Month: May 2024

It Came From . . . 1985

“Go that way, really fast.  If something gets in your way, turn.” – Better Off Dead

People with babies can be really rude at the movie theater.  One kid was crying so loudly that I could barely hear the person I was talking with on the phone.

I was recently looking at some graphs that showed, by birth year, what time people thought were the “best” for various things.  For example, most people thought music peaked about the time where they were stupidest and going through puberty, say, 12-14.  I recall reading that one “dealmaker” would always put on music that would have been popular when the person he was trying to influence would have been in that age range.

Worked like a charm for him.

Movies are different.  For most people, surveyed, regardless of birth year, movies peaked in the 1980-1990 era.  Why?  They were creative, not afraid to take a risk, and great new movies were coming out almost weekly.  My initial cut at this list of movies had 25 movies on it.  And I thought of including at least 10 more.

It was an embarrassment of cultural riches that we had at that time.  Well, at least we have Marvel™ Movie Product  #432 now.

As always, the list isn’t in any particular order, and feel free to toss your favorites in the comments.

Witness – What I like best about this movie is that I’m fairly certain that it inspired Weird Al to do Amish Paradise.  Other than that, just a fish out of water movie about a crusty cop pretending to be Amish and an excuse to put Harrison Ford in something that wasn’t Indiana Jones® or Star Wars™.

If you see an Apple™ store get robbed, does that make you an iWitness®?

The Breakfast Club – I really didn’t like this movie.  It tried to make as if teens were angsty and filled with self-loathing and/or had bad relationships with pushy parents.  Most of my friends were fairly well-adjusted, so I just didn’t relate to any of the characters.  Of note:  I think people are complaining now that the characters were all white.  Imagine how it would fly if they were all BiPOC?  Regardless, it makes the list because it’s a cultural touchstone for so many other people.

Vision Quest – Now this character I could identify with – a teen who has a vision, and goes on a quest.  Okay, it’s about wrestling, girls, and life, and features a great soundtrack and lots of wrestling.  Oh, and Linda Fiorentino.

When two silkworms wrestle, how often are the results a tie?

The Sure Thing – 1985 was Peak John Cusack.  Sure, now he is an uber-Leftist on XX, but back then he was just another actor who could put in a great performance as a teen everyman.  Of note:  this was the first time I ever saw a cordless phone in a non-science fiction movie.

Lost in America – This is a movie about yuppies who decide to retire and go around the country in a big camper.  On their first stop, the wife gambles away all of their money.  Low-key hilarity ensues.  My favorite line?  “You are not allowed to use the words ‘nest’ or ‘egg’ ever again.”

Brewster’s Millions – Richard Pryor has to spend $30 million in 30 days and have nothing to show for it to inherit $300 million.  John Candy plays the sidekick.  Good times.

Rambo:  First Blood Part II – This movie transformed the brooding John Rambo into something closer to Batman® in a bandana.  Normally I wouldn’t put a sequel on the list, but this is a very different movie in every way from First Blood.

First PEZ™, Part II

The Stuff – What if your ice cream was eating you?  Yes, that’s the plot.  Yes, it’s played for laughs.

Back to the Future – Ever daydream about making sure your parents had sex?  Well, no, not until I saw this movie.  Time travel showed up in quite a few 1980s films, but this and Terminator probably top the list back when it was still a “new” movie concept.

Day of the Dead – Yes, a sequel, but, wow.  It was considered very, very gruesome for the time and place of release, but now this stuff is on TV all the time.  Interesting plot that could have had a much better script.

Fright Night – What if vampires were cool, suave, your next-door neighbor, and looking to bang and drain your girlfriend?  Better call a washed-up TV horror movie host to help!

The Amish do not approve.

Weird Science/Real Genius – People were optimistic that science could solve our problems in the 1980s, such as getting a girlfriend or popping a lot of popcorn all at the same time.

