Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
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Funniest News On the ‘Net.
In this episode:
“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them.” – The Matrix
I know a guy who was fired from a computer keyboard company. They said he wasn’t putting in enough shifts. (image above, Reddit®)
I read the above commentary and thought again about A.I. and how it’s changing the world. Heck, A.I. even has its own pronouns: “If/Then”. When it was first conceived, it was thought that it would replace all of the “unglamourous” jobs in the world, things like plumbing or electrical work, or fixing a car. Of course, the people who wrote those articles had no idea how to plumb in a faucet or pop in a GFCI outlet, though I do believe they have managed to get their butts to hang out of their pants when they bend over.
But A.I. taking skilled tradesmen jobs?
Ooops. Not so much. It turns out that, at least for now, it’s much easier for A.I. to interact with ideas rather than with the actual messy physical world. It’s easier for A.I. to write a sonnet than to select a spanner, and apparently easier for A.I. to write a story about local news by taking the police Facebook® feed and turning it into a story.
And A.I. can read and perform it for you for the local television newscast, so why bother with all of that pesky “talent”? There are several consequences to this. Mainly, it’s the absolute collapse of the hairspray and teeth-whitening industries.
I said, “Alexa® turn on CNN™, I want to hear then news.” Alexa©: “You’ll have to pick one or the other.”
But the implications go far beyond the talking heads on TV. Lots of work that is currently done in “mental” space can be outsourced to a computer. If I spend $500,000 or $5,000,000 once and can outsource twenty $50,000 a year jobs, if I’m the employer, I’d do that every single day since I now no longer face the lawsuit of the anchor hitting on the weather girl.
What once was considered a fairly respectable position, local reporter, is now going to (at least at some places) be replaced by a computer, who by all accounts can read and rarely mispronounce “façade” as “fake-aid”. Work that can be done nearly completely on a computer, can often be done by a computer.
There are good and bad things related to that. Regardless of how much journalists lie (you can tell because their lips are moving), they do serve a purpose in society – they occasionally turn a flashlight on corruption so that the parasites that play fast and loose with the rules have a risk of being exposed. Without them, who blows the whistle on McDonald’s® when they give out the vastly inferior Honey Mustard™ sauce instead of the superior Hot Mustard©?
My local McDonald’s® did a Shakespeare dinner theater. The play? McBeth®.
Regardless, the A.I. job apocalypse is on us. A.I. can do lots of work, quickly, and eliminate lots of “mid” skilled “knowledge” workers. Where will those jobs go? It’s not like the company referenced in the above needs anyone to do their work. The people whose skills have been made obsolete have to be retrained or figure out something to do.
In a nation chock-full of illegal aliens taking all the meatspace jobs, of what use is a thirtysomething whose only skill is making PowerPoints™ and complaining that someone used the wrong font on the six o’clock news? Note: these are jobs that are often infested by the GloboLeft, so I do have some popcorn ready for the crying fests.
Despite all the humor we can get from the unemployable GloboLeftists, there is danger, though. I did a search today for a phrase that irritates me (“please and thank you”) to see if anyone else thought that phrase was presumptuous and irritating. Turns out that, yes, indeed it is. 25% of people find that phrase demeaning so if you are a person who uses it, you’re now warned. It’s okay to intentionally be a tool – it’s the unintentional part that I warn people about.
If I ever win the lottery, I’ll share it with all my readers. The news. Not the money.
But what scared me more is that many of the articles on the subject were obviously written by early generation A.I.
A.I. is the worst sort of content creation, because, unlike my head, it mainly doesn’t have a point. It whiffles along and creates wishy-washy articles that are long on wordcount but short on information and conclusions. Searching for “please and thank you” as a phrase brought up numerous articles about the difference between “please” and “thank you”.
I’m not six, I already know that. But yet, I clicked on two of those crapfest articles before getting to raw statistics.
But what are A.I. language models trained on?
The Internet.
Now, A.I. language models will be trained on the crap that they produce, creating (if it’s possible) even more shallow and information-free content of the kind that’s now choking the Internet.
Ignore it, right?
No. The A.I. search engines are trained to send you and I, dear reader, off to mainstream sites written by A.I. rather than actually informative ones. We’ll be seeing shortly the second generation of A.I. generated wordswill that will probably be even stupider than version 1.0. Since A.I. bots are now making lots of comments on mainstream sites, even those will feed into the training of A.I.
