Category: Bad Smells

The Debate

“Mr. Rooney, Ferris is home and he’s very ill.  I debated even leaving him.” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Who won the presidential debate last night?  People who didn’t watch.

As my father said when the cows got into the marijuana, “Son, the steaks are high.”

That’s how I’d describe the Trump/Kamala debate.  Apparently, they’ve never met, so her charge that Trump put a wet finger in her ear and said “Wet Willie Brown” is certainly false.  One of the rules is that Kamala has a two-drink minimum.

I decided I’d just blog about the debate instead.  Since I’m going to get into the hot tub later with a cigar and maybe a scotch, today’s post will be, unfortunately, written while sober.

Notes:  I like the muted microphone idea.  It stops the debate for being a shouting match, though I wish they would give the candidates an array of condiments they could throw at each other.  Regardless, here is my (partially made up) transcript.

But she’d be happy to force you to take it.

My biggest hope?  That Trump says, “Be quiet or I’ll spank you, you disrespectful little turnip.”

Showtime!

Kamala walks to Don.  I think she would have peed on him to show dominance, but she couldn’t lift her leg up, or Hindu tradition prevents it.

First question:

Are people better off than four years ago?

Kamala:  “I understand the problem and I have no idea what to do about it.  I’m going to say absolutely nothing, but then attack Trump.”

Trump:  “No sales tax, other countries will pay for the wall, took billions and billions from Chi-nah.  We’ve had a terrible economy, worse than ever seen since ever.  We’ve had people stream into this country from mental institutions, and even Baltimore.”

Kamala:  “Worst epidemic, worst unemployment and personally burned the Constitution after farting on the Statue of Liberty.”

Trump:  “Cut taxes, make the greatest economy, ever, and then Kamala ate a baby.  Alive.  At Central Park.  I was there.”

Kamala:  “I’ve memorized a thing about the economy.  Here it is.”

Trump:  “She has no plan.  It’s four sentences – run spot run.”  I wish I had made that up, but that was Trump’s line, it’s hilarious.

You want to add tariffs, and that might cost more money.  Why do you hate America?

Trump:  “They kept my tariffs, because I made the best tariffs, and now people can’t afford bacon.”

Kamala:  “There was a trade deficit, and Trump sold chips to China, and the United States should win the race against China.”  It really didn’t say anything in the answer, but it was well said, much better than her normal word salad.

Trump:  “Taiwan sold chips to Chi-nah.  Immigration is bad.  She’s a Marxist.”  (Actually, one of Trump’s passionate answers, and pretty articulate and less hand-wavy than usual.

President Trump you were against abortion and then for abortion and why do you hate women?

Trump:  “Six Supreme Court justices got Roe v. Wade out of the states, and now states can make a decision and people can make a vote.  Ohio and Kansas were okay with killing kids.”

Kamala:  “Trump is a liar.  He’s the devil.  Women have to leave a state to kill a baby, and can’t even do it at their home state.  I might sign a bill making baby killing legal everywhere.”

Trump:  “Kamala’s a liar.  And stupid.  And incompetent at government.”

Kamala:  “Any woman should be able to kill any baby whenever.  Perhaps up until college.”  Kamala is making it personal, and looking at Trump as an accuser.  Trump doesn’t fall for this.

Trump:  “She’s a liar.  Everybody knows it.”

The microphones are not always turned off during the answers of the other candidate.

It’s hard to make a good abortion joke, but leave it to the Left.

Why did you let just a few illegal people in?

Kamala:  “I want to stop drugs from coming in.”  She starting to slur her words.  “Trump didn’t approve the bill and that’s because he hates you and you should go to his stupid rally.”

Trump:  “There’s no reason to go to her rallies.  People don’t leave my rallies.  People want to take their country back.  What they have done with allowing millions and millions into our country, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets.”  This has happened, but ABC News disagreed.

Kamala:  (first giggle) “Talk about extreme!  The very worst republicans love me.”  Kamala is actually effectively getting under Trump’s skin at this point.

Trump:  “I fired them.”

Perhaps he’s upset because that was Fang-Fang’s dinner?

How can you send all of these illegals back?

Trump:  “They allowed terrorists, drug dealers, criminals and Venezuelans in.  Their crime is down.  But they’re destroying the fabric of our country.” (no humor added on this comment)

Kamala:  (next giggle, more slurring) “This is rich!  Trump is a criminal and awful, and I have answers, I promise.”

Trump:  “It’s a political prosecution.”  Really good answer here.

Kamala:  “Trump would kill your children if he were back in the White House.”

Kamala, you flip flop, so please explain why you have such a good reason to flip flop?

Kamala:  “After I was against oil, I was for oil.  I want everyone to have houses, because that won’t increase inflation, but we’ll need to need to import labor to make them.  And this friend I had in high school who is totally not made up was sexually assaulted.  I want to help people not be mean like Trump.”

Trump:  “I am so very rich.  Fracking?  She’s been against fracking and the police (even Sting) and – I’m talking now – does that sound familiar? – and wants to turn do transgender surgery on illegal aliens.”

Transgender surgery for even alien-aliens, would be my bet.  But ALF as a woman?

Mr. President, why did you start an insurrection and why do you regret it?

Trump:  “Peacefully and patriotically.  You left that out.  When are the illegals going to be prosecuted?  When are the people who burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted?”

Mr. President, why don’t you say you regret this?

Trump:  “I didn’t do anything to regret.”

Kamala:  “I was at the Capitol.  The President wanted to desecrate the nation’s Capitol because he hates you and Donald Trump hates Jews.”  Trump does not take the bait to stare back at her, which people would take as threatening.

Trump:  “Why is she now doing anything on the border?  Biden can close the border, he’s not.”

Mr. President, why won’t you say you lost the election we stole fair and square?

Trump:  “The illegals are trying to vote.”  Kamala does not look remotely happy and ABC pulls away from the split screen.

Why does Donald Trump want to stop illegals from voting?

Kamala:  “Donald Trump should accept the fact that we stole the election fair and square.”

Trump:  “Victor Orban – why is the world blowing up?  The most respected and most feared president was Trump.  Kamala didn’t get a single vote.  She failed.”

Israel and Palestine aren’t getting along, tell us a made-up way that you’d solve it?

Kamala:  “War is bad.  We shouldn’t have one.  I really like Israel, though.”

Trump:  “It never would have started.  Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine.  Kamala hates Israel.  But, Kamala also hates Arabs.  And probably hates kittens.”

Kamala:  “I love Israel.  Trump is weak and loves dictators.”

Trump:  “Putin endorses Kamala.”

Commercial Break – A commercial for feminine products.  Who knew women were filled with blue liquid?

Mr. President, you could solve Ukraine in 24 hours?

Trump:  “We’ve spent $250 billion in Ukraine because Biden won’t ask Europe.  I can call Putin and Zelinsky and settle it.  I’ll do a deal.  It would be a great deal.  We could have World War III.”

Kamala:  “You’re running against me.  Putin wants to take over all of the Starbucks™ in Europe.  No cappuccino for anyone.  And Poland.  You want to give up Poland.”

Trump:  “Quiet, please.  Putin would be sitting in Moscow, and don’t forget he has nuclear weapons.  Kamala was sent to negotiate peace, and three days later?  War.  She’s worse than Biden.  She is a horrible negotiator.”

