Looking at the FM website project after six million views and 40 thousand comments.

Summary: Last week the FM website had its six millionth page view since starting in November 2007. Over 33 thousand posts, over 40 thousand comments.  Here are our top hits for 2015 so far, plus a few thoughts about the project.  {2nd of 2 posts today.}

Top hits for 2015

Here are the top 16 posts for this year to date. Some of these are oldies (i.e., the posts about inspiration, the bloat of generals, and Germany’s invasion). Some are recent posts ( (i.e., the 3 climate science posts). Most traffic to posts after the first week comes through the grace of Google.

The FBI told their story about North Korea attacking Sony. Before we retaliate, read what they didn’t tell you.	36,950
The 97% consensus of climate scientists is only 47%	10,716
For your New Year’s Eve festivities: an inspirational speech from a great leader	09,859
The Texas drought ends; climate alarmists wrong again!	06,278
How close are we to the next recession?	06,144
How bad is our bloat of generals? How does it compare with other armies?	05,832
A Destiny of Failure – Germany’s plans to invade England during WWII	05,545
Is the profession of science broken (a possible cause of the great stagnation)?	05,414
Prepare now, for oil prices will rise again.	05,010
How we broke the climate change debates. Lessons learned for the future.	03,977

Some TV and film reviews were popular

Explaining the season 6 finale of “Castle”, and what’s coming next. Spoilers!	9,503
Interstellar’s Quantum Love and Other Cosmic Horses#*t	4,686
The little-known dark side of Ender’s Game	4,476
Tomorrowland: If You Don’t Like This Movie, You’ll Kill Our Future	4,130
Kingsman: a mirror too disturbing for critics	3,995
Hollywood transforms “The Hobbit” into The Desolation of Tolkien	3,906
Fury: the big screen display of America’s love of war, & inability to understand it	3,868

Some thoughts about the project

When starting this project I was told by a very wise man that complex material and a non-partisan perspective would never gain a mass audience. That’s proven correct. The audience has rotated over time. A tribe comes to cheer posts celebrating their truths, then jeer when new material rattles their blinders. Despite losing and gaining audiences repeatedly, page views have remained roughly stable during the past 3 years.

The predictions page shows a remarkable run of successful predictions. The Smackdowns page shows some notable failures, embarrassing but fortunately small in number.

The 40 thousand comments reveal much about our readers. They’re educated, articulate, and widely read. They are almost all fiercely tribal, holding their group truths as beyond question by fact or logic. I wonder if the three million words on the website — backed by tens of thousands of links to authoritative sources — have changed a single mind.

Above all, readers tend seek two things from this website. First, confirmation of their beliefs. Most (not all) avoid contradictory information as vampires flee from sunlight.

Second, they want entertainment — info-taiment. They have no sense that what they read should impel personal action, any more than watching Blue Bloods motivates them to become police or watching Star Trek motivates them to build the United Federation of Planets.

America’s outer party of professionals and managers wants the feeling of engagement with the great events of our time, without the risk or effort of actual engagement. This yearning shines forth from comments by both liberals and conservatives. I suspect they seek a charismatic leader to follow. America will begin a new era when they find him (or her).

For More information

Please like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and post your comments — because we value your participation. To learn more about America in our time I strongly recommend reading Closing of the American Mind by the late Allan Bloom.