Month: May 2023

Survival Economics, 2023

“Kent Brockman here reporting on a crisis so serious it has its own name and theme music.” – The Simpsons Movie

I tried farming rabbits, but I found it a hare-raising experience.  All memes this post, as found.

Perhaps the single biggest concern I have is that we’re spending our time as a species worried about trivial stuff.  What “trivial stuff”?  How about Ukraine?  I think that’s what Kamala and Brandon would want us to focus on, but they’re stuck on vodka and sniffing children.

Ukraine?  I don’t have a side in that conflict, and steadfastly refuse to have one.  Both governments are at about the same level of totalitarianism (this isn’t me talking, this is from those organizations who measure this stuff).  I’m not going to get into it, but I can back my ambivalence up that, yeah, both sides are crap.  If Trump had a second term?  This conflict wouldn’t exist.  We still wouldn’t have a wall, but this conflict wouldn’t exist.

But Ukraine is trivial compared to the subjects everyone is avoiding:

Food, and Energy.  I originally had a third, Immigration to add to this list, but the post got too long on just the first two.  Of course, I’ll get to immigration.  Sometime.  Just like the US Border Patrol.

Let’s start with Food.

The Earth does have a finite food supply – I can prove this because sometimes the shake machine doesn’t work at McDonald’s®.  There is only so much food that can be created.  It’s large – world hunger is a solved problem at the current population level of the Earth.  We have more people than ever, and we have food to feed absolutely everyone on Earth as long as everyone doesn’t want the Stuffed Crust® pizza.  Sure, not everyone is getting filet mignon at every meal, but we have, on an absolute basis, enough calories to make sure that no one on Earth right now needs to starve.

Amy Schumer is proof of that, though I’ve heard she’s happy there’s a ban on harpooning whales.

That’s a big deal.  This is the first era in the history of life on the planet that we can say that no person on Earth needs to be hungry.  The biggest basketcase has generally been Africa, primarily because they tend to kill each other by the bucketload because it’s Tuesday and don’t have mountains and winter.

What?

Yeah, mountains and winter.  I can’t stop Tuesday from showing up.

Mountains catch snow, and snow, melting as the summer hits, keeps the rivers flowing.  The reservoirs across the United States are, in effect, artificial mountains that keep the rivers flowing when the snow isn’t there.  This also keeps a minimum amount of water flowing when the rivers would otherwise run dry so I can skip stones.

While this increases the transport opportunities available due to rivers that makes transportation cheap, it also has the most important benefit of making agriculture predictable.  This makes sure that although there are good years and bad years, those are the exceptions everywhere but Africa.  In Africa, the lack of mountains makes a good year and a bad year a random and unpredictable event.  In a world without Western Civilization this is a famine event.  In a world with the evil Western Colonialists, it means that there’s food available and nobody has to die, unless the UN has a voice.

When you average it out over the globe, however, there’s more than enough food in 2023 and the problem for most farmers in the West is that food is too cheap and too plentiful.  The only thing that stops distribution is kleptocracy – I read that European farmers can make milk, turn it to powder, and ship that powdered milk to Africa cheaper than Africans can produce milk.  This never gives the locals the ability to create a viable farm industry.  Except if Bill Gates gets involved:

In 2023, the problem isn’t too little food, it’s too much.

Yet the impulse from the Left is to:

  • Destroy Western farming because of muh climate change,
  • Implant the idea that we must eat bugs because (rolls dice) communism and muh climate change, and
  • Make all of this subject to the most stringent regulation, because that makes the Left sexually stimulated.

Even rice isn’t immune from the rage of the Left.

Just letting everyone know, she’s over 18, so perhaps someone can throw themselves on this grenade and wife her up, which might shut her up.

What people seem to miss is that this oasis in time where everything is going well.  We have

  • the technology to maximize crop yields,
  • the oil to power the machines to plant the crops,
  • the natural gas to create the fertilizer to nourish the crops, and
  • the land with the topsoil to produce the crops.

It’s clear that, despite The Mrs. being able to make a few strawberries a week from a flower pot, we can’t feed the world from one.  There is a finite limit to the production of food, and it’s very tight.

And, like every other thing on the list, we’re not serious about it.  California had a plan in the 1970s to create a series of reservoirs to give them water in amounts required to avoid droughts.  They ignored it, and now California is like a teenager, “It’s too wet.  It’s too dry.  I want to live in a mall.”  They weren’t serious about it.

And food?  One side, the Left, wants to reconfigure man and have them live in pods and eat bugs.  The other side, the Right, wants people to be free and many of them eat steak.  I’m not having trouble picking a side here, though the Leftist mind control has convinced the Zoomers that they can live via osmosis, or something:

The point is, no adults are looking at this problem, and the deluded Leftists that are looking at it fall to the same sad solution they have for every problem:  Live in the Pods, Eat the Bugs.  People are bad, so we need more communism and control.

Energy is not much better.

Just like reservoirs are artificial mountains, huge piles of lithium and batteries and infrastructure and expensive cars that sometimes let all of their electrical energy turn kinetic after a fender bender isn’t the answer.  It’s because the Leftists aren’t serious.

