Category: BFYTW

How The Left Is Changing Society, And How To Fight: Part II

“You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords.” – Serenity

What do you call a two dead parrots?  Pollygons.

This is part two of the series on social structures and control.

Most (stress on “most”) Western Nations adopted a modified version of a new social order between 1776 and 1920.  It looked like this:

  • Absent or Figurehead Monarch: The idea of absolute rule by King melted away, and was essentially done in the first world by 1920.  I mean, we dudes all still dream about it, but it’s gone.
  • Government Bureaucrats: The core of government power now flowed into an unelected bureaucracy that was, more or less, immune to election.  When governed by a Constitution, this was good.  When governed by avarice, not so much.  Thankfully, most of the bureaucrats in the twentieth century were governed by bad eyesight and a to close the window for lunch, if the DMV is any clue.
  • Elected Leadership: The idea that elected leaders subject to the will of the people would be the ones to run the government was a noble one.  Sadly, we started electing at least some dirtbags from the start.
  • Military Leaders: A professional military, generally subservient to the civilian leaders but still with cool uniforms.
  • Clergy: A strong church presence, though unofficial, was still the backbone of the country’s morality.  Some priests even became lawyers, or what we would call a father-in-law.
  • Constitution: At least in the United States, the Constitution was the basis of civic religion for the majority of the people.  In other countries, there were other things, like Great Britain and the King or Queen or Meghan Markle.  It was a basis for the foundation of the nation (or, country).
  • Big Business: In the twentieth century, big business (including big banking) finally grew to the point that it was able to be a primary force in society, providing products and jobs for the voters, donations for the leadership class, and, apparently, lots of fedoras.
  • Middle Class: This was the engine of prosperity – working to build the economy.  For a large part of the twentieth century government policy was focused on increasing this segment, since they were the spark plugs that both worked the line for GM® as well as ran the plants.
  • Lower Class: The big goal of most first world nations was to shrink this class, through education and sometimes direct payments.  Making them productive, it was felt, would be a win for civilization as a whole.

Although not optimum, this version of civilization was built on a solid structure that focused on the atom:  the family.  It tried to take feedback from voters, protect their rights, and create wealth and happiness for most.  It was an example of what happens when the people and the economy and the government more or less agree on virtue as the basis of society.

If honesty is a virtue, why doesn’t anyone want to hear the truth?

Yes, there were flaws.  But compared to today?

The flaws were miniscule.  It actually worked very, very well.  For a while.  But what was happening when the Left was in charge?  Well, you got a very, very different structure.

That’s not the power structure of most modern-day dictatorships.  That power structure assumes a Dear Leader, secret police, no church, a frightened military, and everyone else shoved into the frightened peasant class.  The culture there has nothing to do with any traditions, has nothing to do with religion, has nothing to do with trust (trust no one is the motto in lands with a secret police) and has nothing to do with Truth, Virtue or Beauty, since those are viciously stamped down if they conflict with the will of Dear Leader.

  • Dear Leader: The top was an individual.  Certainly, there were committees, but the basis was an individual.    Lenin.  Mao.  Kim.  The government didn’t revolve around them:  they were the government.
  • Secret Police: Dear Leader can’t be everywhere, all the time, so the next best thing was a hated and feared secret police.  Is it better to be hated or feared?  If you are Dear Leader, you want both.  You want the people to fear the secret police, but you also want the people to hate the secret police so that they could never govern.
  • Scared, Weak Military: Dear Leader needs a military, but they need to be scared of being replaced or killed.
  • Scared, Weak Bureaucrats: If the guys with tanks are scared, what hope do they have?
  • Scared, Weak Everyone Else: If the guys who assign Boris his Commieflat are scared, what hope does Boris have?

What size soda does Kim order?  A supreme liter.

The atom of a dictatorship isn’t a family, it’s an individual.  The goal of a dictatorship is weak families and no middle class.  The goal is to create distrust and to have parents not trust their children, nor spouses trust each other.  One of the first actions of the commie Spanish Republic was to make abortion legal, and eliminate marriages because they wanted to “make women equal”.

The reality was the Spanish commies wanted to destroy family ties so that the state was the unquestioned leader.  This creates a different kind of stability – one based on constant fear and no trust.  I wonder if that sounds familiar to anyone?

We are watching most of the Western World morphing from their old structure into the structures that Dear Leader would love.

  • Uniparty: Most of the Democrat mainstream and Republican mainstream have the same “values”, with only a variation or two.  The Republicans acted like the neighborhood dog that finally caught the car when the Supreme Court revoked the absolute right of women to kill babies “because it’s Tuesday” and had no real plans.  Abortion was a fundraiser, not a real issue to them.
  • Converged Bureaucrats: Bureaucrats in the FedGov are now out only for themselves and the bureaucracy they serve.  The ATF doesn’t care if you have guns, really.  The ATF just wants to have funding and to be able to shoot the family dog on Tuesdays.
  • Incipient Police State: Don’t think we have a police state that hands out unfair punishments?  Type “January 6” into a search engine sometime . . .
  • A Vanishing Clergy: Church used to be an important touchstone – in the 1950s some banks wouldn’t give a mortgage if the pastor of your church didn’t speak favorably about your character.  Extreme?  Probably not – it kept a place in the community for virtue.  The goal of the Left is that they have the monopoly on defining virtue.  Hey, Live, Laugh, Love, right?
  • A Captive Press: When was the last time anyone in the Mainstream Media actually tried to challenge The Narrative?  Oh, yeah, Tucker Carlson.
  • Twisted Constitution: The Constitution of the United States was written on plain language so the common citizen could understand it.  Now?  Emanations and penumbras and twisting of “thou shalt not” into “thou shalt” has made Constitutional law like a game of limbo – how low can you go?  That the Civil Rights Act is now more important than actual Constitutional protections is all you need to know.
  • Subservient Military: Obama spent a lot of time and effort clearing out high-level officers in the military that weren’t on the Left.  Notice that none of the top brass pushed back against the vaxx mandate?
  • Big Business: Big business has always had inordinate power due to their size and the amount of money they control (this includes big banks).  During the last 40 years big business has dominated and destroyed most profitable small business niches.  This results in a . . .
  • Much Smaller Middle Class: The middle class is smaller and poorer than at any time in my life.  This is getting ready (over the next two years) to get much worse.
  • Everyone else: This is the goal – that 80% plus of the population are stuck, working paycheck to paycheck, unable to accumulate wealth, and having their saved money inflated away.

The values of this brave new world aren’t anchored by any sort of church.  Values in 2023 move around every day at the whim of the Left.  It’s all coordinated, too.  Whatever value that they want is pushed through channels to the public, often with movies and television shows backing it up using emotionally laden content to transmit the message.  Remember those “very special episodes”?  Yup, all of them were propaganda.

But he was such a good boy.  Never hurt anyone.

They had left the Internet and alternative media alone.  Probably, it was left for a safety valve and because most Normies get their news and opinions from Mainstream sources.  In reality, especially in the aftermath of Trump being meme’d into office in 2016, the hammer has started to come down.  Information wants to be free, but the Left has taken the Dear Leader approach to information.

Ever notice that comment segments on news stories went from “nearly every news story has one” to “Comment section?  What’s that?” in a span of just a few years?  The problem was that people in the comment section were making too much sense.  The people in the comment section were exposing the lies in the news stories.  They had to be dealt with.

Websites like mine have been “detuned” from the search algorithms.  This makes it harder for normies to find places that have unapproved ideas.  YouTube® has veered into censorship, having kicked podcasts off the air for simply arguing against the vaxx or agreeing with the very real possibility that the 2020 elections were hijacked.

