay, I did marry an American man, just as the system intended, but when I was denied an H-1B visa, I took him away to Eastern Europe. This removed us both from the American taxpayer pool and turned a net profit on the whole venture. My American economics degree was a good investment, after all.

Losing Yourself, Finding Yourself

My mother is sixty-five and has four grandchildren, but many American women in their seventies have no prospect of grandchildren at all. Boomers in the US are sad, because their daughters are either radicalized academics or jobless and trying to find themselves in their forties. Their daughters will never have children unless they froze their eggs a decade ago.

But honestly, having been through two pregnancies in my late twenties and early thirties, I know that eggs are not the only problem. Making a baby is tough on your body, and that’s only the beginning. Babies are fragile; toddlers aggressively suicidal; pre-schoolers need active running around, which occasionally lands them in the emergency room; elementary school students need domestication; middle schoolers must learn how to study while accepting their fast-changing bodies; and high schoolers … we just got our kid to high school. Give me a second to catch my breath.

A mother’s job starts at birth and lasts the rest of her life. She runs this gauntlet - staying up all night, fighting the world in order to make this screaming little grub into a functional, intelligent, good person. It’s hard to do that if you’re in your fifties, and you can’t do it at all if you’re afraid of stress.4 Cowardice consigns you to a sterile, substandard life. It makes you make yourself an invalid.

The Madwoman in the Attic

Remember the Victorian archetype of the crazy old aunt locked in the attic? Millennial Aunts have enthusiastically accepted this role. They signed on for the Bertha Mason Premium Plan and locked themselves into a self-indulgent prison. They thought victimhood was romantic, or, God help them, empowering.

Like my jobless friend, many of these spinster-aunts would rather wallow in genteel decay than get back on their feet. They’ve trapped themselves in useless degree programs or scammy nonprofit jobs, because that’s what feels safe. Nobody locked them in this attic. They just won’t leave. They’re shrieking, moaning, crawling around up there, getting worse. They could stand up and come downstairs, but that would be hard.

How Do You Deal with the Madwoman in the Attic?

That depends on whether she is your woman and whether it’s your attic.

If not - that is, if you don’t love her - just stay away. But what if you do love her? Yes, she was lazy. Yes, she’s crippling herself in order to guilt the rest of us into taking care of her. But we have to do what’s best for the people we love.

What’s “best”? Do you lovingly bring the aunt in the attic some more laudanum? Make sure she’s securely locked in up there? Assure her that her lifestyle is valid? Or do you open the door, tell her it’s time to find a job, and point out that you’ll be renovating the attic next month, so she has four weeks to find a new place to live? Thank God for my friend’s landlady.

If you love your Millennial woman, and, like me, you don’t believe in the “every lifestyle is valid” bullshit that put her into the attic in the first place, you have only one choice. Force her out.

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This post comes to us from an anonymous Tortugan. - Ed.

For college, the cost/benefit is not as good as it once was. Having to pay off student loans has gotten brutal - you can’t even discharge them in bankruptcy. Grade inflation and falling standards in enrollment and education give employers less reason to care about your diploma with each passing year. If you’re working a part time job that makes five figures, though, you can take a class or two at a time on top of that and get your degree without spending some god-awful amount.

For example: dealing poker. There are some skills you need to learn there, but they’re minimal, and compared to other career options, you can get them fast. Right now it’s open to anybody.

The Floor

I deal poker in Texas. I started two or three years ago, and it was very much a downside-risk-abatement thing. It pays decently well, so even if I find no other access to any other money, I’ll always be able to make a living doing this as a backstop. I’m in my 50s now, but even into my 70s, I could go get a job working at a card room or casino in any of a hundred places in America. I hope I never have to, but I can if I want to.

I work when I want to, and as much as I want to. You get paid, if you want to, every day. And there’s no longhouse. You have other political problems, but I never went to any Ibram X. Kendi trainings.

Barely Legal

I don’t know what you know about gambling in Texas, but it’s only mostly illegal. We don’t have casinos here, we have what they call “card rooms” - a gray area that allows you to spread poker. They also have these things called sweepstakes, a similar gray area that lets you have slot machines. (We don’t have legalized sports betting. People who want to go to actual casino-casinos go north to Oklahoma or east to Louisiana.)

You go to a card room and you walk up to me and start playing cards. If you want to bet on a card game, that’s your business, and maybe you’ll win. We’re not an app on anybody’s phone. People who come here know what they’re getting into, as opposed to these college men who open a phone app and bet thousands of dollars on “I guess Messi’s pretty good.” On the other hand, a card room gets your membership fee and your seat fee, but nobody involved receives “any economic benefit other than personal winnings.” So it’s all above-board.1

I like it that way. I have this weird, Baptist mentality about gambling. I’ve never had, and never want, a management position in any gambling entity; I just deal cards. If people want to play, I’m happy to deal to them, but I’m never encouraging anybody to gamble. My thought is: if they want to lose their money, they might as well lose it to me.

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“We woke up one day in the woods.”

“Who?”

“People. Us. Guys just like us. We were animals rutting in the swamp. And then we split the atom, built cathedrals, went to the moon.”

“Created financial instruments,” Armando said, “and supermarkets.”

“Everything. I wanted to understand how we could have possibly managed that.”

“And did you?”

“I don’t know. I think I would have just sat down and died.”

Jim Murray is an anthropology professor at some minor league university in Detroit, and he has been canceled, resigning from his teaching position after a social media witch hunt. He’s a young father with a five-year-old daughter, and suddenly he’s working on a sewer repair crew.

There he is, underground, with these working class guys. They find a fissure where all the pipes come together, and they crawl through it, climb up out of the manhole, and Detroit is deserted. There’s nobody there.

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The style of the writing reminded us of Cormac McCarthy. It’s sensory and serious, with concrete imagery of the world around the character, and densely written.

In the bathroom, he put on deodorant and shaved clean and let the faucet cool his fingertips before pressing them to his eyelids. He staged spit mostly air into his cupped hands and showed his palms to the sky like the Elgoni were said to do. The earth outside the window was so dark, it might not yet exist.

Broadly, it’s a meditation on manhood. Horror, but there’s not much splatter. Lovecraftian, but Kelly has a far defter touch than Lovecraft did. We don’t have dark hints for fifty pages and then the money shot of the monster. Instead, we have dark mutterings for a good three or four chapters, until things go extremely sideways. If you are a father, this book is going to mess with you. In a good way, but there are scenes that are just absolutely wrenching.

Everybody says men don’t read anymore. Well, yes, they do, but mainstream publishing doesn’t publish anything for them. Manly, independent fiction, mostly on Substack, seems to be the theme for this podcast, and The Earthen Dark is a very fine example of that.

If you’re not out trick-or-treating, pick up this book and sit home on Halloween and plow through it. And then you won’t be able to sleep.

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Mentioned in this episode: Cormac McCarthy, The Road, H. P. Lovecraft, and the Futurist Letters review of The Earthen Dark by .

Join us next time for American Paladin by Larry Correia.

Over the summer, we had ’s Tortuga Fitness Challenge, and now we have the start of another mighty entry in Tortuga Society’s efforts to make healthy pirates. This is the Hyperborean Project. - Ed.

BOOK 1: BUILDING THE BETTER BEAST

CHAPTER ONE

Work it harder
Make it better
Do it faster
Makes us stronger
More than ever
Hour after hour
Our work is never over

- Harder Better Faster Stronger, Daft Punk

Before the internet was a library, it was a collection of taverns (not a series of tubes, no matter what Ted Stevens said). And in the tavern where serious men talked about serious chemicals - what the Olympians enhanced their biochemistry with, or the Tour de France winners boosted themselves up with, what the guys in the MLB and NFL and NBA clubhouses juiced with when the testers weren’t looking - there was a man who went by the name DatBTrue.

You probably don’t know him; most people don’t. He was a legendary anon whose forum was the proving grounds for the elite’s frontier protocols, passed along by coaches, trainers, pushing-the-envelope sports medicine doctors, and the pharmacists who worked with the pros. These secrets never made it into any textbook because they were too valuable to publish, so if you wanted to know what the top of the sport looked like from the inside, you went to Dat’s board.

His core claim was simple: nothing useful happens without exercise. You can take everything in the pharmacy, he’d say, but it won’t matter if you don’t train. Drugs improve your recovery and let you do more with what you’ve got, but without the stimulus of exercise, you’re just wasting your money and your time.

But one day, someone showed up on Dat’s board and said: It ain’t necessarily so. Androgens - testosterone, nandrolone, trenbolone, the whole armamentarium - don’t just amplify the training stimulus: they are the stimulus. Give a man enough testosterone (especially some of the hyperperformative analogues), and enough protein, and his body will build muscle without him ever touching a weight. The endocrine system is that powerful. You get muscle, strength, the whole package, without the exercise.

Dat, who knew more about this territory than almost anyone alive, conceded. That was one of the only times I ever saw him get mogged on his own board. He took it with grace, because he was committed to an honest reading of the science. He said, “Fine, yes, you can build and maintain muscle with androgens and protein. It’s damned inefficient, so why wouldn’t you also exercise? You’ll get a lot further in the same time frame, with even a modest time investment.”

Let me address the reader who just read the DatBTrue concession and thought, “Great! I’ll take the androgens and skip the workout.” You can. But the muscle you build that way is plastic surgery - the appearance without the substance. It looks like the muscle on the weight-lifter, but it doesn’t perform like his. Training produces a body that lives longer, resists disease, and keeps the mind sharp even after the look starts to fade.

Why pay the full price of the chemicals for a fraction of the return, when the same chemical investment multiplied by the training stimulus gives you the whole thing? The claim “nothing happens without exercise,” while technically false, is still practically true.

WARS THAT SHOULDN’T BE FOUGHT

Cardio vs. resistance. High intensity vs. high volume. LISS vs. HIIT. Free weights vs. machines vs. resistance bands. The internet has spent two decades fighting these battles. Two decades of comment-section wars fought by people who’ve never met each other, over training methods they’ve never tried, who are never wrong about anything because they never tested anything. The answer has always been the same: in the right proportion, for your goals, both.

Resistance training builds the machine, cardio builds the engine, and mobility work keeps the chassis from falling apart. The lifting-only guy has horsepower with no endurance. The running-only guy has endurance with no power. The man who does both (and stretches) is the whole machine.

The question of proportion is a personal one. Powerlifters train differently from marathoners, and both of them train differently from hybrid athletes who want to be good at everything. It depends on your goal.

THE MOBILITY LAYER

The gender gap is real. Women do yoga and pilates, but men (gymnasts and yogis aside) don’t. This costs the men their hips, hamstrings, lower backs, and quality of life at fifty. (Fifty arrives faster than you want to believe when you’re in your twenties. If you can’t touch your toes at thirty, you can’t get off the floor after your back gives out at sixty.)

Yes, there’s a lot of woo-woo attached to the flexibility world: chakras, energy flow, mystical language that makes the whole practice feel like something that belongs in a New Age retreat rather than a gym. Ignore all of that. It’s packaging. The stretching, mobility work, and range of motion training is as practical as the squat and the deadlift. Mobility has been part of athletic training for as long as there have been coaches. Your coach taught you to stretch, right? The coach wasn’t wrong.

WHAT EXERCISE DOES TO THE BRAIN

The brain is not a muscle, but it does respond to training. The same work that builds the body builds the brain, and by the same logic: stimulus, adaptation, growth. Aerobic work releases BDNF, the growth factor that neurons use to wire and rewire. It grows the hippocampus or memory center and sharpens executive function. You are building the body and getting the brain for free.

THE LONGEVITY CONNECTION

Muscle mass is the predictor of longevity; resistance training prevents the sarcopenia that kills the elderly. And it isn’t just muscle mass. VO2 max, resting heart rate, blood pressure, balance, grip strength, cognition, metabolic blood markers, all of them improve with exercise, and all of them predict healthspan. Exercise costs nothing, requires no prescription, and outperforms most of the expensive longevity interventions. Longevity clinics will sell you IV drips and supplements, but if you’re lifting and walking, you’re getting the better return on investment. Build the body and you extend the life: the bridge to the “Your Next Century” section of the project.

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Free and paid subscribers get to see some of our notes. The whole conversation, conspiracies and all, is available only to members of the Tortuga Society.

The Tortuga Society argued about (and reviled) Rules for Radicals, picking up the debate started in Chaos Is A Ladder, in this month’s Tortuga Book Club (led as always by ).

: “Rules for Radicals is a book for organizers and not for the folks who are actually touched by the community. The Hell’s Angel sitting next to me when I was 10 got better than most when dealing with Alinsky. He said: ‘You’re here to use me as a shock troop until I die.’ Well…”

Whose Good Was He There For?

His own.

Alinsky got a lot of money from Marshall Field III. He probably invented the tactic that Jesse Jackson perfected in the 1980s and 1990s: “Hey there, such and such corporation. Boy, sure doesn’t look very diverse in your company. I sure wouldn’t want to have to call that out. Or you could just hire my boy here and make a donation to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.”

Why Was He So Influential?

Because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave him some level of credit.

The people who were educated on him picked up on him, and then the next generation was educated on, this guy is fabulous! Which is why Barack and Hillary learned to love him young.

He got something. He got something about how to sabotage. Or how to be contrarian in this way.

[Behind the wall: whether the Right can run Alinsky’s playbook, and how to beat an Alinsky operator by stealing his one good idea. Somewhere in there an armed robber loses his gun hand.]

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I first encountered the Ur-Crypto about twelve years ago, when I saw a widget on a website for payment in it. The branding was great - I was able to intuit from the very name that it was not just another method of sending dollars over the internet, but an actual competing currency that used the existing infrastructure of the internet as part of its payment system.

When I read the white paper, I was immediately captivated. The technology seemed to represent a real possibility of checking the government’s ability to tax via inflation. The strongest parallel to me seemed to be BitTorrent’s check on excessive DRM in PC games. The government could make an example of careless pirates here and there, but due to the peer-to-peer nature of the system, they couldn’t really shut it down.

Over the next few years I dabbled in Bitcoin here and there. I was never all that interested in it as an investment; I was simply hoping for an increase in adoption as a competing currency to the dollar so I could spend it more often, like at Porcfest, the annual gathering of the Free State Project in New Hampshire. Although it was difficult my first year there (2018) due to the then poor cellular connectivity in the White Mountains, it still felt worthwhile as part of a global monetary revolution.