Kamala:  “I’m going to say a lot of things about Trump, to avoid talking about how I failed negotiating in Ukraine.”

Trump:  “I got Europeans to pay for NATO.”

Kamala was a lot more prepared than she was the first time around.

Do you regret what happened in Afghanistan?

Kamala:  “We got out of Afghanistan.  Trump’s deal in Afghanistan was the worst.  Trump invited terrorists to Camp David, America’s most holy place.”

Trump:  “My agreement was good, the Afghanistan withdrawal was horrible.”

President Trump, why are you a racist?

Trump:  “I’m not.”

Kamala:  “He is.”

Trump:  “She’s horrible.”

Kamala:  “He’s horrible.”

Trump:  “She’s horrible.”

(Hosts utterly losing control)

President Trump, how are you going to fix healthcare?

Trump:  “I saved Obamacare, but it wasn’t great, but I’m trying to find a better one.””

Oh, wonderful Kamala, how can you say something about healthcare that conforms to the answer you memorized?

Kamala:  “I’m not going to take your guns.  And I know people who have been sick and we want Obamacare to get even better.  And healthcare is a right.”

Trump:  “Kamala wants everyone on government insurance.”

What would you do to stop climate change?

Kamala:  “Climate change is horrible and I have invested $1 trillion in clean energy with my donors and opened factories around the world.”

Trump:  “Kamala loves Chi-nha.  They’ve destroyed business and manufacturing, and Biden got paid off by China and Ukraine?  They are crooks.”

Commercial Break – Debate sponsored by Crazy Z’s Unpainted Ukraine, for the best in discount barely used weapons.

Closing Statements:

Kamala:  “We’re not going back to low prices.  I’ve never had a real job.  We need me as a president.”

Trump:  “Here are the wonderful things she’s going to do, but she hasn’t done it.  Why hasn’t she done it?  I can rebuild America.  I can make it better, faster.  I’ll call it the six-million-dollar country.”

Overall, Trump was Trump, and this was probably his best debate of all of them during three elections.    Kamala, however, didn’t look like the blithering idiot that she is, since it looks like they got her off the sauce long enough to do debate prep.

If you liked Trump, you still like Trump.  If you liked Kamala, you’re probably not a regular reader, but you probably still like Kamala and are relieved that she didn’t Biden-out with disjointed word salads.  I think Team Kamala will be happy enough with this performance that they’ll trot her out for a few very carefully scripted interviews.

There will not be another debate.

How will the normies take it?  Not a clear victory either way, and the undecided mainly don’t watch these things, so it’ll be decided by what news they hear between the “top hits of the 80s, and more” and what they’re paying for gasoline.

Or, by the people who count the votes in big cities in swing states.

Stay tuned, and I suggest spending election night at a mountaintop restaurant, where the steaks will be high.

Cold AC, Hot Showers, And Bad Economics

“Baseball.  Cold showers.  Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day.” – Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery

Also, a home DNA testing kit is apparently a poor baby shower gift.

It has been years since The Mrs. and I fought over setting the thermostat.  In summer, we both like it cold, and in winter, we both like it cold.

However, it has been much more of a recent battle on the thermostat with the kids.  Partially this is because they fundamentally didn’t know how the heater or air conditioner worked:  at our house, the unit is either on, or it’s off.

That’s probably the case at your house, too unless you have a fancy system.  The way most air conditioners work is that, when turned on, they’re at their maximum output.  Which is also their minimum output.  My air conditioner is never partly on – it’s either on or it’s off.  Period.

What this means is that if I want the room to be 70°F (3 milli-Coulombs) and you turn it to 62°F, it won’t get colder faster.  Instead, it’ll keep plowing down until it reaches 62°F (1.2 picoparsecs/square meter) if that’s a temperature that it can possibly reach.  Some days it gets hot here in Modern Mayberry, and the AC does just stay on, cooling as best as it can.

If I started an air conditioning repair business for congress, I’d call it AC/DC.

Regardless, when that would happen I would walk into a room on a day where it was 98°F (33mega electron Volts) outside and see my family huddled under blankets while frost began to form on the inside of the house because Pugsley wanted it colder, faster and set the thermostat to “freezer”.

The reason this happens is because of the timing of the feedback – the temperature of the house doesn’t immediately change, so the reaction of someone who doesn’t understand the system and wants immediate gratification is to keep cranking the dial downward.  As a dad, all I can think is, “Man, that isn’t cool.”

After the first brush with a too hot or too cold shower, we quickly absorb the feedback loop that after turning the shower in, we have to wait for the water to change, and if we move the lever too far to the “hot” side because the water is cold at the start, unpleasant things will happen.

That’s a fairly quick loop and sudden cold or hot is a fairly quick teacher.

I think step five is the hardest.

But a much longer loop would be certain parts of our economy.  Sure, if the Fed® changes the interest rate, immediately interest rates change across the country because the Fed™ artificially drives those rates.  So, that’s like your shower, except the Fed© asks us to assume the position so it can use that interest rate to compound us.

Other things, though, by nature have a much longer response time.  Sure, the price of oil cratering can immediately send ten thousand fracking workers to the unemployment line, which is an immediate response.  But soaring oil prices?

Responding to those requires time and investment.  First, suitable land for drilling has to be acquired, along with permits and leases.  After that, a rig has to be found, and a crew has to be found for the rig, and half of the people that used to be on it won’t go back because they’re tired of the 120 hours this week and zero hours a week for months after the price of oil goes to $40 a barrel.

Then, pipe is needed.  And to move it, trucks, truck drivers, pipelines, et cetera.  This takes years to build – Exxon® once noted that their projects are built on multi-decade scales.  That’s a slow change, and often Exxon™ plods along in down years because they know that prices will eventually head back up.

The reason Saudi Arabia has so much money isn’t the crude oil sales, they just don’t let their women spend it.

Politicians, however are impatient, since voters are impatient, and so politicians want results.  Now.  Explaining that having a fracking ban will decrease the amount of oil available which, in turn, will raise prices is beyond the understanding of the average GloboLeftist politician.

The reason is that they have no fundamental understanding of how our economy works and where those segments of the economy with a time delay are located.  They simply think, “We’ll mandate that cars get 250 miles per gallon and are so safe that a fusion bomb ignited next to one will only scratch the paint.”

I mean, it’s worth it if it saves even one life, right?

The fact that these mandates are beyond the bounds of thermodynamics doesn’t matter to them.  They don’t understand what thermodynamics is, and I can barely imagine trying to explain it to a GloboLeftist politician:

John Wilder:  “Okay, we’re going to discuss entropy, which is the idea that systems go from a state of order to a state of disorder.  With me?”

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez:  “Huh?  Why are you in my house at midnight?”

JW:  “Let me try a different approach.  How many pairs of shoes do you have, Ms. Cortez?”

AOC:  “Oh, like 40 or 50?”

JW:  “Good.  Now, what’s the worst thing about having 40 or 50 pairs of shoes?”

AOC:  “I don’t know?  That they smell like my feet?”

JW:  “Well . . . . okay.  But is it hard to keep them organized?”

AOC:  “OH!  Totally!  I mean, l generally just keep them in a pile in the guest bedroom, but that makes them hard to find when I need to go to work.”

