“Today, boys and girls, we are learning about diversity. Can anyone tell me why it's wrong to use N***** to describe Terrel?” my boss asked.

He didn't say this, but it's what I heard. My mind's ear again.

I make eye contact with Terrell. He had heard it, too. I feel vindicated. Maybe my boss did say it.

Ryan McGowan is a former Marine Raider living a life of quiet desperation in the corporate 21st century. After some dropping-out, beach-bumming, and boxing practice, a shady former Special Forces guy recruits him for a small mercenary organization going to the far southern Atlantic coast of Argentina to punish illegal Chinese fishing. Speedboat piracy!

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So, Ryan goes from the hell of a modern, feminized corporate workplace to the ultimate male fantasy, which is like, man, I just hang out with my boys. We sit by the fire and drink beer and lift weights until it’s time to get on our pirate boats and go lay the hate on some evildoers.

Here we are in the 21st century, where there’s no frontier left to run off to anymore. The last lawless zone is the high seas, where there are no crimes. It’s the law of the jungle.

But you know what beats the jungle? The gang. The tribe beats the jungle. That's the whole story. Men burn out the jungle. We make farms, we take wives, we build cities. Men that are loyal only to each other. The gang turns the jungle into a city, and the city into a state. And when the state gets too big, it turns everything back into a jungle. And then it starts all over.

Mentioned in this episode: The Executioner / Mack Bolan (Don Pendleton, 1969), and The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott on Zomia.

Join us next time for The Domes of Calrathia by .

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When good King Richard, that’s Richard of Gloucester
Ascended the throne did he
He made good his promise to lower the taxes
And set all the debtors free.

You’ve heard of the princes who died in the tower
The Tower of London, you’ve heard
‘Twas Henry of Richmond who blamed his foul murders
On goodly King Richard the Third.

With plotting and pledges an army was raised
To force our fair Richard to yield
And the Wars of the Roses then came to an ending
At the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Now you may be thinking my story’s told falsely
Because you have read the Bard’s play
About Dicky Crookback, who murdered his brother
All on St. Bartholomew’s Day.

But the truth is elusive - ‘twas true then as now
And falsehoods are easily spread
For some men became saints while some became monsters
Because of what Will Shakespeare said.

— “The Ballad of Richard The Third,” Gwydion Pendderwen

I love this meme.

I happen to live near a cemetery; it’s a restful if somewhat morbid place to stroll; and I’ve enough Addams Family predilections (or occasional nostalgia for the goth-industrial scene from back in the day) that I appreciate it.

But this meme is almost lying by omission. (By which I mean: the statement is true, but vaccines may be the least important factor in infant mortality reduction.)

Three big revolutions really beat infant mortality, and they all arrived in the twentieth century: sanitation (clean water, mostly), then antibiotics, and then vaccines, the third wave. The pathogens that vaccines protected us against tended to be less “fatal” and more “permanently debilitating.” My grandmother grew up with polio and lived, but, man oh man, was she motivated to make sure everyone else did not go through that.

Arguably, nutritional improvements belong somewhere in there too, mostly again “preventing debilitating effects” more than “keeping you from being killed.” There’s the Haber process, which made nitrogen fertilizer cheap enough for industrial-scale farming, and our superior understanding of vitamins and nutrition, which reduces deficiency diseases.

The fifth unsung hero of this story is the anti-parasite push, which was tremendously effective in the United States, but is still a work in progress in various parts of the developing world. Efforts to fight malaria and dengue draw public attention and Effective Altruist optimization efforts (and sometimes they stop there, which is problematic). Filariasis (which you may know as elephantiasis) and similar parasitic infections are readily treated with ivermectin … yes, that same drug that got so much press during COVID. We tend to memory-hole those anti-parasite efforts into the “tropical diseases” group neglected by the West because the most effective means to disrupt malaria, for example, were DDT and bulldozers. Once mosquitoes weren’t a problem here anymore, killing them stopped being a priority.

If you are particularly conspiracy-minded, you might think the Green movement canceled DDT at just the right time: after we’d cleared malaria out of here but left it a problem for Third World countries. That doesn’t seem to have been the political alignment of the Green movement, though. As much as the Club of Rome was very concerned about overpopulation and Paul Ehrlich was telling us that a “population bomb” was going to overwhelm us all, surely Al Gore and friends didn’t want to solve the climate crisis by letting “tropical diseases” cripple or kill off Africa, South America, and South Asia?

Probably just an unpleasant coincidence. After all, it was feasible to continue to wipe out those parasitic diseases worldwide with diethylcarbamazine, off-patent and mass-produced in India (and for that matter, India decided in 1970 to stop recognizing pharmaceutical product patents in order to mass-produce medicine and reduce their cost, so the prospect of domestically producing literal tons of the latest antiparasitic medication became viable). So … probably not any sort of black-hat theory, as hilarious a mental image as mustachio-twirling archvillain Al Gore might be.

We keep running up against the edge of making antivirals work and exhausting certain antibiotics, so that’s a bit of an arms race, but, all in all, modern medicine is awfully darn good. For all the misgivings about mRNA-based vaccines (with some justification given their actual rollout during the pandemic), what data has come out points to problems with dosing and endocrinological complications. I’ll cover that separately, and people who don’t want to read about it don’t have to. It’s interesting to a certain cohort, and for other people, it’s incidental noise or may just be dismissed as conspiratorial. (What’s the joke? It’s not a conspiracy theory if they really are out to get you. Ahh, what would life be without Addams Family–esque humor, where I started this piece?)

COVID itself, for the unvaccinated, hits different populations differently. In 2020, it was commonly understood that the elderly and those with pulmonary conditions (lung troubles of various sorts: pneumonia, lung cancer, smoking, the casual sorts of breathing impairment) were at risk. Likewise, if you were immunocompromised, it was no great surprise to hear that a pandemic was not going to go well for you. You might not have heard, however, that COVID was most harmful to South Asians (secondarily so to Europeans) and least to Africans and East Asians, to the point where Bangladeshi expats in the UK were twice as likely to die as the gent across the street.

If you said Whoa, that makes me all the more suspicious about that Chinese bioweapons lab-leak theory, you’re not the only person to have thought that. Even if it’s verboten to have such a discussion in the polite circles of Western media, the thought is certainly expressed in India, where concerns about an active bioweapons program targeted at their nation are taken quite seriously.

But that’s a separate article. Let’s stay on topic.

“Constructive framing” isn’t all high-stakes material, but it is a way of presenting information so as to influence your opinion by what’s said, implied, and omitted.

When you’re shopping for groceries, most often you’ll find cuts of beef labeled with a certain percentage of lean meat and a certain percentage of fat (which George Foreman said his grill would cook right off—it’s somewhat true). You do want fat (“marbling”) in your meat for flavor, but you also probably don’t want a lardburger that’s 38 percent fat. So, the meat comes labeled either by fat percentage or … by lean percentage. Customers regard “lean” much more positively.

These two packages mean the same thing, but their framing is very different.

Another place you’ll find constructive framing is in the surgeon’s office. Medical outcomes for serious treatments live and die—if you’ll pardon the expression—on presenting a “90 percent survival rate” rather than a “10 percent mortality rate.” This helps patients feel more hopeful and willing to move forward with necessary care.

If you’re allowed to write a ballot initiative this way, of course, or frame an opinion poll … why, you can get nearly any set of results you want, sometimes even from a hostile audience. The endlessly classic Yes, Prime Minister gives a masterclass in this.

Usually, you’ll find press releases about any potentially controversial topic phrased in what’s termed an “opportunity narrative.” For instance, they frame a climate initiative as an investment in “clean-energy jobs and economic growth” rather than focusing on restrictions, taxes, penalties, or jobs lost in other sectors.

So back to that starting meme. It’s the classic think-of-the-children appeal to emotion. “You should be in favor of vaccinations because think of the children” is the whole message when it’s only maybe a fifth of the truth. Why only a fifth? Why else was infant mortality so low after the 1950s and 1960s? Uh, well … that cultural change. Contraception and abortion. We don’t put up gravesites for those. Bleak line of thought to end on, perhaps. But I imagine Morticia would approve.

But the meme I started this piece with is still a great example of framing: an ideal, heartstring-tugging appeal to support vaccination, a think-of-the-children piece (another tactic virtually guaranteed to shut off rationality in many readers). It isn’t, strictly speaking, wrong in what it says, but it is only a relative sliver of the truth. It’s constructive framing of the “why would you possibly oppose this?” mindset.

To be fair, many of the reasons people give for opposing vaccination are arguments that were valid at one point and have been addressed some time ago. For instance, a concern about the use of mercury led to the removal of thimerosal in 1999. By 2001, it was out of childhood vaccines in the US and Europe. (It’s still used to produce some shelf-stable vaccines distributed in developing nations, the sorts of environments where refrigeration for medical supplies is not reliable. But even there, hospitals have the newer vaccination and field clinics have the ruggedized version.) In short, vaccines are safe for your kids.

Keep those children safe, or my grandmother would never let me hear the end of it. It takes far longer to rebut all the objections than to just throw up a meme that makes people say “awwww,” though, and in our world of soundbite attention spans, brevity wins.

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The Preamble, History and Loyalty

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Obviously we live in a time of partisan animosity, and bitter political and cultural conflict. Maybe still nonviolent conflict for the most part, but conflict nonetheless, and certainly more intense now than in comparable ways say 20 or 40 years ago. Of course, this is a political and cultural conflict and will have to have political resolutions in some way. But in addition to that there is also a need and some desire for unity, and with that one or more things which serve as a symbol and instrument of that unity, which can create the possibility of common ground for all Americans and the chance that our internal conflicts might diminish over time.

To that end I assert that the Preamble to the Constitution is that thing. Very brief, very elegant, yet even now a bit obscure given its central role in the drama of America.

So, begging the indulgence of the reader, this piece is longer than most that have been published here at the League, and certainly longer than anything I have written before. Nonetheless, I feel that there is a certain thematic unity between the Preamble here such that it’s worth the read. And to that end, let’s start with a little bit of context, and then some history.

## The Chain

The Preamble didn’t appear from nowhere, and it didn’t end with itself. Before there was a Preamble, there were the abstract intentions and aspirations toward fellowship and common purpose of 1790s-era colonists. There were the ex-colonies themselves, soon-to-be states, who were the sovereign political actors at that time. Those aspirations, organized and represented state by state, led to the Preamble. That in turn led to the rest of the Constitution, which led to the formation of the federal government. This led to two things which for the most part are interchangeable but yet slightly different enough to be worth making note of. The first is the United States as a nation-state, which happened more or less immediately upon ratification and whose existence was never seriously threatened after the War of 1812. The other is the United States as a nation, one people united in solidarity and purpose, built up gradually over the following years and decades.

The point is not to say the whole world flows downstream from the Preamble. Instead the idea is the Preamble is one integral link in a chain of very important things, some of which are more important than others in various circumstances, but which is collectively the conceptual foundation of America as we know it. Therefore we should take the context of the Preamble seriously, as well as its substance. In more explicit terms, it is the Preamble which explicitly and concisely describes the purpose of America, which is for Americans to be able to raise families, earn a living, protect themselves, and hand the legacy of having done these things down to their posterity.

The 19th Century

For our purposes, two important things happened in the 19th century. First, the pioneers subdued most of the land mass of an entire continent, transforming North American wilderness into what became part of, even most of, America. In doing so, they were fulfilling the intentions of the Preamble, specifically its substance. They claimed land, raised families, and created a legacy to hand down to their families and to us.

The federal government wasn’t necessarily that important in this. It was relatively weak in terms of internal governance at that time, and weakest on the frontier. But the Preamble still mattered, not through federal power, but through the crystallization of common intent among the American people. Someone in Missouri or Minnesota still had common purpose with someone in Pennsylvania. And in concrete terms, there was almost completely free trade among Americans. The “We the People” was real even where Washington was far away.

Also, the Federal army defeated slavery and the Confederacy in the Civil War. This also fulfilled the intentions of the Preamble, but in a different way. The Union victory created the foundation for co-national solidarity among all Americans, no longer corrupted by slavery’s existence in our lands.

Both of these things were crucially important factors in the growth of the United States as a prosperous nation. The westward expansion of the pioneers meant that an entire continent’s worth of natural and human resources became fuel for the American economy. And, as one consequence of the Civil War, the economy of the entire United States was reconstituted away from slavery. Free labor is far more economically powerful than slave labor; that, among other things, was a lesson of the war. As the Republican Party of that era had it, “Free men, free soil, free labor.” So in the course of the fulfillment of the intentions of the Preamble as stated by the Founders representing the former colonies of that time, the United States became a wealthy nation.

What Freedom Means

In addition to economic wealth, both of these events from the 19th century are also crucial events for the meaning and legacy of freedom in America. Regarding the defeat of the Confederacy and the eradication of slavery from America as a landmark in our legacy of freedom, well, that part should be pretty obvious.

But the westward expansion is important as well. Because in the context of the founding and the 19th century, freedom didn’t necessarily mean what many Americans might now assume. It didn’t mean abstract self-expression or autonomy from all constraint. It meant you weren’t a subject, a serf, a slave, or anything of that sort. That is, a person whose fundamental social status is a state of obligation to somebody else. And crucially, the checks and balances of the Constitution, the freedoms in the Bill of Rights, the practical autonomy of the pioneers, those things didn’t just arise out of the ether. They arose from having a preponderance of citizens and citizens’ interests among the population of America, thereby empowering a group of citizens, typically prominent men and landowners, to create the legal machinery we have today on a foundation of self-government and self-determination.

Therefore, on a deep level our freedom is a collective accomplishment of our class of citizens and required a widespread class of citizens to create and sustain it, and the westward expansion of American into continental North America did that (among many other things of course). That is, we created thousands of new citizens and landowners who weren’t serfs owing allegiance to some feudal lord, but instead economically productive first-order citizens who had a meaningful and legitimate interest in governance organized to protect and defend their freedom.

In particular, over the course of the 19th century, due to the economic and cultural development of the United States, economic control over America by England (or anybody else for that matter) diminished to basic irrelevance. Therefore, our legal and political systems could be and were developed as an expression of self-governance of our citizens.

It’s also worth noting that to a very large extent the purpose of the specific promises of freedom in the Bill of Rights and the like was to empower our citizens to defend their status as citizens, and also to raise families, earn a living, leave a legacy to their posterity, ie, more or less to empower those citizens to realize the intentions stated on their behalf in the Preamble.

The Declaration of Independence

As various people have noted, typically the explicit promises of freedom in our Constitution or laws were restricted to citizens, in particular men, (or white men until the Civil War), landowners, property owners, etc. This sounds jarring to modern ears, so let’s take a quick digression on that.

The Declaration of Independence tells us that we are all endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are things we deserve, things we ought to have as a gift from God. But that is not at all the same thing as actually having them. This is obvious from a cursory glance at the world. Many people in many situations do not have the freedoms described in the Declaration, yet they have the same endowment from God as we do. The endowment is universal; the enjoyment is not.

As we have expanded qualifications for the franchise and citizenship in general since colonial times, and we have expanded them a lot, the newly eligible citizens are called to sustain the same common intentions that were previously held by landowner men, or whoever citizenship was previously restricted to. In particular, to preserve and expand the common capacity for earning a living, raising families, protecting ourselves, and leaving a posterity. And to defend the legal and social machinery which supports those things. The circle widens, but the obligations remain.

Therefore to actually have our freedom as a practical reality, this requires ongoing support from our citizens. And the particular rights or guarantees promised in the Bill of Rights, or in statute, or the Tenth Amendment, or wherever, must be restricted to citizens, at least in general. The Left likes to think this happens because America hates brown people, or the like. But as it is typical for the Left, they are wrong about this as well. Non-Americans and non-citizens might be our adversaries in some circumstances, but there is no reason to think things have to be that way by default. It is simply a recognition of the reality that our citizens are the people who sustain us, and whose interest we have the duty and the capacity to defend.

The Declaration asserted an entitlement as a bequest from God. But it is the Preamble and the institutions associated with it who have made it real and defined its limits.

The Failure of Liberal Solidarity

Now let’s fast-forward a few years to the beginning of the 21st century. A number of things have happened basically starting then, which have had severely adverse consequences for solidarity among Americans. But there’s three in particular worth mentioning.

First, to a very large extent our universities lost their mission of scholarship to political agitation and academic novelty. Historically, universities were institutions that transmitted knowledge and cultivated inquiry. And for whatever other problems they may have had, they upheld that vocation in a fairly serious way. The professoriate and the administrators tended to be Left politically, many of them fairly committed radicals even. But for the overwhelming majority, quasi-political activism was not to be taken as being the same thing as scholarly accomplishment, which was a separate and more or less apolitical thing.

But like other institutions, universities want to be seen as being on top of the hot new thing. As such, there’s been a proliferation of new fields which aren’t really scholarship at all, and whose knowledge base has no real value outside the university itself. This has had a few unfortunate consequences. Among other things, there were millions of high school graduates poured into our universities, many of whom might not have gone to college in prior generations. For a lot of them a more traditional curriculum was too rigorous, too difficult, and not very much fun. So from these students there’s a significant amount of bottom-up demand for easy-A departments to major in (as well as some academically lax traditional majors), and campus activism. Not everybody can succeed in a challenging course of work, but almost everybody can get a useful credential, and maybe feel as though they are living an important vocation through raising awareness of Gaza, or the like.

And, the “experts” in these novel fields are another part of the problem. They are highly motivated to dominate university governance, and they tend to do so. The MBA types up and left to work for General Electric or the like. The real experts in rigorous fields are working hard in their disciplines and don’t have as much energy to fight office politics. And to the extent they do, those people are motivated to protect their own field and their own work. As far as general university life or cultural politics goes, the world belongs to those who show up, as supposedly attributed to Ben Franklin. And for our universities those are the activists, not the real scholars.

The upshot is that a couple generations of students and ex-students have gotten a very distorted picture of the intellectual currents in the world. And this cohort includes pretty much everyone who got or aspired to a white collar job in America. The people who would be in a position to say otherwise had other fish to fry.

Do Not Ask For Whom The Dean Screams, He Screams For You

Second, the Howard Dean campaign of 2004. Dean was for the majority of his career a completely unremarkable politician, an obscure governor of a very small state. But in that election cycle, he rocketed up the Democratic primary polls on a campaign of palpable anger, not merely opposition to George W Bush and the Iraq War. Dean eventually lost the nomination, but his campaign infrastructure became the foundation for much of what followed, the netroots, the small-dollar donor base, the internet-centric campaign, it all followed from the reality that for Gov Dean partisan hatred was a feature rather than a bug.