In the years since, I kept hearing about all these breakthroughs with the technology such as Segregated Witness (SegWit), which moved signature data outside of transaction IDs and increased the blockchain’s block size from 1 MB to 4 MB. The latter change was controversial because many in the community thought the increase should have been much larger to help the chain scale and prevent transaction fees from becoming excessive. The “small block” camp maintained that this would compromise the security of the chain by making the ratio of mined block rewards to transactions too low. This dispute resulted in the famous hard fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) from Bitcoin (BTC) in 2017. The Porcfest 2018 debate between proponents of BTC and BCH was so technical and jargon-heavy that I, a finance bro and not a programmer, could scarcely make heads or tails of it.

In terms of number-go-up, BTC has had BCH’s number. In 2017 alone, BTC increased from $1,000 to $18,000 (I sold at $2,000 to pay for moving expenses, ouch). It continued to climb in 2018 with the launch of the Lightning Network, a layer on top of the BTC blockchain designed to facilitate everyday transactions (so, an alternative to what the BCH hard fork intended to facilitate). Wall Street started to take notice, and BTC ATMs began to pop up. BTC’s future seemed very bright.

At the same time, however, something seemed off to me. Big institutional players such as BlackRock were preparing to roll out ETFs for retail investors to gain exposure to BTC, yet there was very little adoption of Bitcoin as actual currency. At Porcfest, the percentage of vendors who accepted BTC (or any crypto for that matter) has declined from more than 50% to less than 20%. If the most enthusiastic proponents of cryptocurrency were dropping the stuff, general adoption faced much greater hurdles.

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The Fungibility Problem

Around 2019, I heard about Monero (XMR) from . Monero is a privacy coin incorporating certain more cash-like features (new addresses for every payment, blinded keys to obscure which addresses share an owner) that Satoshi Nakamoto (the pseudonymous author of the Bitcoin white paper) recommended, but which were never implemented in Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin’s blockchain is transparent. Anyone can see anyone else’s transaction using a block explorer. The parties’ identities are hidden behind their wallet addresses, but this is only pseudonymity, not anonymity. Realizing that Bitcoin lacked such a basic privacy feature made me skeptical. Its popular treatment was as a store-of-value investment like gold, not a medium of exchange that competed with the dollar. But despite gold’s lack of portability compared to Bitcoin, at least gold is fungible. Fungibility measures the degree to which one unit of money is not distinguishable from another unit. A fully fungible money, therefore, does not present any concern that any particular unit will carry any more information about its owner than any other unit when it is exchanged. Information about our transactions is an asset that we do not wish to disclose to others without compensation, so Bitcoin, because it transparently constructs send amounts from previously unspent amounts particular to the sender, lacks true fungibility. If A is a criminal and pays B with Bitcoin, B could be unwittingly implicated in the crime because the amount he receives carries the mark of A’s theretofore unspent amounts.

Privacy coin blockchains are opaque, however. Monero uses RingCT cryptography to hide the sender’s identity. The true send is mixed with 15 other decoy sends, which are real sends from earlier completed transactions on the blockchain. Thanks to a clever procedure called Pedersen commitments, the amounts of these sends are hidden from external observers. Because amounts can vary infinitely, there is a large anonymity set to draw from. In addition, the selection of the decoy sends is according to a gamma distribution, which mimics the pattern by which real sends are drawn from the total funds in a wallet (more recent deposits are more likely to be drawn down first). It is statistically difficult to gather any information about the sender in any Monero transaction, and difficult to the exact same degree for each transaction, due to the fixed number of decoy sends. [In a planned upgrade,] Monero’s RingCT mixing procedure will no longer use a selection of 16 spends but [will be] upgraded to use the entire chain’s transaction history (Full-Chain Membership Proofs), endowing the coin with near-perfect fungibility with respect to the sender. Thus, Monero satisfies the fungibility criterion for sound money much better than Bitcoin.

Monero has other great privacy features as well, and coins such as Zcash and Pirate Chain have some even stronger privacy features than Monero. I compare Bitcoin with privacy coins because privacy coins have significantly more utility as a medium of exchange. Many Bitcoiners agree with this, even though they recommend Bitcoin as a store of value.

What Money Is For

Where I part company from Bitcoiners is my conviction that BTC’s touted “digital gold”/store-of-value function is, under a correct understanding of money, wholly derivative of its function as a medium of exchange, and this function depends on whether it can record shifts in value-creation share among an economy’s participants.

Value creation means giving someone something they want, not the subjective value of the good itself. When I buy a Coke, Coca-Cola does not know how precisely refreshing that drink is to me; all they know is that I was willing to reduce my claim on the economy’s total wealth by the price of the Coke because I valued the refreshment more than that price. Because a sound money supply does not change (or changes negligibly), the transaction is zero-sum in monetary terms - my loss in wealth is their gain - but in terms of value the game is win-win; I enjoyed the Coke and Coca-Cola enjoyed being paid for it.1

Money facilitates exchanges by solving the indivisibility problem of barter. Suppose that Robinson Crusoe has just met Friday. Suppose also that Friday’s only possession is the raft he drifted in on. Crusoe wants the raft but has only one fish to offer. The fish may represent only half the value-creation share of the raft, but half a raft is useless.

The solution is to intermediate with a more granular asset, something like beach glass or cowrie shells. Trust is a crucial element here. Crusoe will only accept money instead of barter with Friday if he trusts that Friday will reciprocate. Otherwise, the glass or shells are not even worthless money; they are not money at all.

Convenience Beats Inflation

The criterion of trust raises an important question about BTC: Do we early adopters of crypto trust the majority of other economic actors to follow us? I’d say we shouldn’t.

The US dollar is an objectively terrible product, having lost more than 95% of its value over the past 100 years. Yet people the world over still can’t get enough of it. This is because it benefits from a substantial network effect combined with immense convenience. Most other government currencies suffer from even worse inflation and lack proper integration with networks such as credit card processing and SWIFT.

Bitcoin usage, especially with the Lightning Network, is relatively quick and easy - just scan a QR code and hit send - but even this doesn’t match tap-to-pay for convenience. And convenience is all the overwhelming majority of people care about. They are not ideological about things like inflation and don’t care that there are vast outfits of middlemen staffing banks and credit card companies. Over many decades, these middlemen have found ways to integrate their networks with retail products that provide so much convenience that cryptocurrency remains, at best, a speculative curiosity to the public.

Buying to HODL

Bitcoin’s flaws are hardly limited to its fungibility shortcomings. On-chain transaction fees are high due to the block size remaining at 4 MB, the Lightning Network suffers reliability issues, and Bitcoin’s primitive nature as the original cryptocurrency remains a problem. Recently, the Coldcard hardware wallet for Bitcoin was hacked with an exploit of weak entropy in its seed generation.2 The Coldcard was the gold standard in wallet storage for the most hardcore Bitcoin enthusiasts, those called “maximalists” (“maxis” for short), who acquire as much Bitcoin as possible and no other coins. People lost millions of dollars in BTC from this.

Even Bitcoin’s much-touted feature of its hard cap of 21 million minable coins is arguably a bug. The act of mining is what secures the blockchain network. As this cap is approached, there will be fewer new coin drops for miners until only transaction fees will then incent them to continue mining. There will only be enough adoption to create the necessary transaction volume if Bitcoin becomes more convenient to the public than fiat currency. It is difficult to see that happening given how BTC’s limitations stack up against monsters like the US dollar. Wall Street seems to be wising up to Bitcoin’s limitations and is shifting to stablecoin cryptocurrency, which offers the advantage of low international transaction fees compared to fiat currencies without the volatility of non-pegged cryptos.

Monero addresses many of Bitcoin’s problems through features like dynamic block size scaling and perpetual coin drops for miners. Although the latter is inflation, it is of an equitable kind, predictable with perfect mathematical precision, much more akin to gold mining than the shenanigans of government treasuries and central banks. I buy Monero through RetoSwap, which is Tor-based peer to peer trading software, and use it where I can, primarily to pay for my website’s hosting.

Monero has a great cypherpunk subculture surrounding it, which I enjoy being a part of, and I enjoy the security of transacting privately, of being my own Swiss bank. But unlike the Bitcoin maxis, I am not under any illusions that the public can be persuaded to value anything more than basic convenience. I don’t think governments and their banker cronies are going to cut themselves out as by substituting blockchain currency for theirs.

BTC maxis will never be persuaded out of their devotion to the OG coin, so as long as they keep buying to HODL, Bitcoin will never go to zero. The value of money is ultimately in the subjective eyes of its beHODLers.

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Shouldn’t We Write This Down?

“If I wanted to automate your position, just how exactly would I do it?”

Eight months ago, my boss’s boss, “Bob,” called me into a meeting. He’d been taking this class in AI and machine learning for his master’s degree, and now he was asking how he’d automate my job.

My first thought was that there was no way this AI/ML progra…

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“I’ve really screwed things up.” “How so?” said Madeline. “I packed the wrong clothes for one,” Calvin sighed. “That, and with this whole Rebecca and Imogene thing, I don’t know. She was bawling her guts out to me this morning, Imogene, not Rebecca, and I realized I’d read the whole thing wrong. I’ve been selfish. Worse, I’ve been a coward.”

The book starts out of nowhere. We have Calvin Munn in Honolulu. He came here in his clothes from New York, which are very fancy and fashionable, but he’s very sweaty. He’s talking to a woman who is the most beautiful woman he could possibly imagine, and he says, “I’ve screwed up.”

Then we flash back to when Calvin is in high school, in Chester, Iowa. He’s very excited about the upcoming release of the video game Civilization VII, February of 2005, and he meets this girl. They went to high school together, but never knew each other. They meet, there is an attraction, but she moves away and he goes off to college. The story moves on linearly from there.

At heart it is a young man’s coming of age story slash romance.

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Cairo Smith is the Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe of the Zoomers. For him, it is the Zoomers who are going to be the new Greatest Generation. They are rising to meet the threat, whatever it turns out to be.

The tone of the book overall is optimistic and patriotic. Not in a heavy-handed way, but nonetheless, it is pro-American. Who ever heard of such a thing?

He had broken his own heart the way one might break his own nose by walking into a wall.

It’s really refreshing to see an author who’s willing to point at someone making mistakes and call them mistakes. He doesn’t have an axe to grind, or if he does, he doesn’t show it in his work. He really tells you what it’s like to be a Midwesterner in New York.

Current Affairs is light and fun without being frivolous and serious without being depressing. It’s not nuanced, it’s not objective, it’s better than either of those things.

Download the sample on Kindle, and it’s got you. If you get two chapters in, you’re done. Start it late in the day because you won’t sleep.

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Mentioned in this episode: Strauss and Howe, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Napoleon Dynamite, Starship Troopers, Homonoid, The Fallujiad.

Join us next time for The Earthen Dark by .

The Xurak trained their eyes upon the galaxy and sculpted their vessels for this task. It is not that they built their worlds of horror because they delighted in such things. They sought the most monstrous of designs to strike fear into the alien heart. Nothing less could be permitted, lest the tragedy of Terra strike again. And it was only after several generations that the Xurak fell in love with what they wanted to inflict on their enemies.

Vas Du’Kaal is the last human child in the universe. A slave to uplifted praying mantises, this kid can’t speak - he’s never learned how. He’s just another cog in the Bugman machine. There is no such thing as mother; there is only your P’taph, the bug who tells you what to do.

So, there he is, slaving away in the maggot-fields, when a spaceship arrives captained by bounty hunter (and legendary 800-year-old warrior) Amon Russ. He’s there to capture some alien, and in so doing, he notices: oh wow, there’s a human child over there, in with the bugs. I will buy that human child, because he’s probably the last one in the universe. And we’re off on our found-family space-adventure.

Fast forward a couple thousand years, and this is what the galaxy of Star Trek looks like: humans are the elder gods that everyone lusts after, or wants to take apart. They want to keep humans in zoos because they’re so awesome. It’s tough to be a god.

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Allegorically, we’ll go ahead and say it: humanity is a stand-in for Western-slash-European civilization, which destroyed itself, basically, between 1914 and 1945, and now you have uplifted races moving into formerly human territory and kind of taking things over. We’ll leave it to our listeners to look for parallels there.

What does it mean when your high-tech civilization discovers that there are actual demons in hell? What if your species is doomed? What do you do next? The Last Human creates a world that is inspiring. This is the way you keep a genre going, rather than just disassembling it and selling off the pieces.

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Mentioned in this episode: our episode on The Domes of Calrathia; Young’s Star Trek essays (The Ultimate Dissident Review and A Leftwing Dream in a Rightwing Future); Starship Troopers, from the Tortuga Book Club; and John Derbyshire.

Join us next time for Current Affairs by .

You really are in a war for your time.

Corporations, governments, intelligence agencies, and even individual people are all expending tremendous amounts of well-directed energy to steal your time, your consciousness. Some do this for money, others for vanity, and others still for more sinister reasons. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but you are being attacked from all sides, at all hours of the day, with weapons of unparalleled sophistication.

The consequences of losing this war for your time are catastrophic, and most of us are losing.

Everything that is valuable in life - health, wealth, community, art, etc. - all these require the deliberate and focused investment of time. Even the simplest things like rest and relaxation require time. If you allow your time to be conquered, you’re willfully giving up parts of your life. In fact, losing the time war means losing your life; it means being poor, unhealthy, lonely, and boring - or at least more poor, unhealthy, lonely, and boring than you could otherwise be.

The siege has been going on for quite some time, but most of the besieged don’t take it seriously. The average person doesn’t even know they’re losing because they don’t fight; others fight poorly and get slaughtered. I have been struggling with this lately, and my goal here is to give you all some practical strategies for winning your own war against the forces of chaos that are siphoning off your life force.

Putting Things Into Perspective

Before we talk about the correct use of time, let’s first consider how much of it we have and how to conceptualize its consumption.

If you sleep 8 hours a night, that leaves you with 960 waking minutes. To make the math easy, let’s assume that you only sleep 7 hours and 20 minutes, which gives us an even 1,000 waking minutes.1

When you think about it like this, 10 minutes is 1% of your day.2

This is very important to keep in mind. 10 minutes doesn’t feel like a long time, but 1% is significant. Most people don’t think of an hour as being that long, but it’s 6% of your day.

Consider Technology

The average adult aged 18-24 spends about 186 minutes on social media alone. That’s about 20% of their time every day: a fifth of their energy.

That’s 1,131 hours.

That’s 73 days of the year.

That’s 28 forty-hour work weeks.

This is an insane amount of time. And what do most people get out of it? NOTHING. I have never known anybody who wished for more time so they could watch more memes.

This isn’t meant to be an article about social media, but it’s just one example of the temporal massacres that take place every day. The first step to stopping this incessant slaughter is to recognize that it is happening.

It’s also worth recognizing the breadth of what we are up against. Previous generations had their own problems, but they didn’t have to deal with anything like phones. What worked for them simply will not work for us.

