Category: Big Thoughts

Change, Batman, Male Prostitutes, And Bears

“You were looking for a way to change your life.  You could not do this on your own.” – Fight Club

My Chinese friend gave me an iPad.  I just love homemade presents!

I can tell when I’m really ready for change.  I don’t think about it.  I don’t plan it.

I do it.  I become it.

Instantly.

How can I tell when I’m not ready to change?

I think about it.  I plan it.  I consider ideas like, “starting Monday, I’m going to . . . “

Then Monday comes around.  Meh.  There’s always next Monday.

Change is instantaneous, it’s a drag racer (I mean cars, not men in dresses that for some unspecified reason like to read to children) after the pedal has been pushed to the floor and the car is launched.  The desire to change?  That lingers and hangs around on the couch, eating curly fries and thinking about what it one day might do.

Shame on you if you haven’t heard of Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute, who offers professional hygiene, discretion, and animal gratification.

One of my friends when I was living in Alaska shared this story:

Wife:  “I’m leaving.”

Husband:  “What, what the hell?  You’re leaving me?”

Wife:  “No.  I’m leaving Alaska.  I’m moving.”

Husband:  “Why?  I thought that, while we had our ups and downs, our marriage is pretty good.”

Wife:  “No.  I’m not leaving you, I’m leaving Alaska.  It’s fine if you want to come, too.”

My friend (who I will call Tim since that’s his name) said that this was a constant pattern that he had seen.  Perfectly happy couple, and then one day, bam, the wife said she was outta there, done with Alaska except for the rearview mirror.  He said it generally happened about 20 years after the couple had moved to Alaska.  Sometimes 19 years.

Do mimes with invisible walls have obstacle illusions?

He had no idea why it happened, but it was frequent enough that he’d seen the pattern play out again and again.

Now that, my friends, is change.

Another example more relevant to me is biking.  I used to bike a lot, and I know from experience that the only thing that is as insufferable as a gay vegan-Democrat-Crossfit® enthusiast is a bicyclist.  But when I decided that I was going to use biking as an exercise to get into better shape (which worked) I went all in.  No, I didn’t buy the silly jersey or the clip on shoes or a bike that weighed .03 ounces (351 kiloPascals), but I did buy the gear I needed to be good enough to lose some weight.  Hell, I wasn’t racing, I wanted a heavy bike so I had to work my fat ass harder.

So, after 5,000 plus bike miles a year for two years, I found I lost approximately 10 pounds.

Why didn’t the bear go to college?  Because bears don’t go to college.

Hmmm, I guess I can’t ride my bike faster than my fork, but when I was on my bike, even though I was far from a world-record anything, I was training as hard as any world-class athlete.  Just not as long, and just without the talent that they had.  I mean, I was dedicated, but there was no way I was gonna cut my testicle off like Lance Armstrong.

But, again, the change was instantaneous.  Just as instantaneous as when I decided to stop biking because I noticed it was causing some damage to my body, and having a bad ankle wasn’t worth losing 10 pounds.

One day, bicyclist.

The next day?

Not.

So, change itself is instant.  And also predictable – it always has and always will require just three simple things, as Ludwig von Mises (who is dead) wrote:

A Vision of a Better State

A Path to Get to the Better State

A Belief That My Action Along the Path Will Get Me to the Better State

If you have Vision, Path, and Belief, you change.  If I don’t have them, even if I’m missing just one of them, I don’t change.  At all.  I just sit on my couch eating curly fries.

Anyone can want to change, in fact I’m sure we all want to change.  But until we get those three simple keys, we won’t.

When my youngest was five, The Mrs. and I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, “Batman”.  Now he wonders why we won’t take him to the theater.

Why do people who have heart attacks sometimes become fitness devotees?  Because they now have A Vision of a Better State – not being dead next year.  They have A Path to Get to the Better State – exercise and eating right.  They now have A Belief That Their Action Along the Path Will Get Them to the Better State – their doctor told them, and now they’re paying attention.

That’s a rather extreme example, but it’s one that gets raised all the time.

I think the reasons that more people don’t make changes comes from a few simple reasons:

Despair:  They don’t believe that anything that they do can change the situation that they’re in so they don’t even dwell on a better state or look for a path.  They’ve given up.

Not Looking:  They simply won’t open their eyes to the possibility of something different, or feel guilt, and also can’t see a way, even if it’s abundantly clear to others.

