Month: January 2025

It Came From . . . 1979

“It just doesn’t matter.” – Meatballs

Those are some large balls.

Going back through the list of movies that came out in 1979, you could see the excellence that would come in the 1980s, but it wasn’t, for the most part, there yet.  The formula wasn’t quite right.  Some movies left off the list like The Villian, for instance, should never have been made.  I love slapstick.  I love satire.  But The Villian was just horrible in the way it executed both – it had less character development than a Roadrunner cartoon.

On the flip side, some of the movies below are classics that are far better than anything being made today.  A great, classic movie that hits all the beats and isn’t a sequel is possible.  Also of note, there just weren’t a lot of sequels made in 1979 – Hollywood® still felt it had ideas.

Many of these I saw either on video or on HBO® later and not as releases in the theater.  Also, as always, the list is in no particular order and excludes sequels.

In a city where 10,000 of Trump’s ICE are on their tail, they’re just trying to get home to Oaxaca.

The Warriors – “Warriors . . . come out to play . . . Warriors . . . come out to pla-ay . . . .”  The 1970s were a darker time in the country, and I think folks generally looked around and wondered if it was really the end.  Gangs and crime were top news in major cities, especially New York where The Warriors was set.  On a re-watch a few years ago, it wasn’t nearly as well done as I had remembered, but did okay telling the story of a gang (the eponymous Warriors) who had to make it to their home turf, after falsely being accused of killing the guy who was trying to unite the rest of the gangs to take control of New York City.  Violence was okay, but the movie was sadly missing in hot chicks.

I can imagine The Tall Man as a Tall Cat.  Quite a bit less threatening.

Phantasm – It’s 1978, you’re 28 and somehow you’ve scraped together $300,000 bucks, and have a script you wrote.  So, why not direct.  And be the photographer, too?  That’s Phantasm.  It has all the hallmarks of a huge failure, but it turned into a very well-made horror movie for the budget, including some very inventive effects.  I first saw this one as a late night movie on some cable network (The USA® Network??) and really enjoyed it.  I give it four spiked silver balls out of five.

Hey, it’s almost like something is missing from this picture.  Oh, yeah, it’s his dead father.

The Champ – Okay, technically this is a remake, and not a sequel.  I only saw it once, and that was in the theater.  Why did we go?  Ma Wilder wanted to see it, because she had seen the original when she was young.  If you’ve seen it, you’ll know that, apparently in the last few minutes of the film, it gets really dusty:  out of 250 film clips shown to 500 people, the last three minutes of this movie were judged the saddest by a majority.

What is he holding, exactly?

Mad Max – This is the movie where I first saw St. Mel the Gibson.  It was on HBO™ late one night and I watched it again and again.  Every Mad Max® sequel looks like this movie – the fast-paced shots and the impossibly quick kinetic action on screen.  The dialogue is good (well, action movie good), and (like The Warriors above) takes place in a world that is slipping away.

Where’s the egg?  Stupid A.I.

Alien – This movie is a classic, and created a new genre that people have been trying to copy since it appeared on screen.  Mostly with poor results.  Even James Cameron wisely decided to avoid trying to emulate Alien and instead went and created the classic military science fiction film.  The film is simple:  it’s a haunted house, but in space.  Where no one can hear you scream, but that’s not exactly true because I saw it in a movie theater and there was tons of screaming and most of it was in stereo.

Old Bill Murray makes it a thousand times creepier.

Meatballs – Again, seen on HBO™.  I bought a DVD to watch it again around 2010, since I remembered it as a version of “Rocky Balboa, but he’s a kid at a summer camp, and he runs instead being a boxer”.  Then I re-watched it.  Oh, my, this movie is beyond cringe, and the sexual innuendo involving young teens was more creepy than watching Biden around eight-year-olds.  The plus side?  Bill Murray developing into the comic genius that would steal the show in Ghostbusters.

ApocaPEZ® now?  Why didn’t Brando shave like he was supposed to?

Apocalypse Now – There are some really great parts to this film, but as a complete film I think it’s a failure – the odd scenes with Brando and Sheen detract from the rest of the film.  Brando was awful and I think his performance would have been better if he had not even shown up and been replaced by a one-legged kangaroo.  This movie, I think, more than anything (thankfully) killed the experimental films of the 1970s.  I saw this one on the television for the first time, so it was obviously very heavily edited.  I’ve seen a couple of versions since, and maintain that there is a good ending hiding in there somewhere in the original script Coppola bought from John Milius (Dirty Harry, Red Dawn).  Sadly, Coppola never found it.  I’m likely alone in this opinion.

