Month: September 2024

Yuri Bezmenov’s 1980s Prediction Of 2024

“Mommy, why are you making civilization collapse?” – Futurama

BEZMEN

Video games never made me want to hurt people.  Working with people did that.

This particular lame repost is because I got tied up on another project today, and this seemed appropriate given the election cycle.  My project was only a little bit productive, and that’s fine by me.  Fresh content on Wednesday!  

Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB agent who defected to the West in the 1970’s.  Bezmenov told everything he knew to the CIA, and was set up in Canada.  He did several interviews which are available on YouTube®, which I’ll link to in a bit.  Most recently, Call of Duty®:  Black Ops Cold War™ brought Bezmenov back into the public consciousness by cutting in clips of his interviews in.

You can watch it below.  It’s only a minute or so.

During interviews, Bezmenov made the quote that only 15% of the KGB’s activity was tied to James Bond® stuff.  Their primary goal wasn’t to find out which parts of an F-15E jet fighter were made out of titanium and which parts were made out of paper-mâché.

Matching the United States in weapons systems was important, but it wasn’t number one.  Besides, the KGB generally had a spy class of ideological communists built into numerous classified projects.  Bezmenov said that 85% of the KGB’s efforts were spent in destroying culture in the West.

Why fight an actual war, if you can get your enemy to become you?

Bezmenov even set out the mechanisms that they were in the process of using.  It wasn’t a complicated process, and it was just four steps.  They called this process, “active measures” and it was nothing less than subverting the ideology that made America great.

The first step was Demoralization.

Demoralization is based around removing the moral framework of the country you’re attacking.  The easiest way to do this is to co-opt the education system.  Bezmenov said that this took 15-20 years, but his number was low.  First, the educational institutions needed to be captured.  The people who train the teachers, the people who are the “guiding lights” in educational theory must buy into Marxism.

I don’t have a direct measure of the ratio of Leftist to Rightist in those that teach education, but I’d imagine it’s no less than journalism, which is at 20:1.  It may exceed history, which is 33.5:1.  Regardless, the educational academy is now firmly in the hands of the Left.  This leads to the production of teachers in a Leftist pedagogy (fancy word for teaching), with bad Leftist theory sometimes even enshrined into law.  No Child Left Behind?  Yes, that was bad.  Common Core appears to be worse.  Here’s one example:

CORE

Yes, this is really what they tried to teach little kids.  From the Heartland Institute.

I have to wonder if the idea is that such simple things like addition and subtraction can be made so complicated that parents won’t be able to teach them to their children.  In essence, it’s a way to further sever the ties between parent and child, while strengthening the ties between child and state educator.

Certainly, not all educators are Leftists.  Here in Modern Mayberry, there are a few, but I think we likely have a more healthy balance.  But there are those who look at the remote classes from COVID-19® as a potential threat to their attempts to indoctrinate children:

DEMORAL

Is Demoralization 100% complete?  Not as long as we have those pesky parents standing up for the customs, culture, ideas, and values of the West.  Is it complete enough to take over society?

Maybe.

The goal of Demoralization is a lot of what we see now on the streets of Portland or Seattle or any other major Leftist city.  Bezmenov described the end product of Demoralization as:

“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

In other words?  Leftist robots.

Destabilization is the next step.  This is the destruction of the systems that define the country.  The economy.  Social relations.  Defensive systems.

In the last few months, the economy has been put into the most precarious state within living memory.  The United States is more divided politically, ideologically, linguistically and ethnically than at any time in history.  Naval vessels ram freighters.  Senior officers are fired due to ideology.  Women are brought into combat operations despite proof that their inclusion lowers fitness for mission.

Bezmenov said that Destabilization took two to five years.

Destabilization leads to Crisis.  Crisis in this system is necessary to get people to accept a new government, new systems, and to give up the old system.  There’s been a great deal of experience in creating Crisis by the Left.  Think the Color Revolutions that have taken place all over the world, from Georgia to Ukraine to Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

What does Crisis look like in the United States?  How about open violence encouraged by receptive District Attorneys that refuse to prosecute?  Does it look like the dollar losing 7% of its value in three months?

KEN

Crisis leads to promises by the Left.  High minimum wages.  Free healthcare.  Guaranteed basic income from the government.  “Equality” in housing, in education, in policing.

Are the promises real?  Of course not.  The promises are whatever it takes to get enough support for the Left so they can take control.

If we are not in the Crisis, you can certainly see it from here.  Ideally, for the Left, Crisis leads to control, or Normalization.

Normalization is the end game.  It’s consolidating the country under the Leftists.  It’s the creation of new institutions.  In the Soviet Union and in China, it consisted of killing farmers and replacing them with people from the cities and expecting these collective farms will feed the nation.

Of course, all of the Leftists burning Kenosha and Portland think that they’ll be the ones in charge.  In the new Socialist Utopian States they’ll be the ones who will write poetry and conduct gender reeducation camps, right?

BULLET

This poetry comes from Seattle, I believe.  Plans are now in full view.

No.  The reality is that they’ll be most likely to be put up against the wall and shot or sent to the convenient leisure gulags.  Why?  They will be disillusioned when the actual power structure emerges.  The reality of every communist paradise in history is that the intellectuals are shot first, especially the intellectuals that are communist.  Why?

Dissent is a thing of the past.

Here are Yuri Bezmenov’s ideas, in his own words:

It Came From . . . 1991

“Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?” – Silence of the Lambs

I had a professor who devoted an entire class to the movie Silence of the Lambs.  It was a Hannibal lecture.

While I think we have one more year (I’ll have to check) in the 1980s to do, we’re jumping into 1991.  Once again, the rule of no sequels takes out a decent movie or two, in this case Terminator 2, which some (not me) like better than the original.  T2 is much bigger and has better special effects, but, whatever.  It’s not on the list.

You’ll also not see some more popular movies from the year.  That’s okay, I either didn’t see them, or didn’t like them, like that crapfest of nihilism, Thelma and Louise.  Awful movie except the part where the feminists die.  That was good.

