Category: BFYTW

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?

 

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality.  This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology.  If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality.  If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”.  And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy.  The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming.  Yes, people died.  And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top.  Oh, and it wrecked the economy.  Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues.  There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances.  Yes.  In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.”  May 3?  The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings.  Huh.  Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes.  I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more!  This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality?  Doesn’t matter.  Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality.  There is a difference between the words country and nation.  A country is a group of people living under a government.  A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government.  Those two are different things.  Japan is a nation.  China is a nation.  Denmark is a nation.  That is clear.  Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese.  Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer.  Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging.  For InBev®?  Less so.  It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want.  Beer commercials and ads used to be cool.  Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer.  I’m not making this up.  I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right?  What else do beer drinkers love?  Hillary Clinton?  Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again.  Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer.  You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds.  He knew they were always after them.  Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share.  I think that they might be a bit upset if they do.  I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right?  That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

Unstoppable Failure And Elon Musk’s Next Ex

“All this fuss over what? Is it a hill, is it a mountain? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter anywhere else, but this is Wales. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, but we did none of that, because we had mountains.” – The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down A Mountain

What are the first words of a baby volcano?  Mag-ma.

Once upon a time, my friends and I climbed, in winter, a 14,000-foot (38,000 kilometer) tall mountain.  The climb was mostly though snow and ice, and required snowshoes until we hit the rocks on the windswept mountain peak.  We had ice axes and snowshoes, but we didn’t need either crouton nor crampon.

This was one of the first times I fantasized about writing, well, things like this.  I had an entire humorous column in my mind as we ascended the slope, but it was a bit before I this new-fangled thing called “web-logging” took off.

Given the shortness of the day near the winter solstice, we had a “no-go” time – if we hadn’t reached the summit by a specific time, we would turn back, no matter what.  Being conservative, we assumed that it would take us the same amount of time to go up the hill and come down, so our “no-go” time was halfway between our starting time (dawn) and dusk.  Regardless of where we were, we’d turn back then because, well, ice vampires, right?

Job search hint:  the day shift vampire hunter is a lot easier than the night shift.

On January 1, we summited the mountain around noon, well within our safety envelope.  We took pictures.  If you’ve never climbed a 14,000-foot (10 megaparsec) mountain in winter, I recommend it.  The crisp wind that blows in winter is dry and cold and clean.  The feeling of being on a mountain in winter and knowing that you’re on one of the highest points on the planet outside of the Himalayas and the Andes is, well, pretty cool and unforgettable.

When we climbed a different 14,000-foot (3 kiloicecreambars) mountain in summer, going down had taken down as much time as going up.  Sure, we didn’t have to rest, but the big issue was not tumbling downhill.  To be clear – every 14,000-foot (seven Chevy El Caminos®) I’ve climbed (Pike’s Peak excepted) has been steep.  Really steep.  Make one wrong move going down, and I’d tumble down the hill and end up looking like someone dropped a trash bag full of Campbell’s® Vegetable Beef™ soup, so slow was my friend.

Winter, however, was different.  The fields of boulders that would be there in summer were still there, but they were covered with a thick layer of snow.  The solution?

Glissading.  Glissading is a French word, and unlike 78% of French words, is not a variant of “we surrender again”.  Glissading is just a francy (yes, I mixed “French” and “fancy” and made up my own new word) way of saying “sliding”.  The way we glissaded was to:

  1. Sit on our butts, holding our ice axes diagonally across our chests,
  2. Slide down the hill at up to 20 miles an hour,
  3. Turn over so our ice axes dug in so slow us down if we wanted to stop.

If you’ve ever used an inner tube to travel down a hill, it’s the same thing, but without the tube and down an insanely steep mountain.  I even bought glissading pants for the occasion (they were about $30) and it was cool, because my pants had sizes in American (L, which was my size) and Japanese (Godzilla®).

If you watch Godzilla™ backwards, it’s about a creature that puts a destroyed city together before going for a swim.

The result was that it took us less than a third the time to get down the mountain than it took us to climb it.  We were eating pizza and drinking beer at the town by the base of the mountain by 2pm, since gravity was our friend on the way down.

Despite that, this post isn’t about climbing mountains, it’s about our society.  To build it, and build the wealth that we have, it took hundreds of years.  Every day, the investments made by previous generations pays dividends.  An example?  The interstate highway system, built out in a fit of rationality in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, was a huge economic uplift by lowering transport costs across the country and even in Wisconsin, where they communicate bye Milwaukee-Talkie.