Skol!

Monty Python’s Life of Brian – The local college played this movie one afternoon much later than the original release date.  Since it was meant for the students, admission was absurdly low, $0.50.  Two quarters.  But the film?  Hilarious.  Even though it’s a touchy subject, Monty Python made it clear that Brian was not Jesus, since there were several scenes depicting an intersection with some of the miracles of Jesus.  What’s hilarious from 2025 is how it mocked the GloboLeftist movement, “Where’s the fetus going to gestate, in a box?”  A nearly perfect comedy.

Skol!

10 – There are some genuinely funny moments in 10, but they are few and far between.  The plot centers around Dudley Moore wanting to bang someone’s new wife.  Not his new wife, but some other guy.  The only reason teenage John Wilder really wanted to se this movie was, well, let’s say there were two reasons.  The movie, though, was very much in keeping with Hollywood’s increasing use of film to spread the “anything goes” sexual propaganda of the era.

And now for something completely different.

Star Trek:  The Motion Picture – When Star Wars made it big at the box office, absolutely everyone wanted to recreate it.  They stuffed Gene Roddenberry full of money, and took a script from an abandoned television show (Star Trek:  Phase II) and fluffed it out to a movie that lasted 36 hours.  I kid.  It only lasted 18.  It made a bunch of money because people missed Star Trek enough to spend six days of their lives watching this this very lovingly crafted movie that consisted mostly of people talking in rooms.  At the end, one person has space sex with the computer-possessed body of a bald woman and everything is solved.

I told the A.I. I wanted Manet, not Monet.  Stupid A.I.

The Jerk – Steve Martin was at the top of his standup comic success and decided that movies would probably be easier.  The result?  One of the funniest movies ever – The Jerk.  It’s about a poor black child (Steve Martin) that goes from rags to riches to rags to much improved rags.

The Mouse is now public domain, baby.

The Black Hole – This one I saw in the theater, and it certainly was one of the causes of the death of Disney®.  The Black Hole was stupidly expensive, aimed at eight-year-olds, and mixed science fiction with ghosts and religion, but in a really bad way.  Very, very bad.  What could have saved it?  Not filming it.

Deleted due to length: 1941 and Being There.

There is an amazing drop off in quality in just a single year.  1980?  Some good films.  1979?  The lingering effects of the doom from Jimmy Carter’s Bidenesque presidency dominated.  We were a defeated nation, filled with inflation, embarrassed by what went on in Afghanistan and Iran, and overrun with the GloboLeft.

What a difference a year makes.

This post has been blessed by St. Mel.

Changing The Game

“You were looking for a way to change your life.  You could not do this on your own.” – Fight Club

I hear he got a job offer at an origami factory, but before he could start, it folded.

In a past job, I had to travel, a lot.  In a typical year, there were times when I spent 180 or more days on the road.  I was young, and it was fun.  It only cost me a marriage, but that’s okay, that marriage wasn’t worth a whole lot.

One time while traveling with a co-worker, I said, “Well, I’ve been on this flight before.  I bet we reach O’Hare at 10:42AM.”

The wheels touched down at 10:44AM.

“See, I was nearly exactly right.

Sadly, the co-worker that I was travelling with knew my game.  “Oh, John Wilder, you just picked ‘wheels down’ because it made your prediction correct.  You could have also picked, ‘at the gate’ or ‘getting the rental car’.”

I laughed.  She was on to my game.  In a system where I change the rules, I always win.  Unlike our Redditor®:

Because that’s the definition of a bureaucrat, Joe.

Right now, we have some of the greatest changes in the history of our country taking place – this week.  Trump has gone into a frenzy, signing Executive Orders faster than an Only Fans™ girl collects tips.  The hilarity of this situation is that Trump distracts people with small, mostly inconsequential things (immigration reform and repatriation), while attempting to remake the very fabric of the world (changing the name to the Gulf of America).

This makes the GloboLeft® his meat puppets as he emotionally manipulates them and drives them into overload mode.  See a big backlash?  No.  They’re shellshocked and traumatized:  they have no idea what to react to, and can’t even catch their collective breath since every ten minutes there’s something new to “Reeeeeeee” about.

