Three things I read this week

How to catch a tiger with your hands, the Golden State Killer, Belle Delphine

Belle Delphine took her hair from a cotton candy machine, posted a thousand alluring photos online and after a few years enough men carnally craved her byproducts that when she hawked capsules of her bathwater she sold out her slosh in three days flat. Who the fuck would buy that? Is an answer you probably don’t want dating your daughter...

How do I know about Miss Delphine? My first exposure to this epitomized product of the 21st century — she’s handled more sausage than a Bavarian deli owner — came from a comment she left on ZeroHedge.

Despite her kinky career path, Belle is a decidedly not stupid multi-millionaire and her wit is on display here. A certain subset of people’s reaction to The Narrative™ has been to assume that everything is a conspiracy. I understand how that’s a tantalizing conclusion to draw, especially when so many things do turn out to be conspiracies, however I don’t think it’s an accurate way to view the world. Conspiracies require planning and foresight, and too many of the people in charge of the western world have IQs to shame a sea cucumber.

Long-time readers will know that I go on a “not everything is a conspiracy rant” once every couple of months, and there’s a reason for circulations. Between the gaslighting, blatant lies and social media fueled news cycles, staying grounded in reality has become an Olympic sport in its own right. But grounded we must remain if we’re to survive this freaky decade, and viewing the world through a conspiracy tinted lens is little more than the other side of believing 100% in the narrative. I was struck by this excerpt from

John Carter

’s long piece, Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare.

And you, dear dissident? Why, you’re there on the platform too, aren’t you? Scrolling your timeline, liking and sharing and responding in your little echo chamber. Just as much a junkie as the rest of them, your attention every bit as locked into the dopamine doom loop. The weaponized algo draws you in, classifies you as one of the bad ones, sequesters you with the rest of the bad accounts, and then proceeds to feed you your favourite brand of poison.

The algo nourishes our spirit with the stories we crave, and Zuckerschmuck’s outrage machine will gladly send us down the rabbit hole if we nudge it in that direction. There’s a conspiracy for everything these days, even this post. I’m controlled opposition, you see. The CIA has gotten to me and they’re coming for you too!

But wait, could there be another explanation for why things go wrong? How about incompetence? Here’s John again.

In order to hold on to power, the Regime is being forced to implement increasingly granular control on all aspects of life. This imposes expenses on two levels. There’s the up-front expense that comes with the control architecture itself – the server farms, the salaries and benefits provided to its personnel. But there’s a deeper, more insidious price that this exacts: the degradation in the systems themselves, brought on by the reduced competence of personnel selected for loyalty over ability

Claudine Gay being one of the more visible examples, the system must select for loyalty over competence. As it continues down this doom loop, doors will fall off planes, rollercoasters will collapse and the electricity will go out on a cloudy day. And with every event there will be a contingent of people claiming a conspiracy, but they’ll be making their caps out of the wrong brand of tinfoil.

The bloke who broke the power grid didn’t do it to propagate the great reset. He cast the region into darkness because he’s more suited to cleaning rat carcasses out of Wendy’s dumpster than he is to calculating base load. DEI hiring policies and a relentless pursuit of quarterly profit earnings will put the wrong people in the wrong jobs, and stuff is going to keep falling apart. Expect it and plan for it, because I reckon it’s coming.

And on that cheery note, here are a few memes.

1 - How to catch a tiger

A tiger can walk for days, but it can only run for short distances. For this reason, tiger catching was always done in the winter, preferably in deep snow, which shortened the chase dramatically.

Once the dogs scented a tiger, they would be set loose to chase it until, too tired to run further, the animal would turn and fight. With the dogs holding the tiger at bay, the men would approach with long, forked tree branches and—somehow—pin the animal down. Then, in a quick and carefully choreographed operation, they would immobilize the tiger’s paws and head, hogtie it, and stuff it in a sack. This, of course, is easier said than done.

Nonetheless, in 1978, Kruglov used the stick and rope method to—literally—bag a tigress weighing more than three hundred pounds. He is one of the only human beings in the history of the species to grab wild tigers by the ears repeatedly and live to tell about it.

The Tiger by John Vaillant. If you’re bored with your current career, you could always move to eastern Russia and start tiger catching with a fucking stick and a bit of rope. Good luck.

2 - Unmasked

Average books tend to be at their best near the beginning, so if the first one-hundred pages are flatulent the rest will probably only go downhill from there. But Unmasked was different. After powering through what felt like an unwarranted cacophony of personal exposition — Am I naught but a Catholic priest hearing thine confessional? — I was rewarded with an exciting post-intermission production.