Summer Rental – Who wouldn’t want John Candy as a neighbor?  Well, I wouldn’t, since he’s dead.  But he also got in a feud with Richard Crenna (also dead) and Rip Torn (also dead) comes to the rescue by turning his restaurant into a pirate boat.  Okay, it’s essentially exactly the plot to Caddyshack, but who cares?  It’s funny.

The Return of the Living Dead – Is it a floor wax?  Is it a dessert topping?  If Shimmer™ could be both, why can’t The Return of the Living Dead be a comedy and a horror movie?  It is.  It cost $3 million, made $14 million, and though it was a very stupid movie, was certainly not brainless.

Volunteers – John Candy, again, but this time as a Tom Hanks sidekick who is brainwashed by the communists and teaches them the Washington State fight song.  Again, fun, and no Asians were killed in the filming of this movie.

Fight, fight, fight for Washington State . . . .

Better Off Dead – John Cusack again, 1985 was really his year.  In this movie where teen suicide is played for laughs, and I loved every minute of it.  Savage Steve Holland’s career was too short in movies, but lived on in animation.  The humor is mainly focused on the absurd, like the two Japanese brothers, one who speaks no English, and the other learned by listening to Howard Cosell.  I liked it.

Commando – I didn’t wear underwear to this movie, thus leading the expression “Commando” meaning not wearing underwear.  Okay, that’s not the case, but Commando could almost be titled Generic Arnold Schwarzenegger Action Movie because it is mainly just Arnie blowing things up and making bad puns.  And that’s okay.

In an Arnie voice:  “Well, at least my hat is purr-fect.”

Remo Williams:  The Adventure Begins – Until getting writing this post, I had no idea that this silly movie was based on a book series called The Destroyer that lasted for over 150 novels.  Yup.  But this is Fred Ward in a humorous movie that never takes itself too seriously, and has the production values of a TV movie, including Joel Grey as an ancient Asian master.

Re-Animator – I’m a sucker for great H.P. Lovecraft movies, and there are very, very few of those because Lovecraft built a wonderful world but didn’t write all that well.  This one involves a medical student who invents a reanimation fluid that make the dead walk again, which was a big 1985 theme, apparently.  This is Lovecraft, done right.

White Nights – Very much a Cold War movie, Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov are dancers who plot to escape the Soviet Union.  It’s a spy thriller with sand dancing.  It’s the closest to a drama on the list, so, it’s got that going for it.

Brazil – No, still haven’t seen it.  Yes, I will at some point.

Does this capture the spirit of the movie Brazil?

France, Spain, And The Fate Of The United States

“If we bail out we can hide out in a French girl’s hayloft.” –  Memphis Belle

My cat’s a commie.  Keeps wanting free food and only talks about Mao.

Over a decade ago, I was reading a post by John Michael Greer (here’s a (LINK) to his current blog).  In that post, he talked about time compression and our tendency to not think about historical events in the timeframe that people actually lived them.  His example was that of a young girl, born at the time of the French Revolution.

In my mind, the French Revolution turned to the Napoleonic era and the defeat at Waterloo in a fairly short time.  I mean, I knew it took longer than the two days we spent on it in World History in high school, but that young girl, born when heads were rolling on the guillotine, would have been 25 or 26 and likely had her own children when Napoleon got waffled in Belgium.

And that poor French girl couldn’t even post about how tough her life was on TikTok®!

26 years.  That’s a number that, back when I read Greer’s post, surprised me.  From a distance of 230 some years, four years of Biden is an eyeblink.

Chuck Norris once stared into the abyss, and the abyss looked away.

The amazing amount of debt that’s been printed in the last four years along with the rampant inflation made me think back to that young French girl.  I think that in 100 years, people will look back on our time and compress it, and I think that they’ll talk about it as the time when the United States sank to third world standards in what, to them, will be just a paragraph in a history book.