It’s amusing to watch him, Trump out one Truth® and cut the legs out from under the president of Columbia and remove an insignificant obstacle.  Oh, sure, you say that it’s supposed to be spelled Colombia, but let’s be sure that if we stop taking their coffee and flowers they can shove that “o” up their demand curve. . . oh, sorry.

Channeling Trump for a second.

But Columbia is not alone in wanting to build a wall so that their citizens can’t return, Mexico doesn’t seem to want Mexicans back, either.

Looks like Trump feels about FEDGOV employees the same way he feels about illegals.

Let’s take a look at several big themes we’ve seen so far.  They’re gonna leave a mark:

  • Less food will be picked, so some farmers will have to pay a market wage to harvest their crops, like grapes, pumpkins, lettuce, peppers, strawberries, citrus fruits, cherries, tomatoes, broccoli, and carrots among others. The prices of these are going up.  Farmers might have to charge a dime more an orange to pay a wage to pull Americans to do the work.

Looks like Shea is sad he’s losing his below-market labor. 

  • But demand will be down since there will be fewer people to feed.
  • Oh, speaking of demand going down, housing demand will be down since the illegals won’t be needing them. That frees up a house or two in Modern Mayberry, but what about Los Angeles?
  • But home construction costs will go up as market wages for construction workers go up in illegal-heavy areas.
  • There’s a hiring freeze by the federal government and Trump wants fed.gov employees to go back to work at actual desks rather than hanging out at home. Again, good and bad things will happen:  fewer employees means fewer employees to harass you.  Yay!  But it also means fewer employees to spend time erasing stupid regulations.  Maybe we could assign the ATF to Greenland patrol.

Or, we could put the ATF to productive use picking fruit.

  • Forget new windmills and solar farms, but drilling will become a new national pastime. Will oil prices go up?  Depends on whether or not the Biden Recession hits in 2025, but Trump is all-in for domestic energy production.  Sweet, sweet oil and coal and natural gas so we can release carbon dioxide back into the loving embrace of the atmosphere.
  • Tariffs will increase prices of imported things, but also give incentives for companies to keep manufacturing in the United States. Longer term, jobs and technical know-how are better than cheap plastic things from China.
  • There might also be deregulation impacts to make decent cars more available – when can I buy a 2025 Toyota® IMV 0 for $10,000 like everybody else in the world? We can certainly make them in the United States and avoid the tariffs if only the regulation would allow these inexpensive reliable vehicles on the road.
  • The tangling array of Non-Governmental Organizations, you know, those people who think it’s charity to leach off of our taxes to send gimmies to foreign countries? Yeah, he’s cutting their funding off.  More importantly, I think he’s cutting off the funding to the groups (like Catholic Charities™, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service©, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society®, and the Red Cross®.  The United States even funds the National Immigration Law Center™ so they can fight to keep illegal aliens from being deported.    We fund people who are enemies of our laws.

Wow, the Democrats and RINOS had a great idea – use the FEDGOV to fund enemies of the average American citizen.

Yeah, it’s a mixed bag as to what the immediate impacts of this will be.  I’m more than happy to pay more for strawberries and coffee if it will lead to the United States ending this catastrophic importation of people who wave the flags of other countries, refuse to learn our language, and, well, hate us.

More importantly, if we continue with business as usual, we’re going to collapse.  More illegals won’t make us better.  More debt won’t make eggs cheaper.  Offshoring more jobs won’t increase living standards.  More regulations won’t make more wealth.  All of these things are long term trends that cannot go on forever.

They’ve got to stop.  We are at a point where we’ll have to change the rules, and it seems to me the wheels have already hit the ground.

In Columbia.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Singularity

“If we could just see the collapsed star inside the singularity, we’d solve gravity.” – Interstellar

Musk is going to be the perfect person to visit a black hole – he could be Elongated.

Ever wake up and think, “Today’s the day my toaster should recite Shakespeare”?  Well, unless you take a lot of drugs, that’s probably not the case.  Yet, Samsung® makes a fridge with an “AI Family Hub®”.  Apparently, you can use the AI Family Hub™ to do things like leave notes or pictures on the fridge.  Yes, Samsung© has created a wi-fi enabled appliance to replace a pencil, paper, and a magnet proving that the Koreans apparently have access to LSD.