My computer started to cuss after the processor got too hot.  I had to install a heat censor.

But not all is lost.  Elon Musk has made “Community Notes” a thing.  They’re a way to point out the Lies of the Left and those that hate Truth, Beauty, Steak, Families, and Nations.

This is how they’re targeting us, and how they have targeted us over decades.  The wonderful part is that we have Truth, Beauty, Steak, Families and the power of Nations on our side.  And people are waking up – 30% to 40% of all voters (not just those on the Right) believe the 2020 election was illegitimate.  This is despite widespread censorship of this idea.

Keep spreading the Truth.  Practice virtue and push your church (if you have one) to be more virtuous, rather than another Leftist conquest.  Starve Big Business, when you can.  Buying from local farmers gives them more money and keeps the money away from people who hate you.

If your misery is caused by paranoia, I can tell you you’re not alone.

We can’t wait until plate tectonics splits California off into an island, and the good news is that we won’t have to.  As I’ve said before, we will win.

We are inevitable.

How The Left Is Changing Society, And How To Fight: Part I

“Looks like civilization finally caught up with us.” – Firefly

The invention of the shovel was groundbreaking, but everyone was blown away by the invention of the fan.

This is part one of a two-part series, it just got too big. Part two is written and I’ll post on Wednesday.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how and why the wheels are coming off of our civilization. Why? I don’t know – I’ve been worried about it since I was a wee Wilder and became concerned that plate tectonics wouldn’t split California off soon enough.

We see evidence of the collapse all the time but sometimes have a hard time putting our fingers on exactly what is driving it all from a structural standpoint. That’s why I’m here to help. Don’t worry. I’m a trained professional.

The social structure of stable societies isn’t an accident. When people were wandering around in nomadic tribes, I’m not sure exactly how things went down, but I do know that once civilization started taking root (so we could have beer, really, link below), the basic unit of civilization was set as the family in any sort of civilization that produces wealth, has reasonable freedoms, exhibits virtue (Truth, Beauty, Steak) and has any sort of stability.

Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer

Think of a mom, dad, and kids. In a stable society, that’s essentially the atom. Often in the West we’re inundated with the idea of individual rights, and those do exist, but the biggest failing of those rights (in my opinion, and I’m right) is where those rights contradict the stability of the family. Atoms are at their most stable when all of the parts are in place – an atom missing electrons is an ion, and I could explain using hydroxide ions, but that’s pretty basic. And let’s not even get started on isotopes.

Why was 6 afraid? Because she could be discovered by the crew of the Battlestar Galactica at any time. And you thought I was going to say, “because seven ate nine.”

Divorce, for instance, is bad for family stability. Duh. Making divorce easy is thus attacking the core of the structure of civilization. Those on the Left who hate society are always attacking the family, and what better way to shatter it than divorce. Oh, wait, there’s birth control and abortion.

While a man and a woman, married (to each other) constitutes a family, that family is truly completed by children. We’re humans, but we’re also animals – there is an innate drive to reproduce and have offspring and then yell inappropriately at little league games. There has to be something strong about the need to reproduce, because babies are so objectionable and worthless. Really. I mean, I’ve never even seen a toddler I couldn’t trounce in wrestling.

So, the atom of society isn’t the individual – it’s the family. Families, not video games or pantyhose, are why civilization exists – it exists because of us, and it also exists for us. If a civilization doesn’t have children, it ceases to exist.

Once I found out that my pizza was burnt, my beer was frozen, and my wife was pregnant. I guess I’m just not good at taking things out in time.

This has some pretty significant implications, since so much of policy (especially Leftist, but the Right is not clean in this, either) is now actively hostile to the family. Examples:

  • Housing Prices: Leftists import hordes of illegals to increase prices and demand, and also make so many rules that building a house is more expensive.
  • Taxes: Leftists want to punish high earners (but not wealthy folks, there’s a difference) to keep the wife in the workforce to keep her from having kids.
  • Divorce Law: Divorce should be as easy as possible, there should be no requirement for fault (which would make cheaters guilty), there should be no consequences to the woman (who initiate the vast majority of divorce) except for fun and prizes.
  • Custody Law: Children should be part of the fun and prizes for divorce, and used to incentivize divorce for women through child support.
  • Alimony: Let’s make the man pay, even if the woman initiated divorce.
  • Propaganda that Women Must Work: This is deep, and is put into the heads of women that they are somehow “less than” if they aren’t working making PowerPoints®.
  • Propaganda that Women Must Have It All®: This one is the YOLO tag, making women feel unsuccessful if they don’t party away their youth and fertility with many, many men.

There’s more, of course, and I could probably write another 10,000 words about how society is actively hostile to the family and the very concept of parental authority. But you see it every day. You’re swimming in it – starting all the way back to inept fathers being the butt of jokes in sitcoms, and the “single mom don’t need no man” trope that started back in the 1970s.

In the 1980s lots of kids had single moms. Now some even have two.

So, that’s one part of the attack. But society isn’t made up of just random families wandering around – instead, there’s a structure to civilization, just like there’s a structure to, say, a beer bottle or the underwire in a bra. One such structure is kinship. Japanese people are all, on a basic level, related to each other and share the same culture.

This basic “being related to each other” is what distinguishes a nation (nation having the Latin root of natio, meaning “birth, origin, race of people, tribe) from a country. A country is just some random folks living in the same place, like New York City. A nation is a group of people who are all much more closely related, like Modern Mayberry, where if you moved here 15 years ago, you’re still one of those newcomers.

Since The Mrs. has kin here going back into the 1880s, she’s covered, but they’re always going to think I’m a bit sketchy.

Why was the mushroom the life of the party? Because he was giving away cocaine.

But kinship should not be underrated. When you look at the happiest country surveys, at the top are nations that have a disproportionate amount of people that are closely related, genetically. You trust your family more, and you’re less likely to cheat them, except at Thanksgiving while playing Monopoly®. Because of that, countries that are all of one nationality can be higher trust with lower corruption, if they aren’t tribal (looking at you, India and Pakistan and all of Africa).

Want to break up a country? After you’re done with the family, aim for disruption of the nation by introducing unlike people that have virtually nothing in common with the native stock in huge numbers. There’s a reason that nations of generally related people exist: it’s more stable.

If you wake up being chased by a lion while on a horse, and next to you is a giraffe and a hippo, what do you do? Get off the carousel and check into rehab.

Beyond the general nature of the family, there is an importance to the structure of society itself. One of the more stable structures of society in history was the feudal model. It consisted of several different classes of people:

  • Monarchy: Generally, the overall boss (when strong), who kept the whole thing in check. Needed: strong neck muscles to hold a big crown.
  • Lesser Nobles: Lieutenants, who administered smaller areas of varying size to keep those running. Needed: ability to bow.
  • Clergy: Served as an overall legitimacy, and also a diplomatic corps between nations. Needed:
  • Merchants: Made sure people had fish. Needed:
  • Professionals: I’m tossing artisan and guild member in here who had mad skills making stuff that society needed. And bankers. Needed: fluffy shirts.
  • Peasants: Someone has to milk the bull. Needed:

Each of these units played a part, and the power varied from place to place, and time to time. One of the most amusing things is when there were too many nobles, so kings would have to come up with wars to kill them off, because no one likes tons of bored yappy nobles around. Just ask Meghan Markle when King Charles ships her off to fight Argentina. Singlehandedly.

Sometimes the nobles were stronger than the king, thus the Magna Carta. Sometimes the clergy was stronger than the king, thus Cromwell. Sometimes the king was stronger than the clergy, thus the Avignon papacy. Even peasants got into the mix, with Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in England making King Richard II put on his brown pants.

Why do dairy cattle have hooves? Because they lactose.

