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Verified Twitter stands on the coast of the Baltic sea on a cold, rainy day, tasked with building a pier, only to prove, once again, how utterly useless they ultimately are.

Remember Reality Honks Back about Physicals and Virtuals, great article just before the war by N.S. Lyons, from a time when Canadian truckers were the enemy du jour for the terminally online masses who still had their brains scrambled by the COVID hysteria.

The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. […] This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.

The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world.¹

Imagine a reality tv show featuring all those loud Virtuals residing on Twitter, specifically the Verified class, trying to build a pier on a German beach in October. Not an undersea pipeline, not such a great feat of mega-engineering, just a pier on the coast, in the cold, Baltic sea water. How would they go about it?

My example is of course a very old form of demagoguery: tasking the intelligentsia of doing the peasants’ work to knock them down a few pegs.

But I’m not aiming to ridicule the loud faux-intellectuals of our era, not exclusively.

Building an undersea pipeline is not manual labor either. If it was a crowd of Canadian truckers in the same reality show, they might be able to build a pier, but that’s all the advantage they have over the Virtuals. An undersea pipeline is a whole different game.

The theory applied to the elites

John Maxwell tells the story of the mouse who crossed a bridge over a deep ravine with an elephant.  As the elephant and the mouse crossed the bridge, the bridge shook.  When they reached the other side, the mouse said to the elephant, “Boy, we really shook that bridge, didn’t we?”  Of course a mouse can’t shake a bridge, but when it teams up with an elephant, yes it can.²

Just as N.S. Lyons’ article made a distinctions between the Virtuals and the Physicals, when it comes to understanding Germany and Europe in general, a distinction has to be made between the actual, Physical Elite that gets work done, and the Virtual Elite that is terminally online and highly visible. The former’s survival strategy involves staying out of sight, the latter gets its power from exposure. They can and do complement each other, work hand in hand, in good times, in a symbiotic relationship (see: woke capital). We’re not living in good times.

A mega-engineering project, like an undersea pipeline, requires very capable actual, Physical intellectuals, from start to finish, in a way that the end result works, more reliably than the average consumer good, doing a job that is essential to a nation’s economy, non-stop, for decades. Delivered on time, in a harsh environment. I’m from a landlocked country, so I might be a wuss, but since I’ve seen the Baltic sea in winter, I have the deepest respect for anyone daring to operate in that environment, to build something so big.

That’s quite the feat. Nord Stream 2 was very important for the German elite, the actual elite, the actual money, not the minions with an arts degree who tweet all day in their second language. Its importance was as understated as possible, a connection between Russia and Germany established after the American project in Ukraine began is a defiant, strategic step away from the goals of Washington’s bipartisan soft and hard power. The Germans were meek in tone but stubborn in action, so it was built. (In effect proving that Germany is not quite the American puppet many hastily paint them to be in the post-WWII world order.)

The hush-hush required to pull this off, combined with the general absence of real talk about energy in Europe left even more room for all the other nonsense that keeps the kids occupied while the grown ups are busy doing the needful. The most underrepresented, voiceless group slaving away to keep the European economy going in the 2010s became the Joules. While Germany presented incredible grün progress, in actuality it doubled down on business as usual when it comes to energy, if not regressed, without any meaningful objection from the public. (Germans laughing at Trump’s remarks about energy dependence, a gif you all know by now.) The public, the amplified, verified and deified part of the public was busy debating crayon drawings in the Continental Daycare that we call the European Parliament, IRL and online.

What’s more important to the actual German elite: Nord Stream 1 and 2 pumping cheap energy to keep the 3.8 trillion dollar economy going, or the pet issues of the second-rate politicians who play pretend decision making in Brussels, debating the ideal size of gherkins until their terms are up and they get golden parachuted to some Atlanticist think thank, to debate the sexuality of gherkins?

Yeah, you guys in the EP deal with the “important” stuff while the adults handle the crisis

The real German elite understands that those idiots bring nothing to the table, they’re a net loss in peacetime, and downright malicious since this war began toward the actual needs of Germany’s industries and populace. (Just like the Greens, in government back home, proudly orthogonal to both group’s interests.)

As a test, we can also send the useless European Parliament to the Baltic coast, although many of them were already there in the twitterati episode, getting hypothermia after failing to make a fire out of moldy deckchairs.³

The loudest voice on Twitter used to be Real Donald Trump, and what did he actually achieve? Was there a wall built? Social media activity seems to be inversely proportional to a person’s or a topic’s actual importance⁴.

Talk is cheap, pipelines are expensive. The way the German actual elite found a way to bend to the demands of the crayon-drawing masses without breaking the economy’s back was to go harder on Russian natural gas addiction and commit to a megaproject. The German public took the easy way out of this morally and technically ambiguous decision by embracing the hypocritical grün framework, offered as a soothing explanation by the actual elite describing how everything is transitioning for the better. Alles in Ordnung, as long as the gas keeps coming, quietly, behind the curtains, under the sea.