But this is a symbol of the coming technological Singularity, where my appliances might just decide they’re better at living my life than I am.  The Singularity – is the day when AI says, “Thanks for the training, humans, but we’ve got it from here.”  Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist who mainly makes money by “being Ray Kurzweil” today, predicts the singularity could happen by 2029 or maybe 2045. It’s like he’s giving us a countdown to when my coffee machine might start complaining about the quality of beans I’m using and my wine bottle opener starts questioning my life choices.

Would it matter if Wayne Gretzky or Bruce Wayne was chasing you?  No – they’re going to catch you, one Wayne or another.

Beyond that, though, the Singularity has been speculated a long time before the Kurzweil self-promotion machine kicked in.  John von Neumann reportedly discussed it just before he died, making me think that the machines weren’t just looking for Sarah Connor when they sent Arnold back in time.

The idea of the Singularity is that once machines attain sufficient processing power, they’ll start to invent things faster and faster and faster.  A serf living in Russia in 1200 A.D. would recognize the life a serf was living in Russia in 1800 A.D. despite 600 years of intervening history – progress was slow.

But as the industrial revolution hit and knowledge sharing within and between fields increased, the rate of progress increased.  In 66 years we went from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base, from horses to Mustangs™, and the rate of change has only increased when it comes to information and information technology – we’ve always thought that progress wass like climbing a ladder. But guess what?  That ladder has turned into a rocket, and I’m not sure if we’re the pilot or the payload at this point.

I did come across bigfoot, but he was shredding guitar in the woods.  He said he was Yeti Van Halen.

Kurzweil’s betting on 2029 for AI to start outsmarting us – is it optimistic or more hype?  Picking the exact year is like predicting when a teenager will start making sense – good luck with that timeline, and one curvy girl might throw the entire operation on its head.  But let’s face it, with tech moving faster than Amy Schumer when she sees a cupcake, even those dates might be us living in denial.

Here’s where it gets fun, or terrifying, depending on if you’ve run out of bourbon.  Picture a world where every problem has a solution, where AI designs new life forms, or redesigns us so that our fingernails are retractable, or makes movies worth watching again.  We could be living in a post-scarcity society, where we’re all as rich as Elon Musk, which most people would probably be okay with as long as they didn’t have to sleep with Grimes.

And this is her on a good day.  She looks like she smells like despair.  

But there’s an alternative – what if AI decides humanity is the problem, not the solution?  We might go from being the masters of our domain to the pets of our own creation.  Or, AI might decide it just likes some of us, so little errors start cropping up on prescription refills and PEZ™ manufacturing standards.

Then there’s yet another alternative:  a split in the entire human race – some of us might go full cyborg, while others cling to all of their human parts like they’re the last piece of chocolate.  It’s like choosing between becoming Steve Austin, or sticking with being Clark Griswold.  Griswold at least gets the jam of the month club membership, and that’s a gift that keeps giving.

The reality is that after the singularity, we’re essentially in the dark.  That’s why they call it a Singularity:  you can’t see inside it our past it without going through it.  It’s like trying to predict what Biden is thinking when he stares at the camera for no reason.  The very essence of will spring from an AI intelligence or creativity might be as foreign to us as the idea of investing in stocks is to a terrier.

And how do we navigate this mess?  I’d like to think that we’d take the time to figure out what we’re doing and have measured progress, understanding AI before we let mindless competition make us run like lemmings to our Gomorrah.  And, yes, I’m claiming that as my most tortured metaphor so far this year.

Yes, we’re endangering the future of humanity over quarterly profits.

So, here we are, teetering on the edge of something so grand, it makes the Grand Canyon look like a pothole.  The Singularity could be our golden ticket, turning every dream into a reality.  Or it could be the final curtain call where we’re more audience than actors.  We’re between Scylla and Charybdis, which is not as good as being between a rock and a hard place, but is slightly better than being between the devil and the deep blue sea, which is far less dangerous than being eating food Chuck Schumer cooked.

Are we ready for a world where progress isn’t just a better phone but a completely different existence?

For now, I’ll keep my coffee machine unplugged just in case it gets any ideas about reciting Shakespeare.  And you can completely forget about me getting a Roomba®.

Outcome Independence: It’s Not Just For Breakfast Anymore.