There’s plenty of precedent for it.  Spain, after the colonization of the New World, brought back ship after ship filled with massive amounts of gold and silver for a period of about 100 years.  This caused several related things to happen:

  • The inflation from the huge supply of gold and silver distorted the entire economy of Europe, causing an inflation that lasted at least 100 years.
  • The huge amount of wealth caused the Spanish to import labor (a lot of to do the work that Spaniards refused to do, you know, like sweeping or making the bed). The Spanish aristocracy also was allergic to work, since they considered it low class.  Apparently, the exceptions were being a professor or a priest, but mainly they just sat around in fancy clothes sweating.
  • Spain then got caught in an endless web of pointless wars, probably because they were bored.
  • Oh, and when the gold and silver stopped flowing from the New World? Yeah, they didn’t stop spending, they just went bankrupt again and again.

This is not a good combination.  In less than 100 years, Spain went from being THE world power and the largest economy in the world, by far, to being poor and irrelevant.

In California you can’t get a tattoo of flames on your biceps, unless you have a fire arms permit.

I imagine the world in Spain as it declined in decadence just slowly got crappier and more expensive every day, just like we’re seeing today, as we see a long, slow slide to becoming the third world.  I wrote last week about the encrapification of the Internet, but other businesses are doing it, too.  McDonald’s® has record profits, but I’ve seen Big Mac® meals advertised for $15 or so.

The Mrs. bought a McFish© sandwich the other day and put it in the fridge, perhaps as some sort of religious ritual since I have no evidence that humans actually eat them.  I opened it up to give it a look, and was surprised to see a biscuit-sized sandwich.

I made some fish tacos the other night, but the ungrateful fish just swam away.

It’s been a while since I’ve even seen a Filet-O-Fish©, but the last time I ate one it wasn’t made out of a single goldfish.  Heck, I think the last time I ordered one was sometime during the Bush Administration.  Which one?  Much like Bill Clinton, I can’t remember which Bush because there were too many.  Back then it was a full-sized sandwich, but at some point, it became bite-sized.

I could come up with more examples from other companies, but that one will do.  Keep this in mind:  McDonald’s is now a luxury food.  Are McDonald’s™ sales number up?  Sure!  Prices have doubled.  But I haven’t been there in months (which is probably good for me) due to my inability to rationalize the idea that a Big Mac™ meal costs more than a pound of ribeye steak.

I can spell panda with just two letters:  P and A.

What’s the outcome?  Middle class people aren’t going to restaurants nearly as much, which is causing them to fail.  Examples abound:

  • Red Lobster© closed 87 locations
  • TGI Fridays® is closing 36 locations
  • Applebee’s™ closed up to 35 locations last year
  • Denny’s© closed 57 locations last year
  • Outback® has closed down 41 locations

Middle class people are now too poor to go to these restaurant chains.  Period.  Inflation has priced them out and wages, held down by continual streams of illegal aliens have not kept up.

This is part of the slow, creeping third worldism showing up in the United States.

Over the span of 26 years, where does this take us?

Why did Napoleon escape exile?  He didn’t have enough Elba room.

My answer is that, just like France before the Revolution couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after Napoleon, and just like the Spanish who brought the great heaps of gold and silver back to Spain thought it was going to be totally awesome (el awesomo, I think is the Spanish translation), our first world wealth is rapidly slipping away.

The next twenty years will be, generally, poorer in the United States and in the West.  The good news, however, is poorer equals poorer, not necessarily unhappier.  Who knows, we might even be happier if we lose the Internet and can’t access TikTok© anymore.

Memorial Day, 2024

“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.

This was originally written in 2023.  It says what I want to say in 2024.

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 Truth, Neutrinos, Taylor Swift, And Otto Von Bismarck.

“I know what you’re thinking, ’cause right now I’m thinking the same thing. Actually, I’ve been thinking it ever since I got here: Why, oh why, didn’t I take the blue pill?” – The Matrix

When I was a kid, I could walk into a 7-Eleven with just a dollar and walk out with a six pack of pop and three candy bars.  Now?  They have cameras everywhere.

I write a lot about the Truth, but I think the Friday before Memorial Day is a fine time to talk about the Truth in general.  Why?  Because I said so.