JW:  “Right!  The amount of disorder increases!”

AOC:  “Oh, I get it!!!  Beer must be really bad for entropy, because when I was a bartender people would get drunk and disorderly all the time!”

JW:  “And let’s not talk about your shower, because I’m pretty sure that with your housekeeping skills and the length of your hair, the drain probably looks like you shave wookies® in there.  Besides do you know how an air conditioner works?”

AOC:  “In this house, we’re environmentally conscious – no air conditioner.  Instead?  Only Fans®.”

I hear wookie® steaks are often Chewie.

Politicians make decisions on a regular basis that have very few short-term impacts, but that may have economically disastrous long-term impacts.

Longer term decisions include:

  • tax policy which drives investment decisions and can kill industries,
  • Social Security and Medicare, in which cash is taken, spent, and then the next generation is saddled with the repayment obligations,
  • immigration policy, which changes the population and workforce over decades,
  • tariffs, which determine winners and losers, and
  • many other things that you or I could name if we just spent 10 minutes thinking about it.

Each of these has a feedback loop that’s measured in decades.  The demise of tariffs and replacement with income tax, for instance, gradually resulted in the industrial might of the United States being dismantled and shipped overseas where labor was cheaper.

I’d make a joke about offshore drilling, but many of those are crude.

Now, we don’t know how to make those things anymore, all because of long feedback loops.

But since I’ve learned about Global Warming, I’ve decided to keep my air conditioning on all the time.  I know I can’t save the planet all by myself, but I’ll do my best.

Hammer Films, Creepy Creatures, B-Movies And Christopher Lee

“I have just been fired because nobody wants to see vampire killers anymore, or vampires either. Apparently, all they want to see are demented madmen running around in ski-masks, hacking up young virgins.” – Fright Night

If Kamala is selected president, she promised a new post-apocalyptic movie.  She’s calling it Mad Marx.

As I’ve mentioned before, when I was a kid (think four or five) there was a local channel that ran horror movies late at night on Saturday night.  First there was the news at 10PM, then Star Trek at 10:30PM, and then, finally, at 11:30 Creepy Creature Feature started.

There was no host, just a title card with a vampire and perhaps some cobwebs followed by one or two B-movies and whatever ads the local salesguy could sell for midnight on a Saturday night.  I’d imagine the ads were nearly free:  five-year-olds in my generation didn’t have a lot of disposable income.

The movies were (at the time I was growing up) almost all from the 1950s and 1960s, and almost all of them were in black and white.  I think that the television station could get these movies for very low cost, or, perhaps free in movies that failed to follow the proper copyright steps, like Night of the Living Dead.

Who flips Rob Zombie’s pancakes?  Count Spatula.

Last month Bob suggested I revisit the old Hammer Film Productions® films, which are mainly known for their Frankenstein and Dracula movies.  The studio turned out over fifty films, however, before it started cranking out science fiction and horror movies around 1957, and brought Peter Cushing in as an actor and having him join former British commando Christopher Lee in 1958 with Lee playing Dracula.

An aside:  apparently when they were filming Lord of the Rings, director Peter Jackson was describing how he wanted Lee (playing Saruman) to react when Wormtongue stabbed him in the back.  Lee stopped Jackson when he was trying to explain what he wanted.  Lee:  “Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody is stabbed in the back?  Because I do.

To be blunt:  I have never seen a scary Hammer™ film.  Most of them were, at their very best, entertaining.  F-Troop’s Forrest Tucker as a scientist in the 1957 film The Abominable Snowman?  Yeah, that’s not going to be scary.

And if the animal got stuck in the chute, would that make him adoorabull?

Oh, sure, when I was a kid Hammer’s® Quatermass and the Pit (United States title:  Five Million Years to Earth) gave me shivers when I was in still in the footed pajama set, but rewatching it as an adult, I found it an interesting concept (alien overlords still “kind of” alive underneath London), but not scary.

One of the big differences I have seen in either the Hammer™ movies, or any number of movies from the day were built around concepts that seem to have been put away in the current political climate.

What concepts?

Humans are the good guys.  Sure, not all humans were good.  There were sniveling bad guys (mostly effeminate) or traitors (especially mostly secret commies) or scientists who didn’t understand what they were doing.  Or Dr. Fu Manchu – he was definitely a bad guy, from a culture so different that although his goal of world domination was clear, his motives were less so.

Dr. Fu Manchu is still more credible than Dr. Fauci. 

There was an optimism about the future.  Roger Corman’s horrible movie Day the World Ended (1955) scared me six ways from Sunday because there was a mutant that was afraid of rain and I lived in a place where it hardly ever rained.  But the end of the

Just like traitors, the scariest bad guys looked like us but weren’t us.  Dracula, for instance, was, like Cornpop, a bad dude.  And he looked like us.  And, sort of, acted like us.  But you knew, deep down, he wasn’t human.

We (generally) win.  Now, I’ll admit that I like John Carpenter movies where at the end of the movie I’m pretty sure that mankind was wiped out sometime not long after the credits roll:  (The Thing, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness).  But most horror movies of the 1950s and 1960s were optimistic that brainpower plus grit would solve almost any problem we face.  Of course, the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was in the “we lose” category, but it was pretty amazing, but much more common were films like When Worlds Collide where humanity, led by Elon Musk, manages to save itself through nearly impossible odds.  On a rocket.  With hot chicks.

I guess he’s now offering space for rent.

For whatever reason, I think the end of the optimism was around 1970.  Westerns turned dark, and B-movies where humanity was the bad guy or where humanity out and out lost became much more common, such as Colossus, the Forbin Project, where supercomputers manage to link up and prove that A.I. is scary and may become humanity’s master benevolent and will be the best thing ever to happen to humanity.  Not long after this (1974) Hammer® was essentially done making films and their quirky and optimistic take didn’t seem to sell anymore.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Hammer’s© fall was right after The Exorcist (1973) came out.  It might be the final and most optimistic movie of this period of horror/science fiction.  Although not a B-movie, it did show a world where true Evil was far scarier than anything that Dracula or Frankenstein ever was.

Yeah, the doctor even called the cemetery, “Human Resources”.

The Exorcist, optimistic?  William Peter Blatty certainly thought so, since, although there was Evil, it could be vanquished.

By Good.  And no matter how many times Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing tried, he never ever could get rid of Hammer’s™ Dracula.  Probably because Van Helsing knew that Christopher Lee was pretty good with a knife.

How Invaders Are Looting Your 401k

“The French have just invaded.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I guess the Mongol Empire had its pros and Khans.

On Monday’s post I gave an example of propaganda, and how it is used to manipulate public opinion.  The example I chose was the phrase “Diversity is our Strength™” which, when viewed from the standpoint of what diversity really gives us, is Orwellian doublespeak.  Diversity causes problems, so much so that journalist Michael Yon has started calling them what might be more apt:  invaders.

One of the problems it causes is related to resources.  While not every invader (legal or illegal) is a net cost to the country, most are.  A recent study by the House Homeland Security Commission (LINK) showed that immigrants (just the illegal variety) cost taxpayers at least $720 billion since Biden took office, and have contributed no more than $120 billion in taxes at all levels, for a net loss of $600 billion dollars.

That’s a huge tax burden, because it assumes that they individual taxpayer is picking up the cost.  So, what kind of costs are in this number?