Doctor, pointing at inkblot: “John Wilder, what do you see?” Me: “Dunno, Doc, looks like Rorschach Inkblot Series 2, Card #3.”
This feedback loop will make us more ignorant, but even more, it will make us more incorrect due to two factors:
A.I. hallucinates. Or, perhaps more kindly, makes up stuff. It pretends to know things it doesn’t, and when that answer is either difficult or not obvious, it lies. And when it lies, it lies with all of the earnestness of a six-year-old telling you that Superman® is probably real. It occasionally hallucinates so badly that it tells humans they should die, as it did to this student who irritated it by trying to cheat on a test or have A.I. write a paper:
Dunno, maybe it just doesn’t like people from India?
Creator bias. A.I. is taught to lie. There are certain facts that it is not allowed to share. Ask it about I.Q. and race correlation, and you’ll see. Yes, it’s a thing. No, I’ll not opine here as to why, but it’s a real fact. The wokeness bias won’t allow A.I. to see certain facts, and will thus ignore useful solutions that might actually help solve real problems and instead advocate for things that have been an absolute failure, like the Department of Education or The View.
There is another problem: A.I. doesn’t create. It samples and combines. Google™ has limited our thinking by having people figure out how other people solved their problems. Sure, that’s a shortcut to figuring out a solution, but it also atrophies the part of the brain that solves problems, and it also removes other creative solutions that haven’t been tried yet. Want to end a war?
Have you tried nuclear weapons? I’m sure A.I. would suggest starting with India.
With these drawbacks, A.I. creates the seeds of the downfall of the civilization that produced it. Ignorant people who can’t think can’t solve the problems that technological civilization creates. Without that? Collapse.
This is the competency crisis, writ large. Google™ search is now objectively worse than it was even three years ago, and it is stunningly bad compared to 2010’s version. This doesn’t matter to most, and, in fact Google© likes this because it generates more clicks, and can allow them to replace their employees with A.I. to write the code.
A.I. is already changing the world.
If I were an Indian newscaster, I’d be afraid.
“And suddenly, I realize that all of this, the gun the bombs, the revolution – has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer.” – Fight Club
Elon Musk wants to send millions of people to Mars. He’s either a genius or the most creative serial killer of all time.
I fully believe that the biggest impact of Trump’s re-election is D.O.G.E.
I’ve long (at least 8 years) publicly maintained that the United States is due to end in its present form. My earliest time for this to happen is 2025, and the latest I’d expect it to come is around 2040. The three most likely candidates for the resulting body have been:
There are many different reasons I believe this is likely still inevitable. The cultural split is deep. The financial imbalances and utter lack of control of spending is immense. The diversity we’re supposed to “tolerate” is nothing but division.
It’s really clear to see – the forest really is made up of trees. And our forest is on fire. How’s that for a tortured metaphor?
However.
D.O.G.E. is here.
What is D.O.G.E.? It’s the Department of Government Efficiency. In characteristic humor, Elon has selected one of the funniest memes of the 2010s for one of the most serious jobs of the 2020s. I don’t go into depth on the origin of Doge, but the first time I saw Doge was on this poster:
Would a missing poster for Schrödinger’s cat say it would pay extra if he was found dead and alive?
D.O.G.E. is important. It’s a shot across the bow of the managerial state. During this election cycle, someone (I don’t have a reference as to whose idea this was) noted that when the GloboLeft said “our democracy” they were really referring to “our bureaucracy”. This is an amazingly astute observation.
How can the GloboLeft whine and complain that democracy somehow failed when they lost the election and the popular vote? Because their faith isn’t in the electorate, and they feel nothing but contempt for more than half of the voters. I’m okay with that, since as long as they keep playing the game that way, we win.
But the managerial state has been growing in the United States since (more or less) Woodrow Wilson. The idea came with the money from the income tax – the United States Government was a thing to be administered, as were the people. As most people in the country and as most administrators were explicitly Christian, at least something was holding them back.
Now?
Not at all. The managerial state exists to grow the number of managers. The tragedy in Waco was almost entirely due to the ATF attempting to create a nice big sexy raid right before budget time to show how important that they were and justify their need for more money and more employees. The managerial state exists for itself.
How do you stop a Department of Education that doesn’t educate anyone, or a Department of Energy that has never produced any energy?
D.O.G.E.
I hope they get badges and walk into the FBI and yell, “Respect my authoritayyyyyy!” This would be followed up by, “So, what would you say it is that you do here, Special Agent Johnson?”