The first thing I want to point out is that a quest for Truth, does not mean everything is bright and happy and puppy tails.  The Truth is, very often a grim thing.  I have found things sometimes aren’t the happy web that I imagined.  Like the Wedding Guest in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner I ended up being “A sadder and a wiser man” because of The Truth.  I guess the Wedding Guest’s bright spot is at least Iron Maiden® wrote a song about him.

That is part of the issue of looking for the Truth – I thought I understood life, and then a curve ball hits.  Some people call this sudden exposure to the Truth:  The Red Pill, based on the red Reese’s Pieces that E.T.® ate with Indiana Jones™ in the movie Jaws.

Or something like that.  Heck, I used to worry about the evidence that the Sun’s neutrino count was half of what would be expected, and that maybe its internal fusion had stopped.  But that was just too scary, so now I worry about celebrity gossip.

What was Otto von Bismark’s favorite Queen song?  Under Prussia.

The Red Pill is choosing to see reality as it is, not as we’d wish it to be.  In this quest, I’ve seen things I didn’t want to see, and understood things often people are willfully ignorant of because the consequences of the Truth are . . . disturbing.

That’s difficult, because then I have to go back through what I formerly believed to be True, and reassess – how does this new Truth change what I thought I knew?  What else do I think to be True that is similarly wrong?   What I trusted as the Truth, after taking the Red Pill, I had to reassess and review my whole worldview through different eyes.

One of my first Red Pills was when I was a sophomore in college.  I realized then that most people simply didn’t care about me, didn’t care if I succeeded or failed, and that the majority of my presence in the world was like that of a finger in a cup of water – pull the finger out, and two seconds later you’d never know a finger had ever been in the water.  Unless I hadn’t washed my hands after going to the bathroom.

There are several things still functioning on the Titanic, for instance, the sinks still hold water.

And, it’s True.  Most of the journey of most lives is shared with just a few very close people.  I remember that one of my friends died not too long after high school – a car crash.  I hadn’t seen him for four years afterwards, and was sad, but, you know, I shrugged and moved on.

That’s not the case for everyone – families are much tighter, obviously, but lots of marriages are transactional:  it’s based not on a bond, but on a transaction, like nearly every Hollywood marriage.

But it comes down to friendships, too.  I once had a close friend at work.  I left the job, and boom, the friendship status was closed.  Our relationship had been a transaction, and it occurred in an artificial setting.  Didn’t mean I wasn’t irritated, but, hey, like Mark Twain said, Red Pill is gonna Red Pill.

She said, “Strip down, facing me.”  It wasn’t until the McDonald’s® cashier screamed that I figured out she meant my credit card.

Searching for the Truth isn’t about avoiding ugliness, searching for the Truth is about being able to make actual choices, using free will free of illusions.  It’s about making actual conscious moral decisions without pretending.  This is better, even if the Truth is ugly.

Why?  Decisions made with the Truth in mind work out better.  If I tried to use reason and logic with a toddler, we’d both end up frustrated and I’d end up with a black eye and a fractured clavicle.  Again.

That’s a key problem with making decisions or basing reality on anything other than the Truth:  “solutions” won’t solve any problems if they’re not based on reality except by accident.  Those “solutions” may even make things worse.  For instance, if the problem is youth crime, and New York City decides that to stop youth crime, for any crime short of murder, they’re going to ignore it and put the criminal back on the streets immediately, what will happen?

For illegal aliens, if the policy to stop those illegals is to fund them to get to the border, bus them from the border to relocation centers, feed, clothe, fund, and then fly for free to yet more free stuff:  housing and food.  How many illegals will that policy stop?

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

The True solution to a problem often requires a True understanding of the problem.  In the examples above, the True problem isn’t the illegals or the young criminals, the True problem is the GloboLeftElite who want the illegal aliens and the youthful criminals to be doing exactly what they’re doing.

Not using the Truth to make decisions when you have it is morally and ethically bankrupt, and the GloboLeftElite and their stooges have a lot to answer for.

The biggest ally I have in my search for the Truth is humility, which is probably one of the best inventions, ever.  Although I’ve learned a lot, the best lesson I’ve ever learned is that I can be 100% dead wrong.  Because of that history, I always, always try to ask myself, “what if I’m wrong?”

