Over-parenting now resorting to new lows

During the initial stages of the helicopter parenting trend, some changes were not so ridiculous. Not allowing your kids to hang out at the mall by themselves, for example. It's a sheltering over-reaction, but at least the imagined threat was threatening, if you believed in it -- kidnappers, drug dealers, etc., having access to your kid with no adult supervision to get in the way.

But that was then. It's more or less a given these days that kids can't hang out in public places (even in all-white areas). And yet the drive to reduce potential threats must continue, in the OCD control-freak mindset of today's parents. The imagined threats will therefore become more and more laughable.

My mother passed along some news that at a local library (in an all-white, upper-middle class suburb), they put Scooby-Doo DVDs in the adult section rather than the children's, because they're just too scary. I used to check out Night of the Living Dead from that library when I was in 1st grade, but that was way back in the '80s (and I didn't need my parents' card or a permission slip either).

Then while buying some popcorn from the Cub Scout troop that I used to belong to, she asked if they still go camping out at a nearby state park where we used to go. Nope, they "camp out" on the field of an indoor soccer stadium. No joke. Of course having a bunch of little kids in there means the whole stadium has to go into lockdown mode.

It sounds like more of a night-long duck-and-cover drill than exploring and making do in nature. And so much for building a campfire, cooking your own food, and so on.

Doing away with small children camping out by themselves would fall under the "not so crazy" category of things that early helicopter parenting would have taken care of. Now it's too threatening and dangerous for Cub Scouts -- supposedly more prepared than the average child -- to go camping at a state park -- not some random spot in the wilderness -- with a group of adult chaperons supervising them -- not trekking out alone.

If you wonder why youngsters today all seem like they're afraid of their own shadow, and collapse into anxiety attacks over trivial stuff, it's because they've been bubble-wrapped their whole lives.

"Protecting them from danger" is pure BS by this point in time. Protecting them from what? If their little shells haven't been hardened to withstand Scooby-Doo and camping out at a state park with adult supervision, they will be hopelessly fragile in adolescence and adulthood. Good thing the parents "know a guy" who can score some anxiety and depression pills for their poor unstable children.

Tonight's GOP debate: The "jerk store" episode from Seinfeld, as snarky Repubs get asses handed to them by nimble Trump

Time ran an article about how all the losing candidates are going to focus their (lowww) energy on taking shots at Trump, with the moderators at CNN eager to stir up a food fight atmosphere.

One problem: the other candidates can't think on their feet, and have to come with a canned speech, micro-tailored talking points, etc. Only this time around, their boring canned speech will include a few barbs aimed at Trump. Shit-eating grins are already spreading across their faces in anticipation. No suffering from l'esprit d'escalier this time, eh Rand?

Obviously they were too busy mentally reciting their canned talking points during the first debate to notice that Trump batted away Megan Kelly's volley about the war on women -- instantly, effortlessly, devastatingly. "Only Rosie O'Donnell!" :crowd goes wild:

No matter how many times these clowns have rehearsed their one-liners, Trump is guaranteed to slam them with an even greater zinger, without missing a beat.

It could be the most entertaining spectacle you'll see all year. Just imagine -- two solid hours of the "jerk store" episode from Seinfeld, where George gets publicly outwitted by an even better comeback to his one-liner that he'd been crafting all week long, and had looked so smugly toward delivering.

The deflation that these limp-dick cuckservatives are going to feel will be all the more yoo-miliating because Trump won't just be swatting down some petty off-the-cuff insult, but their long-festering revenge fantasy.

Too bad it's going to be broadcast to the entire nation, so they can't go on Reddit afterward and write a phony story about how they finally worked up the courage to take on the bully and made him eat his mean words!