How to Fight

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Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul and faith

- “Sympathy For The Devil,” The Rolling Stones

Sympathy for the Devil

You’re much more likely to have watched “Game of Thrones” than to have read Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals, so think of Baelish’s monologue: chaos is a ladder. Littlefinger climbed from nothing and threw down everyone who opposed him, and this is the thesis of the book that we are reading this month in the Tortuga Society book club.

Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals in 1971, opening it with an epigraph to Lucifer, “the first radical known to man.” That tells you something about the man’s sense of humor and of the game. He probably had the 1968 Rolling Stones song playing when he wrote it.

I’m not much of a fan of Alinsky, but I think it’s helpful to know his methods and motivations. Yes, he’s the Temu version of Lenin, but for all that, he set the course for the modern Left. His book is honest about the methods necessary to succeed (think Machiavelli-through-a-Chicago-lens), it’s brief (at roughly two hundred pages), and it’s surprisingly funny. It deserves study the way a weapon does; you learn how to disarm it, turn it, or at minimum recognize it when someone uses it to try to kill you.

So: sympathy for the devil, in the literal sense.

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The Rules

The first thing to understand about Rules for Radicals: it’s not a manifesto. It is a manual with some attached snarkiness (anyone who reads my writing may appreciate that I at least agree with Alinsky on this front). Manuals are prescriptive, since they are largely written by people who have already done the thing and are now teaching it to the next batch of recruits.

Alinsky organized the poor in Chicago’s Back of the Yards and built the Industrial Areas Foundation. By 1971, he had been in the fight for thirty years, an underdog against entrenched power. You can see his desperation in his tactics.

The Have-Nots against the Haves. Alinsky divided society into the “Haves,” the “Have-Nots,” and the “Have-a-Little, Want Mores” class, which he saw as the swing vote in any campaign. (If you think this sounds like a basic class-warfare split overlaid on a left-right political diagram, you got it. Arguably this is why Alinsky didn’t get anywhere, but we’ll talk about that more during the discussion.) The organizer’s job, as laid out in his book, is to pull the sympathies of the Have-a-Little middle class away from the Have reactionaries and toward the Have-Nots.

Alinsky addresses the organizer, not the organized. He wrote to a small cadre of activists about how to move large numbers of people with thirteen (spooky!) rules. They’re not especially warm and fuzzy:

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The appearance of power (the “paper tiger”) is more useful than the exercise of it, if only because you can only exercise it in so many places at once.

2. Never go outside the experience of your people. Keep it local, keep it specific, keep it in the language of the street. This has probably always been good advice, but certainly seems to have been accentuated in our short-attention-span era.

3. Whenever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.

4. Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. Turn the opponent’s stated values against him. He will either comply, which costs him, or refuse, which proves his hypocrisy. Either way… you win. This hypocrisy-judo works best when the media is on your side. The trick might not work so well if you’re trying to report something that the state wants to suppress and the mainstream media refuses to pick up.

5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Mockery moves people where argument does not (at least partially because everyone’s attention span is about one clever quip long). Ridicule is cheap, fast, and it bypasses the part of the brain that would otherwise ask whether a claim is true. Case in point: Twitter, or, uh, the last few elections.

6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Keep the action fresh, keep it concrete, and never let it settle into routine.

8. Keep the pressure on. A method built on perpetual conflict can’t really have an off switch: a movement that wins almost has to move the goalposts and manufacture new enemies for the Permanent Movement to fight. Having won Stonewall, the list of gays deserving rights grew to encompass half the alphabet, because the alternative was declaring victory and letting go of the grifts – and why let go of a good crisis when you still have a donor base? The Great Society was a… seven? nine? year plan, but all its initiatives continue on and grow larger and hungrier, even though the original names have disappeared.

9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. Escalation is theater.

10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. This is the “flood the zone” tactic, the drumbeat of constant news that tends to start looking kayfabe to the jaded observer.

11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.

12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. A system cannot be hated, and a movement runs on hate, so name the villain, put his face on the poster, let the crowd do the rest.

I’m not sure I agree with this one – people really hate the healthcare system, but everyone remembers the shooter Luigi Mangione, not the fellow who got shot.

Who’s this guy again? The audience doesn’t care. They hate the system. Brian Thompson was a replaceable cog, and killing him didn’t fix healthcare; it caused UnitedHealthcare to spend more money on executive security.

So, About Those Killings…

Rules for Radicals has no moral floor, but Alinsky would say: yes, that’s the point. He would probably even go on to say let’s have some fun with it. Politics is a dirty business and pretending otherwise gets you beaten by the people who are not pretending. That’s pretty much impossible to refute, so it’s kind of the reason the book works.

Moralizing without power is impotence; these days, everyone will outright call you a cuck. Alinsky ignored pearl-clutching moralists. As we pointed out when discussing Starship Troopers, the state that can’t defend itself doesn’t get to keep its moral preferences. Similarly, the movement that can’t wield power doesn’t get to keep its principles. While Alinsky certainly wasn’t saying “service guarantees citizenship,” ruthlessness does seem to be a predicate condition to power.

Where I agree with Alinsky most is that people are motivated primarily by their own self-interests, and cloak them in what he calls the “passport of morality.” That’s refreshing. In a world of euphemism, a man who says the quiet part loud is worth reading, if only to be explicit about what the quiet part is. It’ll convince all the autists in the room who are pathologically unable to read between the lines: “Oh, yeah, that is actually what’s going on.”

It is notable that Alinsky – in his prologue – calls out his fellow leftist cohorts for espousing violence in the name of the cause as “people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask” – pointing out that the backlash against these murderous acts will invariably turn off anyone not already radicalized. It’s not particularly clear that Alinsky actually opposes the bloodshed, just that he feels the backlash is going to be too reputationally expensive.

Alinsky could afford to be cynical because he wasn’t running for office. He was the vizier, the kingmaker, and a kingmaker isn’t asking anyone to vote for him. His acolytes, though…

The True Believers

Rudi Dutschke coined “The Long March Through the Institutions” in 1967 to tell the powerless how to infiltrate the universities, the bureaucracy, media, and the courts, thus becoming the powerful. Now, in the 21st century, when leftists have become the establishment, we can see that although Alinsky claimed to have written them to help the Have-Nots, in practice his Rules seem to work better for those who already hold the institutions.

Now you have true believers running a playbook written by a cynical manipulator. It’s interesting that these people – Obama and the social justice crowd – who picked up Alinsky’s teaching and cite him… don’t seem to want to admit to using the propaganda and manipulation he endorses; they seem to think people should actually buy in. Or at least profess to do so. I don’t quite follow why that seems plausible; it seems contrary to Alinsky’s thesis, which is that, rather than the “true believer,” the organizer needs to be a detached “dedicated man.”

The organizer’s first job is to manage his own ego - keep his public image small - because a movement built around his vanity will die with him. He should not be a leader in the charismatic sense, but a technician of power, what at that time they would have called a technocrat. This is a hard role to fill, because anyone who wants to do this has… aspirations.

It’s obvious who has read Alinsky. Rules for Radicals clearly got Obama a lot further than any community organizer ever plausibly could go. The Peter Principle in action, I suppose. As technocrats go, ol’ Barry might have been better than Hillary. Who remembers the controversy over the fact that Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis was… basically a love letter to Saul Alinsky?

Hillary was the only other choice for president we had at the time, because the DNC was going to give us someone in 2008. The country was too mad at Republicans after the economic crash, which is ironic, because that bank crisis was mostly stupid government-mandated decisions to placate the underprivileged, and a smarter conservative policy would have said “keep your hands off the mortgage risk levers” because of… exactly what happened.

A Loser’s Manual

Rules for Radicals was fun the first time I read it back in college. A lot of people were taking it far too seriously at the time, but thankfully, the Left wasn’t doing all that well back then. I remember thinking that Alinsky was pretty condescending to his audience. His followers were definitely all treated as useful idiots. Which – okay, fair enough – that was a pretty level-headed view of things, but it meant most of Alinsky’s followers didn’t like him much, even if they learned from his book.

It doesn’t get mentioned in his book – in fact, mostly gets laughed off – but there was a lot of racial animosity of the groups in question against Alinsky. Blacks were quite interested in building their own racial enclaves in the 1970s and were uninterested in being subservient to a Jew who was clearly there to try and use them in his own rise to power. That’s come back into the open on the left these days, with outright hatred for the Jews having now become as popular amongst the US’s DSA and EU’s Greens as it was amongst the SS.

One notes that Alinsky did not manage to climb his ladder himself. With no alliance from the successful leftist factions of the time, Alinsky rabble-roused class warfare for decades without much to show for it.

But hindsight is always clearer – and this book is still impactful today; it (perhaps improbably) shaped operational politics for decades after it was written.

Defense Against the Dark Arts

It probably doesn’t surprise you that I put Rules for Radicals on the book club agenda as a “Defense Against the Dark Arts” sort of class – this is what I expect most of the book club meeting to talk about.

How to recognize a practitioner: He keeps everything concrete and local. He demands you live up to your own rules while exempting himself from his. He reaches for ridicule before reason. He escalates theatrically; the threat does more work than the deed. He always has a constructive alternative ready - no rants. He personalizes and polarizes, naming a villain instead of arguing a policy.

How to disarm him. Out-concrete him. Refuse his battlefield; make him fight where you choose. Audit his book of rules and turn the hypocrisy attack around. His values are more aspirational and less down-to-earth than yours. Answer ridicule with boredom and minimalization. Call his escalation out – loudly – as a tactic. Steal the constructive alternative, or grant the reasonable part and isolate the rest. Refuse the personalization and drag the fight back to the system. Cake-slice his faction apart, to get them to split their support into different directions. Often, someone else from his side will try and stab him in the back (meant metaphorically rather than “Arkancide” – though I’m sure history records more examples of this than we’d like to think, too). Cf. the Bernie Bros getting subverted in Seattle in August 2015 by the Clinton Machine courtesy of some hired-gun BLM activists.

The only way to win against the Permanent Movement is literally to defund it, à la USAID or Obamacare/ACA subsidies. Hard to get people to go for cutting entitlement programs, but we cut NASA post-Apollo and DOD spending as part of the “peace dividend” despite enormous job losses, so it can be done. Declare the war over and defund the army.

Alinsky could survive being seen as a cynical operator… after several decades, he was one and mostly didn’t care, but his heirs can’t: they need to believe they are sincere, and they need you to believe it too. So, the single most effective counter against a modern practitioner is to make their manipulation visible, to show the puppet strings they have on their people.

In Closing

The powerless need a manual. The powerful have always had one, written in the language of law and capital and connections: at the very least, people successfully followed the principles of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Alinsky wrote this other book for the people who had nothing but numbers and anger. There is something sort of … admirable in that, even if you do not particularly care for the uses it’s been put to, and it’s better than the simple calls to mayhem from Che Guevara or other bloodthirsty sorts.

The interesting thing is that the Right is often not the establishment in many major areas – urban environments, universities, increasingly the judiciary/law, certainly not the media – so there’s plenty of room to run Alinsky’s rules against his ideological heirs.

But that’s hard to do without a sympathetic media. Alinsky could assume he would always find some fellow-travelers amongst the journalists who would report things his way, but that isn’t the case for the Right (in education or media, at least). The partial answer is its own ecosystem, which is the Long March’s logic applied in reverse: institutions first, then the megaphone. The Right needs something more than just online press and podcasts. Maybe this monster acquisition of Paramount-and-everything-associated shifts the media balance a little.

The One Ring. The weapon shapes the wielder. Alinsky forged the technique. His heirs picked it up and look what they have become. That is the price of the dark arts: gradual moral corruption.

For the Debate

I don’t just want this to be “Street Fighting Man: the Saul Alinsky Edition,” so here are a few debate theses that aren’t just “how do we deal with this nonsense when it crops up.”

1. Politics is the exercise of power, and moralizing without power is impotence. Must the organizer think in power first and ethics second?

2. Can means be separated from ends? “The end justifies almost any means” — where is the floor, and who sets it?

3. Does the method serve the powerless or the powerful? The Long March Through the Institutions certainly suggests the Have-Nots used it to become the Haves.

4. Should the organizer be a leader or a technician? Alinsky’s “dedicated man” against the older ideal of the citizen who governs himself.

5. Can a movement built on manipulation survive its own success, and does the method require a permanent enemy?

6. Can the Right use the techniques without becoming Alinsky? Is the method separable from the man who forged it?

If you want to become a Tortugan and join the book club, you’ve got until the 24th – ordinarily it would be the last Saturday, but that’s Halloween, and too many people are busy with family stuff. As spooky as Saul Alinsky is for Red October and all.

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A few years ago, I was sitting in a pointless MBA elective about innovation or some bullshit. The guest speaker (some hot chick) was blathering on about something girl-bossy and dropped this cringey dime: “Your Net Work is Your Net Worth.” I briefly looked up from the r/simpsons subreddit and giddily imagined defenestrating her.

Perhaps that was an uncharitable thought. At the time, I was stressing about a pending job offer and wedding (mine), and counting the days until I could start my real job. Still, years later, I would be glad I showed up to class that evening. The speaker was kind of right, and definitely hot.

Hot rich people do have a lot of hot rich friends, right? Most of my friends are middle-aged, middle-class, mid-wit mids. I must have blown it with social networking.

I’ll admit to squandering opportunities. Anyone who says they have “no ragrets” is likely a monster and they also can’t spell. My college peers who intuited and played the status games that I eschewed are living comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyles in California, yet here I am living a comfortable upper-middle-class life in Parts Unknown. I guess two roads diverged in a yellow mood, but I still have to make a confession of all the times I repeated a pattern of mistakes. How else do I inculcate in my online Network and Fan Club a sense of seizing the moment? How do I guide my sons from making similar stupid errors?

In college, instead of joining the rugby or crew team, I made the key mistake of selling weed. Weed that turned me gay (I’m better now). Weed is a low-status network. I realized this at 20 when it dawned on me that hanging out with the stoners meant a monetary tithe to the network - buying weed and weed accessories. The reward: paranoia and bad grades. Luckily, I cured myself of the weed habit by starting a cigarette habit and dumping the weed friends.

Now I’m in touch with maybe 5 people from my college class. Dunbar’s Number and all that, but still, not a lot, and I don’t see them much anymore. These were key friends, but our recent time spent together is scarce and yields none of the economic benefits boasted by many other college cliques. My fallbacks were law school, a Naval Commission, or teaching (English) in Korea. Real median wage depression in the legal profession and a DUI disbarred me from all three. Whoops.

