Author: John

“Every ancient religion has its own myth about the end of the world.” – Ghostbusters

I guess communism doesn’t work on paper, either, if that paper is in a history book.

This week I finally got a copy of the novel The Three Body Problem by Chinese author Cixin Liu.  It won the Hugo® award for best novel in 2015.  I consider winning the Hugo® faint praise.

Mainstream science fiction has long since ceased being a genre about the interplay of science and humanity.  Today, it has become a way that woke Leftist editors can select Leftist authors to present a Leftist viewpoint.  So, it’s like being a freshman in college, but with extra steps.

There are notable exceptions (John C. Wright comes to mind), but most of the books I see on bookstore shelves today are far inferior to the product of 20 or 30 years ago in every respect.  Heck, they even took the hot chicks in bikinis off of the covers.

Conan would often swing his sword at his opponent’s ankles.  That way they were de-feeted.

I did sit down and devour (I got it on Saturday and finished three-quarters of it that day) The Three Body Problem.  I didn’t get a chance to finish it today, but I’ll have to say I’ve enjoyed very much what I’ve read so far.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn’t expecting Cixin’s first scene to confront a painful era in China’s past.  The opening few chapters took a very difficult look at the Cultural Revolution.  The Cultural Revolution was when, after being pushed aside for a bit, Chairman Mao decided to pour gasoline all over China and set it ablaze.

Cixin’s didn’t spare detail, showing the brutality and unthinking violence of the Cultural Revolution.

What was the Cultural Revolution?

Mao used youth groups to rebel against the communist leaders that were insufficiently Maoist.  What was Maoist?  It varied.  The results, however, didn’t.  It was a reign of internal terror that started in 1966 and reached a peak in 1969.  The only thing that finally ended it was Mao’s death.

The leader of China put out a little red book, just like Mao’s “Quotations from Chairman Mao”.  It’s called, “That’s what Xi said.”

The Cultural Revolution was a religious war.  How was it religious, since the commies were officially atheist?

Because Leftism had become their religion.  Mao was their savior.  And by burning and destroying the past, they were bringing about a cleansing fire that would destroy the world.

As many as (high estimate) 20 million Chinese died one way or another in Cultural Revolution.  They died in all the usual ways: via massacres, struggle sessions, or cannibalism.

Children turned in their parents.  Anyone objecting was, of course, a dangerous counter-revolutionary and was either killed or imprisoned or forced to watch re-runs of The Jimmy Kimmel Show.

Cixin’s book brings all of this home with stark reality.  Sometimes it takes fiction to turn the cruel sterility of a Wikipedia article into something a human can relate to.  This confirms, though, several basic thoughts:

• Leftism is a religion.
• The goal of Leftism isn’t the betterment of man: the goal is an apocalypse where everything impure is burned away.  The goal is to immanentize the eschaton to lead to the final worker’s paradise.
• The number of victims is irrelevant. Everything and everyone is fair game.
• The rules in play are the rules of today, there is no consistency as definitions always change.
• I like pizza.

Leftist Catechism:  Thy jab and thy booster, they comfort me, they maketh me to deny statistics and seek peace in the Pfizer.

As I’ve written about before, Leftism is also a religion built upon self-loathing.  They actually hate themselves.  Why throw themselves in front of cars?  Their life is pain.  They want to die.  At least then they could stop watching Stephen Colbert, which makes the sweet release of death sound good.

Leftism isn’t really a political movement.  Leftism is a religion.  That alone makes it very strong.  In most cases, if a religious fanatic is prosecuted, what will be the outcome?  The fanaticism is, in their minds, justified – the purification of mankind has become their religion.

In one sense, the failure in Afghanistan isn’t really a surprise because of just this principle.  The United States spent 20 years trying to convince a group of religious people that their religion and tribal affiliations weren’t important, and that they should replace it with BLM®, fast food, Dancing With The Stars™ and a good credit score.

• No Afghani soldier wants to die for LGBT+© rights in Afghanistan.
• No Afghani soldier wants to die for the latest Xbox® release.
• No Afghani soldier wants to die for the Afghani teen girl robotic team.

Come on down to Hakim’s discount emporium!  The best prices on gently-used weapons in the tri-nation area.

Why did Afghani soldiers disappear?  They really weren’t fighting for Afghanistan, they were fighting to make Afghanistan more like, oh, a mall in the suburbs in Indiana.