Apathy:  They don’t care.  Curly fries are easy.  Work is hard.

Sometimes change is a conscious choice, but I’ll also admit that sometimes change is forced upon you like the Alaskan husband from Tim’s story above.

If you have something you want to change, change it.  You can’t make yourself younger, but you can make yourself stronger than you are today.  If you want more money, you can’t write yourself checks based on an IOU that you wrote to yourself (like the government does) but you can earn more or save more or both.  I guarantee it.

My grandfather once told me it was worth it to spend money on good stereo speakers.  That was sound advice.

Once I asked a friend (not Tim) to write a sentence of their choice as small as they could.  They did.  Then, I said, write it again, and make it smaller this time.

They did.  Generally, the power is within us to do amazing things, but we have to first believe.  You can choose change, or it can choose you.

But what you and I do with that?  It’s up to us.

Is Everything Worse Than It Was In 1900?

“Jefferson Public School.  Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Back on that planet you say you came from?” – Planet of the Apes

I went into a bar for time travelers and they were upset I haven’t paid my tab from next week.

For large chunks of human history, things didn’t change all that much from one century to the next.  Oh, sure, there were innovations and social changes and cyclic government transformations (Roman Republic to Roman Empire, for instance) but life was such that in many cases, dropping a Frenchman from Paris in 1300 A.D. into Paris around 1400 A.D. would have been a fairly comprehensible change for the resident, except he would probably have had to get a different color beret.

Let’s go back to 1900, though.  What changes might have seemed like science fiction (dystopian or otherwise) to a time traveler from Fort Wayne (let’s call him Taylor) if he showed up in the year 2024?

I guess Joe is happy he finally made a banana republic.

Lets start with . . .

Social Changes:

  • Elevation of sexual fetish to that of a sacrament rather than that of a criminal offense.
  • Unromantic sex with large numbers of partners for unmarried teenage girls and women is the norm.
  • Sex changes for children are not punishable by prison time.
  • Universal, free availability of pornographic images and videos.
  • Women working. Sure, some worked, but it wasn’t the norm.
  • Women voting. Yes, it was allowed in some places, but certainly not all.
  • Criminals being treated with non-judgement, except when it comes to “hate crimes” – the concept of saying a “bad word” as being worse and less forgivable than murder.
  • Rap music. I still can’t believe it exists.
  • The fall in popularity of churches.
  • Staggeringly low birthrates in developed countries.
  • Credit scores as a primary measure of suitability coordinated by large, faceless financial companies.
  • Working for large corporations as the norm, rather than a rare exception, like the dude who worked for the railroad.

My grade on how Taylor would rank these?  Utterly dehumanizing for most of them.  I think he’d be shocked at the collapse of the morality required to run a just society in the absence of tyranny.

Why do I hate the metric system?  I’ll never accept a foreign ruler.

I think the sexual stuff would be the most shocking.  Sure, humans have been boinking each other in all sorts of ways since Adam’s third night with Eve, but the celebration of things that were called degenerate (or worse) in nearly every Western civilization for thousands of years would be the most shocking.

The criminal change would be a big thing for Taylor, since he was probably used to speedy justice of a trial followed by a fairly quick hanging.

World Power Changes:

  • The complete dissolution of the British Empire into a proto-Islamic Caliphate.
  • The complete collapse of the Major Power colonial system leaving many colonies adrift in a state of partially collapsed civilizations that can’t care for themselves.
  • Western government essentially declaring war on their own citizens in order to import aliens who don’t really assimilate, and importing those aliens in staggering numbers.
  • Near universal, real-time information gathering on nearly every citizen from cameras and tracking devices that they buy and carry with them.
  • A very small number of very large companies control what news people see.
  • Drones in modern warfare cutting down the ability of troops to be sneaky, at all.
  • Nuclear weapons which can devastate cities of a larger size than existed in 1900.
  • Intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can reach any area of the Earth and devastate square miles in less than an hour.
  • Jet fighters which, although nearly obsolete, can move at multiples of the speed of sound and destroy people and planes and things hundreds of miles away.
  • Centralization of the financial systems of the world into a near-monolithic system where billions in capital could move easily from one continent to another in seconds.
  • World hunger as less of a problem than world obesity.
  • The staggering number of laws and rules from the federal level covering every aspect of life.
  • Identity theft.