In hindsight, there’s no shame in working for your dad, but in 2009, this shamed me greatly. Still, I made the best of it, learning a lot about power plants and other plants. Did you know that plants make oil and oil makes plants? Fascinating stuff when you unpack it. Five years later, I was assigned a book by his boss: The Second Machine Age, and, in a twist of irony, it convinced me to quit. I was missing an opportunity by not getting involved in software technology. Boy did I feel dumb: I’d gone to school adjacent to Silicon Valley, and now here I was on the East Coast with no computer skills and no network.

It was also at this time that I abandoned my stand-up comedy aspirations. I found the scene to be a huge opportunity cost both in terms of time and network. Even the cool comics are losers by most colloquial definitions, and the mentally ill drug abusers frequenting the mics are not the people you want to be hanging out with on Tuesday at midnight. A part of me wonders what commitment would have looked like - the Philly scene at that time included Shane Gillis and his whole orbit of friends, but none of those guys would be successful until many years after I quit.

I’d had enough with low-status networks, and picked an MBA to serve as my launchpad for upskilling to the workplace of tomorrow. Cleverly, they only teach you about debt and the time value of money after your first check clears, but for me the timing was right, and I am paying down my loan at 2.8% right now.

The other thing about MBA Programs below the top 25 is that they are kind of bullshit. I leveraged my genius verbal IQ and dumb math IQ to get a good GMAT score, then came to learn that many of the racial minorities and women in my cohort had been exempted from the GMAT! I’m in touch with maybe 5 of these people.

My MBA class was mostly not impressive, but it did land me a coveted internship at a Crayon Manufacturer. All the crayons I could eat. My mentor quit during my first week, but one of my MBA cohort (no GMAT) complained that her internship at a large German tech company would require her to work during the school year, and would anyone like to interview? Since our course load was mostly BS (except for finance) I took this one weird interview while on the clock at Crayon Corp and got the new internship at SuperSoft Tech Corp.

This particular job sucked, but I was able to finagle some recommendations and get into a coveted international sales training program in the same company. I closed the deal by walking to the HR lady’s desk in a dreary corner of the building, acting like I already had the job, and asking her when I would receive my offer letter. I think she was so taken aback that I’d even found her that she hotshotted me through the process. This happened all the way back in 2018, when it was still legal to be a white man. It may seem like a boomer story, but younger folks take note, if you’re auditioning, be audacious.

The cool thing about the SuperSoft sales program was that it was a rehash of the more important parts of my MBA. Also, it was global. I made really cool friends from all over the world! Now I’m in touch with maybe 5 people from my SuperSoft Academy, and my network is looking knotty.

COVID ran its course, and one of my impressive new friends at SuperSoft had found a job at a startup in the cloud hyperscaler ecosystem. I was tickled to say goodbye to my boss, who had a CRM system for a head and a fat golfer for a body.

My friend got me an interview, and I waded behind him into the capital flows and salary raises in a series of failing startups. One failed spectacularly, due to an executive embezzlement scheme, and two hundred people lost their jobs overnight. As another startup approached failure, I began to think a bit more asymmetrically. I joined the Tortuga Society. This was in tandem with a desire to try and cash in on the Substack lottery and build an audience for my book. It worked!

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promised me that I could escape the cubicle by playing the Substack lottery. The thing about his newsletter is that it is the only newsletter out there that promises to help you grow your newsletter. I forget what else it’s about. promised untold riches through the black magic of job stacking. I decided to try my hand at it.

It was elating at first, the quadruple life. I thought I had it all: a beautiful wife, a family, a home, 2 jobs, and likely one of the bigger dicks in my neighborhood. You know who probably shouldn’t job stack? 40-year-old guys who coach little league for two kids. I got the speed wobbles.

Job two was more fun, more pressure, and less lucrative than my primary W-2. I had to walk away. This was a decision that cost me a fair amount of psychic unease and probably burned some short-term social capital as well. I suppose you could call all this a midlife crisis. Maybe I was psyopped by Dr. Seuss into believing that I was destined “to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace

and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

The Waiting Place…”

But Thing 1 is that I’ve sort of been in the Waiting Place since I got that stupid MBA, and Thing 2 is there’s an element of dues-paying to all of this. Bet on this: you will see peers around you hit lotteries that they don’t deserve, but then again maybe you are playing the wrong game.

Is there advice here? If you missed all the nuggets, re-read this post closely. Like all internet ephemera, it will vanish with the next dank meme, thirst-trap, or hot take.

Now you are ready for the ultimate piece of advice that will either help you escape the cubicle or master the cubicle: there’s very few people you will work with that you’ll actually want to work with. Those outstanding people will inevitably move to other jobs and not take you with them. Keep those people in your Dunbar’s Number Rolodex. Check in with them every three months or so. Share intel.

Until something changes drastically in white collar work, your job is to get your next job. The informal network that will get you that job requires energy - yours. A small sacrifice of effort to keep you afloat in unsteady seas.

So what do I tell my sons? And what do I tell you, my spiritual sons, uncs, and nephs? Consider an analogy from dating: almost every mature man would prefer having a spank bank full of dimes rather than a body count rife with busted uggos.

Your professional life will be shaped by the rooms you enter, the people you help, the people who remember you, and the people you are still presumptuous enough to call after three years of estrangement.

Go to the dumb MBA class and sift through the muck to pocket the gold nugs. Attend the networking dinner (protip: unless you are hosting, you can always figure out a discreet excuse to exit early). Take the weird interview, maybe on the clock. Follow up with the impressive guy, yeah that guy from SuperSoft. Not the lady: she’s not that impressive. Do the thing that feels a little temeritous, provided it is not illegal or ghey.

Ask the favor before you are desperate. Offer the favor before they ask. Every three months, check the Rolodex. Do not confuse alienation with intelligence. Do not mistake cynicism for taste. Do not build your whole identity around refusing to play games that are, in fact, just the ordinary machinery of human opportunity. Lots of games are stupid. Some are downright corrupt. Some are merely how people find each other.

People say that luck is when preparation meets opportunity, but luck is also proportional to the amount of novelty you’re open to. You get opportunities when you’re open to new commitments. I’ve always been high in openness and skeptical of committedness. But, as I learned in my philosophy (whoops) undergrad, the notion that a person “could have done differently” is a metaphysical and ethical dead end. The past is locked, but mapping your mistakes can be a key to your future.

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Then, from far-flung corners of the world, there arose an unlikely quadrumvirate of heroes. Sir Alexander Jones, a rebel who fell from the sky with no memory, armed with a pair of magic sunglasses that peeled back the veil of illusion. He wielded the holy partisan and fought for freedom.

For the benefit of the listener who has been so foolish as to not yet read Pandemonia: it is a satirical, fantastical retelling of the events of 2020 - basically from March of 2020 to January 6th of 2021 - but in a magical, steampunk fantasy kingdom, with many fart jokes. Sort of Discworld meets South Park meets Alex Jones. And we don’t mean that in a bad way.

We all know basically what happened: there was a guy on the radio in Austin, and then he was on the internet, and there was a president who was completely mind-melted, and there was this creepy little guy who suddenly was in charge of the country, and nobody knew why. It ain’t healthy to stay mad forever about something like that; ridicule is a more effective weapon on your enemies anyway. Laugh at them, and they lose their power.

Fauci deserves more than a stern talking-to, but we can write books about pissing on his face.

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What’s the easiest way to structure this? Zelda. Japanese RPGs, right? Most Zelda games are basically a fetch quest: you go to a place, get a thing, you power up, you uncover a little bit more of the mystery. All the relics the main character Pickle and his party recover are part of Christian Apocrypha, so it’s like, cool, let’s put that together to seal the Demon Corona and put it behind us.

The book was written around several scenes and set pieces. Riggs knew that he wanted to see Anthony Fauci get his face melted away by a stream of holy urine, and then he wrote backwards from that. Who’s gonna do that? A wizard. If Pickle’s an everyman surrogate, then The Wiz, Lord Barrington Goldwater, is a surrogate for the author. Endless puns, sort of not taking accountability.

The prose is deliberately Anglo-Saxon - blocky, Beowulfian terms instead of flowery Latinate language, with a couple of 25-cent words sprinkled in. “Pickle leveled the spear to his eyeline, torqued his hip, and hucked.” Accessible to chuds. Written at a 13th grade reading level.

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Mentioned in this episode: Alex Jones, Waking Life, Out of the Silent Planet (C.S. Lewis, 1938), Dungeon Crawler Carl, Blood Meridian, and Riggs’s next book, working title Petrichor - a weird western with zombie hippies at Burning Man. CJ Heath’s hate-review.

Join us next time for The Last Human by .

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Last month, Professor Axelrod told us to drink coffee and have a Zyn. Now, it’s time to discuss The Ol’ Rona. Is Long COVID a thing? What do you do if you have it? Read on for facts, conspiracies, and health advice. - Ed.

Brace yourself: we’re going to talk about COVID and the vaccine.

Except this time, for once, we’ll have some data, not just screaming denialists and deboonkers.

There’s a lot of controversy about mRNA vaccines and the pandemic. Depending on what you’ve heard, and inevitably … who you believe … one or a couple of the vaccines (or perhaps the boosters) proved to be more hazardous than the others. Maybe this was Pfizer, Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson, maybe you had natural immunity to the virus, or maybe you were one of those populations who got hit hard. There’s a lot of rumor and accusation, so it might be nice to know what the data actually says.

What Data?

Take the question of vaccine effectiveness versus risk. The information needed to answer that question was never made available in a form that would allow independent researchers to determine whether one booster in one area of the country was more dangerous than another. Lot-number-level adverse event data is precisely what VAERS collects, but the CDC restricted access to the full VAERS dataset during the pandemic and actively discouraged lot-level analysis, characterizing it as scientifically invalid. When independent analysts like Jessica Rose attempted lot-number analyses from the publicly available extracts, public health authorities denounced them as misinformation. The question of whether Rose et al.’s findings of lot-to-lot variation in adverse event signals reflected genuine manufacturing inconsistencies, geographic clustering of reporting behavior, or statistical noise remains unresolved because the institutions with the complete data chose not to answer it transparently.

Here’s a particularly keen example. Before the data made denial impossible, the public-health apparatus spent an embarrassing amount of energy downplaying the relationship between booster shots and myocarditis and pericarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle and its surrounding sac). Yes, the boosters did prove to be dangerous, certainly by the standards we’d usually like for generally available medicine.

The second dose was the real troublemaker. Not the first, and not the third or fourth to the same degree. A Nature Communications paper from 2022 confirms that the highest risk clusters right after dose two, particularly in males under 24. The booster doses showed lower myocarditis signal than the second, which makes some immunological sense - the priming plus the first boost produces the most aggressive spike-protein expression and inflammatory cascade. Subsequent exposures find a more tempered, already-primed system.

On comparing boosters to each other, Moderna was worse than Pfizer, unambiguously. The JACC head-to-head population study in British Columbia put it at two- to three-fold higher odds of myocarditis or pericarditis with mRNA-1273 compared to BNT162b2. Canada’s national surveillance data showed an even more alarming 4.72-fold higher risk for Moderna among males aged 18 to 29, the demographic already at the highest baseline. The likely explanation is dosing: Moderna’s shot contained 100 micrograms of mRNA versus Pfizer’s 30 micrograms. More lipid nanoparticles, more spike protein produced, more opportunity for the immune system to mistake cardiac tissue for the enemy (molecular mimicry between the spike protein and cardiac antigens being the leading mechanistic hypothesis).

The sex disparity was stark; testosterone appears to potentiate the inflammatory response to the spike protein in cardiac tissue, with the male-to-female ratio in reported cases between 4:1 and 10:1 depending on the study. A meta-analysis published in Epidemiologic Reviews put the attributable risk after the second dose of mRNA-1273 at roughly 20 per 100,000 doses in males 18 to 24 and about 10 per 100,000 for BNT162b2 in boys 12 to 17. (This is the demographic for whom COVID itself posed a mortality risk so low it was difficult to measure against background noise, the boys and young men who could have walked through a COVID ward unmasked and emerged with nothing but a rage against the technocratic state.) The absolute risk remained low in raw numbers - on the order of a few dozen cases per hundred thousand second doses - but the relative risk concentrated in a demographic (young men) for whom COVID itself posed a minimal threat. This upended the risk-benefit calculus that had been sold as universally favorable.

COVID severity was overwhelmingly a disease of the old and the already-sick. Age was the dominant risk factor by an enormous margin. The CDC’s data showed that people 65 and older accounted for roughly 75% of all COVID deaths in the United States despite being about 16% of the population. Comorbidities - obesity, diabetes, hypertension, chronic pulmonary disease, and immunosuppression - each shifted the odds ratio substantially.

A truly individualized risk-benefit analysis would have produced different recommendations for different populations, which is exactly what several Nordic countries did when they restricted Moderna in males under 30. The American approach was to pretend the calculus was the same for everyone and denounce anyone who noticed otherwise.

(There’s also the question of whether repeated boosting in low-risk populations produced diminishing returns against infection while the adverse-event burden accumulated. The bivalent boosters in particular were authorized without human efficacy data, a regulatory decision that would have been unthinkable before 2020 and that did not age well as the variant-matched antibodies they generated proved scarcely more durable than the original formulation’s, to the great consternation of the public and the manufacturers.)

In addition to just heart conditions, did getting boosted correlate with strokes? Well, yes. In January 2023, the CDC and FDA issued a joint statement announcing that their Vaccine Safety Datalink had flagged a preliminary safety concern: adults 65 and older showed a higher rate of ischemic stroke in the 21 days following the Pfizer-BioNTech bivalent booster compared with days 22 through 42. This was not some internet rumor; it was an official agency disclosure, published on the FDA’s own website. The signal was specific to the Pfizer bivalent, not Moderna’s bivalent, and it was concentrated in the elderly. These were the very people being told that boosters were most critical for them.

The follow-up got murky. The agencies investigated further across the VAERS database, Medicare claims, and the VA system, but failed to replicate the VSD’s flag. The CDC’s final word was that the finding was likely a statistical artifact. Reasonable people can disagree about whether that conclusion was adequately powered or whether the databases were sufficiently independent to serve as genuine falsification checks. What’s not disputable is that the same agencies had spent two years dismissing myocarditis concerns from clinicians and VAERS reporters as coincidental until the international data became overwhelming. The pattern of initial minimization followed by quiet acknowledgment had already been established. Unusual clotting patterns and menstrual irregularities were substantial enough to warrant NIH funding only after two years of women being gaslit about all of this.

Your skepticism of the anecdotal reports is well placed, but the reason anecdote is nearly all we have on that front is, itself, part of the story.