Warlock – When I met The Mrs. we quickly realized that we both liked Julian Sands for this very same movie.  It’s about . . . well what it’s about isn’t horribly important since the plot is silly – an evil warlock from witch-burnin’ time travels to the present followed by a witch burner.  The witch-burner goes on a buddy road trip chasing the titular warlock.  (I love saying titular.)  It ends pretty much like you’d expect.  It might have even been better if it was a sequel to Ghostbusters, but then it wouldn’t be on the list.

Julian Sands looks like David Bowie gave him a makeover.

L.A. Story – I liked it when I first saw it, but on a second viewing it seems a lot shallower.  Steve Martin is good, but restrained, and part of what throws me off on the later viewing is the horse-faced Jessica Parker, who I have learned to loathe.  Best part?  Steve Martin having to prove his credit score to get a restaurant reservation.

You could cook a lot of liver and fava beans on that many burners.

The Silence of the Lambs – As far as genius films go, this is one of them.  From start to finish, the tension and connection to the characters is built up, with the real star of the show being a serial cannibal.  Good times!  Technically, this could be considered to be a sequel of the earlier film, Manhunter, but I make the rules, so it’s in.

If Looks Could Kill – I love this movie.  It’s stupid.  The plot is written in crayon.  It depends on stupid coincidences.  But it works for me.  And apparently just for me, because everyone scoffs at this movie.  Scoff away!  Oh, and it features lots of central bankers being assassinated, so it has that going for it.

Toy Soldiers – This particular movie is also very silly, and is mainly on the list because I believe that there was a time in the 1990s when it was required by federal law that Toy Soldiers be available at any time to anyone who had basic cable.  This movie was on all the time.  The cast was awful, the plot was silly, but it did have R. Lee Ermy and his eyebrows in it.

Apparently in this version, Bill Murray plays a cat.  Like he did in Garfield.

What About Bob? – This is Bill Murray as I imagine him in real life, if he didn’t get mad at people.  Murray plays a psychiatric patient who gets very clingy with his therapist, and in the span of a weekend becomes more beloved to the therapist’s family than the therapist is.  Richard Dreyfuss plays the therapist by, I believe, just by being Richard Dreyfuss.  If you couldn’t tell, I don’t like Richard Dreyfuss

Backdraft – Backdraft was a very good movie that could have been great, but just missed because of the muddled morality of the ending plus the good guy and the bad guy dying sorta pointlessly.  As usual, director Ron Howard throws his brother Clint Howard in a role, because Clint Howard uses his amazingly large brain to psychically control Ron.  Not a re-watcher, but one that was a good summer movie.

Hudson Hawk – This is easily the most ill-advised movie that Bruce Willis has ever been in, where he plays a burglar who sings a lot with his crime partner, Danny Aiello on the way to assembling Leonardo DaVinci’s lead into gold machine for secret evil dudes.  Did I mention that Willia and Aiello sing?  Oddly, a movie this stupid has to have someone that likes it, and in this case, both The Mrs. and I enjoyed it.

And it looks like he killed her.  Also, the corgis look suspiciously plump.

Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead – most memorable scene?  A kid is using a shotgun to shoot plates that his brother is throwing off the roof.  When finished, he says, “The dishes are done, dude.”

Hot Shots! – Charlie Sheen back in the days when he was funny instead of borderline insane in an Airplane! style movie spoof of Top Gun and Rambo.  Funniest foreshadowing?  A pilot with the callsign “Dead Meat”.

Doc Hollywood – Michael J. Fox before his Parkinson’s, and Julie Warner who I keep mixing up with the actress Finn Carter who was arrested in Vegas for credit card fraud.  It would be funny if Finn had stolen Warner’s credit cards, but I doubt it.  Plot?  It’s essentially and nearly exactly the plot for Pixar’s® movie Cars.  But Doc Hollywood’s not animated and cars don’t perform plastic surgery.

That one girl has got a crazy eye.

The Addams Family – As a fan of the television show (there’s a reason we named our son Pugsley), I was dreading that this wouldn’t be very good.  It was good, and the cast simply was mostly perfect.  Oh, we didn’t really name him Pugsley, but we do very much call him Pugsley.  I’m glad Child Protective Services never found that out.

The Last Boy Scout – The start of this movie was just amazing – a football player, drenched in rain, starts running down the field and pulls out a Beretta 84FS in .380ACP and shoots the players that are about to tackle him.  Now, there are two problems with that scenario.  First, you’d probably want more stopping power than a .380, I’d think a .45ACP as a minimum.  Second, is there even a rule against using guns during a game?  I mean, the worst thing might be a 15-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness plus an ejection.  I’ve since found out that pretty much everybody involved in the whole movie hated each other, which makes me like it all the more since I feed off of the pain of others.

This is a lame list.  The quality of movies was in steep decline since the 1980s, and, really, on this list only Silence of the Lambs is a classic.  When do I think it started to go wrong in a big way, based on seeds set in earlier decades?

The 1990s.

Alaska, Reparations, Bad Economics, And Football

“If nobody comes down and buys a car from me in the next hour, I’m gonna club this baby seal.” – UHF

Karl Marx never finished college, either. It was a class conflict.

When we lived in Alaska, one of the nicest things about living there was that we unplugged. Essentially, in Alaska we tuned out things that were happening “Outside”.

While Outside might conjure up images of John Wilder shivering in a cold car as the heater slowly went from blowing negative 55°F (8,321 Kelvin) air to 20°F (2.54 centimeters) air, you’d be right. But to an Alaskan, Outside meant any place that wasn’t Alaska.

The consequences of this mindset were very relaxing. National politics down in the lower 48 is a constant buzz in the background, but in Alaska, almost all of the news was local news – who had seen a brown bear, when the cat show was, and where the burning of Ronald McDonald™ in effigy to celebrate Midwinter’s Eve was scheduled to be. The only time national politics showed up in the news was when it had a direct impact on Alaskans, like drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

I hear this grizzly got fired – he was only doing the bear minimum.

ANWR has been a controversy since the 1970s, but it certainly isn’t much of a controversy with Alaskans – they’re in favor of it since oil drilling in the state literally put money into the pockets of local citizens. The only people who had much opposition were the native tribes that didn’t benefit directly and a very small minority of granola crunching hippies who we’d stake out as bear and mosquito bait in summer. Remember Alaska’s motto: “Step off of the tour bus, and into the food chain”.

