Michael Bates 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿🇮🇪🇮🇱

@CodyLibolt @nath_ormond @EstherOfReilly This is the operating principle of mainstream media now: Report only the news that motivates the correct public response. Suppress news that might raise doubts or undermine obedience.

We need to help young men see fatherhood as aspirational: We need to motivate young men to aspire to be fathers. The secular script for men has typically focused on career success. It has not placed enough emphasis on the role that fatherhood plays in men’s sense of masculine fulfillment. In fact, in the media today, fathers are regularly mocked and ridiculed—the Homer Simpson stereotype of the father as the dimwit dad. As a result, many men do not see fatherhood as something to aspire to. Yet the facts are clear that fathers play a crucial role. On the negative side, children growing up without fathers are more likely to drop out of school, be addicted to drugs or alcohol, have children outside of marriage, and end up behind bars. Today 40 percent of American children live apart from their natural fathers. It is the highest rate of single parenthood in the world. On the positive side, we have to help young men to see that as fathers, they have a huge impact. Vern Bengston conducted an award-winning 35-year longitudinal study that investigated how parents succeed in passing on their moral and spiritual principles—their religious convictions. The study was reported in Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down across Generations and it found two surprising results: First, “having a close bond with one’s father matters even more than a close relationship with one’s mother.” In other words, fathers wield influence, whether they want to or not. Second, the relationship with the father must be warm and close. A father can be a leader of the community, a pillar of the church, a moral exemplar, but if he is perceived as cold, distant, and authoritarian, the child will not follow him, will not adopt his spiritual and religious convictions. A smaller study focused on how to raise masculine boys. Paul Raeburn reports in his book Do Fathers Matter? that, again, the key was a warm, loving relationship with his father. Surprisingly, “a father’s own masculinity was irrelevant [whether or not he was macho in a stereotypical sense]; his warmth and closeness with his son was the key factor” for creating a secure, stable, healthy sense of masculine identity. (from The Toxic War on Masculinity)

So why does "indigenous vs. colonizer" almost always mean Europeans, and almost never Bantu, Turks, Arabs, Slavs, or Han Chinese? A few reasons, in descending order of how much they actually explain: 1. Recency and documentation. European expansion happened in the era of the printing press, photography, census records, and treaties. The Bantu expansion left no paperwork. The Arab conquests are 1,300 years old and mythologized as religious destiny rather than conquest. When the receipts exist, the case is easier to make, and Europeans left receipts. 2. The winners wrote the framework. Modern human-rights language, postcolonial theory, and the very category of "indigenous peoples" were built in Western universities after WWII, primarily to process European guilt over European empires. The tool was designed for one job. Asking it to evaluate the Arab conquest of Egypt or the Turkic conquest of Anatolia is like asking a tax form to diagnose a disease. It wasn't built for that. 3. Christendom is critique-able; other civilizations aren't. You can write a bestseller attacking Western Christian civilization from inside a Western university and win awards for it. Try writing the equivalent book about Arab-Islamic conquest from inside Cairo or Istanbul. The asymmetry isn't about history. It's about which societies tolerate self-criticism and which punish it. So the critical literature piles up on one side and barely exists on the other. 4. The Soviet inheritance. Cold War-era anti-colonial framing was deliberately shaped by Moscow to delegitimize the West while giving its own empire and its allies' conquests, a pass. That framework outlived the USSR and still structures a lot of academic and activist vocabulary today. 5. Race makes it legible. European colonizers usually looked different from the colonized. Turkic conquerors of Anatolia, Arab conquerors of the Levant, and Bantu expansionists in Africa generally didn't look dramatically different from the populations they absorbed. The visual contrast made European empire easier to narrate as racial, and once a story has a clean visual, it travels. 6. And finally, Jews. The framework's selective application reaches its most absurd point when a people indigenous to a specific land, with continuous presence, language, religion, and archaeological record tying them to it for three thousand years, get labeled "colonial settlers", while the actual seventh-century conquerors who Arabized the region get labeled "indigenous." At that point the framework isn't describing reality. It's laundering a conclusion. The label isn't tracking who got there first. It's tracking who it's currently fashionable to blame.