If you’re into COVID nonsense, how about something even more nonsensical? Listen to the upcoming Tortuga Library Podcast’s audio review of Pandemonia, the novel plague plague novel, by Tortugan - Ed.

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Most Dangerous to China’s Rivals

Now, it might also be useful to ask: Demographically, were the disease and vaccine risks spread even across groups? Were certain genotypes more susceptible to myocarditis (and microclots) than others?

The genetic susceptibility to vaccine myocarditis that has been proposed involves HLA variants - specific class I and class II alleles that influence how the immune system presents spike protein peptides and whether cardiac myosin gets caught in the crossfire through molecular mimicry. This is the same mechanism behind viral myocarditis generally, and it’s why some people suffer inflammation of the heart after a common coxsackievirus infection. The HLA loci are highly polymorphic across populations, but the specific alleles that predispose someone to mRNA-vaccine myocarditis haven’t been mapped with the same resolution as the COVID-severity haplotype. This is largely because the institutions that would fund that work have been reluctant to frame the question in a way that might generate inconvenient answers.

Let’s start with the easy and relatively uncontroversial stuff. On the genetic front, the most famous finding was the Neanderthal-introgressed haplotype on chromosome 3, identified by Svante Pääbo’s group and published in Nature in 2020. That 50-kilobase segment, which includes genes involved in chemokine signaling, raised the risk of severe COVID requiring hospitalization 1.6-fold. It is carried by about 50% of South Asians and 16% of Europeans, but is nearly absent in East Asians and Africans. So the genetic architecture of COVID susceptibility had a real ethnic gradient; Bangladeshis and Tamils in the UK had twice the mortality of the general population, and the South Asian diaspora consistently showed elevated risk across multiple countries.

If that makes you think that this is possibly the sort of thing that might be indicative of a gain-of-function lab leak in a project that looks suspiciously like a prototype for “most dangerous to China’s rivals” and could conceivably have been a bioweapon, well … yes.

If you were a Chinese researcher conducting gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses - modifying them for enhanced human transmissibility through furin cleavage site insertion, serial passage through humanized tissue, or the kind of chimera work the WIV was demonstrably engaged in - and you let the virus escape containment, the population most likely to survive the resulting pandemic with minimal mortality would be your own. Han Chinese populations carry almost none of the Neanderthal risk variant, so the virus would be disproportionately lethal to your western and southern neighbors.

The story above works perfectly well whether as accident or as malice. They “passaged” the virus through human ACE2-expressing mice or cell lines derived from East Asian donors, which selected for efficient human transmission. When the virus escaped the lab, it encountered other human populations whose genetic architecture made them far more vulnerable.

The demographic pattern is not the only circumstantial evidence pointing toward the lab, but it is among the most stubbornly under-examined. The standard zoonotic-spillover narrative requires a chance event: a bat virus jumping to an intermediate host, then to a human at a wet market in a city that happens to be home to the world’s premier SARS-like coronavirus research facility, which happens to have been conducting exactly the kind of gain-of-function work that could produce such a virus, and whose lead researcher then stonewalled international investigators and withheld key viral sequence data. That is a lot of coincidences. Add to them the demographic-genetic pattern - that the virus’s lethality gradient maps almost perfectly onto the Neanderthal haplotype distribution, sparing the population in whose laboratories it was being studied - and the chain of coincidences grows longer still.

As you may have learned from xkcd:

Documents obtained through FOIA requests and reported by US Right to Know describe the DEFUSE proposal: an NIH-funded EcoHealth Alliance project that partnered with Shi Zhengli’s lab at WIV, explicitly aimed to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses to assess pandemic potential. The furin cleavage site on SARS-CoV-2 is one of its most distinctive features - and absent from its closest known relatives in the wild - perfectly positioned to enhance human infectivity.

Scott Aaronson, reviewing Chan and Ridley’s book Viral, noted that the case for the lab leak theory does not require a smoking gun. It only requires one to acknowledge that the circumstantial evidence has accumulated to a point where the burden of proof has shifted. The zoonotic-spillover advocates refuse to make that acknowledgment, and so have never adequately addressed the demographic-genetic pattern. Easier to change the subject to anti-Asian hate crimes - which is what happened every time the lab leak theory was raised in 2020 and 2021 - as though the geographic location of a laboratory were a racial accusation rather than a physical fact about where the building stands.

Even if it’s verboten to discuss race and disease in polite circles in Western media, the Indian discourse is far more frank. The Economic Times of India - the country’s leading business daily - ran an analysis in mid-2021 under the headline “COVID-19, China’s Bioweapon Warfare Strategy and Global Security” that examined the lab leak hypothesis as a serious strategic question. The piece situated the pandemic within China’s broader military-modernization program, noting that the PLA has invested heavily in biological warfare capabilities and that China’s biotech sector operates under a dual-use framework that makes civilian research functionally inseparable from military applications.

India and China fought a border war in 1962, have unresolved territorial disputes in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh that have produced deadly clashes as recently as 2020, and are locked in a long-term competition for influence across the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. China’s Belt and Road Initiative encircles India strategically, and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor runs through territory India claims. In that context, a pandemic that kills millions of Indians - India lost somewhere between two and five million people to COVID by excess-death estimates - while leaving China relatively unscathed looks less like a natural disaster and more like asymmetric strategic warfare.

Or is it windfall? The “depraved heart” theory states that even if the WIV didn’t deliberately set out to kill Indians, they conducted gain-of-function research in the knowledge that a lab escape would disproportionately spare their own people. The prestige and funding attached to coronavirus research outweighed the risk to foreigners. This theory requires no conspiracy, malevolent intent, or secret bioweapons program, but only careerist ambition and racial indifference. That is consistent with the CCP’s documented attitude toward non-Chinese lives.

The Chinese state media response to Indian coverage of the lab leak theory was telling in its own way. The Global Times - a CCP mouthpiece - ran a piece in May 2021 titled “Lame Indian Media and Politicians Resort to ‘Lab Leak’ Lie to Shift Focus,” attacking Indian outlets for “baselessly accusing China of weaponizing the virus.” The article’s tone was the standard CCP blend of wounded innocence and barely concealed contempt, but the fact that Beijing felt compelled to respond at all - and in English, for an international audience - suggests the Indian discourse was being taken seriously in Chinese strategic circles.

The Western media’s refusal to engage with the Indian discourse is another form of condescension, the assumption being that brown people worried about being bioweaponed by their nuclear-armed neighbor are just addled by conspiracy theories. Western journalists who spent two years insisting the virus came from a pangolin at a wet market, meanwhile, were doing sober science journalism.

Clear the Spike Protein!

Let’s turn our attention to those who did suffer from this disease in one way or another, whether because they contracted COVID directly or because they got a vaccine (or booster). Some showed “long COVID” in addition to the pulmonary side effects and thrombosis events, and they would like to know what’s effective in treating the clotting issues, the spike protein damage, the vague panoply of symptoms. The general suggestion seems to be blood thinners and of course Paxlovid if you want to interrupt COVID immediately, but what else works?

There’s a substantial and growing clinical literature on this, driven almost entirely by independent physicians, because the funding apparatus that produces large RCTs was not interested in studying post-vaccine injury. Their approaches fall into several mechanistic buckets. The more sophisticated protocols combine these rather than relying on any single agent.

The foundational insight, articulated most prominently by Peter McCullough and the FLCCC group, is that the spike protein itself - whether from infection or from the mRNA instructing your cells to manufacture more of it - persists in tissues far longer than the public-health messaging acknowledges. Spike proteins bind to ACE2 receptors on endothelial cells, directly damage the vascular lining, trigger platelet activation, and form amyloid-like microclots that standard coagulation panels miss entirely. The treatment logic isn’t merely “thin the blood,” but “clear the spike protein.” (And repair the endothelium, dissolve the aberrant clots, and modulate the inflammatory cascade.) That’s a much taller order.

The McCullough Base Spike Detoxification protocol, published in ScienceOpen, uses three over-the-counter agents: nattokinase 2,000 fibrinolytic units twice daily on an empty stomach, bromelain 500 mg once daily, and curcumin 500 mg twice daily, preferably in a liposomal or nano formulation with piperine for absorption.

Nattokinase is the workhorse here, a fibrinolytic enzyme derived from fermented soy that directly degrades fibrin and has shown activity against spike protein in vitro. Bromelain, from pineapple stems, has both proteolytic and anti-edema properties. Curcumin suppresses NF-κB, the master inflammatory transcription factor upregulated by spike proteins.

This protocol is typically continued for three to twelve months, and McCullough frames it as the base layer onto which symptom-specific treatments can be added. This is more of the sort of thing you’re likely to get from your naturopath - which is fine, he’s still a licensed doctor. Pragmatically though, it’s hard to measure progress except by “how do you feel?”

The FLCCC I-RECOVER protocol, now maintained by the Independent Medical Alliance, provides a more granular, tiered framework. First-line additions beyond the base enzymes include low-dose naltrexone for immune modulation - giving significant improvements in fatigue and post-exertional malaise - and, oh boy, ivermectin. In this context, ivermectin isn’t being used as an antiviral, but as an anti-inflammatory. It binds to the spike protein and blocks its interaction with ACE2 and toll-like receptors.

Second-line options escalate to maraviroc for CCR5-mediated inflammation, statins for endothelial stabilization (there is evidence for atorvastatin in particular restoring endothelial nitric oxide synthase function disrupted by spike protein), and, in some cases, corticosteroids for refractory neuroinflammation.

For clotting specifically, the most aggressive approach comes from Resia Pretorius and Jaco Laubscher’s work in South Africa. They identified that the microclots in long COVID and post-vaccine syndromes are not simple fibrin thrombi, but amyloid-like, resistant to normal fibrinolysis, and accompanied by hyperactivated platelets. Their triple therapy protocol - dual antiplatelet therapy (clopidogrel 75 mg plus aspirin 75 mg daily) combined with a direct oral anticoagulant (apixaban 5 mg twice daily) - showed significant symptom resolution and microclot clearance in their published case series. This is prescription-level intervention requiring physician supervision and bleeding-risk monitoring, an important consideration given the intensity of the regimen.

Other agents with mechanistic plausibility and some clinical support include N-acetylcysteine for glutathione repletion and oxidative stress, omega-3 fatty acids at therapeutic doses for endothelial membrane stabilization, sulforaphane for Nrf2 pathway activation, and, in some protocols, lumbrokinase or serrapeptase as alternatives to nattokinase for patients who don’t tolerate it. The Springer review on sustained vascular inflammatory effects of spike protein specifically names renin-angiotensin system inhibitors and statins as endothelial-protective strategies with published positive signals.

The caveat: none of this has large randomized controlled trials behind it. The evidence is mechanistic, observational, and clinician-driven, which doesn’t make it worthless but does mean that dosing, duration, and combination strategies are guided by clinical experience rather than trial data. Anyone pursuing these should be under the care of a physician who understands the protocols, not self-experimenting with anticoagulants purchased online. The Wellness Company and similar telehealth platforms have emerged specifically to connect patients with doctors willing to prescribe these regimens, which tells you something about the state of mainstream medicine’s engagement with the problem.

At the end of this … there is not a definitive smoking gun here, but certainly a series of things that don’t fit the mainstream story. The data suggests you’d be right not to take the controlled narrative at face value. You’re not going to get definitive studies on the topic because the powers that be seem determined to bury their missteps. Unclear what will change this, but at least you are now better informed … and have a pointer to a protocol to fight spike proteins and long COVID, should you need that.

Once a month, the Tortuga Society meets to argue about a book. For Starship Troopers the argument was led by , author of the A Desert Called Peace.

: “I spent about 32 years in the Army. I don’t deserve the vote under the Starship Troopers system because I had a good time. I enjoyed it.”

We want people with civic virtue, on average (they know it’s imperfect), to be voting and holding political office. You don’t get the vote in Starship Troopers as a reward, or payment, or tit for tat for service. The movie kind of said you did, but that’s because Verhoeven’s dishonest.

The book expressly says that civilians are just as smart as soldiers or sailors and, in many cases, smarter, because it isn’t about competence. It’s about civic virtue only. Civic virtue is the total belief that the whole is greater than any of its parts, and that the parts ought to be “humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”

Would You Like To Know More?

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Before we announce the Big Winner, I’d like to take a minute to acknowledge some of the Tortugans who, despite having fitness goals that were slightly different than the 1 Rep Max Challenge, participated in spirit. In particular, a shout out to our boy ButteryFish, who started the summer with an unimpressive dadbod physique, and ended up absolutely shredded a mere 2.5 months later. I would post homoerotic before and after shots, but ButteryFish is one of our anon poasters and I don’t want to blow his spot. You will just have to take my word for it. Go ’Fish!

Now, on to those who participated in the actual challenge, which if you remember was to see who could get the most improved Wilks score over the course of the summer. The good news is, everyone who participated improved their maxes. So, in a sense, you’re all winners because you all got stronger. But in another, less gay sense, the rest of you all lost because only one person can win.

I would like to give another honorable mention to our runner-up, ὁ γαλατάς. Galatas is a 6’6” Viking warrior of a man, who was coming off an unfortunate meniscus tear at the beginning of the summer. He had been reduced to doing mere wall sits and other “physical therapy” exercises, so as you can imagine his squats and deadlifts were less than ideal. Despite proceeding with caution (a silly contest is not worth fucking your knee up over), he managed to add 100 lbs to his deadlift and 45 lbs to his squat, which added significantly to his overall Wilks score improvement of 36.34 points, the second highest of the competition. Congratulations, Galatas!

Ok, enough foreplay. The moment you’ve all been waiting for. Our Swole Summer Jacked Chad Winner extraordinaire: none other than our own Centaur Write Satyr, PhD!

Centaur had a series of beastly improvements. I will just list them out:

Bench: 255 → 275

Squat: 355 → 375

Deadlift: 365 → 405

OHP: 165 → 175

Overall, Centaur improved his Wilks score by a whopping 49.81 points, making him this year’s clear winner! By the way, I have it on good authority that a man’s ability to bench press is directly correlated to his ability to write stunning prose, and so you may want to consider picking up his book, Pandemonia (the Kindle-version is currently available through the Tortuga Society).

So what’s next for the fitness division of Tortuga Media? Well, I’m glad you asked. We are already well underway in preparation for a more robust fitness challenge in the coming year. The next challenge will be more well-rounded than simple simply strongman lifts, and will be based on the Tortuga Fitness Standards published last month. It will also take place over a longer timeframe to allow for more improvement.