As I recall, drilling in ANWR was so popular in Alaska that the movement against drilling in ANWR was based in Seattle so the activists weren’t sacrificed to the wolves.

Yup, almost all of the opposition to drilling was from people from Outside.

The perspective I got from living in Alaska, though, was that ANWR was just a political football. The GloboLeftElite loved ANWR because they used it as a perennial fundraising tool: give us money or evil people will cover this baby seal in oil and then not let the Haitians eat it, which is their right as Haitians and is perfectly normal, you know.

But I didn’t do it on porpoise.

It’s still that way to this day. No, not Haitians eating crude-covered seals, but drilling in ANWR.

The answer, despite being approved in 2017 or so?

No, not today. The GloboLeft keeps putting the ball down, and as Charlie Brown (AKA, Conoco©) gets ready to drill, the GloboLeft pulls the football out of the way at the last minute. It’s not exaggeration to say that this has happened literally fifty times since I’ve been alive. People in Alaska already know the score. Conoco™ is never gonna be allowed to kick that football.

The same thing is true with reparations.

Reparations are a really hideous joke on the black community, because they play off of the very worst of emotions – greed and victimhood. First, who doesn’t want someone else to provide them with all the money they could ever want? I mean, my hand would be among the first up, though I do know that there’s something corrosive to the soul about taking money I haven’t earned from people who haven’t wronged me, but, hey, free money.

The inventor of autocorrect died. The funnel will be helped tomato.

The more pernicious part of the reparations deal is that it establishes a narrative of victimhood and implies helplessness. Be a single mother with six kids by five different baby daddies? It’s the fault of slavery. Be convicted of seventeen felonies, be released, and then finally have to go to jail for life because no one stopped you from killing someone? It’s the fault of 300 years of systemic oppression.

Yup, and this isn’t an exaggeration. And, I guess they’ve got a point. Look at how oppressed Barack Obama was in being forced to be president. It even turned his hair white!

But reparations will solve literally everything, every problem. And let’s ignore pesky and inconvenient facts like the crime rates among blacks, and the relative success of nearly every other minority group in the nation except blacks. Oh, and we should look at how wonderful it has been for native Americans, because we gave them reparations in the form of reservations and unlimited Bureau of Indian Affairs welfare. Like communism, I’m sure it would work next time.

But, for a second, let’s pretend that if we gave out reparations, people would finally shut up. Think that would work?

No. I recall one ludicrous proposal (California, I believe) that would have given black people something like $3,000,000 each. The response? “It’s a good start, but it’s not enough.”

This is Dr. Evil level of economic understanding . . . .

What’s enough? Nothing is enough. There is absolutely no amount that will ever be seen to be enough, because there has been a force-feeding of victimhood for decades into the black community, and to say, “Okay, white guys, we’re even now,” would be contradictory to every bit of victimhood that they rely on to get them through the day. From personal experience in dealing with victims, they relish the pity, and will do absolutely anything to hold on to their victim status.

Also, there is no way that black people will ever get the sky-high sorts of compensation that they’re looking for (millions of dollars in cash, freedom from taxes, a free house, and $70,000 a year for 80 years was one proposal). Perhaps they might get another MLK, Jr. Street or a George Floyd Square, but they’ve already got two national holidays plus Kwanza.

Whatever Kwanza is.

Teach your children about Kwanza in a responsible manner.

No, just like ANWR was a football to money-farm GloboLeft-leaning women with too much disposable income who wanted to virtue signal that Haitians should be allowed to eat all the seal meat they wanted, reparations are a mechanism to vote-farm the black community for whoever promises them the best package that they’re never going to get.

And even that won’t eliminate the “economic understanding gap”.

I’d make a comment here about the ludicrousness of printing another few trillion dollars and then just giving it away as a cure to inflation, but since we’ve long since ceased being a serious nation in any respect, I’ll skip it. Perhaps we’re hoping to spend ourselves into the relative economic prosperity of, say, Spain or Mauritania, where they still have tens of thousands of slaves.

Dang, I shouldn’t have mentioned that, since now the Mauritanians will want reparations from the United States for slavery since I’m sure that somehow the United States is responsible for blacks enslaving blacks 4,017 miles (16 kilograms) away from the United States.

ANWR will likely never be drilled, and black people will likely never get more than a token sort of reparations. And that’s fair, because no living black person was ever subject to legal slavery in the United States, though now we do have unpaid internships. At charities. That don’t want us to drill in ANWR.

I guess you could say the drilling system is rigged.

King, Kamala, And Evil

“Give me what I want, and I’ll go away.” – Storm of the Century

I hear King’s next novel is about a girl who falls off a boat in Maine and is eaten by a giant shellfish – the title is “New England Clam Chowed Her”.

A few weeks ago, I was re-watching the Stephen King miniseries The Storm of the Century.  I recall watching it when The Mrs. and I were newly married.  I recalled enjoying it at the time.  A Cliff’s Notes™ version is generic Mysterious Villain with Mysterious Powers shows up on a Mysterious Isolated Island off the coast of Mysterious Maine for Mysterious Reasons.

The movie first aired in 1999.  While watching it, the demographic change in entertainment is obvious, since all of the characters in the movie are white. This is entirely in keeping with what Maine looked like in 1999 and still looks like, with approximately 90% of Maine residents being white as of the last census.  Of course, if they were going to do the series in 2024, certainly there would be a Moslem or a black woman in a wheelchair who is the only good character.

Oh, and culturally, the characters were mainly married and had kids and most of the relationships were solid and people went to church.  The good guy was a father, who was married, and his wife was probably the least moral character of the movie.

Yeah, not a 2024 movie since women are perfect in 2024.

Honestly, I liked Jar-Jar Binks™ better.

Yet, the movie was dark in a way that got me thinking – is the world out there even darker than we think?