From Europe's ancient genetic divide, tensions still arising between Celto-Germanic and Balto-Slavic people

First there was the tension between Germany and Greece over debt, and now there is the conflict over who is going to take in how many Syrian Muslim immigrants. The European Union is obviously a dead man walking, so why wait to take a postmortem look into why the bulk of Europe could never have held together. There is simply too wide of a chasm between two different groups of people.

A highly popular article in the New York Times took these groups to lie on either side of recent political and economic institutions – the former Communists in the Center and East of Europe, and the capitalists in the West. This misses the former countries of Yugoslavia, who are just as protective of their regional cultures as the Poles and Lithuanians, yet who were not Communist but market socialist, and who were led by Tito rather than Stalin.

So why not just modify it to capitalist West vs. non-capitalist East? That would still leave out a major player – Greece. The Communists lost the Civil War in Greece after WWII, and they joined NATO rather than the Warsaw Pact or the soft-socialist "third way" championed by Tito.

Clearly there's something deeper than just the political-economic differences of the past 100 years.

Peter Turchin took a longer-term look into the roots of the EU crisis, focusing on the debt crisis (that post was written two months before the current Syrian immigrant crisis). He points to the divide between the former core of Latin Christendom as led by Charlemagne, and the more Orthodox East.

As with the political-economic view, this view gets a good amount of the split, but misses key players. Poland has always been on the Catholic side, notwithstanding some support for Protestantism in the early stages of the Reformation. Ditto for Hungary, the Czech Republic (now mostly atheist), Slovakia, Lithuania, Croatia, and Slovenia. Granted, they were Christianized much later than the West, but it was always within the Latin rather than Byzantine tradition, and when they flirted with breaking from the Roman Church, it was toward one strain or another of Protestantism rather than Eastern Orthodoxy.

In the comments to that post, the pre-Roman Celts came up as an even older example of the European core in the lands later ruled by Charlemagne. That gets much closer to the true divide in Europe, which is racial and ethnic – between Celto-Germanic people in the West and Balto-Slavic people in the East.

The genetic anthropologist Dienekes Pontikos took a look into how various European individuals clustered genetically. It turned out that the Balts and Slavs formed a cluster, while the Celts and Germanics formed another, and that these were distinct clusters that hardly overlapped.

Matching that genetic separation, historical linguists are happy to lump Baltic and Slavic languages into a single Balto-Slavic group within the Indo-European family. They are willing to lump Celtic and Germanic languages into their own group as well, with the understanding that it is much older, has had far more time for its members to differentiate themselves, and therefore shows much less mutual intelligibility among its members than is found among Balto-Slavic languages.

Demographically, the split reflects the history of large-scale migrations, namely the Germanic migrations that intermixed them with Celtic and Italic peoples during the middle of the 1st millennium, and the later (Balto-)Slavic migrations of the second half of the 1st millennium. The Slavs began around what is now Ukraine, moved north into what is now Russia, then west into what is now Poland. Why didn't they continue westward? Because the Germanic peoples had already firmly settled into what is now northern Germany and the Low Countries.

This tug-of-war along the center of Europe between Germanic and Slavic populations has never gone away. We don't have to look back very far before the current EU crisis to find its most recent explosive form – the Nazi push to grab Slavic lands for Germanic lebensraum, and the Soviet capture of eastern Germany for Slavic control.

Taking a racial / genetic perspective also allows us to make sense of the greater rebellion against Muslim immigrants in eastern Germany today. In an earlier post, I reviewed evidence that eastern Germany used to be Slavic, although I assumed too much in describing the Germanic replacement as genetic. It could have been that a Slavic people adopted Germanic culture (language, religion, etc.), aside from interbreeding with them.

A later post looked at how genetically similar the Slavs are today, compared to the greater genetic diversity found among Germanic, Celtic, and Italic people. (That reflects the fact that the Slavs were the last major group to break off and settle down on their own.) But the study under discussion also shows that Germans have a non-trivial genetic kinship with Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs, i.e. with the Slavs nearest to them.