  • Housing
  • Welfare
  • Schools
  • Police
  • Transport
  • Impacts on Private Property on the Border

If you assume only 10,000,000 invaders, well, that’s a stunning $60,000 per invader, or for a familia of four, nearly a quarter million dollars.  This gives the term “Anchor Baby” a new meaning, since they are literally anchors on our economy, each one holding us back to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a net negative lifetime cost that could be in the millions.

If you pronounced her name as “Pamela with a K” would that mean we’d have to call her Pamalak?

But we know the answer of how many invaders are devastating our country is higher, and the cost is much higher than the $720,000,000,000 over four years.  On one side, this money is going to support the invaders.  But this is money that should have been spent on our elderly, our veterans, our infrastructure, and our children.  Nearly every single invader, man, woman, or child, is making the Unites States a poorer nation and is taking from those heritage Americans who have the greatest needs.

Of course, you’re saying, John Wilder, what happened to your compassion for your fellow man?  It’s not compassion at all when all of this is being done against the consent of the vast majority of Americans.  How mad are Americans at this?  Kamala Harris is now saying she wants to build a wall.

I’m afraid to visit Turkey or China.  Too many red flags.

As I have maintained again and again, it is not charity if it is forced, rather, it is GloboLeftists using the resources of the country to pay for this invasion.  As James O’Keefe found out, most of the “private” funds used to assist invaders are actually recycled government grants from places like the Department of State, so even the “private” funds are actually resources looted from you and I.  With no input, with no choice.

What’s Ukraine’s biggest import?  Russian artillery shells. 

That’s not charity, or if it is charity, it’s surprise charity like a mugging is a surprise donation or rape is surprise sex.

Here are more costs that the invaders force upon Americans:

  • Increased Housing Cost: Pop quiz – if 20,000,000 invaders cross a border, how many houses will they consume?  If they live 18 to a house, does that lower or raise housing cost?  If we build 3,000,000 more houses for them, does that raise or lower the cost of building supplies?
  • Lowered Wages: Supply and demand figures in again here.  The derivation of this proof is left to the reader.
  • Increased Crime: It costs $1.6 billion just for federal costs to house invaders in prison annually.  States house even more, so who knows what the overall total is.  This total isn’t included in the report’s number, and doesn’t include the value of stolen property and destroyed lives caused by invaders.
  • School Resource Increase: The 5.1 million children of the invaders cost more than heritage Americans.  Why?  They often speak little English, and that costs, at least, 15% more.  But what about the social friction from invaders with American students?  What about the lost learning opportunities?

In the above list, again, there are missing externalities that are caused by a significant invader class – like needs for new laws, the impact of a large law evading class (48% of New York City transit riders don’t pay any fare), and the loss of societal cohesion.  As Sadiq Khan, invader anchor baby mayor of London said:  terror attacks are “part and parcel of living in a big city.”

I guess terrorism is part of the strength that diversity brings us?

Does it bother anyone besides me that hundreds of thousands of “other” people are invading?

In 2019 the Wilder family was taking a long trip through the Great American West.  It was probably around 1AM.  We were in the space where there might have been two FM channels on the entire dial.  One was an NPR®/college station, so I tuned to that one.

The program was about people from other countries and cultures coming to America and the difficulties that they had in assimilation.  Okay, I’ll listen.  It turned out that on this particular episode, the focus was on invaders with really heavy accents.  What I learned that if you, a heritage American, had difficulty understanding someone speaking broken English in a very heavy accent, the problem, citizen, is that you’re a bad person.  You’re the problem.

Yes.  I’m not making this up.  They actually put this on the air.  Now, I don’t know about you, but if not being able to comprehend someone whose grasp of the English language is as crisp as Kamala Harris’ grasp on sobriety is racist, well, I’m a racist.  And so, then, are you.

I hear summer in Finland is the best day of the year.

That’s the other facet of the loss of social cohesion:  in every instance, the culture of the Americans who built the country is supposed to give way to every other culture.  If it’s culturally allowed for people to be rude, pushy, and insulting in their country, well, take your Midwestern manners and deal with it.  But if you’re rude, pushy, and insulting, well, that makes you a bigot.

It’s a no-win situation.

Like the invaders.  What’s the real cost?  I’d guess no less than double the official number, and possibly triple when you look at the inflationary pressures put on our systems by the invaders.  But what’s $2 trillion when you’re trying to “fundamentally transform America” like Obama promised?

I personally wish the invaders no ill will.  Given the nearly trillion-dollar basket of free stuff, almost anyone would come from the places they live, yet as they cross the border, they carried the flags of their homes, because the only reason they’re here is for the stuff.  For the most part, they hold no allegiance to the United States.  This is the opposite of previous waves of immigrants, who either contributed or died, since fed.gov didn’t pour out trillions to help Uncle Hans from the Netherlands.

The cumulative economic impact of the collapse of our immigration system may be devastating at a time when the economic situation of the United States in particular and the West in general can least absorb it.

But at least we know that peace is war, and diversity is our strength.

Propaganda: It’s Not Just For Diapers Anymore

“I’ll be taking these Huggies® and whatever cash you’ve got.” – Raising Arizona

A friend told me he could use his 3-D printer to make guns.  I didn’t brag:  I’ve had a Canon™ printer for years.

Movies are amazing tools.  Movies are the backbone of an entire American industry, but it’s a really small industry, with global box office revenues hitting a record of $42.5 billion before COVID.

Sure, $42.5 billion sounds like a lot of money, but Elon Musk paid $44 billion for X®.  One single pipeline, the Nordstream 2®, cost about $10 billion.  That’s just one pipeline:  natural gas pipeline construction spending was over $206 billion in 2020, so it’s roughly five times the size of the size of the movie business.

Yet we focus on movies, and focus on stars.  And Ben Affleck, for some reason.  Must be his insurance company.

But the reason that we focus on movies, of course, is the stories.

The stories have real power, because they’re watched and internalized.  Part of the point of propaganda is that, even if you’re aware of the attempt to manipulate you, you’re still impacted by it, though in a lesser format.  And movies, when we’re actually “shown” a story are much more powerful than reading a story.

But the NBC sitcom based on his life was shot before a live studio audience.

I think this is because reading requires the reader to function as a co-creator of the story:  you have to imagine the armies of Orcs headed to Helm’s Deep™, so as Tolkien writes the words, your part of the creation is imagining and modeling the characters, the setting, the smoke and fog and the arrows in flight.  Yes, books and stories and news are propaganda, too, but the visual is so much more effective, which is why they went to such great lengths to stage the drowned boy on a beach to make people feel a certain way so that millions of invaders could be let into Europe.

Large chunks of movies are pure propaganda.  I recall watching Raising Arizona right before I had a baby.  There’s a fairly humorous scene in the movie that involved Huggies™ diapers, so I bought Huggies© diapers to give them a try.  Huggies® diapers sucked and we moved on to Pampers©, but the propaganda worked.  And I knew it was propaganda.  I knew that Huggies™ had given money to be in the movie.

It wasn’t evil propaganda, but it was propaganda, nonetheless.

If I ever get old, I might quit lifting weights.  Don’t worry, I’ll put in my too weak notice first.