We are tentatively looking at beginning the challenge on January 1st, 2027, so as to leverage all the New Year’s resolution hype, and have it run until the end of the year. But, unlike most people, whose resolutions fizzle out, the Tortuga boys will be keeping each other motivated through our private chat group and weekly standup calls, ensuring great success!

As to exactly what the criteria will be for victory, this is still being worked out. So watch this space, and if you haven’t already joined our illustrious peerage, now might be a good time to do so!

“I’m dreadin’ what I’ve got to watch,” the Colour-Sergeant said.

For they’re hangin’ Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play,

The regiment’s in ’ollow square - they’re hangin’ him to-day;

— Rudyard Kipling, “Danny Deever” (1892)

The Political Philosophy Think-Piece

Starship Troopers might be taken, at first glance, for a bit of Heinlein’s young-adult fiction that outgrew its britches when it swallowed a civics textbook. The plot isn’t complicated: Johnnie Rico, a young, rambunctious Filipino rich kid, gets his blood up and enlists in the Mobile Infantry against his father’s wishes. He gets his ass kicked through boot camp by a drill sergeant named Zim, drops on various planets in powered armor, watches friends die, becomes a noncom, and ends the book a lieutenant with his own platoon.

The interstellar war is against the Bugs - communist hive aliens - and the Skinnies, their humanoid client race. The Skinnies are a bit like the Czechs in this metaphor, or you might even draw the parallel to Korea, or the late-1950s Sino-Soviet split.

Between scenes of Johnnie’s training and his orbital drop-missions, Heinlein inserts a civics course called History and Moral Philosophy, taught by a disabled veteran named Mr. Dubois. Everything but that course is set dressing; very good set dressing, mind you: Heinlein invented the powered armor that every science fiction writer since has been stealing, and the combat scenes read like the work of a man who knew soldiers, but we don’t care about that. Starship Troopers is the most argued-about political novel in the American science fiction canon because of the arguments it makes about obligation and duty: what do you owe the state, and what does the state owe you in return?

The Obligation

The book’s central claim is straightforward and serious: citizenship is not a right. You get “the franchise” (the ability to vote and hold office) through serving your civic duty. The modern frame treats the franchise as a starting condition rather than an earned one, but Heinlein is arguing from the opposite direction.

A polity is a cooperative enterprise that exists to secure the conditions under which its members can live well. But…

Freedom is purchased by people willing to defend it. That price is paid in service, sometimes in blood. The citizen who has served in the military has demonstrated that he values the polity above himself, and therefore can be trusted with a share of its governance; the citizen who has paid nothing has demonstrated nothing: he has no stake in the thing he is voting about. You do not get a seat in the boardroom just because you work in the building. You have to put in your own investment, so everyone else knows you can be trusted not to loot the firm (a bar most of the current shareholder/voter class would fail).

Is that true? It’s a better question than the one most readers bring in. These days we are not used to thinking of both civil rights and civil responsibilities, which is, if you watch how people behave under the current system, rather a lot of the problem.

We’re again doing Starship Troopers for the Tortuga Book Club on Saturday - similarly to how we did The Populist Delusion last month - and I have many excited readers going through it. (Quite a number of veterans, quite a number of SF fans.) Come join the discussion with us. Members only.

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Governance: The Franchise as Voice

Though it appears to run relatively democratically, the Terran Federation is not a democracy. It is not a military junta either, though it is routinely accused of being one (mostly what we see in the book is the military command structure, so the view is a little tilted). What Heinlein does show us is a republic, in which the franchise is restricted to those who have completed a term of voluntary federal service.

For any volunteer, of any aptitude, the state must find a slot. The catch is that the state chooses the slot, and it is not obligated to make your term of service pleasant (it is, in fact, somewhat obligated to make it unpleasant). If you are young, strong, and stupid, you may end up in the Mobile Infantry, which has the highest casualty rate of any branch.

Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers against the cultural default of his own moment. Johnnie Rico is Filipino by ancestry, and his native language is Tagalog. The Mobile Infantry is multiracial, and the book makes a point of the races serving side by side. Women serve; in 1959, the real American military was closed to women in combat. Heinlein is making an argument with the casting: the Federation does not franchise by ancestry or by sex, only by service, which is open to everyone. But the inclusiveness of Starship Troopers is not the DEI of twenty-first-century armed forces. The Federation cares about what you do and how well you do it (a standard the diversity office would find terribly un-inclusive).

Consequential Service

The assignment has to be consequential or the whole thing collapses into special-case exceptionalism carved out for the politically privileged. In the book, the maimed veterans teach and recruit and run logistics. The state assigns service and decides what counts as a job well done.

Two tensions remain. The first is that the state is the arbiter of its would-be citizens’ service. An elite would form, capture the state, and just assign den-mother make-work to their children.

The second is the demographic blind spot. If contribution to the state was the criterion for franchise, then childbearing would surely qualify - what could be more worthy than literally propagating the existence of the state? - but the Terran Federation does not assign anyone to be a mother. They might tell a woman to be a nurse or a logistician or a teacher (or a Fleet pilot), in which case the nursing or the teaching or the military duty is the service, and the children are beside the point.

Why doesn’t Heinlein go there? It may be as simple as “assigning brood-mare as a role is an icky prospect for a sci-fi novel,” but the book never says whether citizens are expected to become parents. Or perhaps our own demographic crisis is our state leaning in the other direction, and a polity generally favorable to marriage and children might have a different experience … Heinlein might have thought the natalist question quite curious in 1950s America.

History and Moral Philosophy

This is the part that gets quoted in every debate about it. Dubois teaches four things:

1. Violence has settled more issues in history than any other factor. This, the book’s most famous line, does not celebrate violence, but makes a claim about the world: moral suasion is a late and fragile development, and the state that cannot defend itself does not get to keep its moral preferences.

2. Moral faculty is a human attribute, and its development requires a society that can afford to cultivate it. You cannot have philosophy in a society being raided by barbarians.

3. Duty, honor, and loyalty are the predicate virtues of any society. The book holds in contempt the soft civilian who wants the benefits of civilization without the costs.

4. The basic unit of moral accounting is the polity. This makes modern readers uncomfortable, and Heinlein means it to. He portrays Rico’s father, a wealthy businessman, as a man who has confused his own comfort with the good of the species. The book’s arc is Rico learning that his father was wrong.

The above philosophy is taught by a veteran with a prosthetic arm (visibly maimed), which is Heinlein’s way of saying: the man teaching you about duty has paid for the lesson in pain and suffering. A veteran knows what the state costs because he has paid some of its maintenance. A civilian does not, so his opinion is worthless.

The World That Made It

Heinlein published Starship Troopers in 1959, and you cannot understand the Federation’s response to the Bugs’ attacks without understanding what the West looked like from the inside during the fifteen years after World War II.

1945 ends with the atomic bomb and the Soviet Union as an ally of convenience that immediately becomes a rival; 1946 Kennan’s Long Telegram and the containment doctrine; 1947 the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan; 1948 the Berlin Blockade and Airlift, the Czechoslovak coup, and the reinstatement of the American draft; 1949 NATO, the Soviet atomic bomb, and Mao taking Beijing. By the end of 1949 the world is bipolar with two communist giants, and the West has lost China.

1950 NSC-68 and the militarization of containment, and then Korea in June. In Korea, the United States fights a limited war against a Soviet client, has the power to win outright, but chooses not to because escalation means general war with the Soviets. MacArthur is fired in 1951 for wanting to expand the war. The armistice in 1953 leaves the peninsula divided, thirty-six thousand Americans dead, no victory, and a permanent DMZ.

The initial drop in Starship Troopers - the “limited engagement” - is basically the Korean War (MacArthur’s solution would have been to glass the planet). The war ends with some of the Skinnies peeled off as Terran allies against the Bugs, like the North Korea/South Korea split that persists to this day. The tactical incoherence critics love to point out is the incoherence of American limited war doctrine.

1952 and 1953 the hydrogen bomb on both sides and mutually assured destruction becomes a permanent condition; 1956 Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, Soviet tanks crushing the Hungarian Revolution, and the Suez Crisis, when the West loses its moral authority in the Third World; 1957 Sputnik and the missile-gap panic - for the first time the West feels strategically behind; 1958 the Berlin ultimatum and the Taiwan Strait crisis; 1959, the year Starship Troopers was published, gives you Castro in Cuba and the Kitchen Debate. The world feels like it is losing ground to communism on every front.

Heinlein’s personal history is routinely gotten wrong. He ran for the California State Assembly as a Democrat in 1938 on a quasi-socialist platform, moved right through the 1940s, and by 1959 was a libertarian with a Cold War hardening that would keep going for the rest of his life. He wrote apocalyptic essays on civil defense and survival and the decline of American will, saying the West could not outbreed the communist bloc and had to outkill it.

The doctrine of the moment was the Eisenhower New Look. The West could not match Soviet manpower, and it certainly could not match Chinese manpower, so it focused on firepower: the tactical nuke as the equalizer, the neutron bomb, massive retaliation.

If Heinlein’s Bugs are the communist bloc, the hive has no individual will to negotiate with. It will also beat the Federation in demographic terms; the Bugs can replace their losses faster than the Federation can replace its own. The only way to stay ahead is with atomic weapons; Heinlein describes “delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale.”

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The Common Critiques

The fascist charge. The most common critique is that the Federation is a fascist state in all but name. The franchise is restricted, the military is glorified, the individual is subordinated to the polity, and the enemy is dehumanized. The book’s defenders point out that the Federation has no secret police, no single leader, no racial ideology, and no territorial expansionism. It is fighting a defensive war it did not start. The Federation appears to be more meritocratic or even bureaucratic than fascist. “Service guarantees citizenship” might even count as a peculiar form of credentialism.

A libertarian would object to the franchise restriction on principle, because the franchise is a right and rights are not earned. Heinlein does not object; he thinks the franchise is a privilege (carrying the social obligation of service) and privileges are earned (by performing that same duty). That is a somewhat novel departure from libertarian orthodoxy, but remember that Cold War timeline. You can afford luxury beliefs after the tanks have stopped rolling.

The system is unstable. Any reasonable criticism of this particular governance really ought to address that a franchise restricted to veterans quickly turns into aristocracy of the British-Navy-officer-class sort. This may look more like nepotism: the children of the successful martially inclined citizens entrench their best-and-brightest as the future governors of society if only by ROTC-style programs and elite military academies. Yes, and isn’t that what you’d want? The highly competent and elite, dedicated to public service rather than personal greed and aggrandizement?

The service filter does not test civic virtue. This is the strongest critique. Military service does not select for wisdom, judgment, or moral seriousness. Adolf Hitler volunteered for the Bavarian army in 1914 and served with distinction, which did not make him a great choice for national leader. The book itself notes that veterans commit crimes at the same rate as civilians, which undermines the claim that service uniquely instills social responsibility. If the franchise is a certification of civic maturity, that certification isn’t very reliable.

The filter selects mostly for stubbornness. In addition to physical courage and obedience, the trait that gets you through the service requirement is the refusal to quit. A franchise selected by endurance is selected for the least corrigible citizens in the polity, which is the opposite of what governance requires. Stubbornness is not the trait we want to select for in every decision-maker in society. If any service counts, the service measures nothing except someone’s willingness to endure the boneheaded decisions of those in command.

If you think IQ would make a better selection mechanism, think harder. Take Robert McNamara, a Ford executive and one of the so-called Whiz Kids brought to the Pentagon to reform it with systems analysis and statistical management. Bluntly, he failed. McNamara was brilliant, and so were the men he brought with him, but the framework he applied did not capture the reality of the situation; he got wrapped up in his own model. The body counts, the systems analysis, the rationalization of the war, all of it failed against the actual war. The Whiz Kids could not see what their model missed; they could only (very intelligently) rationalize it. Intelligence does not prevent framework capture. It can, in fact, enable it: a lesson we’ll see again in discussions of climate change, for instance.

The ability to see what the framework misses goes by several names: wisdom, prudence, and phronesis among them. This good judgment comes partly from experience, partly from temperament, partly from the willingness to hold the model loosely and to be wrong in public. No IQ test captures it.

Governance requires cognitive ability plus domain judgment. A cognitive filter measures the former, while the service filter … measures neither well, unless it’s practical service. And speaking of practical…

Heinlein possibly refuted his own thesis in the funniest scene in his book. During recruitment, Johnnie learns that if you want the franchise and you are a ninety-pound asthmatic with no mechanical aptitude, you may have to spend your service years counting the hairs on a caterpillar in a research station on Luna. (This is - most likely - lampshade-hanging of a humorous justification. One notes that the state does not actually opt for this; it instead sends its maimed to be teachers, recruiters, debaters, logistics personnel, etc.) Here, Heinlein is having some fun with make-work compliance jobs, but he’s telling us the paraplegic in the wheelchair can still do his duty and get the vote if he’s got the grit. One struggles to see how the poor bastard would get through boot camp.

The occasional sinecure for the occasional unsalvageable but vastly determined edge case does not sink civilization. The flood of bullshit jobs for well-connected grifters, on the other hand, is the curse of our modern era. The Terran Federation is good at finding still-useful roles for people if they aren’t suited to drop into combat, so perhaps this is all extrapolation from a joke line … but people often seem to blow this joke out of proportion.

The tactical criticism. Rico’s unit carries roughly 240 kilotons of nuclear yield in micro-warheads, equivalent to about sixteen Hiroshima-sized explosions, which contradicts the mission’s stated goal of restraint and smash-and-run. The tactical rationale is nonsensical. Equivalent destruction could be achieved more safely by orbital bombardment.

This is a fair critique of the book’s military realism, but it misses the point: Heinlein was writing about the moral experience of the infantryman, not optimal force employment doctrine. One must also consider that a brigade-level maneuver would perhaps be less plausible, given the need to transport a small cadre over interstellar distances. The Roughnecks in their powered armor with solutions ranging from knives up to micro-atomic weapons are discreet in the same way that special-ops raids might be today.

The “everybody drops” doctrine. The book insists that every member of a unit, including the chaplain, drops with the troops. Critics note that this is inefficient and that specialists should be kept out of combat. Defenders cite Patton: leaders must share the risks of their men, or they will not understand the costs of their orders. This is the “every Marine a rifleman” premise of the Marine Corps. Given their powered armor, this criticism seems doctrinaire at best. If you want officers who know what their orders cost, you put them on the drop. They’ll be fine.

Tortuga’s book club is a reading and discussion group for people who like their books with a fight in them. Veterans especially welcome - you have paid for this argument in a currency the rest of us have not, and we want to hear what you think of Heinlein’s version of the deal. If this is the kind of thing you enjoy, come find us.