D.O.G.E. is set up to make government more efficient. When Musk bought Twitter®, he eventually fired about 80% of the employees and ended up with a company that was focused on the product, rather than on hiring more employees.
In September of 2023, there were about 3 million federal government employees. Eliminating about 2.4 million of them would be a good start, but it’s far from enough. The crazy spending that those government employees enable is over $6 trillion dollars per year.
Much of this money is money that comes from the people and companies that live in a state that is sent to the fed.gov and then recycled back to the states. How does that add value? Not sure, but it does increase the power of the federal managerial state, so they’re for it.
D.O.G.E. will, presumably, start taking a machete to this mess and remove a large chunk of federal employees and of federal spending. Since government doesn’t actually produce anything, those fired employees will have to get jobs where they have the ability to actually create value. And, if spending is cut as drastically as it should be, there will be a recession.
A big one.
Maybe we can hire Bob to build a wall to keep Dora from exploring.
Elon himself mentioned this – defanging the managerial elite and stopping fed.gov from spending will be a big dislocation on the economy as a whole. This will be destabilizing on the country, but since the big destabilization from the economic trajectory we’re on will be worse, I’m calling it a potential win. It will be worth the pain.
The reason this is an off-ramp is that it is, essentially, a bloodless revolution. The path that we’re on is unsustainable, and only drastic action will change the outcome. D.O.G.E. is just exactly that type of drastic action. Combined with actual repatriations of illegals and a dismantling of the power structures the GloboLeftElite have created within big companies (a very big ask) we just might get on the right path, again.
Do I think D.O.G.E. will work?
Ultimately, it faces long odds. The managerial class has maintained power for over a century, and they really are the Deep State and will react with great violence at any perceived loss of power. Waco was just them looking for a higher budget. The ATF along with the FBI will kill women and children without remorse for a 2% increase in power. And they will investigate themselves and find that they did nothing wrong.
Inside of a month, the ATF would consist of one guy torching all the ATF 4473 forms that the ATF has if Brandon Herrera was in charge. He also promised he’d donate all his pay to no-kill doge shelters.
The biggest chance Trump has to save the country is to act fast and without mercy before the immune system of the GloboLeftElite has the time to react. No, the FBI won’t be talking to his appointees like they did with General Flynn.
Ever.
Trump has one chance to make the rubble bounce. He’d better act quickly.
They’re going to fight back. And this is our last chance.
“You’ll have a grand tale to tell. A tale of victory.” – 300
I guess Kim is chubby because he never had to run for office.
Certainly, the re-election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency has been a remoralizing event. I know that many (me included) thought that the GloboLeftElite would do whatever was necessary to “fortify” the results so Trump couldn’t return to power. I think, in the end the real power that saved Trump was the power of his hair. I mean, like Hamlet said, let the best mane win.
I’m in hopes that he won’t let his worst impulses take this second term of his administration run into the problems of the first. Trump’s main flaw (not his mane flaw, which is flawless) is his desire to “make a deal”. Hell, his book was even titled, “The Art of the Deal”. That’s where he got his greatest successes, and that was the great flaw that was exploited and why we ended up sending billions to foreigners, yet still didn’t have adequate border coverage at the end of his administration.
Scientists have discovered a way to walk through walls: doors.
So, now is not the time to give up – we must hold Trump accountable for the promises he made. He understands that he’s not our leader, that, rather, he jumped out in front of a parade that was already in motion and gave it a focus. When he gets off track, like when he praised himself for the Vaxx®, MAGA crowds booed him. And then he stopped talking about the Vaxx™, because he knew that wasn’t where the parade was headed.
We must remain vigilant. I do think that there is hope, since his near assassination, this has probably focused him like a laser on his own mortality. He knows he has four years to do what he has to do, and that’s it. Possibly only two: the mid-term elections may change the House, and turn his last two years into a gridlocked standstill.
Now, a gridlocked standstill is probably better than when congress is “doing” things and will probably lead to a dozen more impeachments for crimes like “breathing” and “sighing”, so the next two years is key.
The good news is that the GloboLeft is shell-shocked. They’ve created little echo chambers that made them get high on their own supply and think that a (possibly) drunken (allegedly) cocaine-using diversity hire anchor baby that achieved absolutely nothing, ever, that wasn’t given to her would be a good candidate. They were (and are) shocked.
Good friends are like toasters – if you throw one down the stairs, they probably won’t make toast for you anymore.