I’ve since developed another theory:  the bigger the lie that they’re attempting to force you to swallow, the more the propaganda, and the more it becomes vilified to have an opinion that differs even by the slightest degree from the lie.

You can probably think of examples, but I’ll start off with one of the biggest lies:

“Diversity is our strength.”

That’s just a horrible lie.  Would Japan be better off if 100,000 Haitians were dropped off in Tokyo tomorrow afternoon?

No!  Haitians have had over 200 years to try to improve Haiti, and it’s awful.  It’s not because of climate or natural resources:  the Dominican Republic is on the exact same island, and has a per capita GDP of $11,825.  Not great, but not horrible.  Haiti?  It’s an economic basketcase with a per capita GDP of $2,125.

Bringing Haitians to any country wouldn’t improve it, because the people who make Haiti the hellhole that it is are the Haitians.  Being on the Magic Dirt of Japan won’t change them.  Being on the Magic Dirt of the United States won’t change them, either.

“Ramen” – Scooby Doo® finishing a prayer.

On particular film that focused on this subversion was 2017’s Logan.  Yup, another superhero movie about the character Wolverine™, but this one ended with the immortal and indestructible mutant Wolverine© dying as an old man, and with his replacement mutants all being illegal aliens from Mexico.  Oh, and the cross that they put on his grave?  The end scene shows one of the mutants pushing it over so it’s an “X” and not a cross.

I’m not making this up.

According to the movie, diversity is not only our strength®, it’s inevitable.  Oh, and your Christian God?  We’ll mock Him as well.

The reality is that greater levels of diversity are correlated with greater levels of crime, lower levels of social trust, and lower productivity in a workplace.  For a “strength” I’m not sure what that “strength” is improving.  So, it has to be sold, again and again and again.

The propaganda machine has been in overload mode for decades on the “girls are just the same as boys” and the result has been a confused mass of children as the most impressionable youth are hit with that message and women are shown in action movies doing things no woman ever born on planet Earth would be capable of doing.

I guess one of Abraham Lincoln’s regrets was appointing Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court.

The really fortunate thing is that this latest propaganda has been a horrible mistake.  In the new rules, no woman can ever do anything wrong.  No woman can be forced to grow and change since they were perfect since birth.  No woman can be defeated by a man, ever.  It’s the revenge of the Girlboss©.

That makes for a really stupid story.  And Hollywood™ is finally figuring that out since people don’t go to see really stupid movies with stupid plots.

That’s to our advantage.  If people aren’t going to see the propaganda, well, they won’t be indoctrinated.

And, although I’m not firmly of the opinion that Elon is on our side, his purchase of X® gives him the ability to influence the propaganda that’s being forced on us 24/7/365 from every single location.  It allows people to react to The Narrative and mock it.

And that’s the key, because it’s not really The Narrative, it’s really The Narrative Against Truth.

The essence of a good meme is a few words and an emotional punch.  The reasons memes from the TradRight work much better than from the GloboLeftElite is simple:  our memes are based on Truth, not based on The Narrative.

It scared me when I asked the librarian where the conspiracy books were and she said, “They’re right behind you.”

And, no matter how much they fight us, their propaganda couldn’t make Huggies™ better than Pampers©.  And no matter how hard they push, their propaganda can’t make lies the Truth.

Think about what you cannot say, and ask:  “Why can’t I say that?”

How Did It Get So Crazy, So Fast?

“It was O-Ren Ishii and her powerful posse, the Crazy 88, that proved the victor.” – Kill Bill, Vol. 1

My friends always made fun of me in high school for having an imaginary girlfriend.  Of course, the joke was on them:  they were imaginary, too.

One of the comments on a post a few weeks back asked a pretty good question:

“How did we get so crazy, so fast?”

The answer actually involves several intertwining threads, mice, Soviets, and gasoline engines, so let’s see of we can weave a web that covers at least a chunk of what has made us so crazy, so quickly.  This is a distillation of the last seven years’ worth of study and writing, so some of it might be pretty familiar.  Also, it’s not necessarily complete yet, but here are the major threads that I see that have led to what Heinlein called The Crazy Years.

First:  Societal Malaise Due to Abundance

I’ve written several times about John Bumpass (that’s his real middle name according to the Internet) Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiment, see immediately below this paragraph for links to two previous posts.  The short summary is Dr. Calhoun asked a crazy question:  what would happen if you gave a population of mice everything they could want:  food, water, freedom from predation, space to live, bedding material, and places to make nests.

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

The result?  The mice died out.  At a certain point they stopped mating, mother mice stopped taking care of infant mice, gangs formed, and some mice (the “beautiful ones”) just spent their time grooming themselves and not really interacting.

If this sounds like Reddit® or TikTok™ or the Democratic National Convention, well, you’re right.  For a certain subset of the population, abundance has ruined them.

My friend told me I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “ironic” which was ironic because it was Tuesday.

I think it started in the 1960s.  I’m just guessing.  I like to blame the hippies, so they’re likely the early-version.  It then continued into the wildest era of abundance the world has ever seen:  the 1990s.  If you look at any time lapse, that’s when the United States started leading the world (it has spread now, literally) in having obesity, not hunger, be the bigger (pun intended) health problem.

I think this started to manifest itself, big time, in the music of the 1990s.  We went from Warrant singing about Cherry Pie to Kurt Cobain mumbling about how living in the suburbs with all the Pop Tarts™ his fat face could eat was killing him.  Turns out that shotguns are even more deadly than Pop Tarts©.  Who knew?  We had a generation that was lost because they had everything.

I think a candidate for the hallmark phrase of this Crazy Cause is:  “Why are we even here, dude?”

Never take diet advice from a fat guy, and never take life advice from Kurt Cobain.

Second:  Societal Anxiety Due to No Challenges

I recently made the comment on X® that a lot of people would e better off if they had been bullied as kids.  Was I serious?  Yeah, I was.  One response was, “Why do you want to make things worse?”

The truth is, for me, that bullies actually helped me build my character and my resolve.  And, believe it or not, sometimes the bullies were right and the things that they bullied me about (second graders can be assholes) were things I needed to fix to be a better person.  Did I lift harder to get stronger because of it?  Yes.  Did I develop the internal resilience so that the people who (rightfully) bullied the smarmy second grader that I was eventually earned the respect of the bullies?

Yes.  Males, even young males, need to develop a hierarchy and understand their place in it and why they are inferior to Chuck Norris.

No child is born perfect, and it is the challenges in life that help define and develop character.  Without challenge, development is stunted.

I think that today’s twentysomethings have the problem that they look into a future that certainly looks grim to them, yet they’ve never had a chance to develop their character and are told again and again how perfect they are and how their choices are important.

Newsflash:  the choices of a second grader generally deserve about as much attention as the choices my dog wants to make.  Both will eat all of the cake in the house if you let them and make messes everywhere.  It’s our job as parents to not care what they think when it’s important to develop character and virtue.

Chuck Norris can recite pi backwards.

As a society we face many of the same problems:  what is it we stand for and what are we trying to accomplish?  We don’t have Soviets to fight, we’re actively encouraging invaders into our country to replace us, and we don’t have any cool national purpose like the Apollo program.

I think a candidate for the catchphrase of this crazy cause is:  “Why am I so worthless?”

