This Post Delayed By Something I Ate or Drank

I felt hyper on Thursday and not in a good way. My feelings were all over the place, but none of them wanted to walk in the sunshine. Once I recognised it, it felt like I had had an accidental encounter with something alcoholic. The grapes with my morning yoghurt? Was that a wine vinegar with the rocket at lunchtime? I don't know, but it took twenty-four hours and two bars of chocolate to clear. I feel okay now. TSIR - This Shit Is Real.

Why You Should Replace Your ISP's Modem-Router

Last year I had a long-running problem with Talk-Talk, who could not find out why my broadband speeds had been so slow. They were in fact in breach of the contract, that’s how slow it was, but I wasn’t hammering the bandwidth at the time, so didn’t notice. I had a Bright Sparks engineer visit, I had BT replace the copper into the house from the distribution pole. Still nothing. So I retired the modem they had sent me a few years ago, and used the modem in the Netgear D6400 I was using as a router. It has wireless-AC and Talk-Talk’s router only had wireless-N.

Hey presto! Instant speed and reliability increase. The problem must have been with the Talk-Talk router: one of those faults that hides in the shadows when an engineer pokes around with a stick. That lasted for about 120 days, and then the connection started to go. I could watch the Netgear sign on, and see the downstream signal/noise sink down, go below zero and drop the connection. By now, I had learned not to call the helplines, who start talking about freaking micro-filters, and diagnosed a faulty modem chip: the rest of the router was just fine.

So I swapped in the Huawei modem-router Talk-Talk had finally managed to send me while they were not finding out what was wrong with my connection. I turned off the wireless and hooked it into the Netgear. Line reliability restored, with a speed of 4600 mbps. Um yeah. Let’s see if it improves after a week or so.

Nope.

So after having read many reviews about the Billion routers, I bought an 8800NL R2. £55 plus change from Amazon, with delivery via Doodle. It needs to be connected to a computer via LAN cable to be configured at start-up, but otherwise, plug it into the ADSL socket, hook it up to the Netgear. Take a look at the line speed.

8190 mbps.

Out of the box.

Boom. For real.

It’s currently at 9120 mbs. Never had that before.

This proves what I’ve often suspected. It’s in the ISP’s interests to send you something half-way reliable with speeds towards the lower end of what they promise. That way it naturally restricts the amount of their network bandwidth you can take. If it drops out fairly frequently, that’s a plus as well because they can always restrict your line speed even more while they "test for quality of connection". Oddly, you’ll never go above about half of their quoted maximum.

There are reasons Talk-Talk is cheap. A call centre in Guam is one of them. Second-rate Huawei modem-routers is another.

You can’t do anything about the call centre. You can buy a decent modem.

(Caveat: the Billion has wireless-N. That didn’t matter because I use the Netgear as a router. If you need wireless-AC, you will need a different model.)

Being Your Own Mental Point of Origin

“Be your own mental point of origin” is one of those phrases that for a long time I never really understood. Something about it kept slipping through my fingers.

Recently I saw a video called 15 Sacrifices You Need To Make If You Want To Be Rich


Alux can have some silly videos, but this is a good one, though you need to get past the Alux Lady’s voice and listen to what she is saying. It comes down to this: if you want to be rich, it’s going to take a lot of work over many years, and that work is not going to leave you a lot of time to give a wife and children the attention they deserve, or to hang out with loser friends, go for junk entertainment, and dozen other time-wasters, and even maybe for your health and sleep. You’re going to need to defer some of those things, such as family, and just plain drop others until you’ve achieved your goal or made an honest effort and failed.

This applies to a lot more than making a lot of money. It applies to training and competing for an Olympic medal; acquiring the skills and connections needed to establish yourself as an artist, writer, photographer or other creative; establishing oneself in a profession, trade or industry; or even working up from an entry-level job to one that pays enough to let live in your own place and save some money.

Now imagine someone leaving university and pursuing whatever demanding goal it was for ten years or so. Maybe they succeeded, maybe they didn’t. Either way, they know what it is to have an absorbing, sometimes frustrating but sometimes satisfying life that has nothing to do with women and children. If they were successful, they will place a high value on that. The idea that ‘all this success is just meaningless’ is a social cliche, not an emotional reality: the meaning isn’t in the reward, it’s in the competition. So they will still place a high value on the process, even if the results were disappointing. The idea that failed strivers reject all the behaviours they learned as ‘empty and meaningless’ is a cliche for losers. Nobody who has spent ten years filtering out junk, drama and losers is going to embrace any of it. They have turned into a person with self-discipline and self-respect, and those are things nobody trades.

So a lot of those temporary sacrifices are going to be permanent, but won’t be sacrifices, not to someone who has succeeded or put in an honest effort at achieving their goals. Because doing that changes the kind of person you were.

You can see where this is going. A man pursuing a goal over an extended period is going to look a lot like a MGTOW-with-short-term-relationships. If he doesn’t blow it by turning Beta when he makes his goal, he will be a de facto MGTOW-with-short-term-relationships for life. Not because he isn’t ‘Alpha enough’ to handle long-term relationships, but because he has evolved an idea of value in which the cost of LTR’s is not worth the benefit.