It’s a powerful question.  If everybody is doing the same thing, and I do something different, what happens if I’m wrong?  What’s the upside if I’m right?  We live in a world of uncertainty, and finding Truth is not always clear.  It’s True that the dollar will eventually go to zero, but it’s also True that I could go broke waiting for that to happen.

So, I try to seek whatever evidence I can to help me.  I also like to use those close friends (and The Mrs.) as people to help point out when I’m delusional.  They try, and sometimes they’re right, and sometimes I’m right.  By writing these points down in the posts I’ve put out, I’ve also made it so it’s harder to delude myself that I knew better than I really did.

Just kidding.

I’m really hoping this isn’t a spoiler for you Civil War buffs. 

The reward, though, is to live a life where you’re guided not by delusion, but by Truth.  It may not always be the happiest outcome, but it is the real outcome.  Or if that’s too scary, I’ll just concentrate on whatever Taylor Swift is doing instead.

Stupid neutrinos.

The Internet Is Crappier. On Purpose.

“It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday.  Google™, even though you’ve enslaved half the world, you’re still a damn fine search engine.” – The Simpsons

I’ve had millions of hits, but none of them from Best Korea.

Today I had to spend an hour searching for PEZ® dispensers honoring the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial.  Amazingly, despite the time I spent looking, no one that I could find has made a PEZ™ dispenser to honor this historic moment.  To me, it was amazing that Amber’s lawyers worked so long and hard to prove that Depp was utterly innocent.

Google™ used to be better.  I remember it wasn’t a little better, it was a lot better than it is today.

To be fair, I’ve mainly stopped using Google© as my search engine of choice.  Besides being horrible, unethical, demonic, GloboLeftistElite shills, they also have futzed with their algorithm so much that when I do a search for common phrases that are pretty unique to my site, I don’t show up on the first two pages.

Go figure.  I mean, horrible, unethical, demonic, GloboLeftistElite?  I might be able to deal with that.  But kill my search results?

They’re dead to me.

The FBI recently announced that Hillary Clinton’s laundry did itself.

Search had long been skewed by Google®, but the autistic programmers that originally put it all together really took that “Don’t Be Evil©” original mission statement to heart.  They wanted to create great search results.  They even went as far as to make sure there was a firewall between their search people and their ad people so that search was preserved.

Oh, sure, they put their thumb down as hard as they could to get Hillary selected in 2016.  Heck, one researcher thought that over 3,000,000 votes were impacted by their search results, alone.  Hmmm, Donald Trump is put on trial for forking over $130,000 to a tramp via a shady lawyer (yeah, he has horrible taste in people) but Google™ subverts their entire search platform in favor of a candidate?

No crime here.  Move along, citizen.

Regardless, the search engine was still pretty good.  As the newfound desire of the GloboLeftElite to clamp down on speech, starting about 2017, Google™ seemed to shy away from that.  Again, the search results in 2017 were pretty good.

If Elon Musk really does send thousands of people to Mars, he’s either a genius or the most creative serial killer of all time.

But around 2019, the ad executives at Google™ decided that, perhaps, the search results were too good.  You can read an article about that here (LINK).

The problem was that if the search engine were too good, that meant fewer searches.  Fewer searches meant fewer ads.  Fewer ads meant less money.  The paradox was, the better Google™ got at search, the less money they made from ads.

The result was the same as at most businesses when money meets principles:  money wins.  Google™ searches were “encrapulated” so that they were crappier.  More irrelevant sites should show up in a search.  Oh, and the ads?  They weren’t getting enough clicks.  Solution?  Make it less visible that they’re ads – make them look like legitimate search results.

But I did not know that the IRS now accepts Apple® gift cards!

Indian scammers *love* this, since now they can buy an ad, redirect people to their scam website, and get the scam going.

In a recent example, I did a search for a fairly unusual phrase, put quotes around it, and hit “go”.  My quotation marks around the exact phrase I was looking for were utterly ignored.  The results were . . . entirely encrapulated.