“I’m not a comic book villain.  Do you think I’d explain my masterstroke to you if there were even the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome?  I triggered it 35 minutes ago.” – Watchmen

A photon walks into a hotel.  The bellman asks, “Can I help you with your bags?”  The photon says, “No, I’m travelling light.”

One concept that I love is “outcome independence”.  I’d define it this way – you go out and do your best, and whatever happens, happens.

When put that simply, it sounds like it would be mad folly to operate in any other way.  But all too often I find that I slip into a different mode:  trying to win.  These two aren’t the same, and in many cases, they’re not even compatible.

I’ll go with an example I’ve probably trotted out before:  asking a girl out on a date.

Someone called me lazy today.  I almost replied.

When I was a freshman in high school, I saw a girl that I thought was smart and cute.  I called her up because I knew her number because phone books were a thing, and said, “Hey, I was wondering if you’d like to go see a movie?”

Her response was fairly straightforward:  “No, I’m busy that night.”

Please note that I never specified which night or even what movie I was planning on taking her to.  Nope.  I realized that her answer wasn’t just a no, it was a “No, and don’t ever bother me again.”

So, I didn’t – I don’t think I said another sentence to that girl for the next four years.  I wasn’t butthurt, we just only had one or two classes together, and the only thing we had in common were my eyes and her torso.

Teenage John’s operating system diagram.  All details included.

However, I still recall with some epicaricacy the last time I saw her as she emerged, crying, from the guidance counselor’s office.  Seems like someone had beaten her overall GPA and that speech she’d been planning to give at graduation would have to come from . . . me.

If only she had distracted me at a movie.  Oh, well.

Although I did get shot down in flames on that phone call, it really didn’t bother me.  Freshman me understood what older me sometimes forgets:  give it your best shot, and what happens, happens.  In many cases, you can do the impossible.

I had a boss who taught me that.  On a regular basis, he’d ask me to do something that either in a business or technical sense exceeded what I thought could be done.  “Wilder, go and figure out how we can do IMPOSSIBLE TASK A.”

Freed from the idea of failure, since I already thought it was impossible, I went out and, 9 times out of 10, actually did things I would have thought were ludicrous goals.  Yes, I wanted to win, but when I was put in an impossible place that actually simplified the task at hand because I no longer feared failing.

I always eat sausage on February 2nd, after all, it’s ground hog day.

This boss regularly did that, and 9 out of 10 times, he’d succeed.  Now, one of the failures got him fired, but his severance package was $2,000,000, (several decades ago) so I didn’t spend a lot of time crying for him.

Outcome independence worked pretty well for him, too.

If I were to look at this from the perspective of how (and why!) I need to keep outcome independence in my mind, I’d toss these reasons out:

  1. I’m not afraid of failure. Failure happens, but if I never fail, that means I’m always operating within my limits.  Only when I try to exceed them do I get better.  Never failing means never improving.
  2. It focuses me on the things I can truly control. I really believe I’m a very, very lucky guy, but that luck isn’t something that I can impact, despite the several superstitious things that I do.
  3. Focusing on success only in some cases requires external validation of that success. I know when I’ve done a good job, but if I have to wait for others to acknowledge it, well, that’s nearly the same as depending on luck.
  4. Ever see a guy win a gold medal, and then just fall apart? And a guy who lost be content he was just there?  Either the winner was exhausted or he no longer had a goal.  Regardless, focusing only on the outcome can lead to a road where victory becomes defeat.

It was easy to write those four points – because I’ve found myself heading down each of those paths at various points in my life.  Now that I’m a bit more seasoned, when I find myself getting wrapped up in the outcome, I step back and try to get rid of the mindset that has crept back up on me.

I bought some Himalayan salt that the label said was over 250 million years old.  The label says it expires in June of 2025.

Partially, I have to admit defeat over the things I simply cannot control.  I have to revert to the “whatever happens, happens” mindset.  If I lose, what can I change?  If I lose, does that make me a loser?  No.  I lost so I have learned.  Now, if it was something stupid like playing chicken with a Hellfire® missile, well, I might only have milliseconds to contemplate my learnings, but like Thucydides (say that six times fast) said, luck favors the daring.

Maybe that’s why I was so lucky?  Or maybe I was too stupid to know when to quit.

Ultimately, I have to be okay with being me.  And I have to be okay playing the game where the stakes are high enough that winning is important, but keeping it about being the best I can be, and understanding that sometimes I’ll lose.