The set of changes was bad, but this may be thought of as more chaotic.  In Taylor’s time, colonies certainly exploited the natural resources of a region, but in many places they also gave order and governance to areas that had (until that time) were at the mud and straw hut technology level, and are rapidly regressing back to the mud and straw hut technology level.

Do national anthems qualify as country music?

Warfare went from Teddy’s charge up San Juan Hill to remote controlled impersonal warfare that has the capacity to kill billions in an afternoon.  I’m pretty sure that would be horrifying to him.

General Technology:

  • Modern cars, including partially self-driving cars are amazing pieces of technology, and combined with modern highways provide a dream transportation system – coast to coast, in a car, in a couple of days.
  • Air travel from nearly any part of the world to nearly any other part of the world is possible in hours.
  • Humanity has travelled to the Moon. The Moon!
  • Instantaneous communication with people all around the world is possible.
  • Instantaneous video from anyplace in the world is possible.
  • Most of the knowledge accumulated by the human race is available nearly instantaneously.
  • Organ transplants are a thing.
  • Modern architecture has become ugly and soulless, with no space for beauty and humanity.
  • Creation of industrial “food” which incorporates large numbers of components that were created in a chemical plant rather than a growing plant or cow or pig.

What would Taylor say about these?  He’d probably be impressed by the first part of the list, but the last two would be very troubling.  In the last two weeks I ate a “pretzel” with cheezefoodsauce®, and it was tasty.  But compare it to a freshly grown garden tomato?  I’d rather have the tomato every time.

The Mrs. didn’t want a brain transplant, but then the surgeon changed her mind.

Wow.  I don’t think he’d like to swap his steak and eggs and butter for Cheeze-Itz™ and Doritos©, but they seem popular.

So, what color beret kufi do you think the Frenchman be wearing in 2124?

How Did It Get So Crazy, So Fast?

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

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

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

“How did we get so crazy, so fast?”

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

First:  Societal Malaise Due to Abundance

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

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second:  Societal Anxiety Due to No Challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chuck Norris can recite pi backwards.

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

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

Third:  Societal Atomization Due To Tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.  That’s a thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s good news.

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

We lead.  Or we choose our own path.

And?

We’re gonna win.

Kamala: The NPC Candidate

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Trump’s request for three debates?

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

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

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

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

What, really, is an NPC?

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

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

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

See?  NPC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the NPC class copes.

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

Huh.  Wrongly think.  Get on board, citizen!

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

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

Göbekli Tepi: How Beer Created Civilization

“You blow it tonight, girl, and it’s keggers with kids all next year.” – Heathers

There’s also a neolithic monument to Dad jokes:  Groanhenge.

FYI upfront:  very likely I’ll not have a post at all on Monday – travelling for pleasure and won’t be back until the wee hours Monday morning.

Göbekli Tepi is back in the news.  But first?  What the hell is a Göbekli Tepi?

Göbekli Tepi is a location in the southern part of Turkey, right near the place you put the onion in, and later discover you forgot to remove the plastic bag with the gizzards and cooked it, and decide, “meh, it probably won’t kill me,” carve it up, and serve it anyway without telling anyone.

Oh, wait, it’s the country Turkey not the tasty bird.  Göbekli Tepi is located right near the border with Syria, and is one of the most significant archeological sites.  Ever.

Why?  It’s made of huge stone structures, carved intricately and realistically, and showing more artistic skill than any post-modern artist.  That’s not saying much, but, there it is.

I once read a very moving story in Braille.  It was touching, really.

Original by Sue Fleckney – https://www.flickr.com/photos/96594331@N03/20385309880/, CC BY-SA 2.0, snarky comment by Wilder.

It’s old.  Very old.  9,500 B.C. old.

That’s a really long time to try to even imagine.  I’m not sure I can, since when compared to the lifespan of any human except your mother, it’s hard to conceive.  I’ll never be able to put it in terms anyone can wrap their brain around, but let me give an example:

We’re closer in time to Jesus than Jesus was to the building of the pyramids.  Göbekli Tepi is four times farther back in time than the construction of the pyramids was from the perspective of Jesus.  This was so far back in time that pottery had yet to be invented, but, strangely, Tupperware™ was already in wide use.

Tupperware™ even made a casket with a clear lid.  It was a failure, I don’t know why.  They had a great slogan:  Remains To Be Seen©.