Around the same time and in a similar way the lib pundit Jonathan Chait invented Chaitred, the argument that the politics of that time were properly organized around hatred of George W Bush and for that matter Republicans in general. It is true for many of us that it is easy for us to harbor unkind thoughts toward our political adversaries. But it was the Democrat activists and lib punditocracy of the time which made explicit the idea of hatred as an organizing principle for the Left in America.

## California Dreamin’

Third, California. The economy of 21st century California is deeply connected to the Pacific Rim, especially for upper-middle class white collar Californians. Its trade, entertainment sector, technology sector are all enmeshed with Asia. Even for those who not explicitly involved in international trade across the Pacific, California’s professional class had connections with suppliers, clients, customers, and sometimes finance based in Asia. Obviously there had always been lots of trans-Pacific trade of one sort or another long before the 21st century. But this particular thing became especially important as Asia itself became wealthier. Among other things, there arose a new class of very wealthy Asians who had Asian-based income streams but needed more stable assets and cultural connections in America.

California’s white collar professional class came to see these connections as their own proprietary achievement, a mark of their sophistication and cosmopolitanism. But in reality, the Pacific Rim’s professional connections in California are downstream of its interest in America as a whole: our elite institutions, our high-wage culture, our consumer markets and above all else our political and financial stability. And of course those things were largely a creation of our history of governance and the Republican Party, especially in California. But California’s elite forgot this. They imagined themselves as the crucial actors in the matter, as the key intermediaries between Asia and the United States.

Accordingly, they developed a mindset where they are not accountable to American governance, but a separate thing, outside of any legal system except the norms governing their particular slice of international trade. It’s not just a matter of California becoming a blue state at this time, but also Democratic Party as a whole taking on the mentality of California writ large. There were other interests and other elements of geographical representation inside the Democratic Party, but to the extent that there was any conflict or difference in emphasis among them, the coastal Democrats would always win. Not only is California and a few other California-like places where a very large percentage of Democratic general election votes are, but it also holds an even larger percentage of lib money, talking class professionals and messaging infrastructure.

The Hostility Crescendo

So over roughly the past fifteen or twenty years, in at least three meaningful and important ways, contemporary American liberals have failed their obligations of loyalty to the United States, especially liberals at the staff and activist level of Democratic politics. They have rejected solidarity with normie America. It’s important to be able to conceive of this failure of loyalty in a broad scope. In fact, for many libs this is a significant point of failure. A decent number of them want to rationalize that they are not opposed to the American project in general, they are simply hostile to W or Trump, their personal aesthetic, or their particular political agenda.

But unfortunately that is simply not true, at least as it pertains to the main currents of American liberalism over the last 15 years or so. Liberals aren’t merely opposed to one or more particular politicians for any number of credible reasons. They are hostile to the very design of America itself, as that has manifested from colonial times for a hundred years or more.

So, why are the libs doing this? For many of them, especially for those in the Democratic Party with the California Dreamin’ mindset, the dominant motive is disdain. They don’t necessarily hate Middle America, at least not at first. They simply insist on creating a world, or at least their part of it, where what we do doesn’t matter. Unfortunately for libs, when that ambition is frustrated, when Middle America successfully asserts itself, then the disdain turns to bitterness and antagonism. That’s whats behind most of the polarization of our political culture. We broke their assumption that they could ignore us.

Think of our system of governance as a complicated machine with inputs and outputs. Citizens participate as inputs, voting, advocating, engaging, and accept that outputs somehow emerge from the machine, outside the control of any one actor or political intention. That’s democratic solidarity. Contemporary libs believe something different. They believe they’re entitled to manipulate the outputs directly, not just to participate, but to control the results. This is what PMC-ism actually means as an operational matter. It’s a claim to a different status in the system.

This disloyalty manifests in specific policy areas, in particular what I somewhat theatrically call the Four Horsemen of the Lib Apocalypse: trans, immigration, DEI, Hamas. Clearly lib activists see these issues in a much different light that mainstream America, or conservative America. Even so, a lot of what’s going on here is not about sincere policy convictions. Even activist libs aren’t really committed to sex change operations for convicted felons, in spite of what Vice President Harris once promised an activist group. What they are is displays of where solidarity lies. Taking these positions signals: I’m with the activist class, not with Middle America. Their values and concerns don’t constrain what I advocate.

This is sometimes a conscious choice by individuals, but not always. But it does require a culture of disdain and repudiation of solidarity to marinate in. The cumulative effect of that culture produces clearly antisocial policy positions from what used to be mainstream liberal America.

Ultimately this is still history, albeit 200 years ago or 15 years ago but history nonetheless. How does the Preamble fit in now? Specifically, how does the Preamble illustrate our values and our intent in a way that might help us in 21st century America?

Well, there’s a few ways.

We the People

Let’s start with the obvious. America was founded by white people. Not all the white people in the world, but a particular group of them, colonists in British North America who had a specific history and specific reasons for what they were doing.

This is important in a couple of ways. First, it refutes the critical theory Left. If your fundamental position is that America is illegitimate because it was founded by white settlers perpetuating colonialism and capitalism, then you can’t be loyal to the posterity of those settlers and their project. You’ve disqualified yourself from the conversation about what America should be.

But also, this is not a white nationalist framework either. America is not about the greater glory of the white race. It’s about the success of a particular project that those people established, for themselves and their posterity. The Preamble tells us what that project aims at. Those things are America’s purpose, not racial advancement or purity.

And by implication, there is a reasonably clear context to describe how people of other races or other ethnicities could conceivably be American. Either they or their ancestors were American citizens in the Founding era, or at some point between then and now they became grafted on to the “We the People” of the Preamble as immigrants.

And following from that, the Preamble invites us to think deeply about immigration in general, in terms of who is really an American in a more meaningful way than simply what it takes to get a green card or a passport, though obviously in an ideal world it should inform those things as well.

First, it’s important that they are asked to be here, or at least acquiesced to, in our laws. It’s typical for immigrants to America, including illegal immigrants, maybe even especially illegal immigrants, to be sympathetic people with readily understandable reasons for doing what they do. But even so, their interest is not necessarily our interest, and it’s very difficult for an illegal immigrant to really be an American when their first meaningful interaction with America is to be here in repudiation of our laws.

Secondly, they came to America as it is, specifically to participate in the American project as outlined in the Preamble. They are not here to resolve grievances related to their home country, or to advocate for meaningful changes in foreign and domestic policy. Of course, in many circumstances advocating for American policy changes is a reasonable thing to do. But intentions of American immigrants cannot be contingent on that. If the possibility or reality of some American policy or facet of culture is unbearably offensive for one or more immigrants, they should not be here. The American people deserve to know that new immigrants are not here to exacerbate domestic polarization and animosity, and that it is their intention to make a new life in America, with America as it is.

Finally, this state of affairs lasts and even improves over time. It is not momentary or opportunistic. It’s a genuine, sustained commitment. And over time, this loyalty is strong and bidirectional. As immigrants demonstrate commitment to America, they give native Americans an occasion to be loyal to them in return. As these conditions are met, those immigrants are fully and completely American at the deepest level. Not probationary or second-class, but the real thing.

The libs are right about one thing: many immigrants are absurdly, wildly patriotic, even to an extent that would be cringe for some native-born Americans. For large numbers of native Vietnamese, Filipinos, Venezuelans, Cubans, Poles, Eastern Europeans here in America, it is obvious that those people are deeply committed to the American project as described in the Preamble. And it is not remotely a coincidence that those are the sort of immigrants most likely to support the Republican Party.

But the libs are wrong to treat this as automatic boilerplate that applies to all immigrants in all situations. This is a contingent thing. Some immigrants clearly pass, some clearly don’t. The liberal error is collapsing a conditional claim into an unconditional one. “Immigrants who demonstrate loyalty are fully American” becomes “all immigrants are fully American, and questioning this is wrong.”

That leaves the issue about what we about the immigrants who don’t make it, whose presence in America hurts our solidarity instead of helps, and can’t or won’t act any other way. Well, the obvious answer is deportation. But, the key point is that deportation is a thing, but not the only thing, and maybe not even the most important thing.

First of all, many immigrants are here legally in some way, even some of the worst actors. So at least in an immediate sense, deportation is not on the table for them anyway. But well beyond that even, immigration restrictionists have oversold our capacity for deportation. They like to say things like, “They all go back,” mostly because for them it feels good to say it. This is especially relevant in a world where Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are in charge of federal immigration enforcement. I don’t trust either one with effective immigration enforcement along the lines of what’s being pursued now. I don’t trust that it is effective, I don’t believe they can maintain morale at ICE and other enforcement agencies. I don’t trust they can maintain public support for their enforcement strategy.

So, it is important that the government’s response to illegal and unwanted immigration must go beyond deportation. Specifically, it needs to include E-Verify, defunding, and visa management. Discourage illegal unemployment, defund all the ways anti-social immigrants defraud and exploit our government and our people. Revoke visas for anti-social elements. Do not extend visas to foreigners who are demographically or ideologically similar to anti-social elements already here. If done correctly, this is more practical and more time-effective than a program of mass deportation.

## Solidarity From Americans

And it’s not just about immigrants either, this is useful for native-born Americans too. One useful interpretive key is to note that the Preamble is relatively vague as to who We the People are, but it spells out in some detail what the purposes of our union are. This is contrary to typical lib advocacy which in an attempt at bean-counting and micromanaging representation. “Are you really sure there will be a credible number of Puerto Rican transgenders represented in this agency if we don’t legislate a set-aside mandate for it?”

The point being, for rhetorical libs gambits such as this, they don’t have to be specifically refuted. In fact, they don’t have to be meaningfully engaged at all. Most importantly, we have other purposes and priorities, and it should be our intention to advance those priorities, ie things downstream from the various clauses in the Preamble.

There’s also the reality that for the most part libs don’t have the cultural competency to advance their own agenda in a spirit of fairness. And sometimes it might be possible to try to sort this is out toward some mutually beneficial end, but for the most part it serves no purpose. If libs want to talk to us in spirit of respect and mutual interest, absolutely we are not too cool to listen. But for the most part they don’t. Either libs don’t want to talk to us at all, or they are just giving voice to troll-y performative jabs and disparagements. So maybe we can hold some hope toward a friendly resolution to our ideological polarization, but not very much. At least not in this environment. And to the extent we can, we should avoid the distraction.

Of course for the libs themselves, they should advocate for fairness or a collective effort to minimize poverty and material privation, or whatever it is they claim to be believe in. But this must happen in a spirit of solidarity and respect for the citizenship of those who might disapprove.

## From Reactive to Purposeful

The Preamble is especially useful for the American Right. For a long time, conservatives have been trapped in reactive politics, ie “own the libs.” That’s not definitionally bad. Liberals had enormous institutional and cultural power, and there was a real need to push back. Sometimes theatrical confrontation was what worked.

But the reactive posture doesn’t tell you what you’re for. It only tells you what you’re against. And a movement that’s only against things eventually loses coherence.

The Preamble fills this gap. Our governance is not just about owning the libs, it’s the purpose that our constitutional order is actually meant to serve. That’s the test for whether a fight is worth having: does this advance that purpose, or is it just noise? This also helps avoid overcommitting to short-term news cycle dramas. If you’re clear on the ends, you can evaluate whether a confrontation is necessary or just entertainment for the activist base. Some fights are essential; many are just distractions.

The move from reactive to purposeful is the move from resistance to governance. This is especially valuable to bear in mind now, during President Trump’s second term, where the distinction between reaction and intention maps pretty closely to the distinction between Trump’s clear objective successes and lifeless haphazard bluster.

In spite of sometimes needlessly alienating some allies, Trump is clearly the best foreign policy President for America since Reagan. Between both halves of the Trump Administration, the United States has realigned the political structure of the Middle East according to our values and interests, without spending a whole lot in terms of manpower or money.

There is a pattern in President Trump’s leadership. He is cunning, often savvy, reactive, and opportunistic. But his capacity for creativity or implementing long-term constructive solutions is really bad. So that means, when the stars align and there is an opportunity to make strategic gains in America’s interest, President Trump can and often times will capitalize on the opportunity. That’s the way it’s been with the Abraham Accords, Venezuela, Iran, even to some extent Ukraine and Syria, where in spite of being humanitarian disaster areas, have actually worked in America’s geopolitical interests in bankshot ways.

Contrast this with China, where the Administration’s record isn’t as good. In at least some economically crucial sectors, we are simply being outcompeted by China. And to address this, we would have to make meaningful thoughtful changes toward improving our capacity for this or that. Trump sometimes talks a good game here, but this isn’t the sort of thing he has the expertise or the desire to execute on, so for the most part we haven’t.

Of course, the worst of it is domestic policy, which tends to be what Americans care about the most. For at least six months, maybe a year or so, it’s been pretty apparent where the real energy in the Administration is, specifically three things: immigration enforcement theater, largely credited to Stephen Miller, alternative medicine advocacy led by HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, and tariffs which the President clearly cares about and is handling himself.

The American people are not invested in these things, at all. It is an enormous failure of American Right thought-leaders that almost all of them are continuing to front for Trump here. Even restrictionist Americans don’t necessarily support Stephen Miller immigration theater. There is negligible grassroots support for MAHA or tariffs.

What the American people do care about, is standard of living, jobs, wages, inflation, crime, energy, border security, fairness. And it’s not even that the Administration’s record is particularly bad. But bad or not, these are issues where the Administration just can’t be bothered.

In concrete terms, it’s been made clear by several pollsters that the hopes of the grassroots regarding affordability was that the price level would revert to the pre-Biden inflation levels. As a practical matter, that’s not how modern economies work and on this point we are no exception. The second Trump Administration successfully ended the Biden-era inflation basically by not repeating the Biden stimulus appropriations and then let the matter go. Of course in doing so, price levels did not revert to the pre-Biden levels. As a policy response it was a reasonable thing, but it clearly did not address the hopes or expectations of America voters, especially a large number of voters who voted for Trump on the inflation issue.

This is why for the American Right, we cannot allow ourselves to be closely tied to Trump’s spastic persona. Our loyalty must be to the voters, who have the legitimate sovereignty to speak in the name of America, and to our fundamental intentions laid out in the Preamble. Trump is simply much too erratic to be reliable.

The Jurisprudential Gap

There’s also a gap in conservative legal thinking that the Preamble can fill.

The mainstream legal right, basically the Federalist Society and its orbit, is overwhelmingly textualist and originalist. What did this text mean when it was written? That’s the right method for most things, but not everything. It doesn’t answer a complementary question: what are we doing this for? It also doesn’t address the particular problem of the lib legal establishment motivated to project PMC class values as if they had force of law. Or for that matter the conservative legal establishment, in the case of Bostock v Clayton County.

Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, held that under Title VII transgenders are a protected category regarding employment discrimination.

Justice Alito, in dissent, argued that “sex” in 1964 did not mean sexual orientation or gender identity. Alito was right, and if we had a better collection of Supreme Court justices Alito would have carried the day. But his argument was essentially originalist and textualist and said basically Gorsuch was doing textualism wrong. But Gorsuch could say he was “textualist” as well and who’s to say who’s right? There needs to be a point where we can say, these sort of word games are simply facepalm stupid.

There have been a few others on the right who have noticed this as well, most prominently the professors Adrian Vermeule at Harvard and Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame. Unfortunately the things they suggest to replace PMC entitlement, such as Thomas Aquinas, natural law, Integralism, the authority of the pope and so on, have no meaningful constituency beyond themselves really.

The Preamble is a much better alternative imo. Let’s face it, if you’re transgendering you’re already a little bit out there by yourself. In that way you’re not really fulfilling the purpose of our constitutional order, which at least in principle is ok. For the most part America allows for individuals to do their own thing. But also, in the same way it’s unrealistic and unfair to expect the rest of America to conform to your particular eccentricities.

The best part is, contra Vermeule and Deneen, we don’t have to import any foreign jurisprudence or legal influence to do this. The Preamble is already at the center of the beginning of our constitutional order, we simply should invoke it more often.

## Diamonds Are Forever

The Preamble is a diamond in words: small, dense, multi-faceted. In the Founding era, it was the crucible where abstract colonial aspirations became a concrete nation that has existed in continuity ever since.

What the Preamble offers us now is not a program, but a standard, a guide and an aspiration. It tells us what the American project is for, and therefore what loyalty to that project requires. It gives us a way to distinguish between those who are genuinely part of the “We” and those who for various reasons are not. It creates clarity about what we owe each other, about what we can legitimately demand, about where the boundaries of solidarity lie. The Preamble does not promise that everyone will be included. It does promise that those who are included share a purpose. That is a harder thing than universal belonging, but it is also a real thing, something that can actually sustain a nation across generations.

For a country that spends enormous energy fighting about what America means, we should not neglect the 52-word sentence that actually tells us.

“Never call anyone about this again, or I will make it even worse for you. I will put insects under your skin. I will rape you in your dreams forever. I will Prometheus your ass and rip your guts out every day until the end of time.”

Tom Falwell jumps from the south tower, and relives the morning of September 11th over and over until he can tell us what it means. A new college graduate rides a motorcycle into South America and winds up in a parallel dimension as a mute wretch. A dollar-store man buys a Victorian to flip in a dying California town and hears a voice that says “Hello? Please, help me.” The estranged heir of a dead financier gets pulled off the Appalachian Trail into a boardroom fight for his father’s company. Each of these men inherits a wreck, and the people in charge have gone insane.

Science fiction explains miracles away, but Phillips, good Lovecraftian that he is, tells you the mechanism isn’t point. We can know all about how come these calamities came to pass, but that doesn’t tell us what they’re for.

Then he heard a voice behind him, the same hateful voice he had heard over the phone. “Men are so quick to blame the gods, but they themselves, in their depravity, design griefs far greater than what fate assigns.”

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Join us next time for Once Upon A Time in Argentina by .

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I have this friend and mentor, call him Blue Beard. He’s a pirate captain type of entrepreneur. In his twenties, he left a cozy well-ordered life and moved to Eastern Europe, where he started his first company as a bet that he could create better jobs for his comic-book artist friends there than anywhere in Western Europe. He did. Blue Beard sank a few ships, but his fleet of companies grew strong and lean.