Let’s take a big picture look:

Oil is awesome.  It powers everything from jet fighter planes to rockets to that mysterious fire that burned down . . . oh, I’ve said too much.  It has been the primary fuel of the Western world since 1930 or so.

And it’s cool, mainly because oil is just concentrated solar power, and all of the work in making it is based on solar power.  I mean, solar in the sense that the Sun shined millions of years ago, and we’re using concentrated Sunlight from when the dinosaurs were making frozen gelato and rubbing sunscreen on their nipples in their spare time.

(Yes, I know that dinosaurs didn’t have nipples, but I rarely use nipples, and want to be known as the man who popularized dinosaur nipples.  Sue me.)

Oil is a gift.  But, like the ability of Aerosmith® to make good songs, it’s limited.  Oh, sure, it can produce billions of gallons of gasoline, but eventually it’s going to give you a Janie’s Got a Gun and then everyone will be disappointed and then everyone will notice that Stephen Tyler looks like their lesbian aunt.

I love oil.  But it is finite, and by the time this century ends, it will be the fuel of the past.  Sadly, we don’t have a replacement in sight at this point other than nuclear power or Leftism’s failures.

One way to produce nuclear power.

Windmills won’t work because the wind is fickle and electricity hard to store.  The Sun is perfect, if we have millions of years to store its wonderful energy in sweet, sweet hydrocarbons, but solar panels installed in 2000 are already starting to fill up California’s landfills.  We could count on Kamala’s stupidity, but eventually the vodka will run out and potatoes run on solar power.

All of my research shows that the “science” of “climate change” means the same solution is the same as food:  People are bad, so we need more communism and control.

No.  We need the free market.  But we also need a plan.  Sure, I hate government plans, but the signals of the market are silly – if the price of oil rises, there will be more.

No.  We cannot conjure oil out of a free market if it isn’t there.  We do have to plan for a future after oil, not for the sake of climate, but for the sake of humanity.  And, though I am certain of few things, I am certain that Kamala and Brandon are not up for this task.

The solution to this problem is different than most, since it must take place before the problems that will doom billions.  Or it won’t.  And billions will be doomed, and mankind’s dream of going to the stars will be turned into mankind’s dream of dinner at Taco Bell®.

Pretty sure this is a parody.  But in 2023, who can tell?

 

Memorial Day, 2023

“If words cannot repay the debt we owe these men, surely with our actions we must strive to keep faith with them and with the vision that led them to battle and to final sacrifice.”—Ronald Reagan

AA gun at Corregidor.

Last year when The Mrs. was putting flowers on the graves of her relatives, my job was to drive the car while she located the locations. It was her first year when she actively did that for all of her relatives. Her mother had done that previously, but since my mother-in-law passed, that duty of remembering the family had fallen to The Mrs.

I saw one gravesite in particular, and I decided to research it. It stuck out, because it was the grave of a United States Army officer who died in May of 1942. I was curious.

Thankfully, there was at least some information about this officer online. He had been born elsewhere, but went to high school here in Modern Mayberry. His particulars weren’t all that unusual for a young man in the 1930s: he loved baseball, he graduated, went to college, got a degree, got a job, and got married.

While in college, he was in ROTC, so he graduated as a 1st Lieutenant in the Army Reserve. I think even in the mid-1930s people could see the writing on the wall that there was the real possibility of war, so I imagine a core group of people with officer training was just what they wanted on the shelf.

His life was, I imagine, the same as millions of lives in that quasi-Depressionary era. He and his wife welcomed a baby into the world 1940, but by early 1941 the young officer had been drafted back into the Army. He was sent, half a world away, to Manila. I’m sure he told his wife as they shipped him off that his job, thankfully, was to be in the rear with the gear. It would be other people that would really be in the crosshairs of the enemy. Besides, it would be crazy of the Japanese to make a strike at Manilla. That would mean war!

He was at the airfield in Manilla on December 8, 1941, when the Japanese attacked. The planes he was supposed to serve hadn’t arrived. The troops that were supposed to protect the airfield hadn’t arrived. Yet his Company had. On Christmas Eve, 1941, his group was given the task of demolishing the airstrip and leaving nothing the Japanese could make use of.

This is generally not a good sign.

Then, every man in his Company was given a rifle and told they were now members of the Provisional Air Corps Infantry.

This is an even worse sign.

Our young officer and his troops were then ordered to join the defense of Bataan. Bataan is a peninsula that forms the northern part of the entrance to Manila Harbor. To really control Manila and use it as a base, you have to control Bataan. The original allied plans had called for falling back to Bataan and holding out, but MacArthur had thought that defeatist, and planned on a more active defense.

When the Japanese attacked, there weren’t enough supplies for MacArthur’s plan, so they fell back to Bataan, where there also weren’t enough supplies for the defense of Bataan because they stopped shipping those because MacArthur had changed his mind.

The Japanese general who would later be fired because it took him too long to defeat the combined American-Filipino army at Bataan also noted that the Americans had numerical superiority, and in his opinion, could have retaken Manila. I’m not sure that going through this exercise made me think more highly of MacArthur . . . .

If you’re not familiar with the Battle of Bataan, it took over three months, and ended up the largest U.S. Army surrender since the Civil War. Over 76,000 troops were captured.