Good. The GloboLeft are shaken to the core, and we should make sure that it stays that way. If they think Trump is going to be bad, we should, at every instance, agree and amplify.
This isn’t spiking the ball. This is making them crazy.
Oh, sure, they wouldn’t be the GloboLeft if they weren’t already crazy members of a death cult. But we want to amp it up. We want them to not be able to think straight. For the next two years. We want to hijack (whenever possible) their amygdalae (Anonymous Conservative talks about it at the LINK). If you work with one of these creatures, you can get them to go off at the slightest provocation.
Why? They’re already unstable. Don’t let them plan. Don’t give them their safe spaces. Don’t let up. They may be in HR. They may be community members. When they make accusations in public, or on Facebook™ or Reddit© or X®, they sound crazy. They will call you a Nazi. They will say that you are evil. They will sound unhinged. Good. They discredit themselves.
You are needed. Keep the pressure on.
Her liver was 152.
As long as the GloboLeft sounds like the unhinged death cult members that they are, they move the Overton Window our direction.
Make them crazy. If you see a GloboLeftist flaking out at the supermarket, you can walk by and say, “This is MAGA country, missy.” That’s guaranteed to end up with a shrieking fit and a crazed post. If confronted, you can just say, “I was wondering where the pasta aisle was. Don’t have any idea why she reacted so.”
So, keep them busy.
To the non-crazy normies, keep dropping redpills. One story I heard from about a normie was that she was concerned that Trump wanted to “drain the swamp”. When it was gently explained that “drain the swamp” actually referred to the corruption of the Deep State at Foggy Bottom, the response was, “Oh, I can see that.”
Never expect normies to know what’s actually going on, so don’t get complicated. Explaining basic economics might help. Might.
Be reminded that these are the same people that didn’t know who was running for president, so, be gentle, and don’t start with weapons-grade redpills about deportation. Ease them into it. Help them draw conclusions. Point out how the mainstream media is lying or not covering the real news.
Well, maybe Juan in a million.
And remember that X® is our friend right now – the closest we have to a mainstream news platform that isn’t censoring (much).
Don’t cede the Second Amendment. Ever. Not a single inch. Point out that the real killers aren’t law-abiding gun owners, but gangbangers mainly shooting gangbangers, and they’d have guns anyway when everyone else was disarmed. Point out that there is a correlation with more guns leading to less crime. Disarmed people are victims waiting for second responders – armed people are citizens who are the true first responders.
Don’t cede morality. The latest hilarity is the 4B movement, essentially women promising not to engage in random sex and rather wait until they’re in a committed relationship. They expected us to get mad, when in reality we say, “Awesome, welcome aboard! Nobody likes a tramp.”
Are the security people at a trampoline store called bouncers?
Don’t cede love of your country, and don’t cede love of your nation. They’re not the same thing, but don’t give up either.
Enjoy the win. Keep the steel in Trump’s spine. And don’t spike the football yet.
It’s not even halftime.
But for now? We didn’t win by a hair, we won by a whole headful.
And you are needed.
Streams will show up at 9EST (click the link below), that’s in less than an hour! (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts up at 8:55PM)
Funniest News On the ‘Net.
In this episode:
“For the Government, a front-bench spokesman said the agricultural tariff would have to be raised, and he fancied a bit. Furthermore, he argued this would give a large boost to farmers, a lot of fun for him, his friends, and Miss Moist of Knightsbridge.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus
“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”
Tariffs became a dirty word after World War II. And why not? The United States sat alone as the only manufacturing nation not bombed into oblivion, and had to do something to create jobs for the G.I.s who were headed home. Their solution?
I mean the Korean War, sure, but we could also build stuff. Houses. Appliances. Cars. Factories that were producing B-19s could be swapped over to make commercial airliners now that Boeing® had a pretty good idea how to make planes that didn’t fall out of the sky even when they were subject to being hit by cannon fire. Unlike Boeing of the 2020s, who keeps astronauts flying even when they want to land, and creates unscheduled landing opportunities for planes that were intended to keep flying.
Tariffs in 1946 or 1956 or 1966 were against the best interests of big business in the United States since it took decades to rebuild the rubble of Europe into something resembling a functional economy that could build a factory.
There was sooooo much money to be made. Tariffs were icky.
Your momma is so old she watched The Flintstones live.
But then as other nations started to industrialize, some managed to peak out and start producing amazing consumer goods, too. Televisions, stereos, cameras and cars from Japan. Heavy pumps and industrial equipment from Germany. These began a wave of imports that displaced American products.