Göbekli Tepi is old enough that it started being built around the time the very first evidence of agriculture shows up in the archeological record.  This is such an early settlement, that most evidence indicates that it was made by hunter-gatherers for use only occasionally, like the cabin in the woods that they visited only on Labor Day.  But why did they go there?

I know the answer.  Why would hunter-gatherers meet up at the dawn of history?

To party.

I’ve written about this before – there is evidence of grain and yeast in big stone vats at Göbekli Tepi.  This is evidence of the really simple answer to the question of why Göbekli Tepi was built – the guys got together, made beer, sang songs, told lies about the big aurochs that got away, farted, and got really, really drunk.  Want more evidence?  Over 7,000 grinding stones to mash the grain into something they could brew with.  7,000 seems like a lot, but they gathered there to party and get stoned for over a thousand years.

I go to the pool every day to try to get a swimmer’s body.  But no one ever drowns.

Once a year, probably, because that’s all the beer they had because they hadn’t developed agriculture.

That last part is new and is in a paper by Dr. Martin Sweatman (chemical engineer) out of the University of Edinburgh (LINK).  It turns out that a bunch of Scotsmen (I assume it involved grad students, having been an engineering grad student myself back in the day) noodled over the carvings and started counting.  Scotland is boring, so counting the number of times a “V” (apparently the only letter the Göbekli Tepi residents knew) showed up was the only other thing Sweatman’s team could think to do after they drank all the booze in the lab.

Adderall© is dangerous.  One of my friends took it, blacked out, and now he’s a grad student.

They found that there was a pretty cool pattern on the blocks (figure 12 on page 38 of the .pdf I linked above):

  • One repeating set of the letter V (both right side up and upside down) that was either 29 or 30 days (depending on how you count the V). A lunar month is really 29.5 days, so 29 or 30 sounds right.
  • 11 blocks, right under the 29 or 30 letter V. So, 29.5 times 11 (plus the original month above it) is . . . 354.
  • Then, 10 more of the V letters. That brings us to 364.
  • Finally, one more for the summer solstice (their guess), bringing us to 365.

My guess was that the last V?  That was party day – the ultimate pre-dawn of writing stuff down beer bash.  Since they only drank one weekend a year, I imagine these folks were the ultimate cheap date, sort of like a group of high school freshmen who had scored some near-beer.

I guess Cain was Abel. (meme as found)

And, by Crom Coors®, they invented mathematics, astronomy, sculpture carving, building craftsmanship, and agriculture in a short span of time.

To get more beer.

I’ll stand by that statement.

  • Once planting started, had stick around to harvest it.
  • So, we had to build a house.
  • Since others might want our beer, we had to defend the house.
  • We can’t do that alone, so we had to band together.
  • Growing grain is a lot of effort, so, for the first time in history, humans had a use for slave labor.
  • Work went from hunting and occasional fishing and gathering to back breaking farm labor.
  • This meant greater complexity, which fed greater returns, and now beer was available all year round.
  • We built cities, so we could support the beer industry, and had increased disease issues (COVID 8000 B.C., anyone?).
  • Then, we created a division of labor, started the development of technology, and invented the fridge (the first one was in Germany, used for beer making).
  • This led to the apex of civilization the 7-Eleven®, where one could buy beer, PEZ™ and pork rinds 24 hours a day, every day.

Society was created by and for beer drinkers.  I’m not even kidding.  People needed a reason to build all of this stuff, and men were the ones who did it.  Have you ever been around men?  We only do stuff for one of two reasons – one is beer, and you know what the other one is.  Okay, three reasons.  I forgot the PEZ®.

Wait until he tries to explain Netflix®. (meme as found)

In the end, Göbekli Tepi wasn’t destroyed.  It was carefully buried.  This, my friends, suggests a great reverence for the place.  It was like the ritual burial of the frat house after all the fraternity brothers had gotten married and had a real job.

Which was probably the case, they were now all farmers and soldiers and bureaucrats that ran the small cities so they could eventually build breweries, convenience stores and refrigerators.  They gradually forgot about the place.

Then we (modern humans) found it.  Now, the people who found it were very serious people who have grown only more serious over time at university cocktail parties in the woke modern world.  They can’t, for the life of them, figure out what this was, since they forget that this was a place built by and for men to party.

I think Dr. Sweatman is totally right (there’s more in his paper including a Time Lord™ and a possible record of a cataclysmic comet, you should RTWT)– the stone is a calendar.  And it’s counting the time until the next party.