Third:  Societal Atomization Due To Tech

As humans, we have minds that are built around smaller social systems, mainly.  The big move from rural to urban happened in the west only recently.  Our legacy social structure is (mainly) to live in a town for a very long time, put down roots, make friends, make a reputation.

Most people aren’t leaders, they’re followers, and want to be led.  Why else would sane people want zoning regulations?

The good news is I can have up to six Eldrich Abominations without asking for a zoning variance request.

But now, put us in a constantly churning urban landscape where we don’t know the next-door-neighbor in the apartment building?  Who do we turn to?

Well, whatever latenightjokeman says or whatever TikTik™ says or whatever InstaFace© allows to be printed.  People are defining themselves on how YouTube™ says Europeans feel about Donald Trump.

They are also allowed to pick whatever gender they are.  How do I know tech is driving this?  Back when COVID made everyone homeschooled, transgenderism dropped.  Why?  No one to identify to – which is why “transwomen” with no girl parts get offended when gynecologists won’t give them appointments.

Yes.  That’s a thing.

The iPhone™ is a big driver.  It puts connections in the hands of kids.  I talked with one Millennial, and he said that at the start of his high school career, kids “cruised main” looking for other kids.  By the end of high school, it was all phones.  Friendships dropped, and dating dropped.  Mix that with the first two causes above, and it leads to fewer kids.

Dating sites magnify this, and make every girl “4” think that she deserves a Chad ranked 9 or higher because one time a drunk Chad had sex with her.  This leads to Chads being happy, but girls being sad and hollow inside.

I think a catchphrase for this Crazy Cause is “Who or what the heck am I?”

When I was a kid I thought my dad was Superman®.  Later, I wonder why he put a cape on after drinking bourbon.

Result of these interacting strands of Crazy are a large number of people who:

  • Stand for nothing
  • Have no examples of virtue other than seeking money in their lives
  • See no point in anything other than the present moment
  • Are distracted
  • Think they’re too good for PEZ™
  • Are filled with the combination of anxiety and narcissism
  • Do and feel whatever the media tells them to do
  • Haven’t built social circles of any particular strength – clubs and churches are on constant decline

There’s good news.

All of this is self-limiting.  We’re not mice, and plenty of good humans haven’t fallen into Calhoun’s Behavioral Sink.  Many of those same people have overcome challenges sufficient to shape their character for the better.  Finally, there are enough of us that don’t follow.

We lead.  Or we choose our own path.

And?

We’re gonna win.

Kamala: The NPC Candidate

“This isn’t a video game.  There are no extra lives.” – Edge of Tomorrow

Kamala posted a commercial to YouTube®, I tried to reply, but just like Kamala the comments were disabled.  (Memes and content mostly “as found”)

Kamala Harris has invented a new type of presidential candidacy – one based on being absolutely nothing.  Seriously.  She has stated exactly one position publicly:  “No tax on tips” which is precisely the position staked out by Donald Trump two months ago.  I guess we should give Kamala this one, since she’s no stranger to a variety of tips.

Oh, sure, Mr. Trump’s trademark is being “short on details” so that he can leverage a win, but based on 2016, what really outraged the GloboLeft is that Trump actually tried to follow through on many of his positions.  One thing that Trump won’t be to voters is a surprise, but I think Kamala is so unknown as to be a surprise, and not a good one.

Kamala’s first interview question:  “Describe yourself in one word.”  Kamala:  “Vague.”  Interviewer:  “Can you elaborate?”  Kamala:  “Possibly.”

Why?

She’s pulling what I’ll call an “Ultra-Clinton” approach to her candidacy.  Back when Hillary first ran for senate in 2000, I was expecting that, finally, she’d have to address the public.  There wasn’t any way, I naively thought, that she could duck the people for an entire election.  I mean, without killing them.

Whoops.  While Hillary did do carefully staged and vetted “listening tour” events, what she didn’t do was meet with anyone but fawning press.  She successfully avoided all genuine interaction with people so she wouldn’t have to kill time.  Of course, Hillary was well known to be a GloboLeft accomplice, so it wasn’t any surprise when the New York machine churned out a senate seat for her to launch an eventual presidential campaign.

Kamala Harris, though, is another matter.  She is the ultimate in vapor.  What, exactly, does she stand for?  Apparently, no taxes on tips.  But beyond that, she is a ghost.

Is she Indian or black?  Yes, though my guess is that more of her ancestors owned slaves than were slaves.

I guess if she doesn’t owe reparations, nobody does.

Is she for or against illegals scurrying across the border in unending streams?

Yes.  She wants to be seen as “tough on immigration” at the same time she promises to “let every illegal sitting in detention out on day one”.

Is she against inflation?  You bet she is, and on day one of her administration she’ll do something (the something is not mentioned) to stop it.  Why the Biden/Harris administration can’t stop it right here and now isn’t discussed and no one asks here that question, since that would be mean or something.  As usual, the Bee nails it:

If honesty is the best policy, I guess Kamala’s normally uses the second-best policy.

Interviews?  Trump sits down to a multi-hour open and candid conversation with Elon Musk, and sits for interview after interview.  Kamala?  She might sit for an interview sometime by the end of the month.  Maybe.  If they can keep her off the gin for that long.

And Trump’s request for three debates?

Well, there’s just one on the schedule, and that’s enough for Kamala, at least in August.  Heck, in September I’m not so certain that Paperwork American Judge Juan Merchan won’t slap Trump in irons and send him to prison.  Oh, sure, he’ll get out on an appeal shortly thereafter, but don’t count that possibility out.  This election is a circus, and we’re far short of the finale.

They did a study of how often Kamala was drunk.  The results were staggering.

But what is known is that Kamala is really attempting to appeal to a select group of voters:  those who aren’t paying attention and who will vote for a candidate based on what they feel.

Kamala has no need to preen for the hard-core GloboLeftists that want to hang Trump because they don’t like his face.  They’re going to show up for her even if she changes her tune to being pro-life and wants to start distributing AR-15s to every citizen.  They’d vote for her, because what they believe in is based only on what the latest talking points are from the DNC.  These people are Non-Player Characters (NPC) because they’re programmed by the mainstream news or by whatever the talking head night joke men tell them to believe.

What, really, is an NPC?

Since humans are social creature, there is an inherent tendency in many people to follow.  In the past, this made sense.  The number of people, say, a French peasant would have seen in their life was small, and they derived their beliefs by what was presented to them other people, rather than any other source.

This variety of NPC is popular in the UK, and in the United States too!  Talk about diversity!

Women, especially, were subject to this effect.  An example proving that was the number of war brides that American troops returned home with from Germany.  I don’t have the total from Germany, but over 300,000 war brides came from Europe, many speaking little English, to the United States.  These women immediately married men of the armed forces that had bombed and terrorized them for years because everyone said they were in charge now.

See?  NPC.

But as family groups become fractured due to no-fault divorce and a system that gives women cash and prizes for divorcing men, and as people become uprooted chasing economic success in areas far from where they grew up, they became reliant on a different tribe:  mass media.

No one is entirely immune, but some are entirely dependent on mass media for their opinions.  A close-knit family, longstanding friends, family stories and novels and other idea intrusions (like this blog) serve as counter-programming to the NPC soup that many live in.  The more you’re divorced from Infocancer like The View, the greater your immune system, and the less of an NPC you are.