To my knowledge, there is no written record of the Provisional Air Corps Infantry during the Battle of Bataan, though there is a record that on March 4, the 1st Lieutenant was promoted to Captain, just before MacArthur high-tailed it out of the Philippines to safety in Australia.

The troops at Bataan were officially surrendered on April 9, 1942. But in this case, the Provisional Air Corps Infantry was not part of the surrender, and was ordered to the island of Corregidor. Over 20% of the men of the Company had already been lost.

Corregidor was an island that resembled a battleship – at the time of the Japanese invasion, it was bristling with coastal defense guns, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, and minefields. Now that Bataan was taken, the last thing required to control Manilla Bay was that the island forts fall. Corregidor was, by far, the biggest of these.

The Navy ran the guns, but the defense of the beach was the responsibility of the 4th Marine Regiment, along with a ragtag group of other orphan units, including at least one Company from the Provisional Air Corps Infantry and a young Captain from Modern Mayberry, who were sent into the foxholes with the Marines to guard the beaches since they had combat experience from Bataan.

Sometime in early May, the young Captain was in one of those foxholes with several Marines, and a Japanese artillery shell hit, killing them all. Even the very date this happened isn’t clear, and his family wouldn’t even hear of his death until a year later.

I don’t know what this young officer from Modern Mayberry did during his time in battle on Bataan and Corregidor – it’s nearly certain that no one alive does.

His wife later remarried, half a decade after finding out her husband was dead. His son still bears the name of a father he never knew, if he’s still living.

There is a white cross in a field in Manilla, surrounded by green grass that is regularly cut, where it is said, his body lies. The marker here in Modern Mayberry is only for remembrance, to let people like me know he lived.

And, I saw it, and learned his story, and every year around this time, I tell a few people from Modern Mayberry who haven’t heard about him. The Mrs. plans to put some flowers out for him, but even if she doesn’t, I’ll spend some time thinking about him.

The Who, The WHO, Cavemen, Child Labor, and We Won’t Get Fooled Again

Every Saturday we’d grab some fish and chips, head to the park, watch The Who. – The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.

Whoonfirst

The motto of the World Health Organization – “There is no health problem so small that we cannot dedicate millions in government dollars on salaries so that we can look it up on the Internet, hold conferences on it in international vacation spots on the government dime, and also hang out in our palatial Geneva, Switzerland headquarters while eating non-GMO, free-range, gluten-free snacks that we also paid for with government dollars.”

This is a repost from May of 2019 (because a friend came in from out of town and I got to the computer around midnight.  Maybe after a beer.), as I mentioned on Wednesday.  Enjoy an opinion from a simpler time before COVID.

In a bid to make sure that journalists have something to write about, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced this week that it had three new findings:

  • “Burnout” is a psychological condition of international importance,
  • “Gaming Disorder” is a psychological condition of international importance, and
  • They need some fancy new chairs for their office in Geneva, Switzerland, because sitting in chairs for grueling six hour days surfing the Internet are just heck on their spines. A masseuse and some spa time would be nice, too.

This new categorization goes into effect on January 1, 2022, and until then apparently you can’t have these conditions until then, so feel free to be burned out and while playing Pokémon nonstop until you pass out from lack of sleep all you want.  But how does the WHO define these new menacing maladies that are the greatest threat to the world?

WHOHQ

I imagine the view of Lake Geneva is to die for from the roof!  Ha, to die for!  That’s a health joke.  (Photo by:  Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, snarky caption by yours truly.)

Burnout:

Burnout is an “occupational phenomenon”, which means that you can’t catch it from an AntiFa® member, because they’re allergic to actual jobs.  Burnout is defined as:

  • Energy depletion or exhaustion,
  • A greater mental distance from one’s job, and
  • Reduced professional efficacy.

This describes every single employee at the local McDonalds in Modern Mayberry, so I guess WHO is right, this is an epidemic that we need an international agency focused on.  I would say that I hope they don’t work too hard at it and risk burnout themselves, but then I recalled they work for the WHO, so I can rest easily tonight.

mammothreview

Honestly, that picture is the one I’d like to have taken of me in the last moment before I died – go out like a man.  But in reality, I bet that today that guy is an unfrozen caveman lawyer who has to get his billing hours up or the other partners would come into his cave at night and mash him up with big rocks.  For reals?  If this was the last moment of my life?  I would die a happy man.

I’m betting that this “burnout” isn’t a new phenomenon.  I’m certain that our distant ancestors just couldn’t get themselves out of the cave some mornings because Oog, their supervisor, was going to get on them again for not holding the atlatl in just the right way to bring down the mammoth.

Stupid Oog.  And I bet that Oog will tear me a new one on my performance review – maybe I should talk to HR – Hominid Relations.

Okay, so burnout is probably a product of today’s society, since at almost every point in history up until now, being “burned out” would have resulted in starvation.  Perhaps all the employees need is proper motivation?

vicburn

Also 1872:  “I’m sorry to hear that you’re burned out.  Allow me to show my condolences after I’m done with my fiftieth straight 12 hour shift at the mill.”

Gaming Disorder:

Gaming disorder is defined by the WHO as:

  • Inability to stop playing a game even if it interferes with relationships, work, and sleep, and
  • Lasts for a year.