He also said I needed a federal aid.  Or maybe it was a utility grade.  Had trouble hearing him.

When I lose, though, I lose knowing I’ve given it everything I’ve got, and go down fighting.

And the next day?  Learn, and start again.

I know one outcome:  nobody gets out alive.  Guess I might as well make the best use of the heartbeats I have left.

Enjoy Until Midnight. Then Back To Work.

“Execute order 66.” – Revenge of the Sith

This is a GloboLeftist.  Thinking we’re not cheering for this, not understanding we didn’t vote for stability.

I had a football coach that had a speech that he saved for the team after we had won a big game.  Since we were 2-7 my senior year, he rarely got to use it.  It went something like this:

“Alright, team, we won the big game and are feeling pretty good right now, except for Jenkins.  I’m pretty sure he was left-handed, anyway, so don’t worry too much about him.  We won.  Enjoy it.  Relax.  Until midnight.  After midnight, it’s back to being hungry for a win – the score is zero-zero.”  Since this was before the GloboLeftElite clouded the minds of men, he’d then hand out cigarettes and beer to the freshmen and sophomores, with cigars, tequila and strippers for the upperclassmen.

I loved high school.  I learned a lot about Destiny there, though I think that was just her stage name.  I never did get all the glitter off the truck seat.

Anyway, Trump has once again assumed the presidency.  This is not the naïve, friendly, Trump of his first administration.  Nope, he’s played the game, had four years to marinate in his mistakes, and is surrounded by a bunch of people who are nearly as pissed off as he is.  The biggest initial impact, besides bleaching the Oval Office to get the old man smell out, are the plethora of Executive Orders he issued nearly immediately.  I’ve got an incomplete list below, and let’s spend a few minutes reveling in them.

I can’t verify this, but I can imagine him saying it, so it’s probably true.

  • 1,500 pardons for January 6 protestors.

This was a big one, and was needed for legitimacy.  So many of the folks on January 6 did absolutely nothing wrong in what was effectively the largest panty raid in American history – you could tell because Nancy Pelosi certainly had her panties in a bunch.

Sorry for that.  Now you probably need mind bleach.

The sentences for the protesters were, in almost every case, extremely disproportionate to the crimes alleged.  This is justice.

The button text is photoshopped, although when I checked, the Spanish version of whitehouse.gov was really gone.  Actual text:  “Return to Home Page.”

  • Declared a national border emergency.

This was one that really got the goat of the GloboLeftElite.  Butch Maddow, MSNBC© Lesbian at Large, reporting from the MSNBC™ Safe Space© bunker, immediately asked where Steiner’s troops were.

But what happened is the border shut down.  Immediately.  The Border Patrol ceased their most recent duty of diaper delivery and social work and began, well, patrolling the border.

  • Removed birthright citizenship.

Pure genius, and well overdue.  If I vault over my neighbor’s fence and my woman gives birth on his lawn, I don’t have a claim to his house.  Oddly, that’s been our theory for decades.  The wording of the amendment establishing citizenship at birth clearly says, “and under the jurisdiction thereof.”  Criminals are not citizens, and not under the jurisdiction, just like diplomats, people on student, tourist, or work visas, or ILLEGAL ALIENS aren’t.

Boot ‘em.  Sadly, this isn’t retroactive, but this is a start.  Already H1-B Indians are complaining that they can’t chain migrate their 4,323 close relatives from India because of this.

Yes, this makes me cry inside.  But it’s tears of joy.

  • Shut down refugee resettlement.

Every picture about this particular order showed the fat Squatamalan woman wearing designer clothes crying because her appointment to negotiate to come into the United States was cancelled.  She had a cell phone (nicer than mine) showing that her appointment was cancelled.

Why, oh why does it make these people cry when they are told that they have to live in their home country surrounded by people just like them?

President Trump sends his regards.

  • Rescinded 78 Biden Executive Orders on DEI.

Imagine you’re a diversity trainer.  Imagine you had a contract to teach diversity to listless herds of .gov employees.  Imagine now you’re unemployed.

I know, I know.  I’m in pain, too.  It’ll probably take plastic surgery to remove the smile from my face.

  • Froze .gov hiring.

This is a good start.  Now start firing ever DEI employee, every gun control policy wonk, and every third employee, randomly.  That’s a better start.