I finally remembered where the quote came from, a website that was now dark, but that someone had resurrected it elsewhere.  Boom, there it was, the exact phrase (it was an article title) and I was in business.  Google™, however, had ignored my “quotation marks” and my

-ignore

-results

-with

-these

-words and instead gave me a mishmash of crap that still included the trash I tried to weed out.

Now major search engines (Google©, Bing®, DuckDuckGo™) are giving only answers from the mainstream media, especially with certain topics – politics being one of them.  The beauty of the Internet, circa 2005, is that the mainstream media hadn’t figured it out, so great content with dissenting voices was given a huge platform.

If NPR™ started a metal band, would it be called, “All Things Dismembered”?

Remember when Google™ used to say, “About 1,242,400 matches”?  That’s gone.  Google™ has stopped showing the number of pages, no doubt after people figured out that only about 225 results are ever shown.

Of course, NBCNESPNPR© has a lot of money riding on being able to provide curated news to you for fun, profit, and control – so search engines censoring any idea that is contrary to The Message is their goal.  The major search engines seem to be on board with this.

This is also a major reason that comments are now dead on many websites, because giving the people who read the encrapified news are often embarrassed by that pesky Truth.  Why allow comments at CNN™, when someone can come and make The Message look silly with just a few words?

Pressure has been specifically put on several sites, including Unz™, where unregulated commentors have caused Big Search to blacklist them killing their traffic from search. Oops, BIPOClist them.  In the case of Zero Hedge™ (and The Federalist™), Google Ads™ were cancelled until they controlled their comments.

Yandex.com is better in many regards to Google©, even though it is Russian owned.  When I did a search on Google™ for “Civil War Weather Report” – I was buried so deep that I missed it as I went by – over thirty items in front of my pages, which have nearly that exact title.  On Yandex®?  I’m SEVEN of the top ten results, like I used to be back before 2020, when the big political censorship bug hit all of the major search engines.

What’s the difference between bigfoot and Amber Heard?  Johnny Depp never found bigfoot’s poop in his bed.

I guess that if I use Yandex© from time to time, well, then the FSB as well as the NSA will know that I’m searching for Amber Heard PEZ© dispensers.  I couldn’t find a set with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, but I did find one set consisting of Jesus, Amber Heard, and Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer, Micheal Cohen?  I guess they were in a set because they all got nailed on the cross.

Well, to be fair, two of them were nailed on the cross-examination . . . .

Odds And Ends, Not A Proper Post

“Here, here’s a machete, collapsible fishing pole, a few other odds and ends I stuck in there for you.” – Into the Wild

Pa Wilder said, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” which was an odd way for him to tell me I was adopted.

WRSA is back online here (LINK).  Bookmark it.

This will be and odds and ends post, so, be warned.

Normally by Sunday night one of four things is the case, and they are in descending order of preference:

  1. I’ve written the general outline of the post either earlier in the day, on Saturday, or on Friday. Last week, for instance, I started writing with a “near publish” draft that only needed a few more jokes and meme creation.
  2. I’ve got written notes on what I’m going to write about. This works, because writing is just taking notes vivifying them through the addition of 3,000,000 volts of electricity with the help of Igor.
  3. I’ve been working on the post in my head for a day or three. I might miss on a few ideas or points, but I’m generally okay about getting most of them in there.
  4. I develop a strong idea that I want to write before it’s time to start writing. This is dangerous, because I’ve written somewhere near 1,000 posts, I might have written it before.  I actually had to go to a Lame Repost once because this happened and it was 1am and I was not gonna write another.

Now, that’s my order of preference.  One several occasions, I was frustrated with what I had written, thought, “Pffft, close enough,” and hit the go button.  Those have been, more often than not, some of the most popular posts.  I assure you, before I hit the go button, I have no idea if the post will elicit commentary or not.

When I met The Mrs. she said, “Let’s exchange numbers,” and I responded, “Won’t that just confuse people trying to call us?”