Each part of the society could (and did) cause difficulty if the power that they shared got too far out of control. The Merchants and Professional classes were mainly in a support role, but they provided administrative and logistical support for everyone, and the bankers especially definitely led to many, many shenanigans.

Thus endeth ye olde parte the first.

14 Signs Of An Unfree Country

“Keep working on the window if we’re ever going to regain our freedom.” – Star Trek TOS

The homeless voted for Obama.  They heard he’d bring change.

I hadn’t heard of Benjamin Carlson until today.  I had another post that I was planning on doing, but when the perfect content presents itself I become as flexible as a Romanian Olympic® gymnast whose parents are watching from the GULAG breakroom.

Carlson wrote about his time living in China as a journalist.  The title for his X® thread is, “What can an unfree society teach you about freedom?”  In it there are 14 lessons that he learned in China.  He’s now warning us about them, for, I guess, reasons.

All the bolded bits are Mr. Carlson’s words.  The other bits are mine, since I want to give Mr. Carlson credit, but don’t want anyone to think he endorses any of my interpretations, opinions, or bad jokes.

  1. People will adapt to oppression sooner than they will rebel.

That is true of a compliant people.  The makeup of heritage Americans is anything but compliant – to come across an ocean to hack a life from trackless wilderness is mostly the opposite of compliant.  Different people came here for different reasons, but the big takeaway is a lot of us have oppositional defiant disorder, but the good kind.

But that doesn’t get them into Congress (except for a handful) and it doesn’t get people invited into fancy parties and offered media access.  But still, many people reject petty oppression, and are willing to stand up against it.  New Mexico’s recent utter rejection of a wine-aunt governor blatantly violating all the Constitutions she said she’d uphold made me smile.

I have a guess that at least part of the desire to import the unending hordes of illegal aliens at a breakneck pace is related to the desire to have a much more compliant people – people who come here for the give-me-that’s and whose idea of America has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with a parasitical relationship where they benefit.  They’re used to oppression and okay with it, they just want to be comfortable.

What’s ET short for?  So he can fit in the spaceship.

  1. The most effective censorship is first legal, then social, then internal.

Legal censorship is difficult in the United States, though the government has several cases against Trump that rely on him having opinions they find “problematic”.  Social censorship means that certain ideas can’t really be expressed.  Ever wonder why the comment section of the online newspapers mostly disappeared?  The last thing they want is people realizing they’re not alone.  This causes social censorship to fail.  At least among people who can read.

Lastly is internal censorship, when the Truth is so obvious that everyone sees it, yet everyone is afraid to say anything.  Not that I’d mention an election or anything . . . .

  1. A repressive system makes selfish behavior rational.

Look at the looting that is pervasive across Leftist cities.  Why?  Because laws are only to be enforced against people on the Right.  Therefore?  Free Air Jordans™.

I heard he was going to take another stab at marriage.

  1. Ruining 1 person who threatens the regime sends a message that will be heard by 10,000.

People broke stuff on January 6, and some used violence.  But the vast majority were just dudes walking around the Capitol Building.  Yet the harshest penalties are being used against them, including inhumane conditions in prison.

Why?  See point 4. above.

  1. If you can limit the words people use, you can limit the thoughts they think.

Why do you think they demand that calling someone an illegal alien be banned?  Why do you think they want to call a baby a fetus?  Why do you think they want to call anything “gender affirming” care?

They want to change the dialogue, and that means making the words you use socially unacceptable.  This is never ending, and will continue until the word “bad” is replaced by “double-plus-ungood”.

What is the most macho musical instrument?  The MANdolin.

  1. Even decent people will choose to be blind if seeing injustice would hurt their interests.

Why do most cops go-along to get-along?  Yeah, this, but it’s not just cops – any location where people close ranks to avoid scrutiny is suspect.  What happens when the entire country looks that way because there are people you can’t criticize?

  1. If the government lies, many will still accept it as true because of the authority of the office.

This is becoming less true in the United States – look at the pushback on COVID.  I think the trust level has dropped.  Yet, still, 20%-40% of the citizens of the country will believe whatever they’re told by Joe Biden and Stephen Colbert.

  1. Destroying a people’s cultural & religious identity, severing them from their history, punishing their defenders, and making them ashamed of who they are, is a brutally effective way to annihilate a threat.

When Thomas Jefferson’s statue is removed by New York City, and they’re thinking of bringing down all of the George Washington statues and the people who founded the United States are being vilified?  Yeah.  It’s already in full swing

  1. The goal of an unfree system is to protect itself by transferring your distrust of the state to fellow citizens.

According to the Left, Catholics and “White Supremacist” groups are the greatest threats to the United States, despite being responsible for fewer deaths than a Chicago Labor Day weekend.

If only they would have played the national anthem, everyone at the BLM® riots would have sat down.

  1. In an unfree society, the wealth and privileges amassed by politicians become state secrets.

Elizabeth Warren makes $174,000 a year, but her total earnings were $1.36 million last year.  Bill Clinton was broke in 2000, but has at least $90 million today, excluding his Foundation.  Why don’t people know this or care?

  1. If the government shows it has your interest at heart, many are happy to trade freedoms for it.

I’m sure everyone can give plenty of examples.  One lesson I learned is that when people want to give you something, that’s generally because they want something in return.  To be clear, this doesn’t always have to be manipulative, since if after I feed Pugsley, I typically want him to take the trash out after I remind him three times to do it.  I think the three times is just because he wants me to feel like I’m part of the process.

When the government gives, it wants control.

  1. Corruption corrupts everything.

If 10% for the Big Guy is the norm, why shouldn’t everyone take a cut?  Corruption corrupts, and it takes time and relentless effort to root it out.

  1. Even politicians who fight like dogs will protect one another against the people.

The Clintons and Obamas sure look cozy with the Bush family.

My doctor told me I had a healthy prostate.  I was deeply touched.

  1. History must continually be rewritten to serve the purposes of the present.

I’ve touched on this on countless posts and touched on this above.  The history has to be changed from the glorious story of a proud people taming a continent.  The truth has to be replaced with a cursed and infected lie so that the political needs of the Left can be met.  It has to be universal – on television, movies, the Internet, YouTube®, and anywhere people go.

Orwell saw many of these and they’re in his books, 1984 and Animal Farm.  Carlson, I’m sure, has read these and also experienced them.

Just like we are beginning to experience them now.

I could have written much more, but I think I’ll leave it up to you to add in comments about Mr. Carlson’s points.  The good news is you don’t have to be a gymnast to appreciate it.  Besides, I’ve heard that the Eastern Europeans are now into Olympic® boating events.  I guess they’re in row-mania.

Mandela Effect, John McAfee, And Whale Sex

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet

If someone commits first degree murder in Canada, is that 34 degrees in non-metric murder?

The posts have been pretty heavy recently, so I thought I’d do a changeup before we dig back into the heavy stuff next week.  I’ll start with a bit about John McAfee:

John McAfee was being interviewed by Wired magazine back in 2013 (LINK).  In the middle of the interview, McAfee pulls out a revolver and dumps the ammo.  “This is a bullet, see?”

The interviewer responded:  “Let’s put the gun back.”

McAfee puts a single bullet back in the revolver and spins the cylinder, which holds only five bullets.  From the article:

Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession.

There are only five chambers. “Reholster the gun,” I demand.

He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. “I can do this all day long,” he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. “I can do this ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong.”

To be fair, a good stage magician could do this, so I have to doubt it since I wasn’t there.  And McAfee?  While he was a “presidential candidate” he Tweeted® out about the really important issues of the day:

Really.

This is probably number one in my category of “answers to questions no one really ever asked” file.  But, yeah, John McAfee actually Tweeted© that.