It’s just that sort of mismatch that occurs when we look at Leftism.  Sure, some Leftists are basket cases that couldn’t exist outside of their mom’s basement and her boyfriend supplying xim/xir unlimited Cheetos®.  But there is a dedicated core that believes in Leftism with all of their hearts, and are fully committed to it.

Is it possible to have that level of dedication on the Right?

It is.  In fact, I believe it will be inevitable.  Is there an apathetic center?  Yes, but there’s never been a time when the center really mattered, outside paying so little attention to the issues that they make elections exciting.

The Leftists use the term “reactionary” to describe opposition to their atrocities.  That’s what the Cultural Revolutionaries called those they killed:  Reactionaries.

The Reaction will take place and will have all of the fervor of the Left, and twice the guns.  If it comes down to an attempted Cultural Revolution in the United States, the Left will find we’ve seen this movie before.

A crusader walks into a bar, the bartender says, “What do you want?”  The crusader:  “Jerusalem!”

This is a repeat of history:  every time the Left has gained power, in the end, it has lost it.  In Paris, eventually, the communists gave way to Napoleon.  In Russia, it lasted longer but eventually proved itself to be bankrupt.  In China, after Mao died, it was transformed, bit by bit.  Maoist China would have executed Cixin Liu for writing The Three Body Problem.  The state-socialist-market economy that’s replaced Mao is okay with it.

I am likewise certain that the United States will be changed by the coming crusade against Leftism.  It certainly won’t look the same after it’s over.

It won’t have Leftists, for one thing.

“As you can see, Captain Kirk is a highly sensitive and emotional person. I believe he has lost the capacity for rational decision.” – Star Trek (TOS)

I fired my dermatologist.  Too many rash decisions.

Back several decades ago when I had more hair on my head than on my back and ears, I read an article about Nucor Steel™ and how they made decisions.  I don’t remember it, and after 20 seconds of looking I couldn’t find it.

That doesn’t make a difference, because I said so.  At the point in company history when the article was written, Nucor© was experiencing a resurgence in growth and profitability.  It was almost like they were steeling.

One of the things that surprised me was the culture of humility at the company.  One of the executives made the comment that, if they did everything right, they would get just over 50% of their decisions right.  That’s flip-a-coin level of accuracy, yet the company felt that was an excellent result.

Nucor© was right.  Decision making isn’t easy.

Part of the reason is that decisions are, mostly, made in a fog of uncertainty.  Except for my hairline, the future is uncertain.  If Jerry Seinfeld would have told me in 1988 that experts said that the Soviet Union would have dissolved completely by 1992, I would have said right back to him, “Who aaaare these people?”

I tried to write poetry about the Seinfeld television show, but I could never get past the first Costanza.

A few people actually did predict the Soviet collapse, but most people viewed the Soviets as an unstoppable force.  If you would have asked the average Joe in 1988 if the Soviets were more likely to:

• produce a space robot that would claim Mars as rightful Russian territory and then rip Rocky Balboa in half while playing the Soviet national anthem out of speakers tastefully mounted on its butt, or,
• collapse into a pile of wet borscht,

the average man on the street would have stored up WD-40® to properly welcome their new Soviet Robot Overlords with appropriate levels of lubrication.

When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, they had lost their national pride, and were so tied up in internal dissension that they tore themselves apart.

Huh.  History may not repeat.  I wonder if it rhymes?  Corollary:  does Joe regret the Afghanistan pullout as much as he regrets the pullout that led to Hunter?

Discuss.  Difficulty adder:  PG-13.

Hunter Biden:  “Paying taxes is like smoking crack.  I can quit anytime I want to.”

But the point of this digression was to show that decisions are hard because the future is uncertain, especially if you run out of CCP members to “buy” Hunter Biden’s paintings.  Seriously, someone should tell the Biden family that corruption is not a race.

Nucor™ showed courage in admitting that nearly half of the time, making a good decision was something they didn’t do.  Most people put far too much stock in their ability to predict the future of a world that can turn upside down faster than a car driven by a Kennedy.

Reality has a way of making decisions difficult.  But it gets worse.  Decisions are hard even when the only uncertainty is the future. But what happens when there are groups that are actively attempting to influence you?

I recall the war in Bosnia.  Why was there a war in Bosnia?  Because the Soviets tried to mash multiple ethnicities together in a region that had been using Archdukes for clay pigeons since 1914.  Since the Soviet Union was based on mashing together the jet engine from a MiG-21PF with a T-34/76 tank chassis and calling it a “recreational vehicle” mashing together people that have hated each other since Hadrian was building walls made sense to them.  Making the Balkans Soviet Stronk!

