Category: BFYTW

Two Types Of Society. There Is Proof We Have A Choice.

“There are two types of people in this world:  people who like Neil Diamond, and people who don’t.” – What About Bob

A man threatened me with a coffee cup and stole my wallet.  I guess I got mugged.

There are two types of cultures.  One of them looks a bit like this:

I was walking in Silver Dollar City® more than a decade ago.  It was spring, and Silver Dollar City™ was an amusement park where we could take the kids and visit attractions, and even though they weren’t even teenagers, there were plenty of rides for them.

As we were walking through the park, a young blonde man of 18 or so ran up behind me.  It wasn’t a sprint, but the easy strides of a high school football player in top shape – like Michelle Obama, the kid looked like a linebacker.  “Sir, sir!”

I turned around.  “Yeah, how can I help you?”

“You dropped this.”

What did Mike Tyson say to Vincent van Gogh?  “Are you gonna eat that?” (meme as found)

The kid handed me two $20 bills.  This is unusual, since normally I have to at least pull up my shirt for anyone to give me $40 so I’ll put the shirt back down.

I stuttered, “Th-thank you!”  I felt in my pocket, and, sure enough there were two twenties that must have followed my hand out of the pocket like a structured thought sneaking out of Joe Biden’s head.

The blonde kid smiled, waved, and ran off before I could even offer him a fiver for his honesty.  And, thinking about it, he might have been offended if I offered him money.  I know I’ve turned cash down before for similar acts of honesty or help.

You don’t do it for the reward.  You don’t do it for the glory.  You don’t do it for the free shrimp and talcum powder.  You do it because it’s the right thing to do.  Period.

That’s one type of society.

This type of society functions pretty well.  The prices (back then) at Silver Dollar City™ were much lower than at other attractions of a similar nature that I’d been to.  The park itself was clean and tidy, and every local business was polite.  Did they want our dollars?  Sure they did, but they were great about wanting to come by them honestly.  They wanted to earn my money.

That’s the way that Modern Mayberry is, mostly.

Sheriff Taylor retired to a farm, so he could see Barn every day.

But San Francisco?  Wow.

I haven’t been there in almost a decade, but the pictures I’ve seen recently show a city that’s not in decline.  It’s in free-fall.  In Modern Mayberry I always lock my car doors because it’s a habit from living in big cities.  In San Francisco?  People don’t lock their cars.

People don’t lock their car doors (and many leave their trunks open) so prospective thieves can see that there’s nothing to steal without breaking the windows of the cars to rummage around themselves.  The people have surrendered to the criminals.

Porch pirates are everywhere in SF, and steal whatever they can.  People live on the streets in tents, and often defecate and do drugs in public, because, why not?

San Francisco is also leading the nation in stores disappearing or locking up all of their items.  Why?  Because mobs loot the stores, in broad daylight.  If the thief is caught, they’re immediately released.  The only solution for a store that wants to be in business is to sell you the item, go get it from a locked room, and then give it to you after you’ve already paid.

Want to watch Mad Max:  Fury Road in the most realistic way possible?  Go to San Francisco.

Lefties, I’m sure, have plenty of theories for why San Francisco is like this.  White privilege.  Institutional racism.  Failure to provide mental health services.  Lack of reparations.  It’s Wednesday.  Spin a wheel and pick an excuse.  But every one of them is a lie.  And I can prove it.

How?

Go look at the streets today where President Xi of China will be when he travels San Francisco.  The homeless are gone.  Crime is gone.  The streets aren’t covered in poop and needles and Disney™ products.

If the city of San Francisco can do that for Xi, it means that they can do it.  Even Governor Gavin “Plastic Man” Newsom said the quiet part out loud:

“I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town.’  That’s because it’s true.”

A poll was taken by California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office which asked whether people who live in California think Illegal immigration is a serious problem.  29% of respondents answered: “Yes, It is a serious problem.  71% of respondents answered: “No es una problema seriosa.”

Guess he wants to impress people that don’t live there.

San Francisco doesn’t have to be like it is.

The only reason that San Francisco is a horrifying dump is because people want it to be a horrifying dump.  As I’ve said before, the solution is obvious (We Already Know The Solutions).  Criminals need to value the gain they make from a crime less than they fear the penalty for when they get caught.  That’s it.  The equation is simple.

We know exactly what we need to do to solve almost any problem.  And, as is on display right now, the Powers in San Francisco know exactly what solution is required to solve this problem.  But they don’t, or at least limit the solution to times when world dignitaries visit – the effort for just common people is too much.

I wouldn’t worry about it.  It was a he said/Xi said situation.

Why, exactly do they allow a kleptocracy to fester in California?

  • They don’t like guns. Guns have been the great equalizer
  • They will ruthlessly target and destroy common citizens who defend themselves or their property because in their minds only the State should be able to wield force to protect itself.
  • There is no punishment of the criminals, because they’re a favored voting group.

Probably the biggest reason is this:

  • They want the people to be scared. They want the people to feel helpless, as if there’s nothing they can do and they don’t care how much money it costs you.  They want to use this to get just a little more power.