A while ago, someone Blue Beard trusted stabbed him in the back. “The only way to talk to a traitor is with your fists,” he told me over lunch one day. It stuck with me because in over a decade of friendship, I had never heard him speak like that. There was uncharacteristic savagery in his eyes, and I knew he’d been hurt.

I recently found out exactly how treachery feels. I’m writing to say that, while the pain was worse than I had imagined, my gentleman pirate friend was wrong about how to respond. Fifty lashes on the forecastle and a bottle of rum in your cabin is inelegant, unromantic. Deck-hand behavior. A graceful bow from high up in the rigging, as you take your next galleon — that’s how you treat a traitor.

The Tale of my Second-in-Command

Six weeks ago, and with no warning, the operations manager at one of my companies handed me her resignation. She had been with my company for fourteen years, since her first year in college. I had planned to make her a partner. She told me she was leaving over company decisions she found “too capitalist.” Although she blamed those decisions on the company’s other founder, each of those had been mine. Each of them had saved our company that year and put food on her table, but I repeat myself. I already said “capitalist.”

Any serious businessperson would tell you to thank your lucky stars this person left before you gave them any company shares. And yet I felt sucker-punched. Her resignation came at the end of a series of betrayals. Several family members and close business partners had let me know, one way or another, that I wouldn’t get back what I’d invested in them. Some of them left, and I chose to distance myself from others.

The businesses were doing well, but against these personal acts of disloyalty, the improved financials, glowing customer reviews, and professional admiration of my lawyers and accountants felt like nothing.

I was hurt, angry, and irrationally pessimistic, not the frame of mind for running two companies. I pushed through a couple of weeks in cold execution mode, though, determined to not be weird.

A co-founder told me I was the only one worried about “weirdness.” My husband teased me that the only way to avoid people leaving was to fire them proactively. The whole time, I thought about Blue Beard. Was the fist the only language a traitor understood? Any of my people could be next. Should I armor up against them or draw my cutlass?

A Pirate Captain’s Loyalty

Steve Jobs reportedly told his team: “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” Anyone who builds businesses and organizations is a pirate captain in spirit.

Those of us who dare to build from zero have to compete for people with richer, more established employers. We learn to sweep prospects off their feet, showing them the possibilities of a small, agile company doing world-class work against impossible odds. We signal that we don’t care about where you work from or who you vote for as long as the job gets done. We promise hard problems to solve, no HR department, plenty of professional disagreements, and results we are proud of.

This recruitment strategy only works because it showcases the captain’s loyalty to his crew. We are not loyal to a paycheck or because HR told us to be, or because someone will cancel us if we’re not. We will walk across the bottom of the ocean to get the product out, secure the contract, and protect the company. We can go without sleep, proper meals, or a break — fighting one fire after another, saving the day, protecting our team, because that feels good. We are crazily loyal, which is funny, because we’re the ones who left the navy. American tech giants could never steal my top engineers, despite offering them 10-20x the pay.

Addicted to Our Own Loyalty

Gene Wolfe wrote: “Oaths are only mere weak things of honor compared to the benefits we give to others, which are things of the spirit; let us once save another, and we are his for life…One who truly benefits another is for a moment at a level with the Pancreator and in gratitude for this elevation will serve the other all his days.”

Rescuing people gives us a spark of the divine, and we would do anything to feel that rush again. It reminds us we are still pirates. We feed on it.

The advantages of our addiction show up in a crisis. When the firestorm roars and the paperwork becomes irrelevant, your loyalty to your crew is the safety rope that ties you to your ship. Then, your priorities are clear, and you’re free to just fight.

A co-founder once told me he was scared I would manufacture a crisis just because I worked so well in one. I have steered us toward storms rather than away from them. Guilty as charged.

Balance sheets and corporate leave policies don’t have the same draw. Building a company can bury you in exactly the kind of paperwork you became a pirate to escape from. We use our passion to pull ourselves forward. We are different from the boring managerial types that populate large corporate offices.

When Blue Beard talked about fists, that was the addiction talking. I wanted to scream too. Nobody rages like a loyalist in withdrawal.

The Cost

As captains, we’re bound to weaker, less decisive, less reliable people. We can’t beg our crew for approval or hope they’ll be kind (they won’t be, they’re pirates). Our bearing tells them, “Hit me with your best shot, I will wrestle you into submission bare-handed, and afterward give you a few pointers on hand-to-hand.” It’s why they are drawn to us, but they sense the power our loyalty gives them over us.

Have you ever had an enemy who watches your every move like you are his idol? A sullen employee who gets upset by minute fluctuations of your tone? The junior partner who is fixated on your every microexpression and can quote you verbatim years after the meeting in question?

Betrayal is the price we pay for this charisma. No matter how carefully you choose and cultivate your crew, they’ll have their moments of weakness and fear. Give them enough time on your team and most of your people will betray you. They’ll plunge the knife in your back and wiggle it, claiming the best of intentions.

And Yet You Have to Stay Loyal

The ship must stay afloat. The galleons must be captured. Betrayal will come, and the captain must not only stay functional, but face the humiliation publicly and be judged for style by everyone else. Each member of your crew will decide whether to stay on your ship based on your reaction. It’s our job to take such punishment and still make people swoon.

So, what should a pirate captain do?

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Do Not Forget Who’s Boss

And don’t let your team forget, either. You are not their friend, and they do not have to like you. You have responsibility, but you also have power. Be the decisive, unflinching menace your team volunteered to join.

Your people must know who and what you are, at a glance, every time you enter a room. Of course they’re all watching and judging you. You can affect their lives, bank accounts, and families in ways most people can’t. Give them a show.

No games

One of my co-founders tells me he sometimes sees me speeding toward a cliff and his only way to stop me is an ultimatum. That’s a mistake because ultimatums between business partners are a game of Chicken. The only way to win Chicken is to convince the other side you’re so crazy, you’d kill your own company before you fold.

At first glance, a reputation for lunacy is useful to a captain. Two years ago, I told one of my teams I’d pay hundreds of thousands to lawyers before I’d pay a single dime in bribes to a public official (remember I work in Eastern Europe). A year before that, I fired a client (a company partially owned by my own father), because we caught them in malpractice and they wouldn’t do anything about it. I am quite good at going Sans Quartier on outside threats. I ensure peace by demonstrating that conflict is hopeless. It’s a good investment.

What I can’t do is slip into full killer mode inside my own company, with my own people.

Control that Loyalty

Wielding such a sharp emotion requires discipline. You can’t just swing loyalty around, even though it gives you a rush of power. You need self-control and hard limits.

Once I’ve decided to be loyal to someone, I set a term for it and won’t renegotiate it until that term is up. I won’t stop testing them in the meantime, but I wait to act.

Expand

Even and especially after a large betrayal, a captain must expand his loyalty outward. He finds new people to join his crew, new allies, new challenges. Every instinct will fight this. When we are betrayed, we want to curl up and cut everyone off. Like Gollum, you will want to crouch over your wounds and hiss righteously. Gollum was never a pirate captain.

You’ll handle the fallout faster once you’re outside it. Your team will think you are crazy, flaky, distracted, but two years down the line, they will be telling stories about how you saved the day when everyone had written you off. You’ve already paid for this, so collect the full reputational benefit.

Offend

A captain must retain offensive capability. This includes growing and sharpening his loyalty to his people. And yes, widening that circle, even as that increases the probability of betrayal. You get stronger emotionally, physically, financially, and spiritually. People are attracted to power because it solves problems, earns money, and protects families and dreams. Grow your power.

Blue Beard, my old friend, you don’t talk to a traitor with your fists. You don’t have to talk to a traitor at all. You talk to your crew, the ones still on deck, and the ones you haven’t recruited yet, and you let the traitor watch from shore while you take the next galleon. That bow from the rigging isn’t for that poor coward. It never was. It’s for the crew deciding, right now, whether you’re still worth following. Show them you are.

POV: You’re in the Online Right

I pay the bills by being a “data scientist,” a trendy term for “guy who writes reports and makes charts.” It’s a step down from a statistician, but a step up from a sociologist. I say “sociologist” because 90% of my co-workers are exactly that: “doctors” in sociology. People hear “data scientist” and think “oh, they employed computer geniuses to solve real world problems!” But no, it’s more like “they taught political activists how to use SQL.”

I’ve got a background in database management, writing real-ass code for real-ass money-making endeavors, for as many hyphenated-phrases as possible. I know my SQL, and I was down on my luck during the pandemic lockdowns when an old buddy said “hey, you know database stuff, you don’t need medical or statistics knowledge, just get in here and I’ll pay you to code.” I took him up on the offer because I enjoy having a roof over my foid’s head.

My buddy has since left the company, and now I’m stuck with my lesbian CEO, my gay supervisor, and all these other (mostly Indian) medical doctoral students, who for whatever reason wasted several years and thousands of dollars on their medical degrees, only to troon out and take a pass on the residency part. Now they’re resigned to being “Subject Matter Experts” (Excel crankers). When they’re not med-school dropouts, they’re sociology “doctors.” The “making an impact” feel is so thick in the air, you could cut it with a knife.

We specialize in Medicaid reporting, where I’m a fish out of water because I don’t know medical nor statistical shit. Stuff that’s, like, judgement calls on when something is statistically (in)significant, or “best practices” on separating wheat from chaff, or what exact set of Obamacare codes are relevant to a topic, all that shit is beyond me. Did you know that “having a baby” actually has like 80+ codes for different situations? Not just if your baby is head-first or feet-first, but like pre-mature, on time, late, delivered by C-Section, already stillborn when the C-Section happened, delivered by vagina after a C-Section failed, delivered stillborn by vagina after a C-Section failed, delivered by vagina after C-Section was attempted but then the mom chickened out and asked not to, etc? Like, autistic levels of detail.

As a not-doctor, not-autistic statistician, how the FUCK am I supposed to know what all codes might be pertinent to the query, here?! Maybe I could Grok that, but then the state government(s) I work for shit(s) their pants about possible HIPAA violations or cybersecurity risks. Fine, whatever. I’m left to flounder and flail at the data until the results just feel more or less realistic. But honestly, I don’t even know what’s real. It’s not like a software you can debug to meet a spec or fulfill a function, like “When I push button, I should receive bacon.”

I need you to feed me a spec, and then I do the thing, and then you leave me alone. Instead, I’m dealing with live insurance claims being haggled in real time between huge corps, healthcare providers, and the state. The claims I pull today may not actually be there tomorrow, or be there with different values, or I pulled codes for black and white patients, but forgot to add the code for mulatto patients, and need to do it over again, fuck. NOBODY TOLD ME THERE WAS A MULATTO CODE!!

Imposter Syndrome, Except They’re The Imposters

None of that matters, because I know that my real job in Medicaid data mining is just harvesting “facts” for future leftist academics to leverage into “promoting public policy changes.” I provide them with the ammunition to call me a racist.

Every month we have an “all hands” meeting in my data analysis contracting company. I gotta listen to this (very nice and upbeat) lesbian CEO harpy drone on about how we’re “making an impact” (by the time I’m done, that phrase will make your skin crawl, too).

She couches her ham-fisted leftie political opinions in cutesy “not to ruffle any feathers” or “sorry, my politics are showing!” phrases, to make off-hand disparaging comments about male-dominated spaces, or Trump voters noticing fraud, or COVID lies.

Speaking of liberals drinking their own Kool-Aid, I ended up being the guy who hand-entered the new mRNA gene therap— er, “vaccine” codes, into our system as they were released, and my heart sank into my stomach at the description field: “intended for infants 0-6 mos.” ;_;

As a liberal, my boss can steamroll her perspective over our day-to-day tasks, trying to “fix society.” Meanwhile, I have to be VERY cautious about expressing any opinion or noticing I have under her “open door policy.” It’s super annoying, particularly because I’m a natural schmoozer, and I wish I could relate and jive, but I know the knives are out.

My boss is a Cathedral operative, and I have to work for her to feed my children (unless one of you in the private sector can hire me as a Scrum Master, pretty pretty please, slide into my DMs). She and I both have Boston Lithuanian blood, so I can feed her some pierogis and sweet-talk her into giving me a free parking pass for the garage, but the whole time I am revolted. It’s the moralizing, blue-pilled frame, clueless to the destruction she’s wreaking, that bothers me most. From the lesbo thing, to the girlboss attitude, to her “expert” role in dismantling functional society, one subtle twist of a report at a time.

You’ve Had Enough Mash, Now For The Bangers

Here’s what I mean. For the past quarter or so, I’ve been gathering the data for my client state’s Birth Outcomes. That’s like “how many pregnancies ended in abortion,” “how many were stillborn,” “how many were white, black, or no-one-cares-because-they-don’t-serve-the-BLM-agenda,” “how many moms died in childbirth,” etc. Depressing shit that I’d rather not think about, especially when I picture my own darling 10 lb. white-ass, freckly baby girl not making it when she was an infant. She’s a plucky 80 lb. 10-year-old now and a fucking tank, but what if, right?

My favorite, my absolute favorite metric to check for, was the March Of Dimes defined “Disparity Ratio.” The idea is, you divide all your data by race. Then you take the race that is doing the best — with the assumption that it’s always the wypipo — and you remove their results, then average the results of all the other races and make a fraction: the “best performing group” over “urryone elts.” That gives you the Disparity Ratio, which by definition can NEVER be 1. I guess that tracks with reality. I mean, can any random measurement of a thing be exactly the amount of a different random measurement of a similar, but not exactly the same, thing? A “Disparity Ratio” of 1.00 means “Communism UNLOCKED,” and a ratio of a decimal or more over 1.00 is a measure of “how far we have to go before Communism ACHIEVED.” It’s a digital readout of precisely what level of racist wypipo be in dat arya. Exactly how or why, you would or could, derive that conclusion because two numbers are different, I’m not sure, but that’s obviously the implication. It’s a loaded game from the outset.

It’s so loaded that if you end up with a result less than 1 (when White people are not the best-off group in your metric), it’s assumed that you did your math wrong. It says it right there in the first paragraph (not the intro blurb) of the methodology instructions: “The disparity ratio is always a number greater than 1 (e.g., 1.26).” So what happens when the best performing group isn’t White people?

TFW You’re a Moldbug Punchline

So my Indian and gay supervisors (two different people) told me to take my ratios of wymyn who died 42 days or less after childbirth, and get Disparity Ratios of White Wymyns compared to Black Wymyns, and White Wymyns compared to Other Wymyns. It was funny when they struggled trying to figure out how a handful of Medicaid ID#s were marked Female for several years, but then suddenly marked Male in the reporting period requested, and they weren’t sure how to handle whether or not they should be excluded from the results. I mean, the spec asks how many WOMEN died after childbirth, not how many “men” died after… child… birth. Let’s be consistent on which minorities we’re defending, here! Their cognitive dissonance gave away the game as far as why this metric even exists.

But IMO more hilariously, in my particular client state I’m working on… the dead black moms were noticeably fewer than the dead white moms. By any slice, by county, by year, by sub-contracted insurance plan, by anything. Odd, I know, especially for a Medicaid-only population, you’d figure the majority of them are black, right? You racist, you.

When I submitted my results to my liberal superiors, they were in quite the huff. “Oh Top Shelf, you noob, you MUST have done something wrong!” They examined my code, and they re-wrote the code themselves. They pushed up against the same database, and lo and behold, the black moms in this state really WERE dying less often due to childbirth than the white moms! It really do be like dat!?

So here’s me with my less-than-1 Disparity Ratios being like, “Soooo when can we present this to the Medicaid Director? The state Congress? The Governor?? Would love to see a little more attention paid to the poor ol’ wypipo. Maybe get some of that gubment gibs moolah headed their way.” Of course, I can’t actually say this, even with my best “not to ruffle any feathers” hedging. The alternative was to address their discomfort directly, take the March of Dimes spec literally, and— God FORBID— put the BLACK people numbers on the top of the fraction as the best performing group, then lump in the White numbers with all the other races and compare—

Yeah that was a bridge too far. INCONCEIVABLE! My supervisors were scrambling to find another explanation. “Ah, but there are less than 20 deaths in the black category for that year!” “Oh but there are more unreported races in that year than there are black people! So you don’t know how many of the ‘unknowns’ are actually black!” Every “mathematical,” “scientific integrity” excuse in the Best Practices book was thrown at my findings. Until finally, the lynchpin: “We just don’t have enough statistically significant, unambiguous data to report on this metric. We will just have to drop this measure from the report entirely.”

There it was. Democracy dying in darkness, in real time. The absolutely evil euphemism of that Faggot King “Dr.” Timothy Burke was ringing in my ears. These were my hands holding the meat, feeding it into the sausage grinder, the grinder that manipulates procedural outcomes. Something about Thomas Carlyle and there being lies, damned lies, and statistics. I was part of the propaganda machine, supporting an empire that wants my Trad-ish Catholic ass dead, but who I’ll simp to, just to pay down my debt in a fiat-currency-driven horseshit economy.

It’s too bad that the state I’m reporting on seems to have really great results for black moms having babies, and dying less often in the process! Really bad. Would be really bad for journalists to find out about this, how horrific that they might have some good news for black people! That would be bad for the greater good. The greater good of Gay Race Communism would surely suffer if we were to notice where it was winning.

While “Data Science” is a blooming and prolific field right now, God rest your soul if you land one of these jobs. In my experience, they’re mostly contractors for the gubment, which in and of itself is retarded.Srsly tho, think this through, government contracting is by definition bullshit.

1. Poor people can’t afford healthcare coverage, but it’s a moral imperative that they get it.

2. Healthcare corporations won’t lower their prices to a range that poor people could afford; that’s just not fiscally sensible.

3. It’s the government’s job to do the things that society needs, but can’t turn a profit from, like holding criminals in prison. Therefore the government should pay for poor people’s healthcare coverage!

4. The government seems to be really bad at paying for poor people’s healthcare coverage using other people’s money. “It’s inefficient,” they say. Too costly. Hm. (Maybe they missed Step 2 back there, “no one in their right mind would just throw money away to make this happen, which is why we off-loaded this task to the government…”)

5. Ah! The solution is for the government to sub-contract out the healthcare coverage for the poor to… profit-driven healthcare businesses! THEY know how to run things efficiently and innovate to save costs! (Which is weird, because they turned down this opportunity in Step 2…?)

6. ????

7. Suddenly it’s profitable for healthcare corporations to provide coverage for the poor!

The fuck am I paying taxes for.

I was so grateful for DOGE, but it didn’t go far enough.

What Is To Be Done?