Please don’t ask about the mileage it gets.  And don’t ask to see the Sport Edition.

I bring up Bosnia not to make jokes, but to recall a time when propaganda worked on me.  I recall picking a newspaper (or magazine??) up, and seeing an editorial cartoon.  In the cartoon was a soldier holding a dead child.  I don’t exactly recall the words underneath, but the idea was that Bosnia kids were being killed, and somehow this was the fault of the United States for not intervening.

I’ll admit, the cartoon won me over.  I don’t want kids to die.  Where was Bosnia?  I could have come close to it on a map, there’s a reason that the CIA recruited me (this is actually true), after all, and it wasn’t only for my flowing locks of golden hair (the hair part isn’t so true).

But why was it so important that the world suddenly cared how I felt about some backward place in the eastern Mediterranean where it seemed that Albanian plumbing was so advanced it seemed to be magic to the Bosnians?  Where people fought about (for all I know) who had the better hat?

Because I was being manipulated.

Albania:  still better hats than Bosnia.  I apologize if this starts a war.

I’m not sure that it matters why I cared, but what I learned from that experience was that I was being manipulated.  The easiest way to convince people to do something is to manipulate their emotions.  People ultimately make decisions based on . . . emotions.

Car dealers do it.  They depend on it for every aspect of their playbook.  With a young buyer, they heighten the importance of the decision.  “This is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make,” is a line I heard when I was in my 20s.

Then they manage the buyer’s emotions, step by step, until they have a signature on the bottom line.  They do this a dozen times a week.  Buyers do it a dozen times in their life.  Who do you think might be better at this?

In my thirties, I decided to use this evil power for good.  When I gave a safety speech at a company lunch (where family was invited) I emphasized my point by giving my speech while holding a baby in my arms.  It was one of the employee’s kids.  My speech was about the importance of fathers coming home.

It was planned.

Someone came up to me afterward and told me what an impact the speech had on their life, they even remarked what emotions it brought up in them, watching me holding an employee’s baby while I emphasized employee safety and the idea of dads coming home so they could raise their children.

As if it was an accident.

All work and no play makes Jack an indentured servant.

I used emotions to manipulate people that reported to me to keep them alive.  Was it just as manipulative as the political cartoon that made me feel something about a European nation that has only visited my blog 20 times?

Yup.

The Albanians have been here 39 times, and they only have one computer in the entire country, and it has a pull start like a lawnmower, so by definition I like them better than the Bosnians.  Go, Albania!  I hope you get that second toilet soon!

Almost every decision you and I make are based on our emotions.  It’s amazing how easy it is to hack those emotions.  I’ve tried it.  People standing in line to make a copy at the copier?

Try this, “Hey, can I jump ahead?  I just want to make a copy.”

Every single person in line in front of you wants to do exactly the same thing.  They just want to make a copy.

Yet?  Most times if you give them a reason, they can emotionally rationalize letting you cut in front.  People (mostly) want to be nice.  So, if you can give them a reason to feel good about themselves?  They’ll take it.

You should be glad I rarely use my powers for evil.

I auditioned for a part in Hamlet.  The director told me to come back when I was older.   He thought I’d be a good Yorick.

All of the current debate about the ‘Rona has been couched in just such manipulative terms.  “Two weeks to stop the spread!”  “We won’t stop this until we have herd immunity!”  “Coronavirus?  It’s what’s for dinner.”  “Kill the Unvaxxinated, they are Unclean!  Burn them like witches!”  And, to be fair, there has been no shortage of emotional rhetoric from the right, either, but since most people on the Right just want to be left alone, it’s a lot more boring.

In World War II the use of “chaff” was introduced.  Small aluminum slivers dropped from aircraft were used to produce false RADAR echoes.  The idea was to introduce so many signals that the real signal of where the enemy aircraft was overwhelmed by the false signals of the slowly fluttering and falling strips.

We are in a time and place where information, real information, is attempted to be drowned out by pleasure, distraction, and disinformation.  These are the chaff of modern information.

First, pleasure:  Let FaceBorg® and Twitttter™ and Instaham© are used to distract our attention online.  Top it off with Netflax® and YouTubs™ and Otheronlineservice©?  Pleasure and distraction were achieved.