It’s the countdown to beer day.  And who doesn’t like beer day?

Will Great Britain Rise Again?

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

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

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

Doesn’t that say it all?

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

The sickness?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever it is, it sounds Evil to me.

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

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

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

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

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

But would it matter?  Probably not:

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

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

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

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

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

I guess that’s easier.

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

This is coming soon to a country near you.

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

At all.

Civil War 2.0, A Chaotic Month

“I knew your brother would send assassins.” – Gladiator

I would tell a joke about my time travelling experiences, but you guys didn’t like it.

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  6. Open War.

Volume VI, Issue 3

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom at the same place – though it will notch up quickly if there are any signs of the TradRight stiffening up.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly.  The advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Destabilization – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Kamala – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Civil War Weather Report Previous Posts

Destabilization

I’ll start with a couple of my own quotes from last month’s Civil War 2.0 Weather Report:

July will be an even more eventful month, if my guess is right.

This level of political intrigue is the highest since 1859 or so, and it’s quite clear that the glue that holds the country together is nearly gone, and this is a signpost on the way to Civil War 2.0. 

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was a surprise, and certainly not one that I had anticipated.  In the immediate aftermath, Trump’s popularity soared as people saw the raw response to the event from Trump in one of the most iconic photographs of my lifetime, his fist raised in defiance.

Trump is certainly a showman.

As the details of the event continue, it looks like the Secret Service was doing its job as well as Boeing®’s Starliner™ design team.

The other thing the assassination attempt did was show how pathetic the attempt to prosecute the January 6 “insurrectionists” that were so ill-behaved that most of them used trash receptacles for their water bottles.  Comparing the two events shows how silly, vindictive, and political the prosecution of the protesters was and is.

Immediately the political attacks restarted on Trump.  He was Cheeto® Hitler™, and still is in their minds.  Many of them were in open despair that the shooter had missed.

What followed?  Joe Biden dropping out of the race.  Joe was done, but his last middle finger to Obama, who I believe is the one who pushed for the June debate and pushed for Joe to be booted, wanted someone else, anyone else, other than the retarded girl-child with a love of vodka known as Kamala to be the nominee.

Obama lost, and Kackela Harris will soon be voted in by the Democratic delegates as their first candidate that never received a single primary vote, and was selected by a senile man as a revenge choice.

All of that screams stability.

Just kidding.  Of all of the strange and destabilizing things we’ve seen so far, I would lay money we’ve yet to see the strangest part of this election season, and it will be more destabilizing even than what we’ve seen just this July.

Violence and Censorship Update

Well, there’s this:

Which resulted in proof that you don’t hate the media enough:

And also proof that the constant drumbeat has made GloboLeftists evil or crazy.  Or both:

And the GloboLeftElite try to hide what we all saw:

But don’t bet on Bing™ to be unbiased:

And here are things they’re also attempting to memoryhole, including billionaire Alex Soros with a bullet hole and forty-seven dollars.  Hmmm, Trump, if elected would be the 47th President:

And Prince Harry shows why July 4 is still important:

And here are things that the GloboLeftistElite don’t want you to think about:

But there are Bright spots:

Biden/Harris Misery Index

If Democratic economic policy had a face:

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again.  It’s like there’s a pattern here . . .

More to come:

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence is up.  I wonder if Chicago’s Democratic National Convention is going to spike temperatures?  Maybe they’ll play some soothing music?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is slightly down.  I expect this fall to drop.

Economic:

The economy looks to be juiced, but thankfully we have housing options.

Illegal Aliens:

July is showing as down, again, since (my take) the .gov folks are just making up numbers now.

Kamala

I was going to write a bit more, but I’m a bit under the weather, so here are some related memes, in order:

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky.  Thanks so much, Ricky!!