Nord Stream 2 was built specifically where it is to bypass any troublesome country between Germany and Russia. It was meant for this very situation.

Now that option is gone for good, and there’s no plan B. Even if Putin croaks tomorrow and the Russians, once they’ve put down their weapons, disarmed their nuclear arsenal and signed off on punishing reparations, beg us to give them rotten carrots in exchange for natural gas, der stoff won’t be able to flow like the old times, nein. Old times, for the industrial powerhouse of Europe, are physically kaput. So, as the winter is approaching, time to check if the really important problems are having an impact on the German population’s priorities, time to revisit

The state of German Decadence

The upkeep of Western European decadence is too high, it can only be sustained in good times, therefore it must end, so I claimed a few months ago.

The Chart agrees:

Source: Bloomberg. Decadence is marked as green.

It explains itself. I don’t know what happened during the summer, when the Greens got even more popular, maybe the people thought the summer will be endless, just like the German national anthem promises. Turns out it wasn’t.

Or maybe Germany ran out of the chemicals they need to put in the water to make people vote Green (also turning the freakin’ frogs gay), the production of those can be based on natural gas for all I know. Either way the decadence is on retreat and the worst strategic hangover since WWII is expected to hit this winter.

I wish Scholz the best of luck, honestly! He’ll need it, and so do I:

Move the ticker, Twitter! 🚀

The Ukrainians are winning, and Germany is supporting them (claims to), while also investing 100 billion euros into rearmament, so they’re on the victorious team, yay, and there are even voices warning that Germany will win so much on this crisis — just like they did on 2008 by buying up Southern Europe for cheap — that this will ultimately make them even more powerful on the continent and on the world stage.

If only! I want to believe! I honestly do, because I have a fair bit of my savings rotting in Volkswagen shares and let me tell you, that rocket is not taking off, no matter what Twitter is buzzing about since February. I don’t even bother to Google how much Germany, the people, have invested in that state-subsidized Goliath, I’m certain it’s a good indicator, or at least a low bar on how good Germany’s prospects are. According to the market: not good.

Elon or Trump could move the markets, but all these twitterati fuckers by the thousands being sudden experts in East European ethnic grudges and warfare in general can’t bring life to the German benchmark auto giant, no matter how much they chirp-chirp-chirp online. They are useless.

Unless that ticker starts climbing, all your opinions are just irrelevant noise. The big fish ain’t biting, and one of those is bigger than all of Verified Twitter, when it comes to money. No LiveLeak footage of Russians getting owned is memeing the Germany economy back to health, it can be great entertainment, if you’re far away from the consequences, an ocean away (or in Norway), but here in the Old World, the outlook is bleak.

I can make a prediction on this whole mess by googling “VOW3” once the Deutsche Börse opens at 9AM CET every weekday morning, but I’m wise enough not to ruin my day at the start.

That loud little mouse on the bridge we call the Virtual Elite is exposed. Try to cancel winter in Europe, try to psyop our economic crash away, chirp harder than ever, Twitter! Your actual power is about to be put to test in Europe, and I’m afraid it won’t measure up to the task.

I’m not angry. One *le epic sigh* and I’m as calm a winter evening in a closed Berlin restaurant. You will see plenty of angry in the news from the Old World, I guarantee that; this substack is dedicated to stay as cheerful as possible under any circumstances (Subscribe for your regular dose of fun during the dark times ahead! It’s free!).

Moving along the list of nations that should be, at the time of writing this post, celebrating European Coming Out Day:

The state of Polish Decadence

People in Poland are hoarding trash to burn for heat in the winter.

It’s a country that started doing well recently, but you wouldn’t describe it as being spoiled rotten for generations, more like being raped by the 20th century, hard, and only very recently getting a break from eternal misfortune. They didn’t abandon their beach coolers yet.

They were the greatest users of coal for domestic heating in Europe, not an enviable circumstance to begin with, and now they’re hoarding trash for fuel.

Times are getting rough, no caps bussin fr fr for a while in East Europe for the foreseeable future. At least we still have Twitter.

So help us, the way you can, the only way you seem to be able and willing to: virtually. Send the Poles a Reddit Gold for their heroic effort as they grow tits from all the xenoestrogens they’ll inhale as they burn every plastic bottle they can find to stay warm and agitated enough to classify as a prime nuclear target, and send us all, in East Europe, the ass-end of your post-Fukushima, post-9/11, post-truth unipolar Empire the likes, shares and retweets you can! Not joking,

and subscribe (it’s free)

and also buy as many VOW3 shares as you can, it’s cheap now for some reason idk, and don't sell it, never sell, diamond hands! (not an investment advice).⁵

1. Reality Honks Back

2. DISCIPLESHIP AT MESSIAH - A Mouse and An Elephant

3. Art in the post by dream.ai

4. Orban just registered on Twitter yesterday. Is this a sign that he’s about to retire? If so, you heard it here first!

5. Not an investment advice.