I thought that the above bullet points were the goal of a good video game?  I mean, the ultimate video game would have people divorced and starving to death on their couch because they couldn’t stop playing.

This isn’t a video game, but it is one of the funniest clips in the last 15 years.

I’ll admit that I’ve given video gaming a hard time in previous posts, but I’ll also admit that I’ve been the guilty party from time to time.  I have a weakness for strategy games, and growing up there wasn’t anyone else interested, so I didn’t have anyone to play the games with.  There are few enough that have sufficient complexity to be interesting.  But when I find one . . . oops, it’s three A.M., where did the time go?

Also:  Why a year?  Seems random, just like every recipe says “bake at 350°F (771°C) for two hours.”  Are you sure it isn’t 375°F (-40°C) for ninety minutes (400 metric minutes)?  I think when your personal hygiene suffers to the point that your dead corpse would repel a starving hyena, you’ve probably hit any reasonable definition of being just a little too obsessed with Grand Theft Auto®.  But WHO says a year . . . so I guess I’ve got 345 days left.  The power company won’t care, right?

Now I won’t say that there isn’t a role for WHO.  It might serve a useful purpose if it stuck to actual medical issues that are important.  WHO helped eradicate smallpox, and that alone is worthy of actual admiration.  And there are numerous missions that it works on today that are important:

  • HIV/AIDS,
  • Malaria,
  • Tuberculosis,
  • And the big granddaddy of all:

For a summary of how scary Ebola is, check out Aesop’s posts over at Raconteur Report – they’re chilling and make most horror movies look like a best case scenario. Here’s a link to his take: (LINK).  If you’re not already, you should be reading him, daily – Aesop is an unrelenting voice for truth, and that’s a rare and dangerous thing.  Everyone in Fort Wayne – you should read Aesop.

WHO really does have an important mission outside of these silly conditions that it makes up to get the monotone talkers from NPR® all atwitter.  But how serious are they about spending governmental dollars for health?

Not very.  Their offices are in Geneva, Switzerland.  Geneva (from the pictures I’ve seen) is absolutely stunning.  I’d move there in a heartbeat for the scenery and also because local residents vote to see if you can stay.  Not “you” as a class of people, but you as an individual.  If you’re a jerk?  You’ll be kicked out of the pool.  And when Muslims demanded that the Swiss remove the cross from their flag?  The Muslims were told to pound sand.  Oops?  Can I say “pound sand” when referring to a Muslim, or is that soil discrimination?  I mean, we all know that Europe wouldn’t exist without non-Europeans, right?

Regardless of soil classification, I like the moxie of the Swiss.  But the average rent in Geneva is $3000 a month for a two bedroom apartment that probably is smaller than the backseat of the Kia® Soul™ where Miley Cyrus lost her virginity to Joe Biden.  If the WHO were (Great Britain) was (United States) serious, they’d move their headquarters to someplace like Detroit where the town is giving away property.  I imagine that WHO hasn’t moved because skiing sucks in Michigan when you compare it to Gstaad.  I’d post the obligatory picture of the urban wasteland that Detroit is, but, you have Google® too.

But burnout?  Video games?  These are not problems that require international attention or an organization of pampered international bureaucrats.

  • A threat we need an international organization to respond to: dangerous asteroids.
  • A threat we don’t need an international organization to respond to:

Butts don’t kill planetary life, it’s space rocks moving at an average of 17 km/s (3 mph) that are faster than your mother in junior high that will kill you.  Okay, your mother may kill you, but the space rocks will depopulate Australia, if that continent even exists.  I’m thinking Australia is something that map makers drew in because they were bored and wanted to prove to chicks that they were hip, or cool, or fly, or lit.  Depends on what they said in on August 22, 1770.

Yo.

The WHO is like every other government agency.  Over time they forget their primary mission because they’ve either achieved it (Centers for Disease Control), or it’s too hard (NASA) so they end up with scary stories about cookie dough (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy) or create braille books on eclipses (Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars).  Aesop over at Raconteur Report brought up the military in this context with a post that’s the best I’ve read all week.  He’s right.  (LINK)

Why does the WHO behave this way?  Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy seems to still be in full force.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers’ union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

When a cell behaves like the WHO and most other government agencies do, it’s called cancer.  I wonder why no government agency exists merely to keep the other agencies working on what they’re supposed to work on?

I guess that’s just a mystery no one can solve.  Unless we put Roger Daltrey on the case!

WHO LEADER

Real aside:  when I finally listened to Won’t Get Fooled Again – I think I was 20 or so, I realized that The Who was on the side of freedom.  I wish the other WHO would just . . . do their job.

Beer, Bad Movies, and Bathing Suits – Ending Woke One Dollar At A Time

“Why have you disturbed our sleep; awakened us from our ancient slumber?” – The Evil Dead

Yesterday I had a nightmare that my Facebook® account was deleted. When I woke up, for just a second, I was really scared that I had a Facebook™ account.

It’s happening.

Despite the Left fully holding the levers of most of the power in the country, the one thing they didn’t seem to count on was a people that they pushed too far. Historically, they’ve always pushed too far and outpaced the populace, at least in European or Western nations. It’s like The Mrs. trying to get me to do chores. Don’t push, I told you last year I’d get those socks picked up.