I’ve been ruminating on that for weeks, and today I was listening to a YouTube® video while smoking a cigar in the hot tub tonight, and it was about . . . how bad the banking industry was, complete with an informant talking about secret sex parties and all manner of debauchery that I won’t discuss on this mostly family-friendly blog.  The conclusion of the informant was that these parties were used to gather video to use for blackmail.  I guess they just can’t charge each other penalty interest rates.

One very successful trader who was interviewed decided that he was going to quit the high-stress life even though he was making hundreds of millions for the investment bank.  He told his boss.  His boss took him to lunch, and told him a story about a trader that had quit.  The bank then went through his emails, his trades, looking for anything that they could use to sue him or to turn over to the authorities.

It didn’t matter if the allegations stuck, the firm could keep coming up with them until the trader went broke.  It was just like a Mafia shakedown.

The trader decided then, he wouldn’t quit, and made himself such a pain that they fired him.  I imagine that was a really amusing two weeks of his life, and I hope he brought in some trout that he’d caught and cleaned them on the copier.

Punctuation is important!  “I’m quitting alcohol for a month” is far different than “I’m quitting.  Alcohol for a month.”

But when it comes to this blackmail, I wonder just how many people that are successful, are successful only because they can be controlled.  Epstein, more than anything, was likely a generator of this type of material for people to use to control others.  Why have the client lists never been made public?  Why have the recordings never come to light?

Because those same recordings, that same information is likely being used today to control those people.  The same with P. Diddy or Puff Daddy or whatever he’s known as today – what do you think the recordings from his parties were used for?

And how in the hell did Epstein and Diddy get fortunes estimated to be near a billion dollars?

Coming soon to a Diddy near you.

They were part of the control apparatus.

I have no doubt that Kamala is utterly controlled in the same fashion.  She was placed in her current position precisely because she can be controlled, and will do what she is told.  She didn’t lead in the cover up of Biden’s decrepit condition, but she certainly has been complicit.  Whatever committee that is running the White House has decided that with Kamala as president they could keep doing whatever it is that they’re doing, and that she can’t or won’t stop them.

She’s made the deal, and for the trappings of power will do whatever they tell her to do.

Who are they?  The GloboLeftElite.

I used to just call them “The Left”, but that really doesn’t fit, nor does “communist”, and it doesn’t explain the core of what they seem to stand for.

It makes me laugh when the dentist asks the last time I flossed, I think, “Man, doesn’t he remember?  He was there.”

No, the thing that they stand for first is globalism.  This is why they can take and transplant 20,000 Haitians into a town of 50,000, forever changing the demographics of a small and happy town to get cheap labor and dispossess the people that built the town in the first place.  Their reach is global, and I think that nations are just pesky anachronisms in their minds, and whatever people actually built a country aren’t important.

So, that’s the Global part.  The Left part is that they are fully on board with much more governmental control of everything.  They want the government to tell us what we can do, where we can do it, and what we can say, as long as the government allows them to do whatever they want sexually without consequence.  That appears to be all they want.

So, the GloboLeft are the foot soldiers, and the GloboLeftElite are the rulers.  Those are the people who actually run the murky enterprises, and whose desires make the actual laws in the country.  And, they do what they want, and control people via blackmail and lawfare.

It’s just that simple.

If the British started a chapter of their Flat Earth Society in America, would it be called the Apartment Earth Society?

In one way it’s darker than any of Stephen King’s villains, though.  King is a member of the GloboLeft, but probably not the GloboLeftElite.  But the villains he wrote about often had a purpose – in Storm of the Century, King’s bad guy wanted a child so he could raise it to be his Evil protégé.  Wanting a child to carry on your Mysterious Evil Work is far more wholesome than the executives that will ruin a town just to increase the profit margin by a percent or two, or to dilute the heritage American voting stock so that the people who built the country will be dispossessed forever.

Stephen King’s Evil Villian said, “Give me what I want and I’ll go away.”  The GloboLeftElite wants power forever.

Now that, I call Evil.

Dinner? Who Would You Choose?

“Shiver me timbers Philip. At this rate I’ll never get to my Kraft dinner.” – South Park

I defeated my school’s chess champion in two moves.  Guess football and wrestling came in handy.

I apologize for the Lame Repost, but by the time I got to sit down to write, without even the start of a first draft, it was 11pm, and the morning comes early.  So, please enjoy this Lame Repost from back in 2021.

Last week Remus, the late proprietor of the Woodpile Report came up in the comments.  Mike in Canada (one of Canadians that the triumphant armies of the right, good, and true will spare when we kick off Operation Leafblower:  The Cleansing Of The North, which is scheduled right after we finish Operation American Commie And Collaborationist CEO Helicopter Drop) made this comment:

“If you could have dinner with anyone, whom would it be?  Remus. I would have given a great deal to have met him and had a conversation.  I miss him very much. . . Tuesday mornings just aren’t the same now.”

That hit a nerve with me, for several reasons.  The first time any of my posts received any notice of any kind was on his site.  I’ll admit, I asked him to read it via email.  And he did read it, and posted it on one of his weekly musings.  Then, we emailed each other back and forth several times.

I still have his website bookmarked.  I can’t really bring myself to delete it, because I read it weekly for years even before I was featured on it.

I miss him very much, too.

Remus was very special to many readers and writers, primarily because it was obvious:  he was a reluctant warrior.  Like many of the posters here, and many of the blogs I frequent, he wanted no part of this.  He wanted peace, but circumstances kept dragging him back in.

In my case, I wanted to post funny stories and make fun of the events of the day while mixing in whatever wisdom I could scrape from the ages.  Oh, and add in some bikinis.  Why?

Because they’re bikinis.

Duh.

I watched a two-part series about the bikini.  It was very revealing.

But Mike’s question remained:  who would I want to have dinner with.  Remus is a wonderful answer, but I excluded him and other commenters/fellow bloggers from my list.  Also, I excluded dead family members, and religious figures and, of course, Deity.

Why?  Well, I’m the one writing this post.  My youngest experience (this really happened) with Jesus was when I was coloring a picture of him in Sunday School.  I colored him purple.  The nice Sunday School teacher said, “Johnny, Jesus wasn’t purple.”

My rejoinder?  “Well, he’s God, so if he wants to be purple, he can be purple.”