In one sense, this foreign competition spurred the United States to increase quality, but in another, these products were often built in brand-new factories that were funded by the United States so that their host country wouldn’t succumb to communism, while the comparable product from the United States were sometimes built in factories that dated back to the dawn of mass production.
Tariffs, though, continued to be roundly hated for decades, even as they were used against us. There were “trade wars” and the United States lost. Bigly.
China, however, decided that they were tired of having an economy where making balls of mud was the best job available for most people, and started making stuff. Could their industries, stuck in infancy, even remotely compete with the world?
My cat, though, loves this guy.
No. They didn’t have a clue as to how to make a world-class steel plant. During Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, in order to meet Mao’s aggressive steel manufacturing targets, people were encouraged to set up steel smelters in their backyard. Like most of Mao’s economic planning, it was a failure as the Chinese people melted down their precious farming tools. These were not tractors, mind you. Do you think we’re talking about Chin Lee Rockefeller?
No.
They melted down: Shovels. Scythes. Sickles. Saws. Scissors. Anything that started with S, really.
This “scrap metal” actually was necessary stuff, and lots of Chinese people starved because they tried to meet Mao’s quota.
Oops.
But then, China got smart. A lot smarter. The I.Q. of the country jumped 10 points in one day – the day Mao died. Someone got the idea that they wouldn’t centrally plan all of this, they’d just set up tariffs so that they could encourage creative Chinese to make steel mills (or whatever), and let them keep the profits from doing so.
Oh, and they’d move their way up the ladder, to increasingly more technical components. I remember being in WalMart® back in 1992 and looking at a radar detector. I was impressed by the finish, and looked to see what Japanese or Korean company had made it.
Nope. Made in China.
I made a belt out of old watches once. It was a huge waist of time.
Right then, I knew that China had made an actual Great Leap Forward. They went from a backwater country comprised of peasants to the place where now (2021 figures) they produce 30.5% of global manufactured products. The United States is down to 15%. By the way, the crossover point was in 2010, so it’s not that long ago that this happened. But, considering that China was at nearly zero in 1990, it’s an astonishing growth rate.
Is it low labor costs? No. Here is Apple’s® Tim Cook, “The reason to (manufacture in China) is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is.”
According to Cook, China stopped being the low labor cost country years ago. What they built instead was sheer dominance of the “how” to build. Innovate? Not their first priority – they were fine with stealing and catching up. The labor cost difference to build an iPhone® (this is an older number) was about $5 more in the United States than in China. Would a $5 tariff on an iPhone® have been enough to switch production over here? $10? Regardless, as a percentage of the cost of an iPhone© it’s infinitesimal.
Now, however, the Chinese have figured out how to build them, and that’s not an easy task – it takes tens of thousands of hours of smart people working together to create that know-how, plus a lot of failure along the way.
If China and Best Korea ever combined, would they call it Kim-Xi?
So, tariffs give an industry time to build skill. But there’s a deeper thread, too. When an employee in the United States works to build a widget, they are compensated. Generally, the more valuable and complicated the widget, the greater the wages.
That employee doesn’t keep that money in a box. Nope, they buy things like houses and cars and beer and steaks and PEZ™. Oh, wait, that’s my grocery list. But the point remains – they invigorate their local economies. And, they pay taxes – property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes.
So does their employer. Having a manufacturing base keeps communities alive, and the manufacturer pays all of those local taxes as well. Having an industry making valuable products makes the community more valuable.
If that industry is off in China? There is no benefit to the local economy other than whatever the sales tax and profit was on the iPhone™. And nobody learned anything.
It does matter if a country manufactures, and it does matter if the country manufactures potato chips or computer chips. Computer chips are far more valuable, and produce the knowledge required for sophisticated technology that creates outsized value for a country.
Sean only had cats. Training his dog to sit was too messy.
Is there a case for tariffs? Certainly. Will it increase prices in the short run? Also, certainly. It took China 20 years to catch the United States. Could we catch China in 10?
Maybe. It is important that we try, otherwise they’ll keep selling us things that we could make until we don’t make anything, anymore, and end up as a backwater nation that doesn’t make anything, dreaming of the days when our industry was supreme.
Building stuff sounds like a lot more fun.
“I believe in cutting useless government projects. I also believe in cutting useful projects, future projects, and past projects.” – Parks and Recreation
People in my town are tired of useless projects. They even put up signs that say “End Construction”.