If Eisenhower delivered the Gettysburg address (published in 1957 by Oliver Jensen). Hysterical stuff. They need to do this for every president.

“There can be no true religion, till there be a discovery of your lost state by nature & practice, & an unfeigned acceptance of Christ Jesus, as he is offered in the gospel. Unhappy they who either despise his mercy, or are ashamed of his cross!” John Witherspoon, 17 May 1776. 👇

“But what I … wish to impress on your minds, is the depravity of our nature.” The Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon (signer of the US Declaration of Independence), “The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men,” sermon preached @Princeton, May 17, 1776. | #HumanNature

@meepbobeep Peaty is my favorite, too. What are some peaty/smoky scotches that you like?

middle child is learning her mother's alcohol preferences (I like whiskey/strong-flavored booooze) I bought beet brandy from the farmer's market on Saturday it tastes like dirt (yes really) -- I like peaty/smoky scotch she is taking offense at the beet brandy I think it's really neat

“God's judgment of AIDS on a disobedient culture is a warning to the homosexual that God's judgment will fall on him on the final day if he does not repent” from the 1988 PCA report on AIDs—and the whole thing is worth reading 👇🏼

One thing that I didn't really touch on when I was describing the Putsch campaign was this: Lead. (and its effects on Gen X and the Boomers). Remember how I said that 50% of voters are age 50 or older? Well, when the staff were campaigning, we noticed a lot of emails from people aged 45-65, as well as in person interactions that came across as - intellectually disabled -incoherent (unable to string thoughts into a cohesive ideology) - drawing false equivalences / false pattern recognition / false associations - borderline schizophrenic behavior toward institutions These people were aggressive, and seemingly incompetent... lots of them. We were trying to understand if a large portion of our voting base were "cooked by media" as some of the zoomers put it, or if there was actually something else going on. We saw it in varying degrees from almost every Gen X / Generation Jones (late boomer). Some were atrocious: you couldn't explain simple topics to them, they couldn't follow basic reasoning, they couldn't focus on a conversation without interjecting with unrelated conspiracy nonsense (i.e. trying to explain data center zoning problems and they jump in with "it's all moloch" stuff). Explaining policy to about 1/3rd of our prospective voters seemed borderline impossible because they simply couldn't comprehend how systems function. Others weren't as bad, they were struggling to keep up with zoomers, but they were generally agreeable and open to policy ideas. And it showed up in our candidate. Our candidate seemed to display some form of impairment, which we couldn't clearly characterize, but although this impairment was offputting to Gen Z and millenials, the Gen X and Gen Jones people ATE IT UP. So, after I withdrew my support for the campaign, I regrouped with friends in Colorado and tried to understand "why". Our digging points to generational lead poisoning, on par with the third world, which also correlates to immigrants of the third world being seemingly insane (for reasons beyond busted cultures). It appears that a large portion of the voting base for the next 10-15 years will be severely intellectually deficient, with major personality disorders widespread in the voting population... people who think they are voting for "what's right" but because of lead toxicity, don't have the pathways needed to systematically approach problems- and as we replace existing Americans as part of the great replacement, we will see serious cognitive decline in younger voting bases, perpetuating the problem. You can draw this out to engineering and national advancement as well. Ever wonder why there's an advancement gap in most fields of engineering from 1995-2015? Look at the chart. Young engineers and retired boomers alike can point to a competency gap in Gen X, early millenial, and Gen Jones. This is when educational systems took their nose dive, when colleges grade-inflated to a point of absurdity, and when engineering progress slowed down. This isn't a problem with every single individual (in fact, at the micro scale, a lot gen X engineers are highly competent), it's at the macro scale, meaning that fewer individuals are *capable* of doing the work. This is applicable in current, elected politics. Looks at your party chairs and elected officials in this age range. Identify their competency. Gen Z staffers are quick to point out that these people have "brain rot" based on "closed door" performance. I also wonder if this contributed to the earlier boomers never really handing off society to Gen X. If 3.5 micrograms is damaging, we're looking at a generation with near 100% damage rate to some extent, a large portion of the population seriously damaged, and immigrants almost entirely severely damaged. This is going to be a major challenge for the United States, and we should start working on mitigation immediately. We need to adjust strategy and work to convince the damaged groups to support competency.