The Sunday School teacher sighed.  So, yeah, I haven’t changed.  Besides, I’m sure Jesus could drink me under the table if He chose to, purple or not, so it’s not fair including Him on the list.

That being said, I have several categories.  The first is, who, in history, would I like to have dinner with?

George S. Patton, Jr.

Since the age of five, I’ve been fascinated with Patton.  How fascinated?  So much so that my high school history teacher ordered a documentary film on him for our US History class, just for me.  When the lights went down and the projector started and his baby picture showed up even before the title showed – I yelled, “Patton!”

Yup, this was the picture.

My history teacher smiled.

Sure, Patton wasn’t fighting the best the Germans could throw at him.  Sure, he had intelligence information from Enigma knowing what the Germans would do (sometimes before they knew) but he was hip-deep in the intrigue and politics that created the postwar world.

He didn’t know all the dirt but he knew a lot of it.  Plus, the man knew a good cigar and a bad commie from a thousand miles away.  Dewey couldn’t defeat Truman in 1948, but I bet George S. Patton could have rolled over him like a Sherman tank.

Imagine the world with Stalin staring down Patton at the start of the Cold War.  Commies in the State Department?  They’d be hanging from lamp poles, and Patton would have led the columns of tanks entering Red Square when Stalin had used his one and only atomic bomb.

Stalin’s grave?  It’s a communist plot.

This wouldn’t be any silly single-course dinner.  This would be a full-on dinner that would last for hours and end with cigars and brandy on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean on a cool autumn night.

Besides, who would pick better food or cigars for a dinner than Patton?

Who would I skip?

Einstein.  He looks like he smells like cheese, and not in a good way.  Also he seems like he’d be sort of like that guy who mumbled to himself in the back of the class and rocked back and forth.

Honorable Mention:

Isaac Newton.  Isaac Newton did more in any three years of his life than 99.999% of humanity will ever do in a full lifetime.  Me?  I want to understand what he learned about things other than physics, which are largely lost to history.  Downside?  I’d need to record it all because I’d want to hear it again and again.  Other downside?  How can you compete with that hair?

Okay, both Brian May and Isaac Newton have doctorates.  Only one of them had groupies.

Who would I like to get into a (no weapons) fight with?

Alexander the Great.  I’m pretty sure that 18 year old me could dust the floor with 18-year-old Alexander the Great.  Check that.  I’m certain I could take him.  But if I lost?

“Yeah, I remember the time that Alexander the Great just barely beat me.”

For me, it’s a no-lose situation.  For him?  My first thought was it would be pretty embarrassing.  But, after thinking about it, if Alexander lost a fight to someone who came from 2400 years in the future just to kick his butt?  Also a cool story.

Seriously, Alexander would be toast, though.

Who would I skip?

18-year-old Chuck Norris.  I don’t have a death wish.

Honorable Mention:

18-year-old Genghis Khan.  I hear he was tough, but it might be worth it.  While a challenge, since 8% of the men living in the former Mongol Empire are his descendent I’d get to say, “Who is your daddy now?” to millions of dudes.  Me?  I’ll turn Genghis Khan into Genghis Khannot.

Genghis was tough as a child.  I remember when he took his first steppe.

Discarded: 

Karl Marx.  It would be like hitting a fat, slow and stupid bug, and give me zero satisfaction.  And it wouldn’t stop communism, even if I gave him a swirlie and an atomic wedgie.  Someone would come along and write the “something for nothing” manifesto.

Have a (few) beer(s) with:

Ben Franklin.

I think Ben knew all the dirt on all the founding fathers.  If not, I think he would have an excellent collection of ye olde fart jokes.  Failing all of that?  Rumor has it he was quite funny when toasted.  Plus, he was rich enough to buy really good wine.

Who would I skip?

Any Kennedy.  Never drink with a Kennedy.  Any Kennedy.  And never, ever, drive with a Kennedy.

But if Teddy was driving, he would have drowned.

Honorable Mention:

Andrew Jackson.  Skinny as a rattlesnake and twice as mean.  He’d probably take you to strange bars that weren’t on the map because they were in someone’s basement or on their back 40 that you’d have to shoot your way out of.  Since Andrew Jackson was invulnerable to weapons like Wolverine®, just stand behind him.

Who would I like to be on a long airline flight with?

This one was hard.  When I used to be on long flights, I pulled out my book as a shield to not talk to the person next to me.  Who would I want to be stuck next to for four to six hours as I jetted across the country.  There’s only one answer:

Elvis.

Okay, just kidding, since he would probably eat my in-flight meal.  He’d want my hunk-a hunk-a airplane nuts.  The tough part of this answer is that you’re going to be trapped with this person for hours.  So, if they’re a jerk?  Yeah.  Hours of that.  So, I think I’d choose Mark Twain.  Worst case is that he’d tell you stories.  Best case?

He’d tell you stories.  Some of them might even be true.  And it would be fun to fight alongside Twain after some Stewardess told him he couldn’t light up an epic stogie in flight.

Who would I like to choose but I’m afraid he’s a jerk and I’d end up hating a legend?

Steve Martin.  I love Steve Martin’s work, and think he has a lot of genius and wisdom behind it.  That being said, being famous for, oh, nearly fifty years just might have jaded him to people.  Maybe.  And I’d hate to think that a national treasure like Steve was a, well, jerk.  Plus I bet Twain could take out a stewardess with a single punch.

Honorable Mention:

Quentin Tarantino.  I know he’s a jerk, but I think I’d love to argue with him for six straight hours when he couldn’t escape.  That sounds sort of fun.  And if he was a real idiot?  I bet I could make him smell my unwashed clothes from the trip.

Who under no circumstances would I want to be on an airline flight with?

Gilbert Gottfried or William Shatner.  Gottfried for obvious reasons, and Shatner because every time he’s on a flight something is on the wing trying to rip the engines out.

Don’t worry – William Shatner would never run a criminal enterprise.

All of that being said?  I think Mike is right.  I think Remus would have been a wonderful dinner companion.

Who are your choices, and (for more fun) what categories did I miss?  One category I drew a blank on was “who would I like to work for” and then I thought of Jesus again.

He would know when I was goofing off.