Bad Guys

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1818705002023530940

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1818801077308809307

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1816613118056837285

https://x.com/DaRealMonch/status/1817987959922250083

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1817614424141857175

https://x.com/Glock_Topickz/status/1815899177596903814

https://x.com/GangHits/status/1816611210214731827

 

Good Guys

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/89EFTHojJRw

 

One Guy

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrlrzw5550o

 

Body Count

https://dnyuz.com/2024/07/25/kids-a-growing-number-of-americans-say-no-thanks/

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/how-the-origins-of-americas-immigrants-have-changed-since-1850/

https://x.com/EYakoby/status/1817731127672779239

https://reason.com/2024/06/15/house-passes-bill-to-automatically-register-young-men-for-the-draft/

https://themilitant.com/2024/08/02/congress-discusses-upgrading-the-draft-and-conscription-of-women/

https://www.newsweek.com/us-army-military-women-draft-conscription-1916238

 

Vote Count

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184621/presidential-election-voter-turnout-rate-state/

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/politics/voter-rolls-ballot-challenges-true-the-vote-elections/index.html

https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-voter-roll-challenges-explainer-36c5596361f4596f245ffeee7b138764

https://dentonrc.com/elections/conservative-group-has-challenged-17-000-names-on-voter-rolls-in-denton-county/article_71d1993e-4ec8-11ef-bd2b-5fd65c628b62.html

https://azmirror.com/briefs/republicans-sue-to-purge-at-least-500000-people-from-arizonas-voter-rolls/

 

Civil War

https://theconversation.com/one-inch-from-a-potential-civil-war-near-miss-in-trump-shooting-is-also-a-close-call-for-american-democracy-234628

https://radaronline.com/p/trump-shooter-suicide-mission-trigger-second-civil-war/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/23/ohio-republican-trump-civil-war

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/trump-vance-civil-war-gop-political-violence/

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-civil-war-talk-1235066760/

https://www.dreadcentral.com/news/508690/this-controversial-record-breaking-thriller-is-again-the-most-watched-movie-on-amazon/

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/29/how-civil-wars-start/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/movies/war-game-documentary-review.html

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/democracy-suffer-quiet-death-simulated-trump

Incompetence Can Be Fatal, But It’s Always Expensive

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

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

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

You either got him or you didn’t.

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

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

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

Datapoint:

  • Crowdstrike™

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

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

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

Datapoint:

  • Boeing’s© Starliner™

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

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

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

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

Datapoint:

  • NASA

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

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

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

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

Datapoint:

  • COVID-19

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

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

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

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

Datapoint:

  • The Titan Submersible

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

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

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

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

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

Socialists: How To Make A Monster

“Well, ‘free’ is just another word for ‘socialist’.” – Watchmen

There are social drinkers and socialist drinkers.  Socialist drinkers only drink when someone else pays.

TIK History is a YouTube® channel that focuses on, well, history.  Mainly his channel has focused on World War II battles, and mainly battles involving lots of tanks.  He did one series on Stalingrad that (I believe) totaled over 3,000,000 words of script by the time he was finished.  Obviously, that took him years to put together.  That’s more than enough work to earn him a doctorate, which I guess would make him a Stalingraduate Student.

When not doing battle documentaries, he also does some on political philosophy.  Where I do listen to all of his battle recreations, his political philosophy videos are hit or miss.  One that I did listen to (LINK) is one on the similarities of the lives of socialist leaders who had no particular problem with the idea of killing millions to achieve their paradise.

Which socialist leaders?  Well, all of them:

Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, Engels, Stalin, Mao, and (and, to a lesser extent) Pol Pot.  TIK included Mussolini and Hitler, and, on reviewing, in my opinion they don’t quite fit the mold, so I’ve omitted them here.

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

TIK noted that each of these had the same sort of pattern:

  • Horrible relationship with their father or an absent father.

This doesn’t really surprise me.  Mothers and fathers have utterly different roles in raising a child – mothers teach love and empathy and altruism, while fathers teach discipline and honor and courage.  These are very different tasks, but this might be incomprehensible to someone who cannot define what a woman is.

This is directly from Mao’s Wikipedia® entry:  ”During the 1930s, Mao would claim that he resented his father, viewing him as stingy and unaffectionate. He contrasted this with the affection he received from his mother, thus adopting a Marxist dialectical perspective by dividing the family into two camps: his mother and himself on one side, his father on another.”

This leads us directly to:

  • Very strong relationships with “sainted” mothers.

Again, mothers are different than fathers.  Looking at what mothers teach, these socialist leaders were taught that they needed to fix the world, but never told to fix themselves.

What did Freud use as an insult?  “Your mother is so unpleasant that even your own subconscious isn’t attracted to her.  What, no, this is just a cigar.”

  • Very religious youth, followed by atheism later in life.

Religion, when done right, provides both a goal and a means to achieve that goal.  In Christianity, you’re supposed to help people, but those people should also be striving to be worthy, and there are limits based on the religion of exactly how one should help people:  altruism, but with limits.  Remove the religion, remove the limits but keep the misplaced altruism.