Second, there is a halo of false news.  I’m not sure when the peak of real news existed, but I do know it’s not now.  People who are speaking the absolute, provable truth are censored from social networks.  Why?  To reduce signals that compete with the “official” signal, even if that “official” signal is false.

The common consensus truth isn’t the real Truth.  It’s been filtered and sanitized and set for our consumption.  It’s what we see after they release the chaff.

Based on my sense of humor, my sense of humor says I’m 12, my brain says I’m 28, and my body says, “How is it not dead yet?”

Decisions are how we determine the fate of our lives, yet groups are continually attempting to get into our OODA .  OODA stands for the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop, not what I call The Mrs. at 2am on a Saturday morning.

In 2021, the attempt to alter observations and increase disorientation is blinding.  It’s chaff.

If successful, your decisions are owned by people who want to manipulate you, and not for good.

The solution is a difficult one.  It involves examining the data you take in, understanding the source, and really making as careful an observation as you can.  You can’t make a decision without emotion, but the best bet is to be as autistic as possible.

Pull your emotions as far away from the decision as you can.  Look closely.

Be autistic.  The train is fine.

Orient yourself with values and beliefs.  Those should change only very slowly in any person’s life.  Does your decision match with your values?  By the way, you do keep track of those, right?

Then decide.  If you’re as good as Nucor™, you’ll get a little more than half of your decisions right.

(Post inspired by 173dVietVet’s comment last week, even though this probably wasn’t what he was looking for.)

“Here’s to failure!” – The Producers

Well, I guess that solves that problem.

The collapse of Afghanistan’s armed forces was total and complete.  Taliban soldiers entered city after city with little to no resistance.  As I write this, a tragic failure is unfolding in Kabul:  the last McDonalds® grill in Afghanistan is now shut down.

Beware the special sauce.

That actually (really) is the problem.  I was watching a movie the last night called The Outpost, which was about the battle of Kamdesh during the late Afghanistan War.  In one scene, the commander of the Army unit was negotiating with the native Afghanistan villagers.  “I can give you money, contracts, if you help me.”

He was talking in a mud hut with people who certainly use money.  But the people that he was talking with valued many, many things more than mere money:  in this case, religion and honor.  In the scene, however, the Afghan men lay down their arms so they can get contracts.  Who doesn’t like and want more money?

In reality, those same men had been shooting at the Americans, and would be shooting at them again the next time there was an attack.  They didn’t want more money.  And why not?  The contracts and money, to them, were of ephemeral value.  Besides, would that money even be worth anything?

Ohhhh!

The government in Afghanistan wasn’t created by the people of Afghanistan.  The United States showed up, and got a coalition of people rejected from the Mad Max remake because they were too intense.  It really was an accomplishment to get these people to stop killing each other for an afternoon or so.

Having done that, the State Department pretended that it was Kentucky instead of Kandahar and set up a government more suited to Alabama than to Afghanistan.  The Spartans won and made Sparta.  The Romans won and made Rome.  The Americans conquered a continent and made the United States.

The Afghanistan government?  It was written up in memos in the State Department in Washington, D.C. and was as native to Afghanistan as PEZ® or ¡Jeb! Bush.  The war in Afghanistan was won by boys from Kentucky and Alabama, so why not use those rules?

Well, one simple reason.  They don’t work in Afghanistan.

Finally, a place where ¡Jeb! can win.

In the end, the victory of the Taliban this weekend was because they were fighting a religious war.  And not only was it a religious war, it was a religious war fought by a culture that prized the warrior ethic.  The Afghanis have been fighting off and on against each other and anyone else for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.  There’s never been a lot of thought about building an Industrial Park or at Tech Incubator Campus.  Nope.  It’s blood, rocks, and brutal weather.

Those kinds of people are scary.  To them, extreme violence is a religious sacrament.  Death in combat?  That’s a formula for sweet martyrdom and a promise of eternal bliss.

Hmmm, reminds me of the Vikings?

What was the leadership of the opponent of this death cult of warriors?

Well, this is an entirely different type of cult.

The weak and secular government composed of warlords that had been trying to kill each other before 2001. The Kabul coalition government was like putting a dozen feral cats in a burlap sack, shaking it real hard, and pretending it was a functioning government.  I don’t know if they had incentives like a 401k, but I’m sure they had appropriate state-run defined benefit pension plans that will pay off when they retire in 2057.

Ooops.

Incentives matter.