Dangit.  He already does.

The Podcast Of The Century!

Streams will show up here at 9EDT, that’s in around 30 minutes!  (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts up at 8:55PM)

Mrs The Mrs – YouTube

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

In this episode:

  • War and Stuff
  • Jackass of the Week
  • Conversation Street
  • ThinkRealFast

Volcanoes, The Global Warming Scam, And Energy

“Remember when you could just throw a girl into a volcano?” – The Cabin in the Woods

Did you know that you can put molten lava in your mouth?  I mean, only once, but still.

I know we there is a lot of fretting about the current political situation, which may well lead to a dictatorship in the United States (at least temporarily) and that bothers some people, I guess, but thrills others.  As Elon Musk noted, “’When did Rage Against The Machine’ become ‘Rage For The Machine’?”

Outside of the impending dictatorship, which, I know, is like saying, “But aside from not knowing where you were, how did the debate go, Mr. Biden?” I think an even bigger problem faced by humanity is that of energy.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has become more and more dependent upon vast amounts of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels.  Even if you’re an abiotic oil enjoyer, the problem is resource replenishment time, which is certainly at least in the thousands of years timeframe except in certain cases that would be dependent on very specific conditions.  If it’s all dead plants and stuff, that puts recharge rates in the millions of years timeframe.

This is important because, no matter how you slice it, energy is freedom.

And another scientist came up with a unified theory of seatbelts.  He said, “It just clicked.”

The attack on freedom through energy has been ongoing for decades.  I think, deep down, those of the GloboLeftElite who love control (which is all of them) aren’t happy when people have freedom.  Since I’ve observed an inverse relationship between the amount of freedom in the world and the price of energy, the powers that be love Global Warming®.

No, they aren’t really excited about Global Warming™, they’re excited about the amount of control that it allows them to wield over people.  How Dare You Herself admits (see below) that her goal is to destroy all of capitalism.  Now, if that’s her goal, why is she funded by capitalist George Soros?  It’s odd that Global Warming gets so much of the attention of huge power users like Microsoft® and that those that tout the solution create more sweet, sweet carbon dioxide than Poland.

If Greta Thunberg could rearrange all the letters in her name, that would be great.  (Meme as found.)

The concern about Global Warming® isn’t because the GloboLeftistElite love humanity, in fact it’s quite the opposite:  they despise humanity and want to watch it suffer.

That being said, even an old, crusty skeptic like myself noted that it was pretty warm in 2023, so I wondered why that would be.  Of course, the answer was right in front of my face the whole time, but it took a reminder in the form of a story emailed by Ricky to me to jar the old grey matter enough to recall.

In January of 2022, the volcano Tonga erupted.  Now, if you’re going to have a volcano, a good name for it is in order, one that implies that when it erupts it destroyed an entire ancient alien civilization.  Mount St. Helens does not fit the bill – it’s “meh” tier at best.  Mount Pinatubo is better.  But better yet?  Tonga, which is more formally known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga, meets that criteria since you could yell “Hunga Tonga-Hunga” at anyone in an elevator and they’d know you were one serious dude.  Try it, you’ll see what I mean.

When Godzilla® isn’t destroying cities, I hear he has a business flipping houses.

Regardless, in August of 2022, NASA opined that Tonga’s eruption had launched enough water high into the stratosphere to increase the volume of water there by 10%.  Water is, of course, the most potent greenhouse gas by volume.  This excludes my deodorant, which is specifically designed to keep me covered in baby oil and smelling like hydrocarbons and also eliminate pesky ozone in the upper atmosphere.  It’s a three-in-one product.

Hunga Tonga-Hunga shot the largest amount of water vapor added to the stratosphere that men who record such things have ever recorded.  To double the impact, when a volcano normally blows, in addition to water vapor, it often blasts particulates into the atmosphere that block and reflect part of the Sun’s light back into space, leading to a wee bit of net cooling.

I was shocked to find out that six out of seven dwarves aren’t Happy®.

But not Hunga Tonga-Hunga.  It was, in fact, perfectly situated to maximize water output and minimize particulate output.  And it was just shallow enough to zap out all that water, but not so deep so that the water would be absorbed by the deep water above it.  Thus?  A warm year.

And, unless Dr. Evil caused this via volcano an unsanctioned experiment in Evil Science®, mankind was 100% off the hook for this, as mankind has likewise done very little during our lifetimes to make the climate warmer.  Yes, all the agriculture has an impact, but people gotta eat.

But this is still very, very different than the alarmists indicate.  There will be more hurricanes.  Oops, did we say more?  We meant there will be fewer hurricanes.  And it might cause things to get cooler.

In short, Global Warming™ is whatever will make you scared and turn you to full autocratic communism.

The problem with Global Warming® is that it’s distracting us from the real problem:  we need energy.

Yes, I’m in favor of Clean™ energy, but it has to make thermodynamic sense – we have to get more energy out of the system than we spend making the energy, which is not the case with most renewables (ethanol, biodiesel, I’m looking at you).  Global Warming© is a distraction, and is moving capital needed to create an energy secure future into corrupt projects that loot tax dollars to give to political cronies that are net energy sinks.

I guess it’s a Nguyen-Nguyen situation.

But, hey, I said energy is freedom, and if they don’t want energy, they don’t want us to have freedom.

At least they’re making George Soros happy.

Are We In The Middle Of A Planned Revolution? Yes.

“Day 93 under the dome.  With necessities growing dangerously low, who knows what spark will set off this powder keg?” – The Simpsons Movie

I saw two men in matching outfits so I asked them if they were gay.  Turns out that doesn’t make the NYPD happy.

A phenomenon that has sweep the world in the early 21st century has been the “Color Revolution”.  This is characterized by a “grassroots” movement whose aim was theoretically to create a liberal Western democracy on the European model.  An example would be most Western European countries, with the exception of the Islamic Caliphate of France.

What methods were used in these “peaceful” revolutions?

  • Leadership by Non-Governmental Organizations Civil Disobedience
  • Civil Disorder/Disobedience/Protests
  • Total Lack of Chill
  • Use of the Internet to Organize
  • Heavy “Student” Participation

When I read that list, I see a single conclusion:  the CIA did it, sometimes with the help of George Soros.