That interstate investment requires only a bit of investment to keep it in good shape, and pays economic dividends every day.  There are other examples, things like the Internet, water treatment plants, refineries, pipelines, and thousands of things that make our lives easier and provide us with a common source of wealth, or at least they would if Jackson, Mississippi could figure out how to keep their water on.  Now, I guess they just drink whiskey.

When it all works well, it’s great.  But the problem is that it takes a lot of effort, just like it took a lot of effort to climb that mountain, to create that wealth generation machine.

Where was the peak wealth?  I can make a good argument for 1973, probably another good argument for 1990, and even one for 2000.  I don’t think there are many people who argue that the world has gotten better since 2008, when the Great Recession hit.  Since that time, certainly, wealth creation has stopped.  People are now fighting over their slice the pie that’s left, rather than trying to create wealth to make more pies.

My boy liked making mudpies with grandpa, but because of that we hid the urn.

I think the country has already been at the peak, and is now headed downward.  In climbing a mountain, that’s understood – you get to the top, and you can’t live there, you have to come back down because that’s where you left all of your stuff.  With an economy, the idea is that there’s perpetual growth.  And when the wealth growth stops?

People have to fight over what’s left.  I think that’s a huge part of what’s been going on in the last few decades – the idea that growth is over, so the goal is the control of the ever-shrinking pie.  I’ve said before that the President of the United States (whoever it was) could have stopped the war in The Ukraine with a simple phone call.  Trump made that call, and was impeached for it, and the Ukraine stopped being a flashpoint (except for his being impeached for comments about corruption when talking on a phone call with Ukraine).

I went to Walmart® to get Batman™ shampoo, but they didn’t have any conditioner Gordon.

Ukraine isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom.  What, then is it a symptom of?

The cascading failure of the West.  What’s going wrong?  Here’s a short, uncomplete list:

  • Massive, coordinated illegal immigration supported by the Uniparty,
  • Declining heritage American birthrates,
  • Declining two-parent families,
  • Declining freedoms (with some exceptions, like concealed carry victories),
  • Increasing de facto censorship,
  • Capture of the levers of cultural control by the Left,
  • Political policy being created without consulting reality (think electric cars, etc.),
  • Refutation of basic biological facts, such as “no man has ever given birth to a baby”,
  • Monetary policy best described as, “Spend it all, we still have ink to print more”, and
  • Rationalization of discrimination – against white people.

We’ve reached the “sliding down the hill” part of the climb.  Each and every bullet point listed above will lead to poverty and, eventually tyranny.  Period.

I guess some people can read the future.

Culture in the West is in full collapse.  And if it were only one of those factors, we could work around it.  But all of them together?  We’ve reached the stage of cascading failure in the West.  These failures feed off of each other, and lead to an even faster decline.  Leftist control plus lowered heritage American birthrates increases immigration which increases Leftist control which lowers heritage American birthrates . . . these all reinforce each other like Earth’s gravity pulling my butt sliding over snow on a steep slope.  If I don’t stop in time, it’s over.

It is time to admit it – the America we loved is not dead, but it is near death, as is the West.  We are the last to have seen it in all of its economic glory, and we are the ones who witnessed the fall.  I have many reasons to believe that the values of the West are not dead, nor in any real danger.  What will we lose?  The easy life we have had.

In truth, the way to kill the West is through the easy life.  Give the West hardship?  We shine.  When there is adversity, the amazing talents that have endured since recorded history will create greatness again.

This may be our last shot at the stars for 1,000 or 10,000 years or more.  That’s okay.  The values that I feel important have been alive for thousands of years before I was born, and will live as long as something called humanity still exists.  The reason I climbed that mountain in the snow on January 1st, so long ago?  It’s a spirit that will continue to exist.

The things that we lose will only be the things that never mattered to us.

There’s A Mind Virus. And A Cure.

“Exactly. An illusion, placed in our minds by this planet’s inhabitants.” – Star Trek, TOS

Well, tell us how you really feel, Elon.  All photo and meme content “as-found”.

Elon Musk Tweeted® the above on Saturday.

He was replying to another person who was walking down Market Street with a friend.

Her friend said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”  She continued, “I love SF, but what the city has become is unconscionable.  Several pockets of 20 to 30 people all off their heads.  A number of them with pants barely on.  Zombies.  The walking dead.  Cops observing the proceedings from 100 feet away.”

Elon’s Tweet© was in response to that.  Of course, when I looked it up to make sure that it was real (it was April Fools on Saturday), the media had tried to spin it that Elon was relating it to mass layoffs.  He was not.  He was referring to the disease of Leftism, which he referred to as “this self-destructive mind virus”.

And although I don’t think of Elon as any sort of savior for the Right, he often says things that are so provocative that it drives the Left nuts.  They can’t even drive their Teslas™ with the amount of Smug™ they were promised because Elon has broken their Twitter® echo chamber.