It’s not that I want poor people to suffer, I don’t. It’s dat flat red line, tho. Especially in contrast to the hill that follows.

Just look at the PROGRESS since Medicaid was established in 1965! (Pay no attention to the downward momentum it had beforehand.)

WORTH IT.

And this is all before you get Nick Shirley involved. My argument is, like every other Neo-Reactionary argument, that the self-licking ice cream cone of democratic government allows every retarded-but-compassionate idea to be used as a crowbar to get more of your money into the system through ever more back doors being created from way-the-fuck-too-many cooks in the kitchen (your government “representatives”), who will whizz it away on waste and fraud, when they’re not blowing it on legit projects inefficiently.

What’s efficient, and effective if you can commit to it, is community. Patronage networks. Local charities, volunteering yourself. Fraternities.

Or hell, for the nexus of doing exactly my decent paying job, and having friends you can air out to just to keep your sanity, I recommend putting a slice or three of your paychecks toward the one-time payment to gain membership in the Tortuga Society. It’s an online pirate ship full of based nerds like you, ready to hardy-har-har at the absurdity created by the faggots you have to work with IRL. The pressure release valve alone is worth the price, fr, but we share skills and grift each other into gigs. It’s a good brotherhood. With a few based sisters, even. A network like this may just come through for you when you need it, and even enable you to plunder these woke corporations and steal your tax money back! GET DAT CHEEZ SON (OR DAUGHTER)!

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Everyone reading this can visit Rhodes, but the founder's debrief is for the crew. Start …

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“I don’t mean to be condescending, but your life is a shriveled, distorted caricature of what it should be.”

Brock Solitt is a failed academic writing ad copy for porn until the mysterious mogul who owns the company orders a prestige film of an obscure erotic novel. They’ve got an Oscar-winning Italian director, celebrity leads, and unlimited money. Brock writes the script and accompanies the crew through Rome, Venice, the North African desert. The party goes on, spiraling ever deeper.

“Every night we heard his squealing as she engulfed him.”

Don’t worry this book will turn you on. James smuggles a serious argument about morality in the belly of a fast, funny production-disaster novel. The character names alone are worth the cover price. The author himself sat muted while we spun theories about his symbols, then came on mic to render judgment.

And a special bonus quote

“Don’t think so much. Feel more.”

“So you just do what feels good.”

“No, you try to feel what is good.”

Next time, we’ll discuss Millennium by Marty Phillips from Antelope Hill. Check it out.

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The competition is open to everyone reading this, but the coaching is for the crew. Start a paid subscription and listen.

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Topics Include:

• Starting Strength vs. StrongLifts vs. the Texas Method

• What equipment to look for

• Finding your starting maxes safely

• Resting between sets

• Form checks

• Fitting lifts around a workday

• Whole milk, eggnog shakes

• Recommended YouTube coaches

• Wilks scores, weigh-ins, and the leaderboard

• Ego lifting, hex bars, and training past 40

• Toward a comprehensive Tortuga fitness standard

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Retarded Reddit Groups Vs. Higher Fellowships

I have been a member of the Tortuga Society for almost a year at this point, and my experience thus far has been exceptional. The other day, I was reflecting upon this, and I realized something rather profound: this is not a community but a fellowship. I thought it might be worthwhile to share this little insight. Not only is it something many of you will find interesting, but in making this implicit feature of the group explicit, I hope to reinforce it as we move forward together.

What do I mean when I make this distinction between communities and fellowships? Many philosophers and sociologists have investigated the nature of community, and it’s fairly common to distinguish between a community that one joins voluntarily versus thrust into without consent.1 But we are after a much deeper point: what binds men together in a consensual community once they’ve joined?

The Group-Soul

The first, lower, answer to this question is what we could call “ignorant co-experiencing.” In these cases, the members of the group unconsciously imitate each other in a form of psychic contagion.

In your average Reddit or Discord group, people are united by a certain idea or thing. All members enjoy Marvel, identify as non-binary, are “fans” of something. They cluster around their objects of interest, seeking communion with others who share these parts of their “identity.” What tends to happen is that, over time, a collective hive-mind develops. Members of the group are either accepted or rejected based on whether they conform to the dictates of this ”group-soul” or “egregore.” Purity laws are established and boundaries become firmly delineated.2

We don’t need to posit any occult entities (but it is fun to talk that way). All we need is to recognize that what holds these groups together is something like a “field of feelings.” Eventually, all members of the group, under the pressures of conformity, begin thinking the same thing, and degenerate into some human slime-mould, with each member a more-or-less identical copy of the next.

The cult of personality is similar to the hive-mind except that, instead of arising organically through passive feeling for each other, the group holds itself together in the image of a single man. Admired for his work or his popularity, this figure dictates what is and is not acceptable and the members unconsciously mirror him. Over time, they become his minions, their genuine individuality absorbed into the field-of-feeling which is the group-soul. Interestingly, the leader is often not in control here, and there are many leaders who are tyrannized by the ideas others have of them. This is related to “audience capture” in the online space.

What I have called the group-soul is “organismic”: it tends to grow out of a group, ranging over those activities that are automatic or semi-automatic. It is also necessarily impersonal and anonymous. Over time, a set of behaviours, feelings and ideas all mysteriously congeal such that the individual members almost become instantiations of a single collective subject. I have no idea how this works metaphysically, but it is very easy to observe in real life. Sometimes you’ll find people who seem normal, but then, when a boundary of the group-soul is contravened, they will appear almost “possessed” by the spirit of the group.

The group-soul is capricious and touchy. To join a group about feminism and then reject that we live under a patriarchy is to hurt the group-soul, to attack the hive-mind, to be polluted in its sight. Of course, there are no consciously-held principles at play here. Everything lies on the emotional plane, and ideas are only important insofar as they reinforce this collective sense of identity.

What you’ll find in such groups is that the members almost always feel alone. The group-soul acts as a kind of stabilizer, providing a grounding for people who otherwise feel unstable and insecure. They join because of a shared interest, but the real purpose of such communities is to buttress a flaccid personality with collective approbation. This often results in a temporary loss or dissolution of the personality itself.

The Group Mind

There is a higher, more wholesome way of holding people together, which brings me to Tortuga. I know firsthand that Theon Ultima and Rajeev Ram have struggled to find a unifying idea or set of principles for Tortuga, but unbeknownst to them, this confusion is actually one of our society’s greatest strengths. None of the people I know in Tortuga joined because they believed in any unifying ideology. Some, like me, just joined because we liked the vibe. But what is this vibe? Is it simply the reverberations of the group-soul? No. It is a group mind.

This is actually a very important distinction—and a subtle one. I characterized the group-soul according to ignorant co-experiencing or psychic contagion. The group-soul infects us with the ideas and feelings of those around us. When Marvel Fan #1 gets angry because somebody says Marvel movies suck, Marvel Fan #2 does not perceive his anger, but becomes angry with him. The two of them feel the same way, experience the same emotion. This perverse empathy binds many groups together, but there are better alternatives.

In opposition to this passive, mirror-like identification with others, is active, personal co-experiencing. I share a sense of community with others, but the bond is directed toward something; it is intentional (in the philosophical sense).

For example, one of the common views among Tortugans is “the institutions are failing.” There are two ways this statement can unite people:

1. According to the shared emotions that arise through contemplating the failing institutions: anger, resentment or even pride at having seen through the illusions of society. In this case, the group-soul is involved, and the members are united by the emotions that the idea provokes.

2. According to a co-execution of a judgment, we agree. I’m not passively identified with the man next to me; I’m my own person who is “with him” on this issue. I can agree that institutions are failing without feeling any of his emotions.

This latter kind of relationship is much less common, and historically, many philosophers have failed to distinguish it from mere empathy.3

Intentional co-experiencing also brings about a radically different kind of community. Rather than rising up “from the bottom” and taking over everyone’s sense of self as the group-soul does, the group mind works “from the top,” progressing from shared agreement down, preserving the individuality of each person. The result is that instead of a tyrannical bundle of feelings running the group, you get a wholesome vibe in the form of shared beliefs, goals and values. I don’t feel united with you; I see where you’re coming from. We don’t identify with X; we agree on Y.

Communities united by a group mind are necessarily much more diverse because each man is recognized as his own person and there are weaker (if any) purity laws. The members co-experience each other, yes, but this is always accompanied by a knowledge of one’s own self. I “feel you, bro”—but I am not contaminated with your emotions. It’s even possible for me to see where I disagree with someone and feel united through a co-understanding of our differences.

The group mind, to me, is one of Tortuga’s biggest strengths. It is a community bound together by higher laws of feeling and respect.

Promises and Deeper Principles

This line of thinking opens up a whole world of interesting questions, the first of which is attempting to define what values, goals and ideas Tortugans share—but I will have to investigate that another time.4 Here I want to deal with one idea that I have seen in action and that is a rare gem in the world today: promises.

Most—if not all—Tortugans think that the liberal world, with its human rights and contractualism, is kind of a joke. The Tortuga Society was very explicit about this from the beginning: jobstackers were to plunder the woke corporate world, using the stupid systems to their advantage. I have no issue with this vision. In fact, the spirit of cynically plundering a rigged game attracted me when I first came across it. I agree that there are no human rights; I agree that the laws of the country and the world are merely contingent; I agree that natural law, as it is commonly understood, is deeply problematic. Many of these obligations placed upon us are spirits and ciphers. However, I still believe wholeheartedly in a specific kind of obligation: the promise.

As to recovering a proper understanding of what a promise is and what it does, my source is Adolf Reinach, a German phenomenologist who wrote a remarkable little treatise on the foundations of civil law in 1913. Reinach’s central insight was that a promise creates a genuine obligation that exists independently of positive law, social convention or psychological states. When I promise you something, I bring into existence a real claim-right in you and a corresponding obligation in myself. This is not a matter of how I feel, nor is it about social pressure or legal enforcement. It is a metaphysical fact about the structure of social reality itself. A promise made necessarily creates an obligation.

This kind of thinking runs counter to the dominant views in philosophy and law, which treat obligations as either subjective (matters of personal conscience or will) or institutional (created and enforced by positive law)—but I like it a lot.

The Necessity of Promises

I doubt all other Tortugans will ever totally agree with me on the metaphysics, but that doesn’t really matter.5 We all agree in spirit. Everyone I have spoken to feels the importance of promises. In fact, I think they are essential to any group mind and a requirement for all forms of higher community, for all true fellowship.

When I make a promise, you and I co-experience the same intention. We recognize the same object and are thereby united. Promising is essentially related to all fellowship between persons. Moreover, when I make a promise, I put my honour and my standing as a man on the line. I’m obliged, but this obligation doesn’t depend on outside enforcement: it depends on me. To break a promise is to violate yourself as a being capable of forming these higher bonds. It also severs you from the community of men whom you respect, and whose opinion you value.6

A contract is just a shitty version of a promise. It’s adversarial and assumes distrust. A contract stipulates penalties, but once you remove third-party enforcement or if you find a loophole, the obligation evaporates. Contracts render all relationships into modes of exchange, all genuine accountability into calculated commitments and our faith in ourselves into fear of punishment. There is no fellowship here, no shared co-experience, and no real respect: only empty laws, whose hollowness makes them easy to bend. It may be true that the world is built on contracts, but that’s why we have a right to plunder it.

What I’m proposing here is not naïve romanticism. If there is to be any kind of higher community at all, any group mind capable of uniting men in a substantive way, then it can only exist among those who can make and keep promises, and between those who value promises kept. In these communities, what is meant matters more than what’s written, and one’s word weighs more than any legal penalty.

The second essay of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals begins with this point: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem regarding man?”

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Pirates Who Promise

My experience inside the Tortuga Society has been characterized by promises. When someone does something, he gives his word, and that is enough. You wouldn’t believe how easy life is when you make handshake deals, when people can discuss a controversial topic and nobody gets mad, and when the man next to you thinks more about how you can succeed together than about how he can succeed at your expense.

I know I’m not an exception. I hope that by stating this, by making it explicit, I might entice other like-minded men to join because I can think of few things more valuable in the world today than trust.7

We in Tortuga are not trying to replace the state or anything crazy; we’re just creating a “walled garden,” as Theon likes to put it, a place where competence, and mutual obligation, are the norm. Members can undertake projects together (like my own Tortuga Philosophy Café - post coming soon), support one another in times of struggle, and maintain standards of excellence precisely because we can rely on each other’s word.

I do not think most people—even the members in Tortuga—have recognized the profound implications of this kind of view. Instead of trying to design the perfect system, the perfect set of “rules,” I think we would all be much better off if we merely endeavoured to be men who could make and keep promises.

I expect things to get much worse over the coming years, but one good consequence of these periods of uncertainty is that what’s truly certain stands out in stark relief. Groups of men who can trust and depend on each other will dominate everyone else, because they are the only ones bound by something higher.

As Tortugans, we may twist and even break the fake rules in the “real world,” but we play according to others that most people don’t even know exist. That will ensure our success.

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In a previous post, I announced that I would be sharing a modified version of the Starting Strength workout with the Tortuga boys. This is that.

The Starting Strength workout, like most good ideas, is fairly simple. The program consists of three days a week of training, with at least one rest day in between each training day. You will be doing 3x5 (that is, 3 sets of 5 reps) of the major lifts, and each workout, you add 5 lbs. The idea is that, because Starting Strength is geared towards beginners, you will be able to lock in those beginner gains and make constant progress. You do this until you are not able to complete 3 sets of 5 reps at the new weight, in which case there are some steps you can take to try to “break” this plateau, which we will cover below.

Eventually, this program will stop working for you and you will have to transition to an intermediate program, but you may be surprised at how long you continue to make consistent progress just adding 5 lbs every time you go to the gym.

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As some of you are no doubt aware, our beloved Tortuga Society has been going through some growing pains in the last month or two. Gaining members is a good thing, but that doesn’t mean we should rest on our laurels. Fortunately, your intrepid officer class has been hard at work expanding the Tortuga mission to both support our members’ personal improvement endeavors, as well as bind our buccaneer bros more tightly as a community.

One of our new initiatives will be the introduction of the Tortuga Society Fitness Standards. We want every self-respecting rightoid to be in shape - especially our guys. There are multiple reasons for this: on a personal level, you will feel better, you will have more energy, and you will probably live longer! And let’s not pretend your attractiveness to the opposite sex isn’t a factor here, especially for our young single bucaroos. I don’t know that you need to be hitting yourself in the face with a hammer, but hitting the gym a few times a week will surely improve your luck with the ladies.

There’s also a strategic factor to physical fitness. Everybody knows that attractive people have a natural advantage. Being in shape will help you nail job interviews. It will help you get a promotion. It will definitely help you make sales. This is true even when you are dealing with a heterosexual man who doesn’t want to fuck you. People simply react more positively to attractive looking people.

That’s why this New Yorker article was such a self-own:

This cover makes being right-wing look awesome. Which it is.

As I alluded to above, I think the “looksmaxxers” take it too far. I don’t think you should be getting leg extensions or plastic surgery, or anything, but being in shape, being well groomed, and being well dressed are signifiers of a confident, successful man. So your aesthetics matter - you are a brand ambassador for a social movement.

That’s why we will be introducing Fitness Standards to the Tortuga Society. Don’t worry if the word “standards” gave you a fright just now. We’re not going to kick you out if you don’t currently meet them. You should be looking at these standards as metrics - a way for you to identify weak areas where you should focus your efforts.

The Competition

We’ll kick off this new initiative with our first ever Tortuga Fitness Challenge. This challenge will run to the end of the summer (August 31st) and will focus on the Big Three compound lifts: Barbell Squat, Bench Press, and Deadlift.

I will freely admit that the compound lifts are often overly focused on in some right-leaning communities, to the exclusion of all else. This is wrong. If you are benching 400 lbs but you can’t run a mile, you have some major deficiencies in your training regimen. That being said, basic strength training is the core building block of an overall fitness program, and the compound lifts have multiple benefits that can’t be replicated with isolation machines, dumbbells, and other shit like that.

To motivate those of us who may be *ahem* slacking on our fitness activities, the introductory Fitness Challenge will consist of core strength training lifts. The contest will not be a competition of who has the strongest lifts, but rather who is most improved. In fact, it will probably be difficult for our more experienced lifters to win this competition, as two months isn’t a lot of time to make progress unless you are picking up those beginner gains.

But don’t worry, gymcels. We will also have a leaderboard with our absolute strongest Tortugans, so your efforts will not be in vain.

Now, without further ado, the plan:

We will be judging the winner of the competition by comparing Wilks Scores. The Wilks Score is a bit of arcane powerlifting lore which was developed to easily and fairly compare lifters across weight classes and genders. In order to compete in the competition, you will need to enter your bodyweight and 1 rep max into the above linked Wilks Score calculator. If you do not know your 1 rep max, you will need to find out by trying to lift some heavy weights. If you are a brand new lifter though, you probably shouldn’t be trying to hit maxes just yet because you don’t want to hurt yourself. It’s possible to use the calculator on a set with more reps. I might suggest shooting for a 4-rep max, and using that instead.

And that’s really it. At the end of the summer, we will retest maxes and re-calculate our Wilks scores. Whoever has the biggest difference between their starting score and their ending score is the “most improved.” If there is a tie, the tiebreakers will enter a fight to the death (sorry I don’t make the rules).

Tips For Noobs

If you are absolutely new to lifting, you probably feel like the South Park kids after the Underpants Gnomes explained their business model to them: Phase 1: Calculate Wilks Score, Phase 2: ???, Phase 3: Be Stronger. So here I will provide some guidelines for new lifters, to try and fill in that all-important Phase 2.

First, this should go without saying, but you are going to need access to a squat rack. Almost all gyms will have one of these, so you just need to find a gym close to you and join it. Maybe you live in an apartment complex with a free gym in the basement or something. Perfect. The only thing is, you can’t go to Planet Fitness. This isn’t necessarily because you can’t get jacked at a Planet Fitness, but Planet Fitness does not have squat racks. They have Smith Machines, which are for isolation exercises, not squats. Nobody cares what your Smith max is.

