Louis Moreau Gottschalk: Creole Composer

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829 – 1869) was at least a double-threat: Half-Jewish, half-Creole (which means half-black and half-white, on his mother’s side).  A fiercely proud son of New Orleans, he nevertheless proclaimed his loyalty to the Union on Secession and spent the years of the Civil War touring the Federal States, including New York State, where he played three times on the third floor of Old City Hall in Oswego, on Lake Ontario. In an interview with the Palladium Times (Oswego) in 1863, he declared that the young women of Oswego were the most beautiful in the entire geography north of the Mason-Dixon Line.  Gottschalk was related by two or three removes to General Beauregard, and so, on the word of my grandmother, am I.

Reversion to Tit for Tat

As the optimal strategy for iterated games, Tit for Tat long ago became the norm and basis of human social coordination. It is manifest in our sense of fair play, in our customs and laws, and in all our economic exchanges. Tit for Tat is then a strange attractor for human societies. They all tend toward it, homeostatically. The further you push a society away from Tit for Tat, the harder will it try to get back.

Prevent a people from responding to tats for a long, long time, and eventually they will snap. The frenzy of the explosive rush to restore equilibrium will manifest in a million tits for every tat. Those who had lately done well by tatting will find themselves all tits up.

It will be a bloody ugly rebound.

No Title Necessary: Res Ipsa Loquitur

Comments invited.

Our Turn is Now

With the end of the Great War of the 20th Century, both China and Russia rebooted. Both are in the painful, joyful, difficult process of shedding the social forms they assumed under the conditions of Total War more or less hot, and returning to something more like their ancient traditional orders. Now it is our turn.

God send our reboot is at least as pacific as theirs.

Playtime is Over

When you reduce selection pressure as the West has massively done since the Industrial Revolution, you get a lot more depravity (you get r instead of K), because the relative penalties to error and vice go way, way down. And vice versa: when you increase selection pressure, the relative rewards to virtue go way, way up, so you get lots more virtue.

We have no immediate prospect of an uptick in natural selection pressure, although the handwriting is on the wall. It’s out there (it always is).

But Trump is imposing artificial selection pressure (in part because he and his ilk can comprehend the writing in flame on the wall (to the depraved at their banquet, it is gobbledygook, nonsense, mere noise: mene, mene, tekel upharsin)). His basic message is simple: Playtime is over, no more pretend, everybody out of the pool, time to get dressed and back to work.

The liberals are going crazy because this strictly artificial – i.e., merely social, rather than biological – increase in selection pressure pushes the same neural and cognitive levers as would be triggered by a sharp uptick in natural selection pressure. It feels to them like a sort of death. They are terrified of death. Trump makes them aware of their death. Like death, he just doesn’t care about their whining (as much as they are used to). So they panic, and then they turn to defensive rage. It’s a tantrum.

“You’re Fired!”: Trump Fires Obama (And Bill Ayres, and Possibly George Soros)

“You’re Fired!”: It is now clear that James Comey was the chief Obama-hangover and Soros-seditionist in the Post-Obama federal government — a mole doing Obama’s bidding (that is to say, Bill Ayre’s bidding and George Soros’ bidding) in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s humiliating defeat in November.  Trump’s move was not only morally and governance-wise justified; it was symbolically brilliant: Comey received notification of his firing via a hand-delivered message during his speech before an FBI “diversity and recruiting” seminar in California, as I understand it.  The best way to drain the swamp is to let the swamp know that it is being drained while it is making a narcissistic swamp-speech in another swamp.

And while Trump was firing Comey, he was conversing in a friendly way with the Russian ambassador! 

I am currently reconciled to President Trump.  A friend of mine, who voted for Hillary, has come over the the Dark Side and is now in favor of President Trump.

Faster, Pussycat — Kill! Kill!

President Trump’s betrayal of his promise to repeal Obamacare has been disconcerting, as has the GOP’s recidivism in not sending to the CEO the blanket-repeal that they sent sixty times to his precursor in office.  No one objects to Obamacare relevantly.  That it is piss-poor healthcare is incidental.  The essential objection to the “law” is that a two-thousand-page “law” is a contradiction in terms.  A two-thousand-page “law” can be nothing other than a bludgeon of tyranny, to be used against the freedom – and the discretion, and the wisdom – of the people.  The Trumpmeister needs to live up to his campaign promise, the position to which he owes his election.  To quote the title of the Russ Meyer’s 1965 sexploitation movie: “Faster, Pussycat – Kill! Kill!”  Kill the “law” and start over.  Kill it.  Stomp it into the ground. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, and kill.  Trump should throw away his Pussy Hat and act like a man.

Hacked by Russia: A True Confession

It is not from any desire to shock my fellow Orthosphereans, but merely in order to explain how, beginning as a bland and generically liberal person, I came finally to be associated with an ultra-right-wing website obviously controlled by the spuriously defunct KGB, that I make the following confession of my long history of seditious crimes and treacherous misdemeanors. The evidence against me is overwhelming.  Below is Exhibit No. 1.

Left: Yessen Zhazoursky, Dean of the School of Journalism, Moscow University; Right: Yours Truly (TFB),  Doctoral Candidate in Comparative Literature, UCLA.  (Fall 1986)

The location was a beach house on Old Malibu Road, with convenient access to the Pacific Ocean hence also to surreptitious traffic to and from casually surfacing Soviet submarines in Santa Monica Bay.  (See the recent Coen Brothers film Hail Caesar!) I call attention to a damning detail of the photograph.  Obviously the Dean and I are exchanging vital, secret information in the medium of coded inscriptions in a notebook that can be concealed in a jacket pocket.  The red stripes of my shirt might also be significant.  By the way, the affair had been organized by Pepperdine University, long known as a communist front.  Below, again, is Exhibit No. 2.

The Cure for Fascism is Almost Always More Fascism

Accusing people of fascism seems to be all the rage nowadays.  A popular jingle puts it this way:

No Trump!  No K.K.K!  No fascist U.S.A!

Getting the meter right is a little tricky at first, but as this jingle is almost always a mob chant, newbies seldom have to go it alone.  If you try it at home, I suggest that it is most fun to really dig into the three K’s, so that they sound like the rat-tat-tat of a pistol firing, and then stress the first syllable of the word Fascist in what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called sprung rhythm.  Don’t repeat the rat-tat-tat effect with the U, S, and A., though, since this trips up the meter.

The Second Reality Crumbles – Short Take I

The Left believes itself to be historically inevitable.  The Left vehemently execrates anyone who denies its fundamental premise that it is historically inevitable.  To the Left, people who think otherwise than that the Left is historically inevitable are not thinking at all: Such people are ignorant, boorish, and very likely incapable of thinking – or, as the Left has long called it, “critical thinking.”  (I note in passing that the phrase “critical thinking,” like the phrase “social justice,” conforms to the Leftist linguistic pattern of taking an ordinary and perfectly well-understood noun and obliterating its standard meaning by the prefixation to it of a modifier which is actually a negation.)  Leftist “critical thinking” forecast the outcome of the 2016 presidential election many months in advance.  The election would go “inevitably” to That Woman.  The fix was in and the fix was cosmic or perhaps ontological.  Nothing could un-fix it, right?  However, the “inevitable” outcome failed to manifest itself.  For the Left, this constituted a cognitive, but more importantly an emotional, catastrophe, the equivalent of Krakatoa suddenly erupting in San Francisco Bay and spoiling everyone’s fun at the Gay Pride Parade.  The Left has always lived in a second reality, but now events had shaken that second reality to its phantasmal foundation, and the whole illusory structure began to collapse.