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The Steelman

Now, let’s make a serious case for Starship Troopers, because the refutations above are mostly a pile of gotchas. A book club that only tears a book down hasn’t really engaged with it.

Heinlein would have been utopian and silly to write a book in which the Federation was perfect. He wanted to ask what a polity owes to the people who defend it, and what those people owe to the polity. What sort of responsibilities belong with rights? The modern answer, that the franchise is a natural right and military service is a job like any other, is not obviously superior. It produces citizens who have no stake in the state’s survival beyond their own comfort, and it produces soldiers who are treated as employees rather than as members of a political community, somewhat interchangeable with mercenaries, though we still wrap them in the flag. Heinlein’s answer is that the franchise should be earned by those who have demonstrated that they will pay for it. Some may find that answer uncomfortable, but it is not obviously wrong.

On moral philosophy, violence does settle things. The state that cannot defend itself does not get to keep its moral preferences. The soldier (and by extension other agents of the law) is the guarantor of the conditions under which moral life is possible.

The book’s defenders also point out that Heinlein was writing against the draft; the Federation’s service is voluntary. The point of the franchise-through-service system is that the state cannot compel service, and therefore cannot compel the sacrifice that justifies the franchise. You choose to serve; you are not punished if you stay home, but are simply not given a share of governance. This is a libertarian argument, and a republican argument in the older sense of the word, the sense in which the republic is a commonwealth of those who have accepted to share in its maintenance.

A self-selecting elite bound by honor and duty is better than a self-selecting elite bound by nothing. What we have today is a meritocracy of the credentialed, selected by the ability to game a system designed by the previous generation of the credentialed. The Federation’s elite at least has to risk its life; the modern elite has to risk a bad LSAT score. The officer who commands a platoon in combat has been tested in a way no examination can: he has made decisions with lives on the line and lived with the consequences.

The Pentagon Question

In WWII, the US mobilized an economy, built a two-ocean navy, produced the atomic bomb, and ran the Normandy invasion, all of it in more or less four years. The people who did it were a mix of military officers, corporate executives on loan as dollar-a-year men, and scientists. The political class, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to note, was mostly a hindrance. The competent organizers delivered, the politicians mostly got in the way, and the organizers were mostly left to run things.

To Heinlein, the lesson was clear: let the leaders lead. But WWII was a total war with a clear objective and a unified command, and the Pentagon’s peacetime record is much worse: procurement overruns, Vietnam, Iraq, the F-35, the Afghanistan withdrawal. The Pentagon’s competence in WWII did not generalize to peacetime governance, which has no clear objective, no unified command, and no enemy.

Can the Pentagon fix a city? It arguably has. From 1948 to 1949, the Soviets blockade West Berlin, a city of two million, and the US Air Force and the RAF deliver 2.3 million tons of supplies over fifteen months and break the blockade. The Army Corps of Engineers also built the Panama Canal and the Mississippi flood control system. MacArthur’s military occupation reconstructed postwar Japan. Disaster response is a fourth solid example; the military is routinely the first and most competent responder to domestic and international disasters.

The Pentagon is good at physical reconstruction and logistics where the objective is clear and measurable and the feedback is fast. It is bad, however, at social reconstruction, where the objective is contested, the feedback is slow, and the causes are political. More or less the same organization that ran the Berlin Airlift also ran the far less praiseworthy reconstructions of Iraq and Afghanistan. (Call those what they were: persistent insurgency versus denazification and Marshall Plan / GARIOA / EROA reconstruction. Also, one might reasonably say we rebuilt Japan at least partially in order to fight the Korean War.)

The organization that can airlift food to two million people doesn’t necessarily make a city work for several reasons. It is generally not in charge of the city, and running one requires solving a coordination problem that has no clear objective and no unified command, and many people with contradictory incentives trying to pull the soldiers in many directions at once, which is not a thing the Pentagon’s model handles well. The Federation’s competence claim is about governance, which is the social kind of problem, and the Pentagon’s record on the social kind probably doesn’t comfort you.

For the next problem, consider the business executive. The highly successful career man from IBM (an archetype so worn it has its own name in Silicon Valley) leaves for a startup and discovers that half of what he thought was his skill was actually IBM’s infrastructure: procurement, legal, HR, the brand, customer base, supply chain, and the compliance apparatus: all of it was doing work he was attributing to himself. The startup strips it away and he freezes, or he imports the processes of the big company without the scale that makes them work, and the startup drowns in overhead. He’d have the same problem at an NGO, or in politics, where the infrastructure is the party machine and the donor network and the press relationships, and the executive who has none of it discovers that his boardroom skills are a smaller fraction of the job than he assumed.

The admiral assigned to command the cavalry is the same problem inside the military. The admiral knows how to command a fleet. The cavalry is a different arm with different doctrine, different logistics, different culture, different tempo. He will make mistakes the cavalry would not make and he will miss things the cavalry would catch. His competence was fleet-shaped, but the cavalry is not a fleet.

The Federation assumes that competence in one domain, military service, transfers to governance. It is the inverse of Rico’s father’s problem: private competence and no civic competence. The veteran has military competence and may have no civic competence. Both are domain mismatches, but Heinlein only describes one of them.

The Elite-Formation Taxonomy

If you want to take the argument past the book, the question to ask is how a polity forms its elite.

The bureaucracy selects for administrative competence. The Deep State is a real institutional actor with real preferences, preferences that are not the polity’s. As Jerry Pournelle put it, “The people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control.”

An aristocracy selects for a long time horizon. The British aristocracy thought in centuries and was not captured by electoral incentives (it was captured by its own sense of entitlement). It was also parasitic, self-serving, and obsolete. By and large, it died to artillery and machine guns on the battlefields of the First World War and went on to lose its empire.

A theocracy selects for zeal. It has the long time horizon, because the religious frame is eternal, and is resistant to capture because its legitimacy is not electoral. What it does not have is competence. Theocracies select for doctrinal mastery and religious devotion, and those are orthogonal to the ability to manage a complex economy or fight a modern war. Ancient Rome or Islamic Iran could be the working examples, although one might note that these days, they’re not working all that well.

The junta selects for command and is captured by the officer corps. Its time horizon is short because its legitimacy is its grip on power, and its grip is always contested. Pinochet’s Chile is the interesting case of a junta that transitioned out after a decade. This is rare and arguably the best outcome a junta can produce. Most juntas just ossify into a kleptocracy with epaulettes.

The fifth category, the one we are living under, is the oldest of them all. The republican mode selects for support-command and the ability to command the support of the citizen body. Its mechanism varies with the technology of the age. In the Roman cursus honorum, the elite was selected by birth, wealth, military glory, oratory, and electoral success in the assemblies. It was captured by the network of patrons who traded support for votes. In the modern instance, the elite is selected by charisma, coalition-building, name recognition, and fundraising, and captured by the party apparatus, the donor class, and the media coalition. The elite serves the coalition that elevated it. (The aspiration this mode never delivers is the natural aristocracy: the elite of virtue and talent.)

The sixth category is oligarchy, the one we do not name. The oligarchs do not need to hold office because they hold the thing the officeholders need, and the officeholders serve them in the ordinary course of business. It has the ability to accumulate and deploy capital, but the polity it creates serves that capital. We have a great deal of oligarchy and almost no vocabulary for it (the vocabulary gap is itself a feature of the oligarchy), which is why it hides in plain sight as the sixth of our five categories.

So, where are we? The twenty-first-century US is republican plus oligarchy plus a large bureaucracy. The elected elite serves the electoral coalition, including the compliance bureaucracy and the professional-managerial class, the oligarchs fund the coalition, and the civil service administers it. Each component fails in the direction of its own proxy. The republican mode fails toward the coalition, the oligarchy fails toward the capital, the bureaucracy fails toward the institution, and the mix fails in all three directions at once, which is why it makes us feel like we’re being governed by no one in particular and everyone in general.

For the Debate

The pro and con versions of the theses herein, as suited for debate purposes:

1. Is the franchise a right or a privilege? If it is a right, the Federation is illegitimate on its face. If the franchise is a privilege, what earns it? Service? At what age and in what condition? On what occasions might one lose the franchise (or other civil rights)? (Usually by some violation of the social contract such as the more serious crimes. Likewise, traditionally, it’s been frowned on to trade your franchise away, to literally sell your vote, for instance.)

2. Does obligation ground the right to vote, or does that right exist independent of the obligation? Heinlein says the obligation comes first. The modern frame says the vote is a birthright and the obligation is a separate matter, for example conscription. Which is right, and what follows from the answer?

3. Does competence in one domain transfer to another? The Federation assumes military competence transfers to governance. The IBM executive in the startup and the cavalry admiral suggest it does not. If competence does not transfer, what does, and can it be measured? The Gordian-knot question suggests a simple answer: “Does it do better than the other guy?” After all, our existing “leadership” makes some pretty mind-boggling errors.

4. Is a hazing-based filter better or worse than a credential-based one? Both select for proxies of good judgment. The hazing filter selects for stubbornness and would tend to develop into a caste of warrior-kings. The credential filter selects for the ability to pass exams and is gameable by the wealthy, giving birth to a bureaucratic nerd caste, which would then lock others out in a long-march-through-the-institutions fashion. (One reasonably postulates an oligarch class that might flirt with either, and game the appointment process for sinecures rather than spots for its sons in the Mobile Infantry.) Which failure mode is worse?

5. Does the West survive, and was that survival ever in doubt? Heinlein’s answer in 1959 was that the West survives by becoming martial without becoming totalitarian. The historical answer is that the West survived with liberal democracy intact, which is evidence against his thesis. Does that settle the question, or does the current crisis reopen it? It doesn’t seem clear from where I sit that an economic challenge to leadership is best answered by the military, but Clausewitz would certainly scoff at that.

6. If the Federation is a bad answer, what is the good one? Every elite-formation model on the table fails in its own characteristic way. Is there another viable solution, or is the choice between failure modes? Can we, perhaps, find some means to check and balance more effectively than we currently do?

Pick one and fight.

A Closing Note

Starship Troopers is a thought experiment about what a society looks like when it takes obligation seriously as the foundation of the franchise, but Heinlein did not fully script out what it would do over the next sixty-plus years (he was not the first builder to have this problem). From our perspective sixty-seven years later, we can see how things turned out: more or less fine. We haven’t gone extinct. We have the leisure to argue about a sci-fi novel.

Is citizenship (and the franchise) a right or a privilege? To what extent do you have civil responsibilities to match your civil rights? Where do they delimit one another? How much does competence transfer across domains, how do you filter the right people into authority and leadership roles, how do you inculcate people with moral behavior? Will the West resist its various threats? Soviet-era communism has faded, yet the memetic contagion of communist and socialist ideals continues to rot people’s brains while the PRC seems to have figured out how to do capitalism better than we do (but who knows, Japan in the 1980s looked unbeatable too). If the various offerings of the Terran Federation don’t add up to the correct answer, what’s the better one?

Service guarantees citizenship! The scissors are issued, the lawn is waiting. Cut the grass, comrade, and the franchise is yours.

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If you really want something to fight about, next month we’re going to visit Saul Alinsky’s famous Rules for Radicals, for (Red) October. Everyone should know this book that shaped the Left. It’s a quick read, and it taught generations of community organizers (yes, including the guy you’re thinking of) how to cause trouble.

“No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

That is Carl Jung, and it is where the book gets its title. Is it a mystery? You know what happened on the first page. The question is whether he is going to get away with it, and it does not look good for him from the very beginning, which is classic noir.

The protagonist is Kevin Chapman, early thirties, a recovered incel who never had a dad. He was rescued from the sit-in-the-house-being-a-weirdo lifestyle by his uncle Cliff, a drywall installer who took him to work and taught him how to hang sheetrock.

By the beginning of the book, Kevin is a working man, married about a year, and his wife Michelle is going to college on his money. He comes home on a Friday and she is on her way out the door. “So long, Kevin. I’ve fallen in love with a woman. I’m leaving you.”

An argument ensues. He punches her, she stabs him, he beats her to death with his grandmother’s maple rolling pin. That is not a spoiler - it all happens in the first five pages. What is left for Kevin is that he has to learn about violence.

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Cliff’s refrain is that a man works. Cliff came of age when you showed up, made money, and life pretty much happened, and that is not the world Kevin has to live in. But a man works has a double meaning - a man performs work, and a man makes things work.

This is the whole mission of Vigilante Crime and Pulp: the classic sensibilities of mid-century crime fiction in contemporary settings, with the types of characters you actually know in real life.

It is a skilled, technically layered noir of shit going from bad to worse, and it hits on the culture of our times without being a political book. Roots Down to Hell is claustrophobic in all the best ways - the barn, the little house, a world closed in.

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Mentioned in this episode: The Wrong Man; Augustine’s Confessions; our episodes on Everything on Black by and Once Upon a Time in Argentina by ; Psycho Pulp, the Hitchcock-themed Vigilante Crime and Pulp anthology; and Louis’s next novel, The Meanest of Days.

Join us next time for Pandemonia by .

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

- The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

There’s a particular kind of book that gets written in the wreckage of a movement. It’s the book that explains why the movement failed, why it was always going to fail, and why the people who believed in it were deluded. It’s written by someone who’s given up, with a certain texture of giving up: the sense that the author has finally seen through the illusion. It feels like an epiphany, like the scales falling from the eyes. It is, in almost every case, just the author rationalizing his own despair.

’s The Populist Delusion is just such a book. Published in April 2022, at the lowest point of the populist project’s fortunes, it arrived as a postmortem for a movement that had just spent four years being contained, humiliated, and buried. Trump had lost, January 6 had happened, the Never Trumpers were gloating. The pundit class had declared the populist moment a fever that had broken. Into that wreckage, Parvini tossed a book that said, “Ehh, it was never gonna work anyway.”

Parvini’s argument, if you strip it down to its bones, is elegant and grim. The 2016 Trump campaign was the first genuine populist awakening in generations, a mass movement that sensed something true about the corruption and self-dealing of the ruling class… but the movement’s understanding of how change happens was delusional.

The populist believes in popular sovereignty, that The People are the source of legitimate power, and if enough of them demand something, it will come to pass. Parvini says this is a fairy tale. Power never flows upward. Instead, it circulates among organized minorities who replace one another in an endless game of elite circulation. The masses are at best the raw material for this process. The infantry, never the generals.

The people belong to no one!
They are fickle, can be manipulated!
They don’t matter

Tim Rice, “Dice Are Rolling,” from Evita

Underneath it all is a metatrend that Parvini draws from the elite theorists, which you can see operating in every political system, every institution, every election: incentives drive behavior. (You may have noticed I tend to latch onto this as a general operative theory.) The elites do what their incentives tell them to do, and their incentives are always about preserving and ideally expanding their own power.