So find a squat rack (and a bench press, obviously - but you can drag a bench under a squat rack to make a bench press). Then, you need a program. This is another place where people get hung up on the “analysis paralysis” of figuring out which program is the best. The answer is just pick one. Especially at the beginner level, if you just pick a program and stick to it, you will make gains. That being said, there are a few widely circulated programs out there that are targeted specifically for beginners, and those will probably be your best bet. I’ll give you two options:

Starting Strength by the infinitely memeable Mark Rippetoe was the gold standard when I started lifting. This is what I started with, and it still holds up. The one critique I would make is that Starting Strength incorporates cleans into the programming, which I don’t think is strictly necessary for a beginner program. Cleans train explosive power rather than just raw strength. This is a more advanced training tool that shouldn’t be incorporated until you’ve built that foundational level of strength. Plus, it’s very easy to hurt yourself doing cleans wrongly.

You also don’t need to read that whole ass book before you get in the gym. There is a lot of technical explanation and physiology contained within this epic tome that may be interesting, but isn’t strictly necessary for you to get in the gym and start moving weights around. Ideally, you should just watch a few videos on:

• How to Squat

• How to Bench

• How to Deadlift

• How to Overhead Press

Don’t overanalyze. It’s okay to go down the YouTube rabbit-hole on lifting videos if you find that kind of thing interesting, but not at the expense of going to the gym. You aren’t going to get stronger by watching YouTube. You will get stronger by going to the gym.

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If you are a paid subscriber to Tortuga Media, you’ll get my modified version of Starting Strength, which includes cleans.

Another great option is Stronglifts 5x5. I haven’t personally done this program, but many people swear by it. It has the advantage of being completely free (they try to upsell you on the app on the site linked above, but the programming itself is not paywalled). Just from looking at it, Stronglifts seems basically the same as Starting Strength, except with 5x5 instead of 3x5, so you will be doing more volume with Stronglifts. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though it might mean you end up doing slightly less weight. The Stronglifts site also has some good advice on breaking through plateaus, which can be helpful after you’ve finished the newbie training regime.

That’s it. Get a squat rack, get a program, go to the gym. Stay motivated by checking in with the competition in the chat, bragging about your gainz, etc. At the end of the summer, we will declare a winner!

“There’s all these clowns, and then one of them is a scary clown.”

Ben Etxina is 25 in 2025, a cusper born between “Millennial dorks” and “porn-fried Zoomers.” A programmer who’s allergic to screens, he lives as the kept boy of his immigration lawyer girlfriend, writing erotica for middle-aged women. From this pad, he launches a picaresque globe-spanning bender, both fleeing and pursuing a somewhat fictionalized billionaire and his shadowy “scenebux.”

We’ve choked down a decade skin-suited novels, and we love Smith for his refusal to take sides in the Culture War. He nails one strange, specific moment (late spring 2025) and drops you into a young man braced for his coming of age.

“This is what it’s like to be 25 in 2025. Almost no one will show you that. Read Cairo Smith.”

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Next time, we’ll discuss Pornoland by Tyson James (AKA ) from Lost Arrow Press. Check it out.

If you’ve watched a $500 drone turn a $5 million tank into a smoking hole and thought, somebody is getting rich on this, you’re right. It’s just nobody in the US.

Everyone already knows that drones are changing war, it’s been on the news every night for three years, but here’s the part nobody has said out loud: the country that invented precision airpower cannot currently build the cheap version of it. The reason for that is the stupidest you have ever heard.

From exquisite to expendable

For two decades, American airpower meant the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper — beautiful, expensive, MALE-class machines (Medium-Altitude, Long-Endurance) that cost tens of millions and that nobody but a superpower could field. In the trade these are called “exquisite” systems. Exquisite as in expensive, small in number, and precious. You do not throw one away to kill a truck.

Look at the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. Azerbaijan took $1–2 million Turkish Bayraktar drones and ~$700k Israeli Harop loitering munitions and used them to find and gut Armenian armor. The Armenian separatist army, dug into its mountain defenses, had no real way to jam what was hunting it. Cheap eyes in the sky plus cheap fire from the sky, and a hundred years of armored-warfare doctrine got blown up.

Now consider Ukraine. The dominant weapon of that war is not a Reaper, but a first-person-view quadcopter, a hobby airframe with a warhead zip-tied to it. They run $200 to $2,000 a unit, built from commercial parts. They can be iterated weekly and flown straight into a tank that costs a thousand times more. The industry word for this is “attritable,” as in cheap enough to lose. If you send ten and one connects, you came out ahead by orders of magnitude. That’s the inverted cost-exchange ratio.

• FPV strike drone takes out armored vehicle: $200–$2,000 / $1–$5 million = 0.00004 - 0.002.

Now take the Geran-2. The Russians fire a lot of them into Ukraine the same way the Iranians fire Shaheds across the Strait of Hormuz. They’re kind of trash, but they’re carrying around a lot of bomb load right now in 2026. The American defense against them? Exquisite.

• Air-defense missile takes out Russian Geran-2: $3.5 million / $35,000 = 100.

Who is more likely to win by that arithmetic? Hint. Smaller numbers are good.

This isn't a fringe take. NATO's deputy supreme commander in Europe, Sir John Stringer, says the days of sitting back and engaging every threat with fast jets and surface-to-air missiles are over, and that swatting $35,000 Shahed-style drones with multimillion-dollar Patriot interceptors is unsustainable. War has stopped being about who has the most exquisite machine and started being about who can stamp out the most attritable ones. These are the munitions of the modern battlefield.

So, who has the advantage here? Who makes the cheap drones? Here is the part that should make your teeth itch.

We outlawed this industry

There is no magic in a $500 drone. Strip one down and it’s carbon fiber, aluminum, a little wood and plastic, a battery already perfected by the cell-phone industry, a motor you can wind out of ordinary copper, the same three-dollar control chip that Texas Instruments has been stamping out by the truckload since the 1990s. These are parts that any motivated teenager could find.

And American teenagers were. A decade ago, the hobbyist drone scene here was genuinely world-class. But then came the FAA. The regulatory apparatus met the emerging drone industry with a reflexive, risk-averse, process-bound “no.” You can’t do that, you can’t fly there, you can’t sell this. Fill out these forms, and wait until you give up. The hobbyists who could have launched a million hundred-dollar drones spent fifteen years wrestling with paperwork, by which point somebody else stepped in.

China, meanwhile, let its builders build. Now, they own the global supply chain. Look at the manufacturer’s label on any hobby drone, or on anything you order off Alibaba. When Ukraine needed drones at scale, a meaningful chunk of that supply ran through Shenzhen. When Beijing throttled that pipe in response to political pressure, Ukraine started losing ground. They clawed it back with home manufacture, kitchen-table assembly, and a frankly heroic gray-market smuggling operation routing parts through Europe and the Middle East. They’ve survived so far, but picture trying to win a war while your ammunition supplier is your adversary’s close friend.

If we’d had drones to sell to Ukraine … but we didn’t. We regulated ourselves out of the most important weapons category of the century.

Too Lean

The instinctive objection is, “it’s just cheap Chinese labor — structural cost advantage, nothing to be done.” Yes, China’s mass-manufacturing is a genuinely fine art and no, a domestic small-run operation is probably never going to beat Shenzhen on raw unit price. This is how China got ahead, but unit price was never the axis we’d win on.

Any cheap source manufacturing is always going to have an edge, but the thing you want is not always the cheapest thing. Everyone out there has to ask themselves whether their alliance with the PRC is permanent, and what happens if things go wrong and shipping gets interdicted.

For a generation, just-in-time manufacturing (and lean manufacturing overall) led us into horizontally integrated supply chains, sometimes of near-monopoly production. All Hard Drives Come From Thailand, Your Syringes Are Probably From The Philippines, Your Tires Were Made In Sri Lanka. It’s efficient, right up until it isn’t. A six-month chocolate shortage makes people bitchy until they get over it. A shortage of insulin, or penicillin, or bullets, and people fucking die. Drones just moved into that second category.

Nations have strategic imperatives for certain critical things necessary to maintain their sovereignty. In the modern world, that's things like food (and fertilizer), fuel/power, fresh water, and the ability to protect their borders and their citizens. In that last category you have both the literal armed forces and police and the munitions industry necessary to supply them. If you have weapons, but you’re dependent on someone else for the ammunition to keep fighting, you can’t defend yourself very long. This has led to things like concern about shortage of artillery shell manufacture, but also of course a dependency on all drones coming from China — a grave concern if you happen to be, for instance, Taiwanese.

Every nation that watched what the US did with the Predator and Reaper (and, more to the point, what Turkey did far more affordably with the Bayraktar) wants that kind of long-flight monitoring and strike, especially for policing vast expanses of ocean and low-intensity asymmetric threats like the pirates off Somalia or Malaysia. Poland is near the top of the list, and of course every Gulf state is concerned about Iranian (and Houthi) drones and speedboats. Sri Lanka wants cheap autonomous eyes over its coastal waters so badly it’s prototyped some of its own. Some nations won’t even try to build it — a manufacturing lead is hard to catch up on, and plenty of them will just stockpile drones, parts, or both, because they don’t believe they can stand up a local infrastructure. Europe is planning to spend up to €800 billion on defense by 2030, with drones threaded all the way through it. Everyone at once wants out from under the single point of failure.

Not everyone gets to be choosy. If you’re an African warlord with no industry to build your own drones, you shrug, take the bribes, stockpile what you can, and you hope the Chinese don’t decide to back your rival. You’d have taken the same deal from the Soviet Union, or the Cubans, or the CIA, or the French. China wins on price, but if you’re crosswise with Beijing’s aims, and you can imagine an insurgency suddenly enjoying Chinese support, you’d better have your own source of weapons. You need indigenous manufacture of the strategic imperatives, or a strongly allied partner who can’t be cut off by a casually sabotaged railroad. It’s wildly inefficient for most nations to run their own defense industry instead of shopping the international arms bazaar, but there are good reasons for them to do it anyway.

The right to build Bayraktars under license and make derivative versions thereof will be very useful; a whole lot of people don't trust the Turks but would like this class of drone because it's proven out. The Israelis have the same problem selling their drones; they mostly work, but a lot of people don't get along with Israel Military Industries and Israel Aerospace Industries, or can't be seen dealing with them. The appealing part for a lot of these potential customers is not just a US offering, but an indigenous solution: US tech / engineering, but with local control and manufacture so that they don’t have heartburn over their supply chain.

The suits are finally panicking

It’s fun to watch the official answer go from “no” to “yesterday.”

In June 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order titled, with zero subtlety, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance”. A month later, the Secretary of Defense signed a memo reclassifying small drones as consumable assets — ammunition — handing procurement authority down to individual commanders, and announcing that the bureaucracy’s gloves were coming off.

Builders have been screaming for a decade that the real risk is risk-avoidance. Nice of everyone to catch up. By the end of 2025 the FCC had banned new foreign-made drones (read: DJI drones) from authorization for sale, and the War Department had put out a request to industry to build 300,000 drones, fast and cheap, backed by a roughly $1.1 billion program. The man who couldn’t get a hobby permit in 2015 is now the guy the Pentagon is begging to scale.

The market has, predictably, lost its mind. The names in this space — Red Cat (RCAT), Skydio, Anduril, Unusual Machines (UMAC), AeroVironment (AVAV), Palladyne AI (PDYN) — have ripped on every headline, some of them up several hundred percent on the year. One of them, Unusual Machines, counts the President’s eldest son as an advisor and one of its largest shareholders, which tells you everything about where the connected money thinks this is going.

The actual edge here isn’t even the $500 airframe — that’s a commodity, and commodities don’t have margins. The edge is everything bolted on top: the autonomy, the AI targeting and navigation that lets the thing find its mark through jamming and spoofing, the software layer where a $3 chip turns into a weapon. That is where we could lap the Chinese, or likewise where they will push the frontier. There is a stupid amount of interest within the FPV drone space both in the fiber optic drones and in how to combat them.

The frontier past that is autonomy. No, not full autonomy. Everyone always goes down the Terminator rabbit hole, but we don’t want to whole-hog on killer robots. What if they turn around and target our own side? What people are very interested in, though, is fire-and-forget: a drone you maneuver into range, “click on” a target, and let it handle its own approach and impact.

This isn’t hypothetical. Back in 2021, a UN panel reported that a Turkish STM Kargu-2 “hunted down and remotely engaged” retreating fighters in Libya with what the report called a true “fire, forget and find” capability. The panel never actually confirmed a kill, and the breathless John-Connor coverage oversold it, but the capability is real and shipping.

Here’s where the two-tier supply chain bites again. A toy FPV drone runs on a $40 flight-controller board; an autonomous killbot doing its own computer vision and path-planning needs real silicon — an NVIDIA Jetson-class companion computer, some of it under US export control. Off-the-shelf AI guidance modules are already for sale on Alibaba, but buyers don’t trust the PRC to not put a black box in the kill loop. So, the clone projects are already underway. Ultimately, Texas Instruments can make those chips too and Sony can make the cameras. Those are names more worthy of trust than DJI.

The credentialed system spent fifteen years telling the competent people to give up, and in doing so, it handed the decisive technology of the era to an enemy. Now, what’s the next inversion, and who’s already building it?

Learn to see it coming, because the institutions won’t.

Solipsism is part of the human condition, and every generation probably thought they were witnessing a unique historical moment with themselves at center stage. The current vibe that civilization is about to pass through a one-way door is nothing new. Maybe it’s THE SINGULARITY!!!, maybe it’s THE FOURTH TURNING!!!, maybe it’s just history grinding along, but we can all feel it.

Scenebux, written by Cairo Smith and published by New Ritual Press, is a snapshot of our time, and of the (possibly hallucinated) right-wing scene of the moment. It occurs specifically between April and July of 2025; the opening scene references the death of Pope Leo on April 21st of that year. The main character and narrator is Ben Etxina (yeah I dunno how it’s pronounced either), an Idaho Basque (yes, that’s a real thing, I checked so you don’t have to). He’s a fairly ridiculous character, a recovered Internet porn addict and washed-out software engineer, writing Midwestern-Mom-porn erotic novels, and living with his serially unfaithful girlboss lawyer girlfriend in San Francisco. The book opens in a tacky, pretentious bar, with a hilarious description of Ben using the topic of nuclear war to chat up a girl. That’s the feel of the whole novel, right there: edgy humor overlaying apocalyptic dread.

Shortly afterward, a fistfight with a biker gang and a retaliatory sabotage of a motorcycle launches Ben into the meat of the book: a picaresque round-the-world chase, a sort of “Zoomer” James Bond story. Drug-addled techbro burnouts in the South Pacific, anti-AI terrorists in Berlin, a shady hedge fund manager in Dubai, and a bottom-tier spook in Laos all make appearances.

Scenebux is hilarious throughout, in a deadpan and ultra-referential way. As I said before, it is intentionally pinned to the late spring and early summer of 2025, and many of the jokes reference Substack or Twitter personalities. I won’t pretend that an oldhead like me got all of them, but I still laughed at every page. I cannot even express the joy I got from the the sly and esoteric Meat Loaf reference late in the novel.

If that last paragraph makes Scenebux sound like an unserious book, nothing could be further from the truth. Although it starts out as a farce, with the frequently drugged manchild Ben careening across the globe in an attempt to avoid retribution from the biker gang, the quest uncovers a shadowy hedge fund and a conspiracy called The Filter. Tonally, the book shifts from humor to horror, as sudden and violent death frequently interrupts scenes that begin comically. Scenebux is a fun and engaging read with an underlying thread of seriousness, as well as a perfect portrait of the current cultural moment.

I don’t know if I even believe in the Singularity, and I’m certainly not going to speculate what the far side of it will be like. Maybe nothing from this side of it will be emotionally legible to someone beyond it. But if it is, Scenebux accurately captures the vibe of standing on the brink of a great unknown.

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First contact to offer took one week. I'm still not totally over it.

A LinkedIn recruiter cold-contacted me, I had one call with her, and a day or two later I was in front of the hiring manager, talking up my data engineering skills. Within an hour of finishing that interview, they’d booked me with the department VP for the next morning. I had an offer by that afternoon. For all that we shit on LinkedIn — and I include myself in that — it was pretty insane. They moved REALLY fast.

I was coming up on a promotion and raise at my current job (call it J1) and I was trying to get some leverage to jack up whatever they were going to offer me. So I started doing market research to figure out what my skill set was actually worth.

I started by applying to a few jobs on hiring.cafe — love that website, everyone in Tortuga should be using it. Maybe 10 to 15, and I was shooting for the moon: Dropbox, Netflix, companies I had no business applying to on paper. Every one came back cold or auto-rejected. Not one led to an interview, but what did I expect? I was a stranger in a pile of strangers.

What actually worked was when I stopped trying to pile in with everybody else and made myself findable instead. I secretly toggled my LinkedIn to “Open to Work” — not the loud version with the green banner everyone can see, but the recruiters-only setting: no banner, nothing your feed or your boss can see, you just quietly surface inside the searches recruiters run. One caveat — LinkedIn tries to hide that flag from recruiters at your own company, but it doesn’t guarantee it, so if your shop runs LinkedIn Recruiter, mind that. I flipped it on in late fall, and the recruiters came. Something like 10 this calendar year alone.

The toggle only works if there’s something worth finding when they look. By the time these recruiters reached out, I’d built out my LinkedIn so the experience section was almost exactly like my resume: comprehensive detail, but not word-vomit paragraphs (I keep the actual resume to one strict page). My J1 title was right there. All the relevant stuff was on the profile.

Then the other half: I responded fast. Always had an up-to-date resume ready to send, always made myself available for calls and follow-ups, replied inside the hour whenever I could. A recruiter who has to wait two days for a reply just moves on to the next name. I had to be discoverable and ready.

Now here’s the part I can’t take full credit for. I know some of what was happening behind the scenes, because the VP told me later. The Friday before that recruiter reached out, they’d posted the job on their own job board. By Monday they had hundreds of absolutely dogshit applicants, just from the weekend. That Monday, the VP made an executive decision and killed the requisition. Then he called an account manager he knew at a staffing firm (someone he had a relationship with from a previous company) and told her to just find him someone. I think she found me literally the next day.

My luck stacked. They’d advertised it as a regional posting, which shrank the pool a lot. I’m in an LCOL Midwest area, and data engineering isn’t exactly the hottest field around here. Because they’d pitched it as a hybrid-office position, they had to geographically bound the search, and my location was sitting right there on my profile. If they’d posted it as “remote” from the start, the pool would’ve been national, and with my relatively low years of experience I’d have been passed over completely.

When they asked me how I’d do something, I never gave just one answer. Data engineering has somewhere between 270,000 and 6 million ways to solve any given problem, so I’d say: “There are a lot of ways to do this — here are two or three I’d consider off the top of my head, and obviously I’d adjust once I had more details.” I walked out thinking I’d put in maybe a 70–80% performance. It was clearly higher than that, because within an hour they’d booked me with the VP.