The closest argument is that, if the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, John McAfee really does die a lot in alternate realities, like all those Mario® corpses I accidently killed by walking into turtles in Super Mario Brothers™.

What’s the Many Worlds interpretation?  Simply this, that whenever a clerk asks “paper or plastic” the answer is “yes”.  When there’s a decision or a probability that something happens, all the things happen.  The catch, though, is that the Universe branches at this point, and those decisions and probabilities themselves bring new universes into being.

I won’t go into the details, since you can read if you’re interested and you’d be bored if you’re not, and I’ll bet the incredibly intelligent Frequent Commentors will engage in a lively debate as to the relative crackpot level of Many Worlds.  For this post, let’s just call it a convenient way to create a nearly infinite number of parallel universes right next door, but (probably) disconnected from our reality.

I put in the probably because for a long time I’ve thought that the Many Worlds interpretation might explain the Mandela Effect pretty well.

I actually ran into the Mandela Effect before it existed during a conversation with The Mrs. one evening.  We were watching a TV’s Funniest Game Shows on Fox® when we were newly married.  Richard Dawson was narrating.  I have written about this once before, but this is a (slightly) different take.

Me:  “What?  Richard Dawson is dead.  He died in 1989 of lung cancer.  I remember reading it in the paper one morning.”  In fact, I remember it specifically as in January or February of that year.

The Mrs.:  “Yup, I remember the same thing.”

I used the pull-start on my Briggs & Stratton two-stroke Pentium® computer and dialed into the Internet and, after the modem made those squeaky-fuzzy sounds found . . . Dawson was alive.  This was despite The Mrs. and I having had exactly, down to the month, the same memory of his death, from the same time and cause.

I wonder if parking would be difficult in a parallel universe?

It’s not called the Richard Dawson effect, it’s called the Mandela effect because a group of people were convinced that South African leader communist Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s, versus his actual death in 2013, and this surfaced around 2010.

One of the biggest examples of this that people share is something simple – the Fruit of the Loom® label.  I had a memory of this logo looking as a variety of fruit sitting in front of a fruit cornucopia.  I even asked (while The Mrs. was cooking dinner a few years ago) for The Mrs. to describe the logo.

The Mrs.:  “An apple, and some grapes, maybe another fruit, all sitting in front of a cornucopia.”

Me:  “Which side is the cornucopia on?”

The Mrs.:  “The right side.”

I showed her the picture below of the logo with the cornucopia.

“Yes, that’s it, exactly.”

Except the Fruit of the Loom™ people say they’ve never had a logo with a cornucopia.  They say they’ve never had a cornucopia in their logo, though they been asked about it plenty.  But it’s not just me.  The painter of the album cover for the 1973 album Flute of the Loom had some thoughts about the logo:

And the way I remembered it on my t-shirts and underwear?  This logo looks exactly like it, though I’m nearly certain it’s a fake:

The only other really big one for me is the character of Jaws from the James Bond movie Moonraker.  I’m not old enough to have seen it in theaters, so, like every male since forever, I was watching it on TV the night it premiered for the first time on network TV.

Back then, every guy at school had seen Moonraker the night before.  And the one scene that made us all laugh?  When the great, hulking character Jaws had been rescued by a tiny little blonde girl named Dolly.  Jaws smiles at Dolly, exposing his metal-filled mouth.  And the funny, payoff scene is when Dolly smiles back, and exposes a mouth filled with braces.  Love at first sight, and hilarious.  You can see it in the clip below:

This is exactly how I remember it.  Exactly.  And exactly what the guys were talking about at school.  And, like the t-shirt above, it’s almost certainly a fake, too.

When I discussed the scene with The Mrs., despite never watching Moonraker together, she remembered the braces as well.  In her words, “Without the braces, the scene just doesn’t make sense.”

But when I checked the streaming version of the movie, well, no braces on Dolly.

Can I explain Richard Dawson, Fruit of the Loom©, and Dolly?

No, I can’t.  And the memories are interesting because they’re so very specific.  It’s almost like there’s something else at play.  Back to the Wired article on John McAfee:

To illustrate his point, he takes out his pistol. ” Let’s do this one more time,” he says, and puts it to his head.

Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly and nothing happens. “It is a real gun. It has a real bullet in one chamber,” he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have proven faulty. I’m missing something.

. . . I’m not seeing the world as he sees it. He opens the door to the bungalow, aims the gun at the sand outside and pulls the trigger. A gunshot punctures the sound of the wind and waves. “You thought you were creating your reality,” he says. “You were not. I was.”

He pulls the spent cartridge out of the chamber and hands it to me. It’s still warm.

If John McAfee really is dead, you damn well better believe it’s consensual.

We Already Know The Solutions

“Watch your top knot.” – Jeremiah Johnson

Bill Clinton thought Hillary would be a good president:  “There’s no chance she’ll blow it.”

Alexander the Great is said to have solved the riddle of the Gordian Knot in 333 B.C.  Whoever solved the Knot, the legend said, would rule all of Asia.  Alexander took one look at the large and complex knot, pulled out his sword and cut right through it.  I think Alexander was certain that he’d be successful and that no one would challenge his solution since he had, you know, an army with him.  I guess you could say he was so confident that he was knot sure.

One of the things that I’ve seen fairly consistently in my life is that, like Alexander, I generally know the answer right when I see the problem.  Some of them, like calculus problems, it took a lot of work to get the answer, admittedly, but there was no place when I said, “Well, if only the Federal government had a Federal Bureau of Solving Calculus problems, I’d be set.”  No.  I knew the only answer was for me to sit down and hack through that calculus problem until I had it solved.

Most problems in life are just that simple.  Too hot in the living room?  Get a fan.  Turn the air conditioning down.  Experiment to see how many cold beers it takes to make me feel cold.  But I never think to act on that until I’m uncomfortable.  When I’m slightly warm, I don’t go running for the fan, I just deal with it.  But when I start to sweat?

Time to take action.

What does a hipster say to create peer pressure?  “C’mon, man, no one is doing it!”

I think most people are like this, not just me.  Sure, there are things I do when I anticipate a problem coming down the road to save myself the trouble.  But like that room temperature slowly rising, at some point I look at the situation and note, “This must be dealt with.”  But I always knew the solution.

The solution itself isn’t the issue.  Most solutions are mind-numbingly clear.  The level of frustration or fear or whatever motivating me just has to be high enough that I’m willing to take the action necessary to solve the problem. To be clear, I also have to believe that my action might work – if I think the air conditioner is broken, for instance, I won’t bother to go over to turn it on and will stick with the whole “drink a lot of really cold beer” idea.

The above paragraph contains all three of dead economist Ludwig Von Mises’ causes of Human Action.  Von Mises said for anyone to take conscious action, for any action three things needed to be present:

  • A Vision of a Better State
  • A Path to That Better State
  • Belief That Following the Path Will Take Us to That Better State.

While I’m focusing on today is when we already know what we want, I’ll just noted that it doesn’t have to come in that order.

It turns out my chemistry teacher was right – alcohol is a solution.

On a personal level, I have to be uncomfortable enough from where I am and where I could be to initiate action.  The Vision has to be sufficiently far from where I am for me to care.  But, again, I generally know the solution, it just requires enough discomfort to create action.  If my air conditioner isn’t working in December, that’s not a big deal.  If it has failed in July, that’s where I’m willing to pay extra to see the repair folks show up on a Sunday afternoon because the liquor stores are closed then.

Other examples – I don’t paint my house when it’s a little faded, I might need to see some bare spots.  I wait until the trashcan is maybe slightly more than full to take it out.  But in each case the action isn’t in question.  I always know the solution.  It’s not a mystery.