So, I sat down.  No idea.  Normally I keep a bank of those, and there was one really good one, but I’m saving that for the next Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.  I thought about a Lame Repost, but I sifted through several candidates, and none of them felt right.

I do have several ideas, but each of them would take in several hours of research.  Why so long?  Because I’ve learned one very important truth:  I have to have my facts right to write for this crowd.  If I make an error in logic or fact, I’m called on it.

I appreciate that – it’s made me work to be better.

But to hit on a topic what will require a few hours of work to get up to proper speed on is one I typically don’t want to start at 10:28pm on a Sunday.  I’ve done that before, and finishing when the Sun is coming up sucks, because it will mean I’m going to be tired all week long.  I might even have given that a shot tonight, but last week I was under the weather and was dragging just a bit.

How many ants does it take to rent an apartment?  Ten ants.

As in:  drastically better in one night.  One night, go to bed feeling awful.  Next morning?  Felt like I could chew rebar and spit nails.  Metaphorically, I mean.  My teeth aren’t nearly as strong as steel.  Except for the one.

But the dragging had a backlog effect – the ideas I normally jot down during the course of a week just didn’t make it to paper or electrons, since I didn’t really have any.  On almost every day I have tons of ideas, but the last week, blah.  Thanks, virus.

Okay, that’s how the dog ate my homework.

Comments – normally I run a few rules that have (probably) cost the blog on the Google® counter – I mainly let people share most ideas they want to share in the comments.  Do I agree with all of the ideas?  No.  I don’t even agree with myself from week to week, and I certainly would love to have a heart-to-heart with John Wilder from a decade or two ago.

The comment moderation software is strong.  I have no idea how to de-tune it farther than it is.  In most cases, I can see the comments for moderation.  In some cases, I can’t, and the machine buries them, sometimes so far deep that I don’t find them unless I spend time in the moderation software.

That’s not a Crocodile Dundee reference . . . THIS is a Crocodile Dundee reference.

The comments I leave moderated (when I find them, often these go straight to the spam filters) are generally personal attacks that don’t add to the debate.  Oh, and the debate?  If commenters are talking to each other, I rarely step in.  It’s a food fight, and I’ll let it play out.  All I ask is that we attack ideas, not people.

Except the GloboLeft.  Make fun of them however you want.

That’s it for tonight – odds and ends over.

What Wins? The True, The Beautiful, And The Good.

“And I would lead what was left of the human race to ultimate victory.” – Terminator 3:  Rise of the Machines

In 1970, all female solo artists were pre-Madonnas.

WRSA is back online here (LINK).  Bookmark it.

The birthrate is dropping in most locations on the planet.  And it’s dropping fairly quickly – quickly enough that in South Korea there will be only 40 people alive in the year 2100 for every 100 people alive today.  That’s how you get collapse, and I’m sure it’s caused a lot of Seoul searching.

There is an explanation, and you’ll see fairly rapidly that that explanation cements the assurance of the ultimate victory for the True, Beautiful, and Good.

The first problem leading to our current set of troubles is cities.  Cities depend on technology, but they also depend upon having a supply of people living in the cities.

Being in a large city ultimately and always brings about a tendency of a large segment of the population living in them to move to the Left.  Why?  Because being in a city is dependency.  If I want to get rid of some excess trash, I can take it into my backyard and burn it, quite legally.  This is because the minor air pollution source from burning trash isn’t very long and my neighbors don’t live all that close to me.

What do you call a broken dumpster?  A trash can’t.

But if everybody in San Francisco decided they wanted to burn their garbage on the streets, the air pollution would be horrific.  And where would they put all the street-poo?  Burning your own trash isn’t an answer in San Francisco, so people that live there are dependent on someone to do it for them.  They’re also dependent on people for lots of other things:

  • Make food for them so they can eat while watching people poo in the streets,
  • Make roads for them to drive on and for people to poo on,
  • Provide them water to drink and to wash the poo off of their shoes,
  • Provide a sewer for people who poo in the streets to ignore,
  • Protect them from the people that poo in the streets, and
  • Protect them from the fires that the people who poo in the streets set.