Probably one of the first places that this method was used was the Soviet Union.  All of the “spontaneous” protests at the beginning were likely anything but spontaneous.  The wonderful part of this type of operation is that if it works, great, an enemy is off the board.  If it doesn’t?  Everyone involved can put on their “so sorry that happened to you, buddy” face while preparing for the next one.

To be fair, I don’t think that most of the people that were trying to get the Soviet Union to collapse thought it was going to work as well and as completely and as quickly as it did.  One minute, the Soviets were all “Viktor Drago” and the next they were all “Trotsky after meeting an icepick”.

What do you call a man with an ice pick in his head?  Anything you want – he clearly doesn’t control the security apparatus of the USSR.

But there is more at play here.  Ricky emailed me an article from 2014 that talked in depth about Color Revolutions and their mechanics by Andrew Korybko which inspired this post.  You can find that article here.

The Color Revolution Model: An Exposé of the Core Mechanics

When we look at a Color Revolution, it’s like looking at an iceberg:  you only see the bit above the water but miss entirely the part that’s going to cause James Cameron to make a billion dollars and inflict those stupid Avatar™ movies on us.  No, Color Revolutions are years in the making and start with:

Ideology:  In the Color Revolutions to date, all of them have been based on the attempt to create a Western-liberal style of government, hence my suggestion that this was the CIA attempting to export “freedom” to a group of people who have consistently and convincingly desired to not be free.  Sure, some Egyptians want to live in a Western-style democracy, but most of them don’t.  Hell, most of the Muslims that have moved to Western Europe don’t want, at all, a Western-style democracy.

They want Sharia law, they want a government based in Islam, and they want all the wealth that the Western-style liberal democracies seem to create.  They want to live in Cairo on the Thames, not the actual, crappy Cairo on the Nile.  Why did Egypt’s Color Revolution fail?  Why did Libya’s?  Why did Syria’s?

They didn’t want that Western liberal democracy ideology, they just wanted the stuff.

Telling a good joke about the French Revolution is all about the execution.

Cash:  As NASA astronaut Gus Grissom said in the movie The Right Stuff, “No bucks, no Buck Rodgers®.”  In a Color Revolution you could say, “No simoleons, no Napoleons”.  That’s as close as I can get unless I retcon Stalin’s first name to Moolah.

But money has to come from somewhere, and most of the people that make up these Color Revolutions are poor college students who live on ramen and despair.

Where did BLM get money?  According to the Claremont Institute (LINK), Microsoft® pledged $244,400,000 to Black Lives Matter.  Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization pushing radical GloboLeftElite disruption.

Microsoft© is funding a Color Revolution

Against . . . you.

That’s a pickup line that could work for Boeing, too.

People:  There is always an inner circle of leaders of the Color Revolution, probably hand-picked by the funders.  The are willing and passionate about the Color Revolution, primarily because they see themselves as the ones who will get power after the event.  Because someone has to drink the Kool-Aid®, there are also followers.  Those are broken into two groups – the troops and the members of general public that are sympathetic to the revolutionaries.

Propaganda:  First, the message is crafted.  It is prepared in advance for the moment it will be communicated, and the People mobilized.  The propaganda may already be in place, sitting on websites prepared by and for the movement.  It may have been trained into the foot soldiers of the Color Revolution.  Regardless, the message gets out, and the goal is to get sympathy and support as the revolt proceeds.  In the United States, mainstream media is fully onboard with the GloboLeftistElite plans – would anyone be surprised to find out that ABC® gave Kamala the debate questions?  And answers?

I do think the debate about Mobius strips is a bit one-sided.

Spark:  Once all of the above are in place and ready to go, all that’s needed is a spark.  George Floyd, for instance was a spark.  It wasn’t George Floyd, it was that there was a video of a dying junkie that met the needs of the Color Revolution, which was already prepared and ready to go, complete with Ideology, Cash, People and Propaganda, complete with a complicit media to fan the fiery but non-violent flames.

Once these all came together, Floyd’s death was chosen and someone, somewhere, said, “Perfect.  Go.”  It doesn’t matter that Floyd was going to die due to the incredible amounts of drugs in his system.  All that mattered was what the video showed of his on-camera death.

Korybko suggested, back in 2014, that examples of these Sparks included (all of these are direct quotes):

  • A rigged election
  • The jailing of an opposition leader
  • The signing of (or failure to sign) a controversial piece of legislation
  • A government crackdown against the opposition or the imposition of martial law
  • Declaring or being involved in an unpopular war

Of the three Sparks that Korybko suggested, the top almost certainly happened in 2020, and the second and fourth are being implemented in some fashion against Trump and/or his supporters.  The list is, obviously, not exhaustive, and the event need never have happened in reality, as long as people can be convinced it happened.

After the event, the protests start.  And grow.  And spread.  In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the Floyd Protests were an attempted Color Revolution in the United States that was called off after the mechanisms to secure the 2020 election for Biden were in place, and, perhaps a warning of sorts to Biden that he’d best do what he was told if he could remember.

I was listening to a podcast tonight and Eric Weinstein noted that he had been assured that Biden does not have access to “the football” and that the United States is currently being run by a committee of the powerful.  The same committee, no doubt, that has put Kamala at the brink of power.  Note that Biden only dropped out after the (first) failed assassination of Trump.

Occupy Wall Street challenged the money powers of New York (not sure who was funding them, China?).  This was not to be allowed, so, to counter it, Trayvon Martin was used as a Spark, moving on to the “Gentle Giant” Michael Brown, and finally to George Floyd.

The fact that the clear self-defense shooting of Trayvon Martin was used to get the hippies and AntiFa® out of New York and have them start protesting for black people instead of against bankers.  I guess the bankers got scared, and hippies and AntiFa® have a short attention span, or their leaders just like money.  They had to have something to do, and since it’s always easy to stir up a racial fight, that’s what the bankers picked, because a class fight might have endangered actual bankers.

One stolen joke is a coincidence, two is a pattern.  Thirty is an Amy Schumer standup routine.