This is crucial, because it means that all power is in the hands of man, and there isn’t any space for a higher power.  Man has no limits, and thus there is no meaning to any of this, so everything is justified as long as it brings about the desired end result.

Socialism doesn’t even work on paper, if history books count.

  • Prosperous or stable middle class upbringing with no particular hardship.

Mao, for instance had a hardworking father that bought up several acres and employed several farm workers – this was substantial wealth for where he grew up – Mao as a child had his own room, which was amazingly rare.

  • Relationship with real jobs was spotty, at best.

I think Marx did some occasional writing for papers, but mostly he lived based on begging money from friends and family.  Yet, he had a maid, drank like a fish, and smoked enough cigars to bankroll Cuba.  So, no job, his wife constantly giving birth, his maid once giving birth (likely to Marx’s kid) and he lived in an eight-room house.  No wonder communism was a failure: listening to the advice of a pauper on the way to get to economic prosperity is like taking the advice of Boeing in 2024 on how to make spaceships.

These people either hated or feared the idea of economic independence.  Lenin worked for two years before becoming a bum.  Ditto with Trotsky.  Stalin’s only job, ever, was as a cobbler as a child working for his father for a very short time when he was a kid.

A GloboLeftist said that if we had to kill our own food, we wouldn’t eat meat.  But I say if he had to make his own computer, he wouldn’t whine on Reddit®.

I think the poor economic conditions that each of these people had filled them with envy.  It’s not that they wanted everyone to prosper, it is that they wanted (especially with Marx and Lenin) other people to work harder so they didn’t have to.

Each of them is slightly different, yet those same patterns appear to remain.  Additionally, I think the family structures (I wrote about this at the links below) of their countries allowed them to come to power in a way that wouldn’t have worked in England or the United States.

Another Key To Understanding It All: Family Structure

Family Structure, Part II: Orphans Still Not Required

When I look to the modern politician that most models this family structure and early life, it is clearly Barrack Hussein Obama – each of the points that would lead to a socialist or communist dictator were and are there.  I think this explains, at least partly, his current engagement to try to steer and control the Democratic party and to “fundamentally transform” a nation that he hates.

Which brings us to the other candidate that fits the pattern:  Kamala Harris.  Although she never won a primary, she fits the pattern as well:  her father was absent from her life after their parents divorced, her mother was her sainted figure, raised as a Hindu, she is more than likely not at all Christian, since her father is a rabid communist and commies hate Christianity.

Makes me wonder if her quest for power has left a bad taste in Kamala’s mouth.

That leaves Kamala as filled with altruism as someone guided by religion, but without the constraints that the belief in God.  Or whatever gods Hindus believe in, since I don’t believe anyone actually understands the religion.

Regardless, these two people are dangerous.  And they are potentially working together.  If you look at the intense desire to bring in hordes of illegal and legal immigrants used to either socialist or chaotic government, look no further for the reason:  they hate America.  They hate you.  And they want to replace you because, in the end, they hate themselves as well.

Here’s hoping that Kamala can’t keep away from the vodka during the campaign.  Perhaps we can convince her to start a vodka diet if we tell her she can lose three days in just one week.

Gen X, Gen Z, And The Crisis Of The Soul

“And then we’ll all have a Christening for Rosemary’s baby.” – Last Action Hero

They call me “The Exorcist” at the liquor store.  After I leave, all the spirits are gone.

The kids today have a lot of challenges.  Generation Z and Generation Alpha have had a very significantly different childhood than most people reading this post.

For me growing up as a Gen X kid, we were very, very free.  I regularly came home to an empty house when I was in kindergarten.  The first time I let myself into my house with my own key, I was in third grade.  The first time I stayed overnight by myself (in winter, no less) I was in fourth or fifth grade.  By the time I was in high school I didn’t even see a parent three or four nights a week most weeks since I was going to school in an apartment about fifty miles from Wilder Mountain.

I certainly didn’t raise myself, but Gen X was pretty free range.  We left the house when we got up, and got home, dirty, muddy, and sunburned when the photodetector turned the yard light on because that was Ma Wilder’s definition of ‘dark’ in the ‘be home by dark’ direction.

Life is like a warranty – it runs out at the worst time possible.

I certainly used several of my free hours to do things that were things my warning label said not to do, and certainly would have voided my manufacturer’s warranty had I goofed up.