I also came with one hard, concrete example. I had a SQL query I’d optimized at J1 copied into a note on my second monitor, and when it came up I pasted it straight into the Teams chat and walked the interviewers through my reasoning. I could say flat out that it was saving J1 about $1,200 a year — from that one optimization. I had something real to back up my resume.

When I asked the manager later why she picked me, she said my answers showed her I thought similarly to the way she did, and she really liked that. I think that’s the multiple-answers thing. Laying out options and reasoning instead of pretending there’s one right answer is how she works, too. That’s what set me apart.

I still can’t believe the payoff. This job is over an hour from where I live. It was pitched to me as hybrid: roughly two days a week in the office, with the first three-plus months fully onsite. By the time I got to the VP, he said, completely unprompted: “Just to put your mind at ease, this is NOT a hybrid position. We’ll have you in the office on an as-needed basis, maybe once a quarter or less. We can do fully remote for you.” I don’t know if that was always the plan, or if they wanted me badly enough to restructure the job on the spot. They knew from the start I was over an hour out, so maybe they liked me enough out of that first interview that the VP decided he wanted me and was going to do what it took to keep me. My recruiters did some negotiating on my behalf too. Once the VP floated remote, I told them it was now non-negotiable, make it happen. I ended up with a 65% increase, but I'm going to negotiate again upwards.

So far, there’s no catch. I’ve been running the new job and finishing out J1 for about three weeks now. It’s an adjustment, but I think I may have genuinely lucked out. Not counting my chickens yet, though.

The front door — the apply-to-Netflix front door — is jammed. Hundreds of applications pile up there, and mostly they just get ignored while somebody with authority makes a personal call. The doors that open are the ones on the side, and they come and go quickly. All you can do is decide where and how you’ll be standing when your opportunity comes. You make your own luck.

It’s good to be a white dude in Bali.

Upon first arrival at the airport, about 15 people were trying to give me a ride to my hotel. I resisted multiple times but eventually gave in to the most persistent guy.

I recommend against this because he ended up overcharging me. If you have enough money to not care, just accept that you’re going to spend way more than you would with their version of Uber. You will have to be very firm and direct because there might be a guy who’s not particularly willing to take no for an answer.

But! He offered me his girls as he drove me to my hotel. The guy’s English was good enough, but he communicated having sex by making undignified throat noises and shit. I hadn’t even put away my luggage yet.

By the time the taxi driver dropped me off, I was pretty annoyed, so I just went along with the price he gave me, which amounted to a more expensive Uber ride by US standards. Turns out I left my credit card in the ATM in the midst of the stress of trying to figure out how the ATM worked to pay the taxi driver. But then, some man tracked me down on the sidewalk with my credit card in hand — effectively restoring my faith in the Balinese.

My first evening, I wandered my street and randomly chose a bar to check out. There was an eclectic mix of expats and locals, and the conversation turned out to be rather delightful, first featuring a flamboyant Indonesian man who was tempered by actual men from Australia and Britain, and the Indonesian women acting as a sort of middle ground between the two. I quite liked that I was the only guy in his twenties, and the only American.

I went across the street to inquire about some clove cigarettes. I don’t smoke, but at the time was lowk autistically interested in the incredibly cheap and varied selection of cigarettes offered in Bali. Most everyone smoked there, which I found to be charming at the time, cus they also had those really skinny cigarettes. As the aesthete I am, I quite liked seeing all these skinny chicks smoking skinny cigarettes, including the one I ended up fucking; more on that later.) Anyways, smoking kills and I only lightly smoked a couple for the novelty factor. This is a safe space for pretending to smoke clove cigarettes.

Bali has a healthy relationship to transactionality. In the U.S., at least in my faggy neck of the woods, people are retarded about transactionality, but in Bali, it’s spelled out. No one is getting their feelings hurt about it like a hormonal 14-yr-old girl.

Wokeism isn’t a thing there. This one caught me off guard at first, but it’s arguably what makes the place so great. The bar I mentioned, which I returned to most nights during my stay, had a Substack type of vibe — racist white men in or nearing middle age, openly objectifying the island’s abundance of beautiful women and cheap amenities, while the locals objectified the westerners’ money and appetites. All the gals at the bar are trying to get the white dudes drunk off as many daiquiris as possible, and will lowk get offended if you try to tip them cus they know on some instinctual level that tipping is not what God intended (more rumination on tipping later).

For context, I came here after a month in Australia, which I quite liked, as the woke mind virus has not quite metastasized there. So I was already buttered up and enjoying my newfound freedom to make homophobic jokes and enjoy some well deserved misogyny. I somewhat accidentally tripped really hard on acid (having had zero prior psychedelic experiences) at some night club in Melbourne a few nights before flying out to Bali, so my mind was extra open. Perhaps that’s part of why I still ruminate on this trip about once per week.

On the second night, one of the older woman workers told me that she has a lot of hot young girls in the back. The people at the table informed me that this is called “The Aquarium” — a room with large glass walls and a bunch of whores, who you can select and take back and have sex with in one of the rooms. I was intrigued.

I still had some lingering libtard feelings about the proposition, but I said yes and went back. I have to say, I was quite surprised with the selection — petite, thick, tall, short, and always Asian. They select your girl of choice by shining a laser at her until she notices.

Some local guys looking at the girls asked me if I “liked them small.” I do like them small, in fact, so I chose a petite 5’ girl. Now, though, I wish I had chosen the only girl who was making eye contact with me. She was also petite, just taller. Perhaps that sex would’ve been more passionate.

The rooms had that vaguely decayed feeling from the humidity, but were otherwise perfectly clean, containing a queen-size-bed, clean sheets, a couple bath towels, a condom, and a bathtub with a hose. There were bright overhead lights, creating a curiously clinical feeling. The prostitute I chose decided to play kpop songs on her phone the whole time.

I was still experiencing the after-effects of years of taking the blue pill, which did color the entire experience. Like for example when I confirmed her age like a good boy, instead of trusting the system and getting to it. (I must disclose that I was not in fact a virgin, but was really fucking repressed, and kept trying to solve that with more blue pills.)

It’s important to note that essentially no one there gives a shit about how much sex you’ve had — being a tall white dude seems to speak for itself. They recognize that men universally want to have sex with young women, and use this fact to make money, as a service in a pretty saturated market. A local woman told me almost verbatim that the girls are just kind of lazy and don’t do much with their lives, so there is really no need to be whining about empowerment while simultaneously touting that sex work is work, as the girlies love to do in my hometown of Portland.

I even opened up to some of the local women about my conflicting feelings on the matter, mostly just saying that I generally felt bad about the situation. Even in the moment I recognized my concern as somewhat performative. I was trying to signal moral correctness, out of a fear that my pals at the bar would see me in a negative light. In retrospect, this was completely irrational, and all the women I talked to seemed pretty blasé about my concerns, but would offer me some assurance, saying things like, “It’s okay...it’s not even bad.” In fact, one of those very women encouraged me to go to the Aquarium beforehand, saying “you can just go and smash (clapping her hands aggressively to convey having sex) and then come back and have another Long Island iced tea.

The sex wasn’t even that great. Turns out positions are more limited when a foot of height difference is involved, but the nice thing is that no one is going to care how the sex was. Neither you nor the whore know each other or speak the same language, so there’s a strong sense of anonymity. That can help you make the experience more solipsistic, or whatever mindset you need to actually get into it.

Anyway, it was so cheap you could just try someone else the next night. This, I unfortunately did not do, but I intend to return. I’m sharing this partially as a personal impetus to actually make it happen. There’s also a bunch of foreigners there as well as locals who aren’t necessarily whores, so there’s plenty of different opportunities to practice actually seducing a girl.

But it wasn’t just the sex that made me want to return — I also found a unique ease of connection. I ended up going out to breakfast, to the beach and invited to someone’s abode for dinner, all from the people I met at the bar. The conversations at the bar were also a highlight for me — an older British guy who I talked to about the aquarium, and he offered me assurance by mentioning the people he supposedly killed in war as a pilot, and still sees himself as a good person. Another Brit, this one sharing my name, sparked up a conversation that frustrated me at the moment, but since then I find myself thinking about it fairly regularly. He was basically trying to get me to question my epistemic frame, starting by asking if I knew what chem trails were, then when I would speculate, he would say, “so you don’t know,” which is actually a conversational technique I still find to be obnoxious, but it basically led to him asserting that he only believes things that he could observe for himself. I still think he was partially fucking with me, but what was so electrifying was having actual different opinions and a comfort with moral ambiguity. A restaurant owner near my hotel offered me work, help finding an apartment, and said she had some connections and could take me on a cruise around the Islands. I wish I’d stayed for longer. But I didn’t.

I was feeling rejuvenated when I arrived back home to Portland, and decided to go out to a pretentious goth club to see if the DJ was any good and try my newfound skills at meeting people in bars. I happened to be paying in cash, and forgot to tip the bartender. She was being nice, saying things like “appreciate you” until the third drink, when she said “you haven’t been tipping all night.” I informed her that I had been traveling and simply forgot, and she responded, “well you’re in America now. Not everyone can afford to travel.” She also gave me the classic “If you can’t afford to tip, don’t go out,” which I told her was stupid. It was the first time I recall hearing that line, and just clocking the inherent retardation of needing to give money to someone in order to not be socially ostracized. She told me to go away or she would kick me out, and I told the person in line behind me to be sure to tip her because she was being a cunt. I don’t think the bartender heard me because she didn’t do anything.

She did end up kicking me out, after seeing me taking a sip of someone else’s drink (which was offered to me), along with a hetero soy couple, because they’d let me hit their vape. At least I didn’t get berated “for not clapping loudly enough” as one 1-star review of the place says.

None of this bullshit would ever happen in Bali. Almost everyone in the bar I went to was vaping and smoking like it was the 50s, with zero edgy pretensions attached to it. More broadly, this American way of conducting business through guilt and fear of social exclusion would not be seen as an acceptable way to maximize profits from your patrons. In Bali, tipping is generally seen as gauche. I actually tried to tip the whore the next day due to the blue pill still in my system, and the older woman (effectively one of the madams) who originally brought me back said I could tip, but I told her how much and she was like “no that’s way too much,” so I gave the whore a more acceptable, smaller, tip, and the older woman in that moment asked if I wanted the whore’s number (I took it but she never texted me back lol). The madam told me that the tip could count towards another girl that night. I said no thanks. This makes me cringe now.

The Portland bartender and Balinese prostitutes are both transactional, but the Portland model is societally corrosive because it moralizes it and relies on petty social shaming. If the Portland bartender knew about my time with the Balinese prostitute, she would likely say something like: “It’s valid for a woman to sell her body. Sex work is work. But you should not want to have sex with her. That’s taking advantage of poor people. You should tip heavily and then leave with blue balls.” Portland is not good for the white man. I want to pay $40 to fuck a hot Indonesian girl for an hour and eat a bunch of fresh fruit. I need to move to Bali.

Kat is a sheriff’s deputy in Illinois, widowed young, drinking alone, selling case tips to a sleazy lawyer to feed the online gambling habit. She answers a domestic disturbance call, and the husband who opens the door (freshly beaten) hits on her while she takes his statement. He’s warm, glib, always checking whether the joke landed. By the quarter mark this homme fatale has talked Kat into murdering his wife for the insurance money.

Kat gets inside the house, learns that everything he told her about the woman was a lie, and kills her anyway. And that’s act one.

We went in braced for Lady Cop fiction: girlboss Sherlock on one flank, the gun guy’s fantasy action Barbie on the other. Instead, Kat is competent, somewhat crooked, and realistically female. The setting also isn’t nostalgia-bait bullshit; it’s drywall, Starbucks, 5-Hour Energy. And under the pulp sits an actual theology with a father where God should be versus a tarot-reading witch in a trailer park.

: “The author owes me a night of sleep.”

: “I quit Twitter for a week because the book was more interesting.”

In 2026, there is no higher praise.

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Next time, we’ll discuss Scenebux by from New Ritual Press. Check it out.

Author’s Note

This story was written in the mountains of Nepal in 2019 when I was 24. I was attempting to finish an impressionistic travel memoir entitled My Giant Goes with Me (which if it were published today would be subsumed under “autofiction”). While much of that work displeases me now, this little part of it hasn’t lost its shimmer and is the best thing I wrote during that period. This is also the first literary work that I was genuinely proud of and willing to share. My Urania (or LVIV, as it was originally titled) is the worst length possible for commercial purposes, sitting at around ten thousand words—too long for a short story and too short for even a novella. It falls under the category of the ever-neglected novelette. In today’s fast-paced world, however, such a length is perfect for a quick read, ideal for a chapbook. Perhaps I will do that one day, for it was written with the care and intensity of a lyric poem. While I have changed much, both as a writer and as a man, I can’t help but feel that this little story still perfectly encapsulates the kind of person that I am, for it marked something of an awakening for me. I have decided to not edit it because I know that the pretentious 24 year old me would not want some 31 year old guy messing with his stuff.

Lugano, Switzerland. May 2026

Je dis qu’il faut être voyant, se faire voyant.

—Rimbaud

LVIV

1

I always thought my best days while travelling would be full of adventure. I thought they would come from big events, daring escapes, tumultuous romances, and never in a million years would I have guessed that a dreary November week spent in a small town in Western Ukraine would contain the one genuinely transformative event in my life, the one moment that changed the way I perceive the world: against it the rest seems like denouement.

What happened during that week? To put it simply, I experienced the most intense and the most consistent form of happiness a man can know. For about a week my internal state remained fixed at the absolute maximum, though nothing much happened during that time. Not only was that week in Lviv devoid of all luxury, but there was no drama, no adventure, no sublime views. The feelings I felt rose suddenly and violently to the surface, though I suspect the pressure had been building for weeks, rising incrementally day by day. It may have just been luck that the eruption happened in Lviv, during the most relaxing part of the trip.

I had been travelling for two months. I had just graduated from college and was touring through Eastern Europe. After having been constantly around new people for more than two months I was finally all alone. Lviv was the first place where I had a room to myself. In every other country I followed the usual code of hostel life: I slept in crowded hostel dorms with squeaky, steel bunk beds; I showered with flipflops because the bathrooms were communal and stank of rotting hair; I wore a sleep mask and ear plugs to drown out the snoring; I put my bag in a locker to ensure that nothing was stolen; I wrote my name on the food I placed in the fridge—or if I forgot, found that the following day it had been eaten by some other person. To have one’s own space, to lay one’s clothes out over the floor in piles, to leave the dishes until later—these are luxuries that I didn’t know I had back home. For over two months I followed the rules of hostel life, and now, after all that time, I was finally by myself.

During that time I carried a thick leather-bound journal, which was only a quarter full despite my trip being all but finished. In my small apartment, in a room that contained nothing but a bed, a desk, and a small window overlooking the early winter grey, I resolved to work day and night to fill its pages with stories of what I had experienced, or if not with those then with thoughts, ideas, poems, with anything and everything that came to mind. I felt that I was somehow at war with that journal and my strategy was to blitzkrieg my way over the enemy’s white, lined territory as quickly as possible. My days passed according to a militant schedule: I would wake up, write in the journal, go for breakfast by myself, read, write more, go for a walk and continue on like that until about six o’clock at night, at which point I would meet up with some friends I made in Kyiv a few days earlier, and the four of us would go out for dinner and drinks at one of Lviv’s local gimmicky restaurants.

For a day or two things went on as normal. I was cheery but I’m naturally cheery, so that was no surprise. Then all of a sudden the water within me, which until that point was pleasant and relaxing, like a warm bath, was brought to a violent boil.

2

It all started with an awakening. Not a spiritual one, not some drug-induced enlightenment. I mean a literal awakening: it was 5am and my eyes snapped open so fast I almost felt the weight of my eyelids smack against the orbital bone. I have never been a morning person, and while travelling I slept until at least nine in the morning every day, sometimes getting out of bed as late as 11am and sleeping for more than ten hours. For that reason waking at 5am with no alarm and without a reason to get up was perplexing.

I also found that I was filled with desire, sexual desire. An almost unbearable pressure. I couldn’t remember any erotic dreams, and when I really thought about it all the erotic dreams that I had had in the past never led to anything as intense as this. Every cell of my body, it seemed, was trembling, flexed and flickering with excess energy. The average person would have just relieved themselves, but as I lay in bed, with sky beyond the windowpane still dark and dawnless, an obscure section of a famous book rose to the surface of my mind and convinced me otherwise. Months ago I had read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and although I’m not sure I buy many of the claims made by Mr. Hill, the chapter on sexual transmutation suddenly made perfect sense to me. As I understand it, sexual transmutation involves focusing your sex-drive onto your work. In Hill’s case that was making money; in mine The Great Journal War. The idea made sense to me in theory when I read it (I’d considered writing a short entry about the effects of pornography and diminished productivity in the journal); however, the full implications didn’t fully resonate with me until I experienced them for myself, until that morning when I sat down at my desk, the cells of my body buzzing like a hive of queenless, sexual bees, and began to write. All morning I wrote. I didn’t get up to do anything. Not to eat, not to use the toilet, not even to have a glass of water. Then at about 9am I went for breakfast at a small cafe.

I walked out into the street outside which smelled of espresso and cigarettes. The sky above me was lead-grey, with clouds so thick and gauzy that they hid the sun entirely. I was wandering around the inside of a snowglobe with frosted glass and no confetti. At the restaurant I ate by myself, unable to talk to the middle-aged woman at the counter who spoke no English, unable to talk to anyone, and the grey sky, the bland food, along with the omnipresent smell of cigarettes and the sight of bad teeth would be enough to make anyone feel cold, reflective and alone. But I am not anyone. After eating my breakfast in silence like a monk I wanted to explore, to see the city, to exert myself physically. I decided to walk to the top of a large hill at the edge of town, and all the way there I felt a spring in my step, felt my legs wanting to take off from under me, and whenever I went down a flight of steps I let gravity carry me down at a jogger’s speed—not so much walking as falling feet-first from step to step.