These movements aren’t popular, and aren’t spontaneous, though they’re staged to appear so.  They aren’t even permanent – most countries that have had a Color Revolution revert to their old styles of government with just a little bit of time and often a lot of chaos.  Egypt went from its military government to a very brief “democracy” and then right back to a military government because that’s what Egyptians seem to want.

This may sound as crazy as predicting the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, but the government of the United States is nearing collapse, and the Color Revolution technique, or something like it, is being employed against you and funded by people like Microsoft® to guide the fall into, they hope, a situation where bankers can frolic freely.

That’s the rub – the importation of the endless hordes of illegals, the economic devastation of inflation and the contrived energy and housing crises and continual cultural provocations are cracks, big ones, setting the stage for a major change.  And, again, each and every one of them is intentional, and it’s gone far enough that I still believe we’re entering the danger window in 2025, with the early to middle 2030s the most likely time when the final Spark hits.

Beyond the Spark?

It’s up to us.

Time: It’s The Only Thing You Have

“I didn’t invent the time machine to win at gambling. I invented a time machine to travel through time.” – Back to the Future 2

I have two dogs, Rolex® and Timex™.  They are watchdogs.

Preface:  I got home very late, so, here’s a Lame Repost.  See you with a great new post on Monday.

Time.

Of things that have long fascinated me, time is at the top of the list.  Even when I was a little kid, time fascinated me.

The idea that time, of all of the physical parameters of the world there was the one that we couldn’t control.  Humanity has mastered the power of the atom, at least partially.  We haven’t tamed fusion, but we can create it, and have several fewer islands in the Pacific because of it.

Humanity has dammed the largest of rivers, giving us power.  We have used technology to shrink the world.  The first recorded circumnavigation of the world took 1082 days.  Magellan didn’t quite make the whole trip, but he still gets the credit on a technicality.

Now?  The International Space Station does an orbit in 90 minutes or so at 17,150 miles per hour, which is nearly as fast as Haitians are entering Texas.

Humanity has conquered the riddle of steel – we’ve made steel buildings that reach upwards into the sky to please Crom.  We have conquered climate – people live at the South Pole in perfect comfort, as well as managing to live in Houston without melting into puddles of sweat.

Batman® couldn’t solve the riddle of steel, but he could name the worst riddle:  being riddled with bullets.

We can see at night.  We can talk, nearly instantly, with people a continent away.

My phone buzzes every time there is motion outside my front door – it’s like having a superpower of sensing where and when there is activity at a distance.  Another superpower is being able to access obscure facts anywhere on the planet that can reach a cell signal.

But time remains fixed.  It flows only one way.  And it is the most subjective of our senses.  Even Pugsley notices it:  “This summer was so short!”

He’s in high school.  That’s when the transition from the endless summers of childhood begin to transform into the fleeting, never-ending carousel of years that is adulthood.

Best thing about being in Antifa® is that you never have to take off work to protest.

I’ve long felt that I understood why this was.  Let me give it a shot.

For a newborn, the second day it’s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life.  For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years – much more.  It’s not a big percentage, but it’s much smaller than 50%.  For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years.

If you’re forty – half your life is twenty years.  1/8 versus 1/20?  It’s amazingly different.  We don’t perceive life as a line.  We’re living inside of it – we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives.  Each day you live is smaller than the last.

But that’s not everything.

As we age, novelty decreases.  When we’re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily.  New words.  New thoughts.  New ideas.  That’s why babies keep falling for that stupid “got your nose” thing.  They don’t realize that I can reattach it.

Three clowns were eating a cannibal.  One clown says, “I think we started this joke wrong.”

Over time, though, novelty decreases, as does the percentage of your life that each day represents.  Ever drive a new route somewhere?  When I do it, I have to focus my attention.  It seems like it takes longer because I’m having to deal with novelty.

I’ve had my “new” laptop nearly seven years.  I had my old laptop for longer than that, yet my “new” laptop still seems like it’s temporary.

There are only so many routes I can drive to work, so much novelty that I can find in a daily drive.  Even a commute of an hour begins to fade into a brief moment in time if it’s the same commute, day after day.

Work is similar.  Over time, we gain experience.  Experience shows us how to fix problems (and sometimes how not to fix them).  But that experience of taking a solution and modifying it to fix the next problem isn’t as hard as fixing the first problem.

The fact that each day is a smaller portion of my life, combined with the fact that as I get older, the possibility that I see something new dims.  I’ve solved a bunch of problems in my life.  Finding a new one is . . . difficult.

Life goes faster, day by day for me.  Every endless summer day of youth is in my rearview mirror.

And yet . . .

Each day is still 24 hours.  I can still use each day and live it with all of the gusto of a 10-year-old fishing for trout after building a tree fort, playing with his dog, and building a model of a Phantom F-4 to dogfight with the MiG 21-PF already hanging from the ceiling.

They did not see that coming.

Even though those 24 hours seem shorter now than at any time in my life, they are relentless in their exact sameness.  I get to choose how I spend those moments in my life.  I get to choose what I want to produce, and how hard I work to make it happen.

Humanity may never have the ability to crack time – it appears that even today, outside of sands falling from an hourglass, we can only describe time as a fundamental entity, something we measure against.

Does the flow of time vary?  Certainly.  But only if we’re moving at large fractions of the speed of light or are caught in a huge gravity well, but let’s leave your mother out of this.

Gravity is just a social construct invented by an English Christian to keep you down.

I have come to the conclusion that I will likely never understand what, exactly, time is, outside of this:

Time is all we have – it is what makes up life.  We measure our lives in it, because no man can buy an extra hour of life.  We have the hours we have.  The only difference is what we do with that time.

I mentioned in a previous post that (during the week) I often get by on scant hours of sleep.  That’s because I have more things that I want to do in my life than I can fit in a day that’s less than 20 or 22 hours some days.

I choose to try to do more, to try to make use of this time, because each moment is a gift.

Maybe I can settle for that definition of time:  a gift.  Each moment is a gift.

Don’t beg for more, or live in fear of losing them.  Just make each moment count.

Perhaps that’s the secret and precious nature of time.  It is the one thing we should never waste, and never wish away.