There are tons of other things that people in big cities require, things like electricity, and gas, and I could go on for a very long time.  People in the cities even want the city to entertain them with museums and theaters and, I guess, poo fountains.

I took a survey of what shampoo women used in the shower.  98% said, “What the hell are you doing in my bathroom???”

Contrast that with someone living out in the country.  Sure, they need food, but they often have gardens and chickens and cattle – many a local farm here produces a lot of excess food just from their gardens that they sell in the farmer’s market, plus that one dude who buys corn from Walmart® and sells it at a 50% markup.

Roads?  Yup, the county grades the gravel road a few times a year but most farmers box blade their own roads with their tractors.  Water comes from a well, mostly, and although there’s an electric pump in the year 2024, there’s also a creek and a pond if it came down to it.  They’re on a septic system, and if that breaks, an outhouse isn’t very high tech at all.

And protection?  God made men, but Sam Colt made ‘em equal and if someone tries to break into an occupied farmhouse, I certainly hope that they have their will in order.

I think The Mrs. put glue on my pistols.  She denies it, but I’m sticking to my guns.

Yes, the typical farmer or rancher today is much more dependent on the outside world than one even 80 years ago, but they control so much more of their own destiny than a comparable city dweller.  It’s psychologically better to live in the country, and the feeling of independence provides a feeling of power that calling 911 never will.

People in the cities (even recent immigrants, illegal or not) aren’t having kids, but people in the country are.  This is not a fluke:  John C. Calhoun’s (not the president, the scientist) Mouse Utopia experiments showed this:  in a closed environment free of predation and with all the necessary food and space to live, mice essentially stopped breeding, got weird, and then died out.

This is what is happening in cities.  Is this enough to create breakdown?

No, probably not.  There’s one other missing factor:  religion.

Cities are more secular.  It makes sense – when I lived in a city, I noted (not positively) that every single day most workdays my feet went from carpet to tile to concrete to car to concrete to tile and back again at the end of the day.  Every step I took was on an artificial surface that man had made.

I guess that Eve was the first person not to understand the Apple® terms and conditions.

People living in cities can look around and, in some places, can’t see anything other than what was conceived and made by man.  Yet, when I get up here in Modern Mayberry at my house, I walk outside and I’m on grass, I look on natural slopes and trees and creeks and things not made by the hand of man all the way to work.  I don’t know if the utter absence of nature in a day is enough to inspire secularism, but it’s sure nice to see the hand of Someone Bigger Than Me at work as I make my way to my much less important work.

It’s beautiful.

WhatIfAltHist is a YouTuber® that does history and philosophy stuff.  In one of his recent videos he noted that his researcher had found that in every single case, when a society became urban and secular, birthrate collapsed.

A case in point in American history is that the birthrate dropped starting in 1920 as society became more urban and more secular.  However, the Great Depression started a spike in birthrates that lasted until 1958 by a population that was under stress from economics and a world war and lived not in the cities, but in the suburbs, which allowed room for (more) independence and much more nature.

After secularization took hold again and the pace of urbanization increased, the birthrate dropped again and my generation, Gen X, was the result.

God was originally going to use wasps to pollinate flowers, but in the end He went with plan bee.

It seems that historically humanity has been walking this tightrope back and forth between urbanization and rural, and between religious and secular.  There’s obviously a tipping point where people just give up, and those that are in the rural areas keep breeding – there’s a reason that the Amish and the Mormons are gaining as a percentage of the population:  they’re rural and they’re religious and they make babies.

When Obama talked about clinging to our guns and religion, it was his biggest fear that he was vocalizing.

That’s where the seed of the new civilization to replace this one will spring from:  it certainly won’t be San Francisco.  And, whatever emerges from this transition won’t be like what came before it.  We’ll be able to recognize it, we’ll be able to explain it, but we can’t fully predict what it will look like.

I do, however, expect that whatever this new civilization won’t be drenched in either degeneracy or tyranny, and will respect and see the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.