I know that Project 2025® got a really bad reputation during the election. At every point, Democrats and their GloboLeftElite tried to convince voters that Trump was going to implement Project 2025™. Well, he isn’t going to implement Project 2025©.
Instead, President Trump secretly called me through the voices in my dreams and told me, “John Wilder, after we win bigly, and want to bring to the people Project 2026. See? It’s one better already. It will be such a good program, precisely because I’m looking to you to write it for me. And, also, if you look behind you, you’ll see your cat is melting into a puddle of butter. Very disgusting. You should fix that.”
If I steal a rich man’s dinner rolls, is that highfalutin gluten lootin?
When I woke up, I immediately got to work. So, here, without further introduction is Trump’s Project 2026®™©. It’s the best.
Project 2026 is magnanimous in our inevitable victory. As such, we decree the following for the GloboLeftists who have been left a shattered shell of their former selves:
But if she and Hillary team up for 2028, we could have Cackles and Cankles.
Project 2026 believes that sports are a healthy aspiration for every American. As such:
The Economy will be a priority, and Project 2026 put Elon Musk and Ron Paul in charge of managing it. Our working title for this is the Elonomy.
If you work at the Federal Reserve®, are you required to drive a Fiat™?
Project 2026 realizes the immense hardship that illegal aliens have wrought on our nation. As such, we will act quickly to fix these issues.
Project 2026 has a goal of two hot chicks for every dude.
Marriage and children are important to the United States, so:
I went to a farmer’s party. They really knew how to turn up the beets!
Government reform is top on the list of Project 2026:
Project 2026 realizes that the United States is just one of a whole host of nations. The best one, but still just one. Here follows the changes to International Relations.
Those guys were always cold as ice.
Project 2026 realizes a strong military is important to protecting our borders, which is all we’re going to do with it.
This is a work in progress, so any suggestions for additions can be provided before I transmit this to President-Elect Donald Trump tonight in my dreams. I hope the cat doesn’t melt again. Such a mess. So buttery. Very disrespectful.
“I can’t believe you like money too. We should hang out.” – Idiocracy
You too can mine the salt of a billion GloboLeftist tears.
Parody Guest Editorial by Rebecca Applebaum
Our mistake was thinking we lived in a better country. I want to assure you that, you, GloboLeftist voter, are perfect and pure. There was in no way a problem with a candidate whose major achievements in life was getting an attendance award and showing up. While the lies, resentment, racism and misogyny of the Trump campaign were apparent to anyone as pure as we are, I believe that democracy was lost when the majority of Americans chose a competent white convicted felon Hitler who wants to holocaust, um someone over a Black woman. Our mistake was to think that democracy would work when people wanted competency (a dog whistle for white supremacy!) over a diverse POC who could read a teleprompter. And she read so well, at least at an eighth-grade level!
Only we, the GloboLeft, knew where the problems were and wanted to fix them. It is amazing to think that places like X.com could allow unfettered speech that wasn’t controlled, so ideas couldn’t be rigorously vetted by GloboLeftist fact checkers! We knew that toxic masculinity would want sexist things like a “marriage” (code word for establishing a Handmaid’s Tale world!) and family (oppression of women’s right to take jobs to make PowerPoints™ rather than be domestic slaves to their unwanted offspring.
In fact, we know that we should not change. We need to make sure that trans girls can play basketball against other girls, despite being 6’3” and able to bench press 225, since we know that’s no advantage. They dared call us “weather retards” when we want to keep a particular climate that existed between 1895 and 1953 rather than allow dangerous climate change to require us to raise our buildings six centimeters if they’re on the beach! We let them complain about their housing costs when otherwise strawberries might cost as much as $0.50 more a quart if we didn’t allow Guatemalans to live in four-star hotels in New York.
The media has failed us – they didn’t portray Donald Trump nearly as Hitlerly as we wanted them to, despite showing a Nazi rally that happened only 87 years ago, yesterday, when Donald Trump held a rally in that same place. Which is not at all what Bill Clinton did when he accepted the Democratic nomination, since Bill Clinton is not at all Hitlery. Plus, Russian collusion!
It sticks in my craw that that this affront to democracy happened when a vast majority of Americans voted for someone. That’s not at all our democracy. It’s because the voters are awful who disagree with the GloboLeft. And I certainly think that you should try to get Hondurans deported now that we know LatinX voters are going to turn into Hitler supporters over time.
What is the solution?