I was discussing the Fall of Kabul with The Mrs.  Her response was short and was exactly what I would have expected.  “What did we think that we were doing over there, anyway?  We should have gone in, knocked out Al Qaeda, and left.”

The Mrs. is, of course, correct.  Von Clausewitz observed this 200 some-odd years ago when he was writing his book On War that winning a war consisted of two parts.  The first part was getting the other guy’s troops to stop fighting.  Von Clausewitz classified that as, and I quote, “es ist easy-peasy.”  Beating the troops of the enemy was really the easy part.  To win a war, however, you had to remove the will of the whole people to fight.

Biden monitors the evacuation in the War Room.

After World War II, the war was over not because the military bits were done fighting.  It’s that pretty much everybody was tired of fighting, most especially the Germans and especially the Japanese, who discovered to their dismay that they weren’t radiation proof.

It is true that one French general had said, “I have not yet begun to fight, and I probably won’t start, that sounds messy.”  Please don’t mention the Italians, because then I’d need a scorecard.  Their hearts weren’t in it from the beginning.

The Mrs. followed up with, “Why on Earth have we been there for 20 years?”

McDonalds™.

Well, this obviously means war.

Well, not exactly McDonalds®, but the same thinking that McDonalds© represents:  the worship of markets and material things.  As a nation we were convinced that if we give people around the world a McDonalds™ and professional sports and air conditioning they’ll be just like us and want to make PowerPoints© for a living and live in overpriced housing in crowded cities.

But they’re not like us.  That’s our mistake in thinking that everyone wants Netflix® and chill.  Nope.

The intelligence failure at the heart of this will haunt Joe Biden for the rest of his life.  Last month, Sleepy Joe said, “Under no circumstances are you going to see people taken by helicopter from the roof of the United States Embassy in Afghanistan.”

Well, I guess that will leave a mark.

Yesterday he followed up with the most cowardly thing ever said by a politician that I can recall, he denied he had any responsibility for the largest American miscalculation since Custer said, “Aw hell, how many Indians could there be?”

Nope.  Biden said he is completely and utterly not responsible for anything related to Collapsistan.

If this were Highlights® Magazine, I’d ask you to spot the differences.  (Hint:  they’re the same picture.)

There are some things he could pass the buck on, but this is not one of them.  Does Pretender in Chief Biden bear full responsibility for what is happening right now?  Yes.  It’s a military matter that he’s been aware of for years.  He had choices.  He could have evacuated American civilians months ago.  He could have put our embassy into a minimal staff situation and sent all of the LGBT flags and Black Lives Matter® posters home weeks ago.

Bringing the things that the Afghani people really wanted.

He didn’t.  To the extent there is responsibility for keeping Americans in danger, it is his, and his alone.

But this is a pattern, not a single point.  Oddly a quick Internet search also found this, when I typed in “Biden Denies Responsibility”:

• Biden Denies Dems’ Responsibility For Crime Wave
• Biden Denies Responsibility For Border Surge (illegal aliens, not a Taco Bell® run for the border)
• Biden Denies He Has A Hooker And Crack Loving Son Named Hunter

Looks like we’re back to Hidin’ with Biden!

It’s like Joe Biden isn’t involved in his life at all, and certainly isn’t interested in the consequences of his decisions and actions.  Or, if I might be more charitable, his dementia-fogged mind might have him reliving being 18, so he hasn’t done all of those awful things yet.  I hear he asks Kamala for the keys to the Studebaker© so he can run down to Pop’s Malt Shoppe and hang out with Archie and the gang.

Kamala already took credit that she and Joe were running the show..

Thankfully, the Pretender in Chief had his priority straight:  the Marines had been called on to cook at the McDonalds© (see, it’s all about McDonalds™) at the airport in Kabul.  The Marines have also been called upon to do that less important task of guarding the airport as chaotic mobs of people desperately try to get on any plane that’s leaving.

I wonder if anyone will try to make political points with this?

Just like the battle for Kamdesh ended up with American soldiers (and two Latvians) on helicopters leaving while the base was bombed by B-1 bombers to destroy the ammo left behind, the war in Afghanistan ends with Americans on planes leaving while the government collapses.

Unless Washington somehow uses this failure to justify going back in (which I don’t think is possible) this is the very end of the Afghan War.  What is left now is the beginning of the aftermath.

But no more bacon cheeseburgers for you in the Helmand Province.

(It’s a Star Trek joke.)