To be honest, no matter how hard I try I can’t rationally explain my experience of climbing that hill. In the end these words, no matter how skillfully written, no matter how cleverly contrived, will fail to capture what I felt. I can say that I felt amazing, that I felt energized, full of life; but those are logical thoughts, abstractions, and what I felt—perhaps all feeling in general—was beyond logic, and to that extent I need an illogical explanation, one that describes what I experienced during that walk on a more fundamental level. So when I say that some unknown force had anesthetized my body while I slept and removed my heart, I don’t mean it literally. And when I say they had replaced it with a V8 engine, I’m not crazy. They had drained my blood and pumped me full of gasoline, stripped the meat from my bones, shattered the bones themselves and cast me a new shining skeleton. I had a brand new body. Piece by piece they replaced the bones, the organs, the nerves, the muscles—everything except my brain. I was living in the future. I was normal on the outside but inside I was gyrating mechanically, held by steel braces and powered by gyroscopes, alternators and cogwheels. My heart stopped beating and began to purr softly, and as I made my way up the steps I felt restless, like a car about to stall. The RPMs were rolling too low; the clutch was burning. I jogged the rest of the way to the top, passing nobody but an old man with deep wrinkles who drew caricatures. He was waiting with canvas and pencil in hand for someone. I gave him a smile as I passed. I was the only one there.

When I got to the top I looked at the view, and it was terrible. They call Lviv “The Paris of the East” but there is nothing to look at, no major landmarks, only a few churches and older buildings, but nothing on the scale of what I had seen in Rome or Prague or Vienna, nothing that would impress me. Only the blue corrugated roofs covering the houses stood out—baby blue, metallic roofs which looked bright under the grey overcast sky, the colours being more saturated because of the lack of light. Apart from one segment of a crumbling stone wall the hill itself contained nothing of interest either. All of which made my feelings at that moment even more bizarre, for at the top of that hill those blue roofs could have held my attention forever, not because they were beautiful but because everything was beautiful. The sky, the trees, the steps, the blank canvas, it didn’t matter. You could have placed any vista before me and nothing would have changed. Replace the dreary Ukrainian countryside with a sunset in the Caribbean or a view from Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and all would have remained the same. I was maxed out—or so I thought.

After many pages of journaling and a nice dinner with my friends I went to bed, expecting that I would wake up at noon the following morning feeling tired, lonely, and terribly sad. Each action must have its reaction, yes? When I placed my head on the pillow at 1am I fell asleep instantly, only to awake with the same libidinous energy at about 6am the following morning. I wrote for another few hours and then left for breakfast. The cafeteria I liked was about ten minutes away from my apartment, and while walking there I experienced the rarest of events: a completely new feeling. Genuine ecstasy. I should note before continuing that I have never taken drugs and that I remain the only person I know of who never even tried weed in high school and college. The feelings I felt came from within me. I had no foreign substances in my body. I barely even drank while I was there, which is almost a cultural sin in the Ukraine.

It was another sombre morning of grey on grey. I was walking along happily when I passed straight out of my quotidian reality and stepped into another. I crossed a boundary, opened a doorway to another part of experience that until that point I had never known existed. And it was divine. I could exhaust the entire English language and still I wouldn’t have the words to describe it, for it was the most powerful form of happiness a man can know. It was so powerful that I can’t even think of a time in my life with which to contrast it against. That must be how it feels to become the Heavyweight Champion of The World after knocking out Mike Tyson, how it feels to win the World Series with a home run late in the 9th with two outs, how it feels to be reunited with a loved one after you thought they were dead, how Moses felt when God gave him the stone tablets—a happiness so full and deep that it fills every pore of your being, a flood of feelings so intense that you drown because you’re unable to swim back to the surface of everyday life. If somebody had asked me the time I would not have been able to give an answer. Only a smile. If a man would have tried to mug me I would have offered my watch as a tip. It was almost unbearable in its totality, and as I walked I looked across the streets, passing houses, benches, trees—all familiar vistas that I had seen previously that week, many times and in better light; I saw how they now possessed a sort of incandescent glow, a shimmer, how everything gave off these graceful undulations, like the air above black pavement in the summer heat. It was all liquescent and unstable somehow, as if I were in a dream. I even closed my eyes for a few seconds to see if the world would return to me in its solid form but it didn’t. Not for that block, nor for any of the following ones. In fact, I spent my breakfast in this state of divine bliss, sitting there by myself, eating a pancake and few bowls of fermented vegetables with no book, no phone. Nothing. Just the world which I felt as a fine, translucent fluid swirling around me and which I inhaled through the pores in my skin like a salamander.

Eventually it all congealed, and I returned to a state of functional contentment. On the way back home this state soon shifted and I began to worry that I was going insane. I have never been depressed, but still! Who else experiences these highs but a manic-depressive or some other mentally disturbed person? When I got back to my apartment I wrote a quick note about how I was feeling. A timeline of sorts. If I were going crazy at least I could show the doctor my progression. I was curious to see if I would have more of these episodes in the future, and how they were spaced. I had a few more but that first one remains unique, for it was the first opening, a kind of fissure along the glassy surface of an otherwise normal life, an open wound through which a deeper, more mysterious reality bled. Later, at the end of the week, that small opening would be ripped open and the full force of what flowed beneath it would bubble up and consume me completely. But that story starts a few weeks before coming to the Ukraine, when I was in Lithuania, in Vilnius.

3

I had been to Vilnius once before on that trip but after finding a cheap flight to Ukraine I came back for a couple days to wait for my flight. When I arrived the staff greeted me by name. I had spent a long night playing Risk with them the previous week, losing after my massive army was defeated by a paltry force of divinely protected soldiers at the tip of Australia who rolled a continuous string of sixes. I remember asking if I had the room to myself and they said no, there were two others in my room: a Polish girl and a Georgian one. Too bad, I thought. By this point I desperately wanted a room to myself, though I did fall asleep without seeing either of my roommates that night.

In the morning I remember rolling over and seeing long locks of wavy black hair spilling over the side of the adjacent bed. Perhaps I had hair on the mind because I was in Lithuania. I never noticed women’s hair until I went to Vilnius. It felt like I was in a shampoo commercial while I was there because every woman I saw had long, thick, silky hair. In any case the jet-black locks cascading over the edge of the bed stood out somehow. Upon reflection I can’t think of another moment where someone’s hair made such an impression on me, which is strange. Even now I’m surprised with how vividly I can picture those dark waves shining in the early morning light. While eating breakfast I met the owner of that amazing head of hair. Her name was Tamari, and she was from Georgia. Perhaps it’s the primacy effect, but her hair is always the first image that rises to the surface when I think of her.

I knew nothing about Georgia except for a few random historical facts and where to find it on a map, and to this day I have only met one Georgian person—namely her—and my ignorance with respect to this country and its people has formed the belief in my mind, however irrational, that the country is populated by the most beautiful and the most powerful people on earth because my sample size, which consists of a single individual (her), is so magnificent.

I knew Georgia was at one point part of the Soviet Union, so I had envisioned Russian features the previous night: a cold stare, fat cheeks, thin eyebrows, a large lower lip. Instead she had coffee coloured skin and dark brown eyes. There was something Asiatic in her appearance too, but she lacked the daintiness that women from India, China and Southeast Asia have. She was tall, with sleek, feline legs, large hips, a small waist, and perhaps the biggest back I have ever seen on a woman—a thick, broad, muscular back which the average person failed to notice because her features were so perfectly balanced, and because her movements were slick, graceful. Yes, she had a big back, but it looked no more out of place than the powerful shoulders on a puma. She had a wide mouth full of chalk-white teeth, each one perfect and without a trace of erosion. The geometry of her mouth must have fit the Greek golden ratio, for I’ve never seen such a perfect crescent of a smile. They didn’t stand out either, her teeth, which is to say they didn’t dominate her features. I noticed them only because she smiled often and easily. With her liquid hourglass shape, with her brown eyes and her straight white teeth, with those and with all the other complementary combinations and juxtapositions, she appeared to be a perfect mix; and one feels that if racism ended tomorrow and the best parts of every ethnic group were mixed together you would end with a people that looked like her.

We were formally introduced at breakfast but I can recall almost nothing from that first meeting. It obviously went well because it wasn’t long before me, Tamari, her Polish friend and a friend of mine named Ray went to see the Three Crosses, a monument that commemorates some famous event I knew nothing about. There was one moment of friction during that walk. An awkward silence. It came early on. I don’t remember what caused it but it was long and deep. We were walking through the park, along the edge of the river. The leaves were ablaze and the air was cold. Neither of us saying anything. It was the kind of silence that can be socially terminal if it is not handled with care. Then, all of a sudden, the perfect line came.

“You better say something,” I said, “this is getting really awkward.”

She laughed and the tension dissolved in the wind. I kept the joke for a little longer though.

“You better say something quick. This is getting super weird.”

“No you say something!” she said, smiling uncontrollably.

“Don’t turn this around on me. It’s your turn.”

“My turn?”

And so on”¦ After that everything passed effortlessly. There was never another bum note in all the time I spent with her. She was so happy, always smiling, always in good spirits. I wanted so badly to get to know her more, to talk with her more, one on one, but that evening her and her friend had to bus back to Warsaw. I went with them to just outside the hostel where they got a taxi. We hugged and said goodbye. Warsaw was behind me by this point (a previous stop), and I walked back to the hostel feeling a little sad because I knew I would never see her again—at least on this trip. There wasn’t enough time to go back West. I was on a freefall through Eastern Europe and would be passing through Ukraine and Romania before coming to Sofia where I would then be lifted all the way to London (on a flight that was cheaper than the shuttle bus from the airport to central London). There was no way of stopping that descent. The tickets were booked and the dates were set. But as luck would have it, Tamari had a weekend free while I was in Lviv and agreed to take the eight-hour bus ride to come for the weekend with me before I went South.

I had a few more days of reading, writing and walking between my first prolonged fit of ecstasy and her arrival at the end of the week. And what wonderful days they were! I thought my cheerful exuberance would fade after a day or two, but no: my feelings never dipped, never wavered. Sometimes I think the journal entries were the source, for I have never written so many words with so much passion. In Lviv, after two months of almost no writing, I had planned to catch up on all the events I had failed to record, to write down what had happened to me, what I had seen, where I had been, but soon I began writing about whatever was on my mind: about writing, reading, philosophy, walking, food, drink, happiness, and anything else that popped up. I sat down at the small desk in my bedroom before the leather-bound book with a full fountain pen and an empty mind, yet when I put pen to paper it flowed out of me at such a speed I could barely keep up: long sentences containing thoughts I didn’t know I had, sometimes using words whose definition I didn’t know. I felt I had dug a tunnel directly to a kind of subterranean mental spring, to the substrata where the unconscious absorbs its nutrients, and once there I slurped up everything I could, sucked all the muck that had been stuck there for decades along with a few glittering, unpolished gems through the straw of my fountain pen, day after day, all day, and when I finished I felt cleaned out, fresh. Like a piece of polished crystal I refracted a pleasant light in all directions.

I sometimes worried that a crash would come, that one day I would awake with a pitch-black depression that was every bit as dark as my joy was bright. But the terrifying fall never came. I was all lightning and no thunder. Day after day life pulsed along. The journal was steadily increasing in size and every night I went with my friends to a new restaurant. Lviv is full of fascinating restaurants, places so strange that they could exist nowhere else on earth. There are no regulations in Ukraine, or if there are nobody cares about them. The people of Lviv take full advantage of this and open all sorts of gimmicky restaurants, like a Jewish restaurant that has no prices on the menu and makes you negotiate, or the bar that reduces the price by half if you flash a special card. I even heard of a place (on my last day) whose entrance is an apartment door. You knock, an angry old man opens, yells at you for a few seconds, and then he leads you to the bar which is hidden deep inside. The whole town loves these strange ideas, and during the day at around 1pm you can see all the mascots from the various restaurants go for lunch, see a table with a hangman, an army general, fireman and a bunch of other strange characters seated in a circle drinking vodka, always vodka. But of all these interesting places one will forever stick out in my mind: the Masoch Cafe.

I knew that sadism comes from Marquis de Sade but had no idea that masochism finds its name from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian writer who was born in Lviv and whose short novel Venus in Furs detailed his bizarre sexual predilections. One of my friends, Danny, a great hulk of an Australian, thinking it would be a fun night out, suggested we go to the bar erected in his honour. When we arrived a hundred-pound Ukrainian girl dressed in an eighteenth-century corset carrying a leather whip greeted us. She was beautiful but she had these ice-blue eyes, the hard emotionless eyes of a shark. In a thin voice she told us we would have to sit downstairs in the cafe until a space opened in the bar, so we decided to have a drink and wait.

The cafe made in Sacher-Masoch’s honour is not a seedy place. I had actually spent an afternoon there a few days earlier without knowing about any of the history. The cafe section, moreover, remains free—which is to say you aren’t flogged by the servers. For about half an hour we drank, talked and looked at the various quotes that were printed across the walls, along with portraits of Sacher-Masoch. Then the girl with an icy glare returned, said there was space up at the bar and followed behind us as we left our table. Unbeknownst to us, we had been enjoying a regulated protection by sitting in the cafe section, and as soon as we began walking towards the bar we had become fair game. She began to whip us—and not in a cute, playful way but with the intent to hurt. The worst part was that she knew the most painful spots to hit. I would have been fine if she’d have smacked me on the ass a few times, but she continued aiming for that small area behind the knee where the skin is soft and tender. While she smacked us we all laughed (all except my friend Tom who was terrified) but she herself never so much as smiled. She just looked at us with this predatory stare, twirling the whip round and round as she looked for the proper angle to strike, like a viper.

At the top of the stairs the lights were dimmed and the walls bore exposed brick. There were about two dozen people up there, all seated at tables. (As an aside, I love that the bars are so strict about allowing people in. If there is no space they turn you away without hesitation, or they make you wait). We sat down and Tom took the space closest to the wall, hoping to avoid any future lashings. Of course, our new server—a smaller, bespectacled, librarian-looking girl—was even more cruel than the one who had greeted us initially and seemed to genuinely enjoy inflicting the pain. It was such a strange atmosphere because most of the time it was like any other bar, but when the girls came around they would give you a firm smack on the back. And they were stealthy about it. Tom was always looking around, not wanting to get hit, and occasionally I would see that small Ukrainian girl slide around behind him, tensing her arm for a quick snap, and then receding into the centre of the room after noticing that Tom had sensed her presence. Occasionally she did slink up on him, give him a big whack and then saunter away silently while she held back the curl of a smile.

All of this was quite fun, but things really got interesting when the show started. After about fifteen minutes they selected two girls, Americans I think, and made them bend over a pair of adjacent stools. The girls were only smiling drunkenly at each other awaiting their comical punishment. The rest of us looked over at them, bewildered. Had anyone walked in a few seconds earlier they would have thought this was like any other themed bar. The librarian and the ice queen came out with their whips, and we all expected a cute, funny demonstration. Instead they both gave the Americans a hard smack, and the crack of the whips muted the small whimper that both girls let out. They looked to the other in disbelief at how hard they had actually been hit. They couldn’t believe it. None of us could. They endured half a dozen similar strikes and were brave about it. When they returned to their seats everything returned to normal. the servers continued their rounds, acting as if nothing had happened.

I had been teasing the librarian all night, telling her that the slaps felt good, flipping the power switch a bit. I was just so full of energy that I couldn’t help being difficult. I also wanted to get in one of the shows. For one thing, when was I ever going to do something like this again? For another, I was genuinely curious to see if I would enjoy it. I’ve never had thoughts about being flogged, but one never knows what lies in the depths of the dark spring! I was game for anything. When she finally came out I was made to remove my shirt and she brought this large stick with leather straps around the ends.

“Okay, sexy boy,” she said in a high-pitched voice.

I didn’t like being subdued with the straps, but I had already committed to participating. I didn’t want to be that guy and duck out at the last minute. I put my hands in the straps and the large stick over my shoulders. I checked to see if I could get out of it, and I could. (I’ve always had a slight fear of being helpless; seen too many movies where people are killed after being incapacitated.) I knelt down against a chair with my hands behind my head. She lit two candles and began dripping the hot wax over my back to the sound of everyone’s discomfort. To be honest, it wasn’t that painful. The wax congeals as soon as it touches the skin and you feel only the flash of the first contact. Nothing very erotic about this either. If I’m honest it was just annoying. After about a minute she blew out the candles and plunged the stalks into my back. That I felt. I thought I was done so I stood up, but she angrily told me to get back down. She wasn’t finished. Then the whip came back out—perhaps a bigger whip—and she said to me in a piercing, strangely cute voice that was loud enough so the rest of the bar could hear, “I will now hit you seven times, and after each time you must say: I want more.” The I want more bit seemed repulsive to me somehow, servile. And I think here, at this moment, I understood the essence of masochism: it’s not about the pain per se; it’s about submission. The pain exists to stimulate the I want more bit. It’s wanting more, the desire to be dominated that some find so pleasurable. I felt like I understood though I did not feel it. To be honest, I just wanted to get it over with. When she hit me the first time I said, very unenthusiastically,

“I want more.”

“Louder,” she said, hitting me again.

This time I was quiet, and my silence seemed to anger her a bit, to frustrate her.

“Say it!”

Again, unenthusiastically: “I want more.”

“Louder!”

And here I may have let my high spirits get the best of me. Perhaps I would have been better off playing along, indulging her a bit, but instead I replied, “You’re going to have to hit me harder if you want me to say it louder.”

I don’t know if these words enraged her or removed the precautions that she normally took, but she began to beat the living shit out of me. She brought the whip high above her head and came down hard. The bar gave out a loud vicarious cry as I kept silent. I think it was my desire to see how far she would go and my curiosity to see how much I could take. My silence made her even more wild and she continued well after the seven hits she had promised. “Say it!” she said, hysterically. Silence. Determined to get a reply she adopted a new, machine-gun-style technique and began to hit me non-stop, as hard as she could with no breaks.

“Say it! I want more.” And then, timed with every hit: “I. Want. More. I. Want. More.”

Finally the pain was so intense that I said it, and as if it were a safe word, she relented. I must have been hit over twenty times. I stood up but she still wasn’t satisfied.

“One more.”

“You know what, I think I’ve had enough,” I said.

“No! One more!”

“Say please.”

“Please? I don’t say please. You say please!” Her eyes were burning behind her square-rimmed glasses. I thought I saw steam on their surface.

“Okay one more.”

I knelt down and she gave me one final smack. I was silent. When I was finished my back was almost bleeding. Large red striations ran lengthwise with studded bits of wax still caked on. The raw skin flared and burned as I slipped my shirt back on. When I got back to the table Tom asked me why I had taunted her so much and to be honest, I didn’t know then and I am unsure even today. All I know is that I like to push things to the end. I constantly want to feel the edge of what I am comfortable with, and while in Lviv I had the strange feeling that the edge had dissolved completely, that every obstacle could be overcome—every obstacle, that is, except for that demonic, hundred-pound Ukrainian girl.