There isn’t a single deep southern state that’s been controlled by Republicans for generations. GOP control is a recent thing: Louisiana: 2011-2015, 2024-present Mississippi: 2012-present Alabama: 2011-present Georgia: 2005-present

“Call: (760) 733-9969 for a good time in Mojave!” I first discovered the number in 1976, deep in my phone-phreaking days, when the world still hummed along copper wires and every tone held a secret. Back then, long-distance calls were adventures, not obligations. I would chase the faint ring across the continent just to hear it ring, once, twice, a dozen times, out in the middle of nowhere. That lone phone became my quiet obsession, a single silver thread stretched across the empty desert, promising that no matter how isolated you felt, someone, somewhere, might pick up and change everything. By the mid-1980s I was attending Comdex in Las Vegas, the air thick with the scent of new circuit boards and cigarette smoke, the future of computing crackling on every booth. One afternoon I slipped away from the neon sprawl, rented a beat-up sedan, and drove east into the Mojave. The road unspooled like a ribbon of heat, and after an hour the city lights vanished behind me. There it stood: the phone, solitary and gleaming under a merciless sun, exactly as I had imagined it for years. A few dozen people had already made camp nearby, tents pitched in the sand, campfires flickering at dusk, strangers drawn by the same myth that had pulled me there. I joined them for a night, sharing stories under the stars, and when the phone finally rang I was the one who answered. The voice on the other end belonged to a woman driving cross-country from Maine. She laughed when I told her my story, and for 20 minutes the desert felt smaller than my living room. That call was only the beginning. Over the decades I dialed the number, from payphones in airports, from college dorms, from the back of tour buses and, later, from the quiet of my own office late at night. Sometimes I would let it ring twenty, thirty times just to hear the wind answer. Other times it connected instantly, and I would talk with whoever had been lucky enough to reach it, truckers on midnight runs, teenagers daring each other, dreamers and drifters and poets. Each conversation was a small romance, brief, unexpected, charged with the thrill of pure chance. One voice, though, stayed with me. A man named Alex picked up one rainy evening in 1987. We talked for over an hour about circuits and code and the strange poetry of connecting people who would never otherwise meet. By the end of that call we had sketched the outlines of a business. For the next ten years we built a small business few know I had. All legal and boring but fun. The phone taught me something profound: connection is not about proximity. It is about the promise that someone is always willing to answer. That lesson lit a fire in me. In the late eighties I began installing payphones of my own, at one time thousands of them, scattered across the country like new constellations. I placed them in airports where travelers needed one last good-bye, in remote mountain towns where the only signal was hope, and along lonely highways where the night felt endless. Some of those phones still stand today, weathered but working, their receivers warm from decades of voices. A few I have quietly upgraded with Wi-Fi hotspots, so the old copper lines now run to a Starlink station to the sky…. The desert taught me the value of keeping doors open, and I have never stopped. Even now, decades later, I still dial that updated number (619) 733-9969 was area code updated to now: (760) 733-9969. It is run by an enthusiast. He will text you: “Booth apocalypse Their skeletons haunt the night Graffiti sermon” The line may be now a party line these days, but the ethos remains. In my mind the phone still rings out across the sand, a silver beacon under the same stars that once watched me camp beside it. It reminds me that every great connection begins with a single, improbable ring, and sometimes the most beautiful stories start when you are willing to drive into the desert just to see who answers.