Anything that looks like MGTOW brand is anathema those Men’s Writers whose audience is men who want to know how to manage long-term relationships with women. That audience does not want to be told to get themselves a demanding goal. It wants to be told how to bump along with what it has, but with less pain per bump. It wants long-term relationships with women, because those are a substitute for demanding goals. (Though if they have a family and try to raise two decent kids, well, that’s a demanding goal. Such a pity most parents don’t treat it like one.) What those men want to hear is that they should not be the servants and ATMs of their wife and children. What they need to know is how to work that trick: how to have a life of their own, but no too much of a life that might cause them to look at their marriage and wonder what exactly they are getting from it that’s so much better than what they can get from their own devices? And don’t nudge and wink and talk about sex, or no-one will take you seriously.

Having-a-life-but-not-too-much-of-a-life is what’s meant by “being your own mental point of origin”. Because if you have a demanding goal, that goal is your mental point of origin, not yourself. Until you decide to change it.

This Post Cancelled Due to Snow

The Temperature Is Too Damn Low

It's too cold. I came home this afternoon and snuggled up on the couch with Neil Gaiman's American Gods until it was time to cook supper.

Discovered this guy on Tidal.



You know where heaven is? It's a bar you walk into, and the band sound like this, everyone's friendly, and you get relaxed but not drunk, and when they stop playing, it's way past midnight.

What I Got Out of the Basquiat Exhibition, Boom For Real

Anonymous asked me what I got out of the Basquiat exhibition, Boom For Real, at the Barbican. And when I started this, I had read a bit of the latest Art Monthly, and that contained a review of the exhibition.

Artworld reviews have a number of rules, and one is: the greater the reputation of the artist, the higher their auction prices, the less it’s considered au fait to ascribe political motives and meaning to their work, or to judge it against the political requirements of the bien penseurs’ bien pensants. Bringing issues of Jewish identity to reviews of Mark Rothko would be simply crass, and the reviewer that did it might never be invited back. An artist starting on their career is going to get the full treatment, in which the slightest brushstroke will ‘challenge notions of (insert identity politics straw man here)’.

Basquiat has made the auction prices. He will never be in the Great Museums, but every serious and fabulously rich collector has their Basquiat. He is one of the few artists who is a success in the market without needing the validation of being exhibited in the temples of contemporary art. People who know visual imagery like his work and buy it. I was surprised to learn that Patrick Demarchelier has one, because his glossy, well-lit, kind and gentle style is the antithesis of Basquiat’s. So he should be hors de merde politique, but Art Monthly seems to think not.

Art Monthly is wrong. Basquiat does not need politics to contextualise his work. If you want to do that, watch Downtown 82 and Julien Schnabel’s movie. If you want to understand how his work made the hit it did, you will need to know about the 1980’s New York art market, and there’s enough about that in Basquiat: A Quick Killing In Art. The exhibition covered as much as a visitor needed to know, leaving them to wonder who 'Boone’ was that they should be so nastily portrayed.

There is a group of creative people who stand as a judge of their audience, rather than the audience standing in judgement of them. J S Bach, Ravel, Debussy, John Coltrane, Raymond Chandler, Henry James, Leonardo da Vinci... you get the idea. You can like or dislike their work, but if you think it’s bad that just proves you don’t know squat about music, or painting, or literature, or whatever. And yes, it is possible to not like a body of work, while accepting that it is important and good work. For a long-ish time, that was my position on Basquiat. I could see he had the touch. Look at one of his paintings and it won’t “go away”, it won’t fade in your visual field. The damn thing stays there and keeps bringing your eye back to it.

Others have borrowed the style, but they don’t quite get the sublime confidence that comes out of every one of Basquiat’s jagged marks.

It’s that sense of sheer confidence that I get from his work, and it’s like having a glass of cold Coca-Cola on a hot day. Papa Hemingway said that “the first draft of anything is shit”, and that’s the curse of literary production. Basquiat found a way of making a first draft - and one I’m sure he thought about and planned before starting - that was good enough. Hip-hop is not about polish but the spontenaity of performance, after a lot of practice out of the public eye. Inspired by that, Basquiat started somewhere and added bits here and there until the painting was enough. His paintings feel as if painted in one session with no going back - much as the best early hip-hop feels it was recorded in one take. Thought about and with bits prepared, but put together once and once done, over, never to be repeated.

There’s a scene between Rene Ricard and JMB in the movie goes like this:

RR: “It’s Benny, he wants to know why you’re not at band practice.”
JMB: “Oh man I forgot”
RR: “You’re a musician, you paint in your spare time. Like Tony Bennett?”
JMB: “I didn’t know Tony Bennett painted.”
RR: “My point exactly.”