In France after the Revolution, it ended with Napoleon – a strong man to push back the insanity of the Terror. In Germany, after the public revolted after the (failed) communist revolution, the economic destruction of the 1920s and the unbridled degeneracy of the Weimar Republic, to, well, you know what happened.

Stalin managed to take a gun after taking power and shoot everyone to the left of him, setting himself up as the single source of communist thought (well, after also taking an icepick to a rival living in Mexico), which I’ve heard referred to as the Leftist Singularity. It’s like the old joke, “Robespierre and Trotsky walk into a bar. There are no survivors.”

An example of the Leftist Singularity in action. All memes (from here on, including this one) are “as-found.”

Leftism is inherently unstable since it nearly invariably ends up feeding on itself. The college Leftist poets are despised by the “real” Leftists. Real communism has been tried, and every single time the results are the same. But this time, will it be different?

The grounds for a bit of optimism is that the American consooomer seems to have started voting with their wallets and is refusing to consooom the Woke products.

  • Disney™ has lost nearly a decade of growth in stock price, and has lost half of its value since 2021.

Disney© is the source of endless corporate cultural rot. Brought about as a child and American friendly company, it now openly panders to people who want to push sex-change surgery to kids. The result is oddly predictable – the people who have kids don’t want to take their kids to a movie to have their values subverted. Bud Lightyear™ was a character that everyone loved. Disney™ solution? Inject LGBTQIABIPOC+ into the movie. Result? Parents avoided it, and it was a huge money loser.

I’m thinking this might be the secret Disney™ corporate strategy?

Inject values about woke female empowerment? Everyone stops going to their movies because their movies are now boring because it would disrupt The Narrative if a woman had to learn something, if a woman had to struggle, if a woman ever had to be saved by a man, and if a woman wasn’t the best one ever at whatever she chose to do, the first time out. Huh. I’m thinking my ex-wife might be a big Disney™ fan.

Seriously, Disney® managed to make Star Wars™ boring and devoid of wonder, all in the name of Woke.

Oops.

I’m thinking some prankster changed the numbers on the sign, but if you notice, all that Bud® is still sitting there.

  • Bud Light® is now down over 25% in sales.

That’s devastating to the bottom line, and I won’t go into the story in too much depth because it’s pretty fresh in everyone’s mind. But what’s not fresh is the beer, since it’s rotting on the shelf and I heard today Bud™ is now having to buy it back, and corporate is having to buy dusty, expired cases back. To make it even more amusing, now the LGBTWTF groups have disavowed Bud™, making them about as popular as polio or monkey pox, depending on the group.

Ooops.

  • Target® sold “tuck-friendly” female bathing suits, plus a line of “pride” clothing for kids.

Why is Target™ in the business of sexualizing our kids? In the “how could it get worse?” files, it turns out that one of the clothing designers for Target’s™ “Pride” line is featured in a shirt noting that “Satan respects pronouns.” Plus, well, look at him – nothing about him says, “safe to leave kids with,” and a lot that says, “voted most likely in high school to be found to own a house with a crawlspace filled with bodies.”

Target® is feeling the heat. They’ve reportedly (in at least some stores, crunched all the “pride” material into the back of the store into smaller sections. Apparently, this is mainly in the South, though stories are conflicting. Since Gavin Newsom has solved all of California’s problems and successfully revitalized San Francisco and stopped street pooping, he has taken the time to show great concern that one store stopped, under public pressure, selling propaganda materials.

Ooops.

It’s afraid.

I think this is what scares the Left. The idea that people will rise up without ever even talking to each other and destroy the companies that force-feed the populace a diet of propaganda and Woke. It starts small, with a beer. Now, at least some companies are backing off the idea of Woke.

Will this stop the Left?

No. I think they’re filled with hubris, and can’t see the real danger that they’re provoking, and the inevitable backlash as children become the targets of sexual predators is going to be stronger than all the Diversity Inclusion and Equity that BlackRock™ can extort. The backlash will end up in a predictable place . . . with a predictable reaction if we don’t stop it before it goes too far.

Now this is the kind of transitioning I can support.

Do we win? Yes I, I’m sure we will. This month? No. Next month? No. But people are awakening, learning that this is money we don’t have to pay to them, that this is a game we don’t have to play, that we don’t have to give them the minds and souls of our children, which in the end is what will end Woke.

FYI, friend in from out of town, might not have a post on Friday.

COVID-19, Looking Backwards

“What is more dangerous than a locked room full of angry Narns?” – Babylon 5

Behind every angry woman is a man who has no idea what he did wrong.

This will probably be my final post on the ‘Rona.  It may get a mention from time to time about lingering effects on the economy and society, but I think the whole COVIDmania is far enough in the rear-view mirror that it’s time for the final review, barring some amazing new revelation like Corona was actually made by Big Toilet Paper to move product.

The disease clearly did kill people, but so does the flu.  It did kill elderly folks by far in a greater percentage than in a normal year, but was nearly a nonexistent threat to most people in good health under the age of 65 or so.  It was a threat ranking somewhere below “blood poisoning from cutting a finger opening an aluminum can” for anyone under the age of 20.