Tulsa needs to pay attention!! Kaiser..Soros…

Progressive urbanists are tragicomic because they’re eternally bumping into problems they are ideologically barred from understanding. “Why won’t people ride the trains? Why do they choose suburbs? It’s a mystery, let’s commission a study.”

I’m actually a big proponent of moving on from the history. The reality is that Israelis and Palestinians live there now. Israel is a legitimate state that isn’t going anywhere. And acceptance of that fact is critical to any future peace. But the consistent pattern if you do want to focus on the history is: - Arabs refuse to live peacefully next to Jews. - They start a war trying to wipe out Jews. - They lose that war. - They complain that it’s unfair and a crime for them to have lost. - Then they start plotting the next war. If you want to break that pattern, you don’t do it by trying to rewrite history to convince them that their refusal to accept Jewish neighbors and Israel was justified. Or pretending like the consequences of the wars they keep starting are all due to the other side. You do it by convincing them to move on. Arab countries like Jordan, Egypt, UAE etc did exactly that. It’s why their populations aren’t suffering from constant war.

Some of us on the right were and continue to be critical of Trump because of where he falls short of our principled views and/or policy preferences. It bothers us that Trump isn't concerned about the national debt, that he supports harmful tariff policies, that he abuses pardon powers etc. None of that prevents us from supporting his administration when they do good things that are consistent with our principles. It certainly doesn't prevent us from cheering on border enforcement, encouraging a strong national defense/counter-terrorism strategy, or supporting better tax policies. Other people formerly on the right have made opposing Trump the central principle of their political ideology. They determine all of their policy views based on Trump's current policy preferences. Then there is another group that determines all of its views based exclusively on Israel now. Again, their guiding principle is driven exclusively by opposition/hate. Both of these groups are now increasingly allying themselves with left-wing extremists because their guiding political principle is centered on things that have nothing to do with policy outcomes or what's good for America. Even if they sometimes call themselves "America First". You will notice that we aren't the ones who changed any of our views. We aren't the ones suddenly pretending the threat from Islamic terrorism is overblown, that communism isn't that bad, or that Democrat extremism isn't a problem. We aren't the ones coordinating messaging with the left. We aren't the ones allying ourselves with Hasan Piker, Cenk Uygur, Anna Kasparian etc., or making excuses for open bigotry on the left. The mistake that some people have made is to assume that the group doing those things, which is now driven exclusively by hate (whether of Trump, Israel, Jews etc.) is still part of the right's coalition. They certainly aren't reliable elements of it, and there is no need to pander to them. Let them try to get power within their new coalition, while the right should focus on recruiting people who are driven by wanting competence and policy wins, not motivated exclusively by hate.

Ironically good tweet from Yglesias. There are in fact two types of schools: Those where they discuss how to construct ideological propaganda and those where they disseminate it.