We were also pretty awful to each other, at least in middle school.  I have long maintained that kids in middle school are the worst people on the planet:  they have learned how to bully people by digging at their deepest insecurities, but they haven’t learned enough empathy to not do that.  See?  Absolute worst people on the planet.  I know, I was one of them.

I won’t dwell much on my specifics for this post – this isn’t about me, but about a generation that was given great independence from the start.  Many, many generations had it far worse than Gen X, since at no point when I was 8 did Pa Wilder seriously mention selling me off to the mines to move explosives so that valuable miners wouldn’t be injured.  Again, he may have mentioned it, but not seriously.

You’d think that being the first generation born after the pill was invented and abortion was entered into the sacraments of the Left, that Gen X would have been the most wanted generation in history.

No, not really.

What’s Gump’s password?  1Forest1.

Many parents that were often more interested in themselves during the “Me” decade of the 1970s.  In fact, Gen X was born at the intersection on a great societal upheaval of Woman’s Lib convincing women they didn’t want to be mothers.  Or wives.  That was also the beginning of the cult of the no-fault divorce as well.

Society’s feelings are often transmitted in the media, and let’s look at the roster of Gen X villains:

  • The baby from Rosemary’s Baby was a Gen X baby.
  • So was Damien from The Omen
  • So was Regan The Exorcist.
  • Although Michael Myers from Halloween was technically a Boomer, when he first appears he’s a kid, the same age as Gen X at the time. Same with Jason Voorhees.
  • Who opens the door in Poltergeist? Gen X.
  • The vampires in The Lost Boys? Gen X.
  • Everybody in Scream.
  • Oh, and when we grew up? The Faculty.
  • I think the shark from Jaws was a Boomer, so we’re off the hook on that one.

I started downloading Jaws the other day, but my computer keeps dying after one megabyte.

I don’t know what it was about Gen X that made people think of Satan when they thought about us.  I’m pretty sure that other kids weren’t quite as bad as I was.  Except Damien.

I can’t speak for other generations, but I’m not going to complain about my experience being a part of Gen X.  Yes, I was bullied, but I got tougher.  Yes, my parents gave me a lot of freedom, but Pa Wilder missed very few wrestling matches and rarely missed a varsity football game, even when a three-hour drive was involved.  I knew I was loved.

Coming out of high school, I felt (and still feel) that the limiting factor to my life is . . . me.  I feel the ball is in my hands.

From observation, kids today (on average) don’t have near the opportunity to be free range that we as Gen X did.  And, at least around Modern Mayberry, they aren’t bullied.  People are nice.  The kids are nice.

Maybe . . . too nice?

The best thing about taking money by bullying kids is you can buy yourself something nice.

We have created a fundamentally different generation with Gen Z and Gen Alpha.  Heck, what’s the best way to ground a member of Gen Alpha?  To make him go outside and hang with his friends in real life, away from his electronics.

I sense (and I could be wrong) that a lot of Gen Z and Gen Alpha has never had to face real adversity.  Instead, they’ve lived their lives with a sense of impending dread and massive confusion amidst the greatest material and information wealth the world has ever seen.  Starvation in the United States, and, for the first time ever, in the world, is virtually unknown.

World hunger?

It’s a solved problem.  There is more than enough food for everyone in the world right now, and the only starvation that occurs happens in war zones or is politically motivated.

Yet the GloboLeftElite has put into the minds of the kids today that the world is doomed.  They’re feeling higher levels of depression than kids from the Great Depression.  Suicide is their second highest cause of death.

Gen X had “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”, while Gen Z and Gen Alpha have “All Good Girls Go To Hell”.

Yet, my generation had Mutually Assured Destruction while Gen Z and Gen Alpha have Climate Change.  At least the Soviets were the bad guys in MAD, but in Climate Change?  Every human is the villain, oh, and we’re deeply in debt, robots and immigrants are going to take their jobs.

Gen X is so old our Social Security number is in Roman numerals.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been taught to hate themselves and humanity, and it’s so bad that they don’t want to have kids.

More than anything, this is a crisis of the spirit.  My generation was vilified as the Anti-Christ incarnate, and we responded by getting married and having children and getting by in life.

Did we make it?  Yes, I think we did.  Will they make it?  I think so, though, for many, their road is tougher than ours.  Weak men make hard times, and I think that’s where we’re at.

But, hey, think of all the great memes they’ll make!