This phrase must have tested highly with the NPC species Karenus Manageriusspeakum.

Kamala is not for you.  Kamala is for the NPC.

Kamala has to appeal (or pretend to appeal) to the middle.  These are the people who aren’t on the GloboLeft, and aren’t on the TradRight.  They just want to grill and enjoy the sunset and consume mass media.  Be aware, this how they were built – to follow.  Immersive multi-media that’s fed from a screen and doesn’t require any critical thought is what they desire.

For the NPC the TV or TikTok™ is their tribal sense of purpose.  Along with a lot of drugs.

How the NPC class copes.

The difficulty for Kamala is that for many of these people the last four years have been hell.  Their businesses have been closed (if they own a business) and their paychecks have dwindled in the face of ever-present inflation.  They’ve seen awful riots, they’ve seen this weird transgender explosion that they don’t much like, and now they notice huge numbers of people who moved into their neighborhood and don’t speak any English staring at them when they fill their gas tank.  They know they’re supposed to like them, but also have a tingling sense that these aren’t refugees or immigrants.  They’re becoming worried that this is an invader class.

Huh.  Wrongly think.  Get on board, citizen!

Kamala has to appeal to those people to win.  She can’t do it on record, so the best option is to run against anything she has ever stood for, or at least pretend to run against that.  She can say anything in front of any group, and will wait for the networks and search engines to run interference for her so that she can fulfill her strategy to win the White House.

How?  Kamala intends to be the first NPC candidate, standing for nothing, with no real substance except a desire for power with the media as her staunchest friend and defender.  Let’s get this woman some more gin!

Will Great Britain Rise Again?

“They chose to murder and steal.” – The Dark Knight

Notes:  All memes are as found, and no podcast tomorrow – The Mrs. has to catch some sleep.

Alice Smith is a reciprocal follow on X®.  She’s the great-great-great-granddaughter of Scottish economist Adam Smith, and is a good person to follow (@TheAliceSmith) if you’re already following the most important account on X™, @wilderbyfar.  She’s from the UK, and had the absolutely best post I’ve seen on the current sickness that’s destroying the West:

Doesn’t that say it all?

Immigration to the West (Europe plus the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) has nothing to do with freedom or our culture for most immigrants.  It’s merely about the stuff.

The sickness?

It’s from the GloboLeftElite attempting to brainwash the world into thinking that:

  • There is no difference between a man and a woman,
  • Anyone can be a man or a woman,
  • There are no intrinsic differences between races and ethnicities,
  • No one can pretend to be a different race unless it’s been okayed in advance even though all races are the same,
  • White people should somehow feel shame for their race even though all races are the same,
  • There is no difference between people of differing I.Q.,
  • People who are wealthy merely “won a lottery”, and,
  • Every culture is valid.

It’s the last one that we should talk about right now.

I’m not particularly interested in going on a culture jihad, so, perhaps all cultures are “valid.”  I suppose, if cannibal, rape-y, stone age tribes are your thing, I guess you could call it valid.

But all cultures are certainly not equal in things like freedom, justice, morality, and economic output.

Here, for centuries, the West has been far ahead of the world.  Europe was free-ish (feudalistically speaking) since the Black Death, which greatly changed the relationship between serf and local lord.

And in a continent that was freer than any in the world, there was a place that was freer yet:  Great Britain.  Great Britain had a really big advantage:  after the year 1066, it really was never invaded by a external enemy army.  Sure, you could make a case the culture has been subverted by outside forces (and I will below) but not by force of arms.

This isolation as an island nestled right next to Europe allowed a strange development – yeoman farmers who were encouraged to take up the longbow and become soldiers so that while the English lost land in France, there was never a doubt about them losing England.  The Scotts in the north were much the same, being hard-headed independent herders, they had to be strong, and were used to fighting both against and with other Scotts as well as the English.  And, yes, that’s a complement. (I’m partially Scot myself).

This isolation of individually armed individuals set up an independent society with no safety nets.  If you were too poor, stupid, or drunk to make enough money to live, you died.  If your lord decided he wanted something out of line, well, your +3 longbow could outrank his +1 armor at a distance.  As a result, Britain’s I.Q. rose over the course of centuries because the culture itself winnowed out stupid people, yet the strong, stubborn sense of independence remained.

Even the song “Rule, Britannia!” has the following lyrics:

“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves;
“Britons never will be slaves.”

This is a very, very different culture than that of the current people who opened the floodgates to Great Britain – they were unabashedly Globalist and Leftist, hated everything that Great Britain stood for, and were more than willing to start the migration into Great Britain.  I’d be lying to say that none of them pulled their weight – in some cases Britain got some of the best from their home countries, hence the term “brain drain”, but this was the exception rather than the norm.  Most of the immigrants to the UK have been a net negative to the country.

But no outside army ever conquered Britain.  Except the army of beggars that have invaded it have done something that no one thought possible – united the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland – against the onslaught.  What does it take to get people who have been fighting each other for centuries to hold hands, literally, and march together?

Whatever it is, it sounds Evil to me.

And it is.  Evil.  Brought directly to the shores of Great Britain by GloboLeftists in misguided altruism and the GloboLeftistElite out of a calculated bid to displace inconvenient people who don’t want to be replaced.

There reaches a point where something so awful happens that a culture revolts:  it says, “That’s enough.”  In the United States for transgender acceptance, it was the murder of six children by a trans killer so crazed that they still won’t release her manifesto.  That was enough.  The GloboLeftistElite wanted to try to hide it (see how autocomplete will try to take you to murders of transgenders, but not murders by transgenders).  These murders is why Bud Light™ is Bud Deadtome© for so many consumers.

It appears that the United Kingdom (Great Britain plus Northern Ireland) has had enough of murderous vultures in their society.  The cause?  The murder of three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9 at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in a town called Southport.  By knife.  By a 17-year-old that had no place being in the United Kingdom in the first place.

English people had watched as rape gangs of organized sexual assault on at minimum 1400 young women that was denied to even exist in Rotherham because the victims were mainly white and the perpetrators were of privileged minority status – Pakistani, mostly.

This was covered up at a national level.  Filing cabinets full of the data on the case mysteriously disappeared.  That was never solved.

But would it matter?  Probably not:

Some of those convicted (many weren’t even tried) got as little as 2 years.  Britons can get more time for being mean with words.

Oh, and the last one?  She was posting Bible verses.

That set the situation, along with other, repeated, ongoing murders and rapes by people not fit to live in any sort of civilized society.  These three final murders were enough.

The response of the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was exactly what you would expect from a member of the GloboLeftElite:  he blamed the people pushing back against unrestrained and unrestricted illegals swarming the United Kingdom.  And if you complained online, even if you were more likely to be arrested than the illegals swarming the streets with swords and machetes.

They’re now calling him “two-tier Keir”, since his justice has two tiers:  a harsh one for actual English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish and one where all acts by any minority are ignored.  Probably because Starmer hates his own people, because he hates himself.

I guess that’s easier.

The United Kingdom has found a point where they say, No More.

This is coming soon to a country near you.

Oh, and if they offer the type of deal below?  We should take it.  Because it’s not about the stuff.

At all.

Learn This One Weird Trick

“I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s weird and pissed off.” – The Thing

The Mrs. is so weird:  she starts every conversation with “were you even listening to me?”