It’s similar as a society.  In a society, we all have the ability to act as individuals, but there is some minimum number of people that are required to take action.  One group, the 3%ers, took their name from the idea that only 3% of the American Colonial population fought and won against the British.  I’m not sure that 3% is correct; that’s irrelevant to the post.

Why did the chicken cross the playground?  To get to the other slide.

Certainly, that’s a minimization, because if there hadn’t been broad support for the American Revolution anyway, it wouldn’t have happened.  Rather, I am certain that group of fighters represented the symptom of a greater dissatisfaction.

Everyone on the side of the Revolution knew what had to be done.  If you take a few minutes to re-read the Declaration of Independence, it certainly spells out the vision, and also spells out the reasons why it was important to take the action.

Of the signers, at least John Hancock had belief that the actions would work, since he signed his name so boldly and largely.  And John Hancock never told a knock-knock joke.  Why?  Freedom rings, baby.

For each of the societal ills we see, the solution isn’t complex, it’s simple.  We just haven’t had the guts to implement it.  If mobs are ruling the streets of San Francisco or Chicago or Malmo, the solution isn’t to study the problem with a commission.  The solution is to make crime much more uncomfortable than the reward for committing the crime.

I’m glad Godzilla® wasn’t Korean.  That would have been Seoul destroying.

That solution to stopping crime will involve dead criminals.  Oddly, it takes less to keep criminals in line than to stop criminality, but the solution almost always involves Rooftop Koreans and bar owners with very short shotguns and prosecutors that don’t prosecute good and honest people stopping crime.

If the problem is illegals flooding the southern border, the only actual solution is to make living in the United States a living hell for illegals.  I assure you, if sufficient pressure was applied, the illegals would deport themselves in weeks.

Have an anchor baby?  Fine.  It goes into an orphanage or with foster parents.  Illegals have to leave.  Something tells me the parents will pack up the kids as they head out.

Brought here as a young child and the United States is the only country they’ve ever known?  Not my problem.  They have to go back.

Drugs?  Simple solution.  I’ll leave that one to you.

Illegitimate kids?  Remove spousal support and child support and welfare.  Illegitimate kids will cease in a year and the baby-daddy with 20 different baby-mommas will disappear while those baby-mommas cease to have sex randomly.  Or, if they do?  They have to suffer the consequences.

What about the kids?  Yeah, heard it.  Don’t care.  It’s that sort of forced compassion that destroys nations, turns them into countries, and eventually leads to Balkanization.

I fell into the reupholstery machine at the furniture factory.  I’m completely recovered now.

I’m right and every person reading this knows it.

The wonderful part is that these solutions will take place.  Sadly, because the room is getting warmer, these solutions will take place only when the discomfort is so high that it will be unpleasant for all concerned.

And then, once again, the Gordian Knot will be solved.

You Are The Rebellion

“This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Kenobi, it will soon see the end of the Rebellion.” – Star Wars:  Episode IV, A New Hope

What’s red and smells?  Rudolf’s nose.

I still regret going to the Star Wars™ movie that came out in 2015.  It was bad enough I had to look up the name – The Force Awakens.  I did wonder about one thing – it was clear after the first trilogy that the rebels won.  The Empire® was defeated, the Emperor© was dead, and people were partying on all the planets that the tyranny had been defeated, even if they had way better uniforms.

No, according to this movie, clearly the rebels had spiked the ball in the end zone at the buzzer and . . . lost.  In The Force Awakens, the Empire™ was in fine order, except run by a teenager with mommy issues who ran a galactic empire despite the fact that he was an observable and miserable moron.  The movie was awful.  The only thing that could have been worse is if the Rebellion® had been made up of Han Solo clones because someone said “Many Hans make light work.”

Why did James Dean cross the road?  Because he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.

But Leftists seemed to love this awful movie.  Why?

Because they have the pathological need to be the victim, like the Rebellion in the original Star Wars©.  And who is more the victim that the righteous rebel, working against a monolithic government composed of evil people?

That’s still what Leftists think in 2023 when they have already consolidated power over:

  • Electoral College voting rules,
  • Most federal bureaucracies,
  • The FBI,
  • The CIA,
  • Academia,
  • The general officers of the military,
  • Most Fortune® 500 companies (Disney™ isn’t an exception), and
  • The executive branch.

If the voting irregularities from 2020 are repeated in 2024 (and there’s no reason to expect they won’t be) then the presidency will, forever, be owned by the Left and they could put a rutabaga named Timmy into the Oval Office.  If they can get a crook with fake hair, fake teeth, and no idea what day it is “elected”, then the Left owns the presidency.

I will admit, most Democrat candidates look like they could use a hand.

And justice?  Anyone from the Left who faced federal charges for the George Floyd riots had their charges dropped, yet some people who went into the Capitol building, our Capitol building, are facing thirty years in the federal slammer while murderers regularly get off with a dozen years or less.  That’s justice in 2023.

Yet the Left still wants to be thought as the rebels.

Why?

Deep inside the mind of a Leftist is someone who hates success.  They hate people who have achieved, and they hate anything that is good, anything that is strong.  Even the Leftists in America hate America and want, at their core, to bring it all down, to watch it burn.  They say they love science, but that’s a lie – they like certain small numbers of group-think “science” when it aligns with their ideology – Climate Change® for example, and less so when it involves utterly obvious things like biological sex.

Do they hate sexism?  No.  They revel in it as long as it comes from a culture that’s weak, like the Islamic world.  Do they hate violence?  No, they love it when it happens in some third-world hellhole.  I could go on and on, but one of the things that they really hate is success, which is why they reacted so strongly to Trump’s “s**thole country” comment – they idolize failure as if it were a sacrament.

It’s nice being in Antifa – their people never have to take time off of work to protest.

I could try to psychoanalyze this victim mindset further, but, why?  Leftists are weak, and worship weakness.  There’s a reason for that:

They hate themselves, and are miserable.  Why do they lay down on the road during protests?  They want people to run them over.

The people who manipulate the Leftists aren’t the same as the Leftists – they really don’t hate themselves.  Nope, instead they just love power.  Think the Clintons believed in anything they said?  The same people who, when leaving the White House, stole the drapes?  They believed in one and only one thing – power.  And, apparently, nice drapery.

The reason that the Leftists are so easy to manipulate into being followers is that, for them, their victimhood forms the replacement for what would otherwise be their religion.  In Leftists, the game is to be the farthest Left.  This is the reason that, like a flock of birds that have been startled, they keep saying “True Communism™ has never been tried”.  Why hasn’t True Communism® ever been tried?  Because it wasn’t far Left enough.

You know what never gets old?  Russian and Ukrainian tank crews.

I recall reading as a much younger Wilder that the Soviets had a plan for when they took over the United States.  All of the True Believer® Leftists would be the first up against the wall.  The people on the Right?  They could deal with them because they weren’t hopeless traitors like the people on the Left.  I have no idea if this is true, since I read this when I was just a pup, but, really, it makes sense.  Would you ever trust a Leftist if the Soviets didn’t trust them?

So, that’s the Left.  They want to be seen as the rebels because they want to be seen as weak.  They even compete for victim points with a pronoun and disability Olympics®.  How many more points does a lesbian in a wheelchair score versus a black Moslem man with turbo-AIDs?

One thing most people missed about the Right is there is a significant difference.  Trump was popular because he talked about the things that we believe in.  Illegal aliens?  The wall just got 10 feet taller.

That line got cheers.

But this line?

“But I recommend taking the vaccines.  I did it.  It’s good.  Take the vaccines.”