That’s it.  The reason for the kleptonomics on the street is because it serves those who could fix the problem.

Me?  I’ll take Silver Dollar City© and Modern Mayberry any day.

Does It Seem Like Everything Is Falling Apart? It Is.

“Don’t come apart on me, Frank.” – Scrooged

What makes a good tongue-twister?  That’s not easy to say.

The story of the 20th century was one of things coming together.

Part of it was based on technology – the world shrank as successive technologies made communications, typically mass communications, easier and quicker.  The world went from letters carried over land to telegrams to telephones and then radio and television.  Information that previously took weeks to get out, could now go out to millions nearly immediately so we could all know how tough Meghan Markle had it last weekend.

With this communication, the model was simple:  one to many.  One person could have their ideas spread out to literally everyone.  In the Soviet Union, radio versions of Stalin’s speeches could be broadcast instantaneously to every person with a radio in the Soviet Union, though those radios were powered by large industrial tractors produced in Tractor Collective Number 323 that weighed 17 metric tons.

With the advent of this communication, it became feasible to run an actual empire, in real time.  Things started clumping together because the span of control allowed it, and the size of empire was useful.  The Soviets started collecting satellite states like they were Hallmark© Christmas ornaments, and so did the NATO nations.

What does the blue in a communist flag stand for?  Food.

Europe itself clumped together into the EU, which, oddly, was exactly the plan of an Austrian art-school reject.  Up until the 1990s, clumping together was all the rage.  There was strength in being together, and it was also strength in the titanic war without weapons between two competing ideologies:  Western Capitalism versus Eastern European and Asian Collectivist Communism.

Some have said (and I would have argued, incorrectly, in the past) that technology is neutral.  It is not.  Technology absolutely changes the equation between the types of governments that can exist.  Take, for example, weapons:

To be really good with a sword takes a lot of practice.  I assume this because I watched a lot of movies where people learn to be good swordsmen and people always seem to get older in the montage.  Beyond that, the suit of armor that a knight had to have was really, really expensive?  How expensive?  More than “hot dog at an NFL® game” expensive, it was completely unaffordable unless you had a manor and a bunch of dudes growing stuff for you.  And, if you had it, those dudes couldn’t really do anything to you when you were out and about.

Which Knight was chosen to build the Round Table?  Sir Cumference.

Freedom, in this case, belonged to those who had armor.  That equation changed over time, and it’s a real reason I like firearms.  I can go in a store and buy a close copy (or in some cases much better stuff) than the United States Army gives to the rank-and-file soldier.  Remember, “military grade” is the code word for the cheapest stuff that they could buy that might do the job.

Anyway, as long as millions of Americans are as well armed as the average infantry soldier in our army, we are free.  Round us up and try to put us in concentration camps like they did in Australia during the recent pandemic?  Not going to happen because, well, all the guns.  It doesn’t even take a montage to learn how to use a firearm.

Mao may have been ugly and smelled bad, but he knew something very true:  “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”  Why does the Left want to take away guns?  Because they want power, and as long as you have weapons that equal theirs, they cannot make you do whatever it is that they want.

Robespierre, Trotsky, and Mao walk into a bar.  There are no survivors.

But that’s a digression.  Technology allowed the flourishing of really large empires, mainly due to information management and that “one to many” communication model.  Being together in these combinations allowed two sides to fight each other.

Until they didn’t.

The biggest failure of Soviet-style communism wasn’t the socialist part, but the collectivist part.  Capitalism in the West simply out produced them, but the collectivist mindset wasn’t really “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  That sounds spiffy, but in reality it became, “From each according to how little work they could get away with, to each according to how much they could milk the system for.”

I asked A.I. to make the workers lazy.  Boom, the cell phones show up.

This collapsed.  I think it was a coincidence that it was just as the Internet began to flourish, but the Internet has changed the entire way that communication can flow.  The old model was “from one to many” while the new model is “from many to many”.  Not everyone has an equal voice, but ideas now flow freely.

This is what puts the panties of Those Who Are In Power into a wad – they have lost control of the Narrative.  It’s also going to be the story of the 21st century:  the time when things dissolve.

We’ve seen it start with Brexit.  Brexit would never have happened under the previous mode where the only options were the options from TPTB.  In this case, the people rose up, and said no.  Of course, in the case of Great Britain, TPTB decided to keep the unending flow of illegals headed there, because the last thing they want to reward were people from Great Britain deciding their own destiny.

I wonder if Departugul will be next?  Or will it be Polend?

It’s too late to put the genie back into the bottle, however.  We see strains on NATO where vastly divergent incentives have weakened that alliance, and I see similar strains on the EU right now, where countries like Poland and Hungary are being ostracized for not wanting to become minorities in their own lands.

Likewise, we see the pressures of division putting strains on the United States.  Every reader here is a part of that, since you regularly partake in ideas that are not approved by those who would have you live in pods and eat bugs and give up your arms.  For the greater good, you know.

The story of the 20th century was of coming together.  Our story, right now, is of things coming apart.

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.