I left the Masoch Cafe full of energy, not sexual energy but adrenaline, as if I had been in a fight, and to be completely honest in the minutes following our departure I would have loved a fight, would have loved if some drunk had come out of a shadowed alleyway looking for trouble. My body was on red alert. The nerves on my back were flaring up intermittently, as if someone were revving the engine. Of course, nothing happened on the walk back to the apartment. I wrote to relieve some of the tension and then fell instantly asleep. On my side.

Sometimes when I tell this story (and I don’t show the video) people think I am making things up or exaggerating. But as you can see, this was what I looked like when I got back to my apartment. I learned then that I’m definitely not a masochist. I must admit I didn’t really see the appeal then and I still don’t. I just remember being very angry and very sore.

4

Were there any problems that week? Any low points? Yes, yes there were. But only one. It was the morning Tamari arrived. She had taken the night bus and was scheduled to arrive in Lviv early that morning. At 4:30am. I didn’t want her arriving by herself in this strange country early on a cold November morning, so I roused myself at 3am and walked to the bus station. Although the rain had stopped some time ago, the light from the streetlamps wriggled across the cobblestones in wavering filaments, and the trees lining the streets were slick and gleaming, like bundles of black wire, each branch diamonded with small drops of water.

It was a long walk. Took me about 40 minutes. When I finally got there I ordered an espresso at the small cafe and texted her. She would be there soon. She was just crossing the border, and once past her data would be gone which meant I would no longer be able to talk with her or find out where she was. When first she passed into the blind zone I waited patiently, even happily. I had brought an ereader and a pen and paper, so I could easily distract myself until she arrived. I still remember the name of the company: Polski Bus. And I remember everything during the next hour.

At 4:15am I see a large blue bus enter the station. I think for a moment that perhaps she is early, but soon I see that it is not a Polski Bus. I read for a bit, jot some notes in a small notebook and then see another bus pull into the station. It’s 4:30 now. The time she should be arriving. I can’t see the company name in the distance, so I pack up my things, pay my tab and head out through the cold November wind. When I get there I see that it is no Polski Bus. More reading, another coffee. Then a new set of buses pull in, but still there is no Polski bus. Now she is late and my mind starts to wander. Perhaps they are stuck in traffic. Perhaps they had a flat. Perhaps”¦ and then thoughts of every kind assail me: the bus has a flat tire and is pulled over at the side of the freeway—no, it crashed and everyone died; there is another bus station in Lviv and she is waiting there; she is already here and is robbing my apartment. There is still no Polski Bus. A battle ensues between my rogue unconscious mind and the higher-level version of myself whose job it was to patiently and carefully disassembled those deranged arguments, but every time I succeeded in convincing myself that no disaster had occurred a new one cropped up, a new disaster, a new strange conspiracy. She was never coming. There never was Polski Bus. This was all a cruel joke. And on and on and on”¦.

I wanted to leave that small cafe but was worried that I might leave and then Tamari would arrive, alone, expecting to see me, and then be stuck out in the cold. Finally at 5:15 I made an ultimatum: I would leave at 6am. By now the paranoia had subsided and I was waiting again without any mad thoughts, though they were waiting too—anxieties and fears, doubts and worries—they were rapping their knuckles on the cold frame of the door, trying to get in.

Then at 5:30 a bus pulled up. A Polski Bus! I ran from the cafe and stood outside the door. A herd of old Poles passed me down the steps and collected their baggage. The smoke from their breath mixed with the exhaust fumes of the bus. So many Polish people, so much pale skin, so much blond hair. Where was she? I waited and waited, but she never came. An old man stumbled out of the bus and I looked inside and saw that it was empty. With a cloud of worries closing in around me yet again I started walking towards the cafe—but then I heard my name, heard it the way one hears a car driving past beyond the open window, far off, as if coming from the night itself. I turned, looked around, and then I saw a silhouette with a scarf wrapped around its head, a shadowy, backlit body from which no details could be discerned, but I could tell her by the shape, by that feline hourglass torso, that it was her. I came closer and then I saw her smile, a sort of crescent moon rising out of the wispy folds of her scarf. We embraced and then I immediately asked her why she was so late. She looked at her watch. “I not late. I ten minutes early!” I told her it was almost an hour past the time she said she would arrive, and then everything clicked, with the memories of maps, flights and latitudes falling into place all at once: there was an hour time change between Warsaw and Lviv.

The sky now paling at the edge. The air still sharp and frosty. Warm exhaust fumes from the taxis rising up between our legs, rising and freezing clear. After so much mental activity I felt burned out, tired, frozen stiff. But then, standing there, side by side, I felt her fine fingers weave silently in between my own. So warm! So soft! Her long smooth fingers interlaced with my own. And the spark from that small embrace travelled through the arteries, up the arm, all the way to the heart which was now racing.

5

Back at the apartment I had prepared the fold-out couch for her in case she wanted to sleep in different beds, but immediately upon entering she declared in her usual straightforward manner, “I will sleep in thees bed,” meaning the other one. My bed. We changed, laid down, and I turned off the light. Then, propping myself on my forearms, I leaned over just above her, said goodnight, looked into her eyes, and bending down slowly, kissed her.

The next few minutes were silent but not without sound, for there can never be a perfect silence. What we call silence is really life played softly with an adagio tempo, and those different melodies yield different kinds of silences: there is the silence of the waves breaking across the shore of a deserted beach, the silence of the wind sliding through a field of tall grass, but this was the silence of two bodies coming together, of hands on soft cotton, of sheets shifting, of heavy breaths and hot clumsy kisses. But then there was a noise which, like the first bolt of lightning on a summer’s night, broke the silence:

“Fuck you!”

The soft features of her face had hardened and her jaw was clenched tight. I stopped immediately, but as soon as I did she told me to keep going. Everything was fine, she said. And that was it: no explanation, no warning, no holding back. From my perspective this demonstrated supreme—no, divine trust. Her swearing was so important, so idiosyncratic and remains so vivid in my mind for just that reason. That whole week was marked with extremes, with the dissolution of boundaries, and the swearing (along with the biting, the scratching and all the rest that followed that night) seemed perfectly natural. Sometimes I feel that it couldn’t have happened any other way. Life itself was open, volatile, and crazy during that time; and since sex is part of life like any other part, it follows that it too would be open, volatile and crazy.

I had never given myself to anyone the way I gave myself to her. I had never before surrendered so completely to anything or anyone—even myself. For the first time in my life I allowed the full spectrum of my feelings to manifest, allowed the deepest parts of myself, the darkest, most powerful parts of myself to rise up without fear of what they were or what they meant. It was utter chaos, yet somehow within all that chaos there was an order, a unity. Oneness. And though it seems strange to use a mystical vocabulary when you’re talking about rough sex, it makes perfect sense to me. In Lviv there were no boundaries or borders. Just free expression, creation and liberation. We were barely more than strangers to each other, and yet there was a closeness and a passion that went far beyond the base animal cravings that such a meeting should have engendered. We could say anything, do anything, and it was all perfect. Every word, every act and every thought was justified and righteous because we were their creators. At times it was violent but so are thunderstorms. And if the sea, sun and sky are all good, then thunderstorms—which come from all three working together—must also be good, even though they are dark, violent, destructive.

Afterwards, she nestled up beside me—calm, quiet, content. Like the kettle after it’s been taken off the burner. I never asked why she swore and she never mentioned it. I said only in passing that I thought it was primal—a word she didn’t know—and never brought it up again. There was no need. At the time I understood it all without understanding anything.

6

To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect with Tamari. I knew she was happy and easygoing (my two favourite traits) but in all fairness we hadn’t spent much time together, and part of me was worried we may not get along. There were no problems; our time together was a perfect symphony. In all my travels I have never been around someone so easily. Never any tension, never a single bum note.

As with the rest of that week, the actual events that took place were simple and unexciting: we went for coffee at cafes, we made chicken and rice for dinner—or rather, she made chicken and rice for dinner (I was useless)—we hung out with friends, wandered the geometrically arranged streets of Lviv, inspected the churches that lay sprinkled throughout the city, and she studied for her exams while I wrote. Honestly, I can’t convey what happened when Tamari came to visit me. I could describe the city of Lviv. I could tell you how it fans out in concentric squares with the town hall sitting in the center, how the buildings looked, how the food tasted, but you would never understand what it felt like to walk through them, to wander under the endless grey sky without a plan, stopping now and then at one of the many beautiful cafes to enjoy an espresso, a glass of brandy and a piece of black-forest cake, the occasional cigarette. Perhaps the events aren’t important in themselves; perhaps it was our being there together that made them such. Because during that time I was still full of forked lightning and she was radiant as polished zinc: everything we saw was spangling and metallic, everything we touched was left galvanized and glowing in memory.

She was the most confident woman I have ever met, the most centred, the most joyful. I remember one night she was talking about her childhood, about a certain girl that didn’t like her. I couldn’t believe it. She was so happy, so kind, so easygoing. How could anyone dislike her? She told me the reason: “because I was more beautiful.” What I found amazing was that there was no trace of ego in that statement. She talked about her beauty the way she would have talked about her height or the weather. It wasn’t something to be proud of; it wasn’t a foundation upon which to build self-esteem. It was a fact. She was beautiful. There was no need to feign modesty or any attempt to impress me. It was a detached statement. She had no stake in it. And I feel that if anyone would have told her that she was not beautiful, rather than anger, sadness or some other negative reaction, she would have met them with an emotionless, bemused look—the same look that she would give if they had told her she was four feet tall with platinum blond hair.

She was Orthodox but embodied more stoical and Buddhistic virtues than any self-proclaimed Stoic or Buddhist I have met. She hadn’t read the books, nor did she care about the cerebral arguments: she lived it, embodied it. Nothing could suppress her ardour or diminish her insatiable love of life. She used to be a runway model when she was young but stopped at the age of fourteen. I asked why and she said, “I learn that once you get older you must do things for photographers to be model. I didn’t wish to do those things. So I quit. I would rather be happy. I just want to enjoy my life.” Again, not an iota of negative energy. She retained the same smouldering glow that she always had. And what wisdom at fourteen! To make that decision, to walk away from it. There was no need to get angry at the way the world was, even if that anger was justified. She had made a decision to be happy and nothing, not the cruelty of the world, nor any comment made by any person would disturb that peace.

She smoked occasionally, though you would never have guessed it with those chalk-white teeth. Her body seemed too strong to be affected by the tar and other toxins. I took up the habit for the week I was there, buying a few packs for five dollars, and I retain such fond memories of lighting up in the cafes with an espresso, in front of churches, restaurants and bars, or late at night on the small balcony with all the lights out, overlooking the small courtyard. I had never smoked before and thought I would do it for a week or two and then quit forever. Tom, a recently recovered smoker himself, hated this idea; thought for sure I would get addicted. I didn’t but the week in Lviv and the week that followed made me understand why people smoke—that is, what they get out of it. Having never smoked myself, having never tried a cigarette, I didn’t understand why people did it. There is such a campaign in Canada against smoking that I never considered doing it. In Ukraine, however, as well as the rest of Eastern Europe smoking is the norm, just like drinking. Everyone smokes, and the small kiosks along the streets sell cigarettes in beautiful cases. No pictures of people with rotten teeth or holes in their chests. It’s like going back in time to the sixties, to a place where everyone is blissfully unaware of the dangers.

What else is there to say? I was happy during those days. And although in general I am a happy person, possessing a naturally cheery disposition, this was something different, something more profound, what might be called a metaphysically significant form of happiness: happiness that solves the riddle of human existence. Although I wasn’t able to see all the implications, the first throb of this revelation came to me during the one full night we spent together. She was sprawled out, fast asleep beside me. All the lights were off, but the room was suffused with a dusky blue glow that kept everything from dissolving into darkness, the walls and sheets and limbs of our bodies shining with a cold phosphorescence, as if magnetized with the dust of finely ground sapphires. No camera could have captured the seething beauty of that scene: the smoking blueness, the bed like an ocean under a new moon, those ruffled sheets rising with the tide of her breath. I remember just laying there, looking at the bed, at the spread of it, and thinking how happy I was—not just happy, fulfilled. I remember thinking that I would change nothing. It was a cheap one-bedroom apartment. It was November in a small grey city in Ukraine. And yet if I had all the power and money in the world I would still have chosen to be there. With her.

In an instant I understood that everything I had wanted in the past was an illusion: a penthouse suite could not have given me a better sleep; a five-star restaurant could not have nourished me more than her chicken dinner and my rice pudding. Line up all the woman in the world and I still would have chosen her to be sleeping soundly beside me. All my dreams, all my yearnings, all my desires for more suddenly fell away, dissolved into nothing, and I felt that I was in possession of the one thing that everyone wanted, a peace and happiness that can’t be bought or earned because it is not of this world. The hedonistic calculus which until that point had ruled over my life now seemed worthless, because nothing could have been added or subtracted to make this moment any better: somehow all of those pieces, small as they were, summed to infinity.

7

At night the bus station was terribly disorganized, and she almost missed the bus. We ran from stall to stall asking which one was headed for Warsaw. Nobody spoke English, so Tamari had to ask in Russian which was shakily understood by most. When we finally found it I put her bags in the storage compartment of the bus. Then, with the sour grey fumes spilling out over the road, we hugged, kissed, said goodbye, and before disappearing into the mirrored belly of the bus she turned and gave me one more smile, that same smile I had been enjoying for the past few days, a smile that blazed white hot and steaming amid the frost and then smoke; and that’s my last image of her, that’s how I see her now and what I think of when I reflect back on those days we spent together, days which remain clear and bright and sharp, as if they were tattooed on my brain moment by moment with Japanese wooden needles, days which will remain till the end because they, like her smile, were perfect.

Admittedly, our time together was short but those short days were so densely packed with insights, laughs and meaningful moments that they take up more space in my mental firmament. Never before had I been so consciously aware of time’s relativity, for that week stands out as a trip unto itself. Like a little, glimmering constellation.

When I left the bus station I decided to walk back instead of taking a taxi. It was my last night in Lviv and I know of few more satisfying experiences than to walk the streets alone while reflecting on the silence of the surrounding night. I had prepared mentally for Tamari’s departure, and though I wished she could have stayed, wished that we both could have stayed, I knew all along that it would end like this and that there was a good chance I would never see her again. Nevertheless I felt a wistful sorrow as I crossed over the steel tracks of the tram system, not because she was speeding away from me, but because all of it was speeding away from me—my youth, my time overseas, my memories, my whole life—all of it was slipping away, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Her departure betokened the end of all things, and now everywhere I looked I saw time ticking down. The sky was clear for once but when I looked up I saw those glittering, steely lights going dark. One by one they dried up and died out, and the darkness around them grew until there was a solid black sheet above me. Then the streetlamps began to fade, and as they dimmed the world broke down: the parked cars fell apart, the leaves and branches blew off the trees, the cobblestones cracked and crumbled. The wind blew through the streets and the houses dissolved as if they were made of dust; then the cars, then the trees, then the whole world—dust. Everything was ticking down to this. A fuliginous, atomic fog. No motion, no heat, no colour, no substance. Everything would eventually go dark and Tamari’s departure was a pencil-thin shadow cast by the monument of the past few days, a cruel reminder of the endless night to come.

It was the only time during that week that I felt low, and it was about as low as I have ever felt in my life. But then as I was walking past an empty park I heard a car coming from behind me, heard its tires popping along the cobblestones, and I felt the sound of each stone reverberating up my spinal column, each one louder than the last, each one bursting like a small carbonated sphere along the surface of a glass of Dom Pérignon champagne. All of a sudden the world came flaring back to life and I felt that I was full of these small spheres, that I was boiling over. I was in awe: in awe of the sound, the stars above me, my past few days; in awe of Tamari, of the food, the coffee, the cigarettes; in awe of my trip so far and all the trips that had yet to come. Having been dropped into the abyss my pupils had suddenly dilated and become accustomed to the lack of light. I could see clearly, and all the previous fears, doubts and worries, all the arguments, theories and conjectures—they seemed utterly unimportant. In a way, what I felt then was the obverse of depression. One need not ask the depressed person why they feel that life is not worth living in the moment because their symptoms are immediate and self-evident. Now, as I fell tumbling into the end of everything I just knew: it was all worth it. I wouldn’t say I had any answers, but rather all the questions ceased to matter. If mysticism begins when you stop asking questions, then I’m a mystic. There was no need to cling to a metaphysics or an idea about God, reincarnation, life after death, destiny, no need to try, no need to do anything but spread your arms and take it in.

To surrender yourself completely, to allow the world to fill your every pore, to inhale the cold air, hear the sound of rippling rubber tires and see the stellar lights trace their arcs across the sky, to soak it up like a sea sponge and inhale the mineral-rich currents of the present moment. What else was there to know?

All this happened within the span of a couple seconds, and once the car passed and the popping faded into the night I was left with a strange mélange of disparate feelings. Such a juxtaposition! The darkest depths and the brightest heights! I was staring into this pit of pain and sorrow and felt myself falling into it. A second later I was floating, pumped full of helium. But if space is infinite what is the difference between falling and floating? Perhaps that which I loved and that which I hated were one and the same thing, for during that week I was constantly intoxicated by the flux of phenomena, by the sun rising, by rain falling, by a soap bubble popping as I did the dishes, by anything and everything, but at the same time all of those changes cast a melancholy shadow because they meant the end of whatever beautiful thing had just preceded them. A sunrise burns out the nighttime peace and rain destroys a sunny day. I love watching the change but I mourn the loss of what is changed. And though I felt that everything was somehow worth it in the end, this recognition did not negate the essential tragedy: Tamari was gone, my perfect week had ended, I was getting older, and someday far in the future it would all go dark.

I write this now as if looking back through the back end of a telescope. Everything is far away, cold, petrified. As I sat for a few minutes on the curb I felt all of this physically: a pressure behind my eyes, a sense of being too full, as if my body contained too much blood. I was bloated and forced to sit down on the curb for a few minutes with the liquid hanging at the edges of my eyes, held in place by mental surface tension. Gradually, the tears began to recede from my eyes and pooled at the base of my throat, where they coagulated into a hot, sharp lump. Then they were shed, slowly, breath by humid breath, into the night.

THE END

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