It got booed by those faithful enough to attend a Trump rally.  Never forget this – for the Left, the Current Narrative is gospel.  For the Right, the idea is that their values matter first.

And that leads us here.

In this weird twist, the Left, who thinks they’re some sort of tough rebel group, isn’t, unless the definition of rebel is “supported by virtually all government entities and major corporations”.  The Leftist band Rage Against the Machine should really change their name to Rage Against Those Against the Machine.  Yeah, not very catchy, I know, but true.

How much cocaine did Charlie do?  Enough to kill two and a half men.

So, who are we?

We’re what the Leftists always wanted to be, the real rebels.  We stand our ground in a world that says that our values are out of date, our principles are unpopular, and that real human freedom comes from something other than a dedicated group making it so.

Something tells me the Left is going to be jealous, since we’re the real rebellion.  Oh, wait, they are already jealous; that’s why they hate us.

I must admit, it does feel good to be a rebel.  Because I know we’re going to win, if for no other reason than we are so very, very pretty.

Inversion of Values, Part 2: The Roman Empire

“Yes, sir! That’s exactly who I am and what I am, sir. A victim, sir!” – A Clockwork Orange

What’s black and white and red all over?  A victim of an industrial accident at a newspaper printing press. (All memes today are as-found)

The inversion of virtues:  I’ve written on this topic recently, but decided I needed to have another go at it.  Part of the blogging theme is that my posts are limited in space.  No one wants to read a 10,000-word post on PEZ™ on Friday morning as they drink their coffee.

Virtues make a civilization worth living in.  I’d rather live in a poor civilization with great values than a rich one with poor values, and both of those sound better than what we’ve got going on now.  And I’d suggest that our current free-fall is due to that loss of virtue.

What were Epstein’s last words before he committed suicide?  “You don’t have to do this!  I promise I won’t talk!”

Let’s compare values at the peak of Roman Civilization, the peak of Western Civilization, and what the Left is shoving down our throats right now.  For instance:

  • Rome: Worshiped gods.
  • The West: Worshiped God.
  • The Left: Worship man (atheism) or the State.

See?  Inversion.  Who did the cultures idolize?

  • Rome: Worshiped heroes.
  • The West: Worshiped heroes and Saints.
  • The Left: Worship victims.

See, that’s not hard, and yet more inversion. What about sin?

  • Rome: Sin of hubris.
  • The West: Sin of pride.
  • The Left: Sin of privilege.

I’ll just quit making inversion comments, because this is a slam dunk.  Who are the spiritual leaders?

  • Rome:
  • The West:
  • The Left: Professors, Leftie politicians.

Ideals?

  • Rome: Ideal was glory, excellence (Areté).
  • The West: Ideal was holiness, modesty, courage.
  • The Left: Social Justice, victimhood.

Ideal social class?

  • Rome: Warriors and those who served their fellow men.
  • The West: The middle class.
  • The Left: The lower class, victims, victims, victims.

Even a virtue, charity, has been turned from a voluntary act that provides spiritual growth in the terms of the classic West, to taxation to provide forced “charity” to the (often) undeserving.

I’m thinking I don’t want to know how my tax dollars are spent because I’m afraid all mine went to buy crack pipes in San Francisco.

This inversion bleeds over into all of society.  “Drag Queen Story Hour”?

Wonder why they don’t read to old folks in nursing homes, or to the blind?  Whenever I hear about that, my mind sees:

And then there are questions that are more difficult to answer:

Inversion, of course, shows up in the obvious things:

Jazz Jennings is a transgender person who feels no need to change with no sense of irony:

And their goal is that you will live and produce and that you should be okay with not being meaningful or having any joy, so live in the pod, and eat the bugs, wagie.

And we now have a Marine Corps who worries about people’s feelings.  Perhaps they’ll land with Nerf™ guns so that they won’t have their feelings hurt.

But the pushback is well underway.  Or overweigh:

But there’s a catch:

And I think this has broken the Left, mentally:

And the internal contradictions in their “victimhood” matrix are starting to show:

Canada has shown that it certainly can’t be trusted with the power of life and death:

The inversion has hit, but people (and maybe Higher Powers) are pushing back.  And, I think we will win.  Why?  Because we’re so very pretty.  And?  PEZ®.

Bud Light: “You Never Go Full Bud Light.” Ben And Jerry’s: “Hold My Beer.”

“Lt. Uhura, you’ve interrupted my song. I’m sorry, but there’ll be no ice cream for you tonight.” – Star Trek, TOS

I hear that they’re going to release their famous, “Everyone I don’t like is Hitler” flavor.

I think I might have had Ben & Jerry’s® ice cream once, probably 20 years or more ago.  It was not especially memorable.  I think the flavor was something like, Kill Those Who Worship Jesus Crunch, but I sure couldn’t taste the hate.  It was more of a pistachio flavor.

I can certainly remember the first company that I said, “I’m not going to buy your stuff because you hate me”, and that was Levi Strauss & Co.© products, including anything made by Dockers™.  Why?  They committed to the abolition of private gun ownership sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s.  Although I hadn’t heard the phrase BFYTW, it was my BFYTW moment.  I resolved to not buy things from people who hated me.

Sadly, Levi’s® is still in business.

On Monday, I wrote about the Frankfurt School, a dedicated group of commies that dedicated their lives to destroying all that is good and wholesome in the world in order to replace it with soulless communism.  I imagine they were great at parties.  Monday’s post, rather, was about how there was a continual attack on the people of the West about their history.

The funny thing about being exposed to the idea that there are a group of people that hate America and all it stood for is that their power diminishes.  Yeah, subtle propaganda still works even when you know about it, but in 2023 the propaganda is so unsubtle as to be confused with a Brawndo® ad.

It’s got what plants crave:  it’s got electrolytes.

You can’t unsee the propaganda.  And, you’re soaking in that propaganda.  Here’s the latest two minutes hate, delivered right on time for your 4th of July pleasure by Ben & Jerry’s™:

Ben and Jerry saw an ice cream truck in their neighborhood and ran it down.  “What do you guys want?”  “Nothing, we just wanted to tell you we’re vegan.”

Yeah, you read that right.  They just Bug Lighted® themselves.  They were trying to

I wandered over to the Twitter® comment section on this, and it was bloodier than people being stuck between Hunter Biden and a pile of cocaine.  It was worse than that, even after you factor in the mass of venereal diseases that must be the only things holding Hunter’s underwear together.  After looking through them at length, I found zero comments supporting whatever Leftist social media genius that they left with the password on July 3.

But social media from large conglomerates like Unilever®, which owns Ben & Jerry’s©, don’t do anything that isn’t planned.  Bud Light’s® problems aren’t the result of some crazy person acting on their own.  And Ben & Jerry™ intended this.

The virtue signal Ben & Jerry® was trying to light was one where Mount Rushmore would be given back to the American Indians that owned it.  Of course, the American Indians who owned it killed a batch of previous American Indians to take it, and since the place around Mount Rushmore isn’t exactly the garden spot of the world, they were kicked out of a much nicer place.

It warmed my heart that some nice person asked the most relevant question:  “Hey, Ben & Jerry’s®, why don’t you start?”

To me it’s like what I want to say to the government when they want me to give up my guns.  “You first.”

The amazing part to me is that this has nothing at all to do with ice cream.  It’s about projecting the woke values of a company owned by faceless corporate overlords to erase the history of the United States.  It has nothing to do with ice cream, and everything to do with an agenda.  After you see it, you can’t unsee it.  I’ll just re-print the relevant Stonetoss:

Burgers?

Ben & Jerry’s©, and, by proxy their corporate overlords are selling hate.  The hate?  Against you.  To be clear, this should come as a zero surprise since Ben & Jerry® hate you and want to erase you and your forefathers from history because you’re inconvenient to a business model that wants to sell only to nupeeple who are perfect economic units.