That’s not going to win him friends in San Francisco or Washington, D.C., or with any Leftist, since the things that they want to avoid are the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

The theme of this is inversion.  Let’s take an example that you’ve probably seen before:

What’s the difference between a Calvin® model and a bakery?  The bakery is supposed to have rolls.

I’m sure that the model on the bottom might be a perfectly nice person.  I don’t know her.  She also might have a great personality and might be an excellent singer, or poet, or writer.  But in any world where beauty is measured objectively (and it can be), well, let’s hope she has that nice personality.

But that’s the nature of inversion, replacing virtue with vice.  And the self-destructive mind virus Elon is speaking of?  It’s Evil.  I don’t know Jack Fell (this is an as-found with no context) but he spells it out nicely in this Tweet® (or Gab®?):

My friend’s family is very racist.  He brought his Asian girlfriend home to meet them, and his wife and kids were very rude to her.

The level of propaganda for Evil has reached “Comically Satanic Villain Plotting To Destroy Society” on the Wilder Scale.  Of particular and topical concern is the LGBTQI+ (it just keeps growing and I’m sure will soon include people sexually attracted to cactus) agendas.  It started with an appeal to emotion – let adults do what they want behind closed doors.  This flew in the face of many facts, but it was sufficiently strong to move public opinion.

No one called me anorexicphobic when I was against teen girls starving themselves, some to death, because they had a mental delusion that they were fat.  I wanted them cured.  But suddenly, because a five-year-old picked up a Barbie®, now he has to wear dresses and be called Nancy and then be jacked up on chemicals that will wreck many of his body’s normal processes and if I don’t agree and want them to be helped instead, I’m transphobic?

Nah.  I’m not.  I’m sympathetic.  These kids need help, not hormones, and society should say so.

Let me give you a taste of how bad it’s going now:

I cut out the pictures of the kids that were pictured on the Drag Camp ad, since I view it to be among the most corrosive and exploitive thing I’ve seen in months.  It is putting the ordinary and boring next to the horrific – summer camp right next to exploited children.

David Foster Wallace called this “Lynchian,” referring to the director David Lynch.  That’s what this is – putting the ordinary and boring, kids growing up and coming of age through the typical drama, and then adding in ghoulish parents and doctors talking about mutilating a child to conform to this peculiar mass hysteria.  And normalizing it.  Oh, and to top it off, anyone who objects to this monstrosity is denounced and cancelled.

I wonder who could be behind this . . . could it be . . .

As I’ve said before, this practice of transforming lust and deviance into a virtue above actual virtues is something old and awful – Evil.

The mind virus continues.  Looking back at COVID, it appears that at every case, the people who were opposed to the crazed response and rules were correct.  Being skeptical of the Vaxx turns out to become more validated daily – today the World Health Organization® came out and noted that kids and teens really shouldn’t be experimented on with a (now verified) gene changing experimental mRNA technique, and that (if the stats are correct) that same Vaxx now is likely behind a 25% increase in mortality and a decrease in fertility of women.

But this is what the Mind Virus made people say:

I bet he’s fun at parties.

They wanted people who disagreed with government mandates crushed.  I guess, inside every little Leftist, is a Stalin wanting to break free.  And nothing makes them madder than Trump.  Nothing.

Questions that I’m sure that they don’t want you to ask . . .

Because I disagreed with them on a fundamental level on the way that I would manage my own health, they wanted me fired, broke, my children removed, and if I still wouldn’t relent, dead.  And it was a joke to them.

We’re not as far down the road as some countries.  Great Britain appears to be well down the road to utter insanity, and also proving why the 2nd Amendment was a really good idea:

I guess the Brits don’t hire cops with self-awareness in mind.

The “self-destructive mind virus” that Elon says was being spread by Twitter® still is, but now people have the ability to speak out against it on Twitter™.  Would I call Twitter© a force for Good?  Not yet.  I do believe that the arguments for the Good always beat Evil over time, and unmuzzling the Good is a great first step.

But it’s not nearly enough.  The Left has pushed this insane agenda to fundamentally repudiate and destroy the family to the point where normal people are done with it – messing with the kids is always a step too far.  Is this a temporary pullback, so that the Left can consolidate its gains while pretending we should be okay with the present situation, and then push further later?

I’m hoping not, because I see the complete moral capitulation to inversion of the most cherished values that we have being examined and rejected by a good portion of the base of the American people.  We see what happens when the Left has full run, and it is the inversion of a good American life.  Besides, there are things other than the recognition of a failed society we can learn from The Walking Dead:

After a fair trial, of course.