Everyone in my house had it, and everyone is fine now.  It was a light fever (99°F, 3.2 kilometers) in the afternoon for me, Pugsley never noticed having it (but was confirmed to have antibodies) and hit The Mrs. the hardest, but I don’t think she missed more than a few days of work.

It did take one person I knew, but he was nearly 100 years old.  It also took the life of one of my friend’s relatives – an elderly father-in-law.  I found that one out after making a COVID joke, so, yeah.  For my follow up, I’ll probably end up saying, “Thank you for your loss” at a funeral.

In a world where I expect that “get boosted” will qualify as a synonym for “drop dead” – I’m certainly glad that we’re not Vaxxed.

Being un-Vaxxed was a really easy decision.  First, this was a novel use of a new technology on a massive scale.  In that respect, I’d much rather be the control than part of the experiment, to the point that I’ve never even been tested for the ‘Rona.  How do I know I had it?  Like I said, I had a small fever one afternoon.

I heard that when Elvis was in the Army he spent time looking for suspicious mines.

Yeah, I know that having “a small fever one afternoon” isn’t in the diagnostic manual for the ‘Vid, but since that small fever one afternoon happened after The Mrs. coughed on me at close range about a million times during the night.

Second, I wasn’t personally that afraid of the ‘Rona by that point.  The peaks in the infection rate had been up and down and up and down, but the numbers weren’t adding up, especially in my age range as all that scary.  Back then, I think I said that the only age range where I would even think it might make sense was above 60 or 65.

Third, the propaganda was huge.  Some of the biggest attacks (hackers) came after this site after I posted content that was contrary to The Narrative.  Public relations campaigns were imposed.  The trick where the Leftists swap one chip for an updated chip (Comey Bad Because Clinton Laptop becomes Comey Now Good Because He Hates Trump) was really in play for the ‘Rona.  Thankfully, the Internet remembers: 

Above is a short list of people who I hope took their boosters.

The Leftists were well programmed.  And then, in a move that is especially Evil, they approved this technological monstrosity for kids.  Babies as young as six months.  And they died, and are dying today from the Vaxx.  How many healthy athletes in their 20s had a heart attack prior to the ‘Vid?

None.

The evidence for the Vaxx being awful is piling up.  Approval for the Johnson & Johnson® Vaxx has been pulled, as it is apparently the worst one in use in the United States.  I know two people who took that Vaxx at about the same time.  They had major heart surgery within a month of each other.  That’s an anecdote, I know, but the plural of anecdote is data, and that’s probably why Johnson & Johnson™ is no longer available.

But it’s cold showers.  And video games.  And . . . anything but the Vaxx™.

The Science®, they told us, was clear.  If you get the Vaxx©, you won’t get COVID.  Simple!

Oops.

Yeah, you can get COVID if you get the Vaxx™.  You can spread it, and you can also die of it.  Based on some data that I’ve seen, the ‘Rona that Vaxxed® folks get is actually worse in duration and impact than those who are pureblooded like me.  Perhaps that’s why peabrains like Jeff Spicoli want purebloods to be in prison camps.

I’m on the opposite end.  I actually hope that all of the people who took the Vaxx™ aren’t harmed by it.  I do think that the powers that be are ready to let it go.  For whatever reason this was pushed, even if it was something as simple as getting Trump out of office, it’s served the purpose that they intended for it, and when Russia invaded the Ukraine, well, it was okay to shut it all down.

I wonder what the next thing they push will be?

33 Things To Think About On A Friday

“I didn’t know there was a no train list.” – Archer

If you would like a list of ways technology has made life worse, press one for English.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a list post, so, why not?

Here are some things I think:

  1. The struggle is important.  If every day were placid and peaceful and there was no want, life would become dry and boring, and we would choke on our luxuries.  The Garden of Eden could never last.
  2. When I come home my dog is always happy to see me, but then I remember he also gets happy sniffing the cat’s butt and chewing on furniture.
  3. Risk is important, too. Judging good risks and bad risks mainly comes from taking bad risks.  Avoiding all risk is perhaps the worst risk.
  4. They say a penny saved is a penny earned, but it really takes a few million to buy enough crack and prostitutes to make Hunter happy.

Again?

  1. Women are best when they’re being women, not crappy imitations of men.
  2. Men are best when they’re being men, and masculinity isn’t toxic.
  3. If the glass is half empty, there’s probably room for some vodka.
  4. The biggest fights are over the smallest things. A trillion-dollar budget shortfall?  No one on Earth can even understand it.  The neighbor’s lawn being an inch too tall?  That’s a fight.
  5. If men are strong in the balance of power, civilization endures. If women are strong in the balance of power, civilization is imperiled, in the end for lack of children.
  6. If Life give you lemons, look Life right in the eye and say, “I want beer instead.” Life should know better by now.

If you put root beer in a square glass, do you just get beer?

  1. Moderation is good, because there should be balance in life.
  2. Moderation is bad, because there is power in passion, and no progress was made by anyone being reasonable.
  3. Both 11. and 12. are true.
  4. They say money can’t buy happiness, but it bought Hunter Biden so many laptops he forgot where they all were.
  5. I find the most peaceful sleep I have is when the thunder is blasting out a constant tattoo against the night sky, the worst when it is utterly silent.
  6. All things must end. This is good.  Without an end, there is no new beginning.
  7. That thing about all things must end? I forgot revolving doors.