Heck, if they’re bored, they’ll remove American Indians from their products just to make nupeeple:

Is Land O’ Lakes® saying, “Keep the land, get rid of the Indians”?

Me?  I’m hoping that Ben & Jerry’s® becomes Been Gone & Jerry’s©, an out of business ice cream company that was put out of business because it hated its customers and the country that made it.  Then they can have Wilder Ice Cream©.  Maybe I’ll make a flavor called Been Gone & Jerry’s™.  That one gets most of its flavor from vanilla and me taking pleasure from Ben & Jerry’s® failing.

Dispatches From The Culture War

“Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.” – Star Trek: TNG

My body is like a Greek temple as I age.  In ruins.

There is so much going on any given news cycle in the last few months that it’s now difficult to be amazed about anything.  Credible sourcing that Joe Biden took bribes?  When asked about it, he said, “Then where’s the money?”

That’s not the way that innocent people act, rather, that’s a taunt that’s similar to a mobster saying, “You got nothin’ on me, copper.”  Biden did it, might even remember he did it, and is now telling the world that he’s above it all and doesn’t fear anything.  Of course, he’s a thousand years old now, so he’s probably pretty deep in “old guy DNGAF” mode.

Certainly, Biden (or whoever has the remote control that makes Biden say thinks like a big flesh robot) gave the nod before Trump was indicted.  This was intentional.  There is something about Trump that the Left and Official Washington and Big Money despises that caused them to set up a propaganda campaign among their followers like few before it.  They even got high on their own supply, believing that the echo chamber that they had created was a reflection of reality, rather than just their own words played back to them on an infinite-repeat loop, like I play The Accountant, or Big Trouble in Little China.

Regardless, the split is deep, and, although I don’t think Pew® has updated their Left/Right split data, I think that the split has become ever deeper.  The Los Angeles Dodgers® can’t even fathom why Catholics would protest the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBT+ group that openly mocks Christian faith.  They can’t understand why most Americans don’t want to go to war due to two oppressive Eastern European countries fighting each other over land that’s been fought over so many times that I think they’re on the Juneteenth Battle of Kharkov.

Is the smartest nun called Nun the Wiser?

Trump embraced the LGBT+ agenda explicitly, so it’s not that.  His performance on illegals, while much better than Biden’s, looked more like Obama than Eisenhower.  So, it must be the war thing, since Democrats and the Neo-Con branch of the RINO party have been all-in on Ukraine for decades.

Remember when Russia wanted to join NATO?  Sigh.

Whatever was the common core of America is no longer common.  Using Michael Savage’s mantra of borders, language, and culture to define a country (not a nation, that’s different) is a bleak exercise.

  • Borders: The Right would like some.  The Left thinks that borders are fundamentally racist and that everyone is a citizen of the United States, they just haven’t gotten here to vote for them.  Biden still thinks that Borders® is a bookstore.
  • Language: The Right would like just one, English.  The Left celebrates multiplicity of mutually unintelligible people.  A few years ago, I listened to an NPR® station that had a late night talk program that focused on the idea that it was racist if you couldn’t understand what some dude who just crossed the river or got off the boat said, regardless of how heavy and thick his accent is.  I mean, at least fish have an excuse for having a Finnish accent.

Archeologists never get married.  They’re only interested in dating.

Border and Language are in absolutely horrible shape.  Culture, of course, is the worst off.

One of the constant cries of the Left is that the United States has no culture.  This is patently a lie – fish don’t know about water because they’re surrounded by it, all the time.  So are Leftists, but they hate it.  But I said it was a lie.  Leftists do see the culture, and want to destroy it and rebuild it to fit their ideology because the last thing they want is to see happy people.  Here are just a few segments of culture, and what the Left is doing to try to destroy it.

A huge target for the Left has been the effort to dismantle the history of the West.  Slavery?  Even though it was far from a Western invention, and even though the United States fought a war to end it, and even though Great Britain used their navy to end the trade, it has been painted as only a sin of the West.  The effort is also in full swing to distort and demean every single historical figure that generations of schoolchildren idolized.  Why did the Left start tearing out statues?  Any previous hero must be destroyed so that the Leftists can choose new, acceptable heroes.

I kept making a statue of St. Peter and the city kept tearing it down.  Then they gave me a ticket – they said I was a re-Pete offender.

The customs and traditions are being erased.  Examples are everywhere, but just look toward the military of the United States for some particularly egregious examples.  I’m fairly certain the Marines will soon be issued Nerf® guns so they don’t hurt themselves.  Etiquette is also falling apart, where Americans are told that they have to conform to the etiquette of foreigners and Leftists.  Previously, it was accepted that aliens would have to adopt American customs and traditions.  In 2023, that is racist, of course.

The arts and literature of the nation are being changed.  Movies, which morphed from the pro-American fare of the Disney® era now is actively anti-American.  Thankfully, many of the ideologically driven writers, directors, and executives that are now in charge make horrible movies, but it’s clear that the last decade has brought fewer good movies than the year 1986 did by itself.  Literature now consists of horrible screeds against racism, but they’re not content with that – publishers are now actively editing works from the past to make them conform to Leftist principles.  Electronic media is all subject to that so books and DVDs might be the only way in the future to see the real deal.

Education is a cornerstone for any culture.  Vladimir Lenin said, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”  The commies have always focused on this, and they’ve done a really good job on the education centers of the world.  But it doesn’t happen all at once.  First, they grabbed the colleges.  Then, bit by bit, they grabbed each teacher that they could coming through the system and indoctrinating them into Leftism.  When I was in school, the real first wave of hardcore Leftists were hitting the schools, but it was just one or two.  Now?  Videos I’ve seen in big cities show they’re Lefty, through and through.  Even in Modern Mayberry are they attempting to take over.  Thankfully our school board is pretty good at keeping those zealots out.

And Joe is smart enough to figure out how to make a train go across the Indian and Pacific oceans!

I started writing this post on Fathers’ Day, and was amused because it’s not really Fathers’ Day anymore, it’s “I’m a single mom so I am both father and mother and this is about me” Day.  The destruction of the traditional and nuclear family structure is the first thing Leftists have attacked, from the French Revolution to the Soviet Revolution to the communist version of Spain that Franco destroyed.  It’s a shame Franco didn’t have helicopters.  The social organization of a country is the what regenerates it.  Family structures and gender roles reinforce the culture.  Every wonder why those are marked for change?

Finally, the values and beliefs of a culture help define it.  It used to be that prostitution was a dirty little secret.  Now?  Leftists argue that “sex work is real work” and Moms spend time making money on Only Fans®.  Was there hypocrisy in old America?  Sure.  But shame and ostracism were powerful motivators to keep the rot down.

I did hear that Hunter was sad because he wasn’t getting a new laptop for Christmas.

This list could go on and on – I have over 10 more categories where I could go through the same exercise, but the answer wouldn’t change and this post would then be 4,000 words and I’d get no sleep at all tonight.  The Mrs. keeps reminding me that sleep is no substitute for caffeine, and I’ll have plenty of time to rest after I’ve died.

As I’ve recently been saying, the idea isn’t to conserve our culture, since it has been turned into a smoking crater by Leftists appealing to the vanity and pride of susceptible folks.  This will end as it has always ended, since the reason American culture was successful will cease to exist as American culture ceases to exist.  From there, there will be tears.

And then?  Our job is to rebuild and restore.  And most of the people that formerly fell into the Leftist trap of dismantling the success and wholesomeness of the culture will welcome that restoration, after having seen what their depravity has created.