Unmasked’s highlight is Paul’s explanation of the multistep process he used to catch The Golden State Killer; one of America’s most notorious serial rapists and murderers. A tremendously sadistic man who might have never been brought to justice had Paul not been obsessed with the case for more than two decades!

Employing someone dedicated to cold cases was a budgetary luxury most agencies couldn’t afford. Cold case units were the exception rather than the rule, despite the fact that the number of unresolved homicides were growing exponentially across the country every decade. The last number I heard was that four in every ten cases went unsolved.

Unmasked pulls no punches, the disembowelment is on full display. Murdered children, corpses lush with maggots, bodies dumped in allies, blood patterns on the wall, despondent families, hacksaws and all the rest. This isn’t a book for someone who covers their eyes during a horror movie. Is the gore too gratuitous? I don’t think so. The stories aren’t hyped up fiction intended to make the reader squirm, they’re a true accounting of what happened. Life is brutal, sometimes exceedingly so.

Most investigators follow a standard routine and don’t take the time to study what happened. They are off and running, tracking down witnesses and leads before they’ve ever assessed what happened and why. A lot of times, crime scene investigators follow the detective’s lead without questioning whether the evidence matches the theory. I always stepped back and took the time to ask myself, “What does this crime scene tell me, and what can I glean about the victim and the offender from it?”

Should you read this? If you like true crime, then obviously yes. Also, if you’re a Californian on the other side of 40 I think you’ll find Unmasked especially engaging since you’ll be familiar with many of these murders. And any American over 40 will probably have heard of at least a few of the more notorious killers. I wasn’t familiar with a damn thing, not even The Golden State Killer, so I lost out on some of the thrill of relatability.

3 - Melody

Additionally, it is almost impossible to pull yourself from the now, and even from history, to find humanity within ourselves and others. It’s just all so hard. We can adopt learned helplessness as so many have, or we can actually look for solutions. To look and find solutions we have to know what we are fighting. Increasingly I believe we are not fighting each other, but forces that have vested interests in consolidating power to preserve their privileged way of life.

I loved this paragraph from Melody’s recent article 👇 and I couldn’t agree more! They started a fire in the empty lot next door so that everyone will turn their backs while the valuables are looted from the safe.

Let the Games Begin

4 - El Gato

Sir Fancy Feast is a world-class answerer of the most intriguing question of the day: how did we get here? The mayor of Chicago, for instance, is suing Kia and Hyundai for failing to install adequate anti-theft devices. You see, the criminals stealing the cars are not the problem. It’s actually the car’s fault for shaking its ass all over town like some kind of amoral hussy. I’m pretty sure that Muslim countries apply similar “logic” to keeping their women wrapped up like ninjas, but whatever.

The Great Catsby boils it down to this: we have a system that rewards “injustice,” perceived or otherwise. So the quickest method to climb the hierarchy is to wrap yourself in victimhood. The game starts simple; I’m black or I’m gay, therefore I should be granted more power. But then someone comes along who says, I’m a black gay woman, I’m even more oppressed. Give me the power. Then the next person is a transgender, native American high calorie orphan, and so they get pushed to the top. And so and so forth, in a spiraling race to victimhood’s aphelion until the President of the United States is an aboriginal non-binary illiterate midget who was raised by eunuch giraffes and communicates by sketching obscene hieroglyphs in the dirt and grunting.

All of this you’re no doubt familiar with, I get it. But this article is special because it so brilliantly extrapolates this phenomenon to a higher level, to show us the long term consequences of this ugly game of grouch.

I loved this line,

they cannot control themselves so they seek to control you.

The hierophants of victimhood have all the emotional control of a teething toddler, and when they don’t get their way they throw a tantrum. Recently the gaming community called out the company Sweet Baby Inc, which has been “consulting” with major game developers to help make their products fucking lame more culturally sensitive.

When confronted with allegations of wokery, Sweet Baby Inc’s CEO birthed a catastrophic meltdown in which she called white men “picky babies,” among other things. Huh, interesting strategy. Hurl racist insults at the people who buy your products. I must have missed that lesson in the MBA program I didn’t attend.

Anyways, another great piece from Substack’s most well-informed feline.

how we got to here

If you enjoy reading this Substack and would like to support my work, an annual subscription is just $40 which works out to an affordable $3.33 per month. Every paid subscription elevates the vibrational energy of the universe, since the extra dollars allow me that much more time to make these articles as epic as possible.