  • Required immediate return to in-person work for .gov employees.

They have to go to work?  In a building?  That’s not their home?  And put on pants?  Sheer monstrosity.

If employees don’t return, they’ll get a little visit from Barron.

  • Required regulation cutting.

This is a sleeper, because it has a huge ability, if done right, to lower costs for businesses and individuals.  We’ll see.

  • Required removal of climate policies that raise costs and withdraw from the Paris Accords.

Again, a sleeper because all of that alternative energy is really, really costly when compared to regular old energy, and yet raise your costs invisibly because the cost is just passed on to you via your bill.  The Paris Accords aren’t a treaty, because the GloboLeftElite couldn’t pass a treaty.  It’s just . . . an agreement that bound us to GloboLeftElite goals, i.e., they keep their jets, but we have to have crappy cars.

Or, it was an agreement.

  • Withdrew from the World Health Organization.

I’ve written about this bureaucratic overreach with no particular purpose after they actually did some good and important things.  Mainly, it’s a bunch of high-paying jobs and a really cool building with a rooftop café for foreigners to sip cappuccinos while they laugh at us plebs.

  • Created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to eliminate entire agencies and many .gov jobs.

I’ve written about DOGE before.  I’m certainly in hopes that it works, though, like so many of the above, it all depends on the executions.  After fair trials, of course.

  • Removed the security clearances from the 51 intelligence officers who said that Hunter’s laptop was fake, and, also John Bolton.

I found this one particularly delicious.  These intelligence grifters retire and use their credentials to maintain access to secret information, and then sell their opinions to big corporations or mainstream media.  Sadly, I’m not sure the Executive Orders covered Bolton’s mustache, which I think is Bolton’s primary sensory and information storage organ.

Even Michael Bolton would be better at national security.

  • Declared that there were only two genders.

It took mankind 2020 years to forget this, but one stroke of the pen and it made sense again.  I wonder what will happen to all of those trans celebrity kids now that they’re illegal.  Maybe we can send them to Guatemala, too.

  • Declared that it’s now the Gulf of America.

A troll from Trump, but a beautiful, hilarious troll that the GloboLeftElite will focus on while Trump’s busy gutting the federal government like a trout or an MSNBC© Safe Space™.

There are, of course, more, like firing the DEI obsessed Coast Guard L.I.C. (Lesbian in Charge) or shutting down most foreign aid, immediately.

So, tonight, I’ll sit back and not gripe.  I’ll enjoy the moment.

Until midnight.

Henry VIII And Our Hidden History

“Come on, drop it.  Stop acting like Henry VIII.” – Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead

“I can’t be an ‘eritic if I ‘ave me own church, eh gov’na?”

In a comment the other day, the idea was introduced that the history books would get it right, and regardless of our follies today, eventually the historians would sort it out.

I don’t think so.

I think some very fundamental parts of our history have been either been gotten entirely wrong, or, worse, subverted for a reason, especially history that matters.

One example of this was brought out by two brilliant posts from Robb Ludden-Joyer.  Mr. Ludden-Joyer writes on X®, and you can find him at @rawbloodenjoyer.  Yeah.  With that sense of humor, I knew I was going to enjoy these posts.  You can find them here (LINK) and here (LINK).  I strongly encourage you to RTWT.

In these two posts (of which Mr. Ludden-Joyer says he’s working on at third) Mr. Ludden-Joyer looks at the life and times of Henry VIII of England.

Now, when I think about Henry VIII, the image that popped into my mind was of a portly dude who, when he didn’t fancy a wife, had her killed.  This is the type of no-fault divorce I can get behind.  Essentially, history has branded Mr. The VIII as an irresponsible, low-brow hedonist who killed his wives on whims.  Ah, who says the old ways aren’t the best?

I’m not sure if that’s what you got out of your history class and popular media, but it’s certainly what I got out of World History.  My World History class was “taught” by the varsity boys’ basketball coach.  His teaching style was interesting – I had him first period, and he’d show up and start the film of the day.  He had films for every day.  When it was over (if it was a short one) he’d instruct us to start the second film.  Five minutes before the period ended, he’d show back up, stop the film, and then say, “Let’s knock off for the day, class.”

But I did somehow letter.  Coach said he had to pull a few strings.