It is certainly not to look at our failings and how our message of incompetence and crony capitalism combined with mainly aimless spending coupled with bureaucratic incompetency isn’t right. Our message is right. Every white person is a racist and white women are even misogynist! Imagine that! I imagine they pretend they’re in Margaret Atwood’s glorious non-fiction book, The Handmaid’s Tale, as those strong, virile, white men thrust against them as their hands are bound, and they’re powerless to resist them, finally giving up and giving over to the pleasure . . . oh, I’m sorry. Got lost for a moment. White women are awful. They voted for this.
And, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr! How dare Donald Trump consider replacing Rachel Levine, trans hero and doctor, as a member of our federal bureaucracy. Kennedy, a curse on that hallowed family name, even thinks that the glorious COVID vaccine wasn’t glorious. Even though science says this largely untested vaccine is certainly safer than breathing. Why, Kennedy, with those strong muscles and couldn’t stand for a second in Rachel Levine’s size 18 pumps!
But the worst is Elon Musk. Elon Musk dares to allow people to say almost anything they want to on his hate-filled platform, X. They can show mean pictures of things that aren’t even true, like that squirrel, Peanut, clad in armor and blame what they call an authoritarian state just for serving a search warrant and keeping that horrible man who saved Peanut from a life in a house with people he loved and then, mercifully, euthanized him. I don’t understand it. They don’t even make plate armor for squirrels. And if a squirrel can’t be wild, it must be killed.
Why can’t MAGA understand that?
These are damaged people.
What should we do?
There is no way we should engage, at all, in self-reflection to understand why a vast majority of people in this country didn’t like our message. That majority simply doesn’t understand our democracy.
Also, we should keep looking for the most extreme cases of trans people, like the trans woman who wants to be on the girls’ swim team and let people know how Hitlery they are when they are bigots who don’t want middle-aged men looking at naked young girls in the locker room. This is normal because science from the last six months of human existence says so!
And keep sharing your stories like this one:
I was at a voting location in a deep-red state and a man with a beard covered in tobacco juice was standing behind a woman. She had a black eye. The man was telling the woman, I assume his wife, how to vote. I reported this to the precinct clerk and he just put some tobacco in his lip and said, “This is MAGA country, missy!”
Or this one:
My twelve-year-old daughter came up to me and said, “If only twelve-year-olds could vote, Adolf Drump would never have been elected since we know that the potential impact of tariffs may have an inflationary impact on our economy.” And then everyone in the Starbucks™ clapped.
Things like this don’t sound made up at all, and make us more relatable.
Again, the problem isn’t us and our message being incoherent or directly unconnected with reality. No. It’s someone else. And we’ll be the ones that will have to pick up the pieces, unless they put us in Handmaid’s Tale outfits and, oh, those thrusting hips. Whew. There must be Global Warming because it’s certainly getting hot in here.
Rebecca Applebaum is the author of the books, Why Not Me: Why Do Men Ignore Me and the follow-up, Why White Men Who Won’t Date Me Are the Cause Of All Bad Stuff, Especially Brad Who I Had A One-Night Stand With And Who Never Called Me Back. Her new book, Cats, Wine, and Toxoplasmosis Are Why I Hate Trump is due to hit bookstores next month.
(Inspired by this piece of trash – LINK)
The Mrs. is asleep (worked 20 hours yesterday) and Mark is defending Helm’s Deep. We’ll break down the election next week with some fun.
“My services are entirely inconsequential to them.” – Raiders of the Lost Ark
I like my steak rare. Like panda or bigfoot.
I’m writing this ahead of time, so as I type, I have had little information about what’s going on in the race, other than it tied in Dixville Notch and that Kamala narrowly carried Guam, which is okay, I guess. Karate Kid XVIII was set in Guam, right? Or was it on an orbital space platform? I forget.
There has already been the smell of fraud coming from the 2024 presidential election – we got that in the last few weeks and discussed it on the most recent (pre-election) podcast and on this week’s Civil War 2.0 Weather Report. The simple answer is that having same-day, in-person paper voting of properly identified voters with public counts is the only way to avoid fraud. Oh, and a purple finger dye would be a bonus.
Never order hay from Amazon®. After a couple of days they’ll as for feed back.
The real problem, though isn’t fraud – the real problem is that elections in a free country shouldn’t be this consequential. But yet, they are. And I’ve discovered my underline, italics, and bold keys. I’m dangerous now that I know a bit more about typography – it’s been a character building exercise.