That door hit me as I got out.  It was a pane in the butt.

  1. Success is often more damaging than failure.
  2. As Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be lived forwards, but understood in reverse.” The worst things in my life have always led to the best things in my life.
  3. Corollary to 19., if you don’t have a plan to go somewhere, you won’t go anywhere. If you have a plan, you might not end up where you thought you’d be, but at least you’ll be moving.
  4. Corollary to 20., I might be lost, but I’m making good time.
  5. Corollary to 21., don’t just follow your dreams, chase them until they file a restraining order.
  6. Of course the game is rigged. What’s bothering you now is the idea that they’ve stopped pretending it isn’t.
  7. They say, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” What could be closer than locked in the crawlspace?

I wish I had a wine cellar with an elevator.  That would lift my spirits.

  1. A large part of the last few decades has been spent in trying to convince Americans that their culture is entirely based in commerce and pop culture. That is not true – the values that built America rely on neither.
  2. What are you doing today to make sure that today matters?
  3. Kindness is free. So is sarcasm.  I found out that one of these works better at funerals than the other last week.
  4. As I’ve said before, happy is easy. Not being bored is easy.  Standing up for something that matters is the most important thing.
  5. One of the saddest things about today’s society is that young people find more challenges in the virtual world than in reality. When reality catches up to them they won’t be prepared.
  6. Jenga® would be more interesting if the pieces exploded when the tower fell.
  7. Beauty exists. Truth exists.  Goodness exists.  Those who would rule you would blind you to those simple facts.
  8. It’s called work because they pay you to do it. If it were always fun, it would be a hobby.
  9. I think Elon Musk has a lot of hobbies. And ex-wives.

If Musk started making robot lawnmowers, would he call them E-Lawn®?

  1. If you have a choice about your attitude, be positive. Enjoy the moments you can, and you can enjoy most of them.
  2. You have a choice about you attitude. Sometimes it’s your only choice.

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality.  This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology.  If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality.  If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”.  And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy.  The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming.  Yes, people died.  And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top.  Oh, and it wrecked the economy.  Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues.  There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances.  Yes.  In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.”  May 3?  The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings.  Huh.  Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes.  I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more!  This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality?  Doesn’t matter.  Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality.  There is a difference between the words country and nation.  A country is a group of people living under a government.  A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government.  Those two are different things.  Japan is a nation.  China is a nation.  Denmark is a nation.  That is clear.  Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese.  Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer.  Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging.  For InBev®?  Less so.  It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want.  Beer commercials and ads used to be cool.  Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer.  I’m not making this up.  I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right?  What else do beer drinkers love?  Hillary Clinton?  Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again.  Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer.  You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds.  He knew they were always after them.  Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share.  I think that they might be a bit upset if they do.  I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right?  That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

Unstoppable Failure And Elon Musk’s Next Ex

“All this fuss over what? Is it a hill, is it a mountain? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter anywhere else, but this is Wales. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, but we did none of that, because we had mountains.” – The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down A Mountain

What are the first words of a baby volcano?  Mag-ma.

Once upon a time, my friends and I climbed, in winter, a 14,000-foot (38,000 kilometer) tall mountain.  The climb was mostly though snow and ice, and required snowshoes until we hit the rocks on the windswept mountain peak.  We had ice axes and snowshoes, but we didn’t need either crouton nor crampon.

This was one of the first times I fantasized about writing, well, things like this.  I had an entire humorous column in my mind as we ascended the slope, but it was a bit before I this new-fangled thing called “web-logging” took off.

Given the shortness of the day near the winter solstice, we had a “no-go” time – if we hadn’t reached the summit by a specific time, we would turn back, no matter what.  Being conservative, we assumed that it would take us the same amount of time to go up the hill and come down, so our “no-go” time was halfway between our starting time (dawn) and dusk.  Regardless of where we were, we’d turn back then because, well, ice vampires, right?

Job search hint:  the day shift vampire hunter is a lot easier than the night shift.

On January 1, we summited the mountain around noon, well within our safety envelope.  We took pictures.  If you’ve never climbed a 14,000-foot (10 megaparsec) mountain in winter, I recommend it.  The crisp wind that blows in winter is dry and cold and clean.  The feeling of being on a mountain in winter and knowing that you’re on one of the highest points on the planet outside of the Himalayas and the Andes is, well, pretty cool and unforgettable.

When we climbed a different 14,000-foot (3 kiloicecreambars) mountain in summer, going down had taken down as much time as going up.  Sure, we didn’t have to rest, but the big issue was not tumbling downhill.  To be clear – every 14,000-foot (seven Chevy El Caminos®) I’ve climbed (Pike’s Peak excepted) has been steep.  Really steep.  Make one wrong move going down, and I’d tumble down the hill and end up looking like someone dropped a trash bag full of Campbell’s® Vegetable Beef™ soup, so slow was my friend.

Winter, however, was different.  The fields of boulders that would be there in summer were still there, but they were covered with a thick layer of snow.  The solution?