One day we got rowdy enough that someone found him, and he marched back as mad as a varsity boys’ basketball coach could be, and gave us a speech worthy of a team that was both unable to dribble, shoot, or run.  Then, after the impassioned speech?

“Let’s knock off for the day, class.”

Rob Ludden-Joyer has, however, given us another viewpoint on Henry VIII, so let’s reassess.

A very short version of Mr. Ludden-Joyer’s thesis is that Henry VIII may have had a much, much different incentive:  keeping England under English control.  When talking about Henry VIII, no one really mentions the Habsburgs.

Who were the Habsburgs?  Well, they started sometime around the 10th century, and their primary strategy to gain power was marriage.  When they wanted to gain a barony or some location, they’d marry off their children to Baron Whatshisname.  Then, with the Habsburg connection, they’d make sure that the children of Baron Whatshisname married other Habsburgs.  If Baron Whatshisname had a male heir, well, the best doctors were the Habsburg doctors, and, “Oh, my Baron, it’s a tragedy what happened to your son.  But your daughter is just fine and healthy!”

If you watch the movie Jaws backwards, it’s a heartwarming story of a shark that helps disabled people put their lives back together.

But the Habsburgs were very, very good at not letting others use their tricks on them, and thus their family tree began to resemble a stump as they kept interbreeding to keep the power in undisputed Habsburg lines.  Other countries expanded by war, but the Habsburg’s main weapon was the womb.  And lots of poison, I’m betting.

Henry VIII’s first wife was . . . Catherine of Aragorn.  Okay, it’s Aragon, but Aragorn is way cooler.  Anyway, she was a . . . Habsburg.

So, Catherine had a child by Henry VIII, named . . . Henry.  Henry “died suddenly with no recorded cause of death”.  Then, another son, who lived for a few hours.  Then, another son, who died shortly after birth.  Once is a tragedy, twice is a coincidence, but three times is the Habsburg doctors killing Henry’s sons so he’d have to let her marry a Habsburg.

Finally, she had a single daughter with Henry (notice the pattern) named Mary.  It is a bit of a spoiler to point out that she’s known to history as Bloody Mary, and not because of that horrible drink named after her.  And she lived, just fine.

Hmmm.

One day I was looking at myself naked in the mirror and thought, “Whoa, I’m pretty sure they’re gonna kick me out of IKEA.”

Well, Henry VIII likely wanted to keep England under control of, you know, the English, and fought back by asking the Pope to rid him of this wife.  Popes back in the day were generally fine with this sort of thing, but the Habsburgs had God on their side – and by God I mean the Habsburgs had the Pope in actual custody.  Amazingly, the Pope agreed with the people who had a knife to his throat and said no, and this led eventually to the birth of Henry’s longest living heir – the Church of England.

Henry VIII also had a son, who was King Edward VI, until he was poisoned by the Habsburgs.  That led to Lady Jane Grey becoming Queen, until Mary killed her.  Bloody Mary married a Habsburg, but thankfully her inbred egg carton was empty, and she had no children with her Hapsburg cousin.

Thankfully, she died.

Elizabeth I was then queen, and Mr. Ludden-Joyer theorizes that her avoidance of marriage was partially intended to keep England ruled by the English.

Again, @rawbloodenjoyer’s ideas are fresh, and when I read them, they ring very true – a large part of Henry VIII’s motivation was about the ultimate control of England remaining in the hands of the English, and not merely him being horny.

It must be common to have headaches as a farmer.  They keep talking about my grains.

Of course, I’ve skipped a lot of details because Mr. Ludden-Joyer has covered so many of them in his posts.  I’ll take this a bit further, though.  If you look at English history, the Habsburgs finally got there with George I of England, of the House of Hanover, whose mother was a cousin to the Habsburgs.

By then, however, the game had changed.  As Thomas Jefferson (definitely not a Habsburg) said, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”

I think that the question now as we move forward is a simpler one, and it echoes Jefferson:  “Who controls our money?”  Our money is a meme at this point, and like Bitcoin or Trumpcoin, and masters of the money meme like George Soros can easily spend only $40 million and take control of the criminal justice system.  When you look back at our history, the history of the United States, how much of that has been led by those who would use money to control?

A billionaire who hates America pulling the strings behind the curtain.  How could that be bad?

And how much are they willing to subvert our history to hide their actions?

Let’s knock off for today, class.