Were those Ricard’s feelings or Schnabel’s? That the music and other work was a distraction from his painting? Schnabel’s movie talks a lot about ‘painting’ and ‘painters’, but not so much about artists. It misses the point, which is that Basquiat had, for a few brief years, the touch, in whatever he did. There’s a subtle distinction between a musician who also paints - think Miles Davis or Joni Mitchell - and an artist who paints and makes music, and puts together a garden and designs plates. An artist works in many media, as Schnabel himself turned to making movies and writing a book. Basquiat was an artist who happened to major in painting, and made music and social-critcism graffiti as well.

So to the paintings on show. My main reservation about the pictures in the exhibition as that there were too many with white backgrounds. Like Yves Klein, who is better in blue, Basquiat is at his best when he uses colours as a base for the painting. His sense of colour is unique and striking, and in the end, it’s why I’d want one on the wall. Right opposite a Cranach the Elder and a Hals group portrait.

Push and Pull Immigration

There’s a joke about California. One day someone tilted the Earth to the West, and everybody who couldn’t hang on fell into California. The Americans who don’t live in California think it’s funny.

Except maybe it’s not a joke? Maybe between 1880 and 1920 someone tilted the world to the West, and everyone in Europe who couldn’t hold on fell into America. How did that work? Europe had some hard times at the end of the nineteenth century. Maybe the capable people in small towns and villages got together and asked: which of the men are we going to be carrying next time it gets bad? Which of the women are bitching and moaning instead of being pleasant and useful? Okay guys, pony up for their fares: we’re going to send them to the USA. Really. Pieter in the next village tells me they did it last year, and look how well they’d doing now.

In the same way Castro loaded his boats with criminals and social undesirables, tossed in a few grandmothers and babies as seasoning, and shipped the lot off to Miami. Twice, in two different decades.

In the same way the English for a few decades packed their criminals off to Australia and America before that.

In the same way the NGOs toured round the Middle East and Mid-Africa in the second half of 2015 and for much of 2016, telling the village leaders that a lorry would be coming through in a couple of weeks to take anyone who wanted to go to Europe. No charge. All paid for by some charity. Older people won’t make the journey. The elders did a double-take, and rounded up every man who couldn’t keep his hands off twelve year-olds or other men’s wives, every useless jerk and petty criminal, tossed them into the lorry with the worst of their whining women, and waved them bye-bye. Send money, the elders said, and don’t even think about coming back.

That’s Push Immigration. When the home country puts the people it doesn’t want on the bus to anywhere and waves goodbye. I suspect it happens at rare periods in history. This being one of them.

Pull Immigration is the English bringing over the Irish to build the railways in the mid-nineteenth century, or the Jamaicans to drive the buses and underground trains in the 1950’s, or the Americans bringing in the Chinese to build the railways, or the Germans bringing in Turks as Gastarbieters in the 1950’s. It’s universities and businesses sponsoring people from other countries to work, or employment agencies bringing over EU workers to the UK to work in construction, and it’s immigration campaigns such as the Australians ran in the 1950’s and 1960’s. And there’s a small amount of talented, hard-working people who are attracted by the greater opportunities in another country and move there legally to take their chance.

Then there are illegal immigrants, drawn to a neighbouring economy because they think they can make better money there, but who don’t have sponsors to bring them in legally. Are these Push or Pull? The test is fairly simple: if they bring their families with them, it’s Pull. If the family is back home, either expecting to be remitted cash or to be called when the family member has managed to work themselves into a legal position to bring the rest of their family over, that’s Push.

Pull immigration solves a short-term problem, but nobody asks what the immigrants are going to do once their task is done. When economies are growing, there will be other work for them. When economies are stagnant, or growing without adding employment, Pull immigrants become a problem, however, one that the Pulling country created itself. You’d’ve thought Governments would have learned by now.

Push immigration is almost always a problem from the start. After all, there’s no obvious need for the people, and no obvious jobs for them to take. Except low-paid unskilled jobs. There are no career paths, and little chance of each successive generation doing better than its parents. And their method of arrival is usually illegal, so they are criminals the moment they cross the border.

The only way out for either is economic assimilation. Social, cultural or religious assimilation is irrelevant: nobody cares about how other people worship, or their views on diet or dress, and if they only want to marry within their own. Economic assimilation is what matters. And Western economies - because that’s what we’re talking about here - pose a serious challenge. Western jobs require years of education to get, and a very specific set of behaviours to keep and do well in. Men must be prepared to work with, and even be managed by, women. Women must be prepared to work in the rougher, results-oriented and focussed manner of men. At work the newcomers must think in a thoroughly Western manner about commercial institutions, contracts, agreements, honesty, systems, materials and processes. Those who can’t - European or not - don’t do well and will eventually get the feeling that they are tolerated rather than respected by the productive core of the employees. At that point the sensible ones leave, the cynical ones carry on taking the money until they are eased out, and the insecure and unstable start with the SJW stuff.

In other words, for immigrants to do well in a Western economy, they have to be Westernised from 8 A.M. to 6 P.M. Some cultures can work that trick, but those that can’t or won’t do it get more, not less, alienated from their host economy with each succeeding generation. It’s worth noticing that this last point applies as much to people who were born in the country, as to those who enter it. Assimilation is something each native-born child has to do, and while most of them succeed, some do fail.