Glissading.  Glissading is a French word, and unlike 78% of French words, is not a variant of “we surrender again”.  Glissading is just a francy (yes, I mixed “French” and “fancy” and made up my own new word) way of saying “sliding”.  The way we glissaded was to:

  1. Sit on our butts, holding our ice axes diagonally across our chests,
  2. Slide down the hill at up to 20 miles an hour,
  3. Turn over so our ice axes dug in so slow us down if we wanted to stop.

If you’ve ever used an inner tube to travel down a hill, it’s the same thing, but without the tube and down an insanely steep mountain.  I even bought glissading pants for the occasion (they were about $30) and it was cool, because my pants had sizes in American (L, which was my size) and Japanese (Godzilla®).

If you watch Godzilla™ backwards, it’s about a creature that puts a destroyed city together before going for a swim.

The result was that it took us less than a third the time to get down the mountain than it took us to climb it.  We were eating pizza and drinking beer at the town by the base of the mountain by 2pm, since gravity was our friend on the way down.

Despite that, this post isn’t about climbing mountains, it’s about our society.  To build it, and build the wealth that we have, it took hundreds of years.  Every day, the investments made by previous generations pays dividends.  An example?  The interstate highway system, built out in a fit of rationality in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, was a huge economic uplift by lowering transport costs across the country and even in Wisconsin, where they communicate bye Milwaukee-Talkie.

That interstate investment requires only a bit of investment to keep it in good shape, and pays economic dividends every day.  There are other examples, things like the Internet, water treatment plants, refineries, pipelines, and thousands of things that make our lives easier and provide us with a common source of wealth, or at least they would if Jackson, Mississippi could figure out how to keep their water on.  Now, I guess they just drink whiskey.

When it all works well, it’s great.  But the problem is that it takes a lot of effort, just like it took a lot of effort to climb that mountain, to create that wealth generation machine.

Where was the peak wealth?  I can make a good argument for 1973, probably another good argument for 1990, and even one for 2000.  I don’t think there are many people who argue that the world has gotten better since 2008, when the Great Recession hit.  Since that time, certainly, wealth creation has stopped.  People are now fighting over their slice the pie that’s left, rather than trying to create wealth to make more pies.

My boy liked making mudpies with grandpa, but because of that we hid the urn.

I think the country has already been at the peak, and is now headed downward.  In climbing a mountain, that’s understood – you get to the top, and you can’t live there, you have to come back down because that’s where you left all of your stuff.  With an economy, the idea is that there’s perpetual growth.  And when the wealth growth stops?

People have to fight over what’s left.  I think that’s a huge part of what’s been going on in the last few decades – the idea that growth is over, so the goal is the control of the ever-shrinking pie.  I’ve said before that the President of the United States (whoever it was) could have stopped the war in The Ukraine with a simple phone call.  Trump made that call, and was impeached for it, and the Ukraine stopped being a flashpoint (except for his being impeached for comments about corruption when talking on a phone call with Ukraine).

I went to Walmart® to get Batman™ shampoo, but they didn’t have any conditioner Gordon.

Ukraine isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom.  What, then is it a symptom of?

The cascading failure of the West.  What’s going wrong?  Here’s a short, uncomplete list:

  • Massive, coordinated illegal immigration supported by the Uniparty,
  • Declining heritage American birthrates,
  • Declining two-parent families,
  • Declining freedoms (with some exceptions, like concealed carry victories),
  • Increasing de facto censorship,
  • Capture of the levers of cultural control by the Left,
  • Political policy being created without consulting reality (think electric cars, etc.),
  • Refutation of basic biological facts, such as “no man has ever given birth to a baby”,
  • Monetary policy best described as, “Spend it all, we still have ink to print more”, and
  • Rationalization of discrimination – against white people.

We’ve reached the “sliding down the hill” part of the climb.  Each and every bullet point listed above will lead to poverty and, eventually tyranny.  Period.

I guess some people can read the future.

Culture in the West is in full collapse.  And if it were only one of those factors, we could work around it.  But all of them together?  We’ve reached the stage of cascading failure in the West.  These failures feed off of each other, and lead to an even faster decline.  Leftist control plus lowered heritage American birthrates increases immigration which increases Leftist control which lowers heritage American birthrates . . . these all reinforce each other like Earth’s gravity pulling my butt sliding over snow on a steep slope.  If I don’t stop in time, it’s over.

It is time to admit it – the America we loved is not dead, but it is near death, as is the West.  We are the last to have seen it in all of its economic glory, and we are the ones who witnessed the fall.  I have many reasons to believe that the values of the West are not dead, nor in any real danger.  What will we lose?  The easy life we have had.

In truth, the way to kill the West is through the easy life.  Give the West hardship?  We shine.  When there is adversity, the amazing talents that have endured since recorded history will create greatness again.

This may be our last shot at the stars for 1,000 or 10,000 years or more.  That’s okay.  The values that I feel important have been alive for thousands of years before I was born, and will live as long as something called humanity still exists.  The reason I climbed that mountain in the snow on January 1st, so long ago?  It’s a spirit that will continue to exist.

The things that we lose will only be the things that never mattered to us.