WHAT'S WRONG WITH WHITE MEN?

by Hewitt E. Moore

@hewittemoore

In 2016, White males accounted for 7 of 10 suicides in the United States (roughly 32,000 of the 44,965 reported suicides). To put that number in perspective, 17,250 people died from homicide, and about 37,000 people died in car accidents. Whites are statistically 3x more likely to commit suicide than Blacks or Hispanics. And men are 3.5x more likely to commit suicide than women (although women attempt suicide 2x more often than men).

CLASSICAL NIHILISM

by Daniel Spaulding

It’s a common refrain among self-described conservatives and libertarians in America that both the modern bureaucratic managerial state and mass culture have veered wildly out of control, headed in an ever increasing totalitarian direction, and must some how be reined in. Their prescription is almost always a return to the Constitution, along with the supposed values of the Founding Fathers, and some form of classical liberalism; as one constitutionalist slogan declares, the answer to 1984 is 1776. What is often absent from sloganeering is any meaningful analysis of how society developed from the original republic to the current oligarchic, Leviathan surveillance state.

WE'VE LOST THAT EDENIC FEELING

"Whoopsie daisy! Took a wrong turn out of Paradise, and wound up in Hell."

by Andy Nowicki

According to the Bible, God decided at an early stage, following the initial construction of the heavens and the earth, that "It was not good for man to be alone." The Almighty then devised a plan for man to find fulfillment in his own kind; that is, he split humanity in two, creating wo-man (or "out of man") from the first man's rib.

THE NIHILISM OF "NOW"-ISM

                                                             

by Andy Nowicki

The monstrous predominance of default agnosticism—the reflexive mindset of our era—reinforces a terrible gloominess in the sensitive soul.

Those of a more obtuse psychic composition are able to avoid the snares inherent in such a circumstance, since—being frivolous by nature or by habit—they can slough off such rhetoric with the sort of automatically-generated aplomb supplied by their carelessly-cultivated shallowness. Unfortunately, it cannot be so for those mindful enough to follow premises through to their logical conclusions. These instead are like the one who, in the words of T.S. Eliot, found himself “much possessed by death/ And saw the skull beneath the skin.” For such as Eliot’s protagonist, being smacked in the face with the prospect of moribund, maggoty meaninglessness is simply too much to endure. Such seekers as these are aware of a need for greater nourishment than what they are being offered, else they will starve.

IN THE THICKE OF THE TWERK

by Andy Nowicki

Folks have reportedly been shocked and shattered by the aesthetic grotesqueries displayed by Miley Cyrus’s full-throttle sexed-up meth-bimbo act at the MTV Video Music Awards last Sunday. But the onstage schtick she stuck in the nation’s face during her performance of the vacuously generic party-anthem We Can’t Stop isn’t anything new; I caught the dubious scent a few days ago when I came across the bizarre video for this inexplicably chart-topping single, which, far from being sexily hedonistic, is downright creepy in its unsparing depiction of youthful degradation. (See also Colin Liddell's useful analysis of the video.)

Gone are the Daisy Duke shorts, the lustrous locks and the winsome eyes of Miley in her Party in the U.S.A. teen-tease phase. Even the smokin’ hot jailbait seductress look of Can’t Be Tamed is nowhere to be seen. What we have here is an entirely different vibe from anything that preceded it in the Miley canon, from Hannah Montana's premiere episode through to the present.

COME AS YOU ARE

by Andy Nowicki

In his amusingly-titled article “Smells Like Dead Junkie,” Jim Goad, an iconoclastic icon if ever there was one, takes rhetorical dead aim at Kurt Cobain, the famously fame-hating rock star, heroin addict, and supposed voice of Generation X, who took literal dead aim at himself back on April 5, 1994, when the self-directed Shot Heard ’Round the Grunge World tore a massive hole through the Nirvana frontman’s peroxide-fringed head, knocking the life out of this lead screamer’s poetically plaintive blue eyes and caking the ceiling of the celebrated anti-celebrity’s Seattle mansion with his gorgeously tortured brains.