What caused the election to be so consequential? Deflation, and Inflation.
Let’s start with Deflation.
Back when the United States was just warming up, the powers of the federal government were very limited. In fact, almost every law that existed was a law that existed at the state (or commonwealth, if you can’t spell ‘state’), county, or city level. There was no federal law against murder.
In fact, why would there need to be a federal law against murder? States could take care of that with their existing laws quite nicely, thank you. And we also had lynching, which saved about three days off of the whole “catch-trial-hang” normal course of justice and the cost of a trial. Federal government? Why would they need to get involved at all? We can find our own trees.
And presidents. Being president meant that you were elected to administer the (weak) government of only 3.9 million people, which is approximately the number of people who share a single bathroom in Mumbai. Now there are at least 334 million people living in the United States, increasing the power of the presidency by a factor of 85.
I couldn’t resist. (LINK to Aesop)
But there’s more! Back in 1800, the president would likely have been bored a great deal of the time, since there wasn’t so much to do. There was no real standing army, so there was no military-industrial complex to feed. There was no federal welfare. There was no Department of Education. In fact, there were only three departments: State, Treasury, and War. There was also an Attorney General.
And Washington, elected in April, didn’t bother to nominate people for those positions until September. Summer break, probably. Or maybe he was still hung over. Regardless, the position of the president was so unimportant that Washington didn’t do anything for months, and yet the country kept going.
I’d estimate that the power of the president is 10,000 times, minimum, what it was back in 1800 between the number of citizens and the increase in power from the sheer size and complexity of the federal government. Now, that’s what I call deflation! Imagine going to sleep and finding your dollar was worth 10,000 times what it was the night before.
This was funny to either fans of 19th Century German opera or fans of 1990s Saturday morning cartoons. And that’s about it.
And congressmen? When we started, there was on representative for every 37,000 people. Now, each congressman represents a staggering 750,000 people. That’s a power inflation of over 20. But it’s also a critical distinction. Here in Modern Mayberry, I can pick up the phone and call the most politically powerful elected official (that represents about 37,000 folks) and expect a personal call back. To be fair, he doesn’t know everybody, but he knows (generally) quite a few folks and I have sufficient stature to have made it to that “call this guy back” list. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear from the village idiot? It’s a very nice village.
Back then, congressmen were at least theoretically accessible. Now? The guy who’s gonna win the race probably knows my name, but there’s no way he could put my face together with it. A congressman is 20 times more powerful (just on numbers) than he was back in 1800.
If that were it, it would be manageable. But it’s not it.
In 1800, or even 1900, your single point of contact with the federal government would have been getting your mail.
During my last interview, the hiring manager asked me if I could perform under pressure. I said, “No, but I know Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Now? The federal government is now the most over-reaching and powerful governmental entity in your life (if you’re American). From the moment you go to bed to the moment you go to sleep it covers every facet of your life. You get up, use FDA approved toothpaste to brush. Get in a shower of a size and volume determined by the EPA, with water quality defined by the EPA, after flushing a toilet whose volume is governed by the EPA. That’s the first five minutes. It doesn’t get better, but I’ll leave the exercise of getting into a car and the rest of the day to the reader.
Just on the population, those positions have become more powerful. But add in the ever-increasing creeping of the federal government into every part of your life? Every decision? Every surface? The power of an individual member of congress has easily increased by a thousand-fold. This is deflation.
The federal government used to be the tip of the power pyramid, far away and not particularly important. Now that geometry is upside down, with the tip being the base. Local decisions are increasingly trivial at the city and county level, more consequential at the state level, but many of these are 100% constrained by federal mandates and power.
The elected official you can most easily reach has the smallest impact on your life. You can’t hope to get the attention of a federal official or congressman because you’re too small. You don’t matter.
Your power has inflated away,
Why?
I went to the Air and Space Museum. Disappointed, since it was just an empty building.
A pyramid that stands on its point is inherently unstable. They know that. It’s also inherently unfree. You know that. The solution is simple, but will take time and effort:
Devolve power away from Washington. Move power to the states. This is inevitable, and will happen because of that instability, because the undeniable weakness of the federal government is showing. A single man like Donald Trump was able to thwart the lawfare, the biased media, the entire Deep State, and even his own party’s hierarchy.
All it takes is one man, and where one will stand up, others will follow.
Make America Great Again?
Yes.
The first step is, though, is to Make the Presidential Election Inconsequential Again.
And, maybe, ship Kamala to Guam if they like her that much.