Rebuilding a culture takes time.  It won ‘t be done in my lifetime, but probably will be in the lifetime of my children.  And that’s good enough for me.  Our job is to keep the fire lit, and to not let the Left get away with the lie and call the destruction they’ve created to be simply called “bad luck”.

Oh, and I almost forgot!  Don’t forget to celebrate Juneteenth!

Survival Economics, 2023

“Kent Brockman here reporting on a crisis so serious it has its own name and theme music.” – The Simpsons Movie

I tried farming rabbits, but I found it a hare-raising experience.  All memes this post, as found.

Perhaps the single biggest concern I have is that we’re spending our time as a species worried about trivial stuff.  What “trivial stuff”?  How about Ukraine?  I think that’s what Kamala and Brandon would want us to focus on, but they’re stuck on vodka and sniffing children.

Ukraine?  I don’t have a side in that conflict, and steadfastly refuse to have one.  Both governments are at about the same level of totalitarianism (this isn’t me talking, this is from those organizations who measure this stuff).  I’m not going to get into it, but I can back my ambivalence up that, yeah, both sides are crap.  If Trump had a second term?  This conflict wouldn’t exist.  We still wouldn’t have a wall, but this conflict wouldn’t exist.

But Ukraine is trivial compared to the subjects everyone is avoiding:

Food, and Energy.  I originally had a third, Immigration to add to this list, but the post got too long on just the first two.  Of course, I’ll get to immigration.  Sometime.  Just like the US Border Patrol.

Let’s start with Food.

The Earth does have a finite food supply – I can prove this because sometimes the shake machine doesn’t work at McDonald’s®.  There is only so much food that can be created.  It’s large – world hunger is a solved problem at the current population level of the Earth.  We have more people than ever, and we have food to feed absolutely everyone on Earth as long as everyone doesn’t want the Stuffed Crust® pizza.  Sure, not everyone is getting filet mignon at every meal, but we have, on an absolute basis, enough calories to make sure that no one on Earth right now needs to starve.

Amy Schumer is proof of that, though I’ve heard she’s happy there’s a ban on harpooning whales.

That’s a big deal.  This is the first era in the history of life on the planet that we can say that no person on Earth needs to be hungry.  The biggest basketcase has generally been Africa, primarily because they tend to kill each other by the bucketload because it’s Tuesday and don’t have mountains and winter.

What?

Yeah, mountains and winter.  I can’t stop Tuesday from showing up.

Mountains catch snow, and snow, melting as the summer hits, keeps the rivers flowing.  The reservoirs across the United States are, in effect, artificial mountains that keep the rivers flowing when the snow isn’t there.  This also keeps a minimum amount of water flowing when the rivers would otherwise run dry so I can skip stones.

While this increases the transport opportunities available due to rivers that makes transportation cheap, it also has the most important benefit of making agriculture predictable.  This makes sure that although there are good years and bad years, those are the exceptions everywhere but Africa.  In Africa, the lack of mountains makes a good year and a bad year a random and unpredictable event.  In a world without Western Civilization this is a famine event.  In a world with the evil Western Colonialists, it means that there’s food available and nobody has to die, unless the UN has a voice.

When you average it out over the globe, however, there’s more than enough food in 2023 and the problem for most farmers in the West is that food is too cheap and too plentiful.  The only thing that stops distribution is kleptocracy – I read that European farmers can make milk, turn it to powder, and ship that powdered milk to Africa cheaper than Africans can produce milk.  This never gives the locals the ability to create a viable farm industry.  Except if Bill Gates gets involved:

In 2023, the problem isn’t too little food, it’s too much.

Yet the impulse from the Left is to:

  • Destroy Western farming because of muh climate change,
  • Implant the idea that we must eat bugs because (rolls dice) communism and muh climate change, and
  • Make all of this subject to the most stringent regulation, because that makes the Left sexually stimulated.

Even rice isn’t immune from the rage of the Left.

Just letting everyone know, she’s over 18, so perhaps someone can throw themselves on this grenade and wife her up, which might shut her up.

What people seem to miss is that this oasis in time where everything is going well.  We have

  • the technology to maximize crop yields,
  • the oil to power the machines to plant the crops,
  • the natural gas to create the fertilizer to nourish the crops, and
  • the land with the topsoil to produce the crops.

It’s clear that, despite The Mrs. being able to make a few strawberries a week from a flower pot, we can’t feed the world from one.  There is a finite limit to the production of food, and it’s very tight.

And, like every other thing on the list, we’re not serious about it.  California had a plan in the 1970s to create a series of reservoirs to give them water in amounts required to avoid droughts.  They ignored it, and now California is like a teenager, “It’s too wet.  It’s too dry.  I want to live in a mall.”  They weren’t serious about it.

And food?  One side, the Left, wants to reconfigure man and have them live in pods and eat bugs.  The other side, the Right, wants people to be free and many of them eat steak.  I’m not having trouble picking a side here, though the Leftist mind control has convinced the Zoomers that they can live via osmosis, or something:

The point is, no adults are looking at this problem, and the deluded Leftists that are looking at it fall to the same sad solution they have for every problem:  Live in the Pods, Eat the Bugs.  People are bad, so we need more communism and control.

Energy is not much better.

Just like reservoirs are artificial mountains, huge piles of lithium and batteries and infrastructure and expensive cars that sometimes let all of their electrical energy turn kinetic after a fender bender isn’t the answer.  It’s because the Leftists aren’t serious.

Let’s take a big picture look:

Oil is awesome.  It powers everything from jet fighter planes to rockets to that mysterious fire that burned down . . . oh, I’ve said too much.  It has been the primary fuel of the Western world since 1930 or so.

And it’s cool, mainly because oil is just concentrated solar power, and all of the work in making it is based on solar power.  I mean, solar in the sense that the Sun shined millions of years ago, and we’re using concentrated Sunlight from when the dinosaurs were making frozen gelato and rubbing sunscreen on their nipples in their spare time.

(Yes, I know that dinosaurs didn’t have nipples, but I rarely use nipples, and want to be known as the man who popularized dinosaur nipples.  Sue me.)

Oil is a gift.  But, like the ability of Aerosmith® to make good songs, it’s limited.  Oh, sure, it can produce billions of gallons of gasoline, but eventually it’s going to give you a Janie’s Got a Gun and then everyone will be disappointed and then everyone will notice that Stephen Tyler looks like their lesbian aunt.

I love oil.  But it is finite, and by the time this century ends, it will be the fuel of the past.  Sadly, we don’t have a replacement in sight at this point other than nuclear power or Leftism’s failures.

One way to produce nuclear power.

Windmills won’t work because the wind is fickle and electricity hard to store.  The Sun is perfect, if we have millions of years to store its wonderful energy in sweet, sweet hydrocarbons, but solar panels installed in 2000 are already starting to fill up California’s landfills.  We could count on Kamala’s stupidity, but eventually the vodka will run out and potatoes run on solar power.

All of my research shows that the “science” of “climate change” means the same solution is the same as food:  People are bad, so we need more communism and control.

No.  We need the free market.  But we also need a plan.  Sure, I hate government plans, but the signals of the market are silly – if the price of oil rises, there will be more.

No.  We cannot conjure oil out of a free market if it isn’t there.  We do have to plan for a future after oil, not for the sake of climate, but for the sake of humanity.  And, though I am certain of few things, I am certain that Kamala and Brandon are not up for this task.

The solution to this problem is different than most, since it must take place before the problems that will doom billions.  Or it won’t.  And billions will be doomed, and mankind’s dream of going to the stars will be turned into mankind’s dream of dinner at Taco Bell®.

Pretty sure this is a parody.  But in 2023, who can tell?