All memes today are “as found”.

In the recent week, a miracle occurred.  It seems like every Mainstream Media® pundit found the exact same word to describe Donald Trump, JD Vance, or both of them.

“Weird.”

Yup, “weird”.  That’s the Kamala campaign’s strategist attempting to frame the 2024 election.  Republicans are . . . weird.  Master Persuader Scott Adams analyzed this.  His conclusion?

This was “mean girl” politics.  And the person who came up with the idea was . . . a woman.  Her idea was to use the “in-group/out-group” method of attack.

What’s that?  Well, simply enough, a junior high girl would describe someone as “weird” in order to get her friends to form a united group against someone.  It only works, mind you, in junior high and also if it’s true.  With Trump and Vance?

Well, not so much, for a couple of reasons.  First off, they’re actually the weird ones:

See what I mean?  We aren’t the weird ones.  Nothing about us is weird.  Okay, some things about me are weird, but most of them in a good way.  Most of them.  Those memes above will have a visceral impact, mainly on those who already agree with us.  Some of them, though, especially at the bottom end of the list will be far too much for the normies in the middle.  They might chuckle, but they’re gonna be pretty hesitant to share them.  Regardless, if they see them and they’re not already consumed by the Woke Mind Virus, they’ll start to grow the doubts about who is really “weird”.

Here are some that are a bit more sharable:

See what I mean?

My take is that the following, though, are knockout punches to the middle, because they really hit the values that define us, but that the normies in the middle have a hard time seeing as weird – it builds a cognitive dissonance – the look at that, and realize that’s a far, far better world than we live in today.

Which makes these memes something that might move them.

And that’s my take.  YMMV.  And if someone called me weird?  I’d say, “Hell yeah, I’m so weird I believe in marriage and intact mothers and fathers raising their kids with moral values.”  Agree with them, and amplify.  Because every single time that they try to paint us as something, it’s something that they fear others think of them.

Incompetence Can Be Fatal, But It’s Always Expensive

“You know what doesn’t look good?  A story about gross incompetence.” – American Hustle

My garden shears will never be obsolete, after all, it’s cutting-hedge technology.

My science teacher in high school, who I’ll call “Mr. Johnson” (not his real name except that was totally his real name) often lectured us on things entirely unrelated to science.  It wasn’t a doctrine he was trying to instill us with, it was merely that he was old enough and close enough to retirement that he really didn’t give a damn about 90% of the class.  I don’t think that he even cared if we listened, since he was only talking to 10% of us anyway.

You either got him or you didn’t.

One of his random asides was about the word “crisis”.  Mr. Johnson hated the use of the word crisis except to refer to a single moment in time.  His definition was that the crisis was a moment – the Cuban Missile Crisis when everyone was poised to push the button, and yet backed away from world condemning us to live in a world where The View exists.

Regardless of Mr. Johnson’s definition, I think we’re in the midst of a crisis.

Why do I think this stage would smell of old kitty litter and stale chardonnay?

Datapoint:

  • Crowdstrike™

The Crowdstrike© software incident from just two weeks ago brought down at least 8.5 million computer systems, and brought them down in such a way that they couldn’t restart.  To make it even better, once a fix was found, it had to be fixed computer by computer.  Why?  Because they didn’t test the patch.

Right now, the estimate is that this caused at least $10 billion in financial losses, though a communist would tell you that it was a good thing since all of those computer techs had something to do other than play Tetris™ and Minesweeper© while listening to Dan Fogelberg.

I think Boeing® should adopt a “no slippers” policy.

Datapoint:

  • Boeing’s© Starliner™

The Starliner® is anything but, more resembling a large orbiting bucket filled with cash than a spacecraft, it sits, useless, stuck against the side of the ISS.  If it were the only failure to Boeing’s©, name, that would be one thing, but it’s not.  Their planes regularly either fall from the sky due to poor programming kludges, or have random spontaneous partial disassembly of their planes in flight due to spotty manufacturing quality control.

Boeing™ had a pretty good reputation for decades as a company that took engineering seriously – the name of the Boeing® 707 was rumored to be an engineering joke – it’s one over the square root of two.  It kept showing up in their calculations, so they decided that was a good omen for naming their (then) flagship airliner.  In reality, it sounds like it was just a product number, with the 7 series being jets, and they liked the sound of the end 7.

Regardless, they didn’t call it a “Dreamliner™”.

NASA refuses to send a giant duck into outer space – they say the bill would be astronomical.

Datapoint:

  • NASA

I loved NASA when I was a kid.  They were generally seen as a triumph of competence and coolness under pressure.  They did real engineering, and also were great at managing the integration of multiple complex systems in a manner where they worked pretty well, Apollos 1 and 13 notwithstanding.

They literally wrote the book on getting man to the Moon using the very limits of known technology at the time.  Getting to the Moon was so hard that it was barely in our grasp, yet they did it, time and time again.  They even managed to get the ISS built.

But now?  Barrack Obama stated that the primary goal of NASA was Moslem outreach.  During the eclipse of 2017, they even spent NASA resources to make a Braille book about eclipses.  What was that meant to do, taunt the blind kids?  And, yes, the Webb Space Telescope has been pretty cool.  But the Space Launch System costs about $4.1 billion per launch, and each launch takes about six months.

I was okay after I figured out alcohol could kill COVID.

Datapoint:

  • COVID-19

Every aspect of the response to COVID-19 was horrific from an economic and medical standpoint.  From an economic standpoint, the government response was to blindly throw as much cash in as many places as possible as quickly as that could.  This was a bipartisan effort.

The panic and hypocrisy weren’t limited to the economic response, no.  The medical response was just as inept, as Fauci now admits he just made things up as some sort of medical theater.  Ventilators appear to have killed more people than they saved.  The abomination of the “Vaxx” has led to an excess mortality that many reckon has a body count higher than COVID itself.  I, for one, really hope that everyone who took the Vaxx® recovers, but can we forget a government and its accomplices who tried (and in many cases, succeeded in forcing people to take it?

I can’t, though the GloboLeftElite surely hope you forget.  But remember, there are no refunds.

I was wondering if this was going to be too dark, but then I realized it’s all under two and a half miles of water, so of course it’s going to be dark.

Datapoint:

  • The Titan Submersible

In one sense, I certainly admire the guts that it took to build a submarine from a pressure hull and off-the-shelf parts like an X-Box™ controller, but the hubris of the owner remains:  the CEO didn’t “hire 50-year-old white guys” because they weren’t “inspirational”.  I wonder if we would have made it to orbit if Von Braun had a similar philosophy?

Well, I guess he paid the ultimate price for his hubris and disregarding competence in favor of the “inspirational” stories.  Most CEOs just lose their shareholder’s money, like Disney™, which I could write an entire post on.

The crisis we face is one where we’ve lost the capacity for competence and will to achieve that we had as recently as the 1960s even as our systems grow far more complex.  Again, one software update cost $10,000,000,000, NASA doesn’t produce spaceships that can fly with any reliability, and Boeing™ went from making some of the most reliable airplanes in the world by the thousands to a company that survives on government contracts, accounting errors, and inertia.

Maybe, though, this crisis will do what the Cuban Missile Crisis couldn’t do:

Free us from The View.  Wonder if they’d like a trip to the Titanic?