Still, their plot of who clusters with who puts the bulk of Germans with the Swiss, Dutch, and other Germanic groups, with a fringe group of Germans next to the separate Slavic cluster. I interpret that to reflect Germans in the sample coming from different parts of Germany, and that eastern Germans are substantially Slavic. Those PEGIDA protesters who are trying to run the Muslim immigrants out of town, are likely German-speaking crypto-Slavs. "Germanicized Slavs" doesn't sound quite right, since they evidently haven't adopted the full suite of Germanic customs, including the welcoming of invading foreign races.

Interestingly, in that study the Austrians cluster with the Eastern group (Slavs). If their Austrian sample reflects population density, they likely hail from Vienna, which sits in the far eastern part of the country, surrounded by Slavdom. Vienna lies closer to Bratislava, Budapest, Prague, and Ljubljana than it does to Munich. And of course it shared capital status with Budapest during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the current immigrant crisis, they seem to be as wary as the Hungarians about having a bunch of foreigners settle their country, and want them to either not enter in the first place or to hurry on to Germany, France, Sweden, etc., where they'll receive a warm welcome.

More surprisingly, in the genetic study the Greeks, too, clustered with the Slavs rather than with the Italic / Mediterranean group. Maybe not so surprising, considering that the Slavs settled so much of the rest of the Balkans during Medieval times. The Greeks weren't as closely related to any Slavic group as any Slavic group was to another, but they do show a substantial Slavic imprint. (You'd be surprised how many modern Greeks are blond-haired, blue-eyed folks-who-never-smile.)

That may be more than you ever wanted to know about the genetic roots of Eastern and Central Europeans, but it's worth wrapping your mind around in order to understand what goes on in that part of the world. The best way to describe the divide in the break-down of the EU is not economic or religious but genetic, between Celto-Germanic and Balto-Slavic peoples.

To appreciate why it's the Balto-Slavic side that is the more nationalistic side, read that post of mine about why there's so little separatism in Eastern Europe, and why Pan-Slavism nearly happened. Slavic individuals are much more genetically similar to one another than people of other European groups are to members of their own group. They are therefore more likely to band together in nationalistic ways.

So, it's not just a story about Eastern Europeans being more "homogeneous," i.e. more white, than countries with large immigrant populations. Even if you removed the non-European elements from Western nations like England, France, and Germany, the English, French, and Germans are still more genetically diverse amongst their countrymen than are the Poles, Lithuanians, or Serbians. Slavic populations are much younger and have not had as much time to diverge and differentiate.

Greater genetic similarity means greater ability to organize collectively for group protection. The jump from "the clan" to "the nation" is not such a quantum leap among Slavs as it is among Germans.

Donald Trump descended from Vikings?

If our future President is more willing to go on the unrelenting attack rather than take a beating lying down, it may owe to Viking heritage on his mother's side.

His mother, a Scottish immigrant, hailed from the highlander Clan MacLeod on the Isle of Lewis, one of the Outer Hebrides islands off the western shore of Scotland that was raided and settled by Vikings during the 9th through 13th centuries, when it belonged to the Norse Kingdom of the Isles. In fact, the MacLeods ruled Lewis from the end of the Viking heyday through the early modern era, when they were eclipsed by the Mackenzies in the 17th C.

Genetic evidence points to their Norse invader lineage. From an article discussing the Y-chromosome that belongs to nearly half of MacLeod men:

It is found in Lewis, Harris and Skye, core Macleod territory, but also in Orkney, Shetland and Norway, with a few examples in Sweden. Despite extensive screening, S68 is very specifically located, showing up only once in the east of Scotland and once in England. This is a classic pattern for a Viking marker in Britain, but one much rarer than M17. MacLeods determinedly claim descent from a common name father, a Norse aristocrat called Ljot, a relative of Olaf, King of Man. They are probably right to continue to claim that – science for once supporting tradition.

In their homeland at the dawn of the nation-state, the Vikings were rounded up and drowned at sea by the ancestors of today's Scandinavian weenies who love big government solutions and follow harm-based morality. Where they settled in Scotland, they intermarried and kept their genes flowing albeit at diluted levels. And even when they lost power, it was to other warrior types (Celtic, though, rather than Nordic) who bested them in battle, and who did not exterminate them after victory.

There was no powerful modern nation-state on the rise in the remote areas of Scotland, so there was no force there to carry out a cleansing of the coarser Medieval elements that a nice new nation-state would not want getting in the way of centralized power.

The Norsemen may have failed to secure a foothold in North America one-thousand years ago, but they may be vindicated yet with the election of the first Viking President.

Gen X and Millennials don't say "Hi" around the neighborhood

Although the climate of cocooning leads most folks to stay inside all day, a decent number still go for a walk around the neighborhood. Whether they acknowledge and greet one another, though, seems to have less to do with being sociable vs. cocooning and more with whether they came of age in an accommodating vs. status-striving climate.

Some of the folks who say "Hi" you can tell are introverts and are simply making their best effort to fulfill the duties of neighborliness, while some who don't acknowledge the other pedestrians give off socially normal rather than spergy vibes. They're just too self-important to acknowledge unknown members of the community.

The strongest demographic predictor of who will initiate a simple "Hi" to strangers, or return the gesture if it's made to them, is generation.

If someone from the Silent Gen is walking around the neighborhood, there's a very good chance they'll act neighborly. Boomers too, especially the older ones. There's an abrupt shift with Gen X, though, who are about 50/50 or less likely to say "Hi" or even exchange a nod and eye contact. And some of those who have acted neighborly may have been very late Boomers who I mistakenly took to be early X-ers. The later-born the X-er, the less neighborly they are. And of course the Millennial adults are guaranteed to either stare straight ahead or down at the ground (or phone) when they pass someone.

I remember my Greatest Gen grandparents and others their age greeting others around the community, so put them in the neighborly group as well.

Silents and Boomers (and Greatest Gen) have always been more automatic to greet people in church or other civic places, whether they already knew the person or were welcoming a newcomer. Gen X and especially the Millennials have to be prodded by the leadership to meet-and-greet.

In fact, Silents and Boomers are more likely to acknowledge and start talking to strangers from the community no matter what the setting is. "What wonderful weather we're having today," said to a stranger at the supermarket parking lot. "My, that's a lovely sweater," said to the person standing in front of them in line at the drug store. And so on and so forth.

The earlier generations imprinted socially during a climate of accommodation rather than status-striving, roughly the Great Compression of 1920-1980. Back then, the norm in public spaces was to humble yourself by acknowledging and getting along with others. You see that even during the cocooning period within the Great Compression, like Mayberry or the world of Father Knows Best, where despite being more introverted they still stopped to say "Hi" to neighbors, ask how their day is going, etc.

This imprinting effect does not get over-written even if they later become more self-centered strivers, like the Me Generation of Silents and Boomers. Striving in their case is an acquired language, not their native tongue.

Gen X and Millennials, who went through adolescence and young adulthood during the '80s and after, imprinted on an environment marked by rising competitiveness and one-upsmanship. You lower your status by having to acknowledge others. For the striver, if others are to be acknowledged, it must come off as deigning to do so — a form of social largesse rather than social duty. In any case, it comes down to individual choice rather than obligation to others.

Mirroring the Me Generation, even those X-ers and Millennials who are acting to reverse the hyper-competitive climate still struggle instinctively when it comes to neighborliness in their own everyday lives.

We may not be able to undo the imprinting of our formative years, but we do have to be aware of it and make a conscious effort to behave more neighborly to our neighbors.

PS: These generational differences cannot be blamed on changes in the racial make-up of the environment that the earlier vs. later groups have imprinted on. Certainly growing up in a minority-white environment is more likely for X-ers and Millennials, and is more corrosive of neighborliness than a mostly-white environment. But you see these generational differences in all-white communities too, where racial changes are not a factor.

Fox News lobs bomb at Trump, bounces back, blows the face off of sell-out "right-wing" media

In case you missed the GOP debate, the cuckservative moderators failed to ask any substantive questions of Donald Trump, using the opportunity instead to try to snare him with petty, snarky "gotcha" questions about:

- Whether he's inflaming the War on Women by calling Rosie O'Donnell a fat hairy dyke?

- Whether he has a professionally lit cell phone video of the Mexican government nudging their undesirables over the border? And

- Whether he'll swear loyalty to the Republican Party rather than the American people?

On and on it went, the most shameful thing I've seen in a long while. The substantive questions went only to the empty suits who gave boring, dickless responses, all of them canned. Yet I sat through two hours of questions from a bitter bimbo and a leathery, closeted Jew (frat bro was OK, aside from the opening ambush about GOP uber alles), just to see if it would ever get good (it didn't).

That was the first and last time I'll willingly tune into Fox News. But I'm not part of their target audience, so big deal to them, right?

However, check out the comments at Fox News' Facebook page, or responses on Twitter. Those are coming from the large pool of regular viewers. Not a single person chimed in to tell them what a great job they did as media moderators between the public and the candidates. Every single one that talks about the debate overall is not only negative, but shaming of Fox News as a whole and the individual moderators too (mostly the airhead and the putz).

Even if these devoted viewers weren't all gung-ho for Trump, they were still disgusted by the flagrant set-up of the most popular candidate, and coming from what they had trusted as the only (quasi-)conservative news source in the mainstream media. Recurring comments to the effect of "Now we see your true colors," "Never watching again," and so on.

In fact, most reactions weren't in favor of this or that candidate's total performance, so the debate's effect on the polls may or may not be noticeable. Fox News failed at their goal of souring the conservative voters on Trump.

The main result of the network's debate was in fact to alienate and anger a YUGE segment of the party's base from the network itself. The consensus from the audience response is, "I don't know who won, but the clear loser was Fox News".

And so, not only is the Trump phenomenon breaking apart the corrupt Republican establishment, it has also led one of the central propaganda outlets to self-destruct. While flailing to wound Trump, the arrogant fool wields the blade so recklessly that it hacks off its own head.

Truly this campaign is the gift that keeps on giving.

Another fag hag humiliated by her gay eunuch's adultery (Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale divorce)

This was brought up by DdR in the comments to an old post, but it deserves a post of its own.

Here is the link from Blind Gossip about Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale's divorce being caused by his continued adultery with other men, which was already discussed in an old no-longer-blind item here.

What's weird is that they were not a sham couple, with the wife knowingly and cynically bearding for a closet case. She truly believed he was "just" bisexual, rather than preferring rotted male buttholes over her own pussy, and that he could/would quit his old ways.

It's ironic because Gwen Stefani owes her pop icon status to a persona that blends streetwise savvy with girl-next-door wholesomeness. Turns out, she's just another clueless airhead who got conned by a promiscuous fudgepacker, contracting who knows what kinds of diseases via all the Sodomites her husband has taken loads up the butt from.

I was going to say, "At least our memories of '80s pop stars remain clean of this sort of stain." But then there's the dark-haired babe from Bananarama, who is in a 25-year arrangement with the other guy from Wham! Besides showing Peter Pannish gayface in every single picture, he was also in a duo with George Michael.

Checking google, they split up for awhile recently, probably because his twink-fiddling got a little too flagrant for her self-respect to stay intact.

It's disturbing to look at these cases of Strong Independent Women who date/marry a gay eunuch in order to preserve their public desirability ("power couple!") without having to actually pair-bond with a male. Such a strong signal of the growing divide in trust between the sexes.

Of course in the end, indeed throughout the relationship, she gets humiliated privately or publicly by reminders that her beau prefers diseased dude-rectums over what she felt was a desirable, spellbinding pussy.

I'll never understand how beards or even fag-hags can compartmentalize the fact that their gay BFF / closeted homo husband finds everything about their feminine sexuality and womanhood utterly revolting. I guess they perceive that threat to their self-worth as the lesser of the two evils -- she might have to risk dating and getting dumped by a man whose abandoning her could not be easily written off as "he's not into girls at all," rather than just not into her specifically.

In a way, then, the admittedly fringe trend of women bearding for homos or simply spending all their time fag-hagging with gay BFFs, is a sign of the trend among men to not stick around or pair-bond with women. It's obviously a clueless and unhealthy reaction, but they are reacting to something real.

Related: young women less and less likely to choose men as sex partners, since the early '90s. (That post covered data through 2010, but the decline continues up through 2014.)

Girls are not turning to other girls for physical reasons, as though boys can't pleasure them, but other girls could. Other girls can't fill her up. Instead, it seems like they're searching for an emotional bond during intimacy that their distant, checked-out, porn-scarfing, video-game-addicted male peers are incapable of providing them with.

As in the gay eunuch scenario, these girls are in for a rude awakening when they discover that bisexual and lesbian girls are just using the straight experimenter for a taste of fresh forbidden fruit, and have zero intention of emotionally bonding with her and sticking together long-term. Lesbos are convinced that straight experimenters will return to dudes sooner or later, and so don't bother getting emotionally invested with the bi-curious type.

While the young women themselves ultimately bear responsibility for these attempts to take the easy way out of the problem of men not committing to them, they are too childlike to be the target for reversing the trend. Children will always prefer what appears to be This One Weird Trick to solve all their complex problems, no matter how deranged it actually is.

The target, instead, should be young men who need to be shunned and shamed out of their porn-and-video-game cocoons. Parents can do their part by reversing the trend of over-protectiveness, which turns a blind eye toward their sons losing themselves in safe virtual worlds rather than going outside into the scary real world and interacting with their peers.

Real-life friends and girlfriends must be gained by committing to them socially, unlike the virtual world where their party members automatically join them at prescribed points during a video game journey where no one can ever die and go back to start, and where vicarious lovers can be customized and streamed with a few clicks of the mouse.

Training your children to be afraid of the outside world is setting up the next generation of men to fall back into the risk-free addictions of internet porn and video game grinding, which will in turn drive the next generation of women to disconnect from pair-bonding in all sorts of unhealthy last-ditch ways.

Being local vs. being rooted

The rise of the "buy local" phenomenon is understandable given the omnipresence of chain stores across the nation and corporate control over the economy. Normal people distrust mega-sized entities having so much influence over their everyday lives. Supporting a local business, even if they sell mass market products, or purchasing local products, even if it's at a chain store, allows ordinary people push back against wealthy and powerful outsiders who are trying to gobble up the local ecosystem.

At the same time, we shouldn't mistake being local to a community with being rooted in that community. Depending on where you are in the country, a majority of the "buy local" businesses may not have been around for even five years, and may not exist another five years into the future.

This is part of the broader pattern where businesses catering to trendy upper-middle-class tastes go through a much more rapid and volatile churning, as yesterday's stairmaster farm gives way to today's yoga studio, or as one shabby chic design store becomes too predictable and gets replaced by another, more refreshing shabby chic design store.

These locally owned and operated businesses do keep outside corporate influence at bay, but they do not provide local residents with a sense of belonging to a community. Feeling anchored within a place requires that place to be fairly stable itself. No one can feel secure within a house that becomes unglued from its foundation and keeps shifting all over the landscape.

Chain stores, too, may be here today, gone tomorrow — especially if they're chasing after those with large disposable incomes. In one of the main shopping centers where I grew up during adolescence, there used to be a Whole Foods that arrived sometime during the 2000s, but has since moved 20 to 30 minutes away to a wealthier suburb. I don't think it lasted even 10 years.

As for places that are rooted, some may be local and quirky — such as the few mom & pop grocery stores still left — but others may be nondescript chain stores that have been there forever.

If it's been in place long enough, even a bland generic chain store may serve as an anchor for local residents' experiences and memories, in effect making it a one-of-a-kind and distinctly local place. Particular experiences of particular groups of people have unfolded there across several generations. Only to an outsider would the place look and feel "just like any other chain of its kind," blind to the social history within and around the built environment.

The inability to recognize one's outsider ignorance of local history and conditions stems from autism, which runs high among people who like to gab about architecture, geography, space, place, etc. And of course the handful of longtime residents who whine about nearby rooted businesses most likely never fit into the community in the first place.

"Why can't the city council just knock down those ugly two-story brick apartment buildings next to that lame barber shop and that useless hardware store? It could literally be a mid-rise tower with luxury condos above a Starbucks and a Panera on the ground floor. Oh wait, I forgot — the tacky locals here can't conceptualize how epic a mixed-use space would be. I swear, I'm getting out of this dump and moving to Minneapolis!"

It's disturbing to think of how much influence over commercial and civic life is wielded by this coalition of tone-deaf autistic outsiders and bratty local misfits.

Cohesive communities where folks have deep roots are not so easily destabilized, as the intentional lack of dynamism encourages the local brats to leave and makes it unattractive — BORING — as a target for colonization by trendoid transplants. Likewise, you can easily spot which areas to avoid living in, where none of the shops have been in place for more than five to ten years, mirroring the flux-driven anonymity among the residents.

On the practical side, how can these patterns be used to try to cement an otherwise rootless area? Rootedness would have to be an intentional plan at first. Start with something as "simple" as passing municipal legislation about turnover rates for commercial real estate. "Simple," assuming the will is there to begin with.

That would also go a long ways toward solving the problem of high turnover among residential real estate, as only those residents who prefer stability will stay or move in.

Attacking residential turnover is hard to accomplish directly. People will rightfully chafe at having their residency being regulated so closely by the government, even if it is in the best interests of communal stability. Regulating businesses for the greater community's interests is far more palatable politically.

Moreover, businesses, churches, libraries, and the like can remain in place indefinitely into the future and serve as anchors across the generations. A particular person living in a particular home cannot do that. Those who were closed to them may remember their house as "the house where Mrs. Baumgartner used to live," but that doesn't spread out too far as second-hand or third-hand knowledge, and will not be understood by future generations who don't know who Mrs. Baumgartner was to begin with. But they all may have worshiped in the same church, spent summer days in the same pool, and eaten at the same mom & pop cafeteria across the street.

The Trump phenomenon

Finally, a populist candidate speaking truth to power. His campaign has only started to take off, so there will be plenty of interesting developments ahead. Here are a few observations so far.

There's always a worry with populist candidates that they'll back down or water things down once they're in office. Not with Trump, who is not a career politician. Being a winner to a politician means getting elected to the highest possible office for the longest possible time. Whether you do a terrible job or not doesn't matter.

Trump has little room left to climb on the status pyramid — why not shoot for leader of the free world? Well, what kind of status boost would it be to rule over an increasingly third-world shithole of a country? It would be an embarrassment. Trump's ego works in our favor, since he couldn't stand being known as the leader of a loser country, which is what we're going to wind up as if current trends continue. His megalomania wouldn't be satisfied until he made the nation something worth bragging about again.

Even if he ends up not winning the Presidency, his assault on PC bullshit of all types will have tremendous immediate results. It's like those classic experiments on conformity that Solomon Asch ran. You're asked which of two lines is longer, and one is very obviously longer than the other. However, before you get to answer, about a dozen other people give the wrong answer. Faced with the pressure of sticking out, a good portion of people (by no means all) will quietly go along with the wrong answer.

But when there's just one other person who speaks the truth before it's your turn, it completely shatters the conformity effect. You are guaranteed to give the right answer, ignoring all the other wrong answers and latching onto the single right answer. "Phew, so I'm not the only one who thinks everyone else here is nuts!"

Sure, there are a handful of people who will straight-talk like Trump in real life, but they don't have much of a megaphone and are not very numerous. They can shatter the conformity effect for a good deal of folks who they come into contact with, but not the entire society. And in case you haven't been paying attention, it's been a good 20 years (the culture wars of the '90s) since any major public figure made a point of declaring that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes.

The media and political establishment have no clue how to react, since Trump is pointing out a very clear and very public error that they've all made — all said that the shorter line was longer, and based policies off of that. They're used to everyone having drunk the kool-aid, and only arguing about, say, how much longer the actually-short line is.

Trump is not nitpicking within the range of the received error, he's pointing out that at the basic level, they've all got it backwards — that's the shorter line, dummy, not the longer one! What kinda moron can't see that? The establishment is either stupid, incompetent, blind, deceitful, lying, or something — how else can they explain failing such an easy question like illegal immigration or free trade deals?

What the whining classes take to be mudslinging and name-calling is just the opposite: it's revealing that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. They're used to a charge of "incompetent" meaning that the person bungled the job of flooding more immigrants into the country, or bungled the job of securing more power for corporations than for nations. The elites all have the same goals, and only name-call one another for not living up to their shared ideal.

Trump is interrupting the conversation to ask, point-blank, what the hell kinda ideal is that? — Mexican criminals pouring over the border, and manufacturing sent to China so we can buy a bunch of cheap junk? He isn't targeting a particular individual for failing to live up to an ideal that he shares with them. He's targeting the whole lot of them for sharing such a warped and twisted ideal in the first place!

Shifting the direction that society is headed in — what ideals it will pursue — is far more worrisome to the establishment than mere character assassination. Of course, they don't want to open up a whole debate about whether their ideals are worth holding or not, since hardly any ordinary citizens would take their side. They are left only with mud-slinging (something they do out of habit anyway), which only helps Trump out.

"Do you see? They know I'm right on the issues about where the country is headed, so they ignore that and try to attack my character instead. Cowards!"

Lastly, one common view is that the WASP-y founding stock here has grown too timid, bored, or brainwashed into liberalism that it will take someone on the periphery of white America to deliver us from the plague, a la Giuliani in New York during the '90s. No self-respecting Italian is gonna let some buncha darkie bums get in his way of cleaning up The City.

And yet ethnic / peripheral whites vote liberal. The Celto-Germanic mass of the population may be in a slumber, but they have a keen sense of how much has been lost from recent demographic changes. Italians, Poles, etc., may (or may not) be outraged at the influx of corrosive Mexicans, but that's more of a turf war over who makes a better group of immigrants. They aren't from the founding stock.

Trump is Scottish on his mother's side and Bavarian on his father's. His personality is certainly more on the Celtic side, and he's Presbyterian rather than Catholic. Hard to find a more mainline American candidate than that.

He's also born and raised in New York, where he has stayed into adulthood. That's way more than you can say for the rootedness of the likes of George W. Bush, a New England preppy who LARPs as a Texan, or John McCain, a DC-area native who took up his Wild West cosplay act in middle age. Yosemite Sam also chose his running-mate for cosplay points ("Alaska: The Final Frontier"), and all it did was prove to voters how flakey and shallow people are out West. Romney was born and raised in Michigan, but his heritage is Mormon — more weird Westerners.

I haven't voted since Nader in 2000 (volunteered during the campaign on campus, too), but now there's a far more likely populist candidate to get behind. I honestly never thought I'd be voting again until old age. Voting Trump in 2016 could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to kick the Establishment right in the balls, and end their chances of reproducing.