In the movie “Top Gun”, Maverick picks up Kelly McGillis by singing in the Officer’s Club. The “O Club” – as it’s known – was a thing, but died a slow death. I missed most of it in my career. In the day, Mom got pissed at the Nellis AFB O’ Club for “Lingerie Night” where models came in & showed off lingerie for sale. It was an early memory for me, seeing those women cross the hall…Mom was beyond pissed & went on a crusade w/ the other Officer’s wives, ending up in the General’s office. They won, but I wish they hadn’t. Before 9/11, the Air Force allowed busses of women to come onto the base on weekend nights, headed to the O’ Club. My Dad was the commander of Security Forces at the time; it was a thing he allowed & for a reason. Seriously, busses full of women, all going to the O’ Club…it was a hot spot at any base. The O’ Club could be a wild place. Once, at Nellis, Dad got a call on a Saturday (I think, but definitely a weekend). It was “Red Flag”, with fighter pilots from all over the world attending to do simulated air war against each other…they’d gotten drunk in the O’ Club & started actually fighting, smashing things up. Shit show. He told his troops to go get all the dogs…Nellis was a center for military dog training & he had turned the “Squadron” into a “Group”, then made “Silver Flag” in the desert, where SF got to play war. It was now not just a place SF could be stationed, it was the home of SF. Anyway, he recalled all the troops, went to the club & locked all the doors except one. Then they let the dogs in…nobody escorting, just release the dog with the command to go fuck things up. One by one, the pilots came out in surrender. He loved that story…wish I could hear him tell it one more time. Anyway, the Tailhook Scandal happened & that was the death signal. Now, Commanders counted the amount of drinks you had. Instead of being a place you could relax, you had to be on duty still. You had to pay to be a member of the O’ Club. It became a place where your career was in jeopardy, so membership declined. The Officer & Enlisted Clubs eventually merged to try & survive, but I don’t think it has gone well. Some Commanders would hold mandatory meetings there, and you had to be a member to attend, which generated some memberships, but that was received poorly. The Pilot Training Bases still have a decent club scene. They don’t allow civilians to come anymore, but it’s a bunch of young trainee pilots trying to flex on each other, playing a very physical game called “Crud”. You’ll have to google that. I helped a Major refit the Club at Vance AFB around 2000. He knew what to do & it was great…he managed to get an ejection seat & a stick from the T-37 right at the bar. Then he wired it so that if you pulled the “Trigger” on the stick, it set off alarm lights & sirens in the club, and now our brand new, naive student who fancied himself a steely-eyed killer owed the whole club beers when the lights & alarms went off. I had a few good nights at O’ Clubs. Vance AFB could get wild on Assignment Night. Randolph AFB was still kicking… the AF Nursing program was based nearby & it had a basement Crud room w/ sandbag walls, so things could get wild when the nurses showed up to have fun. My buddy may make General, but I remember him passing out on a General’s lawn as a Lieutenant after a good night at Randolph & being woken by the sprinklers. We lost something. Some of it was worth discarding, but not all of it was & it built relationships in a way we lack today. The Clubs were good, and it makes me sad they are in such a bad state today.

The attack on club system was probably the first sign of wokeness entering the military. The officer clubs were better because the dues were massive and you were functionally forced to join. That was deemed to be "unfair" and most were shut down or defunded. The solution was to create "all ranks" clubs that were mostly shitholes and if officers went to them they would be punished or slandered. Same problem with NCOs and junior enlisted as now no one felt safe going to an on base club so they made no money and most were eventually shut down. At no time did common sense or the welfare of the troops come into play and everyone was forced off base increasing alcohol and drug incidents and DUIs. This was a choice by General Officers to destroyed this system so they would look fair and equitable to the media and congress. It's entirely possible to have a great club system without strippers, but you have to have common sense and not mix groups who have a UCMJ obligation to not fraternize and you have to be smart enough to understand that people with more money want nicer things and are willing to pay for them. But the goal of most people is to destroy rather then build, so I doubt the club system will ever exist again.

On this day 250 years ago, our forefathers gathered for a national day of fasting and prayer. Today, Americans will come together again as one Nation under God. This is who we are and who we’ve always been.

@PatriarchTree Sophomore English at our high school was a 25-page research paper on some classic American novel, with the regular note cards for bibliography and the big note cards for quotes.

When I was in college, you couldn’t pass freshman English without doing this. The research (in dusty library tomes), the 5x7 note cards, the outline, the drafting and, dear God, the double-spaced TYPING! Am I the only living soul who remembers using Witeout for corrections?

25% of current US doctors are not Americans. 25% were trained in foreign countries. US graduates 28,000+ medical students per year. US offers 44,000+ residency spots per year. Every year 1000+ US medical students don't get a residency spot. Foreign medical students take these spots plus the 16,000+ residency spots we can't fill with Americans.