The elites have concentrated incentives, which means they act with focus and discipline. The masses have incentives too, but theirs are unorganized and easily manipulated. In any contest between focused discipline and passionate chaos, the discipline wins, at least most of the time.

Parvini builds on the classical elite theorists, whom the academy buried and the Right mostly forgot: Mosca and his ruling class, Pareto and his circulation of elites, Michels and his iron law of oligarchy, Schmitt and his decisionism, Jouvenel and his observation that every revolution merely swaps one master for another, Burnham and his managerial revolution, Francis and Gottfried and the contemporary right-wing critique of the permanent government. The through-line is that democracy as actually practiced is theater, in which competing factions of elites seek the ratification of the masses and the masses oblige by choosing the option they’re given.

Parvini’s conclusion is the part that made his work controversial on the Right. Political change is always top-down, driven by organized minorities who have seized the commanding heights of institutions, culture, and state power. The Left understood this better than the right ever did. The Gramscians, the Frankfurt School, the whole apparatus of cultural Marxism that conservatives love to decry: they grasped that you win, not by winning elections, but by capturing the institutions that shape what people believe. (In theory, elections are why freedom of the press matters, but if the press is ideologically captured such that alternative viewpoints are canceled, you have lost freedom of the press even if the law theoretically says otherwise. In the same sense, poll taxes kept people from voting if the elites of the time felt it might be disruptive; their voting rights were de facto canceled.) The populist right spent 2016 to 2020 believing that the ballot box was the battlefield. Parvini says the battle was always elsewhere, and the Right lost it decades ago.

Now, the critiques. They come from every direction, which is always a good sign that a book has touched something real.

The Left critique is the obvious one. Elite theory is a counsel of despair. If the masses can never rule, if every revolution just swaps one elite for another, then the entire project of human emancipation is a fool’s errand and the only rational responses are either quietism (Zen acceptance or prepper hermitage) or a cynical, mercenary scramble to join the winning elite. The book is a political sedative, and, the Left claims, historically illiterate. The abolition of slavery, the labor movement, the suffrage campaigns, the civil rights movement: these were mass movements that did change the structure of power.

The populist-right critique has real teeth. Parvini is a defeatist. He watched Trump lose a single election and concluded that the entire project was doomed. The populist movement did not fail because mass politics is impossible. It failed because it was betrayed. The swamp creatures who had ridden the movement into office governed like the people they’d replaced. The answer is not to abandon the masses but to purge the movement of its traitors and build better institutions. And let’s be fair: 2016 Trump walked into that office surprised that he won. He was unprepared for the job and didn’t have his team ready to go. (Not to telegraph the later part of this essay, but it would turn out that his 2024 reprise was not nearly so blindsided.)

The academic critique: elite theory is a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artifact. Mosca and Pareto were writing before the rise of mass media, the internet, and the welfare state, and before the administrative state reached its current scale. Their models of elite circulation are too simple to capture the complexity of modern governance, where power is dispersed across agencies, courts, corporations, media conglomerates, and transnational institutions. The iron law of oligarchy is not really a law. It’s more what you’d call guidelines.

The empirical critique, related but distinct: Parvini’s claim that mass movements never change anything is falsifiable, and the historical record blows a big hole in it. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution: these were not elite circulation, but decapitation - cataclysmic rearrangements of society driven by mass mobilization. Arab Spring, whatever its ultimate outcome, toppled regimes that had seemed permanent. The 2016 election itself, the very event that inspired Parvini’s book, was a mass movement that changed the government of the United States.

But the steelman of the book’s premise is stronger than most of its critics want to admit, especially when you look at how history has shaken out. Start with the hardest question the critics face. If mass movements are the engine of change, why do they so consistently produce outcomes that contradict the will of the people who participated in them? The French Revolution abolished the monarchy and produced Napoleon. The Russian Revolution overthrew the Tsar and produced Stalin. Arab Spring toppled dictators and produced new dictators (or civil wars). The American populist wave elected Trump and produced, what, a presidency largely contained by the institutions it promised to dismantle? The People don’t win. The People break things and watch someone else pick up the pieces.

The critics who cite the abolition of slavery or the civil rights movement are committing a category error. Those movements did not overthrow the elite. They appealed to a different elite or to a faction of the current one, gave it an incentive for change, and won a place within the existing structure.

A coalition of the most powerful economic and political forces in the North, imposed abolition on the South by military conquest. The civil rights movement succeeded because it found allies in the federal judiciary, the presidency, and the northern wing of the Democrat Party, and because the Cold War made American racial segregation a geopolitical liability. The masses marched, yes, but the decision was made in the corridors and enforced by the 82nd Airborne or the National Guard threatening the governors of Southern states.

The defeatism charge is the weakest critique because it mistakes diagnosis for prescription. Parvini is not telling the Right to give up, but to stop wasting its energy on the wrong battlefield. If the masses cannot rule, then the project is to build a counter-elite. The Right should be doing what the Left did in the 1960s and ’70s: infiltrating and redirecting the universities, the media, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and cultural institutions. The Left ran a very successful fifty-year subversion campaign and transformed the country.

The academic critique, that elite theory is outdated, goes the other way. The modern administrative state is not a refutation of elite theory, but its apotheosis. Never in human history has so much power been concentrated in so few hands, and never has that concentration been so thoroughly disguised by democratic ritual. The iron law of oligarchy has been strengthend repealed by modernity, but strengthened. Bureaucrats do not stand for election. They do not fear replacement because they are protected by their unions and a politically allied judiciary. This is the premise behind the deep state thesis. Populism is rising in Europe out of similar anger with malgovernance.

The empirical critique, that mass movements have changed history, reveals most about the critic’s own assumptions. What changed history was not the mass movement, but rather the organized minority that captured, directed, and used it. Lenin did not create the Russian Revolution, but he did create the Bolshevik Party. It was the Party, not the masses, that seized power. (This not-so-cleverly overlooks the Mensheviks, but never mind that.)

Now here’s where the incentive lens gets its sharpest application, because the 2020 election is the purest example of elite theory in action that America has ever produced. Watch what the elites did when their incentives aligned perfectly. They had a man in the White House who threatened their power, who promised to drain the swamp, who was actually attempting to dismantle the administrative state. The incentives were unambiguous: remove him, at any cost, and so they did. The Russia collusion hoax, the two impeachments, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the censorship of the New York Post, the coordination between the intelligence community and the media, the unprecedented expansion of mail-in voting, the ballot harvesting, the vote counts that went on for days, the legal challenges that were dismissed, the whole apparatus of the deep state and its media allies, corporate partners, and social media enforcers: all of it was aimed at a single target with a single purpose.

The elites acted with focus and discipline because their incentives were focused and disciplined, and they won. They produced an unprecedented number of votes, a number that strains credulity, a number that will be debated for generations, but they managed to remove Trump and install their vehicle.

The election of Joe Biden is Parvini’s thesis demonstrated in real time. The masses voted in 2020, yes, but the election’s outcome was manufactured by the concentrated incentives of the ruling class.

But you may have noticed that incentives have second-order effects, what’s commonly referred to as “unintended consequences.” The 2020 victory was Pyrrhic - the most expensive win in American history - and the bill came due four years later.

Watch how the incentive structure shifted, and how the elite coalition that had been so disciplined in 2020 began to fracture under the weight of its own success. The first crack was immigration. The elites had an incentive to import voters. Open the borders, grant amnesty, naturalize millions, and each new citizen is a likely Democrat.

It’s the oldest trick in the machine-politics playbook, Tammany Hall with a globalist accent. And so they appointed the most radical border official in American history to run the border: Kamala Harris. She let the floodgates open and millions came! Imported voters were the future.

The strategy was rational in the short term, but the backlash was the present. The working-class voters who had been the Democrat base for generations watched their wages stagnate, their neighborhoods transform, their communities strain under the weight of mass migration. They drew the obvious conclusion. The party had abandoned them for a cheaper, more pliable constituency. The incentive to import voters was rational for the elites, but catastrophic for the coalition.

The second crack was the interest groups. The Democrats had spent decades cultivating a coalition of identity-based constituencies: the Woke Left, the trans activists, the intersectional academics, the diversity-industrial complex. These groups had their own incentives, and those incentives diverged from the Democrat elites. The groups wanted maximal demands met. They wanted purity. They wanted to push the envelope. The elites just wanted to win elections.

The groups pushed too far: the pronoun wars, the defund-the-police slogans, the drag queen story hours, the trans athletes in women’s sports, the whole carnival of excess that alienated the median voter, and the elites couldn’t control them. The big tent was held together only by the shared incentive of defeating Trump, and once Trump was defeated, the factions began to devour each other.

The third crack was the coup. The elites had installed Biden as their vehicle in 2020, a man who could beat Trump, a man who was acceptable to the coalition, a man who would do what he was told. But Biden was failing. His approval ratings were in the toilet. The cognitive decline was visible to anyone with eyes. And the elites had to make a choice: stick with the failing vehicle and lose, or replace it and hope. They replaced it in a move so transparently antidemocratic, so obviously a backroom deal, that it alienated even the Democrats’ base. (It still feels to me like the Harris nomination was a hand grenade that Joe Biden threw into the works as revenge on the DNC for pushing him under the bus. Harris was politically impossible for them to refuse because of the optics of a black female candidate who was the natural current successor, but she was a gift to the Trump campaign.)

The primary voters chose Biden, and the elites overruled them. The masses voted for one candidate, and the elites handed them another. That is the antidemocratic core of elite rule, laid bare for the whole country to see. The coup worked in the narrow sense that Harris became the nominee. But the base was demoralized, the enthusiasm was gone, the whole thing collapsed, and Trump came back.

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Trump came back. Not a successor, not a fresh face, not a new vehicle for the movement: the same man. The one the entire establishment had spent eight years trying to destroy, through two impeachments, January 6, legal prosecutions, felony convictions, an assassination attempt that came within a quarter inch of killing him. Trump was the first Republican to win the popular vote in twenty years, and the first president elected to nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, in the nineteenth century, in the Gilded Age, before the modern party system, the primary system, and the permanent campaign, before the media environment made every defeat a permanent stain.

If mass politics is a delusion, if the people are never the engine, if change only comes from organized minorities, then how do you explain the most improbable political comeback in the history of the republic, driven by the most mass-oriented political movement in living memory?

The Parvini answer is available, although you have to steelman it hard. Trump got reelected because the movement did what Parvini told it to do: become a machine. The populists built think tanks, a media ecosystem, a legal pipeline, a party apparatus, a donor network, and a data operation. They purged their enemies and disciplined their cadres. They learned from 2020, and ran the 2024 campaign like a military operation. The masses were always there, but in 2016 they were a mob and in 2024 they were a constituency.

2016 proved that the masses could put a man in the White House, 2020 that the elites could remove him, and 2024 that the counter-elite could bring him back. Trump got contained because the movement had no infrastructure, no cadres, no plan, no way to convert victory into governance. The second term is attempting things the first term never could because the movement spent eight years building capacity. The people did not change, but the organization did. The Right did exactly what Parvini prescribed, probably without reading a word of his book. It would make him laugh if he had a sense of humor about it.

Trump’s return reveals that The Populist Delusion’s disillusionment was a misreading of a temporary defeat as permanent. The book’s analysis of how power works may survive, but its diagnosis of the specific moment was wrong.

Worse for Parvini’s thesis, if Trump’s return was the work of the organized minority, then the organized minority was itself the product of the mass movement. The machine was built by people who were radicalized by 2016 and activated by the movement, who devoted their careers to it because the masses showed them that the project was viable. The counter-elite did not emerge from nowhere. The masses created the conditions for the new machine, even if the machine then took over.

So, the dichotomy between mass politics and elite action turns out to be false. The masses are not the engine, but they are the fuel, and without fuel, the engine does not run. Parvini himself says that the masses are necessary but not sufficient. The book’s rhetoric, however, keeps sliding toward the stronger claim, that the masses are irrelevant, and the return exposes that slide.

So how much does Trump’s reelection change the game? Completely. It changes The Populist Delusion’s genre from tragedy to comedy in the Dantean sense: a story that begins in hell and ends in redemption, or at least in the possibility of redemption. Parvini was right about the medicine and wrong about the death. He prescribed the cure for a patient he had already written the death certificate for. The patient got up off the table, took the medicine, and went back to work.

The last time this happened, the country was in the middle of the Gilded Age, the original era of elite rule, the robber barons, the political machines, the era that produced the first great American critiques of democracy itself. And now it’s happening again in the era of the administrative state, the permanent government, the managerial class. Maybe Trump’s return is the exception that proves the rule. Or maybe it’s the rule itself, the organized minority doing what organized minorities do, and the masses just happened to be on the winning side this time.

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Join the Tortuga Society to take part in September’s book club discussion: Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein.

Much in the way its Soviet counterpart had fallen some decades prior, the American Empire was long dead by the time jackals emerged in the first decades of the new millennium to devour the Republic’s corpse.

The bad survivalist fiction is: “look at me, here is my definitely-not-a-self-insert character, and now - poof! - I get to show the world what an awesome gunfighting ninja I am, kill everybody, save my family or some hot chick, and I’m the smartest guy in the world, and we totally survive.” This is not that.

Grayson is the classic manly character of the man who’s lost everything: a child who was stillborn, a wife who’s gone (it’s not even clear if she left, or went off to kill herself), no family at all beyond this one friend, Jack, who’s now dying. Jack was an American Special Operations soldier who trained him up on cool-guy spec-ops stuff, and the last thing Jack does is ask Grayson: will you promise to go see about my brother?

The novel is set in the near future, where things are kind of gradually falling apart. It’s not the sudden zombie apocalypse or the high-altitude EMP that survivalist fiction usually reaches for, but more like Russia in the 90s.

Jack’s brother is in Moab, Utah, with a baby on the way, so Grayson goes down to look after him. Before long, the town gets invaded by shadowy mercenaries trying to steal the Colorado River. Grayson, who’s been set up as the mastermind of the local militias, gets captured and turned loose with a knife so the private military’s dogs and special operators can hunt him down for sport.

But Grayson is basically a human dog, himself. His loyalty is absolute, and when he sets out to do something, he is absolutely going to do it, or die trying.

Western man owes his existence to dogs. In my particular worldview, it’s neither contradiction nor exaggeration to say that dogs are a direct gift from God. That’s why we don’t kill dogs.

Despite the title being about dogs, it’s actually not for furries.

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Mentioned in this episode: Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, and The 13th Grade’s review of Crowbar, Edwards’s other novel.

